Artists began using photographs as reference for painted portraits or sculptures almost immediately upon the discovery of the photographic process in the 19th century. However, it takes skill to translate the reference image into another medium so that it looks “real”—in other words, not like a reproduction of a reproduction, but like the person it was meant to represent. Tricky stuff.
Clockwise from top left: Panoramic Camera, View Finder Camera, 35 mm Single Cut Camera, Micro Camera. Photos courtesy of Hyun-seok Sim
Sculptor/metalsmith Hyun-seok Sim crafts these incredible pinhole cameras from sterling silver and brass. Their name, CamerAg, is a portmanteau of camera plus Ag, the scientific abbreviation for silver. Each one is built entirely by hand, right down to the screws and dials. They all take pictures, but that’s almost beside the point. Many of the cameras lack viewfinders, meaning that composing an image relies on luck and chance more than anything else. But who cares? These work just fine as eye candy. To see the entire collection of 23 cameras, click here.
Rare Avis Wallpaper
2007 Archival digital prints on 24” wide rolls
Site specific installations from found snapshot images
Artist Cassandra Jones uses the familiar and expected banality of stock photography to create these incredible feasts of color and pattern, transforming the predictable images into luminous and startling better versions of themselves. Look at the very excellent post on Accidental Mysteries, which features an embedded video of an interview with the artist first published on BoingBoing, and also check out Jones’s own website. She asks, “Does there really need to be another picture of a sunset?” Like the surface of the sea, a sunset is always the same and always different. The one you saw is not the one snapped by someone else and available for download on iStock Photos, but it’s pretty close. What I find most haunting about Jones’s work is the notion that we never have to photograph another flamingo or tropical beach scene for posterity ever again. We can just observe and appreciate them in situ, instead, and if an image is needed…there are already plenty to choose from. Billions of pictures are uploaded to social networking and photo sites every day; maybe some categories have reached the point where they can be considered full. —Angela Riechers
via Accidental Mysteries
David Graham documents America as a place where the intersection of cultural and actual landscape leads to moments of strange beauty. His cheerful supersaturated color photographs, graced by a bemused appreciation of his native land, capture a vivid jumble of roadside attractions and manmade structures locked in unexpected tension with their environment. Almost Paradise, his newest book with a foreword by noted writer Jack Hitt, ventures into dark territory with images of post-Katrina New Orleans sequenced together with objects in a wax museum and sunny days in no-man’s land. Graham’s postindustrial scenes devoid of the humans who created them will haunt your subconscious in the best possible way.