ontheimage

From 24flinching.com…

As a kid growing up in the eightees’ who naturally gravitated towards GrandMaster Flash, The RockSteady Crew and writing graffiti, I always had an affinity for the New York City subway during the late 70′ and early 80’s. It represented the blood-filled arteries of a city pumping with organic, authentic, city-brewed culture. It was covered with tags and pieces while filled with people of every size, shape, age and color. It was reckless and untamed and most importantly, it was New York City.

I collected some photographs from Bruce Davidson, John F. Conn, Jamel Shabazz and Martha Cooper detailing life on and in the New York City subway in the 1980’s. Enjoy. More…

The International Photography Festival known as “Les Rencontres d’Arles” was created by Lucien Clergue , Jean-Maurice Rouquette and Michel Tournier in 1968. More than forty years later this festival is definitively, the most important event around photography in the whole world.

Usually organized around more than 50 events installed in various exceptional patrimonial places of Arles, Les Rencontres d’Arles (in English the Meetings of Arles) , each summer in July, intend to contribute to transmit the world photographic inheritance and also want to be the crucible of contemporary creation by the discovery of young talented photographers.

Thanks to a demanding programming directed by talented François Hebel and a challenging public, the Rencontres d’Arles explore the current stakes of photography and attest capacity of this medium and importance of the figure of the photographer, witness of the world which surrounds it. More…

From Diane Negra at The Times Higher Education…

In an era of fiscal and intellectual uncertainty in academic publishing, where both the traditional monograph and the anthology are under stress, publishers of media studies books are seemingly in agreement about the attractions of one particular form: the short single-film/TV series study.

Running at about half the length of the conventional monograph and organised to attract both scholarly readers and bookshop browsers, titles of this kind represent a relatively robust area of publication in the discipline. Where once the British Film Institute Classics/Modern Classics stood alone in the category, other series devoted to such books have proliferated in recent years. One can now point to examples such as American Indies from Edinburgh University Press, Spin-Offs from Duke University Press, TV Milestones from Wayne State University Press, Studies in Film and Television from Wiley-Blackwell and Cultographies from Wallflower Press, among others.

The rise of this sort of book as an intellectual/commercial phenomenon has occurred (not coincidentally) in tandem with the popularisation of the DVD box set and the expansion of “serious” internet commentary about media, some of it by academics writing for forums such as FlowTV, In Medias Res and Antenna. It also accompanies the much-lamented (if arguable) death of popular film criticism in print. More…

(Image: TV Milestones Series)

From Lenora Jane Estes at VFDaily…

Walker Evans’s early documentary photographs of poverty in the South during the Great Depression captured the public’s attention—even altering the way many Americans saw their country—and helped define his 46-year career. Yet his little–known works produced in the ensuing decades are equally as innovative. Drawn chiefly from a largely unseen private collection, and curated by the ever–inventive James Crump, the Cincinnati Art Museum’s Decade by Decade (on display through September 5), is the first exhibition spanning Evans’s work from every decade, including his years at Fortune magazine in the 1940’s, 50s, and 60s, until his death in 1975. The exhibition also debuts rare photographs from the Victorian House survey series, which Evans began in 1931, as well as prints from a trip to Tahiti the following year. As a coda, the show offers Evans’s very last images, shot in the 70s with the then–new Polaroid SX–70. Quote Evans, “The matter of art in photography may come down to this: it is the capture and projection of the delights of seeing; it is the defining of observation full and felt.” More…

From Sue Hubbard at 3quarksdaily.com…

Little could the British inventor, William Henry Fox Talbot, have imagined, when in 1841 he developed the calotype, an early photographic process using paper coated with silver iodide, where this nascent technology would lead; the ethical and moral questions that photography would raise.  From Fox Talbot’s point of view the camera was about producing ‘natural images’. But more than 150 years later we know that the photographer’s relationship with his subject is more complicated. As Susan Sontag perceptively put it in her seminal book On Photography: “like a pair of binoculars with no right or wrong end, the camera makes exotic things near, intimate; and familiar things small, abstract, strange, much further away. It offers, in one easy, habit-forming activity, both participation and alienation in our own lives and those of others – allowing us to participate, while confirming alienation.” More…

By Molly Springfield at triplecanopy…

On the night of June 1, 1934, a Belgian information scientist named Paul Otlet sat in silent, peaceful protest outside the locked doors of a government building in Brussels from which he had just been evicted. Inside was his life’s work: a vast archive of more than twelve million bibliographic three-by-five-inch index cards, which attempted to catalog and cross-reference the relationships among all the world’s published information. For Otlet, the archive was at the center of a plan to universalize human knowledge. He called it the Mundaneum, and he believed it would usher in a new era of peace and progress. The Belgian government, however, had come to view Otlet and his fine mess of papers, dusty boxes, and customized filing cabinets as a financial and political nuisance.

Thirteen years earlier, Otlet’s Mundaneum—then called the Palais Mondial—had occupied 150 gleaming rooms in the Palais du Cinquatenaire in Brussels. Thousands of visitors a day filed through, marveling at the seven-foot-high card-catalog cabinets lining the walls of an eighty-foot-long room. More…

From Fans in a Flashbulb: International Center of Photography…

The works of both the American photographer Susan Meiselas and the Iranian-born, American-based artist Shirin Neshat document politics in surprisingly similar ways.

For Meiselas, still best known for her first photojournalistic project chronicling the political upheavals in Central America in the 1970s and 1980s, documenting political change was more than just shooting photographs of military officers and armed insurgents. Over her five years in Nicaragua and El Salvador she photographed other things as well, from weddings to funeral processions, leaving one with the sense of how the turmoil affected all aspects of everyday life. Her use of color, pioneering and controversial in war photography at that time, gave an added immediacy to the images to which she applied it. For more, as well as additional images…

From 3quarksdaily.com…

In the year 867, a new portrait mosaic of the Virgin Mary & Son was unveiled in the apse of the Hagia Sophia — the seat of the Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church in Istanbul (then Constantinople) — homilized by the Armenian-born soon-to-be–Patriarch Photios as a victory over Iconoclasm: the almost-century-long proscription on depiction that had rocked the ages-old Byzantine art world to its foundations. This forbearance of graven images was (and remains) one of the most profound differences between Islam and its Great Satanic neighbors. More…

We take visual imagination for granted. But the blank inner world of a patient called MX demonstrates the rich neural processes needed to create the images in our heads.

From Carl Zimmer at Discover…

One day in 2005, a retired building surveyor in Edinburgh visited his doctor with a strange complaint: His mind’s eye had suddenly gone blind.

The surveyor, referred to as MX by his doctors, was 65 at the time. He had always felt that he possessed an exceptional talent for picturing things in his mind. The skill had come in handy in his job, allowing MX to recall the fine details of the buildings he surveyed. Just before drifting off to sleep, he enjoyed running through recent events as if he were watching a movie. He could picture his family, his friends, and even characters in the books he read.

Then these images all vanished. The change happened shortly after MX went to a hospital to have his blocked coronary arteries treated. As a cardiologist snaked a tube into the arteries and cleared out the obstructions, MX felt a “reverberation” in his head and a tingling in his left arm. He didn’t think to mention it to his doctors at the time. But four days later he realized that when he closed his eyes, all was darkness. More…