Hasta La Ideas

Aaron Ruell, who is perhaps best known for his commercial work for brands including Burger King and Volkswagen, is currently showing an exhibition of his personal photography work at Colette in Paris…

Ruell’s photography has been featured in magazines internationally and he has exhibited it in the US, Milan and Buenos Aires. The show at Colette marks his first French exhibition, and includes a mixture of still life works and portraits.

“I tend to describe my photographs as ‘quiet’,” says Ruell. “I’m inspired by pieces of furniture or accessories that wind up in my still life work. Also by music and faces. My images usually start in one of these ways… While listening to music a visual will come to mind. Or, while watching people, a character will come to me and I’ll then attempt to build a world around them. Or, I’ll see a nice piece of design in furniture or in something as simple as a tea cup and that will warrant an image.

“I like to think of my personal photography as separate from my commercial work,” he continues. “But the reality is that they are tied together. Sometimes I’ll take commercials in order to build a set and then capture a photograph during downtime. Also, the money I earn from shooting commercials is what allows me to shoot my personal work. So while I like to say they are separate, I think they do intermingle in a lot of ways. The key difference between the two is that I don’t have to answer or explain myself to anyone in my photography. And that’s nice.”

The exhibition at Colette will continue until September 25. More info is at colette.fr. Ruell is repped by Biscuit Filmworks in the US for commercial work.

England’s footballers will be wearing a new home shirt for their match against Bulgaria on September 3, with graphics designed by Peter Saville

Given the team’s pathetic performance over the summer it’s perhaps not the best time to be asking long-suffering fans to shell out £49.99 for yet another new kit. In the accompanying press blurb, manufacturers Umbro say that the design “takes its inspiration from the more formal classic shirts of England’s footballing past. Umbro has developed a new longer, more open neckline for the shirt, building on the square neckline that was designed for the away shirt but allowing additional movement across the chest, keeping its shape especially when a player is running.”

Saville’s contribution is somewhat minimalist. A graphic of multicoloured crosses sits on the shoulders which is, apparently, “evocative of the basting stitches synonymous with bespoke tailoring”. They are also meant to represent the diverse nature of modern English society, which should give the Daily Mail plenty to get its teeth into.

UPDATE: We will post an in-depth interview with Saville about the shirt following Friday’s game (this is now up, here). However, here are a few extra details that may answer some of the questions raised in the comments:

To those complaining that he “did nothing”, Saville’s brief from Umbro was strictly confined. He was asked to suggest some ways in which colour could be incorporated into the design of the shirt (the basic look and shape of which had already been determined) while still keeping it predominantly white.

To those of you complaining that the design won’t be visible from the stands… that’s kind of the point. It looks all white from a distance, then the detail is revealed close-up.

Saville’s proposal was that the pattern of crosses would cover the entire shirt and not just the shoulders.

A number of different geometric forms were considered by Saville and Paul Barnes, who worked with him on the project, based on the micro dots and other symbols that some menswear designers have been incorporating into their fabrics. Among the shapes considered was a plus sign, which Barnes then suggested could be transformed into the St George’s cross.

We will be talking to Saville about his contribution to the shirt later this week, in the meantime here he is in an Umbro video about the project

pimg alt=”SeattleTownHall.jpg” src=”http://www.core77.com/blog/images/SeattleTownHall.jpg” width=”360″ height=”171″ class=”mt-image-center” style=”text-align: center; display: block; margin: 0 auto 20px;” //p

pJoin the first Designers Accord Town Hall Meeting in Seattle, Washington!br /
The meeting will take place on September 23rd at the a href=”http://maps.google.com/maps?f=qsource=s_qhl=engeocode=q=500+Aurora+Ave+N+,98109ll=47.623286,-122.343354z=16iwloc=A”School of Visual Concepts/a hosted by the AIGA Seattle chapter./p

pa href=”http://www.designersaccord.org/”The Designers Accord/a is a global coalition of designers, educators, and business leaders working together to create positive environmental and social impact. This town hall meeting is your chance to join fellow Seattle designers who care deeply about these issues, and share in the discussion of how we can make designing in sustainable ways a reality in our region./p

blockquote
6:00 to 6:30 pm: Socialize and network; light food and beverages. br
6:30 to 7:30: Update about the Designers Accord movement; speakers.br
7:30 to 8:30: Breakout discussions; each speaker will lead a roundtable that relates the presentations to local issues.br
8:30 to 9:00: Regroup and share our discussion results.

pThis event is free, but a href=”mailto:sustainability@seattle.aiga.org”RSVP/a is required by Monday, September 20th.br /
/blockquote/pa href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/events/the_designers_accord_seattle_town_hall_september_23rd_17282.asp”(more…)/a
pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/bAodtwnQA6Ey1wp8K2JWnVGG2eI/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/bAodtwnQA6Ey1wp8K2JWnVGG2eI/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/
a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/bAodtwnQA6Ey1wp8K2JWnVGG2eI/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/bAodtwnQA6Ey1wp8K2JWnVGG2eI/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/p

Photographer Arthur Drooker’s haunting infrared images of the bygone U.S.

While photographer Arthur Drooker’s ruins aren’t the castles and shrines that usually come to mind, his infrared images of prisons, mansions and other sites of U.S. decay evoke all the moody history and past lives of their tourist site counterparts. The Mill Valley, CA-based artist’s “American Ruins” exhibit (opening at the Virgina Center for Architecture on 9 September 2010) culls these haunting photos from from his award-winning 2007 book of the same name, featuring luminescent images that with each crack and chip reveal just a bit of the America’s former splendor. To learn more—including how Drooker achieves his otherworldly effects, what to expect from the show and what’s next—read on for the interview, and see more images in the gallery below.

If you’re in Richmond, be sure to check out the opening of American Ruins at the Virgina Center for Architecture on 9 September 2010 from 5:30-7:30pm, or visit before it closes 28 November 2010. You can also get a glimpse of the work in his current show at Santa Fe’s William Siegal Gallery (through 3 September 2010), and look out for Lost Worlds, his large-format book collecting images from 33 sites in 15 countries that’s due out Fall 2011.

What was the selection process in choosing photos for the exhibit? Are all of the images from the book?

All the images are from the book. There are 50 prints, representing each of the 22 sites
I photographed for the project. The exhibition is organized geographically, the same as the book—the geographic regions are the South, the Southwest, the East, California and Hawaii.

what is it about ruins that inspires you and has kept you photographing them for years?

Photographing ruins merges my passions for history and photography. I’m drawn to these sites to make a spiritual connection with those who came before us, preserve the visual poetry of what they left behind, and restore what they’ve built to our collective memory. In making these images, I confront my own mortality and become most alive.

After the success of the American Ruins book, what led you to work on Lost Worlds?

I wanted to continue photographing ruins. Going beyond the U.S. borders seemed to make the most sense, but not so far away that it would take too a long time to complete the project. Hence, Lost Worlds: Ruins of the Americas. In every way it is a more ambitious project: The research, trip planning, and the photography. By the time I complete Lost Worlds at the end of this year, I will have been to about 30 sites in 15 countries. That’s a lot of miles in a little over two years.

How does your subject matter influence your technique or vice-versa?

I photograph ruins in infrared. Infrared light is invisible to the human eye, but I use a specially adapted 35mm digital camera to record it. The ethereal effect illuminates the otherworldly atmosphere that haunts ruins, allowing a photographer to transcend mere documentation and capture the mystery and elegiac beauty of crumbling walls, weathered facades and broken arches as no other format can.