Fauna, Flora and Geometrical Shapes in Benin

Taking Photographs in Museums (a published thesis)

In 2010 le Musée d'Orsay in Paris banned photography-taking by visitors. Targeted at visitors, French intellectuals seemed to be the most affected by this new regulation: what about the museum's mission? Didn't the collections belong to all of us? Was this to increase postcard revenues? Outraged academic blogs were uploaded, photographing mobs entered the Musée in protest and articles nervously written, but the ban is still in place and visitors continue to stretch their arms in front of Monets to photograph lily pads. Museum visits, like any 'special' event (see below the image of St Peter's Square during the Pope's election), have become fascinating instances to observe how living the experience is increasingly cohabiting with its own mediation. 

La Documentation française's recent publication Les visiteurs photographes au musée ponders about this evolution from a legal as well as anthropological and technological perspective. The "problem" isn't new. Wanting to reproduce special artifacts (like art works) is decades old (think cave-paintings and hunted animals, Roman sculptures and emperors, royal painters and kings, daguerreotypes and dead children), but till quite recently this was mostly reserved to elites and limited in production. Today, as cameras become smaller, better at capturing light in dim spaces and drastically cheaper, photography-making is a practice available to practically anyone above the age of four with a smartphone-owning parent. In the book, the editors Serge Chaumier, Ann Krebs and Mélanie Roustan brought together a multi-disciplinary bunch of researchers to think about questions like: what are the laws in place to restrict museum photographers? What are these regulations' foundations? What are the strategies museums engage in to encourage or use this growing practice? And obviously why are visitors taking photographs in the first place? 

Back in 2008 I wrote my Masters thesis about why people take photographs of the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum (this has become a chapter in their book). The iphone was a few months old back then, and things have changed a whole lot since, but overall the roots of why we archive visually have not radically shifted. Through photographs we reassure ourselves that we wouldn't forget, we commodify objects or situations that may feel overwhelming, we curate ourselves for others, we gather evocative material to socialize with others, etc. What evolutions in technology have, in fact, done is affected the experience of the now, and hence the museum experience itself... What the book makes clear is that what is at stake here is finding a way to insure that the museum's mission is fulfilled with the museum's reality taken into account.

[In a similar vein I came across this video recently. It makes a good case for street fashion photography's arguable existential crisis: too many street photographers taking too many street photographs is killing the authenticity of the genre, and of the street, and of the fashion, and of the street fashion, and of all its players... argh, existential angst, where has authenticity gone?]

TAKE MY PICTURE from GARAGE Magazine on Vimeo.

The colour of the past

Toutes proviennent de paris1914 où on retrouve des photographies couleurs du début du 20ème de Paris et ses environs. [Remarquons les chevaux sur les quais de Seine.]

Quai de Seine, Paris, Sans date

Jardin des Invalides, VII° Arrondissement Paris, 1909

Le départ du dirigeable Zodiac III, Bétheny, 28 Août 1909

Montreal: Pigeons Everywhere

Phillips Square, Montreal, 1960s

Dominion Square, Montreal, Québec, Canada, ca. 1950. From CSTMC/CN Collection.  

Everyone's Watching

Shibuya, Tokyo (Japan), 2012
Les Archives Nationales, Paris (France), 2010
Pelourinho, Salvador de Bahia (Brazil), 2011
Imperial Palace, Kyoto (Japan), 2012

HistoryPin: Giving Google Street View a Human Soul and Sense of Humour?

Fixing Playmates and the Birth of Viagra

December 1992's playmate, aka Barbara Moore, is on sale for an estimated 1,500 - 2,500$. Among the many lots, the centerfold prints showing post-production comments on the Playmates' sexy poses seem like the most interesting pieces being auctioned off at Christie's December 8th "The Year of The Bunny: The Playboy Collection" sale.

While unsurprisingly most of the Playboy memorabilia for sale offer a pleasant array of cookie cutter sexuality and generic eroticism (in this case: here's Barbara about to make you a creamy smoothie) these footnoted photographs offer powerful cues  for a better sex-life. Women, own up to it:
- "better curve" (Dec 1992 Playmate)
- "smoother" (All Playmates)
- "slimmer here slightly" (Feb 2001 Playmate)
- "accentuate nipples" (Feb 2001 Playmate)
- "kill nipple" (Jan 1995 Playmate)
- "kill stretch-marks" (Nov 1996 Playmate)
- "diminish stubble" (Nov 1996 Playmate)
- "kill out veins" (March 1996 Playmate)
- "fill with similar skin" (August 1995 Playmate)
- "kill line bellow lip" (August 1995 Playmate)

And how did the pharmaceutical industry come up with Viagra?

Curating: Within Which All Things Exist and Move

I curated an exhibit opening at Art45. Although it opens saturday, the closing party is where things will be at: October 3rd with Pop Montreal, the artists and the catalog launch. Here's the press release:

Curated by Chloé Roubert, this exhibition juxtaposes images from Jon Rafman's Google Street View series with photographic urban shots from the 1950s onwards by Gabor Szilasi. By comparing these artistic approaches to past and current public space, the exhibit touches upon ideas of urban visuality, privacy and authorship.

Rafman will be in the forthcoming exhibit Free at the New Museum in NYC, and Szilasi is a recipient of the Governor General award whose retrospective was held at the National Gallery of Canada in 2009.

The Closing Party with catalogue launch and artists present is organized in collaboration with Art Pop of Pop Montreal, on Sunday October 3rd from 3pm to 5pm.

Art45 is open Fridays and Saturdays from noon to 5pm, or on weekdays by appointment.

Art45 - Edifice Belgo Building
372 St Catherine W. #220
Montreal, Québec
art@art45.ca

A recent example of an anti-modern twist to LaTour's 'quasi object', or Why does the Hipstamatic iphone application exist?

Compare and Contrast: France from Hondarribia in Spain

I was in the Pays Basque for a couple days and finally discovered the what behind the uploading of 'hipstamatic' images on facebook (which is mostly a French phenomenon). These images are slightly fuzzy and sporadically covered with clearer dots. They are also darker around the frame and their colours are warmer than the reality they capture. Another distinguishable feature is the varying result - so the size of the shadow near the edges is different from one photo to another,- and the beige film paper of a Polaroid that frames all the photographs.

Interestingly it isn't only the aesthetic of the image that recall the photos of the past but also the act itself. So unlike all the recent digital photographing processes, there is a lapse of time between when the photo is taken and when the final photo is visible - a lapse of time or process called 'development' - and a definite unclarity of what you are actually photographing since the frame of the hipstamatic camera is reduced to a few centimeters while the final image captures a much larger reality.

The original Hipstamatic was created in 1982 and was the result of a merge between the Kodak Instamatic and the desire to make a cheap and practical camera by two Americans called Bruce and Winston Dorbowski: "It doesn't matter if the photos aren't prefect -- as long as people are capturing memories I will be happy." And basically the iphone App is quite successfully trying to recapture that imperfect image quality and process.

But why?

In 1993 the French theorist Bruno LaTour articulated the idea of 'quasi-objects' or things that can create multiple times and diffuse conceits of a predictable ontological order. In other words the hipstamatic iphone app is jumble of multiple time periods (both of 2010 and the 1980s) or a combination of anachronistic artifacts. It's a retro aesthetic and a ultra-modern device. And in many ways this can be paralleled to other contemporary lifestyle choices that are often coined anti-modern: "DIY labor, recycling, thrifting, urban gardening, sewing while simultaneously seizing individual control over mystified technologies such as computers, the internet, digital recording, medicine, and even water purification and food production and consumption. This is sustainability with an attitude and an aesthetic" (Lee Dawdy June 20th 2010).

The grass always looks greener in the other photo reportage: the example of Hobo Magazine

The Palais de Tokyo bookstore has probably one of the best selection of magazines to discover in the city. Yesterday I was going through the latest edition of Hobo Magazine. It's a very glossy, quite fancy yet hipsterièsque multidisciplinary magazine covering stardom, art, travel, etc. This month two photographic stories were strikingly comparable: one of everyday scenes in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont in Paris and another somewhere on the Californian Coast with dashing sunlight and seascapes.

In my opinion none of the two were particularly remarkable in originality, both reflecting the current style of naïve Vice reportage meets a 70s photographic medium. However what was interesting is the instinctual reaction both my friend (living in the 19th) and I had to the Parisian photos - utterly uninteresting, rather banal and definitely not capturing the parc's people, space and overall identity within the makeup of the city. But without that power of critic we just absorbed the Californian images as truth - the sun looks amazing, the cliffs breath-taking, etc... and without the power to fathom how much we were missing and how much was constructed we simply cruised through the pages.