Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts

18 January 2010

Colour me Berlin



From Color Berlin, an eye-popping photo essay by Matthias Heiderich.

Pictures of one of my favourite cities prompt a listen to some German-language pop, in this case Gustav, the marvelous project of artist/composer Eva Jantschitsch. Although she is from Vienna, if I were zipping around Kreuzberg or Neukölln on that bike I might have this song in my head.

Gustav - Neulich im Kanal


30 November 2009

Twiggy Twiggy



Londoners: the National Portrait Gallery currently has a roomful of Twiggy photographs from the '60s to the present on display (above: photograph by Barry Lategan, 1966). This is a good thing.

If you know me, you might be expecting me now to post, by way of audio caption, a certain shibuya-kei classic from 1991. How about instead we listen to a young Maki Nomiya's original version of that tune, sung in 1981, about nine years before she joined Pizzicato Five.

Maki Nomiya - Twiggy Twiggy

20 November 2009

Without entertaining another thought



This Polaroid by Anna Verlet prompts something in my brain to want to listen to Jens Lekman's cover of Arthur Russell's 'A Little Lost'.

17 November 2009

Koi no dorei



No. 6 from the series 'Moge mijn dood zo zuiver zijn als het breken van kristal' (May my death be as pure as the breaking of crystal) by Dutch artist Liselotte de Groot (2007)

Chiyo Okumura - Koi No Dorei

Lasers in the jungle



Lightning Bugs
by Barry Underwood, from his show Earth Engines at Johansson Projects gallery in Oakland, California. (Hat tip: BLDGBLOG)

The Konki Duet - Slow Sex

09 November 2009

The golden age

A new decade is soon upon us, and while some people (um, like us) are busy looking back, putting together mixes of their favorite music from the past ten years, Momus is naturally already looking ahead. Go and read his notes on 2010-2019 right now, and you will understand why we'll soon begin to eat more mushrooms, learn to make more things with wood, and finally stop wearing jeans. Furthermore:
Your body will thank you for using a bicycle every day during the new decade. Using bicycles will become a condition of using computers successfully too: the correspondence between them will become clearer over time.
I can only hope he's being literal here, and the widespread adoption of pedal-powered laptops becomes reality. Finally:
You have been underestimating the colour yellow.
Indeed we have. I can't wait for yellow--gossamer, silky, pale, enlightened, friendly yellow--to be the new silvery blue-black, which for some reason has been the only legal color in Hollywood since about 2001. The monochrome black thing is never a sign of cultural health--it wasn't for the puritans and it sure isn't now. (I'm looking at you, Tim Burton. The director of Pee-wee's Big Adventure knows better.)

So in the spirit of yellow, and of bicycles, and of a friendlier decade ahead, let's have a look at this picture:



This is from Ryan McGinley's 2007 series I Know Where The Summer Goes. I hope this type of photography will be an influence on the values of the next decade. McGinley's is an aesthetic of adventure, playfulness, and vitality, with nary a scowling angel-of-death supermodel to be seen. (Warning: As there are lots of nude people in this summery series, that link I just gave you isn't very safe for work. Sorry if you've already been fired.)

That is all for now. You have 53 days left to wear your jeans, so put them on, go outside, and slide around in the mud. Have fun.

28 October 2009

Lipstick traces

Link
From David Hlynsky's series of photographs of shop windows in Eastern Europe from 1986-1990, the waning days of the Communist era. Go and take a look.