Archive for the ‘abstraction’ Category
Three Acts
The image at left, from Roman Polanski’s film Knife in the Water, is perfectly poised between geometry and iconography. The Jesus figure is a hitchhiker picked up by a married couple on their way to a sailing excursion on their boat. Polanski’s early film is as taut and carefully composed as this shot. The camera works [...]
In: abstraction, film · Tagged with: Knife in the Water, postaweek2011, religious imagery, Roman Polanski
Who’s There?
The incoming students at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts are being asked to visit and write about the “Haunted” exhibition at the Guggenheim before it closes next week. Although I’ve already written about the Casebere photograph in that show, I visited the show again yesterday in order to follow my students’ exercise. They are [...]
In: abstraction, contemporary, music, photography · Tagged with: Annette Messager, Guggenheim Museum, Robert Rauschenberg, spirals
Litter Art
I was struck by these images on the New York Times website today. They were posted in honor of Earth Day by photographer Bryan Graf, who collected plastic bags that littered his neighborhood and made these airy sunprints of them. The refuse is lovely now, like mysterious jellyfish floating in a tea-stained sea. Set as [...]
In: abstraction, contemporary, environmental art, photography · Tagged with: Bryan Graf, Earth Day
Rock of Ages
I’ve made this photograph as large as possible on purpose: to approximate its impact. And also, perhaps, to play again with scale, which the photographer Edward Burtynsky manipulates here too. This is one of his “manufactured landscapes,” to quote the title of Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary about his work. Burtynsky is best known for documenting the [...]
In: abstraction, contemporary, environmental art, landscape, photography · Tagged with: Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal
Light + Paper
I’ve been wanting to post an abstract photograph for awhile, but haven’t found one that inspired me. This one, by Laslo Moholy-Nagy, is actually a photogram (1926). Moholy-Nagy placed his hand and the paintbrush on light-sensitive paper and exposed it directly in the sun, without a camera or negative. This image is unique in several [...]
In: abstraction, photography, surrealism · Tagged with: Laslo Moholy-Nagy