Blog About Photography

I’ll come right out and say it: I sort of idol­ize Andy Warhol. And yeah, that’s def­i­nitely a pretty easy thing to right now, since the eight­ies came back around again and all that, but I really do think that Warhol was to the sec­ond half of the 20^th cen­tury what Picasso was to the first. I have all the research papers to back it up, too; I’ve writ­ten three.

So, this movie com­ing out about Edie Sedg­wick, “Fac­tory Girl,” has two main prob­lems that become appar­ent just from the trailer. Namely, they are Guy Peirce and Hay­den Chris­ten­son, the dream­boats cast to play Warhol and Dylan, respec­tively (though Dylan has been fic­tion­al­ized in this movie — the character’s name is Billy Quinn, which is lame.) I think one thing we can say about both Warhol and Dylan is that nei­ther of them were, even when they were young, extra­or­di­nar­ily attrac­tive peo­ple, so like, what the fuck. Cast­ing these two dudes may give us some indi­ca­tion of what I’m afraid this movie is going to be: sort of stupid.

I really hope not. Warhol and Dylan’s bat­tle over Edie Sedg­wick is sort of an alle­gory for the forces that were shap­ing the Amer­i­can cul­tural con­scious­ness. It would be a real shame to waste this mak­ing some super­fi­cial bull­shit movie packed with celebri­ties. And every­one will be run­ning around talk­ing about how much they adore Warhol and what an impact he had and all that — like get­ting all into Nir­vana after Kurt Cobain done killed hisself.

The cold comes with weight.
Huge bur­dens of thought, rife with
triviality.

—–

Now light comes early.
A jar­ring reminder of
so much wasted time.

—–

Leaf­less and gnarled,
they make ref­er­ence to what,
these icons of guilt?

Sorry about not writ­ing any­thing… I’m caught up in my other project at Cul­ture War­rior, plus its the end of the semes­ter. I’ll be sure and post a Fri­day Pho­tog­ra­pher tomor­row, and then you’ll start hear­ing from me again more reg­u­larly after Mon­day.
Thanks!

Alec Soth has writ­ten an inter­est­ing post that deals, among other things, with the use of peo­ple in pho­tog­ra­phy and the inher­ent exploita­tion attached. He writes:

Are we sup­posed to erase images of peo­ple to make pho­tographs palat­able for the art mar­ket? I sup­pose peo­ple are dis­turbed by the idea of, in the words of Shul­man, ‘using peo­ple.’ It is dis­turb­ing. Pho­tographs of peo­ple use peo­ple. It makes us uncom­fort­able. But it is also what makes the medium so potent.

Pho­tog­ra­phers shy away from peo­ple for a lot of dif­fer­ent rea­sons, but I know that I often find myself doing it for this one. Lib­eral guilt.

I always feel kind of cheap when I basi­cally rip off a story from the New York Times, but that’s what I’m going to do. I just came across this arti­cle in today’s Arts sec­tion about a pro­posed sky­scaper in St. Peters­burg that is caus­ing con­tro­versy because it’s going to be like 800 ft taller than any other build­ing in town. The build­ing is going to be the head­quar­ters of Russia’s largest cor­po­ra­tion and will anchor a new busi­ness dis­trict right on the Neva River. Said the company’s CEO of the plans:

“This new, mod­ern project will give birth to a new men­tal­ity for St. Peters­burg, which lives in a new, mod­ern civ­i­liza­tion,” said Mr. Miller, appear­ing with the city’s gov­er­nor, Valentina I. Matviyenko. “And its cit­i­zens will feel the pulse of the new econ­omy, the pulse of the con­tem­po­rary world.”

So I’m all for progress. And look­ing at this ren­der­ing, it’s not a bad look­ing build­ing. But, like. Come on. I think an impor­tant part of design­ing a beau­ti­ful struc­ture is tak­ing into account the sur­round­ing area. And height isn’t every­thing. A build­ing this high will be able to be seen from every­where in the city when in point of fact, it’s prob­a­bly not that impor­tant to the cul­ture of St. Peters­burg. So why make it a focal point for the entire city?

That’s a stu­pid ques­tion to ask, so let me point out that it’s rhetor­i­cal. They obvi­ously want every­one look­ing at them. They’re this build­ing so that every­one will who sees it, every­one in St. Peters­burg, will have Gazprom on their mind. It’s all mar­ket­ing, which is stupid.