Month: June 2007

Luther Gerlach’s Los Angeles

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Contemporary Los Angeles via Luther Gerlach’s wet-plate photography.

Using antique cameras he restores himself, and a wet-plate photographic process dating from 1851, Luther is completely immersed in this compelling method of vintage process. Gerlach says, “Quite often I feel as if my soul is in the past and my mind is in the future.” His ability to combine past and present becomes even more evident as he transports glass-plate film, restored cameras, lenses, precious metals and solutions to each photo location via his converted van. His unique use of the wet-plate process, combined with his contemporary style and provocative subject matter has propelled his work on the covers and featured editorial in respected publications, such as; View Camera, Celebrated Living, Shutterbug, and Montecito Journal to mention a few.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Bradbury Building: Looking Backward from the Future
• Downtown LA by Ansel Adams

Arabesque by John Whitney

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I made the complaint in November last year when writing about James Whitney’s Lapis that few of the classic works of abstract cinema have yet to find their way to YouTube. Happily, things change fast in the online world and you can now see a clip of Lapis here. Another recent addition is the whole of Arabesque by James’s brother, John, a very early (1975) example of using computer graphics to create animations. This is necessarily crude by today’s standards—coloured lines and shapes—but it was made at a time when computers frequently filled entire rooms and recording their visual output meant pointing a camera at a monitor. Arabesque has a suitably Arabian santur soundtrack by Manoochehr Sadeghi.

Update: link changed to a better copy.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive