©Gordon Parks
From the project - Drop Out of Art School.
Drop Out of Art School (2012) -
In this age of an Instagram billion dollar buyout, pushing a button digitally transforms an original picture into one of manufactured nostalgia. An artificial time passage is applied by simulating a physical-chemical process relating to a film emulsion that is increasingly in short supply. While the moment captured is not generic, the uniformly applied veneer of a declining technology, and the mood it intends to evoke, is. While the moment is real, the sentiment imposed by the aesthetic may be as bankrupt as Kodak. Within this automation, users themselves can be elevated to the status of artists, or at a minimum, appear artful.
We have yet to comprehend how future generations will view our vernacular snapshots and their attempts to understand will undoubtedly be challenged by a disjointed reality portrayed through the human construct of aged pictures. We may learn that Instagram photos are as true as those imposed sentiments written in a Hallmark card - real feelings though not produced with our own words. But as with any modern day convenience, they are available for a price. The card at Wal-Mart is only 99 cents. The App, however, is free so long as you share your personal information.
‘Drop Out of Art School’ is an impermanent look at the changing Fairview neighbourhood in Vancouver, Canada. Within the time of a month, I photographed the area while on routine errands with a used and gifted iPhone. Fairview, which is where my family calls home, is also the city’s political seat and is home to City Hall and a flux of new big box stores. As the residents of Fairview, and also Vancouver, face intensifying transformative pressures, the project takes a snapshot of the community as our mayor strives to make this former Olympic host and “Most Livable City” also the Greenest City in the World by 2020.
Just as the neighbourhood has and continues to evolve, though arguably over longer timeframes, this project will continue to do so. It will age and some pictures might disappear altogether, like those delaminating from the insides of your parents’ family photo albums. When time permits, please visit Strange.rs before June 1 when the project undergoes a lasting transformation.
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of David Dondero, but if you haven’t, please get on that.
“Books like “On the Road” have a different kind of influence as well. They can, whether we think of them as great literature or not, get into the blood. They give content to experience. Many years after my encounters with Ginsberg around the department water fountain, I took a job in Boston, two hundred miles from New York, and I ended up commuting there by car. I drove at night, so that the trip would not eat up the workday, and I often stopped for gas at a service area on the Mass Pike about fifty miles from Boston. It’s fairly high above sea level there, in the lower ranges of the Berkshires, and I would stand at the pump in the dark looking at the stars in the cold clear sky as the semis roared past and with the wind in my hair, and I liked to imagine that I was a character in Kerouac’s novel, lost to everyone I knew and to everyone who knew me, somewhere in America, on the road. Then I would get in the car, and, bent over the wheel, while the trucks beat on past me, and the radio crackled, the sound going in and out, with oldies from the seventies, I began the long drop down to the lights of Boston, late in the night, late in my life, alone.” -
Louis Menand
Inside The New York Times’ wonderful The Lively Morgue, exploring more than five million prints and contact sheets from the paper’s entire archive.
(↬ Doobybrain)
"It’s sublime, to go into another room and make pictures. It’s magic time, where all your weaknesses of character, the blemishes of your personality, whatever else torments you, fades away, just doesn’t matter. You’re doing the one thing you want to do and you do it well and you know you do it well, and… you’re happy. The whole promise is to do the work, sitting down at the drawing table, turning on the radio, and I think, what a transcendent life this is, that I’m doing everything I want to do. In that moment, I feel like I’m a lucky man."
— Maurice Sendak (Thanks, @rohdesign!)
(via austinkleon)
"When he was 3, my 5-year-old grandson, James, proposed that the two of us go into business together. “We will write things and we will sell things,” he said, thereby yoking two enterprises that are rarely yoked."
I’m thrilled to have photographed the cover story for the June issue of Print Magazine about Mississippi Records and the design work of Eric Isaacson. What a honor to have my work in such a great publication, showcasing some of Portland’s finest.
“I think hatred is wasted energy, and it’s all non-productive…”
Alfred Hitchcock, my favorite director, on happiness.
( via Brain Pickings )
