All posts tagged: photography

Jeff Frost Timelapsed Desert Squatting, and Painting

Artist and photographer Jeff Frost from Anaheim, CA, loves to shoot everything but he specializes in timelapsed photography that, when painstakingly layered together into a video, can be breathtaking. In this video he roamed deserts in California and Utah looking to squat in abandoned buildings, and to make art.

Image © Jeff Frost

Frosts’ sense of adventure and wonder gives him an unlimited access to the night sky and the movement of the planet as plays among the stars, and the occasional wildfire in the middle of the night. It also gives him license to experiment with geometric shapes, perspective, and popping color in the wide open decay of buildings in the sands. Thanks to nearly 40,000 photos and his imagination, we get to see his work as a video as well as a glimpse of a world without limits.

Image © Jeff Frost

The artist explains his practice:

“I have a serious case of wanderlust. My favorite thing to do is roam the deserts in search of abandoned buildings. When I find a room I particularly like, I set up camp there (sometimes literally), and proceed to paint a large mural on the inside of it. I photograph this process with a combination of time-lapse and stop motion photography. At night, if I’m not squatting in random abandoned structures, I shoot time-lapse of the stars zooming overhead.

When I return to the city I have two things: 1) a body that feels like a mean, mean man has worked it over with a baseball bat, and 2) thousands and thousands of high resolution photographs, which I use to make videos.”

Image © Jeff Frost

Image © Jeff Frost

Image © Jeff Frost

Image © Jeff Frost

Image © Jeff Frost

 

Learn more about Jeff Frost on his website and follow him on Twitter

 

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Occupy Wall Street: Handmade Signs and #Hashtags

“New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant” E.B. White

brooklyn-street-art-occupy-wall-street-copy-right-jaime-rojo-09-22-11-web-2Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

And to the above list we might like to add the very, very rich.

“Occupy Wall Street” is the command of a loosely knit congregation of primarily young people who have set up a small colony in downtown since the 17th and, despite the armature of a police state surrounding them, these Millenials are questioning the economic structure of this millenium.  Using D.I.Y signage, social media savy, and a fair amount of street theater, their message has been making it’s way far beyond the cavernous streets of the best know banking district in the country. Fortified with a heavy contingency of uniformed and plain clothesed officers with cameras and weapons at the ready, Wall Street became an iron clad citadel 10 years ago, an impenetrable marble and concrete castle to capital where tourists waddle and traders race daily past the steps on which  George Washington took his oath of office. The stock market is here, the Federal Reserve, and so are all the banks.

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

It’s understandable that a generation with bad prospects of finding work, saddled with high debt for their education and living with parents who are at their wits-end because of underwater mortgages, loss of health insurance and disappearing retirements would now fix their gaze upon the root causes of this permanent insecurity. In many people’s minds the class warfare has been in full effect for a while and these folks are now wondering about those basic tenets of free speech and right to assemble that Americans of previous generations fought to maintain, guaranteed by the constitution. As corporations continue to gain rights and citizens continue to cede  them, these demonstrators say they feel like they have nothing to lose, except their entire country.

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Their camp is a nerve center of hi/low tech creativity where handmade signs on cardboard are painted with sharp slogans and laptops and handhelds are regularly updated with hashtags and twitpics. In the center of the camp  a makeshift digital press office is ringed with faces glowing in the cool blue hue as communication with the rest of the world is continued under the watchful gaze of a ring of blue officers and street cameras. There is also joyful music performed live, with folks sharing food, books, blankets and stories.

Here are some images from the streets of Wall this week – with tourists alternately perturbed and pleased, police polite and alert, and demonstrators all over the place with messages and chants forced into a cyclical narrow path in the public space by temporary steel structures. 2011 has brought an Arab Spring where people have taken back the discourse from ever more entrenched power holders, and this spontaneous discontent appears to be encircling the globe as the shiny finish on corporate globalism seems to lose it’s luster. It makes perfect sense that these demonstrators are in this symbolic and actual nerve center of capitalism in such a public way, using public space to public issues.

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Occupy Wall Street (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Chris Stain Talks About Giving Them Hell

It’s always cool to learn about an artist’s process and the story behind his or her work. Street Artist Chris Stain shares with you here where he gained inspiration for his gallery piece called “Give ‘Em Hell”.

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Give ‘Em Hell, by Chris Stain, currently on view at “Street Art Saved My Life : 39 New York Stories”. (photo © Carlos Gonzalez)

“When I was a kid growing up in Baltimore we always played baseball and pretended we were Eddie Murray or Rick Dempsey when stepping up to bat. It wasn’t until later that I realized that a baseball bat could be used as an equalizer when the bigger kids thought it was a good idea to kick my ass for the fun of it.

This piece represents for me standing up for yourself and the things you believe in. The boy in the picture was originally photographed by Boogie. The background photos were taken by me during a trip to Baltimore. I hand cut the image out of rubylith and screen printed it onto an old table I used to work on. Then I hand colored it with thinned out spray paint and wood stain.”

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From our interview with Chris for Juxtapoz:

“Born in 1972 and raised in East Baltimore, Chris Stain is a New York-based, self taught stencil artist and print maker influenced by social realism, the plight of working people, and skateboarder culture. His straight-forward portraits in urban or industrial settings harken back to the Depression, when bankers and masters of industry declared war on the blue collar and poor. With blunt realism and everyday protagonists, Stain encourages passersby on the street to draw direct connections between social and economic conditions of then and today.”

Read Chris’s answers to the Back Talk questions on Juxtapoz here:

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Exquisitely Crumbling Contruction Walls

Exquisitely Crumbling Contruction Walls

Photographer Vinny Cornelli talks about an entertaining foray into decay he took last week.  It’s a cool way to look at something with new eyes.

by Vinny Cornelli

So this collection of images is about walled-off construction zones and the art that can be fostered on these temporary spaces.

© Vinny Cornelli

© Vinny Cornelli

When you think about it, even in this tough economy, people are still in the middle of construction projects that are walled-off by these fake plywood walls.  Why not sanction these walls as public, and allow our community to color them up?  They’re ugly as sin otherwise. Well, unless some crappy company illegally pastes posters of the newest Tom Cruise movie.  I say forget that.  Why can’t we all just have some fun, be comfortable in it’s legality, and voice our colorful contributions to the neighborhood we belong?

 

© Vinny Cornelli

© Vinny Cornelli

© Vinny Cordello

© Vinny Cornelli

© Vinny Cornelli

© Vinny Cornelli

© Vinny Cornelli

© Vinny Cornelli

© Vinny Cornelli

© Vinny Cornelli

© Vinny Cornelli

© Vinny Cornelli

© Vinny Cornelli

© Vinny Cornelli

See Vinny’s Street Layers HERE.

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