Digital Imaging and Photography

STUFT All Over Again- Red Gallery, Hull UK until July 13th, 2014

2014-07-07T12:08:00.001-07:00

A belated entry to my blog.....Stuft all over Again is the second show at the Red Gallery of Contemporary Arts, Hull by ex-students and staff of the Fine Art course at the Hull School of Art (as apposed to the School of Art and Design) which closed in 2005 to become part of Hull College. The first show was in 2004 under the title of simply Stuft.

Contributers and punters outside of the Red Gallery on Osbourne Street, opening night June 13th 2014.

This show was curated by Louise Hazelwood an-ex fine art student (1991-1994) and Hull-based artist (pictured above in the Hull Daily Mail).

My three pieces.

Is the above piece Rosse Butler's work or Rob Gawthrop's?

One of Stuart Bradshaw's unstretched canvases: Lasker meets Reinhardt.

Many thanks to the curator, the contributors, the tutors and to the Red Gallery for such a great show.

Until July 13, 2014

Red Gallery of Contemporary Art,

19 Osbourne Street

Hull,

HU1 2NL

https://www.facebook.com/STUFTalloveragain

http://www.red-gallery.com/

https://www.facebook.com/redgalleryhull

Old Photograms

2013-12-08T09:47:00.000-08:00

Photograms

2013-12-08T09:45:00.001-08:00

The photogram is perhaps seen as a past art. As photography dark rooms disappear the method of photographic production may disappear too. The technique of obtaining images without the intervention of a camera is deceivingly simple. Its history begins with Thomas Wedgewood and Humphrey Day and on through to the photographic drawings made by William Henry Fox Talbot and then Anna Atkin’s cynatypes.

The 20^th Century is really where photograms belong. Christian Schad when he was a Dadaist produced his “Schadographs” in Zurich. There is Man Ray of course whose ghostly images of objects and parts of the human body contributed to Paris Dada and the emergent Surrealist movement. But “it was the Hungarian Laszlo Moholy-Nagy who, in collaboration with students at the Bauhaus, undertook the most radical exploration of the technique’s potential, using it to study the relations of color (sic), light, and form” (Mora, Gilles, 1998 pp. 143-145). Moholy-Nagy has said that he regarded this direct process of photography as “the most perfect way of representing luminous flux” (p.145).

This “luminous flux” that Moholy-Nagy discusses became central to much of my thinking about image making. Man Ray has always fascinated me: the luminosity of his solarised figures and there is much to be admired in his inventiveness, however his photograms were often whimsical in my mind.

Wife: The Grey Ones, shown as part of the Frequency Festival 2013

2013-12-08T09:33:00.003-08:00

I saw WIFE: THe Grey Ones" at the Drill Hall, Lincoln whgen it was part of the Frequency Festival 2013. It was perhaps one the most convincing pieces of what.... multimedia performance, hybrid art?

"WIFE is visceral, live, contemporary, dance, interacting with original, projected, animations and music. She is the creation of Nina McNeely, Kristen Leahy, and Jasmine Albuquerque. Her three members are dancers, choreographers, teachers, editors, animators, and performers thriving in the underbelly of L.A subculture. She finds inspiration from myth, folklore, archetypes, and the subtleties of everyday human behavior. Influences include Jim Henson, Chris Cunningham, Akira Kurosawa, Kathy Rose, Wendy Carlos, Yayoi Kusama, Planningtorock, Aleister Crowley, her friends, and you. WIFE can only be seen in the dark. WIFE works well with others. WIFE likes to play. Visually, WIFE is bold. Physically, WIFE is daring. Dreams are her driving force. She is metamorphosis":

See it here on YouTube whe in was part of TEDxSoCal in 2012 (?):

A Memory of Moholy-Nagy

2013-05-29T10:09:00.000-07:00

Made in 1990 scripted by Joy Batchelor and directed by John Halas this diocumentary explores the life and work of the artist and designer László Moholy-Nagy.

Halas and Batchelor:
http://www.halasandbatchelor.co.uk/

12/12/12 Bank Street Arts

2012-12-10T01:55:00.000-08:00

Robert Hughes at ALA splitter 03

2012-10-16T09:50:00.001-07:00

Robert Hughes at ALA splitter 02

2012-10-16T09:48:00.002-07:00

Robert Hughes at ALA splitter 01

2012-10-16T09:47:00.002-07:00

Published on 17 Aug 2012 by John W Berry

Robert Hughes at ALA splitter 00

2012-10-16T09:46:00.000-07:00

The late, great art and culture critic, Robert Hughes, was the Opening General Session speaker on June 15, 2002 in Atlanta. His talk, months after the September 11 attacks continues to resonate. ALA President John W. Berry in 2002 posts this video, with permission, as a tribute to our friend and colleague. 'Free Libraries Free Society' was the title of the talk.

Cloud Time by Rob Coley & Dean Lockwood

2012-07-10T04:59:00.001-07:00

This entry is here to congratulate my colleagues Rob Coley and Dean Lockwood for the publication of their book Cloud Time: The Inception of the Future. I should have written something about it months ago, alas I have been too busy.

I have seen two reviews: one from Steven Poole in The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jul/06/nonfiction-reviews-roundup-steven-poole and one from Alexander Barker from The Oxonian Review http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/cloud-capitalism/

EDVARD MUNCH AU CENTRE POMPIDOU

2012-07-09T04:02:00.000-07:00

A modern eye on Edvard Munch | euronews, le mag

2012-07-09T03:52:00.000-07:00

Edvard Munch, Mass Media and Photography

2012-07-09T03:21:00.012-07:00

There are a substantial number of blog entries that deal with painting: from the Renaissance painting to contemporary abstraction. This may seem odd to the casual viewer of a blog that is called Digital Imaging and Photography. Many of these entries are here due to the painter’s use of photographic and sometimes digital technologies or it is about the abstract nature of its piece and its influence on abstract film and digital art. Others are there simply because they deal with concepts or are part of a broader cultural movement like Romanticism or Modernism.

Detail from Edvard Munch's Self-Portrait "A la Marat" at Dr Jacobson's Clinic in Copenhagen (1908-1909)

The inclusion of Munch here has been prompted by the exhibition Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye that runs at the Tate Modern until 14 October, 2012. Edvard Munch can be seen as the heir to Van Gogh and his paintings of self-expression, the last breadths of Northern Romanticism. Van Gogh was famously described as “the hinge in which nineteenth-century Romanticism finally swung into twentieth-century Expressionism” (Hughes, 1991, p.276). Yet Munch seems forever associated with the fin-de-siècle and the symbolist counter culture that expressed their anxiety of metropolitan culture and the coming new century and horror it would and did eventually bring. A.S. Byatt recently observed that “like Van Gogh” Munch “wanted to make passionate images of human beings and nature for a secular world to replace the old religious images” (2012, p.16). This exhibition however, aims to make Munch seem more modern with curators Angela Lampe and Clément Chéroux pointing “out in there catalogue that three quarters of Munch’s output dates from after 1900, most particularly from between 1913-1930” (Byatt, 2012 p.16).

Andy Warhol (1928-1987)
The Scream (after Edvard Munch) 1984

The exhibition “tries to make us see Munch as modern in several ways: his repetition and serial repainting, his interest in photography and film, his use of theatrical lighting” and according the critic Adrian Searle, Munch was “aware of the opportunities and limits afforded by these different media (Searle, 2012). Searle explains that “we always cast the art of the past in ways that always suit us. There is always new research" he reminds us, “new ways seeing” (Searle, 2012). In the late 20^th Century Munch’s art seems to return in the form of many stylistic borrowings. His angst ridden canvases were the template of much neo-expressionist art and as Searle points out, Warhol “re-worked Munch” (Searle, 2012) with his cool touch, while later artists like Peter Doig quoted him (Doig’s painting always seemed to be the product of the reimagining of an art history, where Munch travelled to Tahiti instead of Gauguin).

Artists’ use of technologies other than brushes and paint is nothing new. Renaissance artists to Vermeer and perhaps most famously Canaletto beyond used the camera obscura: those pioneers of New Media Art. Arts relationship with the “popular” and mass culture and mass media may have a shorter history, but it is important to take it into consideration when looking at Munch with fresh eyes. It is amazing that Munch is categorized as a Post-Impressionist. His near contemporary Seurat (Seurat was born in 1859, Munch 1863) and fellow Post-Impressionist “was not shy of taking his motifs from the wild compositions of the most popular advertising artists Jules Cheret” (Hughes. 1996). That other Post-Impressionist Van Gogh was 80 years ahead of Warhol, with his love of newsprint: Van Gogh “loved not only Japanese prints, whose colours was highly sophisticated, but also the crude discordant and even brutal colours of mass industrial printing, which could give his work, he said, the effect of a chromolithograph from a cheap shop” (Hughes. 1996). And what of Bonnard, who produced posters advertising French Champagne in the 1890s and of course there was Toulouse Lautrec whose depictions of Parisian nightclub life not only portrayed people as if there faces were masks, but promoted night clubs and cabarets or James Ensor who depicted modern life as a kind demonic carnival. This cultural mix would have had a profound influence on the young Munch.

Munch’s modernity perhaps should not be questioned; even though his use of photography as Adrian Searle has recognized is far less extensive or as apparent as say, in the work of Degas, Bonnard or Vuillard (2012). Munch’s modernist consciousness may be close to Baudelaire’s description of modern experiences where alienated souls swarm like ants in the city, “City full of dreams/Where ghosts in daylight tug the stroller’s sleeve!” However, the explorations of alienation and his expressionist credentials have been questioned by critics. Richard Dorment argues “that Munch always had more to do with the controlled sensuality you find in a Post Impressionism or Symbolism”, while “any idea that The Sick Child represents a morbidly expressionist cry of anguish is dispelled by the very existence of the numerous replicas Munch was willing to paint to order or knew he could sell” (Dorment, 2012). Laura Cumming (2012) has suggested that the exhibition’s catalogue “may be in danger of making a postmodernist of him”. Did not the expressionist Kirchner cynically alter the dates of many of his paintings to suggest that he painted them earlier, therefore influencing the price? Artist’s like de Chirico reworked there art, as did Duchamp. What about Dali’s work in the last couple of decades of his life? Well, perhaps Munch's repetition was the only way of exorcising trauma, but suffering does seem to sell all the same and countercultures are eventually brought to bear under the pressure of markets.

Egon Shiele, Self-Portrait, 1914

Lucas Samaras Photo Transformation c Mid-seventies

The critics do not seem that convinced by Munch’s photography. Dorment states “that although Munch took photographs and made films these are of little aesthetic importance” and Searle sees their relationship to Munch’s art as “extremely limited”. Perhaps Munch does not have that incredible relationship with film as Edward Hopper whose imagery, influenced by theatre design and film then goes on to inform the landscape of a Hitchcock and infuse Wim Wender's vision of America in films like Hammett. Munch does adopt in his photographs theatrical poses so perhaps his photography is part of that traditional of self-portraiture associated with expressionists concern of the self. One thinks of Egon Shiela’s self-portraits from 1914 with there ridiculous level of vanity. Perhaps they, like Munch’s work are a kind proto-performance art, a forerunner of the art that emerged in the 60s and came to dominate the nineteen seventies art scene. We may live in the age of the narcissistic self where we begin with Expressionism and then the photography of Lucas Samera or Anulf Reiner and end here in the 21^st Century with Facebook, iphoto, iphone and mobile media that is producing endless examples of self-inspection, on the web, in spaces not too dissimilar from this one. The clumsy casualness and unfocused nature of some of Munch’s photography with its almost web-cam like aesthetic, shares something with so many of the artefacts produced in this age of the amateur.

The cover shows a detail of Munch's The Sick Child

The cover shows a detail from a lithogragh by Edvard Munch, The Death Chamber (1896).

Munch's connection with a broader modernism may be found in his involvement other media. Munch had ventured into stage design and “in 1906 he worked in Berlin with the great theatre director Max Reinhardt”, where he designed sets for Ibsen’s Ghost’s and Hedda Gabler (Byatt, AS, 2012 p.17). One may wonder how much he influenced Expressionist theatre (he may have found himself competing with Edward Gordon Craig). Munch is now irrevocably linked to both Strindberg and Ibsen, not least because of Penguin Classics designer, Germano Facetti, who before Warhol copied Munch and used his pictures for the covers of Ibsen’s Ghosts and Other Plays and Strinberg’s Three Plays in the nineteen sixties.

Why a Munch exhibition now? Well there is the rise of 'Nordic noir' which, like Munch's art, explores Scandinavia's dark soul. One thinks imediately of the TV series, The Killing, which has proved immensely poular in the UK, so may explain why London has hosted these paintings.

Sources:

Byatt, AS, (2012), "The mean reds" The Guardian, Review, 23 June, 2012 pp. 16-17.

Cumming, Laura, (2012), "Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye- review", The Observer, Sunday 1 July, 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/jul/01/edvard-munch-modern-eye-review

Dorment Richard, (2012), "Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye, Tate Modern, review", The Telegraph Monday 25 June 2012

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/9354262/Edvard-Munch-The-Modern-Eye-Tate-Modern-review.html

Hughes, Robert (1991) Shock of the New, London: Thames and Hudson

Hughes, Robert (1996) The Myths of High and Low, International Society of the Performing Arts, December 15, 1996.

Searle, Adrian, (2012), "Edvard Munch: a head for horror", The Guardian Monday 25 June 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/jun/25/edvard-munch-tate-retrospective

Northrop Frye in Context by Diane Dubois

2012-06-08T04:47:00.016-07:00

In August 2011 I travelled to Oxford and Gloucestershire with Diane Dubois to photograph a series of pictures for the cover of a book she was writing on the Shakespeare critic Northrop Frye (1912-91). Frye’s writing concerns itself with the theory and practice of literary criticism. He was among the first to interpret the poetry of William Blake and is often considered to be one of the most influential literary critics and theorists of the 20th Century. Fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan once said of Frye: “Norrie is not struggling for his place in the sun. He is the sun.”

The photographs are of the stained glass West Window of St. Mary’s Church in Fairford, Gloucestershire, built in 1490. The place we visited and photographed had a significant influence on Frye according to Diane Dubois. In her essay “The Absurd Imagination: Northrop Frye and Waiting for Godot,” Dubois suggests that “the architonic that informs the 'Theory of Myths' may have been influenced by Frye’s chance encounter with a stained glass window in a church near Oxford, where Frye was a postgraduate student from 1936 to 1938” (Dubois, 2011, p.122). Frye and a group of friends visited the church in 1937, when he saw St. Mary’s West Window, a depiction of the Last Judgement. This provided Frye “with a practical example of Emile Mâle’s book on the iconography of French Cathedrals, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France in the 13^th Century (1913)” (ibid). He read the book prior to attending Oxford, while he was a divinity student. The book “provided an initiation for Frye into the levels of meaning to be found in medieval architecture” (ibid). These levels of meaning, Dubois argues, “adumbrate Frye’s 'Theory of Modes', the first essay in the Anatomy [of Criticism]” (ibid). The five modes are identified by Frye as “the mythic, the romantic, the high mimetic, the low mimetic, and the ironic” (ibid).

Diane Dubois goes on to describe the West Window of St. Mary’s:

The top of St. Mary’s West Window is flooded with the golden light of heaven. The colour red predominates in the bottom right hand corner, as this is where the 'harrowing of hell' is depicted. In the bottom left, souls, rescued from hell, ascend a shining staircase. The window is thus an architectural rendering of salvation. To Frye, it may have suggested the shape of the architectonic that would inform the Anatomy. His biographer seems to think so: Ayre describes this visit to St. Mary’s as “a revelation” for the young Frye (Ayre 141). Tragedy coincides with hell at the bottom of the window, and heaven at the top equates with romance. Irony/satire find their counterpart with the right-hand side of the window, where the damned slide into hell, and comedy with the lifting out of hell and into paradise.

(ibid, pp. 122-123)

The book has recently been published by Cambridge Scholars. The Canadian poet, literary scholar and historian Jonathan Hart has written the back cover blurb. I have included his words here:

Diane Dubois takes a contextual approach to Northrop Frye's work and claims that it is best assessed in relation to his biographical circumstances. In context and in specific details, Dubois' book seeks to illuminate Frye's oeuvre as a personal, lifelong project. This volume successfully situates Frye's work within the social, political, religious and philosophical conditions of the time and place of conception and writing. Dubois ranges from Frye's critical utopia and views on criticism and education through the university, church and William Blake to politics and the Canadian and academic milieu. This book, which is particularly good at tracing Frye's academic influences and his roots in Methodism and Canada, will have a strong appeal to an international audience of general readers, students, teachers and specialists. Frye is a key figure in the cultural and literary theory of the twentieth century, and Dubois' accomplished discussion helps us to see his work anew.

Jonathan Hart teaches at University of Alberta and is author of Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination (1994), Interpreting Cultures (2006), Empires and Colonies (2008) and Literature, Theory, History (2011).

The author, Dr Diane Dubois is a veteran of the Edinburgh Fringe, as an actor, playwright and critic. She has written for the stage outside of the festival and for radio. She is currently Programme Leader of the MA in Playwriting and Script Development at the University of Lincoln, UK. She wrote the university's first Drama degree, thus founding the Lincoln School of Performing Arts in 2003. From 1999 to 2008 she was editor of the Journal of Gender Studies. Her recent publications include “Out of the Parlour and into the Centre: Studying Women's Contribution to English Modernist Theatre and Drama,” in Origins of English Dramatic Modernism (2010). Diane did her PhD at the University of Hull, taking as her subject the work of her fellow Canadian, Northrop Frye.

Sources:

Ayre, John (1989) Northrop Frye: A Biography Toronto: Random.

Cambridge Scholars: http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/Northrop-Frye-in-Context1-4438-3356-8.htm

Dubois, Diane (2011) “The Absurd Imagination: Northrop Frye and Waiting for Godot”, English Studies in Canada Volume 37 Issue 2, June 2011 pp. 111-130.

Dubois, Diane (2012) Northrop Frye in Context, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars: http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/978-1-4438-3356-1-sample.pdf

9-Eyes by Jon Rafman.

2012-02-28T11:07:00.001-08:00

More at http://9-eyes.com/

Sorry for the lack of Postings

2012-02-10T05:47:00.000-08:00

Hi Fellow Bloggers and Blog Readers,

Sorry about the lack of posts, I have been extremely busy. I have graduated with an MA and have been busy teaching.

I will hopefully re-join the blogospheare soon.

All the very best
John

Five Photographers from Lincoln

2011-11-30T10:38:00.000-08:00

Five Photographers from Lincoln showcases recent work from a diverse group of emerging photographic artists covering subject matter ranging from the explosive destruction of novelty decorative items, exploratory regional documentary, abstract landscape and cityscape and experimental portraiture.

Contributing Artists: Mike Downing, Michelle Walsh, Graham Cooper, Mark Terry and John Hudson.

Located at the Seven Dials club in London’s Covent Garden, for more information on opening hours, location and facilities please check the ‘Venue’ page.

Five Photographers From Lincoln: http://lincolnfive.com/
5th of December 2011 for one month until the 5th of January 2012, Monday
- Wednesday 12:00 - 22:00 Thursday - Saturday 12:00 - 23:00 Sunday -
Closed

Seven Dials Club
Covent Garden Community Centre
42 Earlham St
WC2H 9LA

Seven Dials Club: www.sevendialsclub.com/
Contact: Seven Dials 020 7681 8217

The Shock of the New 2: The Powers that Be

2011-11-11T04:55:00.017-08:00

At the end of the first episode and chapter of Robert Hughes’ Shock of the New, we are told that “The Mechanical Paradise” that modernism promised “would soon be less evident. After 1914”, Hughes explains “machinery was turned on its inventors and their children. After forty years of continuous peace in Europe, the worst war in history cancelled the faith in good technology, the benevolent machine. The myth of the Future went into shock and European art moved into its years of irony, disgust and protest (Hughes, 1991 p.56).

The second episode “The powers that be” opens at the site of the Butte de Walencourt above the Somme Valley. In these places, Hughes explains, “our fathers and grandfathers tasted the first terrors of the 20^th Century. There that joyful sense of the promise of modernity, the optimism born of the machine and of the millennial turning point of the new century, was cut down by other machines” (Hughes, 1991 p.57).

Art and language Hughes argues “could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable” (p.56). Total war until this time was basically beyond human experience and the naivety in which Europe entered the conflict was reflected in the propaganda that basically described the experience as somewhere between a joust and a cricket match. More profound was the gap between experience and official language. Those who had experienced grew aware that their leaders: the generals and politicians had lied about the war, its causes, its nature and length and the press had described very little of the realities of the conflict. A whole generation would be lost and traumatised. It was up to the artists and poets to challenge this official language and what separated them from official culture, was that that culture belonged to the elders. Some artists rejected authority and nationalism and the patriotism of their fathers. The children would become pacifists and internationalists and would seek a way out of the madness of the Great War and seek out exile. The main haven for intellectuals in Europe was Zurich in neutral Switzerland.

The café was the natural home of the exiles and a very potent public sphere where many cultural, revolutionary and political ideas formed. In Zurich’s Café Odéon we saw Lenin plan that violent revolution in Russia, it was also the place where Cabaret Voltaire and Dada was born. From here the revolutionary nature of art is explored from dada in Berlin to the constructivists in St Petersburg and Moscow. Of course both revolutionary art movements are doomed to fail as Stalinism and Nazism took hold and dismissed such things as degenerate or bourgeois and punished those artists who practised it with humiliation, exile, imprisonment or death. The idea of a revolutionary art linked to modernism does not disappear and certainly is not all liberal or left-wing. Futurism was all patriotism and warmongering before and after World War I and became quite influential on the young Mussolini as he shifted his politics from socialism to something else. Not long after he came to power Mussolini made futurism fascism’s first official style. Was there a difference, Hughes asks at one point, between Russian Agitprop art and photo-montage, cubo-futurism and futurists use of the same techniques? That other dictator, Hitler generally rejected modernism was favoured classicism and the work of Albert Speer. In the 1930s Mussolini would adopt classicism under Speer’s influence.

Hughes compares Mussolini’s use of classicism and his architecture of state power with the “Architecture of Democracy”, with the scariest example being Albany Mall, the government building of New York State. We have no architecture of freewill, Hughes declares! As for the art of descent, we are left with Picasso’s Guernica and the remnants of the Dadaist strategies in the neo-dada of Jean Tinguely whom Hughes seems to dismiss as rather tame an un-revolutionary: harmless. Art then is out done by mass media and photography in their ability to morally influence the world: “it is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say, This saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian. Specific books perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920s is that they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naiveté that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot” (Hughes, 1991 p.111).

Sources:

Hughes. R, (1991) The Shock of the New London: Thames and Hudson.

Digital Imaging and Photography MA Website

2011-09-16T12:02:00.000-07:00

Thank you to Mike, Michelle, Graham, Sam and everyone else involved in the MA show.

The MA website:

http://lincolnphotomasters.com/

Graduate Shows

2011-09-10T11:46:00.000-07:00

My work and the work of my fellow MA students feature in

Source Magazine

Thank you Michelle!

Exhibitions:

Venue:

Ground Floor Gallery, Architecture Building,
University of Lincoln
Brayford Pool
Lincoln
LN6 7TS

Dates:

From: 21st September 2011
Until: 25th September 2011
9:00 am - 8:00 pm

Venue:

Seven Dials Club
42 Earlham Street
Covent Garden
London
WC2H 9LA

Dates:

From: 7th December 2011
Until: 5th January 2012
9:00 am - 10:00 pm

Sequential Photography

2011-09-08T08:04:00.000-07:00

Fernand Léger

2011-08-31T13:35:00.000-07:00

Fragmentation of the pictorial surface, distortion of the perspectival space and contrast of dimensions, a preference for peripheral or close-up vision, f flattening of volumes, disappearance of the background which gets the whole pictorial content of the picture to unfurl on a single level... The presentation of the object or figure based on several contradictory simultaneous viewpoints produces an impression that the object is revolving on its own axis.

Contraste de formes 1913

Moï Ver

2011-08-30T07:14:00.000-07:00

Moï Ver Paris. 80 photographies, 1931

"Photography, which is until recently had a merely illustrative and documentary value, has proceeded to research of a plastic nature, which is extremely interesting. It is indisputably the cinema that blazed the trail for photography; but, by that it 'keeps,' that it 'fixes' stereotyping, it seems to me somewhat contray to the cinematographic 'fact' which is moveable and successive by definition", wrote Fernand Léger in his preface to Moï Ver's Paris. Through the thickness of the book and in the processing of he pages the photographer rediscovers the relationships of succession perculiar to the cinema.

Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy: Ballet Mécanique (1924)

2011-08-30T03:47:00.001-07:00

In Fenand Léger and Dudley Murphey's Ballet Mécanique (1924) we see animated cut out of Charlie Chaplin in a sequence called "Charlot cubiste". Esther Leslie in Hollywood Flatlands noted that the film featured close-ups of domestic items. "The simple act of close-up in itself" Leslie observes, "acted as an animation of objects , an endowment with life and personality" (2002, p.20).

Unfortunately this does not feature the score by George Antheil with was described as a "futuristic score of the mechanical era", a piece of musical engineering. .