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Curious about the fabulous HOMO hat Nicky Da B wore in our video for Go Loko? Here’s a little bit about the history/meaning.
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The Internet thrives on really, really smart stuff, or really, really dumb stuff. The middle not so much.
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If you haven’t seen the stunning 2001 documentary “War Photographer” about prize-winning conflict photojournalist James Nachtwey, you really must. It’s a beautifully filmed, deeply contemplative study of what it means to be a photographer, and what it means to be a witness to conflict.
It also features an absolutely enthralling cinematic technique: a tiny camera mounted above Nachtwey’s own shutter button, so you can see the stream of time and context around each of his decisions to capture (or not capture.) You can see it in the trailer above, at the 1:17 mark.
And this brings me back to my recent essay, On the Constant Moment. If the Decisive Moment is Nachtwey’s shutter button there with the protestors on the West Bank in 2001, the Constant Moment is your ability to choose different moments from the video feed, from wherever you are, in 2013.
Freed from instant decision in the middle of chaos, able to pause and rewind, did you make different aesthetic choices about when to “shoot?” Would Nachtwey, if he could?
That’s the Constant Moment.
(Source: claytoncubitt)
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Footnotes for “On the Constant Moment”
Links contained in my most recent essay, “On the Constant Moment,” in the order in which they appear:
- “The Psychology of the “Decisive Moment” by John Suler
- Jean François Paul de Gondi - Wikipedia
- “A Primer on Situational Awareness” by Scott Stewart
- “The First Modern Catalogue of an Art Collection: Q&A with Curator Louis Marchesano” by Jessica Portner
- “Capsule Collection Curated By” -Google search
- “Your curation is incredible” -Showstudio Tumblr
- Camera Obscura - Wikipedia
- Early photographer in the field (image)
- “The Response to Photographic Realism,” from “Art and Representation: New Principles in the Analysis of Pictures” by John Willats
- Photron high speed cameras
- “DARPA’s new 1.8-gigapixel camera is a super high-resolution eye in the sky” by Brian Dodson
- Moore’s Law - Wikipedia
- “Street View and Beyond: Google’s Influence on Photography” by Paul Moakley
- “3D Scanning” by Nick Knight
- “War Photographer” - Clayton Cubitt Tumblr
- The New Aesthetic - Wikipedia
- LIDAR - Wikipedia
- “Camera-free Radiohead video!” by Skulls in the Stars
- “Hyper-Realistic CGI is Killing Photographers, Thrilling Product Designers” by Joseph Flaherty
- “Eye Contact: Interrotron” by Errol Morris
- “The Future of Drone Surveillance: Swarms of Cyborg Insect Drones” by Ms Smith
- Dogme 95 - Wikipedia
- “So This is How it Begins: Guy Refuses to Stop Drone-Spying on Seattle Woman” by Rebecca J Rosen
- Hawthorne Effect - Wikipedia
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New post on Always On: “On the Constant Moment”
Wherein I argue that evolving photographic technology is killing Cartier-Bresson’s concept of the Decisive Moment, replacing it with a form of 24/7 surveillance curation, and that it’s totally OK.
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READER MAIL: THIS IS FOR THE MISFITS
hello clayton
yet again, i see something in you that inspires. as a kid, i wanted to go to art school, i wanted to create. i had a good eye for color, and i enjoyed putting visual elements together. it calmed me. my mother did not nourish this creativity, and absolutely shunned the idea of me ever going to art school with the intention of making things. to my mother, and to many people in general, art was a hobby. art was not something people did to make a living, and she was poor enough as it was. she worked hard, lived with a man who i did see make much effort to help, and seemed unhappy. i thought about escaping a lot. but the belief was ingrained in my head, that i would never be able to make art, go to art school, etc.
the fact that you went so far as to have the motivation, the encouragement, to enter an art competition [and win!] as a kid is really cool. and having the determination to still create beautiful things, despite not having money to go to art school, is inspiring. i wish i’d had the strength and foresight to do likewise.
i’m making small steps. thank you for inspiring.This is for the poor kids. The misfits. The neglected dreamers.
You sit in the back of the class because you’re ashamed of your hand-me-downs. You can’t afford glasses so you can’t see the board. You don’t have enough money for your own art supplies, and your school doesn’t supply them because all that money goes to the jocks, so you guiltily shoplift them. The entire machine you’re being pushed through is engineered to ignore you in favor of the elites. The athletes. The rich kids. -
On: Always On — My new portfolio and "art magazine"
“But it’s more interactive than a magazine. I already have Instagram for mobile snapshots, and Twitter for brief thoughts or links, and Tumblr for ephemeral daily photos. So why this photo blog? I’m excited about this part as well: I’ll be using those things to act as a focus group for this thing. Using a complicated set of algorithms collectively known as “my gut,” I’ll be assessing interest in the work I post on social media, based on retweets, reblogs, and likes. Periodically I’ll be taking the content my followers have “up-voted” via those other social platforms, and I’ll explode it in more depth here. The stories behind the scenes, the inspiration behind the aesthetic, the cultural references implicit in the creation, and special editions for the Shop tied to each post. So my followers can, in effect, vote for some of what I will post here, using their own social media accounts to let me know what they’d like to hear more of, or collect, or both.
So, welcome to my new thing. I’m excited for it. Thank you in advance for helping me keep it Always On.”
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Bad commercial art is an artist’s rendering of a middleman’s retelling of a client’s interpretation of a focus group’s misunderstanding.
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People think nothing of paying $3 for a cup of coffee they’ll piss out, but paying for art they “love” requires a trip to the accountant.
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Having a camera makes you a photographer in the same way that having a microwave makes you a chef.
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The evolution of work, aesthetic and pay, a case study in three examples.
Left: personal, free. Middle: indie editorial, three figure rate. Right: international advertising, six figure rate.
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My Subject’s Thoughts on My “Thoughts on Neogender” 2007
I’m an intimate, relational artist. My personal work takes “personal” to new levels, and I have some form of a relationship with each of my subjects. In fact, I can’t really do what I do without one. All of my photographs are collaborations in intimacy with my subjects, and I care deeply not just about what the work means to me, but what it means to them. This is why I’ve linked to the personal accounts of Hysterical Literature sessionists Stoya, Danielle, and Solé, I think seeing their perspective makes the art richer.
So as a follow-up on my “Thoughts on Neogender” (link warning: graphic, NSFW) piece, here’s the email I received from the subject after she saw it in 2007. I’m still friends with her, and she consented to its publication now:
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"One of the functions of art in capitalism is to poach and domesticate radical energies from elsewhere in society."
(Interview with Daniel Spaulding on Communization, Occupy, and the spectre of aesthetics)
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Thoughts on Neogender (originally appeared in Nerve, 2007)
Male to female transsexual. This is a manufactured vagina. A neovagina.
This is genital origami, the penis cut open, carved and folded, crafted by techniques with names like Penile Inversion, the Suporn Technique, and the Wilson Method. The head of the penis morphs into the neoclit. In some methods the scrotal skin becomes the neovaginal canal.
I don’t know which methods were used in the creation of this particular neovagina, but surely this is art of the highest caliber. Sculpture in flesh tissue and nerve bundles.
Is it subtractive sculpture, like Michelangelo’s Pieta, or David? Is the surgeon removing and reshaping a raw outer form crudely delivered by nature, slowly, painfully revealing the inner form of his patient’s mind’s eye? No, both inner and outer forms were delivered by nature, nested possibilities contradicting each other. Which should be considered natural? As in fetal development, male nested inside of female, female morphing into male. We all start out the same.
Perhaps this is a third sex. The concept of a third sex is one that’s been around for centuries in Indian and Thai cultures, and has come in and out of popularity in the Western world in modern times. Do we need to have a binary view of gender? Is it either/or?
She’s had her Adam’s Apple shaved off through an incision in her throat. She’s had breasts created. She floods her body with hormones. After her vaginoplasty she ruptured and almost bled to death.
She almost died to become who she was meant to be. This is being born again as no religion could ever conceive of. When asked what the most important possession in the world was to her, she simply presented a small white plastic object, two by three inches.
Her health insurance card.
Click to view (warning: graphic, NSFW)
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There is transgender. Is there transracial?
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