http://slowernet.tumblr.com/

http://slowernet.tumblr.com/

http://slowernet.tumblr.com/

1. In the Pit (En el Hoyo) (thanks, XCIX)
2. “Emily” from Joanna Newsom’s record Ys
3. V.I.P. by Mark Powell
4. Arctic Monkeys demos and live recordings
5. The 80s, 90s, and 00s photography of Matt Weber
6. Daisuke Matsuzaka, master of the ancient japanese art of housing an entire beer in two seconds. Over, like, Hoobastank or something. (Probably for Red Sox fans only.)

Raul Gutierrez
Travels Without Maps:
Images from China’s Western Frontiers

Nelson Hancock Gallery
111 Front St. #204 (Dumbo)
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Opening Reception September 14, 6-8PM
Show continues through October 14th.

The show opens Tuesday 6/20, 6-8 PM at the gallery at 6 Spring St. in Nolita. Many good artists are included, and based on what I’ve seen, the show is well worth checking out sometime during its run (through 8/4).

In light of previous discussion on this website, here is the statement attached to the three photos (1, 2, 3) I have in the show. It uses circular logic and is thus largely meaningless.

I don’t like Mr. O’Hara’s poem. Its flowery and ornate voice convinces me more of the author’s narcissism than of his loss. I’d probably dump him too.

My lack of enthusiasm makes the idea of responding to the poem in photographs a little confusing. My first inclination was to address one of the few concrete visual images in the poem - that of blue eyes. I photographed several people with pale and delicate eyes in an effort to find something in their slightly eerie gazes that connected with the work. Through no fault of my generous volunteers, this was not a successful exercise. In light of the poem, the photos were literal and forced.

Instead, I have tried to address the theme of loss and aloneness in the context of photography from life. However, I accept that the indirect and uncertain narratives to which these photos hopefully evoke may be in their way equally baroque as the poem I’m disparaging.

So despite my dislike of the poem’s voice, the fact that I had to adopt a similar one in order to respond to it is itself my most interesting response to the poem.

I’m looking for people in NYC with very pale blue eyes who would agree to be photographed for an art project. The session would take about an hour.

Leave a comment or email me at eshepard@gmail.com. Thank you.

If you happen to know and have contact info for anyone in New York who supports, or knows supporters of one of these teams, or just generally is a serious international soccer fan, I would be pleased to learn of it.

Leave a comment or email me at eshepard@gmail.com. Thank you.

Europe:
Croatia
Czech Republic
Poland
Portugal
Serbia and Montenegro
Ukraine

Americas:
Costa Rica
Ecuador
Paraguay
Trinidad and Tobago

Africa:
Angola
Ivory Coast
Ghana
Togo

Muslim nations:
Iran
Tunisia
Saudi Arabia

Asia:
Japan
Korean Republic

I’m curious in an indefinite way about the lives of other people, so I make photography from life that is intended to suggest what a friend calls offhand narratives - entry points for imagination which are ambiguous and understated.

A successful photograph has enough realness to ground it and enough detail, dissonance or intrigue to be more than documentary. I try to inspire the slightly vertiginous feeling that: This exists. This is a life. Without the documentary constraint that what’s shown is precisely real life.

There are a lot of pitfalls in this kind of work, and I fall into them regularly. I sometimes don’t have the social energy or courage to engage people and get the access I need. When I do enter an exciting and complex situation, I don’t have enough experience to relax and visualize what I want to take from it, and instead often shoot too much with too little focus. And I sometimes fall back on irony and juxtaposition - obvious narrative - rather than the more equivocal and interesting.

The selection I am submitting today is a mix of portrait and street reportage which I hope conveys something about both what I have learned to do with photography thusfar and what I hope to say in the future.

Installation

I had a lot of trouble compiling an imagick.so that didn’t fail to open images or crash Apache. The trick seems to be compiling IM with –enable-embeddable.

• PHP4 as CGI, Apache 1.3.x (”dl” is disabled in ISAPI php.)
• wget latest ImageMagick 5 (http://www.imagemagick.com/www/download.html), unzip
• ./configure –prefix=/home/[you] –enable-embeddable –without-perl
• make install
• wget latest autoconf (http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/)
• ./configure –prefix=/home/[you]
• make install
• wget latest PECL imagick (http://pecl.php.net/package/imagick), unzip
• phpize
• ./configure –with-imagick=/home/[you] –prefix=/home/[you]
• cp ./libs/imagick.so [your web root]
• In your php, “dl([path to imagick.so]);”
• phpinfo(), verifying presence of “imagick”, an array of supported file formats, and that phpinfo doesn’t just die at the point that the imagick info is reported.

Usage notes

• There doesn’t seem to be any real documentation for imagick.so, just the C source, and the examples in the package (which don’t have any parameter descriptions). Nice.
• Do not attempt to resize using the default parameters for imagick_resize in examples/resize.php. The optional geometry constraing parameter (”200+200!”) caused php.cgi to hang, taking my cpu load up to 300. Nice. I also couldn’t killall php.cgi when this happened.
• To resize, I used: imagick_resize ($handle, [width], [height], IMAGICK_FILTER_LANCZOS, 0.75). For the final parameter: <1 => sharpen, >1 => blur.
• To set jpeg quality: imagick_setcompressionquality($handle, [0-100])
• I didn’t try imagick_unsharpmask, but there’s some general discussion of IM USM here: http://redskiesatnight.com/Articles/IMsharpen/