knit one street purl one city

polaroid sx-70 promo : ray + charles eames

The Apple iPad may be a magical device from Jon Ives but the Polaroid SX-70 slr had Land and Eames’ on the case – no contest. This is a delightful promo film (11 minutes) full of intelligence, imagination and gentle humanity – no hard sell, it is self-evidently useful.

The two cameras I feel most comfortable with are the rolleiflex 3.5F and hasselblad 500c/m. The SX-70, like the braunschweig and gothenburg inventions, is I think grokkable (silly word but useful signifier), as described by berg.

Thanks to product designer Saikat Biswas for the find.

Also, there may (or may not) be a polaroid-phoenix’d announcement at Photokina 2010 from the impossible project… there is a lot of interest in the format worldwide – there was a photographer who took large format colour images in the polaroid netherlands factory after they closed it down a couple of years back but having trouble tracing – will update.

Ode to J. Smith : travis, dahl + birdsall

Taken last week on Wellington at West Regent in Glasgow, Travis’ Omnific eye billsticker is revealed again; probably first posted (and then covered over many times since) in summer 2008.

The eye design was taken off a 1980s Roald Dahl book cover. It’s classic late-old-school (i.e., just before macs came) graphic design, from the master of late-old-school british graphic design, Derek Birdsall.

If you’re interested in street typography, pop over to the excellent Letterpool who are preparing a new book on London.

London Perceived 2

Just have to share this piece of text by V. S. Pritchett from my favourite book on London – London Perceived. If you have an interest in London, it’s a fine one to look out for second-hand (see previous post Evelyn Hofer :: london perceived).

(talking about the Tower of London…)
“All European cities have these lumps of dead history in them; they obstruct the mind, lie inertly across it for centuries and do no more than alert the fancy for an hour or two in these happy times when a sense of the past is a personal taste, a passing wonder before which we congratulate ourselves on our progress or, at any rate, on our change. But a real sense of the past cannot exist without a sense of the present. We are now closer to the Middle Ages than the Victorians were. [here I think he's talking generally about the just-experienced brutality of WWII as a retrograde step] These picturesque lumps bristle and wake up. In what way does the medieval ethos now differ from that of Europe or, indeed, the greater part of the world? The Tower means murder now, torture now, stranglings, treacheries, massacre, the solitary cell, the kick of the policeman’s boot. The scratchings on the walls of the Tower are the scratchings of Auschwitcz. We are reminded of what the words “struggle for power” mean in our own age. It may have astonished Victorians that Wren’s uncle, a harmless, dull, and climbing bishop, was shut up here for eighteen years; but that sort of thing does not astonish us today. It is normal. I say nothing of the Great. The Tower, grey and nasty, is awake again, and the dirty waters of the Thames lapping under Traitors’ Gate, where they rowed the fellows in, looks sly and has the light of a conniving eye.”

I haven’t done it but I imagine googling Tower of London will not trawl up anything even slightly approaching this analysis – written 47 years ago – and still good for our own time.

maggie nesciur: NYC walker

Not done an entry on walking yet – kind of important – so feel this is a fab one to start with. Maggie Nesciur walks 90 miles a week through the hoods thankful she’s still able to walk and breathe after surviving cancer – discovers life is good. This is a complete breath of fresh air – and judging by the comments, I think Maggie’s life is all up from here…

There you are short n nice for a friday afternoon. So perfect. Found via SwissMiss > Protect New York, then a cracking interview that restored my faith in human nature (and nice pics) at the New York Times.

photograph of Ms. Nesciur by Todd Heisler for the NYT

Humanity – must try harder, says God

Having grown up in Easter Ross, a place deep in the lore of the Brahan Seer, the gift of foretelling was a definite fact to me as a child. But when David Icke predicted that in 1991 my neighbouring island of Arran would be destroyed and sunk by an earthquake, in the absence of Charlie Brooker I had to debunk myself. The humanitarian disaster in Haiti (part of Hispaniola, not an island known for earthquakes, but one that knows plenty about colonialism), is an only too-real indicator that nobody – even Sportsreporter Incarnate – can definitively say what will happen.

Now the recriminations – Haitians made a pact with the devil so that he’d help them get rid of the French… the French accuse the Americans of taking advantage of the situation and making a move on the island… Haitian leaders are corrupt and that’s why the buildings are so shoddy… the Aid Agencies, selfishly jostling for position in the aid money-fest… (For a different take on what’s happening in Haiti, visit the Tanzanian/Scottish photographer Pradip Malde who has a strong connection with the island).

This re-run of Who’s Faultline Is It Anyway, broadcast whilst the bodies bloat and common looters get murdered in the streets by their own police force, make Icke and his highly confused form of truth about several political situations we all understand only too well, seem quite cuddly. And so those who will make political capital from the disaster should remember there but by the grace of…

Richard Dawkins is at the opposite end of the P T Barnum / Cassandra Scale from Icke. Yet both seem to share common themes (worryingly their web sites also seem to share the same crusading I’m Right, So Buy All My Stuff! look and tone). One of those themes is about either denying something exists (God; Dawkins) or insisting that something does exist (er, lizards; you know who). Delusional? I’ve got an App for that (app now removed from iTunes)

The answer is of course nobody, even the Pope on a good day, is right and nobody can know the seemingly infinite width height and breadth of life, the universe and all that – only Beeblebrox has survived the Total Perspective Vortex. And just because you live and work in a building designed by, for instance, Zaha Hadid (just to get the world/building analogy right – we wouldn’t want to suggest that God does 50s brutalism), shouldn’t mean she’s there permanently, concierge-style, answering all our dumb questions about what to do about today’s problems and accepting the blame when it all gets a bit too much. That’s Jesus’s job.

OK hats off to all the aid workers in Haiti, and the Haitians who are doing the best they can to survive the disaster.

journal of urban typography

The vernacular sign is one of those street-based sidedishes that give enormous pleasure, and can stay in your head long after the journey has faded. NYC-based The Journal of Urban Typography run by Bryan Collins, is one of the latest to collate the visual non-conformity of the small business, with some lovely examples. This has become a huge field now – I think David Carson was one of the first mac-generation typographers to take it seriously, but of course it’s being going on as a subject since I suppose the birth of the railways and the first metropoli around the early 19c; i.e., the dawn of mass advertising… or is there such a thing as medieval adverts?

One of the great things about urban type is its ephemeral status – although I spotted this Gillette sign recently on Bute that seems to have been sunning itself in the same window for over 40 years…

By the way anyone regularly passing the Griffin on Bath street in Glasgow will be appalled at the lack of typographic beautifulness but smileminded by the daily wit.

Image from tjout

finnieston : margaret watkins : hidden lane

Margaret Watkins was a seminal figure in early 20c photography in the US. I’m not going to offer any insights here – her influence and place is well covered in many publications. But there are two nice things happening here, right now, in Glasgow I recommend –

1 An exhibition of her work at the excellent new gallery in the funky Hidden Lane, a creative enclave off the boho bit of argyle street (also near to some really good restaurants).

2 Margaret spent her last years in Hyndland, close by in the west end – so it’s a local homage to a world-renowned photographer-artist. The gallery is a great place to start walking up to the west end, via the triumverate argyle street / sauchiehall street and dumbarton road, followed by the incline up byres road and the western pull up past Cottier’s church.

Image from the rather good Robert Mann galleries

atget and abbott

I love this 100 year old Atget image; The Wine Seller, 15 Rue Boyer, printed by his champion, Berenice Abbott.

The light envelops – is it full sun, noon, august – or noon, december, weak light reflected from snow.

An ambiguous space – doors open, but no sign of proprietor or customers. We only are audience, stepping into the stopframe.

I imagine Atget felt that clock stop – time as tantalising echo; it existed but we can’t prove it; just these frozen snatches. I’m sure Einstein wondered about the reality/out of time quality of Atget’s images.

A short span and a long line, seconds into minutes, days decades eternities.

Image grab from Artblart, a very good place for (mostly) American photography from the 20c.

evelyn hofer :: london perceived

The US photographer Evelyn Hofer, who died recently, did 3 large format books in the 60s with the writer V. S. Pritchett – the two talents came together especially fruitfully in London Perceived.

Her deadpan genius loci images and faintly bizarre portraits prefiguring Diane Arbus, married with his rich, enveloping characterisations, make this book one of the first psychogeographic efforts in terms of dealing with the city as a reality (rather than the usual puff piece for establishment and crown), finding poetry, complexity, texture in the everyday.

If you liked James Mason’s The London that Nobody Knows, you’ll love this, ducks…

fake realities out of other peoples’ misery

Glasgow’s Springburn, once the proud birthplace for steam locomotives sent to every corner of empire, is now notorious for “acting” as sink estate for the disposessed, Crusoe’d with a buckfastering of de-humanised ex-working classes; and more recently as rubik cubes for those expecting, and being sorely disappointed of, a better life in dear old North Blighty.

Not far from a massive Tesco (built on top of the St Rollox train factory, and probably the most multicultural shopping space in Glasgow), lie the Red road flats. Occupied in 1969, along with other “slab and point” high rise blocks (its westerly neighbours at Sighthill, across the road from Tesco, were blown up in November 2009), it became recently another icon of the scottish film industry’s middle-class infatuation with its long line of cliched tartan schemies, thistle’d druggies, hoots-mon jakies and sociopaths wearing see-you-jimmy bunnets.

As they used to say in Kelvinside, in their stanley baxter accents – ohhhh… the DEPREDATION…. hev anither wee g an t tae calm yer nerves, Maisie… noo whaur’s yon re-mastered re-issue af Trainspotting, wi’ extra slamdugging…

It would be fair to say now at this point I intensly dislike the studied-from-a-safe-distance, preferably Hyndland or Dartford, morally bankrupt sub-Loach kitchen-sinkery of films like Ratcatcher, Small Faces and recent cctv downer Red Road. Even the knuckle-dragging, Howson-shaped thuggery of tartan noir, er, “literature”, seeks a higher place than these imposed sub-hoi-polloi stereotypes of scottish people. Like bad architecture, slumxploitation films can have a lasting and damaging influence on the psyche of the decent people who are left behind to shrug off the slurs and labels that are still attached long after the directors’ star has faded. Meanwhile the egos-the-size-of-hampden (I am loving my hyphens) filmbrats from the right side of town slum it and think they’re doing serious and important homage to robert louis stevenson.

Anyway, the scottish photographer George Logan is a perfect example of good intentions made muddy by the ability to fake reality out of other people’s misery. On the surface, the quasi-allegorical nature of the images and the cartier-bresson quality moments give a feeling of delight and hope – I was completely taken in. It’s when you look more closely at where Logan is coming from (london-based, high-end advertising photography) and then, crushingly, his quite open (to his credit) admission that the figures are actors (on possibly a bluescreen set) with the tableau then comped on top of the Red road backgrounds, that things go slightly awry. That said he seems a really decent guy who is surely not naive about the social context and local compromises he’s chosen to work with here, unlike some.

Image copyright George Logan