Hey everybody,

for the last weeks this blog was pretty lame, sorry for that, but I was very busy in September and now I am travelling till almost end of november, and probably won’t habe the chance to post new stuff.

But come back then and find some new interesting post!

Greetings from Los Angeles!

As some of you know I’ll spend some time in the states and i’m right now for one week participating in a great international workshop (FELDSTAERKE) with students from Germany, Paris and from CalArts University Los Angeles.

As an introduction to the extremely big Los Angeles area, we saw an essay film by Thom Andersen that is called “Los Angeles plays itself“. Andersen takes literally almost all the movies that were shot in LA and uses their scenes to show the city. The film took about 3 hrs, but these youtube clips give you a nice idea of it. Cool piece, but in my opinion just too long. Maybe one has to see it in 2 or 3 parts.

Photographer Alexx Henry shot this editorial for Outside Magazine with a super hight tec ? camera. Is this the future of magazines?

Via www.aphotoeditor.com

Especially when you are interested in editorial and portrait photography, Andrew Hetherington’s Blog WTJ (whatsthejackanory.com) gives good and amusing  insights, also with a focus on what’s going in in NYC. Andrew went to a lecture with Juergen Teller and filmed it – it’s quite long but also very interesting. I especially like the moment  Teller says that when he started out, a magazin (don’t remeber if he said FACE or ID) paid him 100 £ per page, and to reduce costs, he bought a 35 mm film (that’s what he still shoots) with only 12 exposures which forced him to work “very precise”.This guy really knows what he wants.

I recently found the series  “Vector portraits” of LA-based artist Andrew Bush that I find really really good.

These photographs were made when Bush was driving through the streets and freeways of Los Angeles, he had a medium format camera with a flash attached to his car and then photographed the other drivers, always writing down exact informations about where he took the photo at what speed at what time etc.

On his website, you can see the whole body of work containing not less the 66 photographs. I think some pictures are not that interesting so a slightly tighter edit would have concentrated the thing even more, but in the book it’s probably quite nice to have that much material.

Shot between 1989-1997, “Vector Portraits” is now finally available as a book called “Drive” (I like the original title way more.)

Some more infos @ YOSSI MILO GALLERY were Bush recently had a show with this work.

Also a longer article on Design Observer.

I found this blog where students from Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD) collected tons of links to interviews and blogs. Seems to be a good place to start browsing through the photography world!

In a personal project, Berlin/Vienna based portrait/travel/editorial photographer Peter Rigaud takes a portrait of somebody and then asks that person to name another person Rigaud should photograph, what he does afterwards, and so on and so on. The subjects are also asked to write some lines about why Rigaud should photograph the next person, what is so special about them. On his website, you can see some of these texts, unfortunately very small and hard to read – would like to see this project as a book or magazine!

You find these photographs when you click on Projects>Project 1, but also check out the other stuff, some of his work is quite good I think.

“Komm, mein Maedchen, in die Berge” is german for “Come, my girl, to the mountains” and is the title of a wonderful book by dutch artist Andrea Stultiens. Unfortunately, I’ve not yet seen the book itself, but saw some stuff /articles about it online and if it’s not produced too bad I’ll totaly buy it (it’s only 18 Euros).

Through a colleague, Andrea Stultiens received several boxes with 3000 slides and after overseeing them all, she picked 45 pictures that show a couple over more than 3 decades spending their holidays in the mountains.

Again I think it’s quite  amazing what you can do with found footage and – if you edit your footage an interesting way- what kind of stories one can tell with these pictures. With “Komm, mein Maedchen, in die Berge”, Stultiens constructed a life, a whole world of that unknown couple and to me it’s also very emotional because in many pictures the connection between the two is so present that we, the observer of their live, turn also in witnesses of a big love.

Or maybe that wasn’t a big, lucky love at all? How can we know?

German daily FAZ has a nice online feature with audio interview here. They also did some research of the true history / identityof the two protagonists of the book. See the only german article here.

Here some more pictures:

What makes these photographs also noteworthy is the fact, that the husband who put the camera on the tripod seemed to have a good eye for framing the picture and plcing the couple in the wonderful landscapes of the alps.

I myself am also working on a found footage project about my family, still scanning and looking through the whole material, not knowing how and when this might end, but here some raw scans…

When reading various blogs today I again saw good work  of 2 us-american photographers, Susana Raab and Amy Stein (they both also have blogs). On Susana Raab’s website, there is a lot to see, my favourite is the “Consumed” series from which you see one photograph above.

Amy Stein also has various different projects online, I especially like “Stranded” and “Halloween in Harlem” from which the following pictures are.

I think one reason why it  makes sense to show both photographers in this post is because they both have an interest in us-american topics like Fast Food (Raab) or Halloween / weapons (Stein).

I mostly like “Life is a series of small moments I”

elizabethfleming.com