Vanishing Spirits: The Dried Remains of Single Malt Scotch

Macallan 101

If you’ve ever met me, you know I love Scotch. And I love photography and what weird things photographers come up with to keep the medium new and fresh. So I love Ernie Button‘s photographic experiments with Scotch residue–he’s shining different colored light through it, photographing the residue, and on and on. They’re gorgeous. Like seascapes! Listen on NPR!

Aberlour 108

Extinct Photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts

I’m talking at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts about the work I did for their photography Art Cart. It’s sort of like a petting zoo for the history of photography–I made 12 images in 12 different historic photo process–cyanotype, Van Dyke, tintype, color slide, silver gelatin, direct positive paper, calotype (paper negative), albumen carte de visite (with Gocco printed personalized photographer’s back…yessssssss), salted paper, stereographs, Polaroid, and digital image. The Art Cart will be out so you can hold a tintype or look at a 3D stereoscope picture. And we’ll look at new daguerreotypes! Here is the MIA’s description of the evening:

Listen as some of our cities’ most interesting artists give us the back stories about their work in this series of on-stage narratives.

In 2011, the MIA commissioned photographer Lacey Prpic Hedtke to document the museum’s collection using archaic photographic techniques, such as tintypes, collotypes, and stereograms. She commenced upon an intensive exploration of history, representation, and visual interpretation, resulting in a kind of photographic archaeology that unearthed new connections and fresh interpretations of familiar artworks.

Prpic Hedtke will discuss this project, the history of photography, and how she decided to pair certain art works with particular archaic photographic techniques.

$10; $5 for MIA members. To reserve tickets, call (612) 870-6323 or reserve tickets online.

Jen Altman

Brooklyn and North Carolina based photographer and writer  Jen Altman is doing wonders with Polaroids. How does she do it? I have such a hard time with the Impossible Project instant film, but maybe she has a secret stash of the best Polaroid film ever. She’s also the author of Instant Love: How to Make Magic and Memories with Polaroids.

Joanna Pallaris

Oh my. Joanna Pallaris‘ photos are dreamy and somewhat Francesca Woodman-inspired, but hey, I’ll take it. What do we know about Joanna? She’s British. She works in Polaroid. She makes really romantic photos. These are the type of photos that photographers take when they don’t know what to shoot so just walk around the house with a camera, and then good images come out of it.

E.J. Bellocq’s Ladies of the Night

Is this turning into a Bellocq-blog? I’d be ok with it if it did. Well, here we go, haven’t looked at these pictures in a few weeks. The above is my ultimate favorite. If only Storyville was still around, with their blue books (the lady of the night directory–so organized).

I like how he leaves the backdrop visible as a backdrop.

Can you imagine what other images he made that we’ll never see? Like the images of New Orleans’ Chinatown opium dens? Thanks Bellocq for being an amazing photographer and for letting the ladies be real people, thanks ladies for sitting for these portraits, and thanks Lee Friedlander for finding Bellocq’s remaining negatives and helping them to live on.

Color photographs of 1940s storefronts

I have a thing for good storefronts, in real life and in pictures.

I hope the country doesn’t get so cleaned up that there’s no good junk shops or quirk anymore.

Find these photos and more at the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection

From the Winter Woods

Oh my beauty. Ampersand  in Portland, Oregon just had a show of cyanotypes of botanical specimens made by an anonymous photographer from around 1900 called From the Winter Woods.

Whoever this mystery photgrapher is had a great show in 2011 in a fantastic ephemera/photo/bookstore. Ampersand is always up to something good, keep them in your sights!

Phil Chang

 

 

 

Phil Chang is an LA photographer. His Untitled Series works with unfixed silver gelatin prints that end up looking like salt prints. I like how he’s using a medium that was invented to (finally!) be able to fix images on paper forever, hopefully, and he’s turning around and saying, nope these are still fleeting moments, and like time and memory, it will fade to nothing.

Since they’re not fixed, he has to display them like this, which makes viewing them like participating in a secret:

Vintage Spirit Photography

Check out this Vintage Spirit Photography gallery on Flickr!

Rowan James

Holy Cross © Rowan James

Photographer Rowan James was recently featured in the Onward ’11 exhibition at the Project Basho Gallery. James was also awarded a solo show  at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center. Congrats! I really really love this work.

Anonymous Man