Monthly Archives: January 2012

Future of Photography Q&A No.4 – Derek Ridgers

by John Carvill

Oomska’s ‘Future of Photography’ Series continues…

We presented our interviewees with a set list of questions, and left the matter of in what format and at what length they should answer entirely up to them. Here are Derek Ridgers’s responses.

The question I most get asked, more than any other, and which fits this Q&A well enough is: “How can I get started as a photographer?”

In the digital age this question is probably more pertinent than it’s ever been because there is so much less printed media around and so many more photographers.

My answer would be: know and research well your market and then look for gaps which aren’t currently being addressed.  Obviously there may be good reasons why those gaps aren’t being covered but there will always be opportunities for people who can see things that other people don’t see.  If you want to shoot ‘me too’ type fashion or glamour or kids or nature, fine.  But just don’t expect to get a career out of it.

In other words, don’t follow the crowd, look for something new which you can make 100% your own.  And if it’s new enough and interesting enough, people will beat a path to your door.

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Every One of Them Words Rang True

by John Carvill

Every One of Them Words Rang True: The Defiance of Time in Bob Dylan’s ‘Tangled Up In Blue’.

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Back in 2006, Bob Dylan was interviewed for yet another ‘Rolling Stone’ cover story. Looking back on the tumultuous decade in which he’d first made his name, Dylan reminded the interviewer, Jonathan Lethem, that he was “talking to someone who owns the Sixties”. Which is true. The flip side, though, is that for a long time, the Sixties seemed to pretty much own Bob Dylan. It was as though he had signed some kind of Faustian bargain with the spirit of that decade, guaranteeing him phenomenal artistic success and a quasi-religious following, but forbidding him ever to evolve beyond it. Had his infamous motorcycle crash in 1966 actually killed him, it might have been seen as a fitting end to Dylan’s story: it could have been his James Dean moment, the 500cc Triumph Tiger serving as a perfect metaphor for the breakneck speed and unpredictable trajectory of his Sixties career. Like some sort of countercultural Icarus, they’d have said, he flew too high, too fast, and was thrown back to the ground. Tragic, but inevitable.

Instead, after an ominous hiatus during which all sorts of rumours about the crash circulated, Dylan returned; but the Dylan who returned seemed even more of an enigma than the one who’d momentarily vanished. If Dylan’s audience had trouble relating to the new Dylan who emerged, Dylan himself had problems relating to his own art, and even his own sense of self:

“Well, it wasn’t that the crash was so bad. I couldn’t handle the fall. I was just too spaced out. So it took me a while to get my senses back. And once I got them back I couldn’t remember too much. It was almost as if I had amnesia. I just couldn’t connect for a long, long time.”

A lot of Dylan fans soon began to share that sense of disconnection. To many, Dylan’s post-crash career proved a letdown. If the stripped-back countrified arrangements and minimalist, biblically flavoured lyrics of ‘John Wesley Harding’ were bad enough, then subsequent albums such as ‘Nashville Skyline’ and ‘New Morning’ seemed ten times worse. By the mid 1970s, Dylan was seen as an anachronism, an artist whose only contemporary appeal was retrospective. The hugely successful 1974 ‘comeback’ tour with The Band, which had filled stadiums and set records for ticket sales, was viewed as an exercise in nostalgia, a chance for aging hippies and well-fed baby boomers to fondly recall the high tides of the Sixties from the calmer, more contented shores of the Seventies.

The 74 tour had coincided with the release of Dylan’s 14th studio album, ‘Planet Waves’, which received a fairly muted response: it did hit Number 1 on the US album chart, but only because of pre-sales; business dropped off sharply, and overall it was far from a spectacular success, particularly when compared with the record-breaking popularity of the tour. This served to reinforce the impression that Dylan was very much an artist of the Sixties. He had dominated that decade, but now that decade was becoming an albatross around his neck, threatening to drag him under. As the Sixties receded into the past, so the cultural phenomenon known as ‘Bob Dylan’, once such a powerful force, appeared to be ebbing slowly away.

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A Living Wage for The Walking Dead

by Tony McKiver

Does the current vogue for Zombies say something about the state of our society? Tony McKiver invetigates…

There is meaning to our monsters. Zombies, for example, keep coming back to life to haunt us. “Duh,” as they might themselves moan: That’s what Zombies do. But over a century of movies and comic books—and, more recently, video games and TV shows—they keep coming back in different ways. These variations have been interpreted as corresponding to concerns within broader society. Such a reading allows George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead to be seen clearly in relation to the unfolding crises of the time, with the Zombies playing second-fiddle to the real villains of racial and gender discrimination, or unchecked militarism. In these films, there is little to be mourned about the world that has been overrun by the undead.

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Ernst Rohm

by Rich Romeo

Oomska’s Originals department continues, with this short but sweet poem by Rich Romeo.

What he saw was only one moment:
the music of street terror.

What he left was only one sound:
twisted jaws
bleeding in gutters.

What he was:

only a heaving breast
ready for the bullet–
worthy of his sweat.

There will be many moments.
You won’t be able to count the sounds.

 

 

Mystic River

by Brian Phelan

l'atalante 1

Jean Vigo was the first poet of modern cinema, its doomed genius and abiding spirit, an anarchist dreamer dead at twenty-nine with just one full-length film to his name. But what a film, a poetic realist masterpiece that still resonates today. Whereas even the great directors of the silent era had an emotional range not much above dime-store romances and morality plays, Vigo brought a modern indifference to absolutes and types, a dreamer’s knowledge of inner states, a realist’s understanding for complexity and a romantic’s eye for industrial landscapes and country girls.

And he did all this with just one film, L’Atalante, a film that prioritises mood over plot, refusing to pander to the kind of romantic narrative perfected that same year in Hollywood by Frank Capra. In his It Happened One Night a pretty heiress on the run meets a tough-guy reporter and they bicker all the way to a happy ending. In fairness, it’s a great film, but it ends where real life takes over, before the question can be asked. How could they live together after the adventure of their ‘meet cute’ has ended?

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