grassdoe

so successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful. 

- susan sontag

i find myself continually returning to photgrapher Jonathan Levitt's photoblog, GRASSDOE, for bits of inspiration and glimpses into worlds that are at once other and familiar, where i feel a little bit at home. his photographs are raw and honest and they all possess a simple beauty, whatever season, scene, subject, or way of life they capture. looking at them, i am reminded of the above quote from Susan Sontag's On Photography (1977), except that in Levitt's photos, it is the world that retains it's beauty in the face of the camera. i really think i could live in almost any one of them.


all photographs Copyright © Jonathan Levitt

58 - still life

things have been pretty quiet and still around here as i've been devoting ALL my time to preparing for my comprehensive exams, giving it one last push to complete and submit my annotated bibliography so that i can write the exam in November. what better time, then, to share this animated Still Life (2001) by British artist Sam Taylor-Wood, a silent film work in which a painterly bowl of fruit decays at an accelerated place. engaging the seventeenth-century art historical traditions of vanitas and memento mori, it is perfectly visceral in the way it distorts time and captures the banality of the everyday. 

i particular like the way Taylor-Wood's work actively but subtly engages historical conventions and constructions. as i have been reading about the invention and representation of hysteria in the nineteenth century as part of my study of intersections between art, medicine, and the body, i am naturally drawn to another of her video works, Hysteria (1997), in which a woman performs the emotional states of laughing and crying in the absence of sound, blurring the distinctions between them.