Xeni interviews artist Cassandra C. Jones whose work uses “found photography” from search engines to explore how we relate to images online. …
Click PLAY or watch a sample on YouTube.
More interesting, I thought, was an interview on Boing Boing.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
If you’re as fluent oaf Deutsch as I am, you can translate the name of this mountain town:
Bad Gastein = Bad Gas Town
… Not exactly great marketing to attract tourists.
But I love weird & unique Bad Gastein. I stayed over a week.
Catching up on the internet. Day hiking the Austrian Alps. And biking when I needed a change of pace.
Austria is very inexpensive this Summer due to the recession. Tourism is way down. I paid US$22.50 / day for a private room. With breakfast. (I can drink $20 worth of coffee in the morning.)
You could stay in the dorm for US$10 day. And get a complimentary mountain bike. It just might be the least expensive hostel in Western Europe.
The townscape is characterised by historic multi-storey hotel buildings erected on … steep slopes.
It surrounds a series of waterfalls, in fact.
The spas of Bad Gastein are a fashionable resort, visited by European monarchs as well as the rich and famous. … Well, they were in the 1860s.
Since the 1960s imposing and massive hotels mostly sit empty.
Somerset Maugham could have used this town as a setting for one of his short stories about eccentric expat recluses running out the clock.
The good people of the Rathaus have made an effort. To rejuvenate the resort, Bad Gastein renovated the hot springs and added an ultra modern (in 1970) Convention Centre.
The Casino is a little more appealing.
I’d love to shoot a movie here. In one scene an engrossed young couple, deep in conversation in the foreground, wouldn’t notice as a despondent hotel owner throws himself off the balcony into the waterfall.
Soccer balls, as well as the corpses of suicide victims, get washed downstream, eventually finding an eddy.
more bad Bad Gastein photos
I’m aus. En route to the Swiss Alps.
Congratulations!
This pic came from Facebook.
The rich get poorer?
This news was a surprise to me …
An article from Feb 25th 2009:
Famed celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz is broke. The woman who shot John Lennon on the same day that Mark David Chapman did, the one who has done portraits of everyone from Queen Elizabeth to a pregnant Demi Moore, has had to sign away the copyrights, negatives, and contracts for all her work to a high-class pawn shop. That includes everything she’s going to shoot in the future. In return, she gets $15.5 million to pay her debts, given at an interest rate of between 6-to 16%.
Many press reports are tracing the photog’s money woes to 2004, when her partner Susan Sontag died and left her more properties and debt than she could handle. Certainly, the added financial pressure put her over the edge, and you have to wonder how things might have been different had Sontag and Leibovitz been granted the property rights and benefits that heterosexual couples get. …
Photographer Annie Leibovitz, overexposed, is forced to sell her life’s work
We were watching The Doors, a 1991 biopic by Oliver Stone.
Leibovitz was already a celebrity photographer when she shot Jim Morrison way back then. She’s possibly the top portrait photographer of all time.
Just started to upload my best photos of our big Adventure Race Week event in Idaho.
see more on flickr
Good FUN so far. Not much sleep.
I was a “leader” for a kid’s Adventure Race, Saturday. My team was the youngest. We finished LAST after 4.5hrs.
Though my little guys made it around the very difficult course safely, they both fell off their bikes on the last couple of hundred metres to the finish line.
Oops.
No one understands better the importance of symbolic imagery than totalitarian governments. One day this photo will be revered in China.
Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 – Wikipedia
The Unknown Rebel – AP photographer Jeff Widener. A lone protester delayed the tanks for over half an hour.
I used Google’s Picasa software to scan my computer and backup drive for ALL images.
Next … uploaded many of those to flickr as a backup in the cloud.
See all 21,000 photos on flickr
If you don’t have time to look at them, try the SEARCH function.
One day I’d like to have a system where all the original photos on my computer are automatically backed up and archived in the cloud.
If you thought awkwardfamilyphotos.com was funny, check out pictureisunrelated.com
People send in their
… most mind bogglingly, eye-crossingly WTF photos. …
A couple of samples:
Gadling posted a great photo series.
One example:
Yes – the city of Chicago is so behind on their pothole repairs that KFC decided to fill the holes themselves, and use the whole thing for a bit of goodwill generating PR.
Gadling – The worst potholes in the world
Rick McCharles 