charles latham found!
Some of you might recall my brief article on Charles Latham, and his series Cyrus.
Well – Charles contacted me, and he has a new website! So please check out http://www.sofabeast.com/ and all it’s photographic and design goodness, there’s some fantastic work there.
Thanks again Charles!
new work: the dismemberment of a shoggoth (the once and future king)
The Dismemberment of a Shoggoth (The Once and Future King)
I felt a bit like I was rushing this post, but it being Halloween, it seemed appropriate.
The Dismemberment of a Shoggoth is the first work I’ve executed in a larger series, at present titled The Once and Future King. I would have liked to have had the full artist-statement on the series completed when I posted this image, but it’s still in the works, but meanwhile, here’s a snippet:
Referencing T.H. White’s portrayal of Merlin as a being who experiences time backwards to normal reality, “The Once And Future King” serves as working-title for a large body of work documenting a series of strange, seemingly unconnected events whose causal mechanisms exist outside of normal time and space. While we are privileged to the ‘effects’ described by these events – the disappearance of a student from an abandoned Jeep, a garage where some monstrous Lovecraftian terror emerged and was summarily dispatched, a paradox of a time-travelling book – the ‘cause’ of these events seems entirely unknowable. The events themselves play across a fictional timeline, punctuated by a system of signifiers drawn from actual reality and historical reference.
Playing with the compression of time on a narrative scale, characters stand in the moment, posing, proud, as if in foreknowledge of the future-historical significance of their present context, a hypothetical “spark event” for a cataclysm yet to come. The prophetic mode here references, inversely, the truism “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”; within these narratives, history has already predetermined a far-flung future disaster, and while the immediate causal mechanisms of these seemingly random events is unknowable, the certainty of their eventual impact becomes quite monstrous.
Ideally, when complete, the work will be printed around 60″x90″, and funds permitting, on big beautiful lightboxes. I have included some detail shots below to show the level of “readability” present when viewing the work in person, but I’m hesitant to post a full-resolution zoom.it version at present for a variety of reasons.
More props to the Propnomicon for being an essential resource in the creation of various bloods, goo and otherwise disgusting elements for the scene. Also thanks to my buddy Jer who made me a nice tub of gelatinous congealed grossness he whimsically referred to as “thickened water”. And, as always, my brother for posing for me, and my family for tolerating this level of insanity in their own garage.
Happy Halloween everyone!
making a kill room / in progress pt. 2
A weeks worth of messing about in the garage has produced some 30 gigs of component photos to fiddle with, but while that’s actually happening, I thought I’d post some of the in-progress shots I accumulated along the way. The primary function for these is actually to address problems in the composite-process “ahead of time”, plotting the depth of field, framing etc… but as a result they’re a nice little documentation of the whole procedure as it goes along.
The final piece has a fair bit of work left to it, so I don’t want to discuss it much until it’s complete, but I included a preview at the end. Also, there’s zoom.it links along the way if you’d like to see the full-resolution images in all their excessive detail.
Edit: I’ve now written this post six times over. Images keep vanishing or text starts inexplicably moving into the image ‘captions’. This is a bit frustrating, hopefully this will finally work.
The door has a lot of history (and claw marks), and the sawhorses usually support the soft-top for the jeep; I used three cheap halogen worklamps for lighting (two 500w and one clip-on 250w), and an old trouble light, which worked quite well.
Cheap lightweight painter’s plastic sheeting – not the heavyduty stuff, so it wasn’t exactly durable (or wind proof), but it was cheap and cheerful. Shockingly, duct tape doesn’t adhere very well to old, dusty wood, but it still functioned well as a liner for the plastic through which I drove many a nail. The arrangement was meant to be haphazard and minimal at best, but still afford for some easy cleanup (which it did, beautifully). This shoot was at night, I shot it all again to check the lighting during the day, and fix some focus issues the night shoot highlighted.
Apparently half the text of this post is now missing. Awesome. Here’s the above scene shot the next day, with day light:
The light from the window and entrance (behind the camera) provides some nice fill light, and I fixed a few of the focus/framing/depth of field issues that occurred in the night shots. Finally, adding some of the props and objects that would be in the final shoot:
Good clean fun. Here’s a preview of the not-so-clean-fun:
dismembering an eldritch horror
I have to credit The Propnomicon as an invaluable resource on all things fake-blood and goo related. I ended up using a simple recipe of green-coloured detergent mixed with india ink and charcoal powder for the majority of the ‘wet’ goo, the best part was it cleaned up real quick with just the hose and some occasional scrubbing. My buddy Jer provided some thicker, heavier material you can see on the axe head and elsewhere in the piece that he described as “basically thickened water” – I’ll see if I can coax the recipe out of him, but given he works at a specialty lab for custom rubbers and resins, I imagine the ingredients aren’t over-the-counter. It was delightfully thick and gross however.
The whole shebang cleaned up like a proper Dexter-style kill room too, in about ten minutes, and that was just peachy.
Hopefully the final work will be ready in a week or two, right now all the finer adjustments and brain surgery are on the agenda.
in progress
Garage interior, composite test shoot
I’ve dedicated this week to executing a piece I’ve been planning for some time now, and finally things have mostly fallen into place to get it done. It’s part of a larger series of images which I’ll discuss later, but this one is situated inside my garage, so some cleaning and test-shoots have been needed. Above is the third composite test-shoot of the area I’m going to set up the narrative scene in; there’s just over 30 frames making up the final composite. I’ve posted some details below the cut, but if you’d like to explore the image on your own, my friend Jason linked me to zoom.it as a means of posting these large images, so feel free to check out the full-res image via their site at http://zoom.it/tJ4o (couldn’t get it to embed here, any suggestions are most welcome). Again, this isn’t the final work, just a technical test shoot to iron out some problems.
Tentative schedule has the final bloody shoot finished on friday or saturday, hoping a rough cut can be posted early next week. Details below!
derek liddington – dandy gangs: a working-class love story
The Warhols - Dandy Gangs: A working-class love story
This past week I had the pleasure of serving as still photographer for Derek Liddington’s Dandy Gangs: A working-class love story . Derek’s statement for the performance:
“The performance Dandy Gangs: a working-class love story looks at possible repetitions founded in dandy, hip hop, punk, rock n’ roll and gang aesthetics. Consistent with my interest in melding popular histories and autobiographical moments I have borrowed locations from hangouts I had as a youth growing up in Mississauga, including Mississauga’s Civic Centre and Kariya Park. At scheduled times knowing and unknowing audiences will watch as two groups of dancers and tenors interact through operatic song and dance choreography based on early Fluxus happenings, scenes from West Side Story and operatic interpretations of early 90’s hip hop music. Viewers will watch as opposing dandy-gangs entangle in scenarios of territorial misunderstanding, conflict, tension and resolution expressed through a Fluxus-dance-rock-opera. Gang members will be presented as caricatures melding fashions and attitudes borrowed from the flâneur, dandy and punk; likening the performers to the cultural phenomenon of flash-mobs.” (http://derekliddington.com/section/245097_Dandy_Gangs_A_Working_Class_Love_Story.html)
The two featured gangs were The Warhols (pictured above) and The Stallones, each with a distinctive uniform and their own gang leaders, all wearing masks of their respective namesakes. The outfits were meticulously constructed, with metal studs outlining the gang names on the backs of the clothing (I can’t imagine what all this cost to have made). Wigs were similarly used to distinguish the gangs, and in the same manner, the gang leaders, who had beautiful leather tail-coats.
The performance occurred in three parts: a chance meeting and confrontation between the two gangs during a picnic in a park, a progression of each gang through Square One mall, and a final, operatic-rock battle in Celebration Square, a giant recreation fountain.
Dandy Gangs - Battle at Celebration Square
Photographing the performance was definitely challenging but thoroughly enjoyable. Too often I’ve seen performance work essentially destroyed by a photographer literally pointing a camera a few feet from the performer’s faces; I used a relatively long lens and aimed to be as inconspicuous as possible, and I think I did pretty well. The resulting images were, in my opinion, extremely successful and I quite enjoyed “reliving” the whole performance as I processed the final photos.
Following the cut below I’ve included some of the ‘highlights’ and a few feature photos showing the principal players and outfits.
first digital medium format experience
Somehow I was gonna try to avoid sexual connotations here as per the usual straight-dude technology whatever … maybe I will nonetheless.
Anyhow, my colleague and friend Derek Liddington hired me to do some photography work for his art practice, and rented the studio at Gallery 44 and their delightful Hasselblad H3DII. It was some very challenging work, really enjoyable, and the experience of working with the digital medium format was very rewarding … and enlightening. Before I get to that, I just noticed Derek already posted the shots from this afternoon, so have a look at our endeavours:
http://derekliddington.com/section/174242_Double_Self_Portrait.html
http://derekliddington.com/section/174244_Two_Views_of_a_Working_Class_Fl_neur.html
(I also documented a performance a few weeks ago that Derek directed at The Power Plant: http://derekliddington.com/section/171724_Ballad_for_a_working_class_pomo_Only_the.html )
Best to let his work speak for itself, tho there’s some very eloquent descriptions in the sidebar on the site.
The camera itself was a joy to work with; the image sharpness was superb, colour accuracy and dynamic range was amazing (although I’m proud to say my S5 Pro was just about on par with the H3DII in the this regard), very satisfying clunk to the shutter and everything functioned as and when it was supposed to.
That being said; I was suprised at how clumsy and clunky the interface was, both the buttons/dials and the onscreen menus. It felt like a standard had been created out of utility some twenty years ago and never updated or optimized. Menus were clustered together seemingly at random; ISO selection was followed by Mode (M, A) followed by “Browse” … white balance was hidden somewhere I never found, thankfully it could be adjusted from the LCD screen with nominal difficulty.
I realize that this was my first encounter with this interface, but honestly, for what the camera was worth, and a general sense of the section of business using it … I expected it’d be designed for a more optimized workflow.
the empty room
I often “prototype” works or series of works seemingly indefinitely, and this is mostly because when I do get around to playing with ideas for a work/series I generally don’t feel like what I’m doing is “the work” and just a piece of “the work”. So there’s a ton of pieces I’ve done with the post-fix “(prototype)” in the title, which most of the time will one day grow up to lose that little attachment.
Occasionally the prototype becomes the final product, but, in my defense, that’s pretty rare.
One idea I have been messing around with for a few years now, one that’s undergone a few “prototypes” so far, falls under the title “The Empty Room”. The major obstacle to really exploring this idea has been the absolute mass of clutter in my house and a general lack of access to gritty, abandoned empty interiors (… that aren’t completely uninhabitable, that is). I’m also a touch lazy. But as I like to think that I let ideas percolate over long periods of time and generally that action/inaction does pay off eventually, I tend to let these empty rooms present themselves from happenstance and work with them when they magically appear.
Nonetheless, still in the prototyping stage on this one.
Below are two permutations of some recent experiments, the differences primarily technical. The first image is a composite of several photos, shot horizontally from floor to ceiling, the second is a single shot with a 10mm lens, with the added bonus of HDR rendering (… I am crazy enough to want to make HDR images that don’t look like they’re HDR).
The Empty Room (prototype 2010) (composite)
The Empty Room (prototype 2010) (single shot, HDR)
I suspect, at some point in the future, this will transition into me actually building a room somewhere for the sake of this shot or shots … I am attempting to resist the urge to build miniatures. Not because I don’t like miniatures, and I even have access to a few people doing incredible work with them (HI JER! HI JASON!), but adding the miniature aspect to this work seems to prevent it from being habitable and I’m not sure I can quite reconcile that just yet. I might change my song in a few months tho, as usual.
Meanwhile, if you happen to be moving out of your home/apartment and have neato empty rooms you can whore to me for an afternoon, do let me know.
Day 10 (The Ten Days of Cthulhu) (The Last Day)
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 10)
There was a version with a somewhat telling nosebleed, but it was a little too strong of a mark. I might write more about this series when it has settled a bit, but generally I’m quite happy with the results. Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!
Day 9 (The Ten Days of Cthulhu)
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 9)
And a detail, because these would definitely be printed a lot bigger than they’re appearing on screen:
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 9) (detail)
Day 8 (The Ten Days of Cthulhu)
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 8)
Day 7 (The Ten Days of Cthulhu)
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 7)
Day 6 (The Ten Days of Cthulhu)
Ran into some technical issues with this one that the few solutions I came up with just didn’t cut it visually. So there’s sorta two parts, the first, if I were to use a singular image, would be the one I’d select. The second could stand on its own as a separate work in the series, or perhaps as part of a diptych.
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 6)
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 6 II)
And just to see how they work together:
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 6 Diptych)
Update: Managed a stitch-together of the two parts that’s remotely acceptable, but I’m undecided which I like better.
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 6 Merged)
Day 5 (The Ten Days of Cthulhu)
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 5)
…. aaaand the line is crossed, the shit hits the fan, and the borders start to fall apart.
Day 4 (The Ten Days of Cthulhu)
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 4)
Day 3 (The Ten Days of Cthulhu)
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 3)
weekly photo march 1st
The Beach (prototype)
Ok so I cheated multiple times this week, didn’t take long did it?
This is a composite pano, sort of a prototype for another work I shot at the same time but requires a great deal more tweaking because, well, I think it’ll actually be a piece proper. I must credit Aaron Hobson for inspiring a new tactic to further compress the space in this kind of work, although panos with a definitely-not-wide-angle lens was quite the pain in the ass. Still, I think the compression of space in terms of distance, combined with the panoramic compression, may well aid in that whole fictional projection thing I seem to be hooked on lately. And I’m almost happy with exploiting the depth-of-field here.
Re-reading some Barthes lately; I wonder if the late author would find David Hilliard‘s use of depth of field / tilt-shift focus satisfying to his sensibilities of studium/punctum – Barthes didn’t otherwise seem very satisifed beyond a superficial interest in any photo exploiting such things (a perspective with which I tend to agree, but Hilliard’s work for me is a giant exception).
Inheriting Kima’s Mantle, Autumn
The third part to “Inheriting Kima’s Mantle” has settled into a level of completion such that I’m pretty happy with it. It’s been added to the gallery for Crossroads and well, here it be:
Inheriting Kima's Mantle (Autumn), Digital Inkjet Print 70"x44"
The rest of the series is in the aforementioned Crossroads gallery page.
Inheriting Kima’s Mantle is a reflection on the legacy passed down through our family of dogs – a legacy painfully interrupted in the fall of 2008, when we lost both Lady and Faye in the same autumn. Sammy spent only a couple months with Lady, and Max has never known any companion save Sammy, so the inheritance of knowledge that began with Kima years ago was nearly lost. We have always walked our dogs in the same place – the conservation area near my house – in particular, the field near this crossroads featured in these photos. In effect, my dogs have not only inherited Kima’s knowledge, passed down from dog to dog – her teachings, her behaviour, her relationship to the family – but also the mantle of her territory. They walk the same paths, the same fields, chase the same deer, beat down the same long grass, in their own way, but they share in that inheritance that began with Kima.
The landscape becomes a witness and record of this history, this inheritance, and our dogs, Sammy and Max, must take up the mantle of their predecessors, and our family.
