Boredom, photographs, paintings, art

I remember when in primary I saw for the first time Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase...





We had just got out of impressionism, and hitting abstraction, cubism and futurism. On Duchamp's painting I stopped and said, damn, I see it! Well, it's not as if you couldn't see all the stuff, but most of it was fairly obscure (like music for musicians we do have art for artists, I'd say). But, hey, here you could stop for a moment and actually think that that is, in a sketchy way, what a person looks over time when they walk down a staircase. Everything superimposed. Seeing this so many years later took me to reading the wikipedia entry, and it has this interesting bit...

In the composition, Duchamp depicted motion by successive superimposed images, similar to stroboscopic motion photography. The painting shows elements of both the Cubist and Futurist styles. Duchamp also recognized the influence of the stop-motion photography of Étienne-Jules Marey.

Well, the influence of that was recognized looks like this:



- Man walking down an inclined plane


- Horse walking


- Pelican landing


That makes Duchamp look a lot easier actually. And it somehow brings me full circle to photography and Trenk Parke...

Life: "want to run out and take pictures"

Somehow reading this one post by Alec Soth sticked in my mind: Reflections in the helmet shield. It starts by describing the complicated equipment needed for a magazine shot. Later on it describes the even more complicated setup used by Gregory Crewdson for creating what I would say is an extremely elegant and boring image. Alec notes: "As with the VF cover, this doesn’t make me want to run out and take pictures."

When do you feel the drive of going out to the world and tell something in images? It's amazing to see the joy that the process can produce. At least the result. This is the only image I have ever seen that makes drying negative look like a romance:



That there is Trent Parke, who develops his film every day, no matter where he is. Gosh. Seeing something like that makes me want to go out to take pictures and at night nail them over the window, hear them bend and twist and crackle as they dry, and watch that spider that lives with me keep on building its net. I just pity my film because it will not dry here:



Time to go to the pub approaches.