May
10
2006
In the last few months I have posted pictures in the gallery that I have withdrawn as quickly as I have uploaded them. A website is tempting as an instrument to show a work in progress, but I really need more time to evaluate pictures. A photograph that seems great on the day of the shoot can look quite fiendish after the first cup of coffee on the day after.
So, I decided to wait longer with new works and rather post some older material instead. In the meantime I also try to add to my links page. An easy job because I spend considerable time on the web looking for photographs to collect in digital format. Once in a while I run into something that really absorbs me, like the Atget / Rauschenberg photographs of Paris.
On rare occasions I find a site that really cracks me up. Like today; when I found the site of the ‘Paducah Artist Relocation Program‘. As an artist and a studio photographer I have always felt that I am on a lifelong relocation program. If it is not a disastrous relationship forcing me out of my house, it is the landlord who seeks profit in selling the space that I have so enthusiastically redecorated from an industrial space to a loft that suddenly charms bored managers in a midlife crisis.
So the title of this particular site made me smile and I posted the link in the Miscellaneous section. Not that I will ever go there, but it is nice to know that in a time when most artists are forced out of major cities – because the rents have become unreasonably high – there are also people turning these sad situations into Happy Projects.
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May
10
2006
It is spring in Amsterdam and tourists are everywhere. Armed with water bottles and back packs they stroll down the city looking for drugs, sex and a bit of Van Gogh.
I like to take a camera on my rare walks through the city and it is fun photographing tourists. Over the years I must have taken hundreds of shots of tourists photographing their loved ones on canal bridges, on picturesque squares and in front of tourist shops selling wooden shoes. These are snapshots for my own collection, they do not add to anything I photographed. Or maybe they do, but I do not see it.
I stare back at those who stare at me.
Lately however – being a person who never had a relationship lasting longer than 12 years – I am fascinated by couples of my age and older. These are couples that seem to have found equilibrium in their coexistence. Most of them do not look as happy as I expect them to be. Usually they are fighting over the map that she is holding, while he is pretending to be the city scout by yelling: ‘I told you that the Van Gogh was just the opposite direction. You are holding the map upside down!’.
Sometimes they sit meters apart on a terrace, looking quite bored.
And all the aggravation of walking through a city they do not know causes stress – an awful lot of stress.
Stress
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The Map
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The Terrace
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May
08
2006
As the administrator of a server that also hosts AmeaNet, a web of sites that are visited mostly by Americans, I have some insight in the whereabouts of these visitors, because the server automatically logs IP-numbers, providers and other trivia such as browsers and operating systems used.
The Americans currently make up for about 65% of the visitors of www.ameanet.org. The rest of the visitors come from all over the world, with a few exceptions; the Saudis rarely stop by and Iraq and Iran are also countries that almost never pop up in a server log.A few weeks before the invasion of Iraq however, I had numerous entries from Iraqis using (US) English browsers and IP accounts that traced back to US owned Internet providers. My conclusion was that there was something wrong with the server. The idea that the Americans were already in Iraq, weeks before the decision of an invasion was made, seemed ludicrous to me. Paranoid even.
After the invasion there were rumours that some American troops were already in Iraq weeks before they officially invaded the country.
In the last week Iran pops up frequently in my server logs – same situation, same routine. (US) English browsers tracing back to US owned providers while the geographical location of the visitors is most definitely Iran.
I sincerely hope I am paranoid.
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