And after her flew the completely insane waltz

Musings on photography

[insanewaltz]

[insanewaltz]

“I don’t look at photography as a narrative device. It’s best at revealing all sorts of ghostly little fragments of the complexity of the world. It’s restrictive and completely open all at once. A big part of photography for me is recognizing its limitations, while trying to tap into its many layers of expression.”

Peter Van Agtmael

[insanewaltz]

Aurelio Amendola: Marcello Jori, Monocromo 2011 (Bologna )

La mano insomma agisce come estensione del pensiero creativo e spirituale di un corpo destinato a divenire spoglia dell’anima, sacco di pelle svuotato, come si vede nel non convenzionale autoritratto del Buonarroti nella Sistina3. A far da contraltare ai pensieri michelangioleschi si può ricordare l’episodio narrato da Giovan Battista Agucchi con la celebre risposta di Annibale Carracci a suo fratello Agostino, al cospetto del Laocoonte: «Noi altri dipintori habbiamo da parlare con le mani»; il pittore si autodefinisce come colui che lavora con le mani, che deve produrre immagini e non vacui intellettualismi, in un presunto subordine rispetto al letterato4. E ancora: «l’arte si fa con le mani. Esse sono lo strumento della creazione, ma prima di tutto l’organo della conoscenza»

[insanewaltz]

Not staged but nudged into being

Alec Soth

[insanewaltz]

"They talked so often of writing the Great American Novel - the Great American Play - the Great American Poetry. ...So as I was painting my cow's head on blue I thought to myself: 'I'll make it an American painting. They will not think it great with red striped down the sides - Red, White and Blue - but they will notice it."

Joan Didion on Georgia O'Keeffe

[insanewaltz]

The men didn't think much of her bright color, so she made it brighter. The men yearned toward Europe so she went to Texas, and then New Mexico. The men talked about Cézanne, "long involved remarks about the 'plastic quality' of his form and color," and too one another's long involved remarks, in the view of this angelic rattlesnake in their midst, altogether too seriously. "I can paint one of those dismal-colored paintings like the men," the woman who regarded herself always like an outsider remembers thinking one day in 1922, and she did: ' a painting of a shed "all low-toned and dreary with the tree beside the door." She called this act of rancor "The Shanty" and hung it in her next show. "The men seemed to approve of it," she reported fifty-four years later, her contempt undimmed.

Joan Didion on Georgia O'Keeffe

[insanewaltz]

For Le Corbusier, as he plainly stated, "the exterior is always an interior," in that the natural elements of the sky, earth and horizon were to be treated mythologically as the elements of a vast outdoor room, and extension of the single room shelter.

ph/ Unité d'habitation, Marseille 1952 (P Koslowski)

[disturber-magazine-blog]

If you are putting all your waking hours into doing art every day… you are getting pretty good at having a kind of rarefied taste. So, metaphorically, you are eating some two-hundred-year-old gorgonzola cheese while the rest of the world is eating mild cheddar.

gorgonzola metaphor

John Baldessari in the catalog for a 2000 Getty Museum exhibition

(via disturber-magazine)

[smartilla]

IPF13 starts today! So bummed I can’t go, go check it if you are in Melbourne. Bonus points if you can spot the tiny print by yours truly!

Magic Johnston, 27–29 Johnston St, Collingwood VIC.

[insanewaltz]

In Rome with Sorrentino: dinner parties for 90-somethings, giraffes that disappear, old strippers, nuns with botox, wealth and decadence, cardinals and flamingos. "I was looking for the great beauty and I never found it."

La Grande Bellezza by Paolo Sorrentino. Screencaps by me.

[insanewaltz]

What if the real attraction of the internet is not its cutting-edge bells and whistles, its jazzy interface, or any of the advanced technology that underlies its pipes and wires? What if, instead, the attraction is an atavistic throwback to the prehistoric human fascination with telling tales?

Katharine Vine, editor in chief of Guardian Australia, talks about the ephemeral flow of information on the web.

[bazaardotco]

[insanewaltz]

A study on parking lots by Ed Ruscha. 1967/99

[insanewaltz]

If you don’t have time to write, stop answering the phone. Change your email address. Kill your television. If you don’t have a baby, have one. If you have a baby, get a sitter. If you work too much, work more. If you don’t work enough, work less. If there’s a problem, exaggerate it. If you’re broke, go to the food bank. If you have too much money, give it away. If you’re north, go south.

Ariel Gore, How to become a famous writer. 

[blackgirlrevolution-blog]

I wanted to deliver the Africa that people always knew they wanted; images of Africans that were cool, universal, and not formulaic to existing schemas of what society expected Africa to look like. I was essentially showing the African from a very cosmopolitan lens.

Renaissance Woman Oroma Elewa on her magazine Pop’ Africana (Africa is a Country Interview)  (via blackgirlrevolution)

[insanewaltz]

The incredible imaginary of Oroma Elewa.

[natgeofound]

Women enjoy the benefits of a heated whirlpool in Saint Petersburg, Florida, 1973.Photograph by Jonathan Blair, National Geographic

[insanewaltz]

Vintage National Geographic.

[insanewaltz]

Photography is so democratic because it is so accessible. But that doesn’t mean that anyone can produce—in all this democracy—anything of value. You have to bring insight. And the only thing most photographers do is description. They’re still doing the Diane Arbus.

Duane Michals via BOMBLOG.