McSweeney's Internet Tendency: A Convergence of Convergences: A Contest.

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: A Convergence of Convergences: A Contest.

Kienholz's flag, at any rate, is much closer in size to that of the actual first flag raised atop the dread volcano, the one deemed not photogenic enough ...

which, in turn, had to be replaced, under heavy fire (there's even a photo of the one coming down and the other going up) ...

so as to occasion Joe Rosenthal's decidedly more resonant (if slightly posed) classic image.

(See Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall's bracingly revisionist 1991 take on the fate of both the photo and those who happened to be captured in it, Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories, and the American Hero.)

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Gonzalez-Torres: “I wanted to make a show that would disappear completely. […] It was also about trying to be a threat to the art-marketing system, and also, to be really honest, it was about being generous to a certain extent. […] Freud said that we rehearse our fears in order to lessen them. In a way this “letting go” of the work – this refusal to make a static form, a monolithic sculpture, in favour of a disappearing, changing, unstable, and fragile form – was an attempt on my part to rehearse my fears of having Ross disappear day by day right in front of my eyes.”

village voice > art > Anri Sala at Marian Goodman Gallery by Kim Levin

village voice > art > Anri Sala at Marian Goodman Gallery by Kim Levin

Sala's art slips between sound and image, voice and vision, the legible and the visible, the abstract and the social, belief and mistrust—eluding symbolism and interpretation. It's about looking and listening. As the artist told me on the phone last week, "The formal things are pretty important, not because I'm attached to any formalism but because they're things that bring image, not things that bring explanation. They're things that you fail to translate or explain by words. I'm interested in when language fails to respond to the needs we have. That's when the visual becomes important. Language already has a lot of power in the world, even more than sex."

Rebecca Baron

Rebecca Baron

Baron is known for her award-winning lyrical essay films, which explore the construction of history, with a particular interest in still photography and its relationship to the moving image. Her first film to focus on still photography, The Idea of North (1995), reconstructs the history of Solomon Andrée's 1897 failed attempt to reach the North Pole by hot air balloon through photographic images recovered from under the ice, thirty-three years after his team's disappearance. okay bye-bye (1998) reflects on the Vietnam War, U.S. involvement in Cambodia, and Baron's own experience of living in Southern California. A combination of historical research, media analysis, epistolary narrative and personal meditation, it takes shape around Super 8 footage of an unidentified Cambodian man—footage Baron found on a Southern California sidewalk—as well as iconic and vernacular photographs from the Vietnam era.

Both films use still photography as a springboard for what Baron calls "private research," an associative process that combinesofficial and personal accounts of events, refusing a totalizing historical narrative and emphasizing the role of chance in human experience.

She is also at work on collaborative projects with Doug Goodwin on the history of the cyanotype and with Dorit Margreiter on simulations of poverty.

Staring Back - The MIT Press

Staring Back - The MIT Press

Staring Back
Chris Marker
Edited by Bill Horrigan
Essays by Bill Horrigan and Molly Nesbit

Table of Contents

Any new film and any new book by French filmmaker Chris Marker is an event. Marker gave film lovers one of their most memorable experiences with La Jetée (1962)--a time-travel montage set after a nuclear war that inspired Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (1995). His still camerawork is not as well known, but Marker has been taking photographs as long as he has been making films. Staring Back presents 200 black-and-white photographs from Marker's personal archives, taken from 1952 to 2006. Some of the photographs are related to his classic films (which include Le Jetée, Sans Soleil, ¡Cuba Si!, and The Case of the Grinning Cat), others are portraits of famous faces (Simone Signoret, Akira Kurosawa), but most are pictures of people Marker has encountered as he has traveled the world (an extra who appeared in Kurosawa's Ran, a woman seen on a street in Siberia). The central section of the book contains a series of photographs documenting political protests Marker has witnessed, including the march on the Pentagon in 1967, the events of May 1968 in Paris, and the tumultuous 2006 demonstrations protesting the French government's proposed employment policies.

The photographs are accompanied by several unpublished texts by Marker, including the English language text of The Case of the Grinning Cat and Marker's annotations for some of the photos. The book--which appears in conjunction with an exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University--also includes essays by Wexner Center curator Bill Horrigan and art historian Molly Nesbit.

Chris Marker (born in 1921) is one of French cinema's most influential artists.

Analogue - The MIT Press

Analogue - The MIT Press

Analogue
Zoe Leonard
Photographs by Zoe Leonard

The photographs in Zoe Leonard's Analogue trace the "layered, frayed, and quirky" beauty of a fading way of life. Zoe Leonard documents the vanishing face and texture of twentieth-century urban life, as seen in the shop windows of mom-and-pop stores. Lacking the glamour of the shopping mall and the digitally manipulated perfection of mail order catalogs, these fading objects tenaciously hold on to their disappearing place on city streets. Recognizing that digital technology has transformed traditional photography just as chain stores and multinational corporations have changed the face of urban life, Leonard attempts to preserve the photographic realm of the analogic--the photograph's distinct ability to record physical data into a corresponding image. Analogue is a testament both to vanishing city storefronts and to the endangered status of photography itself.

Leonard also documents a twenty-first century phenomenon, the globalized rag trade. Her photographs follow a shipment of discarded clothing from a clearing station in her native Brooklyn to used clothing markets in Kampala--showing us, in the trajectory of one commodity, the economic and social forces that link us globally.

Analogue accompanies a major exhibition of the same name at the Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University. It includes 83 color images from the exhibition and a text compiled by the artist of quotations from diverse sources.