Everybody Knows This is Nowhere

Hanna 2010 Ryan McGinley (via Art Observed)

There is a great Ryan McGinley exhibit up at Team Gallery in NY called Everybody Knows This is Nowhere. Also some great images and linsks at Art Observed.
 

Larson F 2010 Ryan McGinley (via Art Observed)

I'm not sure I really like nude photography. Even those classic nude landscape-like photos by Weston made me feel weird. But I do love the expressions, the candid faces and the blurry features mixed with other crisp limbs.

McGinley says,"... I sort of approach using the studio camera like a candid camera. And it would be insane to shoot as much as I did on film because for each portrait: I shot between 1,500 and 2,000 photos." Unbelievable. But it doesn't seem all that strange to me, considering the way I've learned to take photos - or sketch a line - is to make many of them. Sketching that way is a very traditional way of doing it. The photography habits though - maybe more a product of digital technology. Would Weston be doing his any differently? I think, with exceptions,

photographers have always bracketed shots. But today I think digital has changed that.

And it's changed what you apparently can capture. And what becomes candid. That's something that's just occurred to me - things can be captured faster. Things you may only think you have seen you now see. Like a weird way your Uncle might roll his eyes - and now you can see that forever, alien-like. It's almost another level of realism - this split second gesture, caught in all it's detail.

Polaroid by Andy Warhol c. 1970's

 

I have been using those kinds of things in my paintings alot. I really liked that first image above, with the dark shape of hair - and the slightest blurring of shapes and different sharpnesses in the face.

I've also been stuck on this memory of an airport somewhere - where the sun was setting into the terminal. And I sat facing the crowd of people squinting. I am stuck on all the expressions with this creamy lit skin and deep red shadows under noses and in folds. But I haven't been able to be fast enough to capture it with a camera.

Also semi-related in Portland: Scarecrow at Reed.