I should mention that I’m in Ireland for the month of July, completing a residency at the Burren College of Art. I imagine posts will be rather slow here, but I do have internet if anyone needs to get in touch. If you would like to send me something this month, shoot me an e-mail and I’ll give you my temporary mailing address.

I was shocked to realize that I have never posted about Michael’s work on the blog, so I thought I’d post some now. At present, his website only features a single project entitled Constructing the Exotic. I’ll leave it to him to explain:

This series explores the conventions of the figure in painting and photography through the lens of historical colonial and native art. By placing the unfamiliar within the familiar the door is opened to questioning the identity of the “exotic other”.

In these images western women who were raised either within the Indian subcontinent itself or simply born into its socio-religious heritage become, in one sense, the “other”. Their placement, the familiar contemporary western cultural landscape, draws the viewer into their world and pulls at the seams of the notion exotic.

Here are two of my personal favorites from the series:

Vani, Alachua, FL., 2006 (from “Constructing the Exotic”)
© Michael Bühler-Rose

Chandra & Kalyani, Alachua, FL., 2007 (from “Constructing the Exotic”)
© Michael Bühler-Rose

Some of this work will be on display from July 8th to August 16h at Bose Pacia in a group show curated by Peter Nagy titled Neti, Neti (Not This, Not This). If you’re in New York, stop by and take a look.

See more of Michael’s work online here.

Mårten Lange sent me an e-mail last week to inform me of an update to his website, including the addition of a new project entitled Bloom. The images in the series naturally remind me of Lee Friedlander’s Apples and Olives.

See more of Lange’s work here.

Hin Chua just updated his website and his latest project, After the Fall (previously titled The World’s What We Make of It), is really shaping up! He writes about the series,

In the origin stories of many religions, the first humans dwelt in an earthly paradise, at one with nature. After their disobedience and subsequent expulsion, some believe that this Fall of Man transformed the very fabric of the natural world and the essence of our relationship with it. Made throughout the world in locations ranging from Berlin to Jersey City, this series is a meditation on that altered, yet fundamental bond.

See more of his work here or here.

I had picked up Olaf Otto Becker’s book Broken Line some time ago and, though I was intrigued with the project – Becker’s inspiration to photograph the Greenlandic coastline – I wasn’t able to spend much time with the images. Well, recently I had a chance to sit down with the book for a while and found the photographs to be very compelling.

More of Becker’s work can be seen on his website and, if you’re interested, a copy of Broken Line can be purchased here. Definitely look at the book if you can.

Marco Bohr’s Icefishers series is a nice compliment to Scott Peterman’s Shack.

More work by Bohr can be found here (don’t miss Observatories).

Well, as it turns out, Mike himself has put a complete collection on eBay.

Complete set of Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards, 1975 (auctioned on eBay)
© Mike Mandel

As he writes in the listing,

The Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards is a photo offset lithographic project that I authored and published in 1975. The project satirized the phenomenon of the fine art photography community being consumed by the larger art world and commercial culture. I photographed photographers as if they were baseball players and produced a set of cards that were packaged in random groups of ten, with bubble gum, so that the only way of collecting a complete set was to make a trade.

Recently, I have offered complete sets for sale, but they are rare. This is a first edition of all 134 Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards (plus one checklist, 135 cards in all). MINT CONDITION, offered for sale directly by the artist. Photographs by Mike Mandel. Texts, statistics and quotes by the respective artists printed on verso. Each card 3-1/2×2-1/2 inches. The reverse side for each card enabled the photographer to fill in their own personal data that referred to the information usually included on real baseball cards. In a sense, each photographer’s response provides an insight about how they approached their participation.

Some of the photographers, curators, and critics included are: Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Harry Callahan, Ed Ruscha, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Minor White, Robert Cumming, Lewis Baltz, Duane Michals, Edmund Teske, Peter Bunnell, Robert Heinecken, Beaumont Newhall, etc. The cards are stored in archival baseball card pages, no pvc, acid free, 9 cards to a page. The set is collected and sold within a storage binder, black, pure archival polyproylene.

I will sign my card upon request.

Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards: Mike Mandel, 1975 (auctioned on eBay)
© Mike Mandel

Have a few thousand to spend? Looking to do it in the next three hours? Then hurry up and place a bid!

[thanks Jason]

UPDATE: The auction sold for $4,049. The person who bought it is probably kicking themselves for not buying the same exact item here for $2,950 (a savings of $1099).

Over on odpTV – accompanying a feature in the new issue of OjodePez, edited by Aaron Schuman – there’s a great NPR audio slideshow of Colby Katz’s Rabbit Hunting photographs (previously mentioned on the blog here).

Take a look!

J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivered a great commencement address last week at Harvard University entitled, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination.”

If you haven’t already, see it, hear it, or read it here.

Friend and photographer Shen Wei has just updated his website with images from his new project, Chinese Sentiment. Beautiful, as always.

Women in Photography has just launched with their first online exhibition of photographs by women photographers: photographs by Elinor Carucci from her projects Crisis and Pain. Every other Tuesday of the month, WIP will present a new photographer, co-curated by my lovely friends Amy Elkins and Cara Phillips.

Visit the site to see more from Carucci. If you’re a woman photographer, you can also find the submission guidelines there.

For a simple example, see my portfolio (shanelavalette.com):

Here’s an explanation of how it works from Sala, the creator:

Everyday, we look at dozens of websites. The structure of these websites is defined in HTML, the lingua franca for publishing information on the web. Your browser’s job is to render the HTML according to the specs (most of the time, at least). You can look at the code behind any website by selecting the “View source” tab somewhere in your browser’s menu.

HTML consists of so-called tags, like the A tag for links, IMG tag for images and so on. Since tags are nested in other tags, they are arranged in a hierarchical manner, and that hierarchy can be represented as a graph.

Sala has written an applet that visualizes such a graph. As you might expect, the visualization get more interesting when there are more tags. Here’s what this blog looks like (shanelavalette.com/journal):

Curious what the colors mean?

blue: links (the A tag)
red: tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: the DIV tag
violet: images (the IMG tag)
yellow: forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Here’s Google (google.com):

Looking at the graphs themselves is interesting – in fact, there’s a Flickr group dedicated solely to these sorts of images – but the applet also animates the graphs, allowing you to watch them grow from the HTML tag, the root node. Pretty neat.

Head to the site and try it for yourself!

For her New York Times article, At Kodak, Some Old Things Are New Again, Claudia H. Deutsch spoke with Steven Sasson, an electrical engineer who invented the “first digital camera.” When Sasson created his prototype at Eastman Kodak in the ‘70s, he told her, the idea was not as easy to pitch as you might think.

“My prototype was big as a toaster, but the technical people loved it,” Mr. Sasson said. “But it was filmless photography, so management’s reaction was, ‘that’s cute — but don’t tell anyone about it.’”

In her article, Deutsch discusses how Kodak has since learned to embrace digital technology and takes a look at what new technologies they releasing and researching for.

Read it online here.

I have to admit – even though I still don’t quite get what she’s going for – a few of Hannah Whitaker’s photographs have really grown on me.

If you haven’t seen it, take a look at the New York Times’ slideshow, The Fallen, where Magnum photographer Paul Fusco talks about the photographs he made in 1968 aboard the train carrying Robert F. Kennedy’s coffin from New York City to Washington.

To say that David Byrne is a prolific artist is an understatement. The work just keeps coming. His latest piece, a 9,000-square-foot, interactive, site-specific installation entitled Playing the Building, “transforms the interior of the landmark Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan into a massive sound sculpture that all visitors are invited to sit and ‘play.’”

The project consists of a retrofitted antique organ, placed in the center of the building’s cavernous second-floor gallery, that controls a series of devices attached to its structural features – metal beams, plumbing, electrical conduits, and heating and water pipes. These machines vibrate, strike, and blow across the building’s elements, triggering unique harmonics and producing finely tuned sounds.

Brilliant. Check out this video to see/hear it in action.

Find out more about Playing the Building here (don’t miss the interview).

UPDATE: Here is another interview with Byrne where you can hear him talk about the piece (thanks Sarah!):

Justin James Reed (previously mentioned on the blog here) has just updated his website with a new, currently untitled body of work and made a few updates to his earlier projects New Cities and South Philadelphia.

Take a moment to look around!

Charles Leadbeater, a researcher at the London think tank Demos, is raising a lot of interesting questions about sharing ideas and the role of the internet. (Along with the above video, also see his TED talk on collaborative innovation and the “rise of the amateur professional” and, if you have the time, read the first three chapters of his book, We Think.)

Lately I’ve been considering how this all affects photographers and bloggers and would love to host some conversation on the topic here.

Share your thoughts (because you can?)!

I recently came across some great landscape work by Joel Tettamanti. His book, entitled Local Studies, features photographs from various regions across the globe. I was particularly drawn to the set of photographs from Ilulissat, Greenland.

You can see more work on his website and purchase a copy of the book here.

If you haven’t seen Antonioni’s 1966 classic Blow-Up (even more of a shame if you’re a photographer), you might not understand but should still take a look at Constant Dullaart’s latest web project Blown-Up Blow-Up (following, of course, Blown-Up Balloon and Blown-Up Explosion).

See more of Dullaart’s work here.