August 2007 Archives

Sorry for the lack of posts of the past couple of weeks. There hasn't been much to say, plus I've been traveling for business and for pleasure, so haven't been able to get out to see anything. Not that there's much to see right now, as evinced by a recent fruitless pilgrimage to Chelsea only to find everything closed up for the season. (I've lived here for how long?)

August picks will focus on the museums in town, though those are a little lacking on the photography front right now. But the fall looks like it's going to be great.

Oh, and check out my other, new site Gallery Wire, for the latest gallery news, sans commentary. It's in stealth mode for the moment, but hopefully will become useful as the galleries come back to life and the fall season gets underway in a couple of weeks.

Matt Niebuhr has written a great post about how photographers approach their work, inspired by the Paolo Ventura interview I posted about last week. He compares Ventura's pint-sized war dioramas to Paul Shambroom's photographs of anti-terror training scenarios being held in the New Mexico desert. Shambroom's lighting and posing makes these life-sized emergency workers appear as action figures, an inversion of Ventura's approach.

The Playas, NM, training center where Shambroom made his pictures, referred to as "Terror Town", is an interesting phenomena brought about as a response to 9/11. The town was basically deserted after the departure of it's primary employer and then was bought up and turned into a training center for first-responders and anti-terrorist security organizations. The view from Google Maps makes appear to be a Southern California suburb dropped out of the sky near the New Mexico border. The take-over has some ominous tones, however, as there are still some scatter residents in the town who are now, paradoxically, held hostage in their homes when exercises are taking place.

If you're a Web monkey with a passion for photography, you may want to check out Magnum. They've been continually upgrading their activities on the Web with blogs, videos, online exhibitions etc. Very impressive. They're looking for a Web Content Manager to keep this new engine purring.

Italian photographer Paolo Ventura is interviewed in the latest update (issue?) to FStop online magazine. Ventura does a lot of commercial magazine editorial work, but this interview focuses on his tableaux work. Ventura is becoming well known for his photographs of action figures reenacting World War II-era scenes - but notably, not combat.

In contrast to the Lori Nix interview from a few days ago, Ventura works in a looser style than Nix, working out the camera angles as the diorama comes together and using common household table lamps for lighting. He also builds the miniatures himself, whereas Nix uses a "fabricator".

Doing a little research on Paolo, I found he'd also done the project "Dress for Eternity", a documentary project about the catacombs of in Palermo, Sicily. Strangely, that work is difficult to find online and isn't even on Ventura's own site. The two subjects and styles are so different, I never would have made the connection otherwise.