Kirkwood's animal farm

I enjoy photographers who can find images in their immediate surroundings rather than in exotic locales or elaborate studio sets. When you live on a farm as Kate Kirkwood does, that might mean photographing the backs of various livestock. Who would guess that such a narrowly focused project could provide the variety that she's found? Below are a few images. You can see more in Gallery II of her website.

Fortes #6

Maybe the flowing white beard is responsible

I'm still trying to figure out how one of my photos wound up here. I remember a sidewalk at night with a crowd of people. There was a man with a long flowing white beard. He handed me a goblet of strange potion. I took a sip, the walls started spinning, and that's the last thing I remember before waking up in MoCP. Life is like that sometimes.

"...the walls started spinning..."

Take that, Steve Reich

I've been having fun lately with Andre Michelle's Tonematrix. The site offers a blank 16 x 16 grid representing a musical score on which the x axis is time and the y axis shows ascending notes in three five-note octaves. By filling in squares one can create simple repeating songs that are quite mesmerizing. The rest of this post will make much more sense if you take a moment now to visit the site. Click on a few squares and watch what happens (making sure to have your computer sound ON).

I've found that it's virtually impossible to create an ugly song. You can enter a whole slew of notes completely at random and wind up with a nice mix of chords, interplay, and syncopation. I've entered designs, blocks, letters, figures from Conway's Life. Each one has a unique song that's surprisingly euphonious (and, perhaps unsurprisingly, monotonous).

Curious about the photographic implications, I began playing around with b/w square photographs as the root of my designs. The first was Nancy Rexroth's A Woman's Bed, Logan, Ohio, 1970:


I converted the image into a 16 x 16 pixel array...


Saved it as a two color gif...


Then copied the pattern into Tonematrix...


Here's what it sounds like:



Next up was Arbus' Young Brooklyn Family Going for a Sunday Outing, 1966:



Harry Callahan's Eleanor, 1949:




Irving Penn's Portrait of Truman Capote, 1965:



As you can hear, each image generates its own song which isn't quite the same as any other. I think they're a bit like audio fingerprints or whale songs uniquely keyed to the individual.

Beyond that fact I'm not sure what significance they may have. I thought about creating a quiz in which I'd have people guess an image after hearing its song but quickly realized it would be impossible to solve. For color photographs I can imagine other possibilities like a 3D graph with color representing multiple instruments across the z axis.

I think perhaps these audio clips are best appreciated as bizarre little experiments just weird enough to be of general interest.

Bryan and Nicole's new old house

My friends Bryan and Nicole are in the process of buying their first home in Portland's Hawthorne neighborhood. It's a fixer, so they've been spending the past few weeks gutting and remodeling before they move in. Bryan has been documenting the process with Holga and flash:










I love the low-brow aesthetic. Anyone who does a home improvement project makes photographs along the way. The Before and After photographs are a remodeling tradition which Bryan has adopted in his own way, driven as much by documentary interest as by the need to make art photography. One could hardly pick a more personal subject to document than one's home. For Bryan and Nicole, these images are charged with importance. They mean something.

Regardless of subject matter the photographs are wonderfully mysterious, with great color and form. The vignetting gives them the appearance of planets in space or objects in a microscope, but instead of some exotic locale they're right there buried in the walls. Within a month they'll be reburied but not before the camera sweeps in.