Tim Davis

I mentioned this work in class on Wednesday. A great early series from Tim Davis, which deals directly with the question of light. In his lucid introduction to the series, he writes:

In photographic language, light is read as grammar; as an aesthetic tool, helping the artist describe an apprehended visual world. I am pursuing a visual world where light is syntactic; light veering close to content. In all my work light is cultural and political. It is put there by someone, for a purpose: to invite citizens to share their money with corporations, to keep workers working, to describe democracy, to allow paintings in museums to be seen in one particular way.

Bradford Pear

Car Accident

Sconce

The Strand

I'm a big fan of the way in which Davis investigates larger political issues through vernacular, often banal, subject matter. And there is a great deal of humor in the work, which always makes it fun to look at.

More work from the series can be found here.

Woman Waiting to Take a Photograph

I thought I would start with some writing on photography. Here is a very short story by Dave Eggers called Woman Waiting to Take a Photograph which some of you may have read. It is included in the 2006 volume The Education of a Photographer:

The woman is a young woman. She wants to make a living as a photographer, but at the moment she is temping at a company that publishes books about wetlands preservation. On her days off she takes pictures, and today she is sitting in her car, across the street from a small grocery store called “The Go-Getters Market.” The store is located in a very poor neighborhood of her city—the windows are barred and at night a roll-down steel door covers the storefront. The woman thus finds the name “Go-Getters” an interesting one, because it is clear that the customers of the market are anything but go-getters. They are drunkards and prostitutes and transients, and the young photographer thinks that if she can get the right picture of some of these people entering the store, she will make a picture that would be considered trenchant, or even poignant—either way the product of a sharp and observant eye. So she sits in her Toyota Camry, which her parents gave her because it was two years old and they wanted something new, and she waits for the right poor person to enter or leave the store. She has her window closed, but will open it when the right person appears, and then shoot that person under the sign that says “Go-Getters.” This, for the viewer of her photograph when it is displayed—first in a gallery, then in the hallway of a collector’s home, and later in a museum when she has her retrospective—will prove that she, the photographer, has a good eye for irony and hypocrisy, for the inequities and injustices of life, its perfect and unmitigated absurdity.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? My first car was a Toyota Camry, although it was more like ten years old.

This might be more for those inclined to straight photography, but there's probably something in it for everyone.

lester brown, "plan b"

mobilize to save civilization!
here.
(link to download lester brown's "plan b 4.0: mobilizing to save civilization")