Art Review - March Issue - (Page 127)

Warning : session_start : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 9 Warning : session_start : Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent output started at /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php:9 in /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 9 Warning : Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by output started at /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php:9 in /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 10 M I X E D MEDIA PHOTOGRAPHY But the more intriguing type of nostalgia at work has to do rather with the apparatus than with the artist. Flickr is littered with countless images produced with old-fashioned film cameras, many of them from negatives or slides scanned at home and uploaded in loving homage to the photographer’s favoured camera, film or format. Of course, there are wellheeled enthusiasts of the Leica, Rolleiflex and Hasselblad, swapping gear tips and talking curves and levels. The more complex contributor, however, is the devotee of some longforgotten point-and-shoot camera from the late 1970s, the fan of a maddeningly unreliable Soviet-era rangefinder, the champion of a defunct film format who has to trawl eBay for the last few rolls. All manner of machinery is represented, from view cameras to Instamatics, pinholes to Polaroids. The motivation to interrupt the seamless consumer vision of the cheap digital image is unclear. The nostalgic popularity, in the late 1990s, of the resurrected Russian Lomo, with its plastic lens and unpredictable focus, is not quite the same thing as going to the trouble of yoking together a dying consumer technology and its replacement. One upshot of the Flickr e ect, though, is surely a decline in sales of the Lomo, as the camera’s retro-savvy target market discovers that any piece of analogue trash will do, up to and including the kind of camera once given away free with breakfast cereals. Compared to the odd fact of technological miscegenation – a phenomenon usually observed in the terminally confused or tech-tentative, with their USB turntables and WebTV – the results, in terms of the images uploaded, are in a way neither here nor there. They are, as one would expect, mixed; but a few formal conventions suggest the scope of the nostalgia involved. The saturated colours of old slide films are especially celebrated. Blur is a value in itself, whether or not it’s dressed up as an experiment with a camera’s depth of field. ‘Timelessness’, ever the aim of the ambitious amateur, takes the form of monochrome studies of pretty girls with bobs and shot glasses at the ends of shiny bars. ‘It could have come from way back when’, opines one contributor to the Polaroid 55 group, saluting a peer’s particularly archaic-looking use of their favourite film. In other words, the photograph seems to come from some utterly indefinable past: a mere ‘then’ made to counter, ahistorically, our uneasy ‘now’. More intriguing than the ‘quality’ of the images is exactly what sort of anachronism we are looking at in a photograph made with, say, a seventy-year-old Brownie, scanned with a cheap film scanner, finessed in Photoshop and posted to Flickr. Is ‘retro’ still the point, ‘nostalgia’ the pathology or ‘kitsch’ the style in question? Isn’t this clash of historical moments also Benjamin’s definition of revolution? In The Artificial Kingdom, her 1998 study of the kitsch experience, Celeste Olalquiaga suggests that the artefact entrusted with our sense of the past may be even deader than it seems: ‘cultural fossils lead to a nostalgic kitsch that yearns after an experience whose lack is precisely glossed over by the desire for a utopian origin, producing a perfect memory of something that really never happened’. The colours were never so warm, the light never so limpid, the snapshot itself never so redolent of summers gone by as when one saw it for the first time glowing among countless digital souvenirs. FLICKR IS A REPOSITORY FOR A SORT OF TECHNO LOGICAL NOSTALGIA ARTREVIEW p126-127 Fotolog AR Mar07.indd 127 31/1/07 12:00:16  Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in Unknown on line 0 Warning : Unknown : Failed to write session data files . Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct /var/lib/php/session in Unknown on line 0

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - March Issue

Manifesto
Dispatches
Consumed
Tales from the City
David Lynch
Marcel Dzama
Future Greats
Art Pilgrimage: Moscow
Mixed Media: Moving Images
Mixed Media: Photography
Mixed Media: Digital
Reviews
Book Reviews
On the Town
On the Record

Art Review - March Issue

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