v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Grenna Museum

Andree Expedition

Hisaharu Motoda

lithograph by Hisaharu Motoda

Softer than my brain

Vallejo Nocturno 2010 - we were there

The Candidate

Vallejo Nocturno 2010- Maryland's Martin O'Malley at a Latino meeting today

The line between artist and audience

From Aram Sanreich's "Mashed Up" at truthdig:

The line separating artists from their audience has always been a bit blurry. From that moment during the Renaissance when someone first decided that a painter was more than just a craftsman with an easel, the whole idea of the Artist-with-a-capital-A has required an entire mythology just to make it seem plausible.

The biggest myth of all is the Romantic notion that artists somehow create their work uniquely and from scratch, that paintings and sculptures and songs emerge fully-formed from their fertile minds like Athena sprang from Zeus. Running a close second is the myth that only a handful of us possess the raw talent – or the genius – to be an artist. According to this myth, the vast majority of us may be able to appreciate art to some degree, but we will never have what it takes to make it. The third myth is that an artist’s success (posthumous though it may be) is proof positive of his worthiness, that the marketplace for art and music functions as some kind of aesthetic meritocracy.

Of course, these myths fly in the face of our everyday experience. We know rationally that Picasso’s cubism looks a lot like Braque’s, and that Michael Jackson sounds a lot like James Brown at 45 RPM. We doodle and sing and dance our way through our days, improvising and embellishing the mundane aspects of our existence with countless unheralded acts of creativity. And we all know that American Idol and its ilk are total B.S. (very entertaining B.S., of course!). Each of us can number among our acquaintance wonderful singers, dancers, painters or writers whose creations rival or outstrip those of their famous counterparts, just as each of us knows at least one beauty who puts the faces on the covers of glossy magazines to shame.

And yet, we believe the myths. How could we not? Who among us has the time, the energy, or even the motivation to buck the overwhelming support the myth of the Artist receives from the institutions that govern our society – to dispute our schools, our churches, even our laws? What is copyright, after all, but the legal assertion of an individual’s sole ownership over a unique artifact of creative expression? These laws, sometimes enforced at gunpoint, require us to believe the myths, or face the consequences.

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la luz de los dientes

Vallejo nocturno 2010 - en san isidro

Permeation of war images

From Camera Obscura, Carlos Cazali writes:

It is of no surprise then that as the manipulation of the aesthetics of both of these image types grows at the same speed as the next version of Photoshop hits that market, that they too are as quickly discarded as the previous software version. War is forgotten. Famine is non-existent. Natural disasters have passed.

Until only a year ago, the war in Iraq was of headline news, now with the retrieval of US troops, the disaster brought about to the country and the toll on the local population has apparently disappeared and rolled into Afghanistan, which ironically has been at war longer and we can’t seem to figure out what is really going on.

Photography therefore is a reflection once again of our modern society. Therefore the responsibility of what we as photojournalists, documentary photographers or simple photographers do is far greater than ever before. It must be of primary concern not only amongst shooters but of those teaching or empowering the craft to search for the most effective way to communicate their personal editorialist experiences to the public. We can no longer afford to rely on the editorial commands of the media, who have a perfectly organized rhetoric of communication and consumption.

If we look back on the events that have led to every major genocide we know of today, Armenia, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur we know they were all highly predictable and with ample evidence once they were occurring and to this day continue to be highly documented. However we seem to be less and less engaged with them and this is once again due to the repetitive nature of the overt use of the image that no longer affects us in our complicity. In Arturo Perez-Reverte’s “The Painter of Battles”, the main character, a self retired and renowned war photographer attempts to paint everything he couldn’t capture on film and to finish it, before one of his very own subject matters, from the war in the ex-Yugoslavia kills him for having exposed his life and endangered his family, eventually killed by enemy troops who recognized him on the cover of a magazine. John Berger of “A Painter of Our Time” similarly shared with us that Art is meaningless to those for whom life itself is merely a spectacle. Both authors are demanding that we no longer remain as mere on lookers justifying that we are only there to tell the story.

The Fish Tank

Vallejo Nocturno 2010 - en el mes de agosto

real things

Vallejo Nocturno 2010- color study 23b

Video Bar

Vallejo Nocturno 2010 - sport zone