subject echo: the float

what is it about the float?

is it the subject's total abandon? are freedom, relaxation, abandon, fear of drowning, etc... feelings we are trying to capture in photographic work?

more practically, is it because we float during vacation or leisure, times when photographers are more likely to have their cameras handy?

is it a romantic meme gleaned from art history?

has the visual proliferation of floating images just reinforced that floating is something to take photos of, creating a reproductive cycle of float photos?

or am i missing the boat here?

comments, please, on floating the subject. (and more links!)


(the images above are by: Davin Youngs, Doug Dubois, Jérôme Icardo, Mikaylah Bowman, Justine Kurland, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Dru Donovan, and Richard Misrach.)

photographers without websites: mikaylah bowman

i might have forgotten one reason why some photographers today might not have personal websites: because websites are totally over.

as the Slate article "The Death of Email" reminds us, things like email and informational web 1.0 sites are quickly becoming the sole territory of the 30+ set. (why sit down and compose an email to someone when you could be IMing, texting, blogging, updating your Myspace, or writing on a wall in Facebook, all at the same time?)

case in point, the work of 18 year-old Mikaylah Bowman. i really love what i've seen of her photos. i posted some of my favorites above, but there were several more that i wanted to include. her take on portraiture seems to naturally run to the cutting off of heads and feet, photographing people from behind, isolating their shoes, accessorizing them with slabs of meat, and dressing them up into other personae... in short, turning classic portraiture on its head is definitely second nature to her.

now, i don't mean to hold Bowman up as a symbol of what i suppose her generation to be, but you've got to admit that she might not have a personal website (with boring static things like a portfolio and contact information)—but she has got a lot of links.

and here they are. and you should check them out:

http://flickr.com/mikaylahbowman

http://oldrecipe.livejournal.com/

http://fjordphoto.org/mbowman/

http://www.myspace.com/breathingproblemproductions