photography

A photographer who worked on O'Connell Bridge for 50 years

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Man on Bridge is an interactive documentary about Arthur Fields, a Dublin based street photographer who captured an estimated 182,500 photos of passersby on O’Connell Bridge. Arthur was out in all weather with his camera 365 days a year for 50 years.

El Zorrero Films are producing a web-based documentary that lets people learn about Arthur and allows them to submit their own Arthur Fields photo or Arthur Fields-inspired photo into the online story of the photographer.

It has been entered into the Arthur Guinness Projects and the filmmakers are looking for votes to help them secure funding to complete the project.

3d Model of Dubrovnik Constructed from Flickr Photos

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This 3D reconstruction of Dubrovnik, Croatia was made entirely by computers from photos sourced on Flickr. It contains 4,619 images and nearly 3.5 million 3D points.

This project is referenced by Victor Burgin in his keynote presentation at Urban Encounters: The Image of Public Space a seminar at Tate Britain in October 2012. Burgin's talk is at the beginning of the podcast embedded below:

[mp3j track="http://static.tate.org.uk/1/onlineevents/podcast/mp3/2012_10_06_urban_encounters_1.mp3" title="Listen Here:" autoplay="n"]

 

Computer Dump in Ghana

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A photo of a partially buried keyboard in a computer dump in Ghana. It is taken from a slideshow on the New York Times website.

"In Agbogbloshie, a slum in Accra, the capital of Ghana, adults and children tear away at computers from abroad to get at the precious metals inside. Copper is perhaps the most desirable, then brass, then aluminum, then zinc. At the dump, the machines are dismantled and often burned to extract metals for resale. The equipment in this digital cemetery come mainly from Europe and the United States, sometimes as secondhand donations meant to reduce the "digital divide'' — the disparity in computer access between poor nations and rich.

Update: The photographer is Pieter Hugo

Photographs of Iranians Visiting the Fronts of Iran-Iraq War

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Shade of Earth

This incredible image is by Abbas Kowsa and comes from his series Shade of Earth: 2007-8 which documents  some of the "hundreds of thousands of Iranians visit the fronts of the Iran -Iraq war (1980-1988) during their New Year (Noruz) holiday...

The pilgrims, often family members of those who died, travel with buses from all over the country to visit the places where the fighting was the heaviest. Iran lost over half a million soldiers during the eight year trench war with neighbouring Iraq."

The photograph and another from the series are currently are view at the Gallery of Photography in Dublin in an exhibition of works shortlisted for the Prix Pictet award.

Paperplane

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Above are some installation images of my piece Fleet installed at the Joinery for the exhibition paperplane.

Still images from the piece are featured in the focus section of the Paper Online Visual Art Journal

Video documenting the installation:

I'm a real photographer

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I've been looking at the work of Keith Arnatt recently. He began as a conceptual artist who used photography as tool - he's famous for the piece where he wore a sign saying "I'm a real artist" and a series of images where he appears to be sinking into the ground.

Later he reinvented himself as a photographer working on various series including photos of notes his wife left for him around the house and a series of photos of objects found on the dump (one of which is pictured above).

I'm a Real Photographer: Photographs by Keith Arnatt is an excellent catalogue of his work.

You see I am here after all

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The title of this post was taken from a postcard found by the American artist Zoe Leonard. It is also the title of Leonard's exhibition at Dia Beacon which comprises approximately 4000 postcards of Niagara Falls, dating from the early 1900s to the 1950s that the artist collected in flea markets and online auctions.

En masse, they reflect decades of changing technologies during which the motif of the Falls, shot from a few standard vantage points, was revisioned: hand-colored, over-painted, cropped, or otherwise manipulated in accordance with changing notions of truth and taste.

More info here

Martin Parr on the Ordinary Object

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Here is an article by Marr Parr about photographing ordinary objects on the Guardian website . Below is an excerpt:

I want to put forward a case for taking more seriously the everyday object, we should appreciate those objects that are so familiar we usually don't notice them. Take the scarecrow, a wonderful example of outsider art, and made with a real purpose. If you were to say to their farmer creators that they were sculptures, they would look at you as if you were mad. However if you take photos of them in splendid isolation, the results are both compelling and surreal.

There are two categories of everyday objects: those that are constantly changing in terms of design, and those that are reassuringly constant. In the former category, take something as simple as the petrol pump. I photographed one in use in Salford in 1986, and now it looks like it is from another era. What at the time may have been rejected as a photo of great tedium has become a fascinating image.