Gland Prix

Hmmm…

Lartigue → Zissou → Wes Anderson → Zissou!

Zissou, Rouzat, 1911 (1911-25) by Jacques-Henri Lartigue

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Multi TV Screens by Fred Herzog

It’s incredibly treacly and nostalgic to say so, but I miss seeing black and white sets. Tube sets, at all, even. My writing detracts from this image - I apologize.

"We could not have known and have only just learned–perhaps mostly from children from two to five–that a new kind of relationship between people in groups is brought into being by SX-70 when the members of a group are photographing and being photographed and sharing the photographs: it turns out that buried within all of us–God knows beneath how many pregenital and Freudian and Calvinistic strata–there is latent interest in each other; there is tenderness, curiosity, excitement, affection, companionability and humor; it turns out that in this cold world where man grows distant from man, and even lovers can reach each other only briefly, that we have a yen for and a primordial competence for a quiet good-humored delight in each other: we have a prehistoric tribal competence for a non-physical, non-emotional, non-sexual satisfaction in being partners in the lonely exploration of a once empty planet."

—

Polaroid’s SX-70: The Art and Science of the Nearly Impossible

Edwin Land in The SX-70 Experience

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Got some rolls of film back today. Put some up on the flickr page. Please check them out and say something pleasant. Or say something nasty without using your keyboard to share it. Share, share. Lot’s of sharing these days.

Oh yeah, the lens. Just for giggles. It’s the Contax 50mm/1.7. That’s a Contax/Yashica mount piece of glass. Love it. It fits on one crummy camera that I own. And every time I look at pictures taken with it I begin to work the desperate, spreadsheet shuffle in my enfeebled mind. I imagine getting a bunch of old Contax gear and see T*’s floating in my head. Instead, I just keep rocking my reliable Nikons.

That I love.

Flaying, Photography

We are now flaying our friends and submitting to be flayed ourselves, every few years or months or days, by the aid of the trenchant sunbeam which performed the process for Marsyas. All the world has to submit to it,– kings and queens with the rest. The monuments of Art and the face of Nature herself are treated in the same way. We lift an impalpable scale from the surface of the Pyramids. We slip off from the dome of St. Peter’s that other imponderable dome which fitted it so closely that it betrays every scratch on the original. We skim off a thin, dry cuticle from the rapids of Niagara, and lay it on our unmoistened paper without breaking a bubble or losing a speck of foam. We steal a landscape from its lawful owners, and defy the charge of dishonesty. We skin the flints by the wayside, and nobody accuses us of meanness.

• Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861