superheadz

It was with sadness that I had received a Goodbye email from Asylum saying that their retail shop will be closing in a few weeks' time. Asylum, for the past 5 years has been, in Singapore, one of the foremost purveyors of all things cool, fun, hard to find and mostly useless. It was also with great excitement that i read in the same email that stock from the shop will be cleared at half off or more, perfect time to pick up things that I don't need but vaguely want to own. Though I was a little late to the sale, I managed to grab this superheadz digital harinezumi camera. Took it out over the weekend for some happy snapping. The very basic digital camera produces images with the washed out vignetted feel of lomo cameras but without the hassle of having to develop the film. Even the most banal scenes, cast in soft focus and shrouded with a green-blue hue, become charged with a sense of melancholy but they are also elevated above the everyday, even if it's only in the dead fragment of a moment past.

barack obama in photos

in The Heroism of Vision, Susan Sontag's studies 'photographic seeing' - "the fact that photographs are evidence not only of what's there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world" - and how this evaluation may be distorted as it is communicated to the viewer.





and so a forgotten photoseries of a 20 year-old "Barry", who might otherwise be just another college student, becomes a humanising foil for the Barack Obama the world sees today. first run in Time magazine, this series by photographer Lisa Jack is a quiet, conversational set of photographs of a young man with 'a bomber jacket, flared jeans, a pack of cigarettes and a Panama hat he thought would look “cool"'. sitting down, lounging, hunched, cigarette smoke twirling upwards: a quiet world away from the upright, electric persona we saw in 2008.





the series reminded me of another reportage that Time, incidentally, ran in the run-up to the elections, by Callie Shell. she traces the behind-the-scenes path of Obama during his campaign, ending with his victory speech at Grant Park. like in Jack's series, we see a human-sized Obama: asleep, doing pull-ups, reading the papers, and even see the bottom of his worn soles. but one is also aware of the remarkable distance between the two sets of photographs, even without the dates. Shell's work has a polished tone even as it looks under the carpet, whereas Jack's series sits casually, almost awkwardly.

perhaps Sontag is right, and no photograph can ever speak by itself. for every photo of Obama there are a host of pre-dispositions on the part of the photographer, and then the viewer. but i believe there are still some comparisons we can make, to some degree of usefulness, between the television image, the two reportages, and the man himself, whoever he is.

credits: Barack Obama: The Freshman, Lisa Jack;
Barack Obama: Road to the White House, Callie Shaw

ryan mcginley: moonmilk

having just opened this weekend, McGinley's new exhibition titled 'Moonmilk' was for me an arresting series of works. the exhibition, referencing the "white, cheese-like substance found inside caves", places naked bodies in subterranean settings to remarkable effect.


Blue Breakdown
182.9 x 274.3 cms

the photographs are arranged in two rooms in the gallery - one larger main room and a smaller one to the side - and the physical scale of the prints relative to the room and to each other reinforces the relative scale of the human element and surreal surroundings in the photographs. ranging from the spectacular to the intimate, we move from the 'Blue Breakdown' print covering half a wall to the book-sized 'Coco & India (Cascade)', travelling from the human speck in the former to the pair of girl-sized girls sitting in the centre of the frame. that, for me, was the strength of Moonmilk: not only the otherworldly backdrop, cast further out by the extraordinary lighting, but the constant human presence in it. at times dwarfed, and other times brought to the fore, but always placing the subterranean world in perspective.


Coco & India (Cascade)
25.4 x 17.8cms

('Moonmilk' is showing until 8 Oct 2009 at the Alison Jacques Gallery)

alecia neo: home visits

Alecia Neo's portrait series entitled 'Home Visits', selections from which are currently presented as part of the 'Air-Conditioned Recession' gallery at Valentine Willie, struck me as a fairly well-executed study of the individuals within a community. taken in each subject's home or workplace, the everyman becomes a personage: a barber on his throne, surrounded by implements; a grandmother wrapped in an ethereal halo. at the same time, there is a sense that the tone of the portraits is being kept admirably neutral, their purpose more descriptive than narrative or moralistic. despite the slightly stylised setups, the photos neither glamourise their subjects nor portray them in an overly pessimistic light.

perhaps one criticism that can be directed at the series is a slight feeling of inconsistency in the treatment of some of the portraits - a sense of work in progress, maybe? but that does not detract from the strength of the series as a portrayal of a community of individuals with a feeling of empathy, rather than mere sympathy.