me news

don’t look up

…through challenging camera angles Menno Aden abstracts most familiar actual living environments and public interiors into flattened two-dimensional scale models. A camera that the artist installed on the ceiling of various rooms takes pictures downwards of the interiors. The resulting images lay out space in symmetrical compositions that look like assemblages stripped off any kind of objectivity. The views into private homes and secret retreats bring up associations of the ubiquitous observation camera. The notion of surveillance is systematically played out by the artist to hint at society’s voyeuristic urge that popular culture has made mainstream…

some wonderful, unusual room portraits by menno aden
(many thanks to ‘uwe’for the inspiring link)

m / 25-06-2012 09:52 - tags: ,  

dutch politics anno 2012

m / 22-06-2012 15:36 - tags: ,  

fresh

the ubiquity of photography means that comparisons to other people are often difficult to avoid, ‘irving penn’ springs directly to mind for example when i met and saw the portfolio of young graduate rein janssen earlier this week, he is a still-life photographer with a hunger for experimentation and some beautiful projects under his belt already, one of the nicest books i have seen in a while and one to watch…

m / 21-06-2012 08:22 - tags: ,  

gold

a recent print campaign for ‘als’ (a fatal disease) featuring portraits people suffering from the condition but who were already deceased by the time the campaign was launched & shot by my friend ‘lukas göbel’ has just won gold at the cannes advertising festival this week, congrats from me!

m / 20-06-2012 09:14 - tags: , ,  

d13 #3

last week i spent a few days visiting the latest (and much criticised) edition of the (5 yearly) ‘documenta’ art festival in kassel, germany

some of the works which i apparently found interesting enough to photograph (and therefore blog about) included this enormous site-specific 30 meter long installation from artist geoffrey farmer: more than 50 years worth of ‘life’ magazines, whereby all of the images have been precisely cut out and mounted on dried grass shoots (complete with miniature grass frames to support the images on the reverse)

the whole installation was sorted by topic (objects, celebrities, black & white etc.) and they are all arranged by size from top to bottom, the mind boggles to think how much effort went into this project and i constantly wonder how many people were involved in it, surely not just the man himself?

of course writing about this project doesn’t come anywhere near to the experience one undergoes when actually seeing it (see also these previous related entries here)

m / 20-06-2012 08:58 - tags: , ,