Secret Gardens

This is an odd and rambling shaggy dog story. I’ve taken up gardening recently and spend quite a bit of time poring over manuals on how to raise tomatoes, amend soil, make compost, set up planting schedules, etc

All of this gardening on the brain made me remember a book I’d picked up a few years back that’s been gathering dust on the shelf, unread: Derek Jarman’s Garden, a journal the filmmaker penned at his cottage in Dungeness in southeast England where he spent hours tending his garden as he slowly succumbed to AIDS. “The flowers blossomed while Derek faded.”

I first stumbled on the book during a long weekend in Nevada City—a tiny outpost in the Sierras that dates from the Wild West era and that’s now, oddly enough, home to several bookstores. One shop with a few stalls on the front porch had its “Closed” sign out but a note hung in the window asking visitors to slip money under the door if they found something they liked. I discovered Jarman’s diary with the price of $1 penciled inside the cover so I slipped a bill under the front door. There was a sense of rightness in finding the book and a weird feeling of grace in the self-regulated trust between buyer and seller.

I dipped into reading it again a week ago. One of Jarman’s lines popped out at me: “I can look at one plant for an hour, this brings me great peace. I stand motionless and stare.” I completely understand this, having spent quite a few mornings peering into pots looking for seedlings or checking on plants that need attention. It is a completely calming, meditative activity…and I feel the same soothing effect as I float through Jarman’s prose.

The book is accompanied by London photographer Howard Sooley’s images. Sooley keeps a blog on The Guardian UK site and just recently wrote again about his project with Jarman. I imagine that if Virginia Woolf had wanted someone to capture the view from Monk’s House, her country retreat, Sooley with his romantic images of storms and thickets and quiet parlors would be her man.

It’s All a Blur

Russian photographer Alexei Vassiliev’s hazy subjects hover just beyond the viewer’s reach, disappearing in a blur caused by a sudden movement or an out-of-focus lens. A woman in a turquoise coat stands in a metro station, bobbed brown hair and a tired swanlike sway to her neck. Her gaze beams directly at the camera, but her eyes are indistinct, hollow gray fields that make her glance all the more intriguing and intense.

Vassiliev who now lives and works in Paris describes it this way: “The more blurred the subjects of these portraits, the more they looked as if they were on the verge of dissolving, fading away, or disappearing — that is when their presence really asserted itself.

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Running Interference

Karly Wildenhaus’s photo series “Interference” reveals how information that travels in pixel format often arrives at its destination scrambled. Her frozen images taken from TV and online video show the scars of long journeys through cable and T1 lines. Newscasters’ faces degrade into abstract matrices of color and this photo of what might be a tank or a train shimmers like an Impressionist painting.

American Negatives

Abner Nolan takes old found negatives and reprints them. There’s not a lot of his work online, but he did do a limited edition book with Trillium called American Negatives which looks like it might be out of print. He will have another limited edition coming out in the next year with These Birds Walk, a photo book subscription series out of Oakland.

Actually, this just in. Todd Wemmer over at Lost and Found Photos stumbled upon a collection of Nolan’s found meat photos in Issue 2 of Meat Paper, a great foodie journal about the “meat zeitgeist.”

And while you’re visiting Lost and Found Photos, take a look around. It’s one of the best resources for found photography.

Lego My Photo

Play around with Mike Stimpson’s Lego reconstructions of classic photographs and see how many you can guess correctly. If you don’t recognize this one, it’s Henri Cartier Bresson’s idyllic “By the Marne River.”

Kith and Kin

These Birds Walk is a small art book publisher in Oakland whose goal is to “provide affordable art books that quietly exist somewhere between a discarded pamphlet on the street and a high end coffee table book.” They publish an annual limited edition subscription series that includes four books, each from an individual photographer. The latest one is called “The Kin Series” and features books by Mike Brodie, Paul Schiek, Ari Marcopoulos and Jim Goldberg. The next series includes Todd Hido, Marianne Mueller, Abner Nolan and Alec Soth. Sign up and you’ll get small doses of good photos four times a year.

Lion King

Discovered this genius of a site by way of the blog “It’s Nice That.”

The Lion publishes one found photo a day accompanied by a song. The owner Arian Behzadi describes it simply as: “For when a song fits a picture or when a picture fits a song.”

Found photos invite us to dream up narratives and giving them a soundtrack is the perfect way to paint immediately and without words a mood and a story. Schoolgirls skip rope caught in mid-air to the hopping beat of Port O’Brien’s “I Woke Up Today.” The view from a train window unreels to the slow melancholy of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here.”

This image of two teens dancing pairs up with David Bowie’s “Heroes.” The lyrics “I will be king and you will be queen…just for one day” seems to fit this photo perfectly—two awkward teens frozen in a dance move, eyes locked, goofy and ecstatic.

New snapshots and new music pretty much every day. You have to open the link to the song in a new window.

As Found

We tend to think of found photos as existing solely in the physical world, pieces of paper from the past covered with chemical emulsion and unknown faces, but the Internet opens up a whole new universe of vernacular photography where the images are less tangible, more ephemeral and free from the bonds of ownership. It’s a vast community-owned pool of pictures.

Sites are springing up that recognize this. As Found is an online gallery that curates groups of photos around themes. This image is from a group called Presidential runner-ups—a sad collection of all the also-rans in US history harvested from the Web. Other sets include handshakes, mechanical parts, albinos. Humor runs through all of these with a chuckle at our own banality. As the owners of the site declare: “Finding is creating.” Recognizing a pattern and naming it gives these images a previously unowned significance.

And take a look at Many Same and Secretly Creepy, too.

Invisible Nation

Salvadoran artist Victor Cartagena’s latest installation, Invisible Nation, fills the walls of Galeria de la Raza with swarms of official Latin American ID photos, many of them passport pictures from the 70s and 80s, thousands of nameless faces that impress with sheer numbers, but also make it seem necessary to look more closely at each of these singular individuals and imagine their story.

For Cartagena, these masses are the reality of immigration so often forgotten in political discussion. Faced with this tidal movement of lives across borders, he insists that identities must be made out within the crowd.

Images are multiplied throughout the gallery. Video loops of faces play on the walls. Armies of photos are tacked with sewing pins to one broad expanse. Boxes covered in brown butcher paper sit in various corners of the gallery looking like so many drug bundles. The front of each package carries someone’s photo, as if all of these lives are parcels to be trafficked.

Cartagena turns tea bags into gauzy envelopes, wrapping each photo in a cottony haze. He then gathers these packets into bunches of 10 or 20 and hangs them from the gallery ceiling. The immediate impression is one of weight, a forest of ponderous hanging cords. A barely audible whisper emanates from somewhere overhead. I don’t speak Spanish, but the few words I can make out are “tristeza más tristeza.” Sadness more sadness.

Reinventing Clichés

Cassandra C. Jones weaves mundane found photos into intricate floral tapestries. She takes images of cheerleaders in mid-cheer, hands and legs flying out in a whirlwind of exuberant gestures, and diffuses all of that overeager, adolescent energy into beautiful pinwheels of color and form. It takes a close inspection to see the details of what at first just looks like beautiful wallpaper.

In another series, she re-imagines an icon of kitsch—the pink lawn flamingo—into what appears to be exotic tropical orchids.

She’s also created what she calls snap motion re-animations, flipbooks really, for which she gathers hundreds of clichéd postcard images—sunsets, moons, soaring birds—then transforms them into stop-motion animations where suns and moons rise and set and birds take flight.