The first issue of the Haphazart magazine is out---- it is produced by self-entitled FREAKS, FOOLS AND PRANKSTERS! It looks good in terms of the magazine reflecting the origin of this Flickr group. There is more about the magazine on pa gillet's blog. You can buy the book from Blurb
The featured artists are PA Gillet (pa gillet), Krystina Stimakovits (casually, krystina), Dom Ciancibelli, Mike Lusk (finsmal), Christian Kinzler (tossthecam).
An interview with pa gillet kicks things off. gillet, who set the Hapazart group up two years ago, describes his work in terms of pictorial meaning, which refers to painting, as being interested in the object not the photographic project. The work, primarily of walls and roads, is informed by Nicolas de Staël and Serge Poliakoff and Lewis Baltz, and it moves as far away from looking like a photograph as possible. The work operates in terms of chance and explores the wear and tear on these surfaces of the city.
The featured artists are PA Gillet (pa gillet), Krystina Stimakovits (casually, krystina), Dom Ciancibelli, Mike Lusk (finsmal), Christian Kinzler (tossthecam).An interview with pa gillet kicks things off. gillet, who set the Hapazart group up two years ago, describes his work in terms of pictorial meaning, which refers to painting, as being interested in the object not the photographic project. The work, primarily of walls and roads, is informed by Nicolas de Staël and Serge Poliakoff and Lewis Baltz, and it moves as far away from looking like a photograph as possible. The work operates in terms of chance and explores the wear and tear on these surfaces of the city.
There are two articles: one by J Neuberger entitled Haphazart! Contemporary Abstracts and Searching for a Theme edited by Mark Sullivan (mark valentine) I'm not sure what they argue in these texts since the blurb book only allows you to preview the first 15 pages. However Mark says that his text is actually an edited version of a topic from the haphazart group - the searching for a theme thread that is entitled theatrical therapeutic thematics in which it is argued by casually, krystina that:
This is an argument for the more improvised and free style of photographic working.
[I've] always thought the photographer's task was to make some kind of sense or create some kind of order from the mass of visual information around..I think nothing is easier than just to shoot whatever comes your way regardless how. In fact there are thousands or millions of images just like that here on flickr. Nothing wrong with that in principle, if all people want to do is to simply share whatever they see at any or every moment of their spare time....and clearly there's room for that, but even someone like Winogrand who could shoot thousands of images every month, would in the end....(usually 3 years after shooting) make a careful and critical selection of his material.
For anyone interested in image making will sooner or later ask themselves what it is that makes an image arresting or memorable or evocative. To a large extent there will always be a mystery about that, however such images do tend to have some things in common....i.e. they have been 'composed' ...and composing means making sense or creating some kind of order of what we see - and it does not matter whether this was done intuitively or consciously.
In a world where most of us are bombarded by a constant flow of images don't we want to try for our images to stand out just a very little, so that MAYBE someone spends a little more than just one second looking at it?
This is an argument for the more improvised and free style of photographic working.
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