LAst CAll

The Wisdom of Craft Stores

Cat people scare me in ways slasher films don't.

Take a Coat

Lovely selection of images from along a raging river in a very cold place.

Ice Day Along the River

Via airbag

Day Late, Dollar Short

It took one of the world's largest stock houses how many months to figure this out after readers of Last Call were on to it last June?

Everybody Jump @ Getty Edit

vs.

Flashback to 6/27/04: Making the Pointer Sisters Proud

Slow Stop Dog

Are Photobloggers the Doisneaus of Our Time?

I sometimes wonder whom among today's (or tomorrow's) crop of photobloggers will rise like cream to the top and become the preeminent iconographers of our day.  My choices?  Michael Costentino stands a decent chance, if he continues to capture visual emphemera like this (which immediately calls to mind this Doisneau classic), and my breath is often stalled -- if not taken away completely -- by the consistent excellence displayed at Todd Gross's work at quarlo, where a mastery of composition, color, and "the decisive moment" converge to form images of startling resonance. 

I feel a kindred spirit with the immensely talented Gayla at Making Happy, because she has a sweet and slightly sad sense of humor (which tends to rise up from her photos like the scent of warm bread does from a freshly baked loaf), and we both rather indiscriminately love all manner of cameras, particularly the "craptastic plastic" Great Wall.  Although when Gayla wields it, the melancholy scenes of desolate nothingness she captures feel like minor works of Edward Hopper, while the pictures I take tend to seem like... well, scenes of desolate nothingness. (If you follow the links, Gayla, thanks for the advice on loading the Great Wall -- I still owe you "Mike Beck and Junior High" by Lynda Barry on MP3.)

Eliot Shepard's work at slower.net speaks for itself -- clearly, this guy is poised to be Patrick McMullan of the 21st Century Net Set, only better.  I didn't even know human beings were allowed this close to J. Lo.  You gotta love the look on the guy's face as he stares at (presumably) Marc Anthony -- a cross between "Who the hell are you?" and "How d'you get so lucky?"

quarlo

The June 30 set is an extraordinary set from the always excellent quarlo. Check it out.

Q & A

Q: What if Edward Hopper was a commercial photographer?

A: Dana Niebert

Let Us Now Hear Famous Photographers

Great little web feature over at the Getty's site: Walker Evans in His Own Words. I particularly like Evans's modest, almost apologetic take on his own work, in particular that he wasn't consciously attempting to record a specific time in history, although that's exactly what he did. Interesting commentary at the end on "photography as hunting" that gels nicely with Susan Sontag's views in On Photography, i.e., that the act of photography (and the language endemic to it) is one of aggression. We "take" or "shoot" pictures. Moments are "captured." Photos are "snaps." Even photography at its most passive, such as Evans' own subway photos, taken with a camera he concealed in his jacket, consists of moments when photographers are moving in for the kill.

And who knew one of my favorite photographers sounded like a cross between Orson Welles and Sir Ian McKellan? If Evans were alive today, he might have had a pretty decent side career as a VO guy for the Honda Accord or one of the many companies whose signs he took pictures of. Why, I can almost hear his august tones telling me why I need to make my very next purchase from U.S. Rubbers coming over the RCA now.

Via Coudal.

Small Signs of Intelligent(?) Life

Eric Etheridge's collection of posted messages, large and small: Sky Hi Small Signs. Can't decide if my favorite is The Rag, Perfect, Motel (Yes/No), or Sky Hi. All have a wistful quality. You can hear a train rumbling over the tracks in the background, or a baby fussing in his mother's arms, the low soundtrack of life.

Via Coudal

Photo LA

LAst CAll attended Photo LA with friends yesterday, and it's safe to say the $15 admission price was a better value than the $12 margaritas at Casa del Mar afterwards. Although it's hard to argue with a sunset that looks like the one below as you sip margies and mojitos with friends old and new (note to Randy and Robert: L. didn't really mean to say, "Randy? Like, smells bad?", even if she did in fact say it, and we hope the cat comes home -- you two were fun).

I digress -- even talk of alcohol will do that to me. Photo L.A., an annual event at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, attracts photography dealers and collectors from around the world. Upon entering, it was a bit like walking into an overlong, physically-realized evening of browsing photo blogs: images, images, images! Everywhere you look! And works by so many amazing photographers: Diane Arbus. Richard Avedon. Sally Mann. From the "Bad Seed-meets-Baby Gap" creepiness of Loretta Lux's work to the sublime-but-subdued works of Ansel Adams, there was something for everyone (including Ms. Lauren Ambrose, perhaps there to do continuing character research for her role as Claire on LAst CAll's favorite TV show). The guide was a great take-away, but it's hard to believe how much more vivid and incredible the photos were in person. The photo at top -- William Neill's Lake Louise, more info here-- seemed to pulsate with an otherworldly glow. It was as if you could reach your hand in and touch the stones at the bottom of the photo, feel the cool wetness of the lake's surface.

The show left me wondering one thing, however: how much of a fine art print's freight is carried by the sheer size of the image? Because there are images that are clearly, through use of light, technique, and subject matter, great images, and there are other that are simply well-framed snapshots writ large, rendered gorgeous by dint of chromogenic print and size, the appearance of fine art created by the thick, black frame, crisp, white matting, and their arrangement on a wall. Does a photograph that succeeds at snapshot size succeed more than one which needs to be 3' x 3' on a stark white wall to be appreciated? And what of its provenance? Does an image need to be taken by a professional photographer to be worthy of being called art?

RELATED: the Diane Arbus "Revelations" exhibition comes to LACMA at the end of this leap year's February. Aren't you excited?