I Met the Walrus

This is the recording of a 14-year-old Beatles fan named Jerry Levitan who snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in 1969 with a reel-to-reel tape recorder and persuaded Lennon to do an interview.

The recording has been set to animation by director Josh Raskin and was nominated for "Best Animated Short" in the 2008 Academy Awards.

Some of my favorite lines:

• "Protest but protest non-violently because violence begets violence."
• "Do everything for peace. Kiss for peace or smile for peace or go to school for peace or don't go to school for peace. Whatever you do, just do it for peace."
• "It's up to the people... We can change it. If we really want to change it, we can change it."
• "It's no good standing on the street corner shouting 'we want peace' and then beating up your mates. You've got to try and work your own head out and get non-violent."

Why Attend Portfolio Reviews?

Mary Virginia Swanson provides a summary of why you might want to attend one.

Eleanor Hardwick

Eleanor Hardwick is an English photographer I recently discovered. She has some beautiful images; there's a feeling of unease and whimsy in her work. And she's only 14 years old.

Tracking Down Those Twins

Danziger, from The Year in Pictures, has an interesting post on tracking down Diane Arbus' subjects.

Back when the Met had on its Diane Arbus show, David Segal, a resourceful staff writer for the Washington Post, wrote an interesting piece tracking down a few of Arbus’s subjects, starting with the “Twins”:

They remember none of it. Not the lady with the camera, arranging them by a wall at the Knights of Columbus hall in their home town of Roselle, N.J. Not the chocolate cake they had just finished, which is very faintly visible in the picture at the creases of their lips. The Wade sisters, as they were known before they each married, recall nothing about the day they gazed into the lens of Diane Arbus and became part of American photographic history. Unless you count the dresses.

"We still have them," says Colleen. "Our mother made them," says Cathleen. "They look black in the photograph but they're actually green."

They were 7 years old in 1967, when Arbus found the girls at a Christmas party for local twins and triplets. Nobody is quite sure how Arbus heard about the gathering, but a few parents obliged when she asked their children to pose. Which is how the Wade sisters wound up on a sidewalk, standing close enough to seem joined at the shoulder, their expression a kind of spectral blank.

It would become one of the most famous photographs of the era's most compelling photographer. Arbus killed herself in 1971, at the age of 48, leaving behind a gallery of characters -- some of them spooky, some of them bizarre, all of them vaguely tragic -- who won't go away. It's a menagerie of weirdos we seem to have known all our lives: those two men waltzing at a drag ball, that Mexican dwarf, the grimacing kid with a toy grenade.

They've been handed a peculiar kind of celebrity, the kind you don't ask for and certainly don't expect. One day you're minding your business, the next day you're immortalized in perpetuity beside "Nudist lady with swan sunglasses, Pa. 1965," or "Transvestite at a drag ball, N.Y.C. 1970."

What's it like to land in this hallowed collection of "freaks," as Arbus once referred to her subjects? It depends on which "freak" you ask, it turns out. The great recurring theme of Arbus's work is a sense of otherness, and if you talk to a few of her subjects you realize that in some cases she discovered that otherness in people and then committed it to film, and in other cases she somehow imposed it.

"We thought it was the worst likeness of the twins we'd ever seen," whispers Bob Wade, the girls' father. He and his daughters are visiting the Met exhibit one recent afternoon and at the moment are standing a few feet from "Identical twins, Roselle, N.J. 1967," the image that is clearly the star of this show. It's featured on the publicity photo and there's a bench nearby so visitors can sit and stare.

"I mean it resembles them," Wade continues. "But we've always been baffled that she made them look ghostly. None of the other pictures we have of them looks anything like this."

You can read the rest here.

Sia's Breathe Me

Sia will be performing at All Points West the three day music festival in Jersey City, NJ. Her video Breathe Me features the clever use of photos/Polaroids. I'll always associate that song with the final episode of Six Feet Under when Claire drives off into her future and sees her life flash by in a photo montage.

I found this version of Breathe Me that's even better than the recorded version.

Custom Shower Curtain

I just found a site called PhotoShowerCurtain.com which sells 100% custom shower curtains. You send them a design or photograph and they will print it on your shower curtain. It's another example of using custom imagery and I wonder how some of my photos would work on this medium. Nude in the bathroom...I know, too obvious right?

Bread Body Parts

Since 2006 Thai artist Kittiwat Unarrom (whose family also runs a bakery) has used dough as his medium to sculpt gruesome renditions of hand, feet, heads, torsos and other body parts. The results are unnervingly realistic with eyes, lips and other details constructed out of cashews, raisins and the like. A lack of hair and blood-like glazes make the work all the more creepy. Sold at his family's bakery in Ratchaburi, Thailand, he displays the parts wrapped like food in plastic and hung from meat hooks. Apparently, the art is in fact edible and tastes like regular bread.

Watch the video below to see Unarrom at work and some visitors' reactions.

Selling Solo vs. Working with a Gallery

Ed Winkleman weighs in on Selling Solo vs. Working with a Gallery.

Manufactured Landscapes

Manufactured Landscapes, a documentary by director Jennifer Baichwal, follows Edward Burtynsky to China, as he captures the effects of the country’s massive industrial revolution. I was already familiar with Ed Burtynsky's work and had often seen his prints hung throughout his photo lab Toronto Image Works while I worked in Toronto. Normally I'm not a fan of landscape photography but the scope of his work spoke to my interest in globalization and its effects on the environment. I was really looking forward to seeing this documentary but was ultimately disappointed. My expectation when watching a documentary about a photographer is to gain insight into their thought process either by hearing their commentary with particular photographs or seeing how they work with their chosen subject. Here, however, the director just tries to create a cinematic equivalent of Burtynsky's still images rather than a documentary on the artistic process of Burtynsky himself. So the end result is a film that would be better as a coffee table book.

Hey, Hot Shot! Opening

From Hey, Hot Shot! "We are excited to announce the five photographers selected for the first edition of Hey, Hot Shot! 2008:

Juliane Eirich
Derek Henderson
Roc Herms Pont
Kate Orne
Colleen Plumb

Please join us for the opening reception for their exhibition on Friday, August 8. The show will be on view at Jen Bekman Gallery (6 Spring Street) through August 23."

How to Succeed in Commercial Photography

This is a great video series with Selina Maitreya, author of "How to Succeed in Commercial Photography". If you need help defining your vision and applying it to your portfolio and website you need to view these videos.