Distinctive Stylus

Every photographer has his, or her, own distinctive stylus.

Apple Pie

I think that William Eggleston's brilliance lies partly in his ability to slice parts(car fin, black man, blueberry, alcove, leg o' lamb)of his immediate environment off which approximate to a particular Deep South sensibility.

With all these slices(cut, even, in foreign lands) he reconstitutes a steaming apple pie whose nostalgic mass must surely remind him of home.

The Seer.

The bloodier photograph contains two dilemmas:

1. In some ways photography can demean private or restricted events, like in the case of this stab victim being loaded into an ambulance, on film. The viewer can become trapped in a corner when the subject looks at him or her and, in a sense, frames another act of violence. How dare you look at me?

In this case the victim is so high that although his line of sight pins me(and you), he registers nothing. The vision in his mind's eye of us kneeling at the back of the ambulance and pushing the shutter must never really have been anything more than a passing semblance in a whisp of crystal meth smoke.

2. Stephen Shore told me that in his seminal work entitled, Uncommon Places, there is no red. He has tried to denude all his photos of the colour red. He believes that the gamut of photography and print cannot sufficiently render shades of red ie. All red is the same in photographic prints despite them being varied. Red is dead. This photograph is a prime example of red is dead.

The cross on the ambulance driver's lapel is also red. Maybe the hospital services knew this when they made their Red Cross(I know they didn't, grant me poetic license), and made it so that they task would always be given immense gravity when they were depicted with the bloodied.

The same can't be said for sky blue.

The other photograph is from the same job which involved photographing a night on an ambulance in the rough Coloured areas of Cape Town. The Medic is checking the depth of a stab wound, seeing if it's pierced the lung.

I think this photograph is effective because the man's penetration of the seated's chest is much how seeing a photograph of violence can stab into our experience or not, for that matter.

This was a tragic SA scene. Everyone in the cramped house was drunk or stoned on something. Kids, folks, grannies and grandpas. Only the two innocent kids staring down from the framed photograph were exempt in that time.

“out of the RED gamut.”

In photographic parlance Gamut refers to the complete spectrum of colors that a given color system can produce. In photography, the gamut available will depend on whether the photographer is working with the RGB (red, green, blue) or the CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, key/black) color model.

Because each of these color systems starts with uniquely different set of primary colors, their combinations produce a distinct set of secondary and tertiary colors. For example, while the gamut of RGB includes a pure blue, that of CMYK will render a bluish purple. Depending of the subjects of the photograph and the desired effect, a photographer will elect one of the color models to have the resulting gamut in his photos.

If a color system lacks a certain shade within its gamut, then the color is “out of the gamut.”

Keep in mind that photographs don’t have to be in color to have a gamut. For example, pictures taken with black and white film or treated with sepia each have their own unique gamut. While black and white pictures will have a color spectrum that ranges from white to gray to black, the gamut for sepia toned pictures will span from white to light brown to dark brown.

Although it originated as a photographic term, gamut has come to have a broader meaning in the English language. In general terms, gamut can refer to any kind of spectrum.

*explanation stolen from the www(photography.com) and adapted slightly

Himmel Uber Berlin

These are some shots of yours truly in Berlin. '03-'05 I think.

Up a tree with Messrs Fritz and Mcubbin. Tom Fritz works at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Psychology in Leipzig which means he knows a shitload about Monkeys. Crawford knows a shitload about tree-climbing and maintains that the Converse Allstar is a 'look-no-further' in the department.

Tom told me that in Leipzig Zoo was a large ape who had been recorded(moving picture) receiving fallatio. So we trooped to the zoo. The large ape looked sad and forlorn atop his pole and the whole idea made me feel uneasy.

Ida was my number one, but I fucked up.

Whisky was my drink of choice.

I am Jo's daughter's godfather. The Polaroid is a Poloroid Polaroid.

Nails

Hammering in a nail is essentially a violent act. See below.

Albow Gardens

On assignment for COLORS magazine I met this suave gentleman who was unpeturbed by the photographic process. I think my presence finally mitigated all the titivating, polishing and tattooing which he had been doing for the last 65 odd years.

In my rounds of the council housing estate I also spent time with a prostitute(see 'nails'). When I asked her to open the curtains she said that it was impossible as they were nailed to the window frame to ban the light. We got along pretty well.

A very young woman lived in a room adjacent to the lounge. I have the feeling that she was kept there as a sex worker, willing or unwilling.

He husband was 7 feet tall and the meanest motherfucker imaginable. He refused to have his photo taken, but was obviously not averse to spectators because he stripped on their lounge table at weekends for cash.

N1 cover

The design of the N1 book is almost done. Here is the cover. The road only really appears on the front and back covers of the book. Inside it is hinted at, but never explained as fully as in the shots in this post.

The book is being designed with Erika Koutny.

Who me, Dave?