As far as these things go, this blog is ancient (born Nov 2006!), and I think it has been overdue to be put to bed for some time now. So this is it. Hopefully it can stay up as an archive at this URL. I took a moment before writing this and clicked through the old NYC Journal work, and it’s such a trip to look at, feels like a different lifetime. I’m happy that that moment found a home here – it was the best part.
If you want, you may visit this new site, /blog2. It’s not meant to be a replacement for this site at all but instead will have it’s own personality. As the adage goes, we have to change to stay the same.
Thanks to everyone who visited and participated here over the years. It was a lot of fun.
Warmly,
Graeme
Holly, Bronx NY, 2011, by Graeme Mitchell
This particular update is overdue, as my last site was long in the tooth.
Creative direction and design by Mr. Diggles.
“I have sort of given up on what the best practice would be for presenting photos online. Every photographer looses with the web. It is a terrible way of showing work. Therefore I like this direction because it is at least somewhat fun.” -Mr. Diggles
There were 4 portfolios in the original edition of this. They were prints hand mounted in leather albums. I still think they are beautiful as artifacts, but they were stupidly expensive and time consuming to make. Moreover, only 4 people have them, and I’m pretty sure they’re not being treated as coffee table books. I wanted a simple small copy for myself to have around, and also since doing the Occurrences newsprint edition, I had a number of people ask if I’d ever do an inexpensive version of Unreal City, so I decided to revisit it and do this.
It’s 8.5×8.5,” 71 pages, 49 pictures, soft cover, perfect bound.
The print-on-demand press quality leaves a lot to be desired, but right now utilizing any tangible medium is good I think. Plus, I think that populace mainstream sort of lo-fi medium is cool, makes the work more eye-level and less precious. Needless to say these aren’t to be shilled as rare or valuable – they’re intended to be enjoyed and shared.
A big congrats to the designer, Tara St. James for being awarded the 2011 Ecco Domani award for sustainable design. Tara is a testament to adhering to an ethic that’s well beyond business and getting rich and getting famous. This is an unimaginably difficult thing to do. Bravo and kudos.
photo: Tara St. James, NYC, 2009. By Graeme Mitchell.
Occurrences is a new book of 44 photographs. It is 58pg in length, sized 11×8.5,” printed on an archival acid free matte paper, and bound in linen hardcover. This hardcover edition will be extremely limited at 6 signed and numbered books and one A/P. However, an edition of 6 isn’t many, so I may do a newsprint edition later.
This quick little video shows the A/P. There will be a few very minor changes made to the finals, but nothing major.
And a big thanks to, Aaron Binaco for the help editing this work.
Update: this edition is sold out.
Harold Edgerton (the fellow you can thank for all that strobe gear you have laying around):
photo: by Harold Edgerton
And the portraits of Julia Margaret Cameron (who did this stuff way way before any of us were even a consideration of existence’s):
photo: Come Alice by Julia Margaret Cameron
photo: Whisper of the Muse by Julia Margaret Cameron
I’m currently assembling a very small edition bound portfolios of an edit of NYC street photography that will represent that body of work to date, 50 prints to be exact (more on these when a few are finished). The name of the edition will be, Unreal City. This is a slide-show presentation of those 50 pictures. So, please, take a minute, dim your lights, turn up the sound, and let it creep around you.
Thanks, and I hope you enjoy.
This is interesting: this print was just delivered as a loan to The Museum of Sex in NYC for their exhibition on rubbers, on view Dec 1st through April, I believe.
photo: Used Condom 2008 (from NYC Remnants), 40×50″ archival pigment print, edition of 3, by Graeme Mitchell.
Here.
The last to go of the greats of the previous century of photography; Irving Penn who, like Avedon and Newton and Strand and etcetera, we’ll all forever, forever stand in the long shadow of. B/c the man LIVED:
So take a picture for him today. So pour a drink for him tonight.
“When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.” -William Butler Yeats
This blog has been a great exercise, but I’m taking an indefenite leave from posting here. I may throw up the occasional new work or NYC Journal posting, and I may revisit the blog idea with my work in a different form down the road, but for now my picture making ideas are focused elsewhere. Thanks!
There is a lot of art I love, most of what is considered good I can manage to find some bit of sanctuary in, or come to some sort of terms with, but on the other hand, when I consider owning art, or decorating with it (a completely hypothetical consideration, as I neither own nor decorate with it in any manner as of yet) there’s really remarkably little I’d be genuinely interested in. (Of course this is aside from photography). So it is surprising even to myself to admit that I could enthusiastically imagine a Jeff Koons‘ “Balloon Dog” in my foyer…or front yard. (A glorious (and gloriously priced) middle finger to nearly any neighborhood association).
photo: Jeff Koons “Balloon Dog” on the roof the the MET, ©Lloyd Ziff (in NYMag, here)
I can’t help but marvel at most of his larger installations. They’re beautiful in their grotesqueness. Adorably troubling. Like a child’s dream after going to Coney Island then watching Gilliam’s, Brazil.
photo: still from Terry Gilliam’s film, Brazil.
What’s attractive about that, about some subaltern-figment-of-the-psyche getting it’s say in huge colorful steel? Well I’m not sure exactly. Except to say that there’s a lightheartedness to it, a punctuated absurdity, a “b/c I can,” and there’s sometimes not enough of that in life that isn’t fabricated/fed to us, that is honest like art is.
I’m bringing this all up b/c Koons is speaking at Strand bookstore downtown on April 13. Details, here. If you live in NYC, and can sweat the crowd, I’d check it out. (Although, last time I was there Eliot Erwitt was signing books and, maybe, 15 people showed up, which sorta depressed me (is this what it comes to?) but that’s another story.)
Damn, I’m leaving again. Stepped in NYC for a week, shot like one roll on the street, discussed a fashion story with a stylists that we were going to get going, then got called out West for another commercial job.
Will be out for about two weeks. Telling you this is getting old, right…
Now, complaining about any money job these days would be wrong, so I bite my tongue about having to vanish again, and I just keep pics like these open on my desktop, small, in the corner, to keep things legit, to keep sanity legit.
photo: Untitled, 1971, ©Kohei Yoshiyuki.
(Meisel did a play on Yoshiyuki’s park photos for Vogue Italia. Supposedly it was too much, (see it, here). And while I prefer the original, as is most often the case, still a fine fash ed.)
photo: Nude, Seaford, East Sussex Coast, 1957, ©Bill Brandt.
(As far as I can remember, I’ve yet to see a fashion take on Brandt’s work. Ripe to be done though. Ripe. Inez, maybe?)
photo: Brooklyn School Children See Gambler Murdered in Street , 1941, ©Weegee.
(Wow)
All of those are from the Moma collection btw.
Enjoy. Will keep you posted.
There’s a nice write up on Mike McGregor, Taj Forer and I in the current Kodak Propass magazine.
You can check it, here.
I promise some posts to come soon. Promise. Got back from London and had 3 shoots pile onto my phone while I was still on the tarmac. Hit-ground-running-stumbling-correcting-cont.running. You get the idea. And I’m looking at this pile of Tri-x on my desk that ‘s begging for a long rodinal soak. Sigh. Sigh again. B/c alas, digital does beckon even I…
I wallow in self-disgust at the notion of doing a post on not posting, but just know web-land that I’ve not abandoned you! So log off and go shoot or do whatever it is you do to get your scooter going, and I’ll see you back here before you know it.
(BTW, I’ve been way interested in the aesthetic of older sci-fi for a little while now, something that the cold, gray architecture in London further set off, so a movie list for homework until I can lay down a real post:
1) Jean Luc Godard’s Alphaville:
2) Roman Polanski’s Repulsion
3) Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls
).