Archive for February, 2008

February 19th, 2008 melbourne pt 1

far too lazy past midnight to put up the larger versions like i usually do…

February 12th, 2008 sorry

February 10th, 2008 i’m jetlagged

in melbourne, there is platform, also known as the sticky institute, underneath the street, before the entrance of the subway. it would be really great to be able to saunter in occasionally and buy new zines off the shelf, flick through pages of photocopied text, and use the button machines or the assistance available. back in perth i browse catalogues of zines online from distros, and hope the contents are as good as they sound from the descriptions before they arrive in my letterbox a couple of weeks later. a dedicated shop for zines seems like a dream.

by the way, i dropped off a few copies of llp #5 while i was there, so if you’re quick, you can buy a copy off the shelf too! (i think it was on the right hand shelves)

in other excursions i also worked on the principle of immediate availability. such as when i spent a hundred and eighty nine dollars on two photobooks at the national gallery of victoria shop. one being the yoshitomo nara “the good, the bad, the average… and unique” - his pictures are just as interesting as his paintings. to make a bad cross comparison, how about the snapshot aesthetic of hiromix with the world travelling tendencies of ningawa mika? common subjects are cats, children and strange objects found by the wayside.

as for furuya seichii’s ‘alive’… i was originally introduced to his work while browsing the university shelves for books on photography, and found the black spine of memoires… but at times i wish i had not read this scathing article about the person himself. i am conflicted about his works - he would not be famous if it were not for the death of his wife, the subject of memoires, and the pictures of which are dragged up again and again in a timeline of life, death and life after death.

the photographs in alive are not linear at all, but one hardly expects a collection of photographs to be so, where the meaning of the sequence should only be known to the photographer. so i don’t really care for the afterword which attempts to explain this away.

let the pictures speak for themselves, even if the photographer is seen as somewhat of an asshole.

(hello minolta tc-1!)