Drive-By Shootings

Above are excerpts from photographer Michael Wolf's series The Architecture of Density, shot in Hong Kong and dating from 2006. In some aspects Wolf's series is representative of a certain trend we've seen in a lot of photography in recent years -- work that addresses specific recurring themes, especially those of the architectural manifestations of the globalized economy, urban density and sprawl, environment degradation, etc. Positively Ballardian? Yes.












But a more common theme that underlies much of Wolf's work seems to hinge on the production of social space in the contemporary urban landscape. It makes for intriguing documentation of human activity in the public domains of everyday life, of the "to-ing and fro-ing" between the open interstices and sheltering recesses of city streets, revealing some of ways in which people engage -- or disengage -- from their physical environment. (To say nothing of the issues of surveillance and voyuerism that immediately come to mind.)

Wolf's most recent exhibition is of the series Paris Street View, culled from (as you might've guessed) Google's Street View. He's done similar projects on this theme from a couple of other cities, including New York City. Between the various locations, he was also able to spin off a newer subset entitled Fuck You, Google Street View. About the use of Street View images, Wolf recently explained:

"It's a form of appropriation and I’m making it my own. They have copyright notices every 10 inches or so on every Google image, so you can see it in some of my photographs. I have images I'm showing in Paris of the sky and there's a 'Google copyright 2009' in the sky. I would look intentionally for the copyright sign to make a point. As Google, you can’t go and do this without asking people and expect to have ownership--and they’re making money off it, putting ads and stuff."

Effectively it's the blue-chip postmodern game of appropriation, except sans issues of "authorship" and originality and instead filtered through the more contemporary hot-button concerns swarming around copyright law, intellectual property, ownership and piracy, and the like. Judging from Wolf's Copy Artists series from 2006, it would appear that this is yet another conceptual trope that runs through some of the work. Later in the same interview at TMN, however, Wolf addresses the issue of privacy and indiscriminate surveillance/documentation. Worth reading in full.

One of Many Hobbies

An interesting riff from Simon Reynolds. Interesting because it squarely hits on some things I've had on my own mind for some time, and I'm intrigued to see that he more or less arrives at the same conclusion that I have. (And does so far more succinctly and eloquently, of course.)

Simon's responding to a happened-upon pair of posts (here and here), which caused him to share a few thoughts about the connection between politics, "digimodern" "pseudo-participations," and the shapings-up of contemporary cultural landscape. He also -- more specifically -- wonders if the blog author "is using the term 'spectacle' in the Guy Debord sense of the word or whether he's just fastened upon the word unawares of its applications."

I can definitely see why Simon would be curious, would wonder about a connection. At times, the phrasing at times ("The sign of ideology is the spectacle.") closely shadows that of Dubord & co., though I suspect it's by mere chance. I suspect the author of the posts in question just happened to chose that particular word to embody the concept he was crafting. After all, some have pointed out vague similarities between Debord's theory of the Spectacle and Daniel Boorstin's discussion (c. 1961) of "the Image." And my guess would be that what the blogger had in mind was probably more akin to the latter.

Scarification

Expectoration, December 2005, Darrow, LA (detail)



Untitled, June 2010, Gulf of Mexico (detail)



Nightmare, Carville, LA, 2010



Gangrene, Luling, LA, 2010

By way of the latest photo gallery at The Morning News, above is some work by eco-minded photographer J. Henry Fair, from his recent series Industrial Scars. Fair's been doing a great deal of work on this theme, much of which has been collected and is about to published in book form, which is to be published sometime this month.

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And once again, because critical discussion on this topic seems to being going full pitch these days, over at Guernica contributor John Patrick Leary weighs in on the recent trend of "Detroitsploitation":

Ruin photography, in particular, has been criticized for its 'pornographic' sensationalism, and my bookseller friend won't sell much of it for that reason. And others roll their eyes at all the positive attention heaped on the young, mostly white 'creatives,' which glosses over the city's deep structural problems and the diversity of ideas to help fix them. So much ruin photography and ruin film aestheticizes poverty without inquiring of its origins, dramatizes spaces but never seeks out the people that inhabit and transform them, and romanticizes isolated acts of resistance without acknowledging the massive political and social forces aligned against the real transformation, and not just stubborn survival, of the city. And to see oneself portrayed in this way, as a curiosity to be lamented or studied, is jarring for any Detroiter, who is of course also an American, with all the sense of self-confidence and native-born privilege that we’re taught to associate with the United States.

Quite a long and thorough piece -- comprehensive, intelligent, and astute. Full article here.

About the only question I have from reading the thing is...someone's making a Red Dawn 2?

(And no, I haven't been researching this topic lately. Just seems like it keeps popping up in a number of places.)

Histories of the Immediate Future

A mini-travelogue highlighting the new and sparkling modern architecture of several British towns in the late '60s, via a book entitled Colour in Shopping - A Visual Survey, British Paint Prize, 1968. Via Between Channels, who has so far posted excerpts from four segments of the book [here, here, and here.] The slightly darkened, slightly jaundiced look of the aged and informal Instamatic snapshots gives these pics a special appeal that's appropriate to the subject.





All the shots of shopping centers remind me of another thing I stumbled upon recently -- a site that documents the locations for the 1976 sci-fi film Logan's Run, much of which it appears was shot in a mall and various commercial spaces in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.

Somewhat related to the top item but from a more contemporary perspective, one blogger's two favorite things -- Brutalism and Booze.

Messthetics

Jane Jacobs might've told 'em as much...

"Now there are signs that the cult of clean has overshot its utility. [Spacings senior editor Dylan] Reid connects cleanliness to problems like 'bigger roads, sanitized suburbs, and failed megaprojects that destroyed the complex ecology of cities even as they tried to revive them.'

'Messy urbanism' is the term coined for an alternative to all of this neatness; it’s an attempt to strike a compromise between the need for order and maintaining the unplanned, energetic, and chaotic nature of city life. Not only does the nascent movement espouse structural diversity—old alongside the new, expensive alongside the cheap—it encourages looser governance and a higher tolerance for disorder.

Street food carts are a perfect example: They’re banned or highly regulated in most places. Yet, Reid points out, a sociologist studying New York City found that a solitary hot dog vendor can bring an entire plaza to life. For all the wannabe policy makers out there who are trying to kick-start stalled metropolises, that’s food for thought."

- from, via

Ruin Porn Reprise

Hyperallergic contributor Kyle Chayka posting about a recent edition of WNYC's Studio 360 that addresses the recent cultural meme of 'ruin porn'...

In the apex of our era of high-flying capitalism, Detroit ruin porn functions as just such a momento mori, a call to remember that the same fate as Motor City could befall all of our great cities, all of our unstable accomplishments. I think Detroit ruin porn is so popular, and such a well-traveled visual avenue, in part because we want to be reminded that it could all fail. The voyeurism isn't just gawking at the old buildings; it's gawking at the possibility and the danger of death.

Which more or less covers my own thoughts on the topic some time ago; as well as echoing what Dylan Trigg, a number of Urb Ex-ers, and anyone who's ever given the matter a little bit of contextual thought might've said on the matter, as well.

And it seems this is the meme that's going to keep giving for a while, because Sean O'Hagan also had a piece on the topic in the Guardian a couple weeks ago, specifically about the noted Detroit work of photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre and their book The Ruins of Detroit. O'Hagan provides a bit of pertinent background info about the duo:

Marchand (29) and Meffre (23) have been taking photographs together since they first met in 2002. They are both children of Paris's banlieue, hailing from the southern suburbs of the city. Without formal training, they describe themselves as 'autodidacts who share an obsession with ruins', which, says Meffre, 'allow you to appear to enter a different world, a lost world, and to report back from there'.

Having photographed old buildings -- 'mainly disused theatres' -- in Paris, they happened upon an image of Michigan Central train station in Detroit while surfing the internet for pictures of abandoned buildings. 'It was so stately and so dramatic that we decided right then we had to go,' says Meffre, 'but we were naive; we had no idea of the scale of the project, of the vastness of downtown Detroit and its ruins. There is nothing comparable in Europe.'

All of which mean, I suppose, that we'll continue to hear more on the topic in the future. Perhaps at some point there'll be some international academic symposium at some point, one involving a call for papers from scholars from a variety of disciplines (cultural studies, sociology, urban studies, art and architectural history, philosophy, etc.), with a published collection of the contributions appearing after the fact.