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Based in New York City.

Links: Wishing I Had A/C

Image © Jonathan Haeber.

Optical illusions, or perceptual illusions? According to the NYT, many of these tricks are due to our brain’s need to predict the future in order to process the present. Deep. (Story here and here.)
Courtroom sketches from the 9/11 co-conspirator trials in Guantánamo.
Snowdon is an example of the type of […]

“Looking Through the Lens” at the BMA

“Looking Through the Lens” is a show that succeeds even as it fails. The exhibition, which closes Sunday, is the Baltimore Museum of Art’s first major, long-term photographic survey, covering roughly the first half of the twentieth century.
Any survey of this kind should be understood primarily as an educational tool. There’s no radical […]

Links: Happy June

Image © Rafal Milach.

Great photo selections from FotoGrafia and World Press Photo 2008 over at We Make Money Not Art.
How to make three-dimensional animals from print advertising. Or virtual three-dimensional animals, anyway.
Paul Fusco describes the happy accident that became RFK Funeral Train.
Tattoos and the NBA: “At one time, people got tattoos to be different, […]

The “Click!” Submission Pool

This week the judging period for “Click!”–the crowd-curated exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum–closed. I evaluated roughly 250 of the almost 400 photographs online. It was really a mixed bag; every twenty photos or so, there was an image that really popped out from the rest. Whether we’ll end up seeing all those […]

Links: Inventions

The NYT ran a good profile of the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto, inventor of Nintendo-as-we-know-it. Most interesting fact from the article: Miyamoto, who may be best known for his signature characters (Mario, Zelda, etc.), considers characters an afterthought in his creative procedure. He prioritizes gameplay, and thinks that people fall in love with his […]

Links: Heard Around the Web

Since a common way of bashing certain forms of art is to point out that they emphasize style over content, it’s no big surprise that scientists now think people prioritize content over style when seeing art for the first time. It may also help explain why people have a hard time enjoying the style […]

Links: The 19th C. Is In

The New York Times reports on Paul St. George’s faux Victorian invention, a “tunnel” that connects New York to London so that citizens of these two great cities can communicate with each other. There’s no sound, however, so waves, signing, and written messages will have to do. The five year-old in me is […]

NYPH: Blog Reactions

It looks like I’m not the only one who was made a little queasy by Tim Barber’s “Various Photographs.” Others include Robert Wright, who also felt the depressing implications of authorlessness in the show, and Jörg Colberg, who was simply disgusted. (According to Wright, even Barber shrugged off responsibility for the thing.)
While I […]

The Inaugural New York Photo Festival

For those of you hitting up the inaugural New York Photo Festival this weekend, I’ve done a quick run-through and picked out favorites among the exhibits. Unfortunately, I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked–I had to catch a train down south, so I only had about 2.5 hours there. […]

Lee Friedlander: “A Ramble Through Olmstead Parks”

A few weeks ago, I stopped by the Met to check out their “Photography On Photography” show. While it was fine, I was more impressed with another show that I stumbled into while I was there: Lee Friedlander’s Olmstead Park commissions. The Times review that appeared in January was mildly interesting (especially the […]