From Ni-na (2007)
From his diary:
When I got home last night, there was a dead pheasant in the kitchen. And by dead, I actually mean decapitated: Its guts were by the microwave, hastily wrapped in newspaper, and its feathers lay sprinkled all over the bench. Quite bewildering really. I suspect someone was crafting something with the feathers. That, or preparing a ritual sacrifice in honour of the leonid meteor shower.
Matthias Clamer's portraits have the same amazing energy and vibrancy that characterises Mark Seliger's work. To me, what differentiates them is that whereas Seliger's portraits embody this sense of intimacy, Clamer's are infused with playfulness. He flirts with caricature, but never to the point of distaste. His subjects are not only having fun, they're having fun making fun of themselves. Maybe this difference reflects the photographers' personalities; maybe it has some relation to the celebrities they capture. Either way, I love both of their approaches.
A while back, I found some illustrations that Alexandre Alexeiff had done for The Fall of the House of Usher. His grainy vision of Poe's tale exists within a nightmarish fog; Ram Rischmann's wood engravings for the 1947 French edition, on the other hand, portrays the story in sharper focus. It embodies a solemnity that anchors the story in the concrete. Whereas Alexeiff's illustrations transport us to a surreal abstraction of other worlds, Rischmann's keeps us firmly on our feet.
It's interesting to see how their interpretations of the story differ. It's also interesting to think about how powerful imagery can be - how the illustrations associated with a text can affect our own reading, and how drastically different those readings can be depending on the imagery we're presented with.
We had a picnic that evening on the hardwood floors of Cross St, Cypress Hill blaring inappropriately in the background. There was so much cheese. It was incredible.
Later, we made our way to The Teacups' album launch party. Katherine and I lay on a floral mattress at the front of the stage, where we had teapots of plum liqueur and miniature cupcakes under the fairy lights of hopetoun.
Guido Mocafico's photography has an impersonality to it; an emotional distance achieved through his straightforward, almost clinical depictions. Yet in doing this he impassionately highlights the complexity and beauty of nature and science and, perhaps most importantly, jellyfish.
From Movement (2006):
