Martin Parr talking about photography

2007-05-07T10:48:00.000-07:00

Food for your iPod (or whatever player):

http://2point8.whileseated.org/?p=189

Some quotes:

“All the boundaries are collapsing. One of the things that’s interesting about flickr, is that it’s probably emerged as the most intelligent photo-sharing site - it’s become the brand leader. And what will happen with flickr is that within five years it will start licensing pictures. In other words, they’ll be part of the Getty Corbis machinery…the agencies are concerned about this. It’s something we discuss at Magnum…”

“…within five years flickr will emerge as one of the major sources for licensing imagery…”

“…the other point about flickr, is I can’t tell you how bad the most of the pictures are. I mean, we see this in the site up there (at Musee de L’Elysee) the noise of this contemporary photography is relentless and ultimately, nullifyingly boring.”

“…we have this amazing interest, resurgence in photography, a renaissance, but boy do we have to wade through a lot of rubbish in order to get to anything half-decent.”

“…the best business model is to have fantastic pictures, that have a unique vision and say something different. And you get away from the turgid quantities of cliches and propaganda which we see not only surrounding our lives, but we also see in the exhibition here.”

“…I’m totally in favor of flickr. I haven’t spent enough time trawling through flickr to find the new stars who may be emerging on flickr itself…”

“… but the last thing I’m going to do - is looking at flickr for my stars of the future.”

“I come back to this individual voice in homogenized times. Connecting with a subject matter, doing it with passion, resolving a set of pictures, coming out with a personal statement - there’s always going to be room for that, because we still, whatever the process, whatever the method, we still need stories that touch us as human beings.”

Conscientious has quite an interesting interview with Parr as well!

Belgian social housing turns to lofts

2007-04-26T16:22:00.000-07:00

London's Trellick Tower was perhaps the first social housing high-riser to attract a lofty audience and since yesterday Belgium's social housing seems to go down the same way. A high-riser in Boom (near Antwerp) of Belgium's most famous postwar architects - Renaat Braem- was sold for over 2,32 million EUR to a real-estate agency which was prepared "to offer 10.000 EUR more than anyone's best offer" to turn the 75 m2 apartments into 150 or even spacious 300 m2 ones. The location of the building (next to the A12-motorway) and the building itself harnesses all failures of modern social housing, so one wonders if after living in converted industrial spaces, this will become the new craze. Incidentally, this reminds me of the Java Eiland-project in Amsterdam where the social housing-aesthetic was used for a prestigious building project.
Braem -once a trainee of Le Corbusier- considered designing social housing as a duty towards society and one can't help wondering what he would have thought of it.

Empty Space

Martin Parr talking about photography

Belgian social housing turns to lofts