A few weeks ago, PSFK attended LVHRD’s second PHTHRD event, a party-slash-competition showcasing the creations and realtime art-making processes of three photographers: Elizabeth Weinberg, Joseph Holmes, and Jonathan Harris. Each photographer was given a polaroid camera, 150 shots, and two hours to take photos (using the party and its 300 guests as subjects) and piece together a final story. LVHRD held an online vote to determine the winner of the battle, with Jonathan Harris, of “We Feel Fine” and “Whale Hunt” fame, coming out as victor. We witnessed the first hour of Harris’ rapid-speed creative process, the photographer and his assistant jumping between snapping shots of men and women in various stages of undress to hurriedly snipping and arranging them in a perfectly fractured blue and pink mosaic. Harris explained his vision:
Starting in opposite corners are uncut pictures of a fully clothed man (bottom left/tinted blue) and a fully clothed woman (top right/tinted pink). Both genders twist towards the center along curved paths, discarding clothes, wigs, shoes, and other accessories along the way, as the photos start to shatter, becoming less about objects and more about flesh. Approaching the center, the pictures are increasingly difficult to discern, as body parts blend together and their owners’ identities dissolve. Throughout the piece, the male and female cut marks are symmetric, mirrored copies of each other, extending beyond the boundaries of the photographs into the white border, itself composed of the individual white borders of all 150 Polaroids, so that the whole canvas comes to resemble a single giant Polaroid exposure.
This is very cool looking but I have to say it makes me happy we’re moving into an all digital/less consumable age.
April 22nd, 2008 at 1:26 pm