Clones

Brilliantly inventive work by artist Peter Funch. At first it's difficult to work out what he has done, but fairly quickly we can tell that there is some clever image manipulation. It offers a perceptive critique of city life by aggregating common themes, through which a typology of urban activity emerges.

Objects

Why? Why not.

Daft fun as Dylan Chandler scrolls through the contents of his home at high speed (which weirdly seems to make a bleepy electronic noise in my head), like some crazy one-armed bandit.

Via on twitter.

Superimposition

And so to the work of Bas Princen, a Dutch photographer attracted to abandoned urban settings with strong geometric character and their capacity for creating striking abstract images. Many photos deal with the collision of cartesian grids and natural forms, as idealised human form-making meets the real world. No surprise then to find an explicit reference to Superstudio in one of the captions - a micro-tiled concrete skeleton that could be the work of these 60s/70s visionary architects.

Kropilak

Branislav Kropilak's stunning large format photographs are now available at what an email confirms as 'affordable' prices. Last time direct contact with him was the only way to check prices, but they are well worth pursuing.

The photographs of everyday modernity have a distinctive graphic quality, taking in subjects as diverse as car parks, planes, trains and billboards. Explore the full set here.

Still Life

The Art School at MMU currently has some large format photos of scenes from its history on display. Amongst them is this photo of a still life class with a slightly surreal air. In the centre are (presumably) the objects set for them to work on, yet they are carefully posed facing away from the study. Furthermore, they are drawing childish outlines in chalk on their boards, which a colleague identified correctly as looking uncannily like the work of Michael Craig-Martin.

All in all, the scene has the signs of a dapper, very civilised protest perhaps against art - or the people teaching it.

Conveyor

"A film is never really any good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet." (Orson Welles)

I liked the everyday simplicity of this video - a couple of bored diners send their camera round a sushi carousel with a wistful song laid over the top.

95 years on

Years ago I had a book containing milestones from the history of photography. Included in it was Henri Lartigue's 1913 image of a racing car, speeding past the camera. The shutter action moved vertically from top to bottom, and as it did so transferred the light
onto the plate. With the pace of the car, the time which the shutter slit took to scan the lens became significant, such that circular
wheels were captured as ovals. So, I believe, the inspiration for Roadrunner's leg action was born.

Now idly snapping from the train to Sheffield, I find that by turning my iPhone to landscape format I can reproduce the same effect. We've clearly come a long way in 95 years.