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Livia Marinescu / Griffin Snyder / Charles Piazzi Smyth / Alasdair Thanisch / James Nasmyth / Ross Coron / George Little / Robert Moyes Adam / Robert Hillenbrand / Luke Gartlan / Anastasia Nikolskaya / George Middlemass Cowie / Robert Newton / Peter Willis / Qi Tian / Helen Henderson / Matthew Cosslett
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“A manifesto for anyone who cares about art” HANS ULRICH OBRIST
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AIDEN ART ESONA BOWMAN
“What does volumes mean to you?” This is a question I’ve found myself asking over the past couple of months. For all its ubiquity, volumes is a theme that confuses people— its endless interpretation is slippery and tough to initially grasp—so this was something I posed to those who wanted to know more about Stereoscope’s fifth issue. In that vein, it is a question I’d like to take a stab at answering in my editor’s letter. To me, volumes has something to do with the physicality and tactility of photographs. Printed images, as in this magazine, operate as ‘trans-media’—where the item, person, or ‘thing’ re-presented in the photograph is corroborated by the volume of the printed page. Here, the photograph operates on both sides of a given plane—reality—much like a molecular structure in which two atoms, on which a bond is based, lie on opposite sides of a symmetrical plane. What I mean here is that the index relives some of its three-dimensionality in the physical reproduction of the image. For me, volumes became an exercise in capturing that relationship between physical reality and the image as a token and remembrance of that truth. I hope that this is made clear in the photographs and writing we’ve chosen to include. I’ve also documented my own interpretation of the theme in the photo essay following this letter. Above all else, regardless of theme or interpretation, I’d like to extend the warmest thanks to the amazing team who put this magazine together, noting how far we’ve taken Stereoscope in a very short four years. From its founding (and I should know—I’ve been here from the very beginning), we’ve continually built on the professionalism, integrity and quality of this magazine—with this fifth issue being just another step in what I imagine will be a very long line of amazing volumes to come. I’d like to extend special thanks to Anna Moore, Jasmine Picôt-Chapman, Jackie Bach and Hope Brimelow for helping and supporting the growth of this magazine—and for dedicating what I now understand to be every single moment of their free time to making this collection of images and words a printed, viable thing. I hope you enjoy every page. Aiden Bowman, Editor-in-Chief
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Exhibitions
Gabriel Kuri ‘All probability resolves into form’ 4 April – 7 June, 2014 21 Woodlands Terrace, Glasgow, G3 6DF
Hayley Tompkins 21 June – 2 August, 2014
Corin Sworn 9 August – 13 September, 2014
Duncan Campbell 20 September – 25 October, 2014 21 Woodlands Terrace, Glasgow, G3 6DF Part of GENERATION: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland
Events
Janice Kerbel ‘DOUG’ Vocal performance Thursday 1 May 2014 Jeffrey Room, Mitchell Library, Glasgow, G3 7DN With thanks to The Elephant Trust
Visual Arts: Projects / Events / Exhibitions
Phil Collins Outdoor film screening Saturday 19 July 2014 Queen’s Park, Glasgow
www.thecommonguild.org.uk Image copyright of Associated Press. The Common Guild is supported by:
AIDEN ART ESONA BOWMAN
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w w w. ac h i k e x p o r t s .c o m
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TAST E coffee and food heaven 148 north street st andrews open from 7am everyday
C ON T EN T S
Livia Marinescu Andreas Gursky: the World Kept at a Distance
Robert Hillenbrand & Luke Gartlan A Conversation on The Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem
Griffin Snyder Portfolio
Anastasia Nikolskaya Portfolio
Charles Piazzi Smyth Portfolio
George Middlemass Cowie Portfolio
Alasdair Thanisch, James Nasmyth & James Carpenter An Ordnance Survey of the Moon
Robert Newton
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128
Squarespace + Stereoscope 132
Ross Coron Portfolio 54
Peter Willis Portfolio 142
George Little Portfolio 66
Qi Tian Portfolio 150
Robert Moyes Adam Portfolio
Helen Henderson
Livia Marinescu Portfolio
Matthew Cosslett Portfolio
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Stereoscope Magazine No. 5 - Volumes issn 2055-2661 Art Direction & Design Aiden Bowman Cover James Nasmyth. “Ptolemy, Alphons, Arzachael & c.” In The moon: considered as a planet, a world, and a satellite. London: John Murray, 1874. (PhotoQB581.N2C2E85) Publisher Stereoscope Magazine, University of St Andrews Printing Agpograf/Nexe, Barcelona Distribution Stereoscope Magazine is distributed internationally through art & design bookstores, museum shops and online. If you would like to know more about distributing Stereoscope in your store or can’t find it in your country, please write to: info@stereoscopemagazine.co.uk Advertising For advertising and special project opportunities please write to: publisher@stereoscopemagazine.co.uk Published with the generous support of the University of St Andrews School of Art History, a charity in Scotland, No. sc013532.
Contact Stereoscope Magazine University of St Andrews School of Art History 79 North Street St Andrews, Fife KY16 9JT t +44 01334 462399 info@stereoscopemagazine.co.uk Special Collections Special collections images are denoted by record numbers; photographs kindly provided by the University of St Andrews Library. Special Thanks Rachel Nordstrom Alyce Shu Dr Luke Gartlan Professor Brendan Cassidy Professor Robert Hillenbrand Sarah Haas Lynn Ayton Dawn Waddell Editors Jasmine Picôt-Chapman, 2012/13 Jackie Bach, 2011/12 Hope Brimelow, 2010/11 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or part without permission from the publisher. Every effort has been made to contact and properly credit copyright holders.
www.stereoscopemagazine.co.uk
C OMMI T T EE
editor-in-chief Aiden Bowman
sub-editor & layout Anna Moore
literary editor Renata Grasso
exhibition coordinator Griffin Snyder
special collections editor MacGregor Tadie
secretary & sponsorship Helen Henderson
press Irina Earnshaw
photography editor Jasmine Arnould
literary editor Miranda Stuart
exhibition coordinator Ekin Arslan
sponsorship John Trevor
photography editor Ilinca Vﾃ｢nﾄブ
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LIVIA MARINESC U
Andreas Gursky: the World Kept at a Distance
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At first sight, Andreas Gursky’s photographs give the impression of a deep cut into the tissue of a different reality, offering a slice of something unseen before. The large-scale photographs offer vistas into crowd scenes and interiors, which have become common places for the imagery of the phenomenon of globalisation, to which we have become accustomed as spectators. His works reveal the burdening anonymity of the individual in places such as fast-paced factories, car shows, retail stores or the stock exchange. The distanced, elevated viewpoint of the photographs belittles the human presence in these landscapes, yet a sharp focus renders everything clear: an abundance of detail and a sense of disturbing precision akin to the spaces or the systems of production depicted. Gursky’s practice is often understood as engaging in a critique of the capitalist society or, more generally, of the globalised world. Others identify in his work a radical ecology that deals with the relationship between humans and their environment on a cosmic scale. While the complexity and variety of themes in his work might suggest a number of interpretations, their power ultimately resides in their sense of escaping categorization. Trained under Hilla and Bernd Becher, in the Düsseldorf Academy, between 1981 and 1987, Gursky consistently deployed the method of his teachers, who were known for their documentary style and frontal representations of industrial constructions. Gursky initially followed the single-subject method, but further departed from this by searching for an alternative way of seeing: a radical distancing that abolishes any possibility of creating a connection between the subject and the viewer. Gursky employs several formal strategies, as he either presents a subject in a full frontal view, or from a very high viewpoint. This ‘severing’, as Michael Fried names it, of the viewer from the plane of the photograph, is not only formal, but also ontological. As Gurskry summarises his aesthetic: “I stay at a distance, like a person coming from a different world”. Distance becomes a method of control, through which the artist tests and redefines the limits of representation. His photographs capture close-up views of highly textured surfaces (carpets, illuminated ceilings), which when enlarged create the illusion of cosmic views. It thus becomes a subtle play on the quasi-mystical power of abstraction, but also on the ongoing question of
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truth in photography, as the photograph seems to reveal everything while simultaneously obscuring through its defamiliarising scale. In a work such as Tokyo Stock Exchange (1990), the mass of traders are shown from a high point of view, engaged in their transactions and with each other, yet remaining detached from the viewer. This photograph marks a movement in Gursky’s work in the 1990s towards a filling of the pictorial space from edge to edge, yet suggesting that the moment contained within the frame continues in the same way outside these. What seems to emerge from this type of work is not a sense of locality or of a group of people at a given moment, but rather a disclosure act of the dynamics of specific global institutions.1 The minimalist chromatics of the photograph create the impression of a swirling movement, of pulsating patches of colour. This theme is revisited in Hong Kong Stock Exchange or in the portrayal of mass parties (May Day IV, 2000). Overall these photographs have a sense of heaviness, probably rooted in their horror vacui character, as the frame is filled entirely, forbidding any entry point into the pictorial space.
*
Gursky’s conceptual strategy has been compared to that of the Minimalists of the 1960s, but also to Gerhard Richter, especially in its dialogue with painting.2 However, he also uses advertising techniques by appealing to digital manipulation, fusing together images taken from different angles to create a totalising representation of a scene. Parallels have also been drawn between Gursky’s work and drip paintings: the shape and colours of the subject, portrayed from a distance, create rhythmic patterns that seem to move beyond the figurative plane.3 In the photograph of Vietnamese women weaving baskets (Nha Trang, 2004), a similar effect of uniformity and repetition emerges through the elevated point of view, creating an impression of abstract forms. The flattening effect achieved might read as a commentary on the anonymity and dehumanising effect of certain work conditions.4 The work retains the same overall sharpness, with a high depth of field and apparently without a human vantage point. It thus exposes the subjects to the viewer’s gaze in a type of panoptical vision. It seems that Gursky’s work is, on one level, an interrogation of capitalist society and the fetishisation of commodities. This is more obviously explored in photographs such as Prada I (1996) and Prada II
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(1997) which offer a full frontal view of high fashion shop shelves, with a sleek, minimal, yet enticing design. Neatly arranged on the backlit shelves, the shoes or sport trainers (in Untitled V, 1997) seem to suggest, through their repetitive pattern, a certain perversion of desire for objects, which reiterates itself without variability. In Prada II (1997), the products are not even present in the picture. The empty shelves do not suggest any sense of depth, of a container; they appear flat, similar to neon surfaces. The objects have not only lost their volume, they seem to have disappeared completely. However, the empty shelves trigger a mental representation of the products, a technique of association akin to advertising strategies. In Gursky’s world, both humans and objects are subordinated to an extreme flattening effect which recalls Guy Debord’s Marxist critique of the ‘society of the spectacle’ (1967), as that in which reality has been reduced to an image, a representation.5 What seems to distinguish these photographs from those of people engaged in work or leisure activities is a sense that in the latter, despite the uniformity of the crowd, human beings are captured within the singularity of their postures and movements. Their individuality is, to some degree retained. These two visions, of the representation of people, and of the geometrical alignment of objects, come together in the more recent works of North Korea (Pyongyang series, 2007), in which Gursky represents the intrinsically pictorial character of mass gymnastics. The human figure is objectified through a process of higher integration, becoming part of an overarching unity. The grid-like structure of North Korean mass games in Gursky’s world is met with the rigorous geometry of the Prada shelves, in what seems to be an exploration of the totality of vision, in its dimensions of ‘seeing’ and ‘being seen’. The pictures formed through the mass gymnastics are kept at a distance in order to be seen completely, and it is through this distance that the human subjects are possessed, in a manner that reflects the control of a totalitarian regime. The products in the Prada shop subvert the subject-object relationship as they reverse the direction of possession. The stark horizontality of the shelves is yet another deceitful sign of their accessibility: by remaining at a distance, the objects possess the viewer’s imagination (positioned as the potential consumer) through a sense of forbidden
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closeness, or through their sheer absence. Thus the photograph makes visible the workings of a desire predicated on this very absence, on this immaterial content, as the brand’s image is supposedly relocated already in the viewer’s mind. The world portrayed by Gursky is deemed inaccessible to the viewer: despite being offered up for surveillance, it retains an impenetrable wholeness which forbids participation. It seems, however, that the viewer identifies with the image as a unified whole, not necessarily with the particularity of its subject matter, so that the overall construction is experienced in a visceral manner. When this is achieved, it seems as though the viewer both observes and is observed by the photograph.
Endnotes: 1
Galassi, Idem., 30.
2
Peter Galassi, Andreas Gursky (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2001), 31-33.
3
Ibidem., 31.
4
Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c. 2008), 173.
5
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (London: Rebel Press. 1967; 2005).
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CHARLES PIA Z Z I S MY T H
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Although principally known for his career in astronomy and widely reputed for his studies of pyramids, Charles Piazzi Smyth published the first ever book to be illustrated by stereographs—Teneriffe, An Astronomer’s Experiment. The following images are from that book, and were produced using an early photographic process known as the wet-collodion process, which, by the 1860s, had nearly come to replace the daguerreotype. Smyth published the volume in 1858, upon his return from an expedition to the Canary Islands, where he had gone to assess the potential for an astronomical observatory. How to view this section: hold the blank page between the two halves of the stereograph so that an image is visible on either side. Now focus your eyes on the edge of the blank page so that neither image is comletely in focus. You should now be able to see the three dimensional image.
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AL A SDAIR T HANISCH /JAMES NA S MY T H
We made moonfall shortly after lunar sunrise. Thankfully our MU62s rendered the solar rays inocuable. We inflated our charts and circumlocuted our position. There were no major landmarks nearby but, fortunately, Prof. Linberg had a telescopic face and we were able to calculate that we stood 27 hyphons west of the crater Imhotep. We translocated 47 hyphons at 18 degrees of North, impeded but not immobilised by our constant falling over on the slippery lunar surface, whereupon we encountered a series of humplets festooned with arêtes and intersected by interesting examples of Finkelstein’s formations. Beyond the third humplet our endeavour was rewarded by the sight of an impressive fig-tail ridge, the first of its kind that we encountered, which we carefully documented on our Heiden-Pollocks. There were numerous craters of cornuclear strata before it, but most curiously a fissure in the underbed, the length of which was approximately 7,000 times the diameter of a 20 pence piece. Its depth, though, was only such as an Andean Burrowing Hornet might dig towards at the end of mating season. At the bottom of this was a purple-green liquid, very viscous and a little truncated when suspended from a pipette. Van Heimscher added some to her Nasmyth nebling flask, but upon cestation it instantly changed to a small nugget of a yellow coloured solid substance that tasted somewhat like porridge –though with perhaps a little too much honey for the taste of most Highland crofters. We followed the fissure about 17 hyphons to the source of the mysterious purple-green leakage. This proved to be a small orb of cracked surface which, though all our tests pointed conclusively to its being made of glass, pulsated as would any terrestrial bladder, bellows, car horn, air pump, erotic implement, stress ball, bagpipe, snoring hippopotamus. Provisionally we could, of course, only hypothesise that the moon had radiated, transfigured, or otherwise vomited up a miniature version of her good self –perhaps by the same wilfulness that causes her to continue her circulations around our own scenario of travail– as was evidenced by the likeness of its cracked markings to the very lunar surface on which we stood. This mini-moon, on witnessing the grandeur of her mother satellite, had commenced a process of leaking remarkably akin to the human practice of crying.
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It seems entirely plausible to us that lunar science shall some day prove this proposition, but, to add, let us say, some weight to those future pioneers who wish to support us, we embarked on a search for further evidence. This began with a small cave we noticed on the side of a hip nooked cliff face, with substantial aid from the Heiden-Pollocks. After 3 hours of climbing we reached the cave only to find that what we had taken to be its mouth was in fact a surface of dark rock. We were careful to note this marvellous discovery: that, to all evidence, the rock appeared capable of being a cave ironically. “Far from being a divertiment,” Linberg observed, “this certainly occupies a degree of investment unravelled not only by what we have seen but also by much, though of course not all, of what we have not yet seen, and a solid chunk of what we will never see to boot,” and I fail to see how any serious lunamorphologist could disagree. To our amazement, our descent was aided by the moon herself giving us a hand –though the hand in question, being of a gaseous substance, proved to be more of symbolic courtesy than of practical value. At the bottom of the cliff we found yet more oozing orbs and deduced that the moon must be offering us to take one home. However, any that we isolated proved to undergo some clear existential difficulties. “It is certain to me,” Linberg commented, “that our interaction needs to be as much dialogic as locative.” In concurrence to this we underwent a process to engage the moon in conversation. Our sonic magnification apparatus being insufficient to encompass the vast lunar ears, we feared that we might not be able to convey the tone we desired –that being one polite, amiable and forceful, with perhaps a certain degree of banter as well. Thus in alterity we began a stomping dance with Van Heimscher leading us in percussion on maracas improvised from the very orbs the moon had just offered up to us. The lunar sphericon proved a quick learner and was soon responding to us in a series of pulses which we could measure by the rise and fall of the scattered orbs. The full details of the interview are provided in appendix 16Bvii but, for the convenience of our readers, we provide here the following extract as transcribed by Prof. Linberg:
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van heimscher What is a crater? moon The filthy throb of a tuba macintosh What can we see in a full moon? moon The crease on a table cloth–fingerwide and salted van heimscher What can you see from a full moon? moon An eye with no eyelashes, a toe with no nail, a mouth with no teeth van heimscher Why are the orbs crying? moon Why aren’t you? linberg Quite so [A humming sound; Orbs cease weeping and retire except for one] van heimscher What are the purple teardrops? orb A quizzical glance We awoke sometime later in close vicinity, we realised, to Imhotep, and were able to gain a clear spectacle of its more conical filaments. “Exactly as predicted,” suggested Van Heimscher and, though Prof. Linberg remained skeptical, the orb and I could not help but agree. Our final destination lay at 7 hyphons of Imhotep at 43 degrees of South. Here we came across a wide crater of about 73 inches more in diameter than the Dome of the Rock. The orb was kind enough not only to show us the way, but also to invite us to bounce upon the crater’s rocky lining, which had exactly the consistency of custard, though more durable. Along with the innumerable benefits this gave to the spine and the Achilles tendons, this also had the effect of producing what could be approximately described as music –though whether strings or woodwind best characterise the sound will no doubt be debated by the academy for many terms to come. The orb informed us that this phenomenon was due to the ongoing vibrations from a meteorite about 700,000 lunar years ago, but also reminded us that this was only a hypothesis. With that she excused herself that her lacrimental duties were pressing and that, as Imhotep and the
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surrounding area were not in her jurisdiction, she had a long way to travel. We offered her a lift in our Gramsci but she declined with all the grace and sincerity expected of such a satellite.
An Ordnance Survey of the Moon The photographs here featured were originally published as illustrative panels in James Nasmyth and James Carpenter’s The moon: considered as a planet, a world, and a satellite (first edition 1874). In a time before space travel and satellite photography, these doubly named “gentleman scientists” embarked on a novel method of selenographic representation. Based on initial telescopic observations drawn in charcoal, Nasmyth and Carpenter created intricate plaster models which were then lit and photographed using the heliotype and, in the 1885 third edition, Woodburytype methods. The results are uncanny: a fourth-removed representation of the moon, playfully exploiting the assumption of objective truth that still clings to the photographic medium. Nasmyth and Carpenter also included photographs that aimed to visually articulate 19th century lunar theory; they proposed that, like a wrinkled hand or an old apple, the equally wrinkled state of the moon’s surface is owed to the effects of time and aging.
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GEORGE LI T T LE
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George Alan Little was a photographer working throughout the 1960s and 70s, in and around Fife. His depictions of working life on the East coast of Scotland are full of technical and intimate details, here demonstrated in the photograph of an Anstruther shipwright, while his depictions of Dundee architecture place its inhabitants within environments that verge on the abstract. Little is frequently playful with the positioning of people in space: with Melville Castle framing its small figure in grand neo-classical patterning, a monochrome couple waiting in an Ayreshire airport, and a vicar standing half-lit within the interior circular design of St Columbia’s Roman Catholic Church in Cupar.
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OPPOSITE PAGE: GAL-148 THIS PAGE: GAL-140 FOLLOWING PAGE: GAL-523
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TOP ROW: RMA-H-217, RMA-H-10106, RMA-H-212, RMA-H-1790 SECOND ROW: RMA-Q-41, RMA-H.214A, RMA-H-214, RMA-H-10107 THIRD ROW: RMA-H-8143, RMA-H-6914, RMA-H-10108 BOTTOM ROW: RMA-H-6903, RMA-H-221
A student of science, drawing and botany, Robert Moyes Adam was most prolific as an illustrator for the Royal Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh. It was for his work in landscape photography, however, that Adam obtained recognition as a photographer. By the 1930s, his images of Scotland were in high demand by travel books and publications. Adam is now widely regarded as the most successful and perhaps the finest Scottish landscape photographer of his time. The following images attest to this reputation, and depict primarily Ben A’an and Loch Latrine, in the Trossachs.
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HILLENBR AND/G ART L AN - JAMES MCDONALD
Stereoscope sat down with two lecturers from the School of Art History to discuss the third photographic volume of the Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem. Published in 1865, the album features photographs by Sergeant James McDonald, and is the product of a study of Jerusalem’s waterworks, commissioned by the Secretary of the State of War and undertaken by the Royal Engineers. Dr Luke Gartlan, an expert on Orientalist art and photography, and Professor Robert Hillenbrand, a widely respected figure in the field of Islamic arts and architecture, joined us in Martyr’s Kirk to examine the images themselves as well as the potential implications of such an album.
Could you tell us what is being depicted in this volume and in these images? Robert Hillenbrand: What you`re looking at are some of the very earliest photographs of the Dome of the Rock, and as it was understood in the 19th century, it was misidentified as the mosque of Umar –Umar being the second Caliph after Abu Bakr. And it was under Umar that Jerusalem was conquered in 638. There’s a long story about the patriarch of the Eastern Church meeting him on this sight, which was then a rubbish heap, no sign of the building that we now see, and saying to his attendant »Truly this is the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet« as he looked at this smelly camel driver, who was the commander in chief of the victorious Islamic army. You have there the very first clash between the new Islamic polity and the defeated Byzantine one. So the important point is that, in the time of the Islamic conquest, this was an accursed and desolate site, a rubbish heap, and the Muslims decided to clean it up and to make it a centre of religious veneration. So they built, as Islamic tradition has it, on the two earlier monotheistic revelations of the Jews and the Christians. And it was intended to mark the site of Mount Moriah, where a whole series of events in the Old Testament are thought to have occurred –principally the near sacrifice of Isaac. What is an ordinance, or more specifically why use photography in an ordnance survey? Luke Gartlan: The photographs are taken by the Royal Engineers,
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who were going as it were, on a kind of mission to chart and to understand, in this case, the city’s waterworks. But indeed, members of the British army had been trained in photography from the 1850s –a continuation of the tradition of the artists of the British army trained in sketching. No longer are these representations seemingly dependent on the eye and the skills of the engineer, but indeed on the skills of the photographer-engineer. Although these are from the 1860s, already in the 1850s in India many members of the British army had been skilled photographers. Like many of those sorts of albums, I don’t think it started off as a particularly professional endeavour; they didn’t start off with an especially clear idea of what they were doing. But as it went on they became more and more ambitious with regards to what they could produce and what they could eventually publish back in London. I think it’s also important that the volume begins with these photographs of the Dome of the Rock. This is to suggest that the Dome of the Rock was a sort of ground point zero for people’s understanding of the Holy Lands at the time. How did it form a sense of national and religious identity, given the emphasis on the Old Testament in this period? RH: Well, this area was under Ottoman control, and the reaction of the Ottoman authorities, in any part of their domains in the Near East, to Western intrusion was quite unpredictable. The very existence of these photographs –taken in time exposures, on tripods, with the full paraphernalia of the technology available at the time– indicates that somebody had gotten permission from the Ottoman authorities to do this. This is a building that has a lot of Muslim-Christian history. In the Christian context, what happens, largely as a result of travellers to the near east, like David Roberts and their way of putting the Dome of the Rock at the centre of a cityscape of Jerusalem and putting some Bedouin shepherds in the foreground –is an effort to create an image of biblical authenticity. If you look at Jerusalem today it is full of high-rises and the view of the Dome of the Rock that one has been accustomed to by earlier photographs is gone. This was not so in the middle of the 18th century when Jerusalem was quite a low city. Mark Twain describes it in some detail, as a city of gleaming roofs and little domes and above it all towers the Dome of the Rock, on a matchless piece of real estate, quite free of all the encumbrances
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of the dense urban fabric that you get in the old city proper. It’s a photographer’s dream: there’s all this space, and you can people the foreground with anything you like, and the standard way of peopling it was with people wearing burnouses and long robes and usually some sheep or goats if that could be arranged. It was all fake, but it had an immense impact on Victorian religious education. These were not just sketches, as Luke said, but these were photographs of real people behaving just as they did in biblical times, or so we are invited to believe. LG: But where this album is unusual in the 19th century is that, unlike that tradition of people like David Roberts coming and taking photographs, at least in some of the photographs we actually have some of the Royal Engineers themselves. And that’s very unusual for the 19th century, to show the very presence of the Royal Engineers, both documenting the site and placing themselves in and around it. So there’s a certain way in which they present themselves rather confidently, as part of the site and its history. And that’s an important distinction between for instance this album and albums being produced by Francis Frith or by Bedford at the same time, whereby the Royal Engineers, by including themselves in the landscape, were presenting these sites in a different way from some of those other contemporary commercial photographers who were already well known at the time. Is that one of a cultural ownership perhaps? LG: Well that’s one of the debates as to what it actually means to include yourself in a picture. One of the sorts of drives towards photography in the so-called Holy Lands in this time is a certain anxiety around the position of religion back in Victorian England. The origin of the species had only been published a few years earlier; this anxiety in Victorian England around religion led to a great desire to establish the foundations of biblical history in the Holy Lands. And that was done on one level by photographers such as Frith who went with very strong religious convictions, but also by Pre-Raphaelites who had a similar desire to establish the sites. And so the market for these sorts of objects, these sorts of volumes, back in Victorian Britain, catered to this desire to concretize the stories from the biblical world.
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How well do these photographs emphasise the religious basis of the Dome of the Rock and its surrounding area? And how should we consider the possibility that it might be problematic to portray the Holy Land in a nostalgically Christian way, and yet for the volume to begin with photographs of an Islamic monument? RH: Yes, one has to see this in a slightly wider perspective, because this is only the first step in the Royal Engineers’ investment in the Holy Land. By the early 1870s the survey of Palestine has gathered momentum, and that is simply a fabulous three-volume book by Conder and Kitchener; Kitchener began as a surveyor of the Royal Engineers, and he knew the land of Palestine backwards. And the work of the survey of Palestine is not this set of dramatic photographs of key monuments –it gets down and dirty and measures every single monument, every single sight, every single heap of stones that might have a connection with the Old and the New Testament. There’s a very strong biblical thrust there. And yet it’s based on empirical data collection… RH: Absolutely –and they learnt on the job –Conder and Kitchener and their team. And you can see them getting better and better from Volume 1 to Volume 3, as they begin to get an archaeological eye which they didn’t have at the beginning, and they begin to learn about masonry techniques, about stratigraphy and how to read ruins. They know their Bible backwards and they know their classical authority backwards, and there they are trying to produce the first integrated view of what is actually there, since the pilgrims of the 4th and 5th century, and of course the pilgrims weren’t archaeologists –there’s a tissue of misinformation in their accounts– but the work of the survey of Palestine in the 1870s is absolutely crucial to everything else that’s happened archeologically in this part of the world ever since LG: I think it’s too easy, with the aestheticisation of such photographs, to single out the images and put them in frames; what we have to understand within a broader context is that this volume is accompanied by two other albums, one of which is a cartographic album and one of which consists of textual notes on the sites. And so there is a very sophisticated way in which there is a relationship between the text, the maps and the actual photographs. It’s an attempt
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to map and to develop a knowledge formation of these sites, which begins now but in fact continues right up into the 20th century, with people like T.E. Lawrence, who continue this tradition. RH: We’re in the days of Empire still and we’re in the days of competition. The Germans, the Italians, the French, all had their eye on this part of the world. But the real German involvement doesn’t happen until the early 20th century. So there’s a full generation, more than a generation’s start that these people have. And it’s not an accident that they didn’t go to Syria. The French did and what happens after the First World War? Syria becomes a French mandate and Palestine becomes a British mandate. There’s a political coda to all this archaeological work, it habituated the local people to the idea that these engineers were masters of a rare technology, that they were incredibly thorough, that nothing could deter them, that they brought out big fat volumes. All this is more than just scholarship. To what extent do these photographs display knowledge of these by either their presence or their absence? RH: Yes, it’s the absence that’s striking –there’s the pool of Hezekiah, the pool of Siloam. The biblical sites, as far as they can identify them, are there. And that calls for some scholarship, there must have been the odd ecclesiastical scholar, the odd reverend who was a great classicist and expert on the topography of the Holy Land, and who would have had an input in this team to tell them what to look for. LG: There is also a way in which the long tradition of scholar-soldier within the British Empire –the idea that it wasn’t enough to rule with the gun one also had to rule with the book, one had to know what one was photographing, one had to know the land, one had to know the languages– is perhaps being evoked here. Because the Royal Engineers would have been there for quite some time before these photographs were taken. These are extremely competent photographs and so these engineers very much know what they’re doing technically. So, again, that kind of suggests the level of sophistication, the level of preparation taken into this actual series. And so there is an awareness of what is actually at stake with this survey
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LG: And an ambition to produce quite a beautiful book. And you can see, we’re still at a period where they’re still pasting in individual photographs, so you can imagine the kind of work that goes into printing them, sticking them in, making sure they’re in the right order, not getting the photographs mixed up, captions and so on. All of which does happen at the time, but within a few years, you start having what’s called a Woodbury type process, which is one of the first photo-mechanical processes, and so the photographs are no longer stuck in –they’re printed as part of the actual book. We’re at a very transitional moment in the history of Victorian publishing as well, which is another huge area which I don’t think much has been done on –the relationship between the Victorian publishing industry and photographers, and, in this case, the Royal Engineers– which is a very close-knit relationship. And you know, the great thing about going to the object, to the actual book, is the questions that the object raises to you. It’s not just a matter of you bringing questions to the material, but how the material itself can pose questions to you. RH: Who was the target audience here? Who bought this? How much did it cost? LG: A great place to start is the frontispiece. The frontispiece provides you with not just the names of the photographers, but who commissioned it, and who, as it were, gave imprimatur to the project. Such frontispieces provide you with a wealth of information to begin asking those sorts of questions. That said, this is not Frith, it was not as widely distributed as his albums were. Would it have been a commercial piece, that anyone could go out and buy? LG: It’s hard to say. I wouldn’t make such a clear division between the official object of the government or the Empire, and the commercial aspect of it. But certainly it’s not as overtly commercial as what Francis Frith was doing, or indeed had as the first goal. And that’s suggested by the title –‘Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem’ LG: And that it was sanctioned by the Secretary of the State of War makes it rather overt, perhaps, in its possible intentions. This is of military significance in terms of the information that it can provide.
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RH: There is always India lurking in the background. I was wondering whether this was financed from the India office, because they had a long tradition, by this time, of supporting archaeological work far, far to the west of India, and the authority of the viceroy would certainly cover the Middle East. So I was wondering what the balance was between London and Calcutta at this time. LG: Well that’s where in the 1850s there are the classic examples of figures in the British army who are photographers ‘slash’ scholars, people who were going out as part of the British army, but with cameras with them. Lord Canning is a great example of a governor general in India, who is very supportive of the photographing of India, and that’s in the late 1850s. So I wouldn’t so much see it as leading back into what’s going on in the Near East, but clearly there’s a strong relationship between the soldiers who were going back and forth through the Middle East, and those ideas are percolating back and forward. RH: I think what’s interesting in this album is how Islam is airbrushed out of it, given that every single person they met would have been an Arabic speaker, with very minor exceptions. Look at the caption for the frontispiece: ‘Ancient fountain near the courthouse in Jerusalem’. What does the word ‘ancient’ evoke for you? Greek, Roman? This is 1536…it’s Tudor, it’s not ancient. But it’s interesting that on the front page there’s a piece of gross disinformation. If we look at the first images of the Dome of the Rock and the manner in which they’re photographed –does it suggest anything about the significance of the architecture as a spiritual space, or is it just cut and dry? RH: It’s a very photographable building. Every time you get onto the Haram al-Sharif –the great esplanade– it draws your eyes like a magnet: it was meant to and it does and it had pride of place in this album –it’s number one. But where’s the date? Where’s information about who built it? LG: That might well be in the second volume, which should include corresponding descriptions or information about each photograph. So you’re supposed to read the two books together. Now this is rather
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unusual in the sense that Frith, for instance, puts the photograph on the recto side and the text on the verso side in the same album. You’re still in a stage here where they’re still trying to work out how to put text and image together. In this case, they’ve decided to separate them into separate volumes. Now we’re not used to that today, going from one book to the other, so we find this kind of surprising. But this is an indication of the kind of problems publishers have as to how to present visual information with textual information, with maps. Because there’s no formula… LG: Well yes, the formula’s being worked out. The thing about this photograph here, of the Dome of the Rock, is that it’s such a great example of what Europeans understood photography to be able to do –and that’s to show extraordinary detail. So, as a photograph, it’s almost a study of what photography can do. For instance, when the daguerreotype was first announced to the public in 1939, Arago, who was announcing it said »What a shame Napoleon didn’t have the daguerreotype, he could have photographed all the hieroglyphics with great detail« So I think in fact by beginning with this photograph you’re not just beginning with the ground point zero site for how Victorians understand the Middle East, you’re also showing what this technology can do –that it can show this level of extraordinary detail on the front of the building itself. RH: If you’ve got it, flaunt it! But in this case, it’s not a study of the actual architecture, is it? LG: I think as a photograph it’s obviously a very important building to start with, so there’s something there, but you could have begun with a slightly more distant view of Jerusalem. If you flip through the album, you see how it goes from a quite distant view, to slightly further back, to further back again, to then a close-up detail. And so the camera’s moving back and forward between the kind of general view, the broader view, and then a specific architectural view. In a sense, the way in which sequence works in the volume is imagining charting and walking around the site and coming across it, coming across the Dome. So sequence here is very important to evoking the experience of being at the site, not just, as it were, particular views or
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particular angles of a site. So in a sense it’s trying to convey some three-dimensionality within the two-dimensionality of the medium… LG: I think that’s where you need a cartographic map, you need to see the images alongside it and understand the different angles and approaches of the photographs. RH: But what’s interesting, to hammer the point home, is that if this table is the Haram, the Dome of the Rock is in the middle of it. The photographer who takes these pictures has got his back to an absolutely stunning panorama of 13th, 14th, 15th century buildings, one after another like pictures in a gallery: an entire museum of Islamic stone architecture, carved, inscribed, articulated, which just goes on for hundreds of metres, and he’s got his back to it! And he never shows it in the whole thing. It’s telling a gigantic fib about what Jerusalem really looks like. And in order to get to the Haram, whichever road he took, it would have been a road festooned with these medieval monuments. And they don’t fit into the story that is being told here. So this is a story full of selection, and that doesn’t make it a lie, but it might make it a little tendentious.
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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: GMC-1620.10, GMC-20-16-20.11, GMC-1620.3, GMC-16-20.8, GMC-16-20.12, GMC-16-20.7
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For nearly 50 years, George Middlemass Cowie worked as a freelance press photographer in St Andrews and the East Neuk of Fife. A wide collection of golfing photographs comprise a large extent of his work, which, however, also includes a rather boisterous and unexpected series of images—featured in this portfolio—of a Highland dancing class. Taken at a Scottish country dancing school in St Andrews, over the summer of 1953, the photographs almost seem to be a playful nod at Eadweard Muybridge’s famous motion studies.
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Las Torres del Parque stand close to the mountains on the fringes of Bogota. Their spires cut into glowering skies, twin monoliths from which hundreds of flats spiral downwards. The towers appear as though frozen in the late stages of a colossal mechanical movement. The pods that fold and interlock from the central column seem arrested in the process of becoming independent buildings. Powerfully dynamic, they intimidate the trees clustered around their bases, boring into the earth from which they grow. The downward curves of the Torres frame the concentric circles of a bullring. Together, the three buildings create a strange aura. Inside the turning cogs of the Torres, thousands of people come home every day to the reassuring stability of domestic space. In the shadow of this homeliness is the gladiatorial arena, its bricks the dark red of a bull’s blood. From a 26th floor window at night, the vast glimmering sprawl of Bogota recedes into smog. Come morning, the smog remains but the lights are replaced by a roaring city enclosed by mountains. Tiny silhouettes flit into buildings and across roads. Gaudy buses, each colour denoting a different company, swarm into bustling streets and race for customers. Taxis buzz through hectic traffic like furious wasps, oblivious to the peace of sunset. Even high up on the 129
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balcony of the Torre, I felt charged with the city’s restless energy. Nonetheless, this vantage point enabled a certain distance. Everyday objects were wrapped in a larger context and took on new identities. The small wall around a tree shed its purpose and became a circle; a staircase became a spiralling arm; the bullring became a disc. From outside the workings of the urban engine, it was possible to imagine its shape, and to manipulate this shape into altogether new forms. The paradoxical sense of still motion that emanates from the Torres is accentuated in a photograph. In it, the camera freezes the cars and people visible beyond, but the dynamism of the tower lies in its very shape. The other photograph pulls its contents out of an urban context through an emphasis on form. Again, there is a dynamic tension here between shapes that suggest movement, and materials which forbid it. From the 26th floor of the Torre del Parque, the urban landscape took on a wholly different and unfamiliar character.
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squarespace.com/students
ST EREOSC OPE MAG A Z INE : VOLUMES, 2014
Squarespace + Stereoscope is a series of short interviews with St Andrews students using squarespace.com to create websites. These are both personal and professional uses, serving purposes spanning e-commerce to charity. Here, Stereoscope is trying to uncover the ways that St Andreans express their creativity alongside and outwith photography, highlighting a few unique examples to show what can be accomplished with a great platform and a little bit of hard work. Enjoy. About: Squarespace’s mission is to provide creative tools that help anyone give a voice to their ideas. For anyone putting a website together for the first time, and even experienced designers, Squarespace provides elegant solutions that set a new standard for online publishing. Squarespace + Students: Whether you’re an art history student or study maths, everyone can appreciate a well-designed, efficient web page. From magazines to portfolios (and even balls), how you present yourself is important; it’s your public face. Squarespace offers students an easy way to make something that works well and looks good at the same time, it’s also fully customisable. With hosting included, custom domains, analytics, and support—should you fall down along the way—Squarespace’s student deal is probably the best around. You can’t beat 50% off.
SQUARESPACE
ST EREOSC OPE
Sarah Haas Thomas Chau Seine Kim
John Trevor Issy Reid George Flickinger
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roof. It also provided an important platform to showcase sponsor logos with hyperlinks to their websites, which formed a big part of some sponsorship deals.
John, we know that The Bongo Ball is a very popular and successful charity event in St Andrews, which has been running for several years now. How much of this do you think is down to the professionalism of your website?
For Xavier Project, what do you feel was the most important component of the website?
Much of the success of The Bongo Ball this year – and in achieving a record breaking £12,000 charitable donation for our charity Xavier Project – was in having a clear, well laid-out and above all professional website. The website helped to market the event to students to encourage them to buy a ticket and reach full capacity, and harbour the support of generous sponsors. In previous years, the sponsorship team have found it difficult to catch the attention of organisations that may not be initially interested, or are inundated with requests from similar student charitable events. The website offered both students and potential sponsors a snapshot of everything we do, from previous event photos to our excellent press coverage, all under one
Xavier Project has produced a number of videos, either as a vehicle to raise funds or to highlight the important work they do. The integrated video function meant that potential guests and sponsors could easily understand Xavier Project with a five minute clip. The website also provided an important platform for Rafiki Fabrix, printed clothes handmade by Congolese refugees which most guests choose to wear on the night, which all adds to the charitable aspect that is at the heart of everything Bongo does. The raffle is also something that adds significantly to our charitable donation and the website provided a place to showcase the prizes, as well as offer important exposure for the companies who generously donated. The majority of our social
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media updates throughout the year directed people to the charity tab of the website so they fully understood where some of their £32 was going. Why Squarespace? I liked the fact you could purchase a domain name and build a website all under one roof with the same provider, and that the domain was included in the price. The half price discount for students meant that it was a small cost to pay for how much we got back in terms of sponsorship. The templates are clean, refined and minimal which is key when trying to convey an important charitable message. The templates were easy to use, but also offered great customisation when we added in Bongo content and functions, resulting in a professional website that looked as if it had been coded from scratch. The level of professionalism, coupled with the analytics function so we could see how many people were visiting the site, offered two important aspects when securing crucial sponsorship deals. We were also looking for a website builder that had an online store function so to offer the potential of selling Rafiki Fabrix through the website in the future. With Squarespace, you can make changes at any point which will be important when Bongo goes through a big change and rebrand for 2014.
Beyond the ease of use, one of the best things about Squarespace is that we truly believe that great design should be accessible to everyone. Our templates are built so that you always start off with a site structure that is simple and elegant. Adding content – galleries, calendars, videos, etc. – is as easy as dragging and dropping. Custom changes that would normally require CSS or HTML knowledge, such as colors and fonts, can all be adjusted and previewed in real time within your browser, so you can create a look and feel that is unique to your event or organization. We also feature deep integrations with various social media networks, so you can easily sync your content from places like Facebook and Instagram. Finally, we’ve recently introduced our Commerce feature to all plan levels, so it’s possible to accept donations or sell a single item with our $8/month plan. -www.bongoball.co.uk Sarah Haas manages the Education Program at Squarespace. She lives in Brooklyn. John Trevor is a pyschology student at the University of St Andrews. He hails from Surrey.
S AR AH What makes it easy for users to create very sleek-looking websites for their events/ organizations? Sarah Haas manages the Education Program at Squarespace. She lives in Brooklyn.
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Lots of small businesses have social media pages, often doing sales through Facebook.
Issy, how did you come about starting Busy Bee Company? I’d been using ribbon hair ties myself for years but they were over-priced and hard to come by, so I decided to source them myself, package them and sell them online more competitively.
How has having a full-blown website helped your business? All of my business is done online, so it’s vital. Squarespace allows me to reach a worldwide market. Why Squarespace?
What inspired your marketing strategy and how has Squarespace enabled a platform for it? With no budget for advertising, social media is how I market my hair ties. People who use it are the people I’m appealing to. Squarespace is a really easy platform to link all my social media channels back to my website and allows tabs for each one at the top of each web page. I’ve also used the blogging function to add a personal blog to Busy Bee Company, which I hope will encourage people to return to my website more than once.
I tried a few other platforms but Squarespace was the most user-friendly and easy to use. It doesn’t require any in-depth coding knowledge and the shop function is easy to navigate and keep tabs on my stock levels and orders. Building the website itself was great on Squarespace as you’re not limited by dictated layouts and visuals. I was able to make Busy Bee Company look exactly as I envisioned.
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THOMA S When did e-commerce integration with Squarespace launch and how did you decide to incorporate it in the way you did? Squarespace Commerce launched in February 2013 after more than a year of research and development followed by extensive beta testing. E-commerce was easily the most requested feature from our customers over the years, and we had a chance to build a solution that was fully integrated. When we started to think about incorporating our own commerce platform, we felt strongly that commerce, like the rest of Squarespace, should be a seamless experience. Your store should be an extension of your site and online presence, not a separate entity.
With that as a guiding light, we also wanted to make it easy for anyone to set up a store and start selling their work. We partnered with a great company called Stripe that enables anyone to start accepting payments in minutes, making it simple to manage and maintain your store from a single place. From inventory to shipping to accounting and more, we built Squarespace commerce to be a one-stop-shop for anyone looking to sell online. -www.busybeecompany.co.uk Thomas Chau is a Software Engineer at Squarespace. He lives in New York City. Issy Reid is a student entrepreneur at the University of St Andrews. She studies art history and hails from Edinburgh.
carousel image from Issy’s website
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order frames which is why its not active right now.
What choices have you made to make the site suit the aesthetic of your work? I wanted the site to be quite minimalist. My photos are obviously the main subject so I wanted the site to be uncluttered and easy to navigate. I want people to be able to immerse themselves in the photos and having any extraneous elements obviously makes that more difficult. What made you decide to sell your prints via a website that is also a portfolio and platform for your work? I had an older website with a different hosting company but it was nothing more than a portfolio. I wanted to do more with the site and more with my photography and Squarespace gave me the ability to have more control over my site, as well as allowing me to actually sell my work. It’s also stupidly easy to set-up the online shop. I’m the one that is being slow and need to
Why did you put your photos on a website rather than a blog or Flickr? Well having a website allows me a lot of freedom and control. Flickr is a great platform but it doesn’t really look that good. I think having your own website makes your photography stand out a lot more and it also allows you to control the way your photos are being seen. You also have the ability to sell your photos, which is a huge plus. Why Squarespace? Squarespace as a platform is really easy to work with and manipulate. It allows you to play around with how your site behaves much more so than other similar services. That made me happy because it means you can really make a site yours with small, subtle changes to the design. However at the same time its also extremely
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clear and easy to use. It also, most importantly, gave me a great stage to put my photography on.
SEINE How have you seen the community really making Squarespace its own? The best thing about Squarespace is the diversity of our customers. We don’t limit ourselves to a specific target market – for every graphic designer and musician on the platform, you’ll also find dentists, lawyers, and self-help gurus. We’re truly a platform that anyone can use to express and share their ideas, stories, and passions. What our customers have in common are their DIY spirit and their attention to detail. They really
care about good design, and aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty by building something on their own. Often, we see our customers sharing their website via social media when they’re ready to launch – it’s really inspiring to see all the different projects and initiatives that are powered by Squarespace. We try to seek out new Squarespace sites on a regular basis and feature a rolling gallery of real customers on our website at www.squarespace.com/tour. -www.flickingerphotography.com Seine Kim is a PR & Communications Manager at Squarespace. She lives in Brooklyn. George Flickinger is a history student at the University of St Andrews; he’s from New York.
an image from George’s landing page
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PE T ER WILL IS
PWIL-25-12
Peter Willis was primarily an architect and architectural historian, working in Edinburgh during the 1960s. Willis also taught academically in the United States and Britain, alongside publishing extensively on landscape history. Far more than perfunctory documentations of buildings, Willis’s photographs select and condense architectural details in a striking interaction of colour
and form. These details are frequently offset against a backdrop of blue sky whose colour appears almost synthetic, testing the categories of natural and artificial within the photographic frame. Amongst other subjects, the photographs in this selection feature Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut, Rotterdam housing and a sunken courtyard in Ottowa’s Musée des Beaux Arts.
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The following two sets of images were submitted by Helen Henderson. Although neither have been photographed by her, their respective colour schemes evince a striking and serendipitous coincidence. Photographs of Helen’s grandmother’s flat in Edinburgh, taken by an estate agent and included in a sales brochure, shortly after her passing, are interspersed between images of a beach, most likely in Cape Cod, which were photographed by Helen’s grandmother herself.
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© Anne Barlinckhoff
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