Archive for the 'News' Category

(Credit: M. Scott Brauer)

From Helen Knight at MITNews…

Like many kids, Antonio Torralba began playing around with computers when he was 13 years old. Unlike many of his friends, though, he was not playing video games, but writing his own artificial intelligence (AI) programs.

Growing up on the island of Majorca, off the coast of Spain, Torralba spent his teenage years designing simple algorithms to recognize handwritten numbers, or to spot the verb and noun in a sentence. But he was perhaps most proud of a program that could show people how the night sky would look from a particular direction. “Or you could move to another planet, and it would tell you how the stars would look from there,” he says.

Today, Torralba is a tenured associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, and an affiliate of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), where he develops AI systems that can interpret images to understand what scenes and objects they contain. More…

(Credit: Couresty George and Betty Woodman)

From Ted Loos at The New York Times, Art & Design…

When a curator from the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome contacted Betty and George Woodman a dozen years ago, he made what would be, for most parents, a welcome request. He wanted to borrow from the Woodmans’ cache of rare vintage prints by their daughter — the photographer Francesca Woodman, who died in 1981 — to mount a show of her work.

“We refused,” Mr. Woodman said recently, seated in the large Chelsea loft where he and his wife have lived and created their own art for 31 years. “He said, ‘We take very good care of work — we had several El Grecos here last year.’ And I told him, ‘Well, El Greco didn’t have his father looking out for him.’ ”

The Roman curator got lesser, more recently printed images for his show.

The Woodmans are choosy about sites for their daughter’s work, and they have been holding out for years for the ideal place to burnish her legacy. Recently they got what they had been hoping for. More…

From Emily Eakin in the New Yorker:

Onward and Upward with the Arts: Last February, Tacita Dean flew to London from Berlin, and upon arriving she called the manager of Soho Film Laboratory. She was on her way to assess the color in three 16-mm. films that she had sent there for printing. The manager had bad news: the lab was under orders, effective immediately, to stop handling such film. Dean intended to show the films at a major exhibition of her work that was scheduled to open in Vienna two weeks later, and she was planning another film, arguably her most important to date: an installation for the Turbine Hall, the colossal space at Tate Modern.

The challenges and possibilities of motion picture images made still.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/31/111031fa_fact_eakin#ixzz1clH9AlQ0 (subscription required)

From James Polchin, The Smart Set

The linearity of the well-dressed party walking single file along a balcony, all framed against a shell-pocked building façade, makes for an unusual wedding photograph. By its title, the photograph asks us to notice the group of people walking between the elegant railing and the damaged building, but all I could see were those rough shell markings. When the photo won a World Press Photo award, it was featured in the German magazine Der Spiegel. The editors noted the façade damage was not from neglect, but rather was the residue of a three-week popular uprising in 1956 that overthrew the government before being defeated by Soviet troops. Nearly 20,000 people were killed. The photograph became symbolic more of the 1956 uprising and its repression than of life in 1965 Budapest. After the Der Speigel publication, Fejes was banned from publishing his photographs in Hungary for several years.

“Wedding” comes near the end of a show that chronicles nearly 70 years of Hungarian and European history through the eyes of five leading photographers. While their Hungarian names are a mystery to many of us today — Gyula Halász, Endre Ernö Friedmann, Andor Kohn, Lásló Weisz, Márton Mermelstein — their photographs have become iconic images of the 20th century. Brassaï’s demi-monde of Montmartre and Montparnasse at night. The haunting and shocking war photojournalism of Robert Capa. The intimate moments of quotidian life in André Kertész’s Paris and New York. László Moholy-Nagy’s rich, modernist explorations in Bauhaus aesthetics and photograms. Martin Munkácsi’s innovative and energetic fashion photography.

To Read More…

Photo by Ruth Fremson from The New York Times

From Roberta Smith at The New York Times…

SCIENTISTS have yet to determine what percentage of art-viewing these days is done through the viewfinder of a camera or a cellphone, but clearly the figure is on the rise. That’s why Ruth Fremson, the intrepid photographer for The New York Times who covered the Venice Biennale this summer, returned with so many images of people doing more or less what she was doing: taking pictures of works of art or people looking at works of art. More or less.

Only two of the people in these pictures is using a traditional full-service camera (similar to the ones Ms. Fremson carried with her) and actually holding it to the eye. Everyone else is wielding either a cellphone or a mini-camera and looking at a small screen, which tends to make the framing process much more casual. It is changing the look of photography. More…