harlan erskine — photography/blog

I have been working hard updating my site. Most of my images are now 25% larger. I have also edited some of the work and added several new sections.

New piece in Imaginary Wars series, The Invaders.

harlan erskine, The Invaders, 20 x 37 inches, 2009

This new piece is included along with two others in the upcoming exhibition at the Photographic Resource Center (PRC) at boston university: EXPOSURE: The 15th Annual PRC Juried Exhibition.

New Section: Beijing Olympics, China at a crossroads

After shooting the “I’m a PC” Microsoft campaign, I traveled to China to experience the Olympic games in Beijing. I was amazed with the visual ecstasy of Beijing and the blossoming of Chinese culture and power. I was also struck by the many contradictions and mysteries that were rapidly evolving right as they were hosting the Summer Games. The images that are up on my site are only a sampling of the larger body of work. More will be added soon.

New Section: architecture, midtown past midnight

During the first year of grad school, I set out photographing the structures of midtown New York. This project carried me through the year. I must have ventured out to photograph close to 20 times. I arrived in midtown around midnight and shot for several hours. The lobbies of these structures are contrived to communicate the marriage of space and structure.

Jorg M. Colberg’s blog Conscientious, which is one of the most well trafficked and consistently updated with original content has been dramatically updated. I really like the new look. Its like going from a amateur to a professional. Great job on the information architecture as well. The blog is now divided into two main sections: Conscientious, for the average and smaller thoughts and posts and Conscientious Extended , for longer form blog posts. So, go now kick in the tires and get some art photography reading on.

Props go out to the site designer and developer, Tim Gasperak.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

I have been meaning to post this all weekend but Horses Think who I quoted in my last post, beat me to it. Either way this is a great piece of art coming out when we need it most. Which works hard to make something which is so confusing and huge into something people can begin to understand.

Apparently the inspiration for the designer, Jonathan Jarvis for his video and Crisis of Credit website was the reporting which grew out of NPR’s This American Life and the new NPR podcast Planet Money. I have been religiously glued to those podcasts for some time and I comment them for putting is clear english what been happening to the economy.

Anyone who is interested in city design should find this TED talk by James Howard Kunstler quite interesting. James Howard Kunstler is is the author of several noted books on the built enviorment including a book I own "The Geography of Nowhere."

The talk runs for about 20 minutes and not only was it interesting but I was laughing out loud in my photo studio. just view the video below or click on this direct link to the talk.

When I first started designing my website I wanted a very simple design that would be ultra straight forward and easy to get to the work while not being too showy or flashy. I ended up going with what I thought would be most logical-a menu of chapters on the left with a simple drag out menu that I found online for free and the portfolio on the right. About 6 months after I had launched the website I came across Daniel Eatock and his philosophy of web design was essentially what I has made but even simpler.

Recently Daniel Eatock teamed up with some developers and turned the philosophy of simple web design into a simple web program called indexhibit. It looks so good I may convert my website into that system just because it might be easier to upload images. For more info please read the history of the project notice I am listed in the “Early User List” area and that the software was introduced on 12.03.07 and no thats not the future he is just using the europe date format DD.MM.YY (I always like that formate better because it goes from small to large) Anyway, there is also a good and very funnyvideo lecture posted at the Walker Art Center where he used to work.