Category Archives: photo

SF Fine Art Fair

The SF Fine Art Fair is this weekend at Fort Mason in SF. Tickets are $15. In all honesty, I don’t know much about this. Zer01, presenters of the 01SJ Biennial are sponsoring an entrance, so there should be something there beyond what you’d normally expect at a “fine art fair.”

UPDATE: Thu May 27 18:04:25 PDT 2010
Photos. I call special attention to Popperceptual by Patrick Hughes.

The Lynching of Mario

Mario, was a recent Italian immigrant, just trying make a living cleaning drains and fixing leaking pipes. No one paid much attention to him at first, but as the number of recent arrivals from Italy increased, tensions in the community grew.

On that fateful Saturday, a rumor spread that Mario had been caught trying to force himself on one of the town’s beautiful blonde maidens, Peach. Gathering clubs, the townspeople gather outside the small cottage that Mario shared with is brother, and demanded Mario to be sent out. When they refused, they broke through the door, and beat Mario’s brother so hard that he remained in the hospital for a week and almost died.

Mario was dragged from his home, and hanged in a near by tree. As hung there, slowly strangling, men and children would beat him until he died, and then continued to beat him until his body broken and torn.

After the lynching, doubts about the rumor began. Some even say that the rumor was started by an rival plumber with a vendetta. The truth is now lost.

Fidel at Bat

The only picture hanging in my apartment is the above photo of Fidel Castro playing baseball. It’s a poster entitled, “Fidel at Bat: Images of the 20th Century.” I bought it because it was such a non sequitur. There was Fidel, playing baseball in a full stadium, with cameras all around him. There was no context for this photo. It was just there.

I wondered what was going through the pitcher’s mind. Was he told to give up a hit to El Presidente? Does he lob the ball up there so Fidel can get a hit? If he does, he can’t make it too obvious that it’s just a lob. What if Fidel just whiffs at it? What if, Fidel when he enters the box, says, “Give me your best pitch.” Do you show it?

Did Fidel play the whole game? Probably not. It was probably just a stunt, but in my imagination, he plays the whole game and goes 3 for 4 with a sacrifice bunt. (“We must all make sacrifices for the good of the whole,” Fidel is quoted as saying in the post-game interviews.)

Originally, I was just going to leave this post with that image, but as I searched around for a scan of the photo, I found several more photos of Fidel playing baseball, including wearing a baseball uniform, instead of his trademarked army uniform. Unfortunately my search added a bit of context to these photos, but it flesh out my alternate reality a bit. Castro was a star pitcher in college, noted for his curveball, so of course, he’s a pitching. He also, lead off. Lead off pitcher. That’s my Fidel.

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Chemical Warfare Project, Phase 1

Eric Pakurar, took a photo every day of the same Greene St doorway in Manhattan for eight months straight, recording how the graffiti changed as part of his Chemical Warfare Project.

He is currently soliciting the identities of the individual artists, the individual pieces on Flickr.

Via Wooster Collective

BoingBoing Interviews Cassandra C. Jones

Digeratti Xeni Jardin for BoingBoing Video and the Chron interview (albeit separately) collage artist Cassandra C. Jones.

Cassandra finds amateur photos of the same thing (e.g. the moon, lightning, a sunset, etc.) and then combines them in novel ways. Such as taking photos of lightning to make the shape of a rabbit, or animating the phases of the moon from a hundred separate snapshots.

Cassandra’s show, “Send Me a Link,” opens this Saturday (Reception 4 pm – 7 pm) and runs through September 5th, at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, 172 Minna Street, SF (11 am – 6 pm, Tues-Sat)