Lassal – photography
After reemerging much later from my last long time assignment, than I had expected, I am thankful that my Madonna is still finding her way into the BURN.ED GARDEN exhibition in San Antonio, Texas.
I started this series – which is not listed on my website – a couple of years ago and held it rather privatly so far.
After a lot of coffee and cereals I decided to release the first part of “The Signs That Mock Me As I Go” for publication.
That was the easy part.
Now I need to figure out how one can show a group of work online, that is more of an object than of an image. Very tricky. For example, I could easily come up with a smell for the exhibition (I am an eye-nose type of person), but I find music very hard to deal with. Give me a cd and I can listen to it forever. Every new song that comes up deletes whatever came before in an instant. As if I only had memory for one single song – always the last song I heard I will remember for as long as I do not hear anything new. It is different with sounds, strangely enough. But I am probably the worst music customer ever, with maybe 3 records that I have bought in my whole life! Considering that my partner is a part time musician, this is actually horrifying to admit.
So now … how do I deal with music for this video that I need to submit? … Dang. Hopefully I remember where I put those 3 records I was talking about.
While I do not believe that everything in a project should be explained away, I got so extremely many emails asking why most of the night/day pictures in the diptychs for Disencounters look so much the same regarding light situation, that … well … I might as well show you our bed, too.
Tone has designed it himself and had it build by experts. It really does remind one of a two piece Donald Judd sculpture. Two “C”s that you can put together in any variation that you wish. And we have so far chosen the anti-dog variation – which gives us a closed double bed and which also goes well with the moskito net that has been proven necessary during the last years – even if it is a bit tricky to get in and out.
So you can see that with the room lights turned off it will always be more or less dark in there. All of the pictures in that “box” had to be made with a low flash, thus the similarities between the day & night images.
And the dog stays out.
(There are other sets of pictures, which were made in other beds, which I guess is quite easy to recognize now.)
David Alan Harvey sent me a note today, that “Disencounters” was up on BURNmagazine. What a nice surprise!
We had talked about Disencounters since November 2010, when I was not yet sure about how long I would still be shooting for it. It turned out that I was almost done. Thankfully.
I then opened up about the series, told Tony about it and asked if he would mind not only to shoot the final diptych for me but also to have the images published. Thankfully he is a good sport with a wonderful and strong personality and very supportive of my work.
So while on 81 diptychs you see Tony’s side of the bed – with or without him – I asked him to turn the tables and shoot me in a similar way for the final image on the final day. So there I am, sleeping the day away …
The images for the series were shot on consecutive days. There are only two nights missing, and that was when I went to ParisPhoto by myself. I even shot while Tony was in England for his construction site, leaving me an empty bed behind.
In these 82 nights we had a lot of unplanned scenarios: we had a sick dog, who had us sleep on the sofa with him, I had a sick boyfriend, who went to bed with a plastic bowl and towel – just in case –, and we had travelling times, when I simply took the camera with me.
David Alan Harvey thought that an edit of 20 pictures would do to get the point across on BURN and I gave him all the 82 picturs to make a selection. The only image I thought important to have in, was the last one in that very last position, which Tony did of me. Otherwise I was very curious which 19 he would select to go before that. On one hand side it is easy, because we have just variations of the same thing in the pictures, but on the other side, if you want to choose a selection without regard to the order, then there are several possible roads to travel.
To see David Alan Harvey’s selection for BURNmagazine, please visit BURNmagazine.
To see the whole set of 82 images, you can go to the Project “Disencounters” on this site.
Feedback (by email) is always welcome.
Thank you so much for your time!
Again. I know!
Decisions, decisions, decisions. Things change and make further changes necessary. Like some major revamping on this site.
I have been taking it slowly, just activated the option “leave comments” on the blog a few days ago – and not even for every post. The unavoidable spam is already flowing in… :) Most of the readers of my blog do not write comments and those who write, somehow prefer to write emails – maybe because so far that has been the only way. So let’s see what will happen in the future when I pick up the open threads again.
Continue reading ‘Website Revamping Ahead’
I regularly get asked if I am still working on MEANING.
I am.
From time to time I have to bridge gaps that become as wide as the universe. Then I stop to think about what I am doing, which usually does not give me any usefull answers. There is a pattern in this experience: Like probably most of us, I do have a very specific image of myself and I often use this image to help me with my important decisions. This sometimes results in a nightmare in which I end up in some corner where I never wanted to go. Why? Because the image I have of myself seems to be pretty inacurate at times and it leads to the wrong decisions.
The gap between phantasy and reality amazes me. Not only in my own person but also in other people, in whole societies even …
This is what got me started with MEANING.
I began with this project a month after I seriously stumbled upon photography in 2008. There was a lot of turmoil in me in direct consequence of that. A world upside down. Very surprising really, to have your life concept shaken up by some event you considered “random” at first – a “simple”* photography workshop. Very disconcerting too. But totally fascinating at the same time!
And even though I actually found all my essential puzzle pieces that year, I still did not have the clarity of vision back then to finish this project. My sight was a bit muddy.
The last 2 years where full of experiment. Experiment with the medium and experiment with myself. Why was I so fascinated by this? What was it? Who was I? Different again from what I thought? Yes, different again.
So now I am putting the pieces together. I am sure it will not go straight. And I will be looking at some more corners before I am done with this. So be it.
That is just how it is with MEANING.
.
*Just to put that one right: I was no photographer back then and my point and shoot did not ask me to know anything about f-stops. I thought that a photography workshop in Tuscany would be a nice kind of holiday with some good talks at most – not unlike other workshops I had visited so far. How mistaken I was! And happily so! I had one of the best and most intensive times in my life. If it had not been this way, it would not have shaken me up as it did.
Here is the first book cover image. Even if I have not started officially yet with this project, I need some stepstones for my thoughts. This is one of them. There are others.
Still working on the detailed concept though – on the narration, which will have much more importance than usual. Still not sure if I will do it all myself or if I will include other people – I guess it means that I have not met the right people yet.
The overall concept of Overtone is clear since September 2009, when I visited Lobo and Marfa in Texas. We were driving through the desert at night, minds wandering, when it struck me out of nowhere. Guess that is how these things always happen.
It was the beginning of a long process of thoughts, of many hours of online research, and of a long list of books I went through. Overtone is going to take me into the music scene … somewhere I have never been due to my damaged hearing, that make me prefer silence over sound. I never bothered about it and I never felt that I really was missing anything. I just concentrated on the visual side of things. Now, obviously, I am totally curious about finding ways to translate sound into an additional layer of meaning for the images I want to do for this project.
I would love to put the project statement up here right now, because I am so excited about all of this, but it will have to wait. I would give away too much by doing this, because there is a relevant twist to the story in this project. And I do not want to spoil the surprise.
I set this project to officially start in 2011. Until then I will be busy with research and with the first part of MEANING, which I think will be a good preparation. A whole new world ahead of me! I love it!
Stay tuned …
blogpost Texas Roundtrip I
blogpost Texas Roundtrip II
blogpost Texas Roundtrip III
blogpost Texas Roundtrip IV
Ok, I got real flak now by some of the readers of this blog because I was so wage in my last post. Sorry. I did not think it would be so terribly interesting to talk about projects that are still in the making, furthermore, well, there is just a lot that still can happen and projects might shift. Apart for some logical reasons for not putting it all on the table right away.
But ok. Let me spill the beans a bit, right? I am so behind on everything do to my lost 3 months, that this might just give me a further push to hurry.
I actually listed the three new projects in the sidebar as work in progress already. Althought merely with working titles.
HUNTed Frankfurt is going to be 100% documentary. But in a different way. From a different angle. It is about the place I am living at in Frankfurt now. Most “normal” people would try to get away from here rather than to move to this area. But I just really, really love it. It feels much more real than the rest of Frankfurt.
Some of you might know “La Grande Bouffe”, a film (1973) directed by Marco Ferreri, starring Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret. More here and there is some in YouTube too, only that I do not have the time right now to preselect links for this post here … I will certainly come back to that later, even though I did get the dvd.
It is a critical film … so I cannot but smile when I go through google and see how they put a “wedding service” up with that name etc. I certainly would not want to be married under that star.
So two of my projects have a reference to that film. A smaller project, which only needs a couple of days additional work, and a larger one. More of an OPUS really, which will certainly need at least 2-3 years of work. The smaller one is highly conceptual, the larger one is documentary. I have a lot of expectation regarding both of them, especially because they will use a completely different approach to say a similar thing.
So much for the new projects.
Concerning the “old” ones, that I am working on again, I was talking about the “Catch me if I can” Journals.
I just came up with an additional way of presentation, as the original way, that I had planned, has still not found a way to be materialized in a way I could accept. That one is ready to be printed out. All settled and done. I will now make a series out of it, to broaden the message.
I was also talking about Wallpaper. Same same. Rework on it is done, all is ready for the printer and … it is definitively going to be a series.
Next would be “A Stranger’s Wish”.
It is amazing how things expand sometimes when you have time to think them over. I always had this hate-love relationship with this project. I knew what part I hated and so the point was to eliminate that part. I worked hard on this one, and then I put it into a drawer for some time. The best thing to do when I get stuck – and the reason why I like to work on so many different projects simultaneously. It actually is not simultaneously, but it gives me time to step back and get a fresh look at things. “A Stranger’s Wish” – or the postcard project – evolved into various different branches. Each of which I like now. No. Each of which I LOVE! So it was a good thing after all.
Concerning the old projects, my first aim was merely to get them OUT there. They were finished, but I never worried about having them published or displayed because I was already working on the next projects. It is more interesting for me to work on projects than to worry about them once they are done. Nevertheless it leaves this feeling of incompleteness … And I cannot really present the project on the website either. It is stupid. So that was my main reason to get back to them. Just – and I knew that would happen – once I look at them again, I need to work on them again too. Not necessarily in a sense of change, but in a sense of addition. I just become aware of further possibilies that I REALLY would LOVE to add to it. All my projects really go in chapters. And probably they will accompany me until my last days. Who needs more projects, right? What is a project anyway? For me it is nothing but a name for something that I am interested in as a person. An idea. A concept. And I will still be interested in this after the end of a specific project … so it is no wonder it feels like I could go on turning that theme around in my hands.
Everything I do here, including the Illustration&photography posts, is of utter importance to me. I think about it and work with it regardless of if I write about it or not. It has always been like this, there is no reason for it to change. Especially not as long as the topics are fairly universal. And my topics are universal. “Meaning”, right? It is all about that one. Everything I do. So much so that I will probably take it away as a project and just write a blogpost about it. At the end of the day “Meaning” is the only project I am working on. Every other project could be considered as a subproject.
Sorry, rereading the post, I see that everything is still cryptic. Actually I am a little overwhelmed. I DID think until recently, that I was doing a monologue type of thing here. I did not look at the statistics, which tell me that I have several hundred readers here every day. So my feeling of responsibility just did a big awakening jump. I might find a way to show some work-in-progress type of thing. Maybe with a newsletter that requires registering. Let me think about this for a while.
As secretly expected I was terribly unhappy about the PINK LOBO dummy books that I got from several online printing services. Every book looked totally different and none looked like it was supposed to. Too bad … So I am stopping this ousourcing experiment for PINK LOBO, which in fact is a hard nut due to it’s colors in any case.
I got me an Epson Stylus Pro 3800 a while ago and will start to do my own prints. I am really sick and tired to wait and to depend on others when it comes to this utterly important part of my work. And I just have to be honest with myself here: my work IS hard to print! At least most of it – yes I know.
Actually I am looking forward to do my own printing. It is good to stay in control when it comes to presenting your work.
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