Happy New Year! And talking of postcards; don’t miss bldgblog’s beautiful selection of old British photochrome landscape postcards.
Archive for December, 2007
Black Country Gold
Ah! Fresh crispy wine from the sun-kissed slopes of… er… Staffordshire and the Black Country.
Goff off
Glasgow City Council shows how creative-friendly and alt-friendly it is by… er,
Eugenio Recuenco
30 Dec 2007 at 23:28
David Haden
neu-real, Photographers, Steampunk
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Madame Figaro series, by Eugenio Recuenco; sort of ‘steampunk meets 1793’. He’s obviously very versatile, but a few of his other fashion series also show nu-real influences. Sadly his web-site doesn’t seem to have a section for ‘personal’ work. Courtesy of FotoDecadent: tracking avant-garde fashion photography, a since-2005 LiveJournal blog that regrettably displays no RSS […]
Charlotte Corey
Another nu-real photographer. Charlotte Corey does the ‘put animal heads on Victorian people’ -thing with her series The Visitors. Similar in approach to Andrew Mamo’s 2000 series Are We Not Men?, and the original freak-show carte-de-vistes of the 19th century.
Party like it’s 1985.
Perfect twee-pop for that New Year Party iPod… 1. “She Lives Somewhere In China” (MP3) by The Shop Assistants; courtesy of Fits, who has kindly recorded it from the original 12″ vinyl. and, with slightly less hi-fidelity sound… 2. “I Don’t Want To Be Friends With You.” The Shop Assistants.
Huge in New York
The Landscapist blog has been touring the photography galleries of New York, and comments on the ‘will it match my wallpaper / fill my entire wall’ demand for huge pictures… “my recent trips to Chelsea have provided a constant exposure to a world of photographic prints that are big. Not big-ish, but really BIG. In […]
Unknown Homer Sykes
Unknown Homer Sykes: The English 1968-78.
The British Art of Illustration, 1800-2007
28 Dec 2007 at 21:54
David Haden
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Running until January 5th at the Chris Beetles Gallery in London is The British Art of Illustration, 1800-2007. A thousand pictures (yep!) from collectors are on show. The £30 slab of a catalogue weights in at… “450 pages of academic essays, erudite biographies, full bibliographies and over 700 full colour images … the most comprehensive […]
Czech and Slovak staged photography
An online exhibition of Czech and Slovak staged photography.
Photomontage before photomontage
27 Dec 2007 at 22:44
David Haden
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Soon to be published, the book The Stamp of Fantasy: The Visual Inventiveness of Photographic Postcards, which accompanies an exhibition of historic fantastic postcards, of the same name, at the Swiss Fotomusuem (runs until 10th Feb 08). Below are polished examples from 1911 and 1912, many years before the dada-ists claimed to have ‘invented’ photomontage…
Dave McKean
British comics artist Dave McKean has nu-real images online, from his Small Book of Black and White Lies (1995) book.
Hiroshige
The Observer newspaper reviews the Ikon Gallery’s Hiroshige exhibition. Returning from a festival (1857).
Fox Movies Japan ident
A Fox Movies Japan ident, for the SF/horror channel, strays toward the nu-real ‘levitating’ look, courtesy of Oregon-based nervo.tv…
WordPress fun
EErk! Weird “blank pages all over D’log” problem. Here’s how I cured it, if anyone else has the same problem. My WordPress dashboard was fine, as was the database. I rebuilt the MySQL database tables anyway, just in case (reducing server overhead as a happy by-product). And then I upgraded to WordPress 2.3.1 and a […]
Bicycles cat
To celebrate the safe arrival of my shiny new bicycle today… a new D’log postings category: Bicycles.
“Watching the buses at Hanley bus station”
21 Dec 2007 at 22:54
David Haden
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Yes, indeed; proving Stokies will sell a DVD of anything that moves, on eBay: A great sunny spring day watching the buses at Hanley bus station. For those outside the city of Stoke-on-Trent who don’t know it, Hanley bus station is the main bus depot and probably the ugliest public space in the city centre.
Sq.eee!
My new Asus Eee 4G ultraportable laptop arrived today. It instantly picked up my wireless router, and was onto the net before you could say “boo”. Photo taken with my new Finepix f40fd digicam. It’s the ZX81 I always wanted 🙂
British Council disbands arts units
20 Dec 2007 at 23:20
David Haden
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The latest dismal arts kibosh from Gordon Brown: ‘British Council disbands arts units‘… “The British Council is disbanding its specialist arts departments … . Experts in the council’s departments of film, drama and dance, literature and visual arts are expected to leave the organisation as many see no place for themselves in the new structure.” […]
The new Birmingham Central Library
20 Dec 2007 at 05:05
David Haden
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A scrutiny committee gets its teeth into the plans for a new £193m/opening-2013 Birmingham Central Library, to be built by Capita Symonds… “Birmingham’s £193 million new library will have half the space for exhibitions first envisaged, may have fewer books on offer than at present and will almost certainly be run at reduced staffing levels, […]