8oinks

dp picture (via cubeinthedesert)

Qiu Zhijie is a Chinese contemporary artist and works with a diverse range of media including photography, video, calligraphy, painting, installation and performance, and combines writing and curatorial practice with his artistic explorations. (via)

For the first time, I used light to write the names of everybody related to me. In the following nights, I did the same thing. Writing always became more difficult later in the night, and also more evocative and sentimental, especially when I wrote the names of those who have died, who live at the other end of the world, or whom I might never meet again . (read more)

Rabbitho on flickr

Sofia Ajram: relax, turn around and take my hand. (via)

Dan Estabrook discovered photography through the underground magazines of the punk-rock and skateboard culture of the 1980’s. He worked with Christopher James, from whom he learned alternative photographic processes as well as ways to combine his disparate artistic interests. Working exclusively in 19th century processes, Dan Estabrook produces intimate, yet compelling photographs that illustrate the beauty of long forgotten methods. (via)

Just one hundred years ago, science could still claim palmistry, phrenology, and physiognomy among its disciplines, and even today we tend to believe that written on the body are the keys to decipher the secret language of the everyday. There is science, too, in photography — mixing salt and silver to represent the otherwise unseen details of the natural world. By processes physical and chemical, it is even possible to distill one’s breath, capture time, and give a material life to the immaterial. It is this alchemy that moves me. Using and emulating nineteenth-century printing techniques, and making visible the very physical materials of which photographs are made, I attempt to have seemingly anonymous photographs become highly personal objects. In these images a single repeated shape, a formation of flowers, or the patterns of dust and decay are almost legible texts, inscribed on the skin of paper, tin, and glass. — Dan Estabrook

via morbid anatomy

Roger Ballen: My photographs comment on the complex word that we loosely term as reality. Reality is ultimatley impossible to define with words, perhaps images will provide some clarity. It is my belief that the most challenging photographs are those that create a tension between what we refer to as the real and the imaginative . My images symbolize the chaos around us and our inability to ultimately control our fate. In contrast to this world, my aesthetic is expressed in a very formalistic manner. (via)

Find Interviews to read or watch on Lensculture and Euroalter

史黛普．王 on flickr

see also: Lies between Lines 史黛普．王

Andrea Babaganoush on flickr

Ren Hang on flickr

see also: Lover by 任航222

Dina Goldstein: ‘…happily ever after’ (via)

Looking back on the past ten years through news photographs. view 50 photos total

Mark Story: There have always been individuals who have lived into old age, but few have lived near the limits of the human lifespan. Currently, there are about 250,000 centenarians living in the world.
With so many people now living longer, a new demographic label has been created for those who have reached 110: supercentenarian. (read more)

Some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me, I want people to know why I look this way. I’ve traveled a long way, and some of the roads weren’t paved.
— Will Rogers

Simone Lueck: Green-hued beasts jimmy-rigged with ancient computer parts and fantastically adorned like religious altars

Urszula Kluz-Knopek, Poland - a contribution for Bye Bye Blackbird on 8oinks!

The first ever zine published by It’s Nice That. The brainchild of designer Rob Matthews and Illustrator Tom Edwards, put simply – “Tom gave drawings to Rob and Rob tried to make them into photographs.” (read more) (via)

Robin Schwartz: My photographs are drawn from real journeys undertaken with my daughter, Amelia. I am driven to depict relationships with animals but the photographs are not documents; they are evidence of the invented worlds that we explore and the fables we enact together. Photography gives us the opportunity to access our dreams, to discover the extraordinary. (via)

shirin: i started a new series entitled empty page. they are sketches made with light. the collection will grow over time.

view album

empty page on flickr

Nollywood is said to be the third largest film industry in the world, releasing onto the home video market approximately 1 000 movies each year.
Such abundance is possible since films are realized in conditions that would make most of the western independent directors cringe. Movies are produced and marketed in the space of a week: low cost equipment, very basic scripts, actors cast the day of the shooting, “real life” locations. Despite the improvised production process, they continue to fascinate audiences.

Welcome To the Terrordome. And Nollywood is scary shit, but not in a Hollywood way. Rather than employ the rituals of history, myth and mystery to seduce and then placate us, scare it all away — all the shit that’s not suppose to be scary but really is, Pieter throws it in our face.

What Nollywood seems to be suggesting is that it is not the “I” of the photographer or even the “I” of the viewer, but the eye of the camera. We’re thrown from “representation” (of something real) to “simulation” (with no secure reference to reality), the normal relation between sign and referent radically remixed so that we lose the connection, once presumed to exist, between sign or image and the reality to which both were thought to refer. (via)

take a look at the complete Nollywood series on Pieter Hugo’s website or gallery

Eric Testroete is a 3d artist that created an extra head for himself. (via)

check out his site, to see how it’s made

Elinor Carucci, born in Israel 1971: “I can’t show intimacy in any general way, if there is such a thing as general intimacy. I can only say something universal about intimacy through actual intimacy. Mine. The actual real relationships I have with specific people. With these people that I love. The deepest I can reach is within what is most familiar and close.” (via)

Since the seventies, the elegant and memorable photographs of Paris-based artist Sarah Moon (*1941, France) are an inherent part of the international fashion world. Scarcely anybody will be able to elude the particular magic of her works. There is a borderland between fiction and truth which seems to be a permanent feature of Sarah Moons works. Poetic as they may be, they always long to reveal a particular form of reality: the fugitiveness of the moment, the boundary between growth and decay, the magic of a single second. (via)

“Very often I say to myself: I would like to make a photo where nothing happens. But in order to eliminate, there has to be something to begin with. For nothing to happen, something has to happen first.” (read an interview with the artist)

Hear from Sarah Moon personally, what goes through her mind, while taking a photograph - in this 10min video

Foxe: those passing clouds

now you are free to forget
what you could not remember

See also:
Use yourself by Elitsa Ganeva
Paralel Dimensions

Bye Bye Blackbird dancing in a traditional black kimono worn at funerals, with the eternal smile. Turn Off Lights When You Leave The Room by Shirin K. A. Winiger

view set on flickr

Alexander Binder was born in 1976 in the Black Forest/Germany. He is a self-taught photographer and has a degree in economics. Both – his photo and his film projects – are characterized by a fascination for the mystic, the spiritual and the occult.

“The overall style of my work derives from the self made lenses i use.The photos are blurred, diffuse and they give a lot of space for your peronal imagination. But it’s not only the style of my photographs - it’s also the subjects i deal with. Most of my projects move between two extremes: On one side the naive ideal of a romanticised, virgin nature in which light unfolds it’s primordial power, as the basic energy of life. And on the other side, the disenchanted monochrome works, that reflect the dystopian living circumstances of modern society.” (via)

What do you want? ”The simple things in life: family, good friends, a beer and a camera.” What do you need? ”The simple things in life: family, good friends, a beer and a camera.”

As a conceptual photographer often heavily invested in his process, Hiroshi Sugimoto has always been interested in photography’s ability to capture light as well as the medium’s capacity to frame and objectify its subject. In Lightning Fields, Sugimoto references the history of photography by pursuing two distinct projects related to William Henry Fox Talbot - inventor of the photographic negative. The first part is Sugimoto’s literal and meticulous reprinting of two of Talbot’s botanical photograms while the second is inspired by the pioneer’s explorations with electricity.

In Lightning Fields, Sugimoto plays with the tenuousness of positive and negative by purposefully incorporating electrical charges as part of the photographic process. Without a camera, Sugimoto applies a Van de Graaff 400,000-volt generator to his large negatives to create photogram-like records of transitory sparks and static electricity.

This richly layered process creates works that, in the tradition of Talbot before him, elegantly blur the boundary between science and photography. (read more at Shotgun)

see also 7 Days 7 Nights

Tamishir on flickr and 8oinks

OMFG! Check the Highlights from October

get inspired! Mashup your favourite posts, use as many as you like and upload your collage / tag: mashup

this one’s called ‘Stages’ - Dive in High Resolution

Previous 8oinks Reviews: September / August / July / June / May

Les Stone; Plaine du Nord, Haiti. Two men in the possession of the Loa support each other in the sacred mud of a festival of honoring the spirit of Ogoun. Voodou believers make this pilgrimage from all over Haiti to the festival of St James to be “baptized” in the mud and find strength from this and other rituals.
Hundreds of people come to this tiny village of Souvenance over Easter weekend to participate in one of the holiest pilgrimages showing their devotion to the African spirits brought to the island by slaves from West Africa. Wrapped in white satin scarves, initiates to the sect chant and dance throughout the night to beckon spirits as onlookers gather. Rum, cane liquor and herbs are offered to appease a pantheon of spirits.

Benjamin Goss: “To those of you who have low humor, and are curious about what Sweden really looks like….this is the book for you!
It contains 75 spontanious and twisted b&w photographs from the province of Värmland Sweden. I have been working on this project off and on for the past two years. This is the first edition, there will most definitely be a sequel.”
link to blurb: You know, people from Värmland

Värmland flickrset

Gon: “assume it: we all have a dark side which always want to fly high. like a vulture. a crow. the ancient rituals and specially rites in all the cultures of the world recreated somehow the dark flights of these black birds with special meanings. some as exorcism. some others as calling or preys. pagan or religious, human or spiritual. black birds flights always had impose some human fascination. symbol of death for many cultures because their behaviour. dreaming with crows use to symbolise that death is coming. a vulture’s flight over death fields is an intense mix of beauty and of fear. if exorcism, we want that black bird will fly away, and this is most used in rites: “bye bye black bird”, let it go, free your own, dare your own. with respect.
“bye bye black bird” is a title suggested by our dear 8oink’s member Annie.

let’s fly, bye bye black bird. here you may post your own interpretations of the black birds rites in another 8oink’s collaboration. let’s be pagan. let’s free our own black bird. let’s do this rite all together. now join your own wings… in the name of death!”

Contributions in all media are welcome. Tag: oink

GBenard a vulture’s dance

Foxe ready to let it out

fenk Bye Bye Blackbird

Shirin K. A. Turn off lights when you leave the room

Alexander Binder Bye Bye Blackbird

Leo Dakar Bye Bye Blackbird

Urszula Kluz-Knopek Bye Bye Blackbird

Zach Manchester Bye Bye Blackbird

Dessa/1911 Bye Bye Blackbird

Michel Lentz NO EXIT

red nails; wrong city Bye Bye Blackbird