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An Arnold Newman "selfie" from 1987.  Image credit: The Jewish Museum

One of my favorite parts of the Harry Ransom Center’s current exhibition on Arnold Newman is the way it resists chronology.  Newman’s photographs are organizes by particular attention to one of ten elements of Newman’s photography as artistic practice: “searches,” “choices,” “fronts,” “geometries,” “habitats,” “lumen,” “rhythms,” “sensibilities,” “signatures,” and “weavings.”  What results is an exhibit that resists a notion of Arnold Newman’s transformation over time.  Instead, the exhibit suggests, audiences might read Newman by his unique manipulation of photography’s formal elements throughout his entire career.

The resistance to chronology is apparent, too, in the weaving, wandering nature of the physical exhibit.  Temporary half-walls throughout the exhibition space designate no beginning or end point for audiences.  Instead, the exhibit inspires audiences to accept Newman’s particular artistic practice across ten themes as definitive criteria for photographic excellence, and therefore evidence for celebrating the photographer himself.

Such a construction has encouraged me to think about the relationship between celebrated photographer and celebrated subject.  Are there ways that these two categories inform each other in the case of Arnold Newman?  Can we trace, even amidst the Harry Ransom Center’s achronological curation, a chronological shift in fame from photographer to photographed?  How does fame work as a mechanism for those who garner fame by representing it and perhaps cultivating it?  Can those who represent fame create it as well?

Image Credit: Google

I had ten minutes to kill yesterday afternoon, and I spent them clicking around on The Guardian’s website. And while I was thinking about posting on something else today, this weird collection of images came across my screen and I thought it’d be fun to put them up. They’re a collection of images amassed by Jon Rafman of people and animals doing funny and/or stupid things when the Google Maps Street View van drove by. Some of them are really quite entertaining, and I encourage you to take a look if you haven’t seen them already. Most of the images have correct corresponding addresses and can be found in Google Earth Street View, which confirms for the weary that these things actually happened. Some of the addresses are ambiguous (e.g., “Victoria Highway, Gregory, Australia”) and it’s hard to find their corresponding images on Google Maps, which is a shame. Sometimes you wish you could move up and down a given location and discern how a given scene developed. In addition to the selections that can be found on The Guardian’s website, even more can be found on Rafman’s website here.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

If you didn't see this image last week, you may have been hiding under a rock. Wikipedia reports that 162 million people viewed this image on January 18 as a result of their protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, which involved blocking all English-language content on the website. As a result of the blackout, 8 million people looked up their representatives in Congress, and a unknown number of people tweeted amusing and seeemingly illiterate things. (Mildly NSFW content in full post.)

While the google “street view” feature has certainly revolutionized the way we look at maps, they’re now taking that technology a step further – over the threshold and into buildings.  The “Art Project,” powered by Google, has partnered with museums all over the world to bring not just the art, but the museums themselves to your computer.

Image Credit:  Joel Sternfeld Via The Getty

H/T Seeing and Writing 3

For the past few years, I have started my course using the Joel Sternfeld photograph above.  Class members usually list as many observations as possible, and then we start to hazard inferences about what this photo signifies...what the items of this environment present.  I have a heart for this image.  The scene invites us to narrate, but it also refuses to tell us the whole story (one part of which is the police beating and death of Malice Green in 1992).  Today, I was reading Laura Smith's latest post on Googlemap pedagogy, and I wondered what would happen if I put in the address, which is also the title of the photo:  "Warren Avenue at 23rd Street, Detroit, Michigan, October 1993."

If you teach rhetoric and technology, you might be interested in “Googolopoly,” a version of the classic Parker Bros. game that charts the search giant’s quest for web-wide domination.

FYI: Rich Uncle Pennybags’ pitchfork is a clue that the creators are ambivalent about Google’s quest to “organize” your data and “make it universally accessible and useful.”

Those of you who have time to kill in during these last few weeks of class can download the entire game here.

via TechCrunch

László Kozma, a grad-student at the Helsinki University of Technology, has created Wikipediavision a mashup of Wikipedia edits and Google maps reminiscent of Twittervision and Flickrvision.