Final Post (but like, not really!)

The internet could be quite suffocating, in ways only outer space may be suffocating - claustrophobic in it's vast expansion. The awareness that it grows faster than we can grasp or count, knocks the air out of me.

So when I thought I would become part of this expansion (you know, beyond Facebook and all) I choked a little. And yet here I am, some 30-something posts later, realizing I've developed a sense of self assurance and perhaps even some discipline I spited not having, only months ago. In short, it was a growing experience - it still is. And yes. Yes it will continue to be (hopefully).

It feels a bit meek to the point of being absurd, to write and think people are actually reading (and to my relief people were - so thank you very much). But it became something about myself and with myself. The permeable thing - I think it played out well, and has actually been a thread in the work I've put out in the past 10 weeks, particularly.

But I did fail in some regard. I wish I could be more consistent with the way the blog turned out. No matter. I'm thinking up another one, and one that will be prompted by self motivation (it's still in the works, right along with my personal website!). Blogs are interesting mediums in that they're like individual soapboxes, and if by chance someone stumbles on it through Google or a erroneous link, as I have come across a great deal of things myself, you can be heard and engage in an interaction that is unique to the internet society.

I've come upon countless strangers - to no full regret, I've accepted the ways I divert my own life by diverting it into the life of others. Not fearlessly. In full suffocation and gasps, hoping to get my voice out there so that I can expand and feel my mind too expand, like a universe of its own. Sagmeister said that keeping a diary promotes self development. I hardly think of this as a diary, and yet I guess it's no more different. And neither are the results.

People keep telling me I've changed. The scarier part is realizing it yourself mid shower with shampoo in your eyes and suddenly being thrust back into the day at the airport, when you felt all the change, and did not know in which ways it will manifest. I only hope it keeps coming, and keeps me in this comfortable (and sometimes all but) nook of creation some dare call creativity.

Thank you for reading! Here are some unpublished images haha.

Edward Steichen in Fla.? Just in time for the break.

Steichen and Fashion --- I think yes.

The Museum of Art in Ft. Lauderdale is having an exhibition on Steichen during his "Conde Nast Years" as the exhibit has been titled (Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, the Condé Nast Years 1923 - 1937). I was looking at some exhibits to attend while being at home - the Miami museum scene is just recently picking up. I realized the other day talking to a stranger that I had taken a lot of the energy of the place for granted.

Not that I could ever be truly immersed in it since I was always 30 minutes from downtown Miami (where all those shots you see in movies and tv shows really are). I hope to reacquaint myself better with the place that has been home for the past 9 years of my life.

We'll see what this does for my over the break assignment. Finding home all over again hahaha. I'll delve into Calle all over again and see what I get out of it. Wish me luck!

(All photographs gathered from MoA Ft. Lauderdale's site).

Some art Reps

Nick Waplington

Christian Witkin

Rankin

Takay

Jeremy Kost

Anthony Costifas

Terry Richardson

Robert Maxwell

Mario Sorrenti

Walter Pfeiffer

Steven Meisel

I posted some artist agencies some days ago, but I found another one and thought I'd share some of the ones I know. I can spend hours on these, but they never compare to having prints! If only I could hold these. Nevertheless it gives for a nice exposure to different styles.

Mostly these are commercial photographers but that doesn't exclude talent at all! So hopefully you enjoy it.

http://www.art-dept.com/photography/

http://www.artandcommerce.com/

http://www.artpartner.com/

http://www.jedroot.com/

A failed attempt

For the final project, a project that is still untitled, I tried shooting an image in the studio. I'm still going through ups and downs on that project. This is particularly from a down.

The issue is that these are genuine "lessons" if they can be called that. So the photographs have to feel genuine to me. They have to feel earnest or else they draw the whole idea in bad light. I can tell this is going to be a long term one.

Good Advertisement

I have a particular taste in advertisement. I like ads that look well thought out. Ads with theory, with an expectation of reaction. Where things don't necessarily look good, but feel good. The notion that in advertising you make everything look so perfect that the audiences wants it, because of its flawlessness, is an old notion. Mostly we're past the idyllic and perfect, except maybe when it comes to cars. Mostly we expect more out of advertising, is it selling a good value to us? do we agree with the implications of the product being sold? why should we not by the other one?

I don't know much about advertising though. I look through a lot of it and analyze it and try to see how they wrap around our lives, how they flood our day-to-day actions and desires, how often, they become icons of something we want and work forward to and in some sense keep us in focus, and in line to making enough money to buy that product or something of equal value. Advertising is motivation.

Diesel has the best campaigns

Great Campaign by Levi's

A Doc. I've been itching to see since last summer.

Some Impromptu Portraits

Thought I'd share. I'm working with these LEE filters for the handheld flash. I got it at the Den for about 3 bucks so it's worth it. I used them for my still life photographs but yeah.

Let me know! :D

Leonardo and Work

I figured it would be somewhat appropriate to blog about Leonardo since we started talking about him in our art history class yesterday.

Presenting our final projects, I noticed there was a lot of room for expanding ideas -- there usually is. There's a strange situation with being an art student. We start projects and then have to move on to the next idea -- quickly, and it's hard to keep the life of any one given project when there's so many that have to be done.

I try to pour my ideas, premature as they may be, into the work I have to put out in class. A sort of pre-exploration of any concept that might interest me. Often I haven't finished them -- but that's the point; they're not finished. Like Leonardo Da Vinci said, "a work is never finished, only abandoned."

La Scapigliata (pictured here) is like a visualization of this idea. There's a beauty to our ideas, as bare as they are, but they continue there -- rough outlines, the embryos of what could be a great exploration.

I was talking to one of the girls I was going to photograph for an assignment. We talked about work and how much we had to do -- I advised that work has life outside of the classroom and our assignments. If we think of work as a grade and not a self-accomplishment merely asserted or denied by a grade, art's beauty can soon become tedious.

I've abandoned a great deal of works, but I intend on going back and exploring ideas over and over again. Some of them are bound to not happen, but we're always sure to find something new in the old.

Leonardo was always finding something new -- that was his greatness and his failure. We need only accept the fact that these things are still a move forward, even if they remain static in the timeline of our work's life.

Art breathes - even the incomplete type.

The Treachery of Images (and puns!)

Thank you Magritte hahaha. I ran into this once a few weeks ago. I saw peeps at the Corner Store for $0.79. I had to do it.

Enjoy.

Hey Stefan!!!

If I make one of these, how's that for extra credit!? hahahhaha

Just joking, but I think this is so awesome! Professor Davidhazy could probably have some fun doing this hahaha.

Just sharing :D

Douglas Gordon & Appropriation

Two years ago I spent a summer at a museum to learn how to write journalistic pieces on Art as a form of critique or for informative purposes.

I didn't realize how much I had learned that summer, mostly because it was all so latent until I came to college and started learning about different aspects of art.

The exhibit was "Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967,” a compilation of artworks in installation, video, illustrations and photographs that centered around Rock & Roll and music for the past 4 decades. A lot of it dealt with fantasy, it dealt with the transcendent idea of music, the self-indlugence of performance, the minds of musicians and the artists that wished to be musicians, the idolization of musicians, the parallel of going to a concert the way a devout Catholic attends mass every Sunday.

One of the most striking pieces was Douglas Gordon's clips from concerts, one from a Rolling Stones concert, another from the Cramps performing. They were bootleg videos shot by the audiences at these shows. The videos were slowed down to move at a glacial speed, the fast energy of the rock shows suddenly very considerate, slow and real. More easily felt, you could see the crowd and catch each individual motion because there was time for that.

They were all appropriated videos. In fact, his most famous piece is 24 Hour Psycho, a 35 second clip from Hitchcock's Psycho made to last 24 whole hours. His photographic work is also very similar with series of photographs in which the motion and changes between shots are subtle and almost imperceptible.

This reminded me of the talk the other day on appropriation of work and copyright. It's been in my mind lately a lot. I hadn't realized Gordon was one of these artist defying that idea as well (though not directly of course - not like Richard Prince).

That's all. Enjoy.

Productive with Product-ish Shots

I guess it's a step forward to working on something. It's better than any of the crap iv'e been doing. In any case, these were test shots for my actual work (which will be very Levinthal-ish).

Comments are more than welcome :P

The Passing

I have never met him. I knew him only through clothing and through quotes and interviews and what people had to say about him. All of that, made him seem great. I'm sure he was.

Alexander McQueen was without doubt one of my favorite artist in the world. There was something dark and beautiful about him and his work. I was always fully enthralled by his designs and his shows - he worked with psychology and social issues, messed with his audience. He was experiential and experimental - he wanted everyone to be part of his fantasy, and watch him unravel fearlessly and fearfully, both at the same time. He was so open to letting everyone see inside his mind and understand the fantastical way he absorbed the world.

Whatever the cause was - it was speculated that it was suicide, though no final word has been given - he carried with him a reputation of non-commitment, of freedom and of lightness that came across so heavily. He'll always be L'enfant terrible.

The strangest thing personally is how I personally become enamored with artist; Plath, McQueen, Collins and a million others. Not romantically, but in beauty. If they make beautiful things, for a second I'm in love with their mind and the way they're in love with the world. I'm in love with their sadness and whatever else motivates them to attempt expression. Like Camus said: "It's not your paintings I like, it's your painting."

I'm not sad he died so much as I'm in some disbelief that his art reached an end. I almost want to envision the last seconds he had to himself and hear his thoughts. I always do when I think of people dying - infamous last thoughts.

Just as he lived in beauty, I hope he rests in it.

Another funny thing

Some late night fashion-related browsing (I had to catch up) led me to this:

Richard Prince! AAAAAAAAAAAH hehehe I will talk more about him when I get the chance. I have lots to say. For now just this hahha.

Change...

Fun change...hehehehe

Inspiration, Inspiration, Inspiration.

I still have no Still Life

I have noticed i have one very basic problem with the still life assignment - I'm so indecisive about additive approaches to art, more specifically photography.

Working on a blank canvas is so difficult, and especially when the subject is as a static as still life is. I'm still wrestling one idea. One thing is for sure though - no more edible subjects.

There are days...

I have a flickr account in which I used to ramble on incessantly and very often to a point of exposition fueled by carelessness and with a sense of outer pressure that makes me cave. There are days when things, feelings, cancel each other out and the resulting feeling is one of apathy and sleepiness.

Yesterday and today were such days.

A painter in San Francisco on flickr, noted once how these were so periodic for me. I told him I had noticed. There's just always a week or a few days of withdrawal from things. I want things to stop. I want to exist somewhere outside. If I were a song, I'd be a song about wanting to be an animal.

Luckily, there's art. Not my own. But art - in poetry, in a painting, in a photograph, in song or film. Beauty, when things get so gray, can be so refreshing and releasing.

And I'm reminded to stop all the worrying and the petty anger and to breathe.

I guess it's only said so much because more complex words just won't do: sometimes you just have to let go.

Three ladies, three muses

Alexandra S.

Chloe C.

Lydia B.

I think photographers are a bit predatory. We're territorial as it is, whether we want to be or not. The mere fact of photographing something, especially today when an image can travel across the world faster than your paycheck can arrive in the mail, changes that location.

So it is in a predatory (in a non-sexual predatory) way that I found and picked these three ladies.

I love being inspired by a face alone, and a body and body language. I find myself scrutinizing everything about everyone I encounter, and that I got to photograph them is accomplishment enough since half of the time I want to photograph someone, I'm rather reserved and quiet about it.

But getting around these faces is fun, for lack of words. They seem so infinite in their capacity for beauty and for grace and I fantasize the feeling of photographing them in different ways before I can even see a clear image of them in my head.

The thing about muses for me, though, is the fact that I like to be beauty through them, and with them simultaneously. When someone agrees to your portrait, they agree to your art, and your expression and they give you ownership of that moment and their behavior (some more willingly than others) and for that moment of collaboration and inspiration, you do a dance with each other's minds And you're with them and understanding them, and you, and images come out and so do memories.

Sure, I can't help it but romanticize the dynamic sometimes. But, truthfully, these photographs of them bring to me a moment of engagement that I find beautiful, all on its own. My own little inside joke.