iheartphotograph

By Martin Joergensen | October 3, 2008 3:20 PM | Permalink

One of my absolute favorite photographic blogs is iheartphotograph - like in I love photograph with the heart symbol. Iheartphotograph is a daily dose of different photography gathered and published by New York based art curator Laurel Ptak.

And when I say different I really mean it. This huge collection of photographs and display of photographer's works is quite far from what I shoot myself (and then again, see later), and quite far from the type of photos I mostly look at in galleries, on the web, in books or in magazines.

And maybe exactly because of that this site has become my daily watering hole in a desert of photography. Now, don't get me wrong. The stuff I look at most is beautiful, well executed and technically impeccable, and as such a boon to the eye and generally very nice to look at. But it contains only few surprises.

Iheartphotograph is exactly the opposite. Not all images are beautiful, most are technically inferior and some are both ugly and in all ways strange. But that's exactly what I like. The images Laurel collects on her site are endlessly surprising and inspiring.
OK, I admit that some are so odd and so bad in the technical sense that it's embarrassing. Shot with small cameras, out of focus, badly lighted and often further mistreated in post. Others are deeply fascinating, esoteric and strangely beautiful.

Some of the artists on display have themes, others have a certain style while others stick out in all directions. Many are very artsy. And I say that in the not-so-respectful sense. It's like if you shoot lousy, blurred, badly composed images of really weird things, desaturate them a bit and give them an inexplicable title, it's art.
Some honestly look like accidental shots, the artist pressing the trigger by mistake. Some remind me of my grandmother's pictures from my childhood holidays, helpless, ridiculous.

On the other hand I see great art on the site more than once a week. Well thought through or impulsive, beautiful or ugly, plain or strange, but surely art - meant in the very respectful way. I love Paho Mann's drawers, Levi Van Leuw's landscapes and Scarlett Stephenson-Connolly's Amongst the Animals, which I all found through iheartphotograph.

In that way iheartphotograph keeps me on my photographic toes: thinking, forming opinions and never resting.

I am not a stranger to doing iheartphotograph-style pictures. We all have our moments of the artful, and even though I don't expect to wind up in a gallery in Big Apple or to be curated for a trendy online gallery, I can also sometimes be tempted to shoot blurred, unsaturated, oddly looking pictures of strange subjects. On this page you see a couple of tongue-in-cheek slideshows with some of my artsy pictures.

But for the real thing: go to iheartphotograph.

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