10/28/24
Photomural in the making / joy of chemistry and light
Behind the scenes production of Essential Pleasures New Happiness Photomural on 1265 Howe st.
Essential Pleasures New Happiness 2024
Photomural featuring prints by Rebecca Brewer, Deon Feng, Sidney Gordon, Simon Grefiel, Natasha Katedralis, Tiziana La Melia, Thomas Nugent, Felix Rapp, Emile Rubino, Gerri York, Katayoon Yousefbigloo
Opening Event 6pm - 9pm, Oct 26 – Feb 8, 2025
The darkroom is a good place to gossip, talk about the city, discuss grant applications, exchange accounting tips, listen to industrial music and meditate to the sound of water flowing through the washing tray. The darkroom is “cheaper than therapy.” Just kidding! The darkroom is just a stuffy, dusty, windowless room. Some imbue it with a form of liquid intelligence, but at times, the whole endeavor just feels clumsy if not slightly dumb and anachronistic. In any case, when in a quest for Essential Pleasures and New Happiness, it’s easier to persevere when you’re not alone in the dark.
Over the last few months, the eleven artists involved in the making of this communal photomural developed their own approaches to making images with light, sensitized materials and chemistry. Some built makeshift rigs for shooting lasers through negatives or developed ways to make contact prints from laptop screens. Others enlarged and collaged from negatives found in abandoned satellite fields or taken to fulfill highschool projects. Felix Rapp gently guided and hosted this happy mess in the cramped photo lab that came into existence through his residency at Malaspina Printmakers.
For many, the printmaking part of photography is perhaps the least democratic/the most obscure part of the ‘medium.’ Crowded like moths to a flame under the dim light of the enlarger, we looked for ways to establish contact between objects and surfaces, and between our different practices. We didn’t want to be precious but still had to be organized. Some found new things for themselves along the way while others were just happy to momentarily forget themselves in the process. From the heat of summer and into the fall, we came in and out of the darkroom, always happy and exhausted when pushing the glass doors that give onto Howe Street. Often, we were surprised to find that it was already night and that the rain was still falling on the fountains of downtown Vancouver.
Text by Emile Rubino & Felix Rapp
9/30/24
Kennedy in Berlin
"Ich bin ein Berliner" (German pronunciation: [ɪç ˈbɪn ʔaɪn bɛʁˈliːnɐ]; "I am a Berliner") is a speech by United States President John F. Kennedy given on June 26, 1963, in West Berlin. It is one of the best-known speeches of the Cold War and among the most famous anti-communist speeches.
Twenty-two months earlier, East Germany had erected the Berlin Wall to prevent mass emigration to West Berlin. The speech was aimed as much at the Soviet Union as it was at West Berliners. Another phrase in the speech was also spoken in German, "Lasst sie nach Berlin kommen" ("Let them come to Berlin"), addressed at those who claimed "we can work with the Communists", a remark at which Nikita Khrushchevscoffed only days later.
The speech is considered one of Kennedy's finest,[1][2] delivered at the height of the Cold War and the New Frontier.
Speaking to an audience of 120,000 on the steps of Rathaus Schöneberg, Kennedy said,
Kennedy used the phrase twice in his speech, including at the end, reading from his note "ish bin ein Bearleener", which he had written out using English orthography to approximate the German pronunciation – his actual pronunciation though is fairly close to correct German and much better than how he is usually quoted.
from Wikipedia
9/2/24
Photographic Amusements 1922 — Walter E. Woodbury and Frank R. Fraprie (PDF)
A hundred year old handbook for achieving novel effects in photography all achieved by a balance of mechanical manipulations and weird chemical formulations. Lots worth stealing from.
Some of my favourite sections:
Magic Photographs
Photography for Household Decoration
Photographing a Catastrophe
Photographing the Invisible
How to Make a Photograph Inside a Bottle
The Disappearing Photograph
Freak Pictures with a Black Background
Sympathetic Photographs
Photographs Without Light
Moonlight Effects
Comical Portraits
Pictures With Eyes that Open and Close
Photographs on Apples and Eggs
7/29/24
Projectionist Jana & Projectionist Ryan
Documentation from the two most recent XINEMA screenings in the garden of UNIT/PITT
7/22/24
Graphic Effects by Photography — Otto Croy (PDF)
A great manual on how to produce graphic effects using cameras and darkrooms. I'm all for photography becoming increasingly contaminated by processes and materials used in graphic design and printmaking. Just as it does when combined to serve a function like a movie poster or advertisement. But without being completely beholden to that purpose.. Signal vs. noise.
Croy writes in the opening statement:
"The photograph has long occupied an assured place in commercial art. The techniques of photo-graphics, especially, open up completely new vistas, because they achieve optical effects never known before. This book shows how you can conjure with photographs. It discovers new fields, offers surprising professional tips and, last, but not least, suggests ideas for working creatively and fruitfully with the knowledge gained. Photographs are an aid to drawing-photographic techniques enliven the imagination and are a welcome addition to commercial art."
7/16/24
I am a camera
This is a music playlist that Francesca & I put together for the launch of issue two of our magazine Le Chauffage which revolved around the now antiquated format of the photo essay. All the tracks in the playlist are about photography, too.
An excerpt from the letter from the editors written by Emile Rubino explains:
The second issue of Le Chauffage contains photographs and texts, photographs of text, photographs as text and vice versa. Loosely thinking through the format of The Photo Essay celebrated by John Szarkowski in an eponymously titled exhibition at MoMA in 1965, this issue considers some of the artistic possibilities that can be found in such an archaic and historically male-dominated form.
Many of the contributions that make up this second issue are not photo essays per se. But each one of them considers the printed page as a space in its own right. The magazine becomes an interior where words and images entertain a malleable and distinctly porous relationship. At times, it is also a space where artists and writers from different cities were invited to meet and collaborate.
6/7/24
Two prints abandoned in a Banff Centre wood shop. They were tucked between a pipe and a wall above a plastic vacuum former station. A whole stack of them. They were maybe leftovers from a workshop that was taught there. I don't know who made them; neither does the recently hired technician. They make me smile. I took them without asking because of this but also because I really didn't want them to get thrown out. I wanted to keep looking at them.
6/5/24
I worked for two years as an assistant to a photographer who had a regular client in the cannabis industry. It was the largest cannabis farm in Western Canada maybe North America? One million square feet of grow I was once told. The farm was maybe ten kilometres away from the suburb I grew-up in where I first learned about / developed a lifestyle around smoking pot everyday. On a few occasions I can recall the photographer expressing his belief to me on our drives back to the city that he thought that cannabis culture was dead. It was hard to deny that it had become a corporate thing like anything else. Outside of its image, the whole market was overinflated from the beginning. When Pot was legalized in Canada people in the liquor industry poured millions into quick developments despite not having real concrete statistical data about the real size of the market. Now that over-investment is starting to show and these cannabis companies are scaling down in different ways. I stopped working on cannabis photoshoots not because I was part of that adjustment because I got a job as a photo tech at a university. It was fun and strange nonetheless. I liked the uniform: evergreen coloured pants and long-sleeved button up shirt which you would put overtop of your clothes. To top it off shoe covers, hair and beard nets.
6/2/24
Many of the close friends who I made when I was in my late teens - early twenties shared in a creative bond. The earliest of which is Antosh Cimoszko with whom I bloomed into my interest in photography. After school we'd combine our meagre photo equipment (cameras / flashes / stands) and take portraits of each other in the spare room of my parent's house. Or we'd get into his beat-up civic and drive out to a non-suburban location to practice shooting with our 35mm cameras. If it wasn't for Antosh my interest wouldn't have been stoked into an obsession. The older I get the less embarrassed I am of these years of photo naivety. Maybe for this blog I'll dig up some of those drug store scans.
When I moved to Vancouver I made more friends like this. We'd go to night clubs or to see DJ's downtown and do drugs together. We were all doing creative things of some variety - most of them inspired by things going on commercially: product design, fashion, graphic design, music. All of them went on to develop careers in their respective interests. I'm the only one who stuck to being an 'artist'. In other words, they all enjoy stability and good pay while I hang onto a day job to keep my creativity going.
As we started to grow apart there was a sense from those friends that I didn't respect what they did because it was oriented around money. This was partly true because in art school most of the critiques leveraged against the commercial side of photography was that it was somehow more ignorant or manipulative than uses of photography by contemporary artists. Commercialism is an easy target in art school environment where I think I felt self-righteous in my pursuit. That contemporary art had something to offer the public which could not be bought... That culture and politic was outside of the market.
Ofcourse now that I write it down it sounds even more ridiculous. Yet I see the same pattern at the art school I teach at now. Those students who just want make animations, design sneakers or draw manga are always considered not serious enough. They're perceived as lacking self-referential edge of contemporary art or a political / conceptual angle. It's belittling and alienating to people who come to art school either with the misunderstanding that it is a vocational school or who just simply like making stuff.
After 6 years of art school (BFA / MFA) I still struggle with the boundaries of what is and isn't serious art. For those of us who are into photography, those lines are often drawn between things we do for money and things we do as art. Photography is probably the only viable skill you learn at art school that leads to some work. I've always kept those two things very separate because one is good (intellectual pursuit) and the other bad ($$ pursuit). It's thanks to artists like Roe Ethridge or Eileen Quinlan that I feel inclined now to unlearn those distinctions. Not just because there is a freedom to letting go of that difference but because of all those friends who I judged for being commercially ambitious while I did the hard work of being critical towards the world.
Antosh and I came together again last year to shoot this Comme des Garcons fragrance collaboration with the streetwear company he works for.
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