Samantha Contis



Things will quiet down here just a tiny little bit as I'm heading to New York for the Photo Festival and various other things...

"Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died Monday night. [...] A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked." - obituary
I admit I am quite fascinated by the phenomenon that is Flickr - for the most part, I suspect, because of all the things that might just happen there. The other day, I decided to have a look at what people were actually commenting on (using photos that have more than 30 comments), and then I got sucked into reading the comments. I realized that there were plenty of comments that made absolutely no sense to me if I tried too hard to understand what they actually meant, but that acquired a strange kind of beauty if taken by themselves. So I decided to compile some of them (usually picking the full comment, sometimes just picking a piece): Digital Fortune Cookies or The Poetry of Flickr. Enjoy!


Edgar Martins' Topologies is a product of Aperture Foundation's "First Book Initiative", which aims at publishing "new work by emerging artists", and it contains what one might call photographs of landscapes. I do not know what it is that often makes artists somewhat reluctant to call such photographs what they are: landscapes. I do suspect that using the word "landscape" might maybe pre-set the viewer's mind to something not desired. But then what effect does "topologies" achieve? After "typologies", we now got "topologies"?