Monday 24 February 2014

Richard Mosse 'The Enclave' exhibition in New York

Following on from his exhibition at the Venice Biennalle, Richard Mosse's colour infrared installation, The Enclave, is on show in New York until March 22nd. The venue is the Jack Shainman Gallery at 513 West 20th Street.


Mosse worked with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten using 16mm aerochrome (basically Color Infrared Ektachrome) to explore the war-torn eastern Congo. The resulting film was transferred to HD video. Here's how the exhibition press release describes the work:
The Enclave comprises six monumental double-sided screens installed in a large darkened chamber creating a physically immersive experience. This disorienting and kaleidoscopic installation is intended to formally parallel eastern Congo’s multifaceted conflict, confounding expectations and forcing the viewer to interact spatially from an array of differing viewpoints. The Enclave is an experiential environment that attempts to reconfigure the dictates of photojournalism and expanded video art.
The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 1000 to 1800.

Tuesday 18 February 2014

Joseph Giacomin thermal art website

Professor Joseph Giacomin and his artistic thermal images have featured before on this blog.

Thermal art is basically as rare as hen's teeth, mainly because thermal cameras are very expensive beasts (although that may be about to change).

Rush Hour by Joseph Giacomin
He has now launched a web site dedicated to his thermograms (or is it thermographs?): Perception Enhancement Studios with a fascinating collection of images captured using a 320 by 240 pixel camera. This is standard res for thermal devices, anything higher counts as HD. One useful feature is that you can choose to view the set of images from three tonal scales. Two are false colour, red-blue and iron, and the third is grey-scale. Personally, I prefer the grey-scale. The false colour scales are designed to exaggerate differences in temperatures, which I feel can often be a bit over the top for art. That said, false colour shouldn't be ignored and I suggest you go to the web site and make your own mind up.

Deianira by Joseph Giacomin
I have come across other artistic thermal images, but I find Joseph usually has the edge when it comes to artistic flair (or should that be artistic Flir ... in-joke).

Tuesday 4 February 2014

RPS Journal Archive online

It's a momentous event for photographic historians. The Royal Photographic Society, who have just launched their revamped web site, have also put a fully searchable archive of the famous Phot J ... the Photographic Journal, now the RPS Journal, on line with free access and free text search. It's at archive.rps.org

You can find out the background to the project on the Townsweb Archiving blog.


I haven't really explored yet but the page scans look very good. My only comments are that you only see your results by Journal volume whereas a date would be nice, and to return to the search results you have to use the browser 'back' button: but that's being picky. It is a fantastic resource. Enter 'infra-red' and then 'infrared' as your search term and see how it all started.