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MP at the MoMA

vieri

Well-known member
A couple of weeks ago, passing from NY I acquired a Leica MP + 2/35 cron from PhotoVillage (great place!) - I really love the combination, and have been using it quite a lot lately. Here a few from the first roll shot with it, during a visit at the MoMA. It's great to be shooting & developing film again!

- double peek


- confrontation


- the staircase


- dialog between (un)equals


- modern art: various kind of


- reading


- going down


- the membership ghost

All with the MP & 2/35 cron (IV). Film is Tri-X, developed in Ilfosol, scanned with a Nikon Coolscan 5000.

C&C as always very welcome.
 

Bob

Administrator
Staff member
Ahh, looks good!
I am impatiently waiting for my new MP to arrive.
I have a brick of tmax and no place to go :cry:
-bob
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Very nice series! I LOVE my MP too --- It has gotten me back into film and even scanning :bugeyes:

I notice a strong halo on the girl's legs in the "unequals" shot -- CA? jpeg artifact?
 
S

sirvine

Guest
Nice images. Some of them look a little familiar to me. ;) One of my favorite places to shoot...
 

vieri

Well-known member
Ahh, looks good!
I am impatiently waiting for my new MP to arrive.
I have a brick of tmax and no place to go :cry:
-bob
Thank you Bob! I hope your MP will be there soon, and you'll be able to put all that Tmax to a good use :D

Very nice series! I LOVE my MP too --- It has gotten me back into film and even scanning :bugeyes:

I notice a strong halo on the girl's legs in the "unequals" shot -- CA? jpeg artifact?
Thank you Jack - same here, actually, the MP did bring me back to chemicals, scanning, and all that... a great camera! :D

As far as the halo, is jpg artifacts unfortunately - thanks for pointing that out , at least I can say is not there in the prints...

Nice images. Some of them look a little familiar to me. ;) One of my favorite places to shoot...
Thank you very much! Indeed looks familiar in your pics as well... ;)
 

HansAlbert

New member
Pictures from an Exhibition


Light(s) and plain white walls within a rigidly right-angled architecture: We see the museum's omnipresent means to attract the attention to the exhibits, its technical efforts, its staged character. This opening "promenade" through the staircase already touches upon the main theme: capturing and presenting works of art in photographs as a multi-layered undertaking. The double peek of the exhibition space on two levels may be seen to symbolize that and, moreover, to visualize doubly the self-conception of the photographer by alluding to the topos of photography's inherent voyeurism and by presenting these first peeks in a filmstrip manner.



So prepared by the awareness of the "objective" mediation, we are now made aware of the "subjective" mediation by our mind: We see a woman looking at sculptures of different levels of abstraction of one woman's head. The artist (Matisse) exposes his model (Jeannette) in five realizations, as it were, from concrete intuition to an image schema. The individual living woman, the visitor, is confronted with the modelling and distorting force of the artist's mind; the somehow brutal showcasing of the heads in glaring light intensifies the confrontation, and the one faint shadow only underlines the lack of the others. Coincidentally but meaningfully, the other visitor, a man, seems to be considering the forceful artistic potential, and "The "Woman on a High Stool", quasi overviewing the scene patiently, reminds us that the photographer is just doing the same as the artist (Matisse) has done when he captivated her into a likewise modelling medium.



What seems to be a rest is a new confrontation. For a moment the exhibits and the visitors have made way for the one uber-exhibit: the structure itself. The non-natural hard rectangular edges, the empty whiteness of the concrete wall, the elegant regularity of the staircase – all that
displays rigorous dominance of form and matter. The skyways – they resemble a guard's walkway – and the slotlike window allude to elements of a castle – of our time. The motif of the filmstrip is faintly re-echoed, but instead of a voyeuristic peek there is rather a touch of Kafkaesque incomprehension of the events within this castle. The blank wall which takes up the right half of the photo apparently reflects this unapproachable character.



Back from the "promenade" we see a gnomish stick figure, suspending from the ceiling like a mobile. Joints, breasts and womb are accentuated, and she appears to be very nimble and so light-footed that one may associate the white pad below with a trampoline. The artist (A.Calder) subjects his model (Josephine Baker) to a radical reductionist treatment: the black Venus has become a dancing skeleton, and her sex appeal is expressed by steel wire, spiral-spring-like. The photographer shows us the pregnant moment when both, the visitor and the steel wire figure, turn to each other so that we are led to apprehend the scene as an imaginary dialogue between an idol and her admirer, united in their dedication to dancing, divided like individual and ideal. And there is another dialogue the photo alludes to: a real one (in this forum) between the photographer and us, the viewers.



From reductionism to abstractness, from figurative distorsion to nonrepresentational shapes. With lines, forms and colors the artist (Ellsworth Kelly) explores the realm of abstracting intuitions without reference to real objects. But these works of art themselves, each neatly framed, are real and individual objects, so that their viewers are aware of both, referential and non-referential contents. As a result we tend to apply the same scheme to the left half of the photo, and the object – an exit door with its handle – can now be thought of non-referentially as such an abstract work of art with hard edges, too. The photo encapsulates this kind of changed look at normal things that we often experience to adopt in a museum of modern art.



The museum embraces the visitors with an elbow-like part of the stairs and continues the captivation by means of another medium, the book. But there is also a reflection on the medium 'photography': The peek top-down has again a touch of voyeurism and plays with the wishful thinking of many a photographer of unlimited accessibility to other people's lives.




Getting to know the museum's world is like a plunge into the sea: The "promenade" down is comprehended under the mobile "Lobster Trap and Fish Tail (A.Calder), i.e. under the idea of being caught in the trap of one's interest in art.



When we are finally leaving the museum, we have already been captured; we have become inwardly members of its world. Officially joining the community is like a ritual act; a woman "priest" appears to be apt at best to conduct the ceremony. Let's call her "the membership ghost".



(I'm not a native English speaker; pardon me where necessary.)

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vieri

Well-known member
Pictures from an Exhibition
Hans, thank you very much for the wonderful comments (as always!), I always appreciate them very much - as far as not being a native english speaker, first of all nor am I ;) and second, I think most native english speakers could learn a thing or two from your language skills... :D
 
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