On Metropolitan

Google's car-mounted cameras are really getting good; I'm amazed by the clarity of some of the recent Street Views, which has allowed me to remotely examine sites I never previously would have considered photographing. The source panoramas are full of strange blurs and mismatched edges, which I have deliberately retained. There are also minor differences between the thumbnails and the full-frame images (eg., #8, below), which I have left alone; they're probably best considered alternate takes, and equal in my judgment.

I still get occasional emails about my not showing these, or the pictures that appear here and over at that other website. I'm not opposed to exhibition, and, over the last two or two and a half years, have made sporadic attempts to get my photographs up on the walls of some local venues. But Vancouver and Toronto curators have not been very receptive to "just pictures." So, early next year, it looks like I'll be renting a display space, fixing it up, making a selection of photographs, writing a "curatorial text" and probably sitting behind the gallery desk, too. I had not really anticipated a 100% DIY practice at the beginning, but modern art's model of the artist emulating different kinds of cultural producers (Dan Graham as businessman; Walker Evans as "commissioning editor"; Ed Ruscha as publisher; Don Judd as engineer) provides a framework for much of what I'm doing. And as I look back on a string of comic book conventions; shoestring "independent nonprofit art display spaces"; used bookstores & etc. it occurs to me that this model, while more or less totally incomprehensible from the outside and about as far removed from the Belkin-Catriona-CAG model as it is possible to get in one lifetime, is faithful to my own experience and temperament. And art is always best when it singlemindedly (recklessly?) pursues its own path, without concession or apology.

Off to Los Angeles and San Diego in a week to make some more pictures.
- posted by cjb @ 11:22 AM