Hasta La Ideas

Like a worn Coke can, silver shows through the red.
Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?…

Beech, glass bead, and mirror.
610 x 200 x 40 mm.
Handmade in Milan

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The world’s largest film camera, designed by photographer Dennis Manarchy, is being displayed alongside large-scale portraits as part of a project documenting the diverse cultural heritage of the USA. At 35 ft long, the camera is capable of producing 6 ft long negatives, and 24 ft high portraits in sharp, super high-res quality. This national artistic documentary project, Butterflies & Buffalo, plans to take a 20,000 mile journey in order to record the vanishing cultures of America.

Despite being traditional in design and function, as the largest film camera in the world, the device is capable of producing images with over 1000 times more detail than the most advanced digital cameras around today. It will travel on a large trailer across the USA in order to capture the portraits of individuals from a variety of cultural backgrounds, including Native Americans, Amish, Cajun, Appalachians, Gullah-Geechee, and Blues artists, amongst others.

“We have the ability to make a print that is two stories tall, with detail that no one’s ever seen before,” says Manarchy. “The crystal and the clarity of these things in these super large forms takes these people and gives them a certain level of dignity, but also puts it on an epic scale. You look into their eyes and you can feel something, and people look special. It’s a story that no one’s heard before.”

Growing up in New York, Manarchy trained as an apprentice with photography legend Irving Penn, and has since worked as professional photographer for the last 30 years, with projects ranging from commercial ad campaigns to private exhibitions.

After serving in the Vietnam War and finding the return to civilian life an anxious experience, a chance meeting in a North Carolina bookstore led him to take up an offer from a Lumbee Indian chief to live with the tribe for 6 months in order to help him readjust and refocus on his photography. Added to his continued love of portraiture, the deeply rooted appreciation for the rural cultures of the United States he gained during this time, have been greatly influential with regards to his work and the Butterflies & Buffalo project.

The project was also inspired, in part, by the documentary journey of photographer and ethnologist Edward Curtis, and the large scale photo-realist paintings of artist Chuck Close – Dennis wanted to both capture the vanishing cultures of America, and pay the greatest, and largest, tribute he could to photography and film cameras.

“There is a beauty and honesty to film that cannot be replicated.” says Dennis. “It’s the purest form of the art. It’s delicate, sensitive, raw… and the process requires absolute precision. But once that image appears and you witness the results of all of the effort, it’s then when you remember why you shoot with film.”

The ISO is 3 for the camera and lens starts at F11 and goes up to F32 to get enough depth of focus and enough light to produce the images, and the darkroom is 80 ft by 50 ft, to allow room for trays big enough to develop the negatives. Each requires a 5 gallon bucket of developer fluid, with the trays being spring mounted allowing for a delicate movement that shifts the developer across the tray. These negatives are then scanned at high resolution, and printed on high quality canvass, 24 ft by 16 ft, by a specialist who can accommodate the large size.

The whole photographic process has to be exaggerated on a grand scale, and up-close the resulting images capture all the minute, intimate details of the human face. Hair follicles, pores, veins, and wrinkles become vividly and beautifully magnified, and untouched by photoshop, these extremely sharp, high-contrast, black and white portraits tell stories of the diverse heritage of a multitude of cultures, many of which are evolving, and some of which are being lost.

Alongside the portraits, which are currently on show in downtown Chicago, at 2 North Riverside Plaza, the exhibition presents the camera along with video documentary footage, which in time will grow should the project receive the funding it requires to travel to planned locations. It will be in Chicago until 31 October, and will then make its way to Monroe, Wisconsin, where most of it was constructed. “By documenting the unique faces of America’s rich culture in larger-than-life clarity we are recording the legacies of our country,” says Manarchy. “This is only the beginning of our cultural journey and I’m thrilled my hometown gets to experience the beginning of this documentary project.”

Although there are no firm plans to bring the camera overseas yet, if funds allowed, project director Chad Teply has high hopes. “If we had our way this camera would continue a journey around the world to document cultures from every part of the globe.”

butterfliesandbuffalo.com

Can you guess what this is?

Okay, classic American car lovers, time for a little quiz. We’ve purposely blurred the photos below, now tell us what you see:

Easy one, right? ’69 Mustang Fastback?

Clearly a Dodge Challenger, with something stuck in the center of the grill?

You’d recognize those Dodge Charger taillights anywhere, no?

That’s obviously a Firebird, with some kind of special front end?

The answers are nope, nope, nope and nope:

(more…)

Today’s guest post is by Amanda Scudder, Organizing Consultant with the company Abundance Organizing. Please give her a nice welcome.

Have you heard the song “The 3 Rs,” the incredibly catchy Jack Johnson tune:

Three it’s a magic number. Yes it is, it’s a magic number …
We’ve got to learn to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle …

This seemingly straightforward ditty holds a profound truth: three little words — reduce, reuse, recycle — are magic. There are endless ways you can apply them to your life — fun, creative ways that can cut clutter while benefitting your health, your budget, and your planet.

Today, I want to apply them to an often-unrecognized source of clutter: cleaning products. An unofficial survey of my Facebook friends revealed that the average American home has somewhere between a bajillion and a gazillion cleaning products stashed in cupboards, under the sink, and in other prime storage areas. Not only do these products create physical clutter, they also create chemical clutter, which can pose significant risks to your health.

The EPA reports that the air inside our homes can be five to ten times more toxic than the air outdoors, containing as many as 150 different pollutants, many of which come from petrochemical cleaners.

Let’s turn to the three Rs to tackle this problem.

Reduce – There are some easy ways to reduce the number of cleaning products you have to store and, more importantly, reduce the number of toxic chemicals in your home.

• Switch to an environmentally friendly multi-purpose cleaner. There are many on the market, some greener than others, so read the label and beware of green-washing (clever marketing phrases used to make a product appear more eco-friendly than they really are). For Consumer Report’s recommendations, visit GreenerChoices.org’s article “Can one cleaner do it all?”
• Another great resource is GoodGuide, an online tool to help you find safe, healthy, green and ethical products or to find out how your favorite brands rank.
• Make your own multi-purpose cleaners using three basic household ingredients: baking soda, vinegar, and lemon juice

Unfamiliar with how to use these three ingredients to clean?

Use baking soda to:

• Deodorize pretty much anything from cat boxes to carpets
• Clean your shower
• Scour your sinks
• Remove grease stains
• Polish silver or your teeth

Use vinegar to:

• Wash windows and floors
• Remove product buildup from your hair
• Clean the microwave
• Clean the coffee pot
• Trap fruit flies

Use lemon juice to:

• Sanitize cutting boards
• Boost the effectiveness of dish soap
• Deodorize drains
• Remove stains
• Clean toilet bowls

Reuse – Because you are mixing your own cleaning combinations, you can reuse spray bottles and buckets, cutting down on the amount of plastic heading to landfills. Mild solutions of water and vinegar or lemon juice left over after cleaning can be used to water acid-loving plants like azaleas and rhododendrons. Stronger solutions can be poured on weeds you would like to eliminate.

Recycle – Turn old sheets, single socks, or stained towels and t-shirts into rags and use them instead of paper towels for cleaning. You can even tuck a dry or damp rag around one of those long handled floor dusters instead of using expensive disposable pads. Wash them and reuse them again the next time. Repurpose a plastic bag holder as a rag dispenser — pull them out through the opening in the bottom and, after they are washed, put them in the top.

So your challenge for today: find one cleaning recipe to try and see if you can eliminate at least two ready-made cleaning products from your cabinets. Be sure to dispose of any toxic products safely (check your local government’s website for where to dispose of hazardous materials in your community).

Let Unclutterer help you get your home or office organized. Subscribe to our helpful product shipments from Quarterly today.

On these shores, the fall/winter issue of Garage comes in two varieties: one features urban cowgirl Andriana Lima photographed by Inez & Vinoodh (and styled to the gold-and-denim hilt by Carolyne Cerf de Dudzeele), while another features that same image as interpreted by John Baldessari, the subject of a solo exhibition that opened last week at Garage editor-in-chief Dasha Zhukova‘s Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow. Baldessari’s work also makes the cover of the Russian edition of Garage, for which the artist collaborated with Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte. The cover image (pictured) is reproduced from a collage featuring a trippy blue, black, and pink tie-dye pattern developed for Rodarte’s fall 2013 collection. “We were really honored to collaborate with John Baldessari, as he is our favorite artist and we admire his work greatly,” said the Mulleavy sisters, who have previously collaborated with the likes of Catherine Opie, Alec Soth, Stephen Shore, and Frank Gehry.

Meanwhile, back in the American edition, Baldessari chats with Zhukova in an extended Q&A that weaves among images of his work. The artist reveals that one of his goals “is to be to known for something besides [putting dots over people’s faces]. It’s going to be hard.” And did you know he loves magazines? “I’m a junkie,” he tells Zhukova of his predilection for periodicals. Art magazines? Fashion magazines? “Sure,” he answers. As for his relationship to the fashion world, Baldessari takes a more personal approach. “When I get up in the morning, I have a mirror. I think about whether this color might look good with that color. I’m not obsessed with it, but that’s certainly about fashion,” he says. “On the other hand, a former studio manager said that she doesn’t even look in the mirror in the morning.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.