Previously on Skandalon

“Minor Martin White (July 9, 1908 – June 24, 1976) was an American photographer born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. […] After serving in military intelligence during World War II, White moved to New York City in 1945. He spent two years studying aesthetics and art history at Columbia University under Meyer Schapiro and developing his own distinctive style. He became involved with a circle of influential photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams; hearing Stieglitz’s idea of “equivalents” from the master himself was crucial to the direction of White’s mature post-war work.” (wikipedia)

Minor White was John Clendenen favorite photographer when he took up photography.

The Boing Boing post links back to Susannah Breslin’s personal blog which is not very informative. More information can be found about this phenomenon under the term “haul video”, “haul videos”, “mall haul” or “makeup haul”:

“Haul videos are the democratization of the home shopping network. They typically feature teen girls just back from the mall, shopping bag in hand, gushing over their purchases (or “haul”) to their webcam to be uploaded to YouTube for the world to see. […]A search for Haul at YouTube returns 105,000 videos. A spot check reveals that surprisingly few of these videos are for U-Haul or another unrelated topic. What more could a retailer ask for that enthusiastic, peer-to-peer endorsements of their shopping experiences? Retailers should be cultivating if not deliberately encouraging the creation of these videos.” (read more over at David Erikson’s blog)

Have the consumer buy form you, have the consumer work for you:

“On YouTube, there are a new set of viral videos called “Haul” videos. These are videos posted by everyday people talking about the stuff they bought on their most recent shopping spree. Some name each items with cost, some are just showing off the items they bought. Some people are showing off how much they saved. There are a few videos that get more then 200,000 viewers them. This could be a treasure trove for local businesses.” (A Guide to Haul Viral Videos)

A “haul” is a cargo. Thus “haul vloggers” could be understand as human carriers, loaded with objects, speaking about those things (or literaly through them, as in the screen capture above), existentialy concerned by all this equipment. Now two things about that :

1) In its general form, it’s not a new phenomenon. Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption” back in 1899 in his book The Theory of the Leisure Classe. Veblen was a major inspiration for Baudrillard’s The Consumer Society (1970);

2) It will be a mistake to associate this phenomenon strictly with teen girls. We all brag to a certain degree about what we buy, may it be books, DVDs, CDs, tools, wine, etc. We may not do it in front of a camera, but we speak about it, we post about it, we tell friends about it (Marco Arment, the lead developer of Tumblr, is currently buying a new BMW). That may be why some are thinking Blippy ―a kind of Twitter where you post about items you just bought― could become the next big thing (it launched last December).

Artist statement:

“These photographs of albatross chicks were made on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, none of the plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the untouched stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.”

To learn more, visit Chris Jordan official website.

“Vik Muniz (born 1961) is a Brazilian born, New York based artist who experiments with media. […] In his picture of Sigmund Freud, he uses chocolate to render the image. For his Sugar Children series, Muniz went to a sugar plantation in St. Kitts to photograph children of laborers who work there. After he returned to New York, he bought some black paper and several kinds of sugar, and copied the snapshots of the children by layering the different types of sugar on the paper and photographing it. He made the images from the sugar at the plantation.” (Wikipedia)

Watch a TEDTalk video by Vik Muniz

About the Wikipedia Knowledge Dump:

“From the bold to the beautiful, from the wicked to the wise, every day the Wikipedia team relegates possibly “inappropriate” submissions to the garbage dump of time. Here, we make selected “potential” rejects immortal and preserve them for posterity. (All of these entries have been nominated for deletion at the time of posting.)”

The site is edited by Cliff Pickover. According to himself, he’s “a prolific author and futurist, having published more than 40 books, translated into over a dozen languages. Exploring topics ranging from computers and creativity to art, mathematics, parallel universes, Einstein, time travel, alien life, religion, dimethyltryptamine elves, and the nature of human genius” (Official website). He’s the author of such books as Sex, Drugs, Einstein, and Elves (2005) and Jews in Hyperspace.

Here’s what you may find while browsing this knowledge dumpster:

• A list of Celebrity Laser Eye Patients
• An article on drunk blogging
• A list of songs about hair
• A list of fictional worms
• An article about the difficulty of having sexual intercourse with a mermaid
• A list of bands beginning with the word “lemon”
• An article about The Chickenology Encyclopedia : a compilation of answers to the question “Why did the chicken cross the road?”
• A list of notable moustaches in art and fiction
• An article about the sexuality of Abraham Lincoln
• An article about human cheese
• A list of Homer Simpson’s lifelong dreams
• Last but not least, let’s not forget the list of people who died in the bathroom.

Discovered via Doctorak, GO!

Artist’s statement: “In this series, Eric Rondepierre began to make systematic use of film archives. Working in American archives, the artist systematically viewed fragments of anonymous silent movies that had been corroded by the effects of time, damp and poor storage. He photographed the resulting anomalies (erasures, deformations, blotches). Scènes comprises 18 pieces and shows characters in action.” (Read more)

Previously on Skandalon.

Artist’s statement: “India has become one of the world’s largest dumping grounds for e—waste. E-waste is highly toxic. It contains lead, cadmium, mercury, tin, gold, copper, PVC and brominated, chlorinated and phosphorus based flame retardants. Many of these heavy metals and contaminants are extremely harmful to humans as well as to animals and plants.” (Read more).

About Sophie Gerrard: “Sophie Gerrard was born in Edinburgh in 1978. She gained an Environmental Sciences Bachelors degree from Manchester University in 1999 and, after working for a time as an environmental consultant, returned to Edinburgh to study photography at Edinburgh College of Art. Her interest in documenting environmental issues lead to a Masters degree in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography from London College of Communication in 2006.

Sophie currently works as a freelance documentary photographer in London specialising in environmental and social issues. In 2007 her series “E-wasteland” won a Jerwood Photography Award and was selected as a UK winner by The Magenta Foundation. Sophie’s work has been exhibited at Flowers East in London and with The Photographers’ Gallery at Paris Photo, Sophie is currently representetd by The Photographers’ Gallery in London.” (More)

See also Danwen Xing’s disCONNEXION series.

Artist’s statement: “This series of thirty pieces continues the procedure of the Précis de décomposition. Again, these are images that have become corroded over time. The frames come from colorized films in the Montreal archives. The choice centres on the body and intimacy, and the “justified” titles relate directly to the image.”

Previously on Skandalon.

About Greg Ruffing: “Greg Ruffing is a Midwest-based photographer available for assignments anywhere. His images have appeared in a wide range of publications including Newsweek, Time, U.S. News & World Report, New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Stern, Der Spiegel, Spin, Rolling Stone, Reader’s Digest, Forbes and Fortune.” Check Ruffing’s blog.

Artist’s statement: “The artist began to notice totally black images within certain films, images that were invisible in normal conditions of perception. He spent years systematically sampling them from subtitled foreign-language films, photographing images directly on the television screen by using the slo-mo and freeze-frame buttons on his VCR. To date, his Excédents series comprises some fifteen black images, constituted by three subsets: cross sections (an integral part of the film), inserts (intertitle cards in silent films) and the actual Excédents as such, which are black shots grafted onto the film for no apparent reason.” (More).

About Éric Rondepierre: “In the early 1990s Eric Rondepierre started exploring the blind spots of cinema. His intervention consisted in choosing frames (the images that are projected at a rate of 24 per second on the screen, and that are invisible in a normal screening) in accordance with clearly defined criteria, and then excerpting them and showing them as large-format photographic prints. This economy of the image, which is often defined as “conceptual,” brings into play several different registers (text, painting, cinema, photography) with a rigour that does not exclude strangeness or humour.”(Read his biography).