Travel Photography by HDR

I have been taking photos in multiple exposure and HDR modes for at least a year.  It’s not only about handing over the results to an algorithm.  It was about changing the role of myself as the picture-taker and whomever was on the other end of the lens as the subject.  They resist being known (as if an image could know). I free myself from the presumption of knowing.  How could I anyway?  The speed is recorded.  It’s a failure in so many ways, as traditional photographic content, ethnography, and landscape.  There’s more but I won’t go on.  These are from Ethiopia Jan-Feb 2014.

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Billboards Blank Space

I take pictures of blank or available billboards. Maybe it is boredom. Maybe it is that they occupy an already empty space between here and there. I know that, as ones eye is drawn to advertising when there is little else to look at, I find it a relief when the canvas is empty, when there is nothing there to draw your interest, no matter how slight. There’s some assurance there, that there will always be blankness. These are culled from the last 2 months, so I imagine going back a few years there are many hundreds along the same lines.

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Ganadores! Winners!

The birth of the critic in me … it all started blacking out teeth on supermodels in Redbook or Cosmo or Teen or whatever else my older sister left laying around. It wasn’t just me. All of us eviscerated those magazines, not with words but making hag faces, whiskers, wrinkles and black eyes on the smooth, perfect and unhuman image of ’70s disco beauty. Fuck all that. And who doesn’t love an easy target. Who doesn’t want to take a crap on the elite, and where are the elite more crap-worthy than latin america. Yes, I might run this risk of crossing some boundary on crossing a border, but the brand is more originates in the crass anglo-images of the fair-skinned conquerors, of euro-races, in the notion of purity and that something better is imported from somewhere that miscegenation (supposedly) doesn’t exist. I promise, nest time I’ll challenge myself more. WINNERS16WINNERS05 WINNERS04 WINNERS03 WINNERS02 WINNERS01 WINNERS15 WINNERS14 WINNERS13 WINNERS12 WINNERS11 WINNERS10 WINNERS09 WINNERS08 WINNERS07 WINNERS06

Natural Fences Make Indistinguishable Neighbors

Trees used as fence posts for pastures, barb wire and electrified wires.  absorbed by their hosts, later cut when the land was converted to other uses.  not a moral narrative about the resilience of nature, yet the ability to incorporate, and in such a way that the invader can’t be removed from the host, seems extraordinary, as would be a cyborg, or foreign materials ingested and absorbed by the organs. I think of the lumps of pencil lead in other kids hands, dark spots, absorbed, painless and grotesque. I remember the mental health museum in st. joe missouri and all the sharp metal objects extracted from the guts of obsessed swallowers. why not leave them be, to allow the host to wrap it around their living material. the willingness of organic material to adapt to modification.

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another filthy site