Notizie Dallo Spazio

Alicia Framis, Lost Astronaut

Però. Secondo questo articolo pubblicato dal Time:
Can’t Finish Your Meal? This Japanese Restaurant Will Fine You for That
il ristorante giapponese The Hachikyo, in Sapporo, infligge i suoi clienti di una multa qualora non finiscano di mangiare per intero la porzione di tsukko meshi ordinata dal loro menù. Le uova di salmone servite su un letto di riso proposte dal ristorante costituiscono un piatto pregiato che ha come ingredienti principali duro lavoro e dedizione. Ordinare tsukko meshi e poi tergiversare con le bacchette nella ciotola lasciandone immangiata una parte, significa vanificare  non solo il lavoro della cucina, ma dei pescatori e di quanti si occupano di sezionare il pesce, estrarre le uova, ripulirle, dunque venderle al ristorante. Il minimo che tu possa fare ordinando tsukko meshi è di esserne riconoscente ripulendo la ciotola fino all’ultimo uovo e chicco di riso rimasti. Pena una multa.
Suona sensato. Che si tratti o meno di un’azione pubblicitaria volta a incrementare i profitti del ristorante. L’idea di multare i clienti potrebbe essere applicata da tutti gli esercizi commerciali che si occupano di vendere beni di consumo in ordine a una politica che limita gli sprechi, riconosce valore e meriti alla produzione e responsabilizza gli acquirenti al consumo intelligente. Umh. Utopia? Eccome. Fantascienza, in altre parole.

In All Chaos There Is A Cosmos, In All Disorder A Secret Order | Carl Jung

The Cosmic Hearth

The Orion nebula is featured in this sweeping image from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The constellation of Orion is prominent in the evening sky throughout the world from about December through April of each year. The nebula (also catalogued as Messier 42) is located in the sword of Orion, hanging from his famous belt of three stars. The star cluster embedded in the nebula is visible to the unaided human eye as a single star, with some fuzziness apparent to the most keen-eyed observers. Because of its prominence, cultures all around the world have given special significance to Orion. The Maya of Mesoamerica envision the lower portion of Orion, his belt and feet (the stars Saiph and Rigel), as being the hearthstones of creation, similar to the triangular three-stone hearth that is at the center of all traditional Maya homes. The Orion nebula, lying at the center of the triangle, is interpreted by the Maya as the cosmic fire of creation surrounded by smoke.

This metaphor of a cosmic fire of creation is apt. The Orion nebula is an enormous cloud of dust and gas where vast numbers of new stars are being forged. It is one of the closest sites of star formation to Earth and therefore provides astronomers with the best view of stellar birth in action. Many other telescopes have been used to study the nebula in detail, finding wonders such as planet-forming disks forming around newly forming stars. WISE was an all-sky survey giving it the ability to see these sites of star formation in a larger context. This view spans more than six times the width of the full moon, covering a region nearly 100 light-years across. In it, we see the Orion nebula surrounded by large amounts of interstellar dust, colored green.

Astronomers now realize that the Orion nebula is part of the larger Orion molecular cloud complex, which also includes the Flame nebula. This complex in our Milky Way galaxy is actively making new stars. It is filled with dust warmed by the light of the new stars within, making the dust glow in infrared light.

Color in this image represents specific infrared wavelengths. Blue represents light emitted at 3.4-micron wavelengths and cyan (blue-green) represents 4.6 microns, both of which come mainly from hot stars. Relatively cooler objects, such as the dust of the nebulae, appear green and red. Green represents 12-micron light and red represents 22-micron light.

via NASA – The Cosmic Hearth

Celestial Valentine

Generations of stars can be seen in this infrared portrait from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. In this wispy star-forming region, called W5, the oldest stars can be seen as blue dots in the centers of the two hollow cavities (other blue dots are background and foreground stars not associated with the region).

Younger stars line the rims of the cavities, and some can be seen as pink dots at the tips of the elephant-trunk-like pillars. The white knotty areas are where the youngest stars are forming. Red shows heated dust that pervades the region’s cavities, while green highlights dense clouds.

via NASA – Celestial Valentine

A Wanderer Dances The Dance of Stars and Space

The Hubble Space Telescope captured a spectacular image of the bright star-forming ring that surrounds the heart of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1097. In this image, the larger-scale structure of the galaxy is barely visible: its comparatively dim spiral arms, which surround its heart in a loose embrace, reach out beyond the edges of this frame.

This face-on galaxy, lying 45 million light-years away from Earth in the southern constellation of Fornax (The Furnace), is particularly attractive for astronomers. NGC 1097 is a Seyfert galaxy. Lurking at the very center of the galaxy, a supermassive black hole 100 million times the mass of our sun is gradually sucking in the matter around it. The area immediately around the black hole shines powerfully with radiation coming from the material falling in.

The distinctive ring around the black hole is bursting with new star formation due to an inflow of material toward the central bar of the galaxy. These star-forming regions are glowing brightly thanks to emission from clouds of ionized hydrogen. The ring is around 5000 light-years across, although the spiral arms of the galaxy extend tens of thousands of light-years beyond it.

via NASA – A Wanderer Dances the Dance of Stars and Space

Colors of the Innermost Planet

This colorful view of Mercury was produced by using images from the color base map imaging campaign during MESSENGER’s primary mission. These colors are not what Mercury would look like to the human eye, but rather the colors enhance the chemical, mineralogical, and physical differences between the rocks that make up Mercury’s surface.

via NASA – Colors of the Innermost Planet

Large Magellanic Cloud

Nearly 200,000 light-years from Earth, the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, floats in space, in a long and slow dance around our galaxy. Vast clouds of gas within it slowly collapse to form new stars. In turn, these light up the gas clouds in a riot of colors, visible in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is ablaze with star-forming regions. From the Tarantula Nebula, the brightest stellar nursery in our cosmic neighborhood, to LHA 120-N 11, part of which is featured in this Hubble image, the small and irregular galaxy is scattered with glowing nebulae, the most noticeable sign that new stars are being born.

via NASA – Large Magellanic Cloud

Giant Stellar Nursery

Stars are sometimes born in the midst of chaos. About 3 million years ago in the nearby galaxy M33, a large cloud of gas spawned dense internal knots which gravitationally collapsed to form stars. NGC 604 was so large, however, it could form enough stars to make a globular cluster.

Many young stars from this cloud are visible in this image from the Hubble Space Telescope, along with what is left of the initial gas cloud. Some stars were so massive they have already evolved and exploded in a supernova. The brightest stars that are left emit light so energetic that they create one of the largest clouds of ionized hydrogen gas known, comparable to the Tarantula Nebula in our Milky Way’s close neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud.

via NASA – Giant Stellar Nursery

Flux Ropes on the Sun

This is an image of magnetic loops on the sun, captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). It has been processed to highlight the edges of each loop to make the structure more clear.

A series of loops such as this is known as a flux rope, and these lie at the heart of eruptions on the sun known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs.) This is the first time scientists were able to discern the timing of a flux rope’s formation. (Blended 131 Angstrom and 171 Angstrom images of July 19, 2012 flare and CME.)

via NASA – Flux Ropes on the Sun

Solar Eruption

A solar eruption gracefully rose up from the sun on Dec. 31, 2012, twisting and turning. Magnetic forces drove the flow of plasma, but without sufficient force to overcome the sun’s gravity much of the plasma fell back into the sun.

The length of the eruption extends about 160,000 miles out from the Sun. With Earth about 7,900 miles in diameter, this relatively minor eruption is about 20 times the diameter of our planet.

via NASA – Solar Eruption

Earth at Night

This new global view of Earth’s city lights is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite. The data was acquired over nine days in April 2012 and 13 days in October 2012. It took 312 orbits to get a clear shot of every parcel of Earth’s land surface and islands. This new data was then mapped over existing Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet.

The image was made possible by the satellite’s “day-night band” of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite, which detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe dim signals such as city lights, gas flares, auroras, wildfires and reflected moonlight.

The day-night band observed Hurricane Sandy, illuminated by moonlight, making landfall over New Jersey on the evening of Oct. 29. Night images showed the widespread power outages that left millions in darkness in the wake of the storm.

via NASA – Earth at Night

Cascando by Samuel Beckett

Nobuyoshi Araki, Sentimental Journey (1971-1991)

1

why not merely the despaired of
occasion of
wordshed

is it not better abort than be barren

the hours after you are gone are so leaden
they will always start dragging too soon
the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want
bringing up the bones the old loves
sockets filled once with eyes like yours
all always is it better too soon than never
the black want splashing their faces
saying again nine days never floated the loved
nor nine months
nor nine lives

2

saying again
if you do not teach me I shall not learn
saying again there is a last
even of last times
last times of begging
last times of loving
of knowing not knowing pretending
a last even of last times of saying
if you do not love me I shall not be loved
if I do not love you I shall not love

the churn of stale words in the heart again
love love love thud of the old plunger
pestling the unalterable
whey of words

terrified again
of not loving
of loving and not you
of being loved and not by you
of knowing not knowing pretending
pretending

I and all the others that will love you
if they love you

3

unless they love you

(S. Beckett, 1936)
from Collected Poems in English and French, S. Beckett, Grove Press, Inc. N.Y. 1977

Homestay

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Angelika Sher

Transcending Matter by Morgan Meis | The Smart Set

Mc Sorley’s Bar, John Sloan, 1912

The Ashcan painters may have “lost” most battles during their time, but we should remember them by their goal: to paint the force of life.
By Morgan Meis

Bernadita, Robert Henri, 1922

Human history is written from the perspective of the winners. But it is also the case that the winners are, more often than not, assholes. Looking back over the wreckage of past ages, losers can come off looking pretty good in comparison. The story of what-could-have-been sometimes beats the story of what-actually-was.
One scenario for meditations upon history’s winners and losers took place in New York City, 1913 when a group of painters decided to put on a show at the Armory building. The idea behind the show was simple. One of the organizers, John Quinn, expressed it in his opening address, “The members of this association have shown you that American artists — young American artists, that is — do not dread, and have no need to dread, the ideas or the culture of Europe.”

America was ready to confront the big boys (and a couple of girls) of European art. American art would no longer be perceived as the mostly provincial, second-order stuff of a colonial backwater. The Armory exhibit would display American artists like Oscar Bluemner, Patrick H. Bruce, James Earle Fraser, and Henry Twachtman alongside Cezanne, Redon, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky, and Duchamp. Likewise, art enthusiasts in the U.S. would get their first glimpse of Continental art movements: Neo-Impressionism, Futurism, Fauvism, Abstraction, and Cubism.

Viewers of the exhibit were also going to see the newest creations of those American artists who had come to be known as The Ashcan School. Painters like William Glackens, Robert Henri, George Luks, Everett Shinn, and a young Edward Hopper. The Ashcan artists painted with a dark and sooty realism. They favored street scenes, often at night, frequently in less-savory parts of town. They were not prim and proper artists of the salon. They were artists making art about real people doing real things. In the confrontation with the newest in European painting, the Ashcan School was bringing to the Armory show a blend of social relevance and a brazen, forward-looking painting style. It was going to be a good fight.

Suffice it to say, the Ashcan School lost. Badly. A headline in the Sun — a New York newspaper of the time — read, “Cubists, Futurists, and Post Impressionists Win First Engagement, Leaving the Enemy Awestruck.” The Ashcans were overshadowed. They weren’t, it turned out, as radical as they thought they were. Next to the wild lines of a Kandinsky, the utter breakdown in form of a Duchamp, the Ashcan paintings looked tame.

The Ashcan School has since been deemed a minor movement. They failed at the Armory and they were forgotten. Art history, like all history, is usually written from the perspective of the winners. But of what does this “winning” really consist? The “victory” of, say, Futurism over the Ashcan School in 1913 has much to do with the outbreak of WWI one year later. Futurism’s vision of a mechanized and war-torn reality was confirmed by real-world events. But are we to judge the worth of a school of painting by its prophetic powers or by, in this case, its celebration of industrialized war? Maybe the road not taken deserves a second look. What do we really know about the Ashcan School?

Because the Ashcan painters often painted scenes from urban life, from the immigrant-strewn streets of New York City, their work is often judged, positively or negatively, as a form of journalism. They were thought to be “documenting” the reality of life on the Lower East Side, “editorializing” the plight of the urban poor. In fact, neither of these motivations drove the Ashcan painters.

The Ashcan painters followed a specific path that was laid down by the charismatic painter and teacher Robert Henri. Henri was born in 1865. He recognized, as did most painters of the late 19th and early 20th century, that painting was at a crossroads. Newer technologies like photography and early moving pictures had displaced painting as the means for creating documents of record. Painting was forced to find itself anew, forced to ask what it could do that a medium like photography could not.
Keep on reading via The Smart Set: Transcending Matter

Ferdinando Scianna | Magnum Photos

Festa di Sant’Alfio, Cirino e Filadalefo, Tre Castagni, 1964 di Ferdinando Scianna

“A photograph is not created by a photographer. What he does is just to open a little window and capture it. The world then writes itself on the film. The act of the photographer is closer to reading than it is to writing. They are the readers of the world.”

Ferdinando Scianna started taking photographs in the 1960s while studying literature, philosophy and art history at the University of Palermo. It was then that he began to photograph the Sicilian people systematically. Feste Religiose in Sicilia (1965) included an essay by the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, and it was the first of many collaborations with famous writers.

Scianna moved to Milan in 1966. The following year he started working for the weekly magazine L’Europeo, first as a photographer, then from 1973 as a journalist. He also wrote on politics for Le Monde Diplomatique and on literature and photography for La Quinzaine Littéraire.

In 1977 he published Les Siciliens in France and La Villa Dei Mostri in Italy. During this period Scianna met Henri Cartier-Bresson, and in 1982 he joined Magnum Photos. He entered the field of fashion photography in the late 1980s. At the end of the decade he published a retrospective, Le Forme del Caos (1989).

Scianna returned to exploring the meaning of religious rituals with Viaggio a Lourdes (1995), then two years later he published a collection of images of sleepers – Dormire Forse Sognare (To Sleep, Perchance to Dream). His portraits of the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges were published in 1999, and in the same year the exhibition Niños del Mundo displayed Scianna’s images of children from around the world.

In 2002 Scianna completed Quelli di Bagheria, a book on his home town in Sicily, in which he tries to reconstruct the atmosphere of his youth through writings and photographs of Bagheria and the people who live there.

via Magnum Photos Photographer Profile
Ferdinando Scianna « Lo Specchio Incerto

The Silent Manor | James Charlick

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The manor originates in 1848, when it was built to replace the previous home on the site which had fallen into disrepair. The original manor dates back centuries earlier and residents included the famous poet John Milton in the 1600′s.

However the manor has remained empty since the last inhabitant passed away in 1987. It now barely stands, with lifetimes worth of belongings becoming steadily buried among the rubble of the falling ceilings, stairs, and floors.

The house is full to the brim of both old furniture and personal paperwork – anything from handwritten letters (in this case dated 14/2/40) to official documents, baptism certificates and party invitations. All hints at past lives lived and forgotten.

The library is perhaps the manor’s finest room, containing hundreds of books from light reading to encyclopaedias, instructional pamphlets to copies of Life magazine, modern novels to books published in the 1700′s.

That the current owners care so little as to let such a beautiful and historical collection rot and disintergrate is almost criminal. Worse still, the structure is likely to give way before the books perish in their cases, burying them in the rubble.

via Silent Manor on Behance.

La Vie Dans L’Après-Guerre

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Willy Ronis, who died on September 12 2009 aged 99, was the last of the great photographers whose images came to define postwar France; like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau, he was an aesthete of photo-reportage and street life, capturing politics and poetry in the humdrum and the everyday.

He was, however, more artistic than Doisneau and less patrician than Cartier-Bresson. Ronis had a tender eye, photographing working-class neighbourhoods where men drank rough wine and children played on the streets.

In Le Petit Parisien (1952), a young boy wearing shorts runs down the pavement, laughing, carrying a baguette that is as long as he is tall. In Rue Rambuteau (1946), two waitresses stand behind the counter in a busy café, wearing aprons that are crumpled and dirty, leaving us in no doubt that their working days are long and hard. But with smoke rising from the grill and light falling across the scene, illuminating their hair, the documentary image is also a composition full of beauty.

To a contemporary eye, such themes – lovers kissing, smoky cafés and Parisian rooftops – can seem nostalgic and clichéd; but the lives Ronis documented during the reconstruction of France after the war were anything but cosy. The country was wracked by poverty and social unrest, and Ronis’ vision was radical: for those who wanted France to be seen as modern, he showed a humble world that was entrenched in the past.

via Willy Ronis – The Telegraph.

Five Poems

Lisette Model, NYC, circa 1950

by Vera Pavlova

Loneliness is a sexually
transmitted disease.
I let you be; let me be, please.
Let’s have a quiet moment
chatting about this and that,
leaving some things unsaid,
let’s have a hug and realize:
no cure for the lonely.

…

If there is something to desire,
there will be something to regret.
If there is something to regret,
there will be something to recall.
If there is something to recall,
there was nothing to regret.
If there was nothing to regret,
there was nothing to desire.

….

Let us touch each other
while we still have hands,
palms, forearms, elbows…
Let us love each other for misery,
torture each other, torment,
disfigure, maim,
to remember better,
to part with less pain.

….

Eternalize me just a bit:
take some snow and sculpt me in it,
with your warm and bare palm
polish me until I shine.

….

When I am in your arms, you think: “She’s mine, without fail.”
But I will shed my body like a saurian tail,
and you will have to search the starry skies
for what you hoped to find between my thighs.

Sure Darling, I am So Happy I Could Die

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Mariel Clayton – Doll Photographer with a subversive sense of humour

Vagabonding

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Landscape & Travel Photographs by Michael Anderson

Madame Bovary leggeva Walter Scott e immaginava l’amore e la vita svolgersi in amabili scenari all’italiana. Se Madame Bovary avesse letto Madame Bovary non avrebbe frenato le sue fantasticherie? I veri libri immorali sono dunque quelli che trattano la vita in rosa e non quelli che ne dipingono gli errori e gli eccessi. Ovvero, non c’è peggior pornografia di quella sentimentale.

Edouard Boubat. Ile St. Louis, 1964

da Diario Notturno, Ennio Flaiano, 1956

Sanne Sannes

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Lens Culture: Vintage 60s Erotica

Dirty Talk II

Sam Haskins, Cheating Ace, 1964

Pretend that I’ve forgotten who I am
and it’s your job to remind me: say my name
and tell me all about my body, what it wants
and what you’ll make it do. Pretend we’re sick,
describe the symptoms: our wild slam-
ming hearts, our fever-flush, our violet veins
throbbing. Pretend I’m blind, and tell me what
you see. Pretend it’s possible to think

after you speak, that body can trump brain
which can trump body, translating the words
into impulses, firing from nerve
to twinkling nerve. Pretend we’ve found the way
to heal, between things and names, the divide:
you be the signifier. I’ll be signified.

Ali Shapiro

PANK Magazine / Six Poems.

Beauty Is Everywhere A Welcome Guest

Anno nuovo, nuova rubrica, una scarica di serotonina: One per day, ovvero, un buon motivo al giorno per procrastinare il suicidio, confutare Sartre e licenziare l’analista. Godersi la vita? Godersi la vita. Fosse per un paio di minuti, fosse grazie a una fotografia, fosse per l’intera durata di un film. Impresa difficile di difficile riuscita tutti i giorni, ma se è vero, come diceva Goethe (Goethe, si), che ‘A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul’, allora, chi ben comincia è a metà dell’opera.
Bisognerà ch’io mi metta in pari con l’inizio del nuovo anno, così ecco gli arretrati e il One per day di oggi.
E che il 2013 ci porti fortuna.

Laura Makabresku

Lisette Model, Running Legs, 42nd Street, New York, 1940-41

Rudolf Schlichter, Woman with Tie, 1923

Martine Franck

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Martine Franck: 1938 – 2012 – LightBox.

Lost and Found

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500px / Sven Fennema / Photos.

Paulo Nozolino’s Photography

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‘A man stands in the middle of destruction, feeling lonely to an unbelievable point, bone lonely. He makes deaf images during his blind walks. Dwelling with thoughts about the loss in all conflicts, the feeling that all systems fail and the certainty that nothing lasts forever. He wonders what light shines in loneliness, what sounds come out of a moving body, what can fill the absence. He has no answers. He sees silent panic, he hears reports on people, he smells the mould, he feels the flesh aging and he tastes the dry saliva in his mouth. There seems to be no escape. He has a word pounding inside his head: resist, resist… bone lonely.’
Nozolino has traveled widely throughout North and South America, Europe, Macau and the Arab world to capture the images in his numerous, well-received photobooks.

Alison Scarpulla

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Alison Scarpulla’s Photostream

Two souls reside, alas, within my breast, And each one from the other would be parted. The one holds fast, in sturdy lust for love, With clutching organs clinging to the world; The other strongly rises from the gloom To lofty fields of ancient heritage.

Ryan McGinley

Faust I, Scene 2, lines 1112-1117.

Hysteria

George Brassaï, Paris, 1932

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark cavers of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white cheeked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: ‘If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden..’ I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.
T.S.Eliot

On Lucas Samaras and Photo Transformation

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Lucas Samaras (born September 14, 1936) is not the best-known artist in America, but among the cognoscenti he is considered a wizard, and among artists he’s an elusive legend: a loner, eccentric, master of unusual media, and visionary who has avoided classification. He’s a solitary worker who has remained outside of movements, trends, or cliques, making work that is always original, provocative, and surprising. Samaras stands out from the crowd in part because he tends to work with unique subject matter—himself. He has interviewed himself, photographed himself, sculpted himself, and decorated himself and, in doing so, he has always seemed to be a work in progress. Samaras is not necessarily a narcissist, even though one of his retrospectives was titled “Unrepentant Ego.” He is an intrepid self-investigator and he has made acareer out of mutating his own image and likeness.

Samaras was born in Greece in 1936 and emigrated to the United States with his family when he was 11. He won a scholarship to study art at Rutgers University, enrolling in 1955, at a time when the Rutgers art department was a hotbed of innovation, with a faculty that included Alan Kaprow, who organized the first Happenings, and Geoffrey Hendricks, who, along with Kaprow, George Segal, Roy Lichtenstein, and students like Robert Whitman, was instrumental in the Fluxus movement. Upon graduation, Samaras received a fellowship to attend Columbia University’s graduate department of art history, which afforded him the chance to get involved with New York City’s burgeoning Happenings scene, where he met artists such as Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, and Red Grooms. His interest in performance also led him to study acting with Stella Adler.

Samaras’s first art exhibition, in 1959, earned raves, and, two years later, one of his pieces was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. He was a significant figure in the New York art world early on, and Andy Warhol once recalled Samaras as being part of a fledgling rock band he tried to join in the ’60s that included Claes and Patti Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, La Monte Young, and Walter De Maria. Over the years, Samaras has made drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, furniture, and jewelry. He has been extraordinarily innovative in media, learning to manipulate Polaroids before the dyes set, or employing materials such as razor blades, chicken wire, beads, and gold.

Samaras is known for a series of “Auto-Interviews,” in which he interrogates himself, but for Interview this notorious loner spoke to his longtime friend and dealer Arne Glimcher, who may be the person who knows him best. The occasion is yet another remarkable body of work—this one composed of computer drawings of chimerical creatures all made on his Mac in the magical aerie where he lives, alone, high above midtown Manhattan, in one of those apartments wherein you might start to think you were an eagle or a god.

via Lucas Samaras – Page – Interview Magazine.

Until The World No Longer Exists

Antoine D’Agata

“The night, the sex, the wandering… and the need to photograph it all, not so much the perceived act but more like a simple exposure to common and even extreme experiences… It is an inseparable part of photographic practice, in a certain sense, to grasp at existence or risk, desire, the unconsciousness and chance, all of which continue to be essential elements. No moral posturing, no judgement, simply the principle of affirmation, necessary to explore certain universes, to go deep inside, without any care. A ride into photography to the vanishing point of orgasm and death.

I try to establish a state of nomadic worlds, partial and personal, systematic and instinctual, of physical spaces and emotions where I am fully an actor. I avoid defining beforehand, what I am about to photograph. The shots are taken randomly, according to chance meetings and circumstances. The choices made, considering all the possibilities, are subconscious. But the obsessions remain constant: the streets, fear, obscurity, and the sexual act…. Not to mention perhaps, in the end, the simple desire to exist.

Beyond the subject, the lost souls and the nocturnal drifting, the scenes of fellatio and of bodies in utter abandon, I seek to reveal some kind of break up through the mixture of bodies and feelings, to reveal fragments of society that escape from any analysis and instant visualization of the event, but nonetheless, are its principal elements.

The brutality of the form, the intensity of the vision obligates us, still more than images that pretend to document, to involve ourselves with the reality of what we are seeing. The spectator can exist then, no longer finding himself in the position of voyeur or consumer but as sharing an extreme experience, wondering about the state of the world and of himself.

The sense of losing sight of the subject may seem like a paradox in a documentary genre where I try to impose my subjective point of view, in an autobiography born from travels and from wandering. But the emotional strip tease, which lets me enter into the pages of this intimate, photographic diary seems to carry me inevitably towards this vanishing point.

A photograph is nothing but a lie. The space is cut off, the time, manipulated. They are two uncontrollably false appearances of an image condemned to choose between hypocrisy ­ and good conscience ­ and being fake. The language used is often one of class: dominator but alienated, unaware of the actual matter at hand: appearance, ambiguity, the imaginary. In my photographs, in my every day practice of the lie, I cannot pretend to describe anything but my situation itself ­ my normal states of being, my kinky intimacies… I can only comment on the mere insignificance of the photographic moment.

Assigned to the anthology of a reduced knowledge, of castrated experiences, the photographer appropriates himself the gestures, diverts the acts and regurgitates signals that ” indicate ” our relationship with the images and determine our perception of a reality that has become hypothetical. And so, the world limits itself to icons, an altar in direct opposition to the rituals the photographer practices. But if the liturgy, the prayer and the sermon are still instruments of a vigorous cult, then for photographers, truth and freedom are found only in the realm of confession.

I try to distance myself from a certain type of documentary photography that often avails itself of symbols that are too easy to read and assimilate in order to present a complex reality in a balance that is endlessly discussed over and over between photography as an instrument of documentation and photography as being completely subjective. It isn’t the eye that photography poses on the world that interests me but its most intimate rapport with that world.

The only photographs that truly exist are the ” innocent ” images. We find them in the family photo albums or in the police archives. Beyond serving as a simple documentation of reality or of a certain aesthetic sense, they attest to the role of the photographer, of his implication, of the authenticity of his position in that moment. The compositions of light, narrative, are no longer, for me, fundamental problems but superfluous lies. What interests me today in an image? The perspective that has justified the act of photography, the interference of the experience, of the ongoing scene, the texture, the material, the meaning of the self-portrait, of the individual, the incoherence of the unfolding sequence, the maniacal reconstruction of the random experience ­ the photographs, like words, are meaningless when isolated…

To criticize in a coherent manner, the dominant image actually demands from a photo that it is lucid in the midst of its messy situation, from the experience between a glance and a good, hard look, the camera and the unconscious, in its fundamentally tainted rapport with reality and fiction. This approach cannot conceive that within multiplicity, associating technique and practice, sometimes opposite each other in their use of the photographic language, I seek to reveal the inherent contradictions to the ” use ” of documentary photography, that should supposedly transcribe tangible reality while at the same time, do nothing more than report a myriad of experiences.

I can then make use of the world for my own ends and in a basically solitary experience, remodel it, and transform it at will, almost as if without images, the world no longer exists.”

- Antoine D’Agata, Until the World No Longer Exists

Anders Petersen’s Photography

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‘I don’t believe in reality really, it’s a bluff. But I believe in a kind of reality that exists because of all the longing, dreams, secrets, nightmares, mostly longings. I think no picture is without longing. This allows you to use what you are afraid of, as a trampoline; to channel your energy into your creativity; go inside and open up like a sharp knife, like a doctor operating.’
Anders  Petersen
Anders Petersen: ‘For me, Soho is something special’ | Art and design | The Observer.

XXX

Nobuyoshi Araki, Theater of Love, c.1965

Burn of the second
throughout the tender fleshbud of desire
Sting of vagrant chili
at two in the immoral afternoon.
Glove of the edges edge to edge.
Aromatic truth touched to the quick, on connection
the sexual antenna
to what we are being without knowing it.
Slop of maximum ablution.
Voyaging boilers
that crash and spatter with unanimous fresh
shadow, the color, the fraction, the hard life,
the hard life eternal.
Let’s not be afraid. Death is like that.
Sex blood of the beloved who complains
ensweetened, of bearing so much
for such a ridiculous moment.
And the circuit
between our poor day and the great night,
at two in the immoral afternoon.

From Trilce, published in 1922, by César Vallejo (born 16 March, 1892; died 15 April, 1938)
translated by Clayton Eshleman

Ernest Hyde

Fred Lebain

My mind was a mirror
It saw what it saw, it knew what it knew.
In youth my mind was just a mirror
In a rapidly flying car,
Which catches and loses bits of the landscape.
Then in time
Great scratches were made on the mirror,
Letting the outside world come in,
And letting my inner self look out.
For this is the birth of the soul in sorrow,
A birth with gains and losses.
The mind sees the world as a thing apart,
And the soul makes the world at one with itself.
A mirror scratched reflects no image-
And this is the silence of wisdom.

Taken from the Spoon River Anthology, Edgar Lee Masters, 1915

Crossing Boundaries

Nobuyoshi Araki, Grand Diary of a Photo Maniac, 1994

I transgress the boundary as if going back and forth between life and death. Sometimes I was taking photos from the window of a car. Up until now, the inside of the car was this world and the outside of the car was the other world, but lately it has become the opposite. Inside the car is the outer world. Outside the car is this world. I feel as if I am taking photographs from a hearse. Sometimes I am looking at the outer world from inside, or I am looking at the inner world from outside. This position can be very fluid and will change again in the future, for sure.

via Crossing Boundaries: An Interview with Nobuyoshi Araki.
Le Journal de la Photographie.

Esther Bubley

New York Harbor, Looking Toward Manhattan from the Footpath on Brooklyn Bridge, October, 1946

April 1943. Washington, D.C. ‘Girl sitting alone in the Sea Grill waiting for a pickup’

December 1943.15-cent photo booth in the lobby at the United Nations service center at Washington, D.C

Utata Sunday Salon » Esther Bubley

Giace Tra Le Pieghe Dell’Alba

Raccolti nel candore di un lenzuolo bianco
riccioli di pube neri
Giace tra le pieghe dell’alba
il corpo d’amore stropicciato dal sesso
La purezza è un altare sacro
l’alcova del primigenio vagito
Strozzato dalla notte
un grido tace sgomento

da Il Pesa-Nervi

Man Ray, 1926

Ho proprio sentito che Lei rompeva intorno a me l’atmosfera, faceva il vuoto per permettermi d’avanzare, per dare il posto d’uno spazio impossibile a quel che in me esisteva solo potenzialmente, a tutta una germinazione virtuale, e che doveva nascere, aspirata dal posto che si offriva.
Spesso mi sono trovato in uno stato d’impossibile assurdo, per cercare di far nascere in me del pensiero. Siamo alcuni, di questi tempi, ad aver voluto attentare alle cose, creare dentro di noi spazi per la vita, spazi che non esistessero e non sembrassero dover trovare posto nello spazio.
Sono sempre stato colpito da questa ostinazione dello spirito nel voler pensare in dimensioni e in spazi, e nel fissarsi su stati arbitrari delle cose per poter pensare, nel pensare in segmenti, in cristalloidi, e che ogni modo dell’essere restasse irrigidito su un principio, che il pensiero non fosse in pressante e ininterrotta comunicazione con le cose, ma che questo fissarsi e gelarsi, questa specie di monumentalizzazione dell’anima, si producesse per così dire PRIMA DEL PENSIERO. Evidentemente è la buona condizione per creare.
Ma sono ancora più colpito da questa instancabile, meteorica illusione, che ci suggerisce queste architetture determinate, circoscritte, pensate, questi segmenti d’anima cristallizzati, come se fossero una grande pagina plastica e in osmosi con il resto della realtà. E la surrealtà consiste quasi in un restringimento dell’osmosi, in una specie di comunicazione rovesciata. Lungi dal credere in una diminuzione del controllo, credo anzi in un controllo più grande, ma un controllo che invece d’agire diffidi, un controllo che impedisca gli incontri della realtà consueta e permetta incontri più penetranti e rarefatti, incontri assottigliati fino alla corda, che prende fuoco e non si spezza mai.
Immagino un’anima consumata e quasi solforata e fosforizzata da questi incontri, come l’unico stato accettabile della realtà.
Ma non so quale lucidità innominabile, sconosciuta me ne dà il tono e il grido e li fa sentire a me stesso. Li sento per una certa totalità insolubile, il cui senso cioè non può essere attaccatto da nessun dubbio. E io, nel rapporto con questi agitanti incontri, sono in uno stato di scossa minima, vorrei s’immaginasse un nulla arrestato, una massa di spirito seppellita da qualche parte, diventata virtualità.

da Il Pesa-Nervi, Frammenti, Antonin Artaud, 1925-1927