me studio

‘tactile’ whizz-kid ‘julien vallée’ talks to gestalten tv about his work

i have posted several pieces about ‘google street view’ and the increasingly strained issue of privacy in the public domain, such as the case in holland where two muggers were arrested after being recognised on ‘street view’ or artists like ‘michael wolf’ (see earlier post this week) whose work plays with the voyeuristic nature of photography…

well, it turns out that yesterday one of my neighbours actually recognised me sat at a café with a friend just around the corner from my house, on ‘google street view’! you can see me (very clearly) right here, i can even tell that i had recently been to the hairdressers and which waitress was working that day… although the document lying on our table has been blurred

the idea is that any faces are automatically blurred to protect the innocent, except in this case the google camera truck captured our lunch session from three separate angles, thus making it pretty easy to identify me… it took me a while to figure out who my companion was that day, but now i know exactly when these pictures were taken (may last year) and i can almost see what we had for lunch… weird…

incidentally i followed the arrow route (heading north) back towards my house and noticed that the bronze coloured mercedes shown here apparently got stuck behind the google camera truck all the way along the canal

this series of posters was made for a paper maufacturer on the issue of ‘sustainability’ only two were eventually used but all can be viewed high res here, my personal favourites being the two shown here: ‘marian bantjes’ and ‘christoph niemann’ although it is perhaps a bit disappointing that all seem to have gone for form (however beautiful) rather than an idea, at least judging by what i can see on screen…

yesterday afternoon photographer ‘lukas göbel’ and i, welcomed a group of eight photography students from the ‘KABK’ art academy in the hague for a session in the photography museum FOAM, the idea was to talk to them about our work and about working as a professional photographer in the ‘real world’… it was a really interesting session and the students also showed their own portfolios and got to ask any burning questions they had, they then made a group portrait

i also spent some time photographing the amazing lead windows in some of the ‘out of bounds’ areas in the museum

british artist ‘stephen wiltshire’ has been a phenomenon in the UK for years with his unique talent: stephen is autistic and as a young child became famous for his incredibly detailed and accurate architectural drawings… from memory

he is now amazing people in the united states with his talent too… (tip via ‘qbn’)