so my new exhibit is here, about three a day, moved from miami, through san francisco, and now hitting madrid, seoul, etc. these are other people's photos made into posters, sometimes vague and abstract (see wells fargo) and none labeled. they are labeled internally as ows15, ows11, etc.

what do I have to say for myself? only that i wish it was my own camera, so i could push them more robustly on the world, without this nagging feeling that i'm posterizing other people's work. also, i'm grateful to the protesters (ors) who seem inclined to park themselves next to these ornate, stone-masoned old banks, giving me the opportunity to exploit the contrast of staid old architecture and young rage. i see the exhibit as a study in that, that and the cultural differences involved in protests at each locale. it's fun when you get a wall-street guy trying to cross the road; it reminds me that, at about ten, i wanted to be a stockbroker, but, at twenty, when i had the opportunity, i passed it up, choosing to be a vagrant instead.

the color, the moment, the contrast, that's what i want. and who is this black and white clown who keeps reappearing? i kind of like him too, though i don't really understand it.

Mono-ha

Loos, T. (2011, June 22). Squeezing essence from a stone. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/arts/design/lee-ufan-squeezes-essence-from-a-stone.html?pagewanted=all. Accessed 8-11.

When I encountered this guy, Lee Ufan, I knew right away that he was onto something. He's obviously good at choosing a stone, placing it next to a steel plate, and going on international tour as the famous founder of the "Mono-ha" movement.

I kind of like that.

fotopic disaster

Plans and work have been set back a bit by the simple, secretive folding of my favorite free photo-hosting service, which was called fotopic. The problems it caused me were really more spiritual than practical; since I virtually never throw anything out, almost all of my photos, both doctored and undoctored, are on my hard-drive at work or on one of these blogs somewhere. But I was using fotopic to make galleries of my favorite subjects, and now these are vanished; it was my prized collection of things that were important to me, all in gallery-type presentation.

What happened to it? Nobody really knows. It was an important photo-holding service, used by big collectors, UK-based, but it was taken over by somebody who didn't care, and let it sit there for a while, and then apparently didn't even notice when unpaid bills probably forced all serving space to become unavailable...what's up with that? they didn't even tell us or let us remove the photos. a lot of unhappy photographers out there. As for me, it's just one more round of reorganization, more attempts to back up anything special; and, once again, the hope that I can get on with a more productive future. My disorganization has led to such hope-vacuums, where I should be in this kind of situation.

I do have plans for my graphic arts ambitions; my study of famous characters, such as AW, who rode graphic arts out of oblivion, is merely stalled, not wasted. Received a Hawkeye shirt the other day that inspired me to the bone: time to do some photoshopping, and see what I can come up with in that regard. In short, I have plans to make my graphics something that people see, as we wear it, and fade into the world of washing machines, rather than into the virtual space of web archive. More about that later...