The Bartender Never Gets Killed

Bearing in mind I don’t shoot things that move very often. I thought I’d have a go at reshooting the pic from my last post.

So I went to the same bar, sat in the same stool, had the same mix of beer, tapas and coffee, and tried a reshoot, but even then…

Ever had one of those days?

There was a huge storm last night, so I didn’t sleep much.

I accidentally deleted some pics. ‘No problem’ I thought, restore from the backup disk… except one folder hadn’t been saved to the backup disk. ‘No problem, restore from the weekly system backup..’ only that file was corrupt on the backup.

O.K time to reach for the trusty recovery utility only to find I’d been tramping all over the data with hobnail boots on and couldn’t get anything to recover.

So, this pic is now totally postmodern, it exists only as a virtual copy of itself… bastard…

Ed Nixon is making triptychs!!! Nice shot Ed.

Click image for larger version…

Click image for large version…

Click image for large version…

I had someone say to me recently after viewing some new work ‘… you have forgotten your duty as an artist to make your work accessible…’

Check out this post by one of my favourite photogs .

Click the image for a large version…

I had an intense discussion last night with someone over the ‘Exotic’ series. They come from the ‘art’ side of the tracks, with no real awareness of the photographic tradition. He really liked the trips, he’s even going to be buying a big print of one, but he expressed disapointment with the latest work. His main criticism was that it lacked the impact of the trips, and that the individual images ‘disappeared’ as I didn’t allow the images to connect formally.

Now that is exactly a design feature, not a flaw.

The task I set myself was this…

1. How do you present a series on a wall that allows individual images to be ‘read’ in the same way as you can read images in a book.
2. How can you present the images so that each component image is complete in and of itself, whilst allowing the connections between the individual parts be relationships of content, without allowing the possibility of the strong graphical connections that were such an inherent feature of the trip project.

In 1. I’m thinking specifically of the wonderful books produced by Silvia Plachy. I really must do a post about her. But the strength of her books is the way you flip back and forth seeing thematic connections between pictures. I can’t imagine that these would work well as individual images on a wall.

The ‘Exotic’ project is about categories of ‘things’ . The almost square format was eventually chosen to give almost equal weight to each element, and that, unlike a linear reading, allowed constant reference to be made between each element.

I tried many arrangements, images of different sizes spaced over a canvas, dips, trips, each collection having a different layout. The move from dips to the square was a huge leap forward for me that allowed me to see ways out of potential deadends I sensed coming up.

In the end the ‘almost square’ seemed to work best. The almost mechanistic choice of the same format concentrates on the images without allowing the page layout to become too much part of the work.

Anyway, it is a work in progress so I’ll probably change my mind at a later date…

Okay, so i can solve the I.E. problems by writing a .htaccess file with this in it..

# MS Internet Explorer - Mozilla v4
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/4(.*)MSIE
RewriteRule ^index\\.html$ /index.IE.html [L]

# Netscape v6.+ - Mozilla v5
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/5(.*)Gecko
RewriteRule ^index\\.html$ /index.NS5.html [L]

# Lynx or Mozilla v1/2
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Lynx/ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/[12]
RewriteRule ^index\\.html$ /index.20.html [L]

# All other browsers
RewriteRule ^index\\.html$ /index.32.html [L]

And THEN, I can write individual CSS scripts and pages for each type of I.E available, with all it’s foibles..

Or perhaps I should spend the time taking pics… ok….

I really really dislike the last pic I posted, here is a rework

I’ve been working through, and fine-tuning, my ‘Exotic’ series recently and I have found that I’ve really been working on two different ideas. So this has now been split into two projects, ‘Exotic’ and ‘Minimal Pairs’. The ‘Exotic’ strand you can see here, and the ‘Minimal Pair’ strand here.

I’m still not ready to write statements about these yet - or even finalise constructions or an edit -  but I hope there are enough ‘Exotic’ prints up on the blog now to give people a clue, but here is a wikky link about minimal pairs.

And now, another work print for the ‘Minimal Pair’ project.

A reworking of Exotic 9