It's been too long folks..Too much to cover in a quick post...I'll get to the big picture/long story of the past two years in the coming days...But I wanted to post some new work and and start a few new and focused conversations...
I will be showing the work at Big Medium gallery in Austin,TX in June. Check out the link below...
https://www.facebook.com/events/309563399118205/
To say you "stumble onto an image"...in how many ways, in what circumstances, with what technology have image makers discovered something in the photographic process that was unexpected, yet oddly effective...The serendipity of Bresson, the miraculous in the mundane captured by Muybridge...a print left too long in a chemical bath...resulting in a new ways of thinking about how to approach the medium...
I think it would be a stretch to say I've done anything remotely close to what has come before (in fact, you could question wether I've done anything at all)...but when I stumbled upon these images...they piqued my interest on enough levels to wonder if anyone else would want to have a conversation about what they could mean...
For perspective on where this is coming from..the total amount of digital data in existence now exceeds 45GB per person on the planet...that's actually more data than there exists storage to hold it..
Since the "mainstreaming" of digital photography we now make more than 375 billion images a year..Given that we've made around 3.5 trillion TOTAL photographs in the history of the medium...it means that the majority of all images made have been captured in the past decade...
Why all the numbers? I guess because since I first picked up Canon A1 with a 50mm f1.4 sometime around 1990...I had no idea i'd end up here...and so quickly...You actually need to take a moment, step back and consider, wonder...think.
How many times have you heard me say ..."IT AIN'T IF your hard drive is going to fail..IT'S WHEN!"..what happens to all this data? This flood of zeros and ones that disappears before it even actually exists in any true physical form beyond photons - then electrons and protons...that said...
There's more to this...there are over 30 images in the group... made up of what I estimate to be more than 75 original files- all interlaced together...as I've work backwards trying to reverse engineer the results...I realized the even more intriguing fact that the resulting recovered files are actually readable, editable .CR2 raw files..All technical nerd-dom aside...the next part of this conversation is about what's actually "contained" in these images...stay tuned.
Very cool stuff Ryan. Can't wait to see the show. The amount of photos taken worldwide is staggering. 3.5 Billion per year. Wow. Even more challenging to make them ones images stand out amongst the (digital) noise. Echoing your hard drive comment, I read a story recently of a South African photographer, who photographs black, lesbian lovers, having all her drives and work stolen. No backup.
ReplyDeleteHey Ryan,
ReplyDeleteGreat to see you showing this body of work. I was just talking about it last night during a class on Scientific Photography and Digital Asset Managment that I designed and am teaching to health science grad students! We were talking about backing up and how not all digital corruption is bad! My example was of course your work!
Thought you might like this quote...
One early emulsion maker found that eating an onion for lunch, then adding his urine to the emulsion made a great improvement in sensitivity. (it would be decades until the chemical reason for this would be discovered )
from my blog at:shawndclark.wordpress.com/2012/04/
I look forward to seeing more of your current work and maybe catching up sometime soon.