erhebung

Old Friends, Old Photographs

Last night was a night of Metric, everyone wanting to fall in love, everyone wanting to play the lead; and yes­terday, daytime, was a day of talking with old and dear and too-​long absent friends. And during one con­ver­sa­tion, someone asked how I achieved the look in the pho­to­graph below, and I explained that the figure was moving, and the camera was also moving, the camera fol­lowing the figure, and so everything else became blur, a wash of light; and that that the light of night had a greater intensity on film than the light of day. I think my friend described the pho­to­graph as hyper-​real. The music of Metric also has a greater intensity at night (as does much music). So: night and day; moving and tracking; clarity and blur; old friends, old photographs.

Xi’an, 2006.

Exploring Today (Yesterday)

Wrote this yes­terday, but didn’t get chance to post it here:

Exploring today: found some deli­cious speakers, but decided they were probably too expensive; also found some very cheap in-​the-​ear head­phones, but decided they were probably too cheap; bought some apples and had a bizarre exchange with the apple-​seller; was told by a lady in a DVD store that I was pretty, then told her that she was pretty too (there was blushing); tasted a nice syrupy cake; wandered around and thought about whether or not I needed a digital camera (pretty sure I don’t, but…); met some amusing, lively people at work, one of whom used to study in Xi’an (“I miss the food”, she said); chatted with a wise lady who remembered being given candy by US soldiers when they lib­er­ated Germany (and last night that same lady talked about how once, while living in Paris and missing home, she had listened to Gounoud’s Faust; her descrip­tion of some of the closing scenes — the depic­tion of The Brocken? — has stuck in my mind). More exploring tomorrow.

Birds and Balls

I’m sorting out the external drives, packing, and trying to pretend I’m not drunk (or hungover, or a mix of the two). In an attempt to focus on some­thing other than muzzi­ness, I’ve been playing Endless Migra­tion, a highly addictive web game in which you have to protect a flock of birds from a variety of airborne threats (storms, air­liners, Zepellins: that sort of thing). Good stuff. I also recom­mend the frus­trat­ingly playable Bas­ket­ball.

Ahoy!

Whiskey has been drunk and train ticket has been bought. And earlier I bought some new combats (not sure if that word is able to cross the Atlantic without a visa; mine are greener than these). Also con­tem­plated cutting my hair, but didn’t go through with it. I am now drunk (Becky supplied the whiskey, and I believe has incrim­in­ating pho­to­graphs) and shouting at (and chasing) an incred­ibly insolent cat.

Changes

More changes, it seems: in the next couple of days, I’ll be heading north-​easterly. I’m expecting it to be inter­esting. Today the plan is to get some new clothes (it is cold out there), get a train ticket (it is quite far from here), and then drink some whiskey (Becky appar­ently has a bottle). We’ll have to see how it all goes.

The image below is two pho­to­graphs, or perhaps two vari­ations of the same pho­to­graph. On the left is a scan — a lab scan I tweaked, a little — of a frame from a roll of film exposed at the begin­ning of 2007; and on the right is another frame from that roll, but a frame I scanned myself (and tweaked, a little) a couple of weeks ago. I think I was going for a dif­ferent look (steeper curve, deeper blacks), the first time I saw the image. I like both.

Xi’an, 2007.

The Screen Goes to White

I watched Lost when it first came out, and enjoyed it, but found it frus­trat­ingly paced. I think I stopped watching it reg­u­larly some­where around the middle of the second season (or maybe it was the third). This video has con­vinced me I should probably give it another go:

Do Anything

The most con­sist­ently inter­esting thing I read last year was Warren Ellis’ Do Anything, a series of columns pub­lished on the Bleeding Cool website. Here are links to each of the indi­vidual install­ments: 001, 002, 003, 004, 005, 006, 007, 008, 009, 010, 011, 012, 013, 014, 015, 016, 017, 018, 019, 020, 021, 022, 023, 024, 025, 026. I highly recom­mend taking a look.

Sites of Incarceration

I found Pete Brook’s thought-​provoking Prison Pho­to­graphy blog via con­sumptive (another thought-​provoking blog), and since finding it I’ve spent a lot of time exploring its archives. It’s def­in­itely worth exploring. Brook is using his blog to ask per­tinent questions:

If a camera is within prison walls we should always be asking; How did it get there? What are/​were the motives? What are the responses? I consider the pho­to­graph as social document, there­fore, what social and polit­ical powers are at play in a photograph’s man­u­fac­ture? And, how is know­ledge, related to those powers, constructed?

It’s implicit, I think, that these are ques­tions we could — should, even — direct at all pho­to­graphy, not just the pho­to­graphy of “sites of incarceration”.

On the first day of this fresh new decade, I read some­thing that lodged itself in my mind and promptly began gnawing:

[…] I think pho­to­graphers are talking pretty much to each other with their photos these days. Does anyone else really even notice pho­to­graphy these days, much less whether it is good or bad? […]

I think other people do notice pho­to­graphy, and I think that some will notice the aes­thetics, others, the content, and others still, an product of the two. But I do wonder if a large amount of con­tem­porary pho­to­graphy (and likewise con­tem­porary poetry, con­tem­porary fine art, etc.) is created solely for appre­ci­ation within a quite insular, self-​contained, elitist milieu.

MCMP Redux #6

I drafted this back in October, and then promptly forgot about it (it’s been a strange couple of months):

I took this pho­to­graph late one morning, or maybe early one after­noon. I was with another foreign teacher at the time, and while we’d been eating we had both noticed that we were being watched by a group of wait­resses and waiters in the res­taurant opposite. It is quite common in China for Chinese people to watch for­eigners, but this group of young people were notable for the intensity of their curi­osity: they watched us the entire time we ate our noodles, from begin­ning to end, unflinching, indefatig­able. So, imme­di­ately on leaving the noodle res­taurant in which I’d been eating some very good beef noodles (it was a Muslim res­taurant, I think), I dashed over the road and took a few pho­to­graphs of our audience. This frame was the last one, and I’m happy that after the initial shock of me walking straight towards them, camera in hand, snapping pho­to­graphs, they each quickly accepted their sudden meta­morph­osis from observer into observed, relaxed, and smiled.

Past install­ments of MCMP Redux can be found here.

Yinchuan, 2008.

Twenty-​Ten

So, 2010 is here. We’re not quite at manned missions to Jupiter, yet, but NASA does have a few inter­esting missions planned. On a related note, I like io9’s 15 Reasons To Live For The Next 10 Years.

In other news, I’ve finally updated scribeoflight.org, which feels like a good start to the year.

The song of the day has been ‘Changes’:

I watch the ripples change their size,
but never leave the stream
of warm imper­man­ence and
so the days float through my eyes,
but still the days seem the same.
And these children that you spit on
as they try to change their worlds
are immune to your con­sulta­tions:
they’re quite aware of what they’re going through.

I have a feeling it’s going to be an inter­esting year.

Mr. Chu

Around a year ago pH and I encountered Mr. Chu. Mr. Chu seemed to be present, albeit in dif­ferent personas, in six pho­to­graphs I had taken around that time: he was an Everyman, one single meta-​man who rep­res­ented many others. The idea was to present his story in Acts and Scenes, the first set of images the six scenes of the first act. The plan then was for more to follow, and more may yet follow; but for now Mr. Chu inhabits a place, a floating world, that is cur­rently off limits. This post is a memorial to Chu, wherever he may be. The captions below each pho­to­graph were created during the Gtalk chat that led to the creation of the set itself.

Scene One — “ONE, two, three, four, Mr. Chu thought as he walked the alley to the Bureau…”

Scene Two — “The head­lights silently approached and Mr. Chu wondered, for a moment, if they were coming for him…”

Scene Three — “As usual, on these nightly trips to his fate, Mr. Chu felt deeply the pain of the infinite commute towards darkness.”

Scene Four — “Mr. Chu had powers, he realised; it was just a matter of deciding how to use them.”

Scene Five — “He stood in the station as he always stood, Mr. Chu to himself, Mr. Chu to the rest of the world.”

Scene Six — “Later in life, Mr. Chu would look back on his failures and try to find out where he had wrong, how he had become the pianist who always hit the wrong keys.”

A Magic Glimmering Realm

More on coral over at Google Books:

Ever since European explorers began to rove the tropic oceans, the Western world hs vaguely dis­cerned the phant­asmagoria of coral isles rising, palm-​fringed and surf-​ruffled, amid the blue des­ol­a­tion of the sea. As the cen­turies passed the image sharpened; new details emerged — of island neck­laces ringing bright tur­quoise lagoons, and many an arched beach of pastel sands. Below the sun-​spangled satin of the waters there loomed a fabulous world of living creatures, more prolific and colorful than any known to man, a magic glim­mering realm of flower­like animals, giant clams and gaudy fish with iri­des­cent scales of gold and silver, ruby and emerald, glinting among the groves and grottoes of the coral gardens.

People wrote dif­fer­ently in 1954.