Pinhole Camera Artist - YUCK!

bmattock

bmattock

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Fair warning: this link may offend. It deals with an artist who makes high-end (read expensive and well-made) pinhole cameras and prints from those cameras, using items as precise as machine aluminum and as unusual as human body parts (graphic image in link). Don't click if that squicks you.

http://www.popphoto.com/photography...res-images-through-skulls-infected-blood.html

I'm posting it because, well, it is interesting in a way, but man oh man did it squick me out. Others may feel differently.
 
I find that quite fascinating. It shows a certain degree of involvement that people don't normally posess. There's almost a certain spirituality about it, as if by including these relics he seeks to appease the spirits.
Fascinating, fascinating.
 
Interesting, but ultimately sick I think. It's pretty disrespectful to turn human remains into cameras.

It's funny though - for years artists have insisted that their gear didn't matter and now here's someone for whom the camera is arguably more important than the subject matter since it is itself an 'artwork'.

What do you guys think of his photography? It leaves me pretty cold, but then conceptual art so often does.

Matthew
 
I read an article on this guy one time, i got the impression he was trying to be weird in art school and took it to a whole new level. He talked a lot about capturing the "essence" of the person or some such nonsense. i don't think i finished the article.
 
M. Valdemar said:
This guy is a mental case, and so is everyone who allows him to photograph them.
Click to expand...

Agreed. How do people like this become art-world celebrities? It depresses me sometimes to see this kind of thing because I'm relatively normal and I feel sometimes that I have no chance at success as a result of my relative normality.
 
I think it's pretty interesting. Just because you don't understand something or because it's a bit different doesn't mean you should immediately write it off.
 
I dont know whether to laugh or to cry when I see so called "modern artists" who piss in a bottle and call it art. (Or whatever.) For the most part I call it lack of talent combined with poor toilet training. What this guy is doing sounds as bad.
 
The guy is definately a fruitcake.
But its pretty stupid to totally write someone off, (or even give someone praise) based on half a dozen pictures of their work.
So far, i dont see his work any less relevant than the majority of crap i see produced by many successful self proclaimed "artists" these days. But i havent examined his body of work or even seen his entire series referred to in the example above, so i'm not prepared to make any real judgement yet. However it is quite different to anything i've seen before, so it does atleast have some sort of novely factor. Whether or not it's relevance or validity as a body of work has any artistic merit is a different story though.
I also dont see anything particularly horrendous about his methods either. Maybe someone who does find it disgusting can elaborate why, i'm genuinely interested.
 
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Whoo...and I thought Peter Greenaway had a sick train of thought...

(Throw in Arthur Tress and Robert Mapplethorpe too; just a couple of happy-go-lucky dudes compared to Belger.)


- Barrett
 
http://www.boyofblue.com/cameras.html
The cameras seem a bit disturbing since he is using human skulls and HIV blood as opposed to oatmeal boxes, but the craftsmanship looks exceptional. I get "i wear black on the outside, because that's how I feel on the inside" from this guy, but that may just me being judgmental.
I usde my Hasselblad 500c/m as a pinhole camera (http://www.flickr.com/photos/art209/2485741326/). Some Haz fans on photonet would be more offended at that.
 
peterm1 said:
I dont know whether to laugh or to cry when I see so called "modern artists" who piss in a bottle and call it art. (Or whatever.) For the most part I call it lack of talent combined with poor toilet training. What this guy is doing sounds as bad.
Click to expand...

Agreed! As Andy said, we each get our 15 minutes of fame.
 
It does not offend me ...and it's not that "modern" it's someway back to the times we ( aka "humanity") just stopped dwelling in caves.
I remember my first reaction when I saw human skulls and bones from Tibet made inro flutes and vessels. I was repulsed as I did not know that it was part of tibetan culture and not some satanist gimmick.
So for him it's back to the roots, magic thinking and a longing after times when all seemed to be simpler and shrouded in mystery. I've got to renew the garlic on my doorpost and chnage the horseshoe as my old one's become rusty.....
 
He would be well-suited to doing FX for horror movies or some sort of prop design.

I still think he's a mental case.

Teenagers who like Marilyn Manson and Goth costumes bought at WalMart might find his cameras impressive.

If I had a kid who died at birth I would not find it amusing to see his heart decorating a moron's camera.
 
I dont understand what people find so offensive about what he is doing!
Is it some kind of morality crisis or what? I thought dead people was done a long time ago, joel peter witkin and andre serrano among others, and you are still offended?

He produces his own cameras, some of them look a bit strange and he certinly has a own way of working photographicly. But what's wrong with that? He might be a bit eccentric but so are a lot of artists (for example, both Mozart and Van Gogh was very strange), it doesnt make him worse and it doesnt have to make him better either.

Of course it is large format pinhole photography, like in the good old days, and it isnt very street photography friendly. But do you people really have to diss him so much for doing pinholes?

I am a bit suprised to see so few acctually talking about his pictures.
Why the hositlity?
 
it "is" icky or you think it is icky? to me carrying dead animal skin as a handbag is worse since that animal died to become a handbag. Dead human hearts is just matter, I mean sure it is "strong" and quite provocative to have a human heart in an artwork but he isnt the first one to do something like that so the discusion isnt new in any way.
 
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