Hasta La Ideas

Large-format photography of contemporary Americana in Alec Soth’s retrospective

Likening his process to “web surfing in the real world,” photographer Alec Soth spent the past 15 years traversing the U.S. with an 8×10 field camera, quietly composing narratives of subjects he finds on his travels. While projects have taken the Twin Cities native down the Mississippi, to Bogota and back across the vast Midwest, Soth’s career retrospective “From Here To There: Alec Soth’s America” falls closer to home at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center.

The photographer’s vision of the U.S. is a lonely portrait of the American road. Using a free-associative method, Soth links the runaways and vagabonds he often depicts by allowing one person’s story to lead to the next, in a style similar to Robert Frank and William Eggleston.

Stylistically, Soth’s use of the large-format camera captures exquisite details, documenting each of his subjects down to tattoos and paint-splattered clothes. The cumbersome camera takes time to set up, but arguably its this time he spends with each person that makes for the disarming intimacy of each image. While the feeling of displacement runs throughout the survey of his work, it’s clear he has given each of his subjects a home among each other.

“From Here To There: Alec Soth’s America” includes new works as well as previous projects and is up through through 16 January 2011.

Also on Cool Hunting: Fashion Magazine by Alec Soth

Maybe it’s our thawing out now that summer’s here or we’re just mellowing with age (though that would mean uncomfortably rapidly), but it was a nice thing, starting off yesterday on a positive note. So why not do it again? We turn to our pal and brilliant event designer David Stark, whose new book, aptly titled David Stark Design just came out. To help celebrate its launch, he recently talked the Broadway and 62nd Street West Elm into letting him take over a portion of their store to build a pop-up shop/installation (might have helped that he handled the store’s launch back in March). The pop-up looked a bit like a traditional flower shop, until you took a closer look, seeing that almost every item in the store was made out of paper. “Everything from the flowers and plants, to the gardening tools were created out of paper and made by us. Even the walls and awning of the store were paper.” If you weren’t fortunate enough to catch it, Stark has put up loads of photos on his blog, as well as this video, showing just a bit of the insane amount of work this took to pull off:

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Following up on our story from a couple of weeks back about the Architectural Association School launching a very impressive retrospective of Rem Koolhaas‘ and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture‘s collection of books, the Guardian‘s Justin McGuirk hit the exhibition up and filed this great report on what there is to see. When we originally linked up the show, we assumed it would just be, well, interesting and pleasant; a nice look at what the starchitect and those at his firm find interesting and wanted to collect and synthesize into bounded form. Instead, and to quickly paraphrase, McGuirk sees the whole exhibition, all 400 volumes of it, as something of look inside Koolhaas’ brain. It’s a gigantic, somewhat manic collection of bits and pieces, showing flashes of big egos, research-above-all, wastefulness, and a weird revery and disrespect for the book format. It’s an interesting read and if you happen to be in London while the show is on, should provide you with all the encouragement you need to hop over to go check it out. Here’s our favorite part:

As the years go by, the books get stranger. There’s the Wired Dictionary, an inventory of all the words published in Wired magazine, one of the by-products of OMA’s guest editorship in 2001. There’s a book called PradaVomit, a mystifying booklet that is one of the many products of Koolhaas’s tenure as Prada’s court architect and consultant. “Even vomit has some content,” says one collaborator in a transcript pinned to the wall; and Koolhaas is probably the only architect to have designed the spring/summer “look book” for a fashion label. Precisely through these book-shaped investigations Koolhaas has blurred the edges of architecture, taking it into fashion, consultancy, journalism and cultural criticism.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The second half of the 20th Century saw design attempting to unite the tension between the function and wonder of daily objects. A new exhibit, “Space Age Lights,” which opened today at La Triennale di Milano Design Museum, shows how lamps and lighting in particular have helped solve this conundrum.

With a collection of often anonymous and never-before-seen lamps, borrowed from individuals who gathered this eye-catching series of objects both in Europe and the U.S., the show offers a rare opportunity to study even the fringes of the era. While technically the Space Age goes from the late ’60s to the early ’70s, its influence extends to various related styles that have developed over the entire century.

Curator Gianluca Sgalippa created an exhibit based on meticulous research comparing each piece with paintings, sculptures, movies and graphics that date back to Futurism, Constructivism and Machinism, including science fiction and fashion icons such as André Courrèges and Pierre Cardin.

The display (conceived by Salvo Bonura) makes the upshot of his exploration clear, as does the show’s subtitle, “Between Pop and the Avant-Garde”—these objects always balance edginess with mass appeal.

The accompanying rich catalogue, in Italian and English, compares these masterpieces from the ’60s to the ’70s with the work of many great (though obscure) authors. “Space Age Lights” runs through 5 September 2010. See more images in the gallery below.

by Alexandra Polier

Known for beautifully raw images of the modern world, Bas Princen’s exhibit “Refuge, Five Cities” currently on display at the Storefront for Art and Architecture shows a series of rare architectural finds in the Middle East. A trained architect, Princen uses photography not only to capture a sense of space but also as a way of subtly discussing current problems occurring within his field.

In “Refuge,” Princen stresses the growing divide in the Middle East between those living the dream and those building it. With little or no people pictured, the images remind us of sites whose initial purpose are long forgotten and have been completely abandoned by man.

Photographed during his travels throughout Istanbul, Beirut, Amman, Cairo and Dubai, the obscure buildings also represent the influx of refugees hired on for their cheap labor, but who in turn have created an infrastructure nightmare.

“I didn’t want to show these people as poor,” Princen said at the opening in lower Manhattan. “They are all part of a master plan, a plan labored by the poor and paid for by the rich.”

The stunning photograph “Mokkatam Ridge (Garbage Recycling City)” (pictured at right, click for expanded image) depicts the city of 80,000 Coptic Christians who make their living recycling Cairo’s waste. This unbelievable image of houses stacked on top of one another, covered in trash—with the occasional clothesline—challenges perceptions of the alluringly burgeoning Middle East.

Priscen came to this project through the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, an international event of exhibitions, conferences, lectures and other activities devoted to themes in the field of architecture and urbanism. The organization is releasing an accompanying exhibition book, “Refuge. Five Cities Portfolio,” that sells from Sun Architecture for €15.

The exhibition runs through 26 June 2010.