NoRelevance.com » photographs

Bobo the Clown & Boy via These Americans

Art — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 20:59:54 +0000

The tagline for the These Americans website is “American Art, History and Culture Through Pictures” and, while this image of “Bobo the Clown and Boy (1951)” portrays the selflessness and compassion that embodies the American spirit, the website does tend to highlight some of the more colorful aspects of the Home of the Brave. Take, for example, their gruesome collection entitled “American Lynching” that contains photos featuring crowds of smiling white folks (including children) squeezing into frame around bare-chested black men tied, hung by their necks and often burned.

Just glance at the sub-menu navigation buttons and you’ll get an idea of just what types of art, history and culture pictures are in store: FSA, slavery, mug shots, lynching, Los Angeles, child labor, civil rights, studio, death, civil war, injury, racism, native american, prison, guns, war, great depression, exteriors. That’s quite a list of keywords for one website and yet it doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of tagged photos found here. In addition to what appear to be fortuitous thrift store/garage sale acquisitions (Polaroids & snapshots), you’ll find works by such accomplished photo-documentarians as Weegee, Dorthea Lange, Walker Evans, Bernice Abbott and Ben Shan, just to name a few.

Vanishing Austin

Art — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:37:32 +0000

Has that beautifully beat-up old sign you’ve driven past for years suddenly disappeared with a cold, glass and steel tower rising in its place? Obviously, if you’re here at NoRelevance.com you’re not alone. But if you’re also in Austin, TX then you’ve got a last chance to see some of those lost treasures and can even help save future vanishings. Vanishing Austin is a website dedicated to, well, basically what the name says. More specifically website owner Jann Alexander’s photographs of “Austin in transition contrast the often-contradictory beauty of the old juxtaposed against the new.” As an archivist myself of beautiful things lost to “progress” I can only stand on my chair and applaud such efforts. Ms. Alexander has also recently unveiled a new poster featuring Austin’s “Endangered Species,” available on her website. Good stuff!

http://vanishingaustin.wordpress.com/

Polaroid Prints – Only $18 a Piece!

Art — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:42:20 +0000

Well, if you were one of the lucky idiots who paid $180 bucks (plus shipping) for the “Special Edition Polaroid One 600 Classic Camera & 779 Premium Film” package that Urban Outfitters was recently peddling then I hope you made every “say cheese” count. With only 10 prints per pack, as has always been the case, the Special Edition package pumped you for at minimum $18 buck a snap–thus quite possibly eliminating the joy and spontaneity that made Polaroid the camera of choice for party-goers and crap-shoot photographers alike. Anyone who has swung by their local thrift store, even if only to drop off that bag of last year’s clothes, has to have noticed the piles of perfectly good Polaroid 600 series cameras growing in the electronics section. I once picked up an SX-70 Land camera (think Warhol) for $3 bucks at a thrift store. Perhaps unbeknownst to their previous owners, film for these cameras does still exist–though mostly remainder stocks on eBay and Amazon.com. You can even find new “crack and peel” type film being made for those vintage bellowed 540/720 series cameras if you search online. A three dollar camera sure puts me back in joy and spontaneity mode.

Do You Know What it Means?

Art — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:24:37 +0000

Do you? I’m not sure you do, unless of course you start browsing the many family photos in this online memory project. DoYouKnowWhatItMeans.org hopes to avoid the type of catastrophic loss of visual history as which happened with the floodwaters of Katrina. Many photos seem to have survived a hurricane or flood or two, which would not be beyond the realm of possibilities for residents of New Orleans who seem to suffer a major “natural” disaster every generation or so. The snapshots instantly bring me back to my childhood. I have fond memories of “hurricane parties,” where several families on a street would convene to one house with the kids all running around the back yard and the dads setting up a giant cauldron atop a propane stove to boil crawfish, crabs and shrimp. Once the rains and heavy winds began the party would move indoors where the moms played Bourré under hurricane lamps, the men tweaked their transistor radios and the kids pulled out their Nash Roberts hurricane tracking maps waiting for the inevitable eye to come…