Monday, April 28, 2008

Art Project, notes


Derick Melander is showing at Repetti Gallery in Long Island City, Queens, opening next Saturday night, May 3rd. It's a three person show with Laura Paulini and Penelope Umbrico entitled, The One and the Many. I mentioned that we have been gleefully working with Derick on our Art Project in a previous post. I can't wait to see his new work. You'll find directions to the gallery here.

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Video of Parson's PDN30 event

We were part of a seminar "Strategies for the Young Working Photographer" hosted by PDN featuring yours truly, along with two other emerging photographers and two editors at Parsons on March 10th. They have posted a video of the (entire, hour-long) panel and Q&A here.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Alejandro Almanza Pereda for Art Project

We photographed sculptor Alejandro Almanza Pereda in Mexico City as part of our artist network project. We've been photographing artists in their studios since November. We then ask each subject to name an artist who has inspired or excited them, and then we photograph that person, and so on and on. Alejandro came to us through sculptor Derick Melander, whose work you can see here. Right now, we're looking forward to two new names on the shoot list next month. In the meantime, check out Alejandro's work, and our photographs of him. He has a show coming up in NYC, so stay tuned.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

52 images of you

Friends of 545 rock! Cheers to you all....check out the photos here!

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

"Check out these 297 Talented Photographers"

Rob Haggart over at A Photo Editor has put together a slide show of photography he likes. I like these photos too. Can you spot the Morgan & Owens shot?


Saturday, April 12, 2008

Movies that read like photos: eh-hem, thoughts on Jesse James, the assasination of...


The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford exposes my weakness for movies that reach beyond the actors, the action, and the actuality. It reels together 10,000 images worthy of each and every still moment. I went into the movie skeptical of the joyride, the big-screen-cinestravaganza that the actors might offer; I grew tired, I rallied, I hit pause and walked away...and returning I saw an image stilled and choreographed. Stunning.

It redeemed. I watched it again, stopping the frames again and again in my head, all the while being taken away to a land I grew up near and only flirted with in my few trips outside Kansas City, sometimes perched up on the front-seat armrest of my family's station wagon. (Yes, it was the eighties, the wagon was big, very big, and I think it was a Buick; and while I am thankful to have never experienced the tragedy of hurling headlong into the windshield, I can't imagine a childhood car-trip memory without that front seat view.) In my nostalgic, wink-eyed memory I didn't have cowboy boots with spurs, or even a cowboy hat, but I did have a BB gun in the car, and I did make my dad pull over next to that pond alongside Highway 169, I think it was, to hunt bull frogs. It's one of many childhood memories on the way to St. Paul, Kansas, where my grandfather ran the area's general store, or was it a hardware store?

There is a LOT of this land in The Assassination of Jesse James; it's an experience that is skillfully wrought into every visual moment of the film, and every stream of this consciousness made the movie, the narrative, (the trance), and abandoned me to my senses and my memories.

Having shot road trip stories in rural Kansas and Oklahoma--our most recent of the two traces parts of Route 66 that my dad traveled while courting my mother in the late 50's and early 60's--I have to admit, not all nostalgia must be avoided.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

This Weekend: Tucson, AZ

I'm off to meet my new baby niece, Emma Ruth Shipley, in Tucson, Arizona. James will be here, so if you have a poker game in the works, give him a call.

I'm rereading Hawthorne on the plane, so I'll leave you with a quote from the House of the Seven Gables. In this quote, Holgrave, the daguerreotypist, is trying to woo the beautiful young Phoebe into his studio.
"There is a wonderful insight in heaven's broad and simple sunshine. While we give it credit for depicting the merest surface, it actually brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon, even could he detect it. There is at least no flattery in my humble line of art."
I love that Hawthorne suggests that truths and secret characters lurk just beneath the surface of everyday life, and that sunshine can expose, and photography can capture, our secret characters. Portraiture seems, in this light, almost a religious vocation. Or in this case, a great pick-up line.

Of course, for Hawthorne, writers do it better.

Have a great weekend!

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Morgan & Owens in T: The New York Times Style Magazine


If you missed our photographs of Las Pozas, Edward James's surrealist wonderland in Xilitla, Mexico, you can find the story on the T Magazine website.

We shot for most of the twenty-four hours we spent in Don Eduardo's jungle. Here are a few more.

On Robert Frank

Charlie LeDuff at Vanity Fair has written a profile on Robert Frank that includes this beautiful portrait of the master at 83 years old.



Is there an American photographer today that could not cite him as an inspiration?