Hasta La Ideas

Some 43 years ago this month, an art-loving (and still anonymous) Grumman engineer smuggled a ceramic wafer imprinted with sketches by artists such as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Rauschenberg onto the Apollo 12 lunar landing mission. Today Trevor Paglen adds to that fledging extraterrestrial museum with “The Last Pictures,” a public project presented by Creative Time. The artist worked with materials scientists at MIT to develop his visual time capsule: a silicon disc encased in gold and micro-etched with 100 photographs selected to represent modern human history. The disc has been affixed to the exterior of the communications satellite EchoStar XVI, which launches into orbit today from Kazakhstan. Watch it live here at 1:15 p.m. EST.

Among the images that made it onto the disc is a shot of “Glimpses of the U.S.A.,” the installation designed by Charles and Ray Eames (at the request of George Nelson) for the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow. Team Eames compiled some 2,200 still and moving images of American life that flickered across seven massive screens under one of Bucky Fuller‘s geodesic domes. Does your head hurt yet? Mission accomplished! Paglen set out to create “a meta-gesture about the failure of meta-gestures, a collection of images that spoke to the Janus-faced nature of modernity, a story that was not about who the people were who built the dead satellites in perpetual orbit so much as a story about what they did to themselves,” he told Creative Time curator Nato Thompson in an interview. While aliens may be stumped by photos of gear used to make atomic bombs or of refugee children frolicking in the sea, you can feel superior by purchasing The Last Pictures (University of California Press). Notes Paglen, “The book contains explanatory captions and texts about the images that tell the viewer what they’re looking at; the disc in orbit does not.”
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Misha Gordin est un photographe vivant aux USA qui, malgré les avancées technologiques, continue de travailler avec un appareil photo argentique. Explorant la place et la nature de l’Homme à travers des clichés visuellement impressionnants, découvrez ses superbes créations sans manipulation numérique dans la suite.

Gabriele Croppi est un photographe italien qui vit et travaille à Milan tout en enseignant à l’Instituto Italiano di Fotografia. Avec sa série « Metaphysics of the Urban Landscapes », il nous délivre de superbes images en noir & blanc de lieux mondialement connus avec des jeux de luminosité et de contraste parfaitement maîtrisés.

Luc Busquin est à la fois photographe et pilote. Ce dernier aime particulièrement combiner ses 2 passions en nous proposant de superbes clichés en noir et blanc, pris depuis le ciel. Vivant à Phoenix dans l’Arizona, ce dernier nous dévoile des images de nuages et d’autres vues aériennes. Plus dans la suite.

Gregory Crewdson at work (standing on ladder) on the set of “Untitled (Ophelia).” A scene from Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, playing through November 13 at Film Forum.

Like the love child of Edward Hopper and Diane Arbus (raised, perhaps, amidst saturated Egglestonian hues, by a spooky yet decisive family of cinematographers), Gregory Crewdson is synonymous with images that are at once magnetic and repelling, haunting and familiar, thrilling and disturbing. His large-scale photographs pack a gorgeous punch. It’s only after the viewer stops reeling that he or she thinks to ask: How he’d do that? The answer, which does not involve Photoshop, is revealed in Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, a new documentary by Ben Shapiro that is now playing at New York’s Film Forum.

“I was immediately struck by the beauty and power of his images, and also by the care, vision, and complexity of the productions,” says Shapiro of his first encounter with Crewdson’s work, in 2000. A few months later, the New York-based director was on the set of a Crewdson shoot in Lee, Massachusetts filming the meticulous preparations that went into a photograph of a man, fresh from the office, who has jettisoned his suit to scale the flower-covered beanstalk that bursts through his lawn. Shapiro observed members of Crewdson’s team spend a day sifting through boxes of fresh flowers–and then stapling selected blooms to the telephone pole-cum-beanstalk. “It was an introduction to the kind of detail that contributes so much to the richness of his work.” Following Saturday’s NYC debut of Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters in New York, Shapiro answered our questions about the documentary (filmed over ten years), its subject, and the challenges of making a film about the making of movie-like images.

What compelled you to make a film about Gregory Crewdson?
It was a combination of things–I admired and appreciated his pictures, certainly, but I was also struck by the scale and elaborateness of his productions–crews of up to 60, dozens or even hundreds of lights, 90 foot-long custom-built sets–all marshaled by a man creating real-world versions of imagined moments. Key to this project was that Gregory was very open and encouraging, and offered complete access of a kind that’s rare. He told me, and his crew, that I could shoot anywhere, any time, and only asked me to back off when there was nudity on-set. Or if I got in their shot, which did happen a couple of times.

What surprised you the most about Crewdson as a person?
In a way what was surprising about Crewdson was that he wasn’t surprising. That is to say, he’s not what you might expect from the photographs which tend to be dark and have a sense of sadness and mystery about them; Gregory’s a very friendly and sociable guy, who likes to laugh. But at the same time he is extremely focused on his work, very dedicated to getting everything as close to the way he imagines it as he possibly can.
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