BigShinyThing

Work from The Clipse, DJ Cam, Asbestos, James Dodd and many more. Dig in. Dig deep. Big up Adz!

Mike Brodie — aka The Polaroid Kid — documents outsider Americana in astonishing one-off polaroid images. Read this interview and check out his work here. He also runs a rather excellent site for polaroid photographers, PLRDS.COM

Horse Meat Disco’s 2008 Drag Ball attracted a huge (and vocal) crowd and inspired entries from all competing Houses. More photos on Flickr.

[Photo ©2008, Darrell Berry]

MIT’s Technology Review highlights the new web service Make3D, which does a truly amazing job of extracting 3D data from normal 2D images.

A spinoff from research at Stanford, Make3D works its magic using:

a machine-learning algorithm that associates visual cues, such as color, texture, and size, with certain depth values based on what they have learned from studying two-dimensional photos paired with 3-D data. For example [...] grass has a distinctive texture that makes it look very different close up than it does from far away. The algorithm learns that the progressive change in texture gives clues to the distance of a patch of grass.

Note the key phrase ‘machine learning’. They haven’t tried to understand the world — they’ve built a tool which can learn to understand depth cues in visual imagery. Cool.

Currently the system only understands scene cues in outdoor landscapes and (rather curiously, we think) indoor scenes which feature staircases (but why not?). Future work will help their system learn about other kinds of scenes. But what it does, it does very well indeed as proof-of-concept. See the Make3D site for demos, or to upload your own scenes for processing.

Impressive as it stands. But as we see it, the most exciting place for this technology to turn up will be at the point of capture — in cameras. Our Nikon D200 already features a ‘programme’ mode for autoexposure, which uses scene cues to understand something of what’s in front of the lens: a big blue rectangle top of image , for example, is probably the sky, and should maybe be overexposed relative to the lower half of the scene so that whatever’s underneath doesn’t come out pitch-black in the photo. Add in Make3D, which could profit from a whole slew of data available at time of capture (by, for example, capturing more depth data before and after the photo is taken by playing with autofocus…) and you’ve got consumer 3D photography done and dusted. We can’t wait.

From the early London punk scene, through Leigh Bowery and the clubs kids, to street culture in Japan and the Asian mainland, Hartnett has been there to capture the look while it’s still fresh and raw. We were keen to ask a few questions of the man who’s seen it all.

BST: You’ve been documenting youth and street culture for over 30 years now. What is it about those worlds that keeps you excited?

PAUL HARTNETT: I started documenting street and club culture at the age of eighteen as a means of social lubrication. I wanted to get close to the key punk players such as Soo Catwoman and Sid Vicious, who lived in the next road to me in West London back then. I wanted to go beyond the visual. A camera seemed a perfect excuse to talk, exchange ideas, develop a rapport. Sometimes there’d be very little beyond the hair spray and eye-liner, sometimes there were all kinds of viewpoints, the most brilliant perspectives.

At the core of my work there is a continuing look at customising, how individuals have crafted a look. My pictures are portraits, executed with a Kodak Instamatic, a Polaroid camera and a range of Nikon stuff. I’m not a technical person. For me it has always been about faces, dimly lit, content driven, not style driven. Faces, colours, textiles, soul. The messed-up, the dressed-up. The fucked-up.

You’ve recently been exploring Chinese youth culture. What were the most interesting things they’re up to?

I recently visited Shanghai and Beijing for i-D magazine. I was involved with a street and club exhibition at Source’s Kong Gallery and this was a way in to meeting some creative souls. Visiting fashion schools such as IFA Paris and Raffles Design Institute was my focus, away from the gallery. There is such a rawness to Chinese fashion. It is often quite crude and quite different to the work Chinese students do at the likes of Central Saint Martin’s in London or FIT and Parsons in NYC. Having observed over 600 fashion students at work, having photographed a selected few, I gained insights. The Chinese are so very different to the Japanese. The work at Shinjuku’s Bunka, for example, is on another planet compared to what is happening in Shanghai and Beijing. Yep, it’s superior. That said, I was fascinated by the grounded approach of so many students at IFA Paris in particular. It’s a place to watch, they certainly have the technical skills.

You’ve covered the most important musical and style movements of the last 30 years. Which of those do you feel the most empathy with, and what’s going on at the moment that you are most excited by?

I saw The Sex Pistols perform many weeks before the Punk Festival of 1976. It was just electric, kind of like Brecht entering the stage. Before that I’d only seen Sparks, Bowie and Cockney Rebel perform live. I was in a band as a teenager, Missing Presumed Dead, so inspired by the DIY ethos of Punk and Power Pop. What I love about fashion and music is when people are totally fired up, and a bit ‘bonkers’ with it. Really exploding internally and doing something individual externally, going beyond a commercial formula, a safe established pattern.

Right now there’s a musician named NIYI who DJs at club nights such as Gauche Chic. As a producer, NIYI is unpredictable, he uses the most unexpected samples. He is very playful and could certainly be categorised under ‘bonkers’. He is my #1 muse right now — a joy to photograph, when he can be bothered to turn up.

You’ve run clubs as well as documenting those run by others: have you always been that involved in the scenes you cover photographically? Have you ever had issues with access — scenes or subcultures who you wanted to document, but who simply closed ranks and didn’t let you near them? How do you deal with that? Who or what scene have you not covered, but would most have wished to?

I ran a club named Kawaii in London back in 1983. It was very inspired by Japan’s club culture. I also ran the world’s first club for drag kings, women who dress as men, back in 1995. The majority were female to male transvestites, some were heavy-duty transexuals. Every Thursday night there’d be 150 toughies, and me. There was one simple rule: NO CAMERAS! This allowed me a somewhat strategic exclusivity.

I’ve never had issues re access. I’ve had good coverage over the last three decades, and I tend to be guest-listed without ever having met the promoters. Door whores just know who I am. Being fat and a few months short of fifty seems to be a plus nowadays. Verification for clubs abroad is easier than it was in the past due to my website, people can check out editorial content, photographic approach, fast as click-click-click. Some fetish clubs can be stand-offish, they live in fear of News International and local councils.

The only club I have ever experienced shit with is that shit club named Boom Box. Oh, what a Hoxton hole. Just so hyped, so over-rated, and so over. I took a few pics… then pressed the delete button and left. I have little patience for fashion sheep.

You seem both fascinated by style and its associated fantasy worlds, but your photos are raw and uncompromising
– you talk about showing the ‘reality of fashion’. What does that mean to you?

Take a look at street-style pics in magazines such as i-D and Dazed & Confused and you will often find credits for an entire team of mag slags; hair stylists, make-up performers… an entire circus. To me this ain’t street-style, it’s manipulation. What I have done for the last three decades is SNAP with seconds of seeing. No touching, no altering, no upgrading. SNAP. Same location, same same same reality. Sure, sometimes I’ll ask for a plastic bag to be put aside or an event bracelet to be concealed, that’s all. So many magazines provide clothes that their advertisers wish to be promoted. That sucks.

What’s the future of street and club photography as you see it? What’s the role for ‘photographers’ as such, when the ‘kids of today’ have MySpace and a bunch of club photo websites on which to show off their poses, and every phone is a camera?

The Internet has come along and fucked so many people sideways. The music industry is in a tizz, everybody
seems to be online so much of the time. Punk’s DIY ethos is everywhere. People pimp their profiles to a narcissistic extent on myspazz and facebore. There are street-style photographers such as Facecunter (I think that’s his name) who snap at fashion events, but in a really bad way. So cheesy and hap-hap-happy. All very Grazia or Closer, Heatish.

I think it’s great that so many people are taking photographs, even if it with with dinky telephone toys. I love that crap quality, that low-res fuzz. I love the diversity available. That said, I continue in my own way. I have CCTV eyes, and pay an almost forensic attention to detail. I like clarity and the portraiture I have amassed is for a future audience I have never met.

Paul’s work will be on display at the Vibe Bar in Brick Lane from 14 February 2008. Go see. Also check out the PaulHartnett.Com and PYMCA sites.

[Thanks to Adz!]

More photos of Ryan’s show on Flickr, along with the rest of our London club photography. [Image © Darrell Berry]

All You Can Eat at Electrowerkz, Friday 19th October. More photos on Flickr, along with our other London club photography. [Image © Darrell Berry]

We’ve lost the last day of our lives playing on the closed beta of ‘image bookmarking’ site ffffound. And so have our design- and photography-loving friends. So we guess that’s a big thumbs up.

ffffound is — like the best 2.0-ish sites — dead simple. Install a bookmarklet into your browser, then, when you see an image you like on any site, anywhere, mouse over it, click the FFFFOUND button, and the magic ffffound fairies will add that image to your collection on the ffffound site, where other people can find and favourite it. Kind of a stripped-down flickr for stolen (sorry — ‘quoted’) images, meets Digg, with a collaborative filtering recommendation system under the hood. And that’s it. No tagging, no text: just images and a community of image fetishists. It shouldn’t be as addictive as it is. But it is. The closed beta has obviously attracted a community of design obsessives, and the content is generally excellent. Shame the screensaver seems to be buggered on our Macs.

We think ffffound is One to Watch. We’ve already used up our complimentary invites, so you’l need to get your access elsewhere, sorry. But get on the phone to your friends and try to get signed up.

Uptown Downtown saw Horse Meat Disco and Rebel Rebel take over Vauxhall’s club Area on Saturday 29th September for a night of NYC-styled punk and disco. You can access our Uptown Downtown photos directly on Flickr, along with our other London club photography. Photo shows Ryan Styles and friend adding a little alt.chic out on the smoking terrace. [Image © Darrell Berry]

Here’s the official release:

100proof announce the release of Issue 3 of their urban culture PDF 100proofTRUTH.

The only publication that gives real props to those it’s due to, still repping all that’s good in the world with 145 pages of visual diversity;

Eclectic interviews, street art, graphics, and photography with a truly global urban youth perspective (uh, no not “urban youth” like pictures of 50 Cent posing with a cognac in Vibe magazine).
— Fallon NYC on 100proofTRUTH.

Featured Photographers are: Witold Krassowksi, Kent Baker, The Face Hunter, Faith 47, Paul Hartnett, Darrell Berry… <blush>

100proofTRUTH Issue 3 is all about the power of the photograph, with a few other talents thrown in for good measure, (like Sfaustina from San Francisco, Sun7 from Paris, Karan Rashad from Iran, Dzyla and Fani1 from Australia, and Laser 3.14 from Amsterdam.)

With big thanks to King Adz.

The Daily Telegraph reports:

The shot, from the artist’s Thanksgiving series, was to be exhibited at the Baltic Modern Art gallery, Tyneside, this week along with some of her other work in a collection owned by Elton John (there’s the mainstream hook). But the day before it was due to be viewed by the public, police came and removed the image over fears that it might be breaking the law. It is thought that one of the assistant directors at the centre called in the authorities last Thursday after a private view as he was concerned that the picture could be offensive. The picture is now being examined by lawyers at the Crown Prosecution Service.

A Northumbria police spokesman said yesterday: “The circumstances around who may have been involved in the production of the image and who may have owned it or owns it forms part of the investigation.”

According to the obviously really well researched article, “Goldin, 54, is well known for her shots of young, semi-clothed girls.” Strange — the Nan Goldin we know and love is famed for her images of people on the edges of society, drug addicts and AIDS patients. The work concerned is also readily viewable on this art auction site as well as on various blogs (where it has been well before this particular storm).

UPDATE: The case has been dropped, but not before causing the gallery to close the show after only nine days. It was due to run until January 2008 …

UNDERCONSTRUCTION is a season of alternative cabaret and other innovative new works, every Tuesday evening at the rather wonderful Bistrotheque space in Hackney (or is it Bethnal Green? WHATEVER). Check details of future events in the season on the Bistrotheque site. More of our photos from UNDERCONSTRUCTION are on Flickr. [Image © Darrell Berry]

[Thanks to Lisa Lee]

Dansistor runs monthly. You can access our Dansistor photos directly on Flickr, along with our other London club photography. [Image © Darrell Berry]

You can access our Bistrotheque Annual Drag Ball photos directly on Flickr, with the rest of our London club photography. Excellent pictures from others can be found in the associated Flickr photo pool. [Image © Darrell Berry]

[And thanks to Jim @ Horse Meat Disco and Helen @ Film Noir]

Pictures from Studio Neon at Egg on Friday 24th August 2007. You can access our Studio Neon photos directly on Flickr, with the rest of our London club photography. [Image © Darrell Berry]

[Thanks to Helen @ Film Noir]

Dansistor launched 11th August and will run monthly. Horse Meat (like you didn’t know) is every Sunday. You can access our Dansistor photos directly on Flickr, along with our other London club photography. [Image © Darrell Berry]

[And thanks to Tim for last-minute Nikon CLS tech assistance!]

A brief (highly subjective) list of internet milestones:

• 1980s: newsgroups and email & packet-switched internetworking
• 1990s: multi-user virtuality, streaming media, dotcom 1.0
• 2000s: people (finally) embracing social media

Anyway, you get the idea. Fast forward through Web 2.0 to get to 2007, and this — Microsoft’s PhotoSynth.

A bit of perspective: when I studied computational approaches to vision in the 80s, ’state-of-the-art’ meant software that could get a cruise missile somewhere near Red Square, given a decent topographic map. PhotoSynth can build 3D models of Red Square (or anywhere else on the planet) from snapshots on Flickr, aggregate and process tags & other metadata to build a semantic web describing what’s there, then navigate the whole kaboodle in real time on any recentish networked PC. Google Earth: roll over and play dead. At least for the next few weeks, Microsoft owns the coolest tech on the block, bar none: some important part of the future looks like this. The original post and other options for viewing are here: just watch the video all the way through. You can see what the BBC have been doing with this tech over at their How We Built Britain site.

Paranthetically, note the presence of the 90’s poster child of infinite zoom — a Mandelbrot set — at the top-left of the SeaDragon demo image used in the video. Does the demo go anywhere near it? No way. In 2007 we no longer use trippy fractals to show off the bewildering wonderfulness of our tech. Instead, we are taken on a zoom into a car ad to show how it’s possible to embed tech specs in a teeny corner of the image without pop-ups. How times change. Wasn’t there a moment there when we were dreaming of more than a better car ad? Maybe not at Microsoft. Sigh.

[via Tim, who sent me a link to the early Java proof-of-concept last year, and a link to this video yesterday]

Why do big companies like to stifle little ones? You’d have thought that in the brave new Web 2.0 world, big brands would have a better way to deal with mergers and acquisitions but apparently not. Example: we are currently witnessing a major user-generated riot as long-term Flickr users are informed by Yahoo! that they will soon have to use a Yahoo! id to access and use the photo-sharing site.

We’re with the rioters.

Yahoo! bought Flickr a while back. Since then it’s grown hugely and doubtless benefited from Yahoo!’s grown-upness and corporate clout. As for us users, the folk who actually populate Flickr with our stuff, Yahoo!’s presence has until now been pretty benign. We’ve also been patted on the back for being ‘old skool’ by Flickr when we sign in — i.e. a user from before the buyout. This makes us feel kind of with it and proud in a very ‘get me i’m an early adopter’ type way. We’re also the biggest marketing tool Flickr has. Only yesterday we were earnestly telling colleages that ‘Flickr changed my life’. And it has.

Here’s an email that one of us sent on receiving the mail saying that I would soon need a Yahoo! id to sign in — the petulant tone is particularly important:

I don’t want a sucky Yahoo! account.

I hate Yahoo!

I like being an old skool user.

Pooooh.

I guess that Flickr/Yahoo! are betting they can afford to lose the old-timers for the sake of more joined-upness and the ability to flog Yahoo! products to the Flickr users who are left. We’re just left feeling that something brilliant has now been tainted and that — much like when Google took over YouTube — the party is somewhat over. And — more worrying for Flickr — I don’t know if I’m going to be envangelising about Flickr for much longer — not if it involves becoming a Yahoo! user. Urgh.

A recent essay by Grant McKracken argues that digital photography, enhanced by sound recording, geotagging and folksonomies, will transform the intimate, ill-remembered ‘Kodak moment’ from a blurry family heirloom, to key documentation of our fragmented identities:

[...] there is a deeper, more pressing value add here that is not much talked about. As change increases and dynamism quickens, individuals will need to have archival data for personal and practical reasons. There was a point in my life when it was possible to say that I had changed jobs, cities, addresses, relationships or perspectives once every six months. (I know this seems preposterous but I think if you sit down and do a “identity chronology” of your own you will see this number or something like it.) This is an awful lot of water under the bridge. The task of reconstruction is now, well, daunting. What would I give for 10 perfectly documented photos for each of those 6 month periods?

Digital ‘arm-chair anthropology’ (McKracken’s term) is in the air at the moment. A much-quoted recent posting elsewhere on the archaeological benefits of the Wikipedia points out that

The Wikipedia is the most detailed, comprehensive, concise, culturally-sensitive record of how humanity understands itself at any precise moment in time.

Viewed in this light, when the Wikipedia is “inaccurate” due to bias or limited understanding rather than simple error, it becomes more interesting because it is inaccurate. Looked at from this perspective, the word “inaccurate” ceases to have any meaning, because the Wikipedia is being used to determine how we see the world, and not whether that view is “accurate” in any empirical sense. In this light, the more accurate an entry is, the less useful and interesting it becomes. And, of course, what those that contribute to a given entry have found to be worth including is most interesting of all. [...]

Since the Wikipedia exists in many non-identical, language-based independent editions, each of which is constantly changing, all of the editions taken together provide a real-time record of not only how our perception of ourselves morphs over time, but how that perception differs culturally around the world as well.

With personal anthropology explicitly in mind, The BBC’s prototype The Time When site enables the public to hook memorable personal events into a collaborative, RSS-able ‘digital oral history’. And of course, there’s the granddaddy of all online archaeological tools — Archive.Org’s Wayback Machine.

Seems that it’s taken the first ten years of the popular Web for people to realise that the digital world isn’t an ephemeral, weightless Now, but another medium on which history — personal and public — inscribes its long shadow. For future anthropologists, arm-chair or otherwise, the beauty and challenge of the early Digital Age technologies will be in the rich access they provide to our individual little worlds as they stood shortly after the ‘End of History’. Dig deep.

[A footnote: maybe the zeitgeisty fascination with personal timelines is the logical progression of what we've been calling NOWstalgia. We have increasingly easy long-tail access to the media that soundtracks the intimate histories of our generation. It's only natural that we desire to string those remembered jewels on the narrative threads of our own stories. Give it a year and literary agents will be optioning personal-timeline memoirs with the same zest currently reserved for this week's star sex-blogger or 'blogging copper'. Just you wait.]

The charming Designers are Wankers are holding a video-phone portrait contest. How very modern. They say:

We want you to flex those artistic muscles and create a film all about you. The objective here is to sell yourself (and not your soul) to a potential employer/client by illustrating how your services are of benefit to their organisation. The duration of the video is to be no longer than 30 seconds, but the quota of imagination on how you approach it is limitless. The winner will be awarded the prize of £5,000, and in addition, job vacancies in various areas of design will be offered at competitive salaries.

The best footage will then be distributed via DVD. How very anachronistic — why not on YouTube? This project is very much like Showstudio’s recent Amaze Me but hopefully with more interesting results. We’ll see.