The Boat Lullabies: March 2007 Archives

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March 31, 2007

Disposal

Posted by nick at 12:38 AM | Comments (1)

March 30, 2007

And Blue

Posted by nick at 12:10 AM | Comments (0)

March 29, 2007

When The World Was Young (Kodak #1)

Posted by nick at 01:18 AM | Comments (0)

March 28, 2007

Hans Bellmer's Dream

Posted by nick at 12:48 AM | Comments (1)

March 27, 2007

Stragglers

Here are a few more photos I just added to Song. I meant to add them with the others over the weekend but forgot.

Posted by nick at 01:01 AM | Comments (0)

March 26, 2007

Set-up

I love all the effort that went into this photo- the mirror angled away from the wall, the propped-up hat, the crude drawn/cut-out hand on the wall- but most all I love the dead serious expression on the woman's face. I also like the fact that though we do get some of the mirror effect, it's the girl on the left who is seeing the full splits rather than the photographer. It's not really a trick photograph but rather a photograph of a trick.

Posted by nick at 12:18 AM | Comments (1)

March 25, 2007

Rescue

Posted by nick at 01:31 AM | Comments (0)

March 24, 2007

Dance Party!

As promised, Here are the new additions to Dance.

Posted by nick at 01:40 AM | Comments (0)

March 23, 2007

Today in Song

I just added some new photos to Song. Here they are.

I also added some photos to Dance- I'll post those here tomorrow.

Posted by nick at 02:34 AM | Comments (1)

March 22, 2007

Mopping Up

Before I packed my slides away for another few years I thought I'd add a few extra photos to Orphans. Here are the new ones.

This photo gains a little poignancy if you know it was taken in 1966 from a navy ship headed to Vietnam.

I also added these two to Lighting Out For The Territory. I really should have put them next to one another given how remarkably similar in compostion they are but I split them up- maybe I'll go back and change it later.

Tomorrow I'll have some additions (both slides and prints) to Song and Dance (though probably more to dance than song).

Posted by nick at 12:20 AM | Comments (0)

March 21, 2007

Orphans is finished!

Orphans, the final section of Slideshow is up over at Square America. Here are a few of the 80 or so in the show.

I'm also guest posting today over at Swapatorium. I posted about 40 slides from a very odd, somewhat spooky series that was produced by the Loyal Fraternity of the Moose back in 1960s so go check it out! Here are two to whet your appetite.

Posted by nick at 01:13 AM | Comments (4)

March 20, 2007

Orphans

Sometime tomorrow I'll be adding another section to Slideshow called orphans- a selection of slides that don't really fit into any of my other shows. Here's a few.

I also added 10 more photos to What We Remember (1957) so take a look if you like.

Posted by nick at 02:57 AM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2007

Slideshow is here!

Everybody should head on over to Square America and check out my new show- Slideshow. It's actually three shows- the first is Lighting Out For The Territory which I've already told you about. Next is The Faces a group of slides (some of which I originally posted over at Swapatorium) of a group of young women undergoing some kind of medical or psychological testing. Finally, there's What We Remember (1957), a blurry group of photos that are all that remain of one family's travels during that year that'll leave you asking yourself- who will remember me when I'm gone?

Posted by nick at 03:18 AM | Comments (2)

March 18, 2007

Sunday Morning 1948

Posted by nick at 12:47 AM | Comments (0)

March 17, 2007

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Posted by nick at 02:11 AM | Comments (0)

Astrodome 1968

Posted by nick at 02:09 AM | Comments (1)

March 16, 2007

The Road Goes On

I just added about 30 more photos to Lighting Out For The Territory, my show of road trip photos by Martin C. Johnson. It's now over 100 photos all on one page so it's just like a real road trip- it takes so long to load you feel like you'll never get started and it lasts much, much longer than you really want it to but a couple of years from now you'll look back just remembering the good parts and wonder when it was exactly that you turned into an such old man and lost the will to do anything the required the least bit of effort. Or maybe that's just me.

Anyway, here are some of the photos I added.

Posted by nick at 01:51 AM | Comments (3)

March 15, 2007

A Visit to the Word Factory

More slides from my Martin Johnson collection.

Posted by nick at 01:03 AM | Comments (2)

March 14, 2007

Lighting Out For The Territory

I just finished the first section of Slide Show (my next show over at Square America). It's not linked up over there yet but you can see it here. It's called Lighting Out for the Territory: The Road Trip Photos of Martin Johnson. From the late 1950's through the early 1970s Martin C. Johnson took a number of road trips criss-crossing the country from his home in Suburban Chicago to both coasts and all points in between. For each trip he put together a slide show to document his travels. Judging from these shows he (and his wife who must be responsible for at least some of the photographs) was far more interested in the road itself than wherever his final destination might have been. For every photograph of Mount Rushmore or The Grand Canyon there were three or four shots of the empty (or not so empty) road taken through the windshield of the car. For every shot of friends and relatives visited there were two of the motels he stayed in on the way. In doing so Johnson has left behind an invaluable record of the golden age of auto travel- an era when the new interstate highway system had opened up the country but before the development it brought had homogenized it.

Here are just a few of the 75+ photos in the show.

For more info and photos by Martin Johnson click here. I think the 70 or so carousels of his slides that I was able to buy as a lot was the single best purchase I've made in ten years of collecting.

Posted by nick at 12:26 AM | Comments (1)

March 13, 2007

Interior

Posted by nick at 02:10 AM | Comments (1)

March 12, 2007

1976

Posted by nick at 01:33 AM | Comments (0)

March 11, 2007

Slides

For the next week or so I'll be going through a bunch of my slides- some of which I haven't looked at in years- so I'll be posting some of my finds here. Hopefully, I'll have a new show- Slideshow (really 3 smallish shows that I'll group together) up over at Square America sometime this week.

Posted by nick at 11:27 PM | Comments (3)

March 10, 2007

The King

Posted by nick at 02:27 PM | Comments (0)

March 09, 2007

Portraits

In honor of portrait week over at Alec Soth's great blog I've added a new page to my Portrait Gallery over at Square America. Soth is one of my favorite photographers and his blog is a must read for anyone interested in contemporary photography (or contemporary art for that matter). This week Soth has been posting on portraits- this post is particularly interesting, bringing up issues such as the power relationship between the photographer and the subject. This issue really hits home for me as a snapshot collector- Unlike in art photography where, as Soth notes, "more often than not the photographer holds all of the cards," in snapshots the power relationship is rarely so cut and dried. In snapshots the subject often has as much say (or more) in how they're posed, where and when they're photographed, as well as what photographs are kept or thrown away as the photographer does.

Is this photo a self-portrait or a candid picture taken by a lover?

Of course in the photobooth, (the source of some of the best portrait photography you'll ever see in my opinion) the photographer isn't present at all.

The inability to pin down exactly where the aesthetic charge is coming from (or indeed if there is any real "aesthetic" at work at all) is both disorienting and liberating.

While the realtionship between snapshots and the street photography of the 60's is pretty well established I think that amateur photography's influence is just as apparent in the portraiture of the last 30 years or so. More and more I feel that this is the stuff I really want to collect rather than double exposures or "mistake" shots (for that stuff check out my show What the Camera Saw).

These next few photos are from a bunch of prison polaroids I've gotten recently.

And finally, here are a few more of the new photos I added- in these you have subjects who either didn't want to be photographed or in the case of the sleeper no knowledge of being photographed.