MELISSALAND

I have been going through and scanning Robert Flynt’s photographs all morning and I am falling in love with so many of them. $900 a piece for these unique chromogenic photographs. Christmas is coming….that’s all I’m sayin

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Absolutely beautiful. (and, I have no idea who did them - found here)

My first curatorial efforts at the new gallery – hope everyone might be able to make it to the opening – Saturday November 29 from 6 to 8pm. Formal invites in the mail soon!

Photo by: Vincent Laforet, Grand Central Station

The inaugural exhibition at Carrie Haddad Photographs borrows its title from The Postal Services’ song, Such Great Heights. The song romantically proclaims that, “everything looks perfect from far away” and the six photographers featured in this show explore a world seen from this same spectacular vantage point. Whether they attempt to transmit a narrative or not, they radiate a sense of great magnitude; the world appears immense and yet wholly intimate and personal. Standing on the edge of the photograph, the viewer feels fierce and full of possibility. The unbounded horizon has always stood as metaphor for the limitless nature of personal experience, inviting explorers and wanderers betokened by the grandeur of the expansive landscape.

The song, Such Great Heights, speaks of an idyllic euphoria, a dizzying love affair, always aggressive, leaving you on a peak you are reluctant to depart: “They will see us waving from such great heights/ ‘come down now,’ they’ll say / But everything looks perfect from far away, / ‘come down now,’ but we’ll stay…” . The photographs included in this exhibition share this same intoxication.

In his essay, ”Truth and Landscape” Robert Adams states that landscape art is important because it can meet our need to experience the world as comprehensible: ”We rely, I think, on landscape photography to make intelligible to us what we already know. It is the fitness of a landscape to one’s experience of life’s condition and possibilities that finally makes a scene important or not.”

Photo by: John Griebsch

John Griebsch photographs of American aerial landscapes depict the pattern, color and design of natural and manmade landforms. Most of the aerials have been made from Griebsch’s vintage 1952 Cessna 170B aircraft. He explains, “I find the need to make geographical sense of the earth, as well as the need to make visual sense of a photograph. I work with ambiguity of scale, and the strong graphic quality of nature, and the hand of man on nature. These characteristics have motivated my work from the time I started flying and photographing as a teenager.”

Photo by: Jefferson Hayman

Photographer Jefferson Hayman’s New York City sky is punctuated by a lone dirigible or airship floating, dreamlike, almost as if pulled from some noir film. Hayman says, “I tell all of my friends in NYC, whenever you see one, call my cell phone and tell me where it is. I then go find it and wait for it to fly into a proper composition, and hopefully I get the shot. I sometimes try to sound intelligent and liken this process to Ahab chasing the great whale.”

There is a certain romance and adventure around airships and Hayman’s photographs evoke a nostalgic journey to an obscure and imperceptible time period. Inside his world, the viewer dreamily contemplates the comfort and resonance of the images which induce inexplicable moments of déjà vu. The frames that Hayman creates are almost as important as the images they contain and are either period or reflect the designs of the early 20th century & late 19th century American aesthetic.

Photo by: Kahn & Selesnick (click for larger image)

Photographers, Kahn & Selesnick have been collaborating to produce multi-layered exhibitions for the past 20 years, and their most recent project Eisbergfreistadt, tells the story of the post-World War I Baltic port town of Lubeck, which was struck by a monumental iceberg in 1923. Townspeople imagined the eventual flooding, thought it was a sign of the apocalypse, and created Eisbergfreistadt, an “Iceberg Free State.” In their signature style, Kahn and Selesnick tell their story by blending together fact and fiction in masterfully staged photographs. Two large works (7 feet long by 1 foot wide) will be on view. Their odd proportions, coupled with such fantastical imagery, make for larger than life dioramas of fictional horizons.

Photo by: Vincent Laforet

Vincent Laforet, a New York based commercial and editorial photographer, previously recognized for his striking aerial shots, has been trying out a new technique utilizing tilt-shift lenses. A tilt-shift lens allows the photographer very exacting control over the depth-of-field in an image, much more than any regular lens could provide. Focus can be restricted to a single, narrow band, with everything else rapidly blurring away. This distorts the appearance and makes the eye think that distances are far smaller than they typically are. When applied to a large scene like a city or a museum, everything appears miniature.

Bathtub II from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Also employing this same approach, but this time in motion, is Australian photographer Keith Loutit. His recent videos featuring the Sydney Harbor and its environs have garnered much interest through such websites as Vimeo, and YouTube. Loutit says, “By combining tilt-shift & time-lapse photography I help audiences to distance themselves from subjects they know well. My goal is to present ordinary subjects, which once treated by this technique become more curious. My process combines thousands of photographic stills into short films that each last less than 3 minutes.” On exhibit will be both Loutit’s video works and still photographs.

Carrie Haddad Photographs is located at 318 Warren Street in Hudson, NY.  For more information please call the gallery at 518-828-7655 or email melissa.stafford@carriehaddadgallery.com (please note: the gallery does NOT officially open until the 29th of November)

I want a Canon EOS 5D Mark II Digital SLR.

1080 30P using the latest H264 video codec at a data rate of over 38 megabits / second.  That’s pretty hot.  The recording rate on this thing is faster than on some pro video cameras.  Actually, I’ve lied - that is not all I want for Christmas — I want that camera, and a few weeks of free time to be able to play with it. And a brand new Mac workstation 

Photographer Vincent Laforet (who I am pleased to announce will be in the upcoming exhibit I am curating, Such Great Heights) got a weekend to play with the new EOS 5D and made a small high-def commercial “Reverie” (this has been blogged and talked about a million times over by now, but fun to check out if you have not seen it yet)  The ‘making of video’ is up over at SmugMug and it makes me incredibly jealous.

The computers only make me tingle.

Here is a short video taken of Vincent talking with PDN products editor Dan Havlik about his weekend experience with the new Canon camera

For just under $4,000, one can now create high-quality short videos. My head is swimming with all the delicious possibilities…..

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless. - From “The Sheltering Sky” by Paul Bowles

(The beautiful photo above is by Stuart Franklin)

The beautiful Laura Dawn as captured by Barry Butterfield during her performance Saturday night in Hudson. What a great, great photo.

“We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience - even of silence - by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting.

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.”
- Annie Dillard

Photo: Boys Falling by Mary Frey

I’m the sun and you’re the moon

The little boy standing on the left is my grandfather (more affectionately known as ‘Pa’).

Tonight I came across these photographs I stole borrowed from him the last time I visited. I have now finally gotten around to scanning some of them. Such a dapper family! (but I suppose it was hard not to be dapper back in those days. My oh my, I was born in the wrong era…..I would have had a BLAST as a flapper back in those days!)

I get so excited to go through old photographs and letters, to hear the stories about our family. This is my grandfather’s family on my mother’s side, The Wilson’s. All that is left is my grandfather Jack, and his younger brother Mason (who is being held by my great-grandfather in the portrait above) - I never got a chance to meet his parents, my great grandparents - but I am named after his mother - Melissa Margaret, whom my mother adored.

Here is my grandfather all shined up for his first communion.  I am absolutely loving the outfit!

And here he is on the left with his sister Joyce and my great-grandmother Margaret in Saratoga 77 years ago. Crazy.

More family treasures to come soon!………..

In the meantime - some tunes reminiscent of the time period:

Sweet Salvation by Bernadette Seacrest And Her Yes Men

Love Haunting by Muzykoterapia

Crime in the pale moonlight (short version) by Flanger

(click on all photos for a larger image)