Smell My Post

I’ve been meaning to post about these ads for a long time. It’s a print campaign for the Kuro TV by Pioneer: seeing and hearing like never before. Very close to Sony’s ‘like.no.other’ I think you’ll agree. Anyway, the series is part of a wider campaign developed by TBWA\Chiat\Day. It’s all about synaesthesia, or the body’s ability to mix up the senses, e.g. seeing the colour green and hearing birdsong, smelling coffee and feeling like feathers are tickling your nose, or seeing the number 5 and feeling like a bright blue light is shining in your eyes.

While photoshopping different elements of a body together is nothing new, there’s something intense and dramatic about these black and white images that grabs my attention. I love the way a frightened eye and a frightened mouth combine to make something that’s infinitely more frightening. I’m in awe of how they’ve got something so processed to look like a real moment in time: alive, gasping with energy and heavy with anticipation. This is why the first of the ads below is my favourite by far – the concept’s there in the second one but it’s not as engaging.

Print ads in monochrome can often look feeble, flat and dull, but these look deep and inky, Hitchcock meets film noir. Add to that some vibrant, chromatic copy that aggressively repositions experience as we know it, and you’ve got an ad that really makes an impact. It’s just a shame that after seeing it at least fifty times I still couldn’t remember what it was for.

Go beyond sight. Go beyond sound. Enter a world where you look with fresh eyes and listen with new ears. A world where you don’t just see, you feel. You don’t just hear, you touch. You don’t just watch, you truly and fully experience. Introducing the KURO.

Look in ways you didn’t know you could. Hear in ways you didn’t know existed. Where you eye bites into a red so juicy it explodes in a gush <pffft> and runs down your cheek. Where every image can be tasted, every note can be felt and every experience is magnified in ways you can hardly imagine.

Eggsitement

I’ve got four days off for Easter, and the only eastery thing about it is the giant Dairy Milk egg that’s been staring me down since Friday. It feels strange having a holiday because it doesn’t really mean anything to me, apart from ‘Easter Parade’, charity appeals on TV and people everywhere. Last year’s set of Easter shots were about as into it as I ever got, barring egg hunts, yellow paint and clay hens at primary school. Sometimes I wonder why I don’t get excited by it all, because everyone else seems to. Even as I write this I can hear the whoops of merry revellers in the street, and call me a killjoy but I can’t quite see why.

Following the Leader

According to my stats on flickr, this is my most viewed photo. More than my comment-blocked, Galaxy-ad skin series, more than the buttery-toned ones from the disused elevator shaft, more than the comedy Easter batch, more than my, ahem, immensely clever kiwi eyes and my beautiful Paris set. More even than my crusty classic ‘Old Woman with Bread’ – a relic which I’m sure people only visit to chuckle at the dodgy photoshopping.

Is this what designer labels are all about? I think it is a boring image, with dull colours, no clarity and no purpose. It doesn’t say anything to me, and I’m the one that took it – it must say even less to everyone else. I suppose this is the essence of a popular label: people will follow it regardless of what it produces. You’ve only got to look at Nike and its horrendous Shox trainers, now a chav staple the world over, and I won’t even start on Microsoft.

It’s such a shame when people blindly follow big names to the detriment of real quality, potential and innovation from the plethora of enterprising upstarts out there. And most of the time they don’t know what they’re missing – moving out of the herd and into the unknown is a risk most of us are afraid of taking.

I feel like I’m on the verge of something important here, something fundamental, so to do it justice and attempt to claim some kind of pathetic ownership for this idea that has clearly been around forever, I’m going to baaaaptise it ’sheep theory’. A quick Google of my hastily constructed doctrine reveals that extensive research has already been conducted in this area and I may have to compete with a sister sheep theory, possibly pioneered by an real live sheep.

Penguins

I went to see the fairy penguins at Phillip Island last Sunday. Luckily it was decent weather all day, if a little windy and freezing cold by nightfall. I was disappointed to find out that photographs were strictly forbidden because apparently the flashes make them vomit and run back into the sea. I can understand of course, as a lot of people have those multi-purpose pocket cameras that flash even in full sunlight. But a total ban on photography? They’ve got to sell postcards somehow I suppose.

The penguins were very cute, all silver, slithery and rotund, hobbling gracelessly up the beach, into the scrub and their burrows. Watching them in all their ungainly glory, I couldn’t help but wonder why they still bothered. Couldn’t thousands of years of evolution have taught them how to sleep in the sea? Couldn’t they have found nesting sites that weren’t a thousand metres up a cliff face?

Afraid of the militant rangers sending me back inside like a naughty child, I kept my camera hidden away while the penguins were parading and took a few long exposure shots on the beach as the masses headed for the boardwalks. Looking southwards, the sky was full of constellations I’d never seen before, deep and thick with tiny stars and galaxies. Not forgetting the disorientating upside-down Orion, something I still haven’t got used to here.

When they get back to their burrows the penguins feed their babies by sicking up the food they’ve collected during the day. Over the tramping of feet and general noise of humans cooing I hear the voice of a young girl, ‘Mummy listen, I can hear them all snoring’. Oh the ignorance of youth.

Resurrection

I’ve decided to attempt to bring this blog back to life again. Exciting as it may be there is only so much I can write about photography, and I doubt anyone is as interested in it as I am in any case. Instead I’m going to take a more open approach and scratch around for something else worth writing about.

This is a frightening prospect as it will make me vulnerable to a whole new arena of criticism. There are so many people out there that have so much more authority than me. Still, writing about topics that people can relate to is more in the libelous, gossip-ridden, cathartic spririt of blogging than what I was doing before, so I’m going to stop worrying about it so much and take the plunge.

Paris by Night

It’s about time I posted this somewhere else. It’s the fruit of this summer’s obsession with low light photography, time lapse and Paris. I originally intended it to be a souvenir of the four months I spent there, a sort of visual comfort blanket that I hoped might give me that Paris hit while I was wallowing in the murky depths of suburban English life. So far, it’s worked well. Every scene says so much more than a single frame photograph ever could – more than regular speed video even – and I think it’s precisely this intensity that keeps me spellbound when I watch it, even for the thousandth time. More importantly though, it protects my bank balance when all I want to do is jump on the next Eurostar.

Defamiliarisation

DSC_0282, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

‘The problem of the artist is to defamiliarise the ordinary’ – Paul Rand, graphic designer.

The familiar consists of the scope of our experience. Outside of these boundaries, we are lost. When what we see doesn’t fit into the rules we order the world by, we’re suddenly out of our depth, forced to reconsider how we think. But how many times can this happen? Surely there comes a point where everything is ordinary, where nothing can be defamiliarised any more?

The moment of defamiliarisation is liberating. The transition from known to unknown, like a cat’s surprise at the wetness as it walks through a puddle, or a child’s realisation that it cannot touch the objects it sees in a mirror.

How can a photo ever succeed in defamiliarising what it portrays? The graphic designer has the advantage of working in a world that is not governed by physics and reality, being able to step outside of the inherent and imposed limitations of the world and into a place ruled only by imagination. By nature a photo has to have an equivalent instant in time and space, that is, it has to be grounded in the ordinary, which makes it so much harder for it to break down the ordinary. I suppose this makes it all the more real as an art form, and easier to identify with, because like us it can’t transcend the limitations of its form.

Life and things

br 15, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

Sometimes I just feel like part of the scenery. How can you engage with the world when you are the world? How can something physical capture anything more than the physical?

In the world, life and objects meet, interact, happen. In a picture, life can never exist. Everything is an object, for everything is colours and lines on a 5×7′ piece of glossy paper.

I touch my desk, a book, a mug of tea. I’m alive, moving, choosing. I am me, rippling and humming with facets. But in a photograph I’m just as static and inhuman as any object. All flat in lines and a present past. All dead but seeming real. And there’s half a heartbeat of me, with that thought in my head, words frozen mid-flow in the space of my mind like juggling balls. Feeling angry, disappointed, satisfied, deceptive, victorious? You’d never know if I was one or none or all of them at once; I’m not just alive, I’m beyond alive, unreachable, unseeable, unthingable.

Nature

p 16, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

There’s something odd about using a digital camera to photograph nature. It’s so man-made, so black and static and hard: everything that nature isn’t. The image isn’t even real in the way that film images are. Instead of light and molecules, everything depends on pixels and sensors, and the finished product often doesn’t even make it into existence like negatives and prints; all you see is more pixels on a screen.

Put a pixel under a microscope and all you see is a pixel. But put a leaf or a strip of film under there and you’ll see elements, molecules, atoms, protons, neutrons, electrons, energy. In this sense digital photography is a simplification of reality. How permissible is it to reduce the physical world we inhabit to a single dimension; to create something virtual from something so real; to condense all the richness of the world into blocks of light? Isn’t that doing it a disservice?

Capturing experience

j 20, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

So often a camera falls short of capturing beauty, because beauty isn’t just something you can see with your eyes. Beauty is an experience, a feeling, a state of mind, an everything. Photos can only represent a fraction of all that; a single dimension.

When I took photos of a sunrise in Jersey, I was surprised the visual beauty came through as well as it did. Yet however it may seem from the pictures, a viewer still can’t grasp exactly what it was like to be there.

The bitingly cold air, the sand muddy and dense like half-set concrete, dipping and bumping, wet feet, seagulls screaming, the smell of seaweed waking up, but most of all, the neverending panorama that even a fisheye lens can’t take in. 360 degrees of stones and sea and sand. Eyefuls of sky stretching out to everywhere. Two hours of chameleon clouds, rising from navy to blue, purple, pink, orange, gold, lemon, streaked with steely grey, blinding white sun breaking through. Not just the sky; the sand itself, wet and receptive, took on every colour like a folded inkblot, punctuated by rocks and lumps.

That 120-minute-long movement, where every colour changes imperceptibly every second, is impossible to record in a single shot. The smells, the feelings, the sounds; they’re complements to that image that now exist only in my mind and in my memory and that no amount of words can equal.

What I mean is, if these pictures look like 100% beauty, the reality was more like ten times that. These images may look beautiful, but nothing compares with actually being there and experiencing it. But equally, experiencing it is nothing unless you see the beauty in it.