Cloud installation created by Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde.
“The clouds are generated using a smoke machine, but Smilde must carefully monitor a room’s humidity and atmosphere in order to get the smoke to hang so elegantly, and with such life-like form. Backlighting is used to bring out shadows from within the cloud, to give it that look of a looming and ominous rain cloud. Smilde says his purpose was to give form to “physical presence found within transitional space.””
Image made by me. This is a photograph of an installation I made using a piece Felix Gonzalez-torres’ paper stack from his Moma Ps1 installation back in 2011.
This month marks the one-year anniversary of last year’s disasters in Japan, and last week on Photo Booth weposted a slide show of images of the aftermath. One of the most powerful visual representations of this recovery, though, came not from professional photographers but from ordinary citizens. The Lost & Found Project is an exhibition that grew out of the Salvage Memory Project, a volunteer effort from across the country which has recovered some three quarters of a million photographs that had been lost in the town of Yamamoto during the earthquake and tsunami. According to the artist Munemasa Takahashi, who leads the project, they’re “mostly snapshots of special family occasions and holidays that anyone would take.” Each photograph was washed, digitized, and numbered according to where it was found, and twenty thousand have been returned to their original owners.
“After the disaster occurred, the first thing the people who lost their loved ones and houses came to look for was their photographs,” Takahashi told me. “Only humans take moments to look back at their pasts, and I believe photographs play a big part in that. This exhibit makes us think of what we have lost, and what we still have to remember about our past.”
The photographs will be on display at Aperture Foundation from April 2nd to 27th.
