Love

One of the most interesting trailers I have seen in a while.

Trailer:

http://modlife.com/angelsandairwaves/videoview/7745/official_love_trailer

Listening to: The Adventure by Angels & Airwaves

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Zink Magazine

Z!nk is one of my favorite magazines for photography. Generally I never read magazines. I buy or subscribe to magazines for the images and design layout and then cut out images I like and take ideas from them for inspiration. The fashion editorials that z!nk runs are always new and innovative. I feel like I am seeing an image for the first time, rather than one I have seen copied a million times over which is refreshing. In addition, their product photography is incredible. Product photography is something I never pay attention to but it is a big part of the magazine and it is all completely flawless. I see the product photography more as an art form in Z!nk than I do anywhere else. So if you are in a bookstore and are looking around I would recommend picking up a copy and just looking at the pictures and the layout of the magazine.

http://www.zinkmag.com/

Listening to: Forest Fire by Fortune Teller

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Polaroid is back!!

"Re-inventing instant film for vintage Polaroid cameras"

Picture from the website:

The incredible website for the incredible project!

http://www.the-impossible-project.com/

I am so happy polaroid film is back. So much of my inspiration comes from the look and feel of polariod images.

Listening to: Life in Technicolor by Coldplay

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Anthony Lane

I was recently going through all of my websites that I had bookmarked and I came across this movie review of the movie Synecdoche, New York by the movie critic Anthony Lane. He is probably my favorite movie reviewer for the simple reason that he always gives me something new to think about or a different way to look at something. I bookmarked his review of this movie before I saw it, knowing that it was on my netflix que and that by bookmarking the review maybe I would get around to watching it sooner.

I'm not going to lie, I was pretty confused after I saw the movie. I loved it and visually it was incredible but there was so much going on. Phillip Seymour Hoffman's character plays a theater director and spends 17 years creating the perfect play inside this massive warehouse (For anyone who is familiar with Ithaca think Barton Hall in Cornell but bigger). I thought everything about the movie was stunning from the concept, to the performances to the visuals. The one thing about the movie is that it definitely needs to be thought about. It deserves conversation and someone to talk about it with. Enter Anthony Lane. His review was detailed and in depth and gave me things to think about. There were definitely things I missed the first time around and now re-reading his review makes me want to watch it again.

Anthony Lane writes for The New Yorker and has a great collection of reviews on their website. He also published a book of his movie reviews which was amazing. I would recommend getting it from a library or going to Borders or Barnes and Noble and just reading the reviews of movies that you've seen. I guarantee you will think differently about some of the movies that you've seen.

Anthony Lane's homepage for The New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/anthony_lane/search?contributorName=anthony%20lane&page=2&sort=publishDateSort%20desc,%20score%20desc&queryType=parsed

Anthony Lane's review of Synecdoche New York:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2008/11/03/081103crci_cinema_lane

Website for Synecdoche New York:

http://www.sonyclassics.com/synecdocheny/site/

Listening to: Little Person by Jon Brion

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Tattoos and Mucha

So I'm looking for tattoo designs for next year when I get my tattoo. My mom and I are planning on each getting a small tattoo on her 50th birthday. I want a small one right behind my ear and as of right now I am thinking about a small design in the art nouveau style. My problem now is that art nouveau is so detailed that Im trying to find something that would work. Luckily I'm not in any rush to get it. Last night I came across this tattoo. Its a full back tattoo in the style of Alphonse Mucha.

Even though I'm not looking for anything near this big I think it is pretty incredible. Mucha was a Czech art nouveau painter and illustrator and is one of my favorite artists. I love the swirls and the patterns characteristic of art nouveau. Some of Mucha's work:

Gustav Klimt was another art nouveau artist that I love. His work is less focused on the illustrative design aspect but his patterns are incredible as is his use of yellow. Both Klimt and Mucha use women as their focus and incorporate women into the design of their art. Their pictures are portraits but in a non conventional sense. Here is some of Klimt's work:

Listening to: Embers by Just Jack

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Recurring Images

There are places that I find myself drawn to and go back to photograph again and again.

My dad and I went out one afternoon a couple years ago and took his large format camera. The negatives are 4x5 and are absolutely beautiful. We went into the woods by the Cornell Experimental Fields and ended up taking a few close up shots of patterns that we found in an old fallen tree. The first picture is from that day we went out with the large format camera

More recently, about a year ago, I went to the experimental fields one day after school. I had nothing else to do that day so I took my Holga and walked the trail taking pictures. There are trails from bugs all over the trees and the second picture is of bug trails left in the wood. I'm sure they were different trees but they make such beautiful patterns.

The last shot is from the same roll of film that my second bug trail picture was from. There is this beautiful overhang with a relatively large tree suspended over a huge drop. I was drawn to the moss in the foreground and by the edge. There wasn't any grass growing, just moss and it gave off such a soft quality that I thought would really fit with the soft light and the light leaks that the holga produces. I also love the black frame on the left side. I think it balances out the image and the vertical trees on the right half of the frame. I never know what I am going to get with the holga and all these small quirks that can never be planned for always end up adding a magical quality to the images.

^large format

^holga

^holga

Listening to: The Way You Look Tonight (Frank Sinatra Cover) by Maroon 5

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Stream of Consciousness

Okay, so try to stay with me on this but I was looking up some things on youtube and I realized how much I try and relate things with one another. I was searching for 16mm short films to see what other people have done with the medium since that is what we have to shoot with for my cinema production class. I came across this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaklKDELP60

(1min 54sec)

^I'm not sure how I feel about this film actually because the shots are all of contemporary things such as big billboards, cars, highways, helicopters, and amusement parks. I feel a little bit as if with this medium we should be preserving something and mixing that old time feel of the film with new shiny things and technology doesn't feel right. Anyway, the piano music in the film was from Amelie which was a french film made a couple years ago with Audrey Tautou. So I decided to youtube some scenes from Amelie and I came across this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIGxc6crmxY#watch-main-area

(40sec)

^This is one of my favorite movies and the director Jean-Pierre Jeunet is one of my favorite directors of all time. He hasn't made that many films but they are ALL worth watching. His earlier movies, Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children are a bit more obscure in terms of the narrative than his more recent films like Amelie and A Very Long Engagement but they are all visually stunning. Jeunet has a very distinct style and all of his films have that strange greenish tint that favor the reds and the greens and he uses a lot of camera motion. This scene with the moving camera of the train station reminded me of another short film that Jeunet recently made for Chanel as an advertising campaign for their fragrance. Here is the short he made:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ljQDJ4EILc

(2min 22sec)

^Jeunet uses similar shots of the train stations and his style becomes very fluid. Its fun to see how he uses his consistent style to tell different stories. I think this short film for Chanel is kitschy and cheesy but it is interesting to see how much control Chanel gave Jeunet with the film because it is shot 100% in his style. The film took a couple months to shoot and had an incredibly huge budget for the final product of a little over a 2 minute film. I wonder what he could have produced with that budget if he was making a film for himself rather than for a company.

A couple stills I liked:

A Very Long Engagement

CHANEL N°5

Listening to: Georgia on My Mind by Ray Charles

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Since this semester I am taking a cinema production class and have to make my own movies I feel like I have been looking at more movies and shorts. I came across this set of interviews conducted by the New York Times and I went through most, if not all, of them. I love the simple lighting of the subjects and even thought the interviews might not be the most heartfelt or emotional, I think they make the actors come across as approachable. They are just a collection of fun interviews. Take a look:

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2007/09/14/style/tmagazine/1194817111537/t-style-men-s-fashion-fall-2007.html?scp=1&sq=screen%20test%20joseph%20gordon%20levitt&st=cse

Speaking of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, if you haven't seen him in anything other than 10 Things I Hate About You then I would really recommend the movie Brick. It is a strange and dark detective story that focuses on High School students and in a way it is like a film noir movie with younger characters. It also won the special jury prize for originality of vision at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.

Below are photos of Joseph Gordon-Levitt from when he was on the cover of the New York Times Style Magazine. The Style Magazine always has really great photographs and I keep a lot of the portraits in the magazines as inspiration for my own portraits.

Listening to: Golden Touch by Razorlight

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Irving Penn

Irving Penn was an incredible portrait photographer and was known as one of the worlds leading fashion photographers. His portraits have inspired me to look and play with light and to capture the spirit of a person in a single frame.

^Picasso

RIP

Listening to: Fire by Augustana

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Light Leaks

One of the things that every artist tries to develop is their own style. Its great to come across a photographer who has a definitive style in their work that is easily identifiable and sets them apart from other photographers. I came across the photographer Guy Aroch when I was working at Trunk Archive this past summer because I kept coming across his pictures in the images I had to go through and his images were always very easy to recognize.

His light is extremely soft and many times taken in the setting sun. One of my favorite things about his images is that they seem to be of secret moments and and Aroch takes the viewer and brings them into the viewpoint of say, a lover. The moments he captures seem to be between two people and are intimate little snapshots of a spontaneous moment. In a lot of his images he creates the effect of a light leak in the same way that shooting with a Holga camera might produce light leaks. This is one of my favorite effects and I would love to try and use it more in portraiture and advertising. It would be interesting to see in Aroch's work just how much of that light leak 'effect' is created in post production.

http://julianmeijer.com/photographers/aroch/17

^The picture of the model in the blue outfit in the hallway is one of my favorite pictures from this batch.

http://www.trunkarchive.com/?fpm=l

Listening to: Black and Gold by Sam Sparro

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I love my Holga

So I finally got my film back from this summer that I shot with my Holga camera. I shot 2 rolls in color and 4 rolls in black and white and it was the first time I shot 120mm film in black and white. Now I'm not sure if I prefer the color film more because I shot with it first or because it has a polariod feel but I don't think I'm going to be shooting as much black and white 120mm film with my Holga. Here are a couple pictures from the summer:

This is my roommate Ally. On Mondays we interned for Mary Ellen Mark and this was taken during our lunch break. We decided to walk around soho where Mary Ellen's studio is because we had some time left. I told Ally to go do something with the door and I'm glad that there is a big light leak where her hands are because I think her action looks a little posed and the light leak conceals a bit of the action and makes it looks more spontaneous.

This image was taken in Central Park. There was some kind of festival going on for kids with a band playing kids music. We also got to see a tae-kwon-do routine set to Eye of the Tiger by Survivor. Totally fitting in my opinion. This woman walked up with probably 6 parrots on her. I wish I had been shooting with my color film to get the colors of the birds but I am really happy with this picture. I think that if I had been shooting with color film the picture would have turned out to be more about the birds than her. I'm glad this picture is about the woman.

Check out my flickr page. I put more of my holga pictures from the summer on flickr so feel free to check them out and let me know what you think.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/matheam/

Listening to: Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk by Rufus Wainwright

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Campaign Videos

Lately I have come across campaign videos for clothing companies and I think it is a really interesting medium for advertisers to utilize. They are generally a couple minutes long which is definitely too long to be shown anywhere on tv. Sometimes the company will put the video on their website. I came across this video for the clothing company Toast this past summer. I was interning at an image licensing company named Trunk Archive (http://www.trunkarchive.com/) and one of the photographers they represent did advertising work for this clothing company named Toast. I love how this film can be seen as advertising but also as an art film. I would love to try something like this in the future.

Listening to: Swing Tree by Discovery

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visit

So today in my visual culture class there was a visiting artist who mainly worked with collages and visual representation and symbols within our mainstream society. At the beginning of class we had 15 minutes to create our own collage of whatever we wanted. This is what I had at the end of 15 minutes....

After she lectured a little bit we got together as a class and looked at some of the collages people had made and tried to draw some meaning from things that maybe weren't initially intentional. I think its always interesting what an artist means to put into their art and what people actually take away from it.

Listening to: Sweet Disposition by The Temper Trap

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