Fixing Stuff, Repairing the World

Alice Rawsthorn talks about the “art of repair” in her review of the Tokyo exhibit Fab Mind.

As odd as it is to see an exquisite 17th-century Japanese bowl in a contemporary design exhibition, it seems odder still to discover that it is there not because of the finesse with which it was originally made, but the skill with which it was repaired during the late 1800s.

Tsukuroi, or the art of repair, is so revered in Japan that it is believed to create a new form of beauty, as the bowl demonstrates. In “The Fab Mind: Hints of the Future in a Shifting World,” an exhibition here, the bowl acts as a prelude to a display of work by the Fixperts. This international network of contemporary designers and makers experiments with recently developed digital tools and ancient craft techniques to customize new objects and repair damaged ones, just as the artisan who fixed the broken bowl did so deftly over a century ago.

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Through a Lens Sharply

Dominque Browning says she was late to fall in love with photography.

That’s why people take their own pictures when they travel. But I never did — I was intimidated by the equipment — and now it is one of my life’s regrets. Then, a couple of years ago, a friend stuck a camera in my hands, and told me to lose my fear. Today, I cannot leave my house without my simple, no-nonsense Canon point-and-shoot, small enough to fit in an evening bag. And I cannot begin to count the ways in which this little miracle of memory has changed the way I travel.

 

 

The Big Picture Strikes Back

A.O. Scott wonders how video convergence is impacting film’s distinctiveness from TV and other video media.

Equally hard to refute is the idea that we are approaching a horizon of video convergence, in which all those screens will be equal and interchangeable and the distinctions between the stuff that’s shown on each one won’t seem as consequential as it does now. We still tend to take for granted that a cable drama, a network sitcom, a feature film, a web video and a first-person combat game are fundamentally different creatures, but they might really be diverse species within a single genus, their variations ultimately less important than what they have in common. They are all moving pictures, after all, and as our means of access to them proliferate and recombine, those old categories are likely to feel increasingly arbitrary and obsolete. The infrastructure of a multiplatform future is before us, and resistance to it can look like an especially tiresome kind of sentimentality. Cinephilia is nostalgia. We might keep going to the movies out of habit, or because it’s sometimes nice to leave the house, but we are losing the old, sustaining belief that this is a special and exalted cultural activity, the supreme mode of participation in the popular arts.

Thomas Hawk Ditches Getty Images

Photographer Thomas Hawk explains why he is leaving Getty Images to join Stocksy, the photographer co-op.

I don’t care how you look at it, for me, 20% is not fair. It’s too low. I’ve been complaining about it for years, but have just grumbled along because Getty felt like the only game in town for stock photo sales.

Artists and photographers deserve more than 20% payouts. I understand that Getty has the buyers, that Getty is the 800 pound gorilla, but still, photographers deserve a better split than 80/20 against them.

There are other reasons why I’m quitting Getty Images too, though.

How do you pack your bag for a seven-year, 22,000-mile international reporting assignment?

Paul Salopek is starting Out of Eden, a seven-year narrative trek “that anthropologists believe was the first path humans took out of Africa to populate the rest of the world,” says Nieman Lab.

But what will likely make the journey more immersive is the multimedia component. Using his video and audio equipment, Salopek said he wants to create a kind of continuous portrait of the world at this point in time. “I’m calling it a narrative transect: Every 100 miles, I’ll methodically take a series of narrative readings that do not vary along the path of the walk,” he said. The plan, as he envisions it, is to stop to take six samples: Ambient sound, photos of the earth and sky, a panorama of his current location, a minute or so of video, and an interview, all in the same method in each location. He sees it as almost a scientific approach, one that can show the changes and similarities in terrain, but also culture and people. And while these transects will make for good multimedia, Salopek said their real value will be as an archive of what the world looked like from 2013 to 2019.

“By the end of seven years, I’ll have created an enduring portrait of a storytelling transect around the world at the end of the millennium,” he said.

 

Street Life through the Nanny’s Eyes

Is Vivian Maier the Emily Dickinson of photography? The New York Times in a slideshow of prints from her previously undeveloped rolls says:

Even to those who knew her, Vivian Maier was a cipher. To the children she took care of on Chicago’s wealthy North Shore, she was Mary Poppins, if Mary Poppins carried an old Rolleiflex. To the amateur historian who unearthed thousands of negatives at an auction in Chicago in 2007, she was a revelation: an undiscovered Diane Arbus, whose work captured the grit and elegance of city life.

Distant Reading

Kathryn Schulz’s New York Times Book Review essay on distant reading has interesting thoughts on how technology can help us understand the greater body of literature.

We need distant reading, Moretti argues, because its opposite, close reading, can’t uncover the true scope and nature of literature. Let’s say you pick up a copy of “Jude the Obscure,” become obsessed with Victorian fiction and somehow manage to make your way through all 200-odd books generally considered part of that canon. Moretti would say: So what? As many as 60,000 other novels were published in 19th-century England — to mention nothing of other times and places. You might know your George Eliot from your George Meredith, but you won’t have learned anything meaningful about literature, because your sample size is absurdly small. Since no feasible amount of reading can fix that, what’s called for is a change not in scale but in strategy. To understand literature, Moretti argues, we must stop reading books.

But distant reading misses the point on how and why people enjoy the literary experience: curling up with a good book; being transported to another realm.

Takeshi Shikama (WSJ)

In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, William Meyers briefly reviews Takeshi Shikama‘s exhibition at Alan Klotz Gallery.

Mr. Shikama is a resident of Tokyo who built with his own hands a mountain lodge in a forest with trees he felled. For the past decade, he has sought refuge there to commune with and to photograph nature. Most of these dark, haunted images of trees, woods, fields and flowers are exquisitely printed on 11-by-14-inch hand-coated platinum palladium Gampi paper. The thin, ecru paper is also handmade, and so transparent the images seem to float. Some, like “Mt. Kuromori 6” (2006), show a dense forest, and some, like “Landscape 18” (2009), a lone tree. “Landscape 3” (2009) shows just the shadows of trees. In the “Lotus” series, Mr. Shikama presents this culturally important plant in several aspects; sometimes the flower in different stages, sometimes the leaves, sometimes just the stalks, but always with reverential delicacy.

Coveting the Fujifilm FinePix X100

As much as I have given in to digital photography, there is still a lot about the analog world that I love. Film and its acrid chemicals. I meet them halfway by processing film traditionally and scanning them digitally. On my cameras, I still like knobs and dials better than buttons and on-screen menus. Fuji seems to understand those of us who like to fiddle with camera dials. We do not know yet how well the Fuji FinePix X100 will shoot, but the initial specs already have me coveting one.

* The camera will have both an LCD screen and a hybrid optical / electronic viewfinder. Maybe I am old fashioned, but I like having the option of using a viewfinder.

* Topside, analog style control dials for shutter speed control.

* The fixed lens opens to f2.

* The style is a throwback to the classic rangefinder in size and looks.

Paul Fierlinger on Paperless Animation

Animator / filmmaker Paul Fierlinger on why he has made the move to digital (paperless technology).

Paperless technology cuts away the accumulation of physical tasks associated with the handling of paper down to zero.

That’s a lot of saved time! When you think of all the tasks associated with the handling of paper, when you have to unwrap a bundle, punch holes into every single sheet, which you pick up first on your right and lay down on your left, carry the bundle over to your desk, pick each sheet up on your left and after drawing, erasing, flipping cussing and throwing a few sheets into a wastebasket you lay the good ones down on your right. All along you have to carefully number each sheet and record the numbers into your exposure sheet. There’s a lot of erasing and cussing involved in this task too.

You have to gather the finished drawings, carry them over to your copy machine and cuss and sigh as you slowly feed each sheet through the machine which is connected to your computer. This involves the lifting and laying down of the cover – twice per sheet no less – and after you’re done with that, you still have to empty the wastebasket, wipe the eraser crumbs off your desk and pat attention to this: you haven’t seen a single second of your work run before your eyes, connected to your brain, in real time! I mention the brain because you have learned very little from all that work.

This unproductive handling of paper surely takes up more time per drawing than it takes to put a drawing on that sheet of paper. Without the benefit of instant replay and the real time scrubbing that paperless work affords you, your acting and drawing skills improve very, very slowly. When I look back at my old films I see only small improvements from one to another but when I compare each paperlessly drawn film from one to the next I can see huge leaps of improvements. And that’s the answer to your question how to get money for a feature film – you get it only after you make a few good films. It took me fifty years before anyone would trust me with decent funds for a theatrical feature. You younger people have all this paperless technology available to you and so many of you are wasting precious years of your short lives by still drawing on paper. I don’t get it.