Link Archives - s2z Photography Blog

Issuu Account

I recently rediscovered an account I had forgotten about, on Issuu it is a series of digital publications I put together in the early 2000s.

Melbourne, a Zombie city?

Much 21st-century architectural discourse has orbited around two dominant paradigms of urbanism: on the one hand, the rapidly growing city-region, exemplified by the Pearl River Delta; on the other, the shrinking post-industrial city, exemplified by Detroit.

Matthew Soules, “Zombies and Ghosts,” Places Journal, May 2021. Accessed 07 Jul 2021. <https://placesjournal.org/article/zombies-and-ghosts-architecture-and-finance-capitalism/>

Weekend Notes?

Here’s a few web links:-

http://daywreckers.com (an old school link blog)
https://www.habatat.com/artists/ (modern digital? artists?)
https://urbanmaoism.neocities.org/index.html (just weird)
https://same.energy/ (visual search engine)(very cool)
https://dietz.ee (art prints)
https://hubertfischer.com [books! Hubert & Fischer is a design studio with offices in New York and Berlin with a global client base]
https://shutdown.gallery (gallery? Where?)(Based on the idea to use limitation as a creative tool instead of declaring it as constraint, SHUTDOWN.gallery aims to rethink existing concepts and to reestablish focus in a world of distraction. Every week, there will be a new exhibition with an artist whose work moves the world of art and design and thus maintains the fertile environment of constant change.)(is the site broken?)

Reasons to be elsewhere #20210612

news photo by the guardian depicting Chinese mission staff face-off with police, London. Peter Johns, 1967 — Chinese mission staff face-off with police, London. Peter Johns, 1967. Courtesy, Guardian News & Media Archive.

The Photographer’s Gallery in London is exhibiting parts of the Archive of The Guardian Newspaper to, “…delve into the legendary Guardian picture library, to explore photojournalism across the 20th Century and the various ways in which a liberal press employs images to elaborate themes such as feminism, nationalism, post-colonialism, racism, industrial relations, immigration, class and the climate crisis.”

Sadly any travel is still off the cards for the foreseeable future. Who said the tyranny of distance was dead?

Research & Links

Poking around online I found some interesting links.

The Photogrpaher’s Gallery in London has a faublous resource, called Viewpoints. Viewpoints offer a curated and eclectic set of perspectives inspired by the gallery’s programme and are designed to provoke new thinking around photography’s role in contemporary culture.

Some viewpoints are:-
Photography and Landscape a series of essays that examines photography’s role in defining and creating the Landscape genre. Unthinking Photography. Unthinking Photography is an online resource that explores photography’s increasingly automated, networked life. Unthinking Photography is a strand of The Photographers’ Gallery digital programme, an online platform for mapping and responding to photography’s role in contemporary culture.

Back in a few days once I’ve read them all.

Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on

Imagine that! Google making a browser plugin that enables users to opt of their analytics program!
Here’s the link, https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout
It is available for all the main browsers.

Summer Preoccupations

This interactive piece on the New York Times website is a marvellous example of how the web can be harnessed for educational good.

Click on the image below; to view.
The woodblock print referred to by the New York Times is by Katsushika Hokusai: “Ejiri in Suruga Province.” It is the 10th image in his renowned cycle “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.” It examines the print in detail and draws some conclusions about its impact on Western Art, even referring back to Jeff Wall’s iteration.

The Arts in Victorian Britain

The Victorian Web a 'pre-internet' site on Victorian History — The Victorian Web a ‘pre-internet’ site on Victorian History

The things you find when you are not looking!

The Arts in Victorian Britain:

Australian Centre for Photography to close

Australian Centre for Photography closing.

The ACP in Sydney is set to close it’s doors. More on the Sydney Morning Herald.
Stills Gallery also is to close.

I visited the space when I was in Sydney while it was still at its Paddington Street address several times of the years. For me however, the CCP in Melbourne is more central to the medium and the local art scene than the ACP ever was. The Sydney Morning Herald article suggests one of the losses of income plaguing the centre was teaching. Something that never attracted me either. So really I feel the ACP was very Sydney-centric. Perhaps the CCP is Melbourne-centric?

Lewis Bush | GRAIN

Lewis Bush | GRAIN:

In its own right, photography, and in particularly those genres of photography primarily focused on events in the world, is underpinned its own set of apparently self-evident truths. Many of these concern ideas about the correct way to use photography, in other words what it should be able to do that the other representational tools we have available to us cannot.[5] This is significantly a little different from the often-discussed medium specificity of photography, in that these beliefs do not necessarily need to have a direct relationship to the actual technical qualities of photography (indeed sometimes they ignore these qualities altogether), but in many cases originate elsewhere in society and culture, often in ideas which significantly predate photography’s invention. The problem with these beliefs, and the value in exploring them, is that they shape and direct the ways we use cameras and photographs in ways which sometimes prevent us using photography as dynamically as we might, and as a result undermine rather than strengthen the goals we seek. For this reason, if no other, we should try to draw them out and assess quite how useful they are.