August 2016 – Dietmar Tallroth

Time and Photography -Foundations

In Article / Time and Photography Series

Introduction

Time is an essential parameter in photography. It can be looked at from a technical or physical, an aesthetic or even a philosophical point of view. Photography (and painting) is also different from other arts in that once it is produced, it doesn’t have an intrinsic duration. In contrast, a movie, a piece of music, a ballet or a play all unfold in time and do have a duration. But in the process of making a photograph, the photographer has to make decisions regarding time and these decisions reflect upon his or her intentions. This series of posts will first look at these different aspects of time in photography. In addition it will visit the topic of time as a subject of photography, which means: “Can we photograph time?”.

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A Tale of Five Painters – Part VII

August 5, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In A Tale of Five Painters

Summary and Epilogue

This series starts to behave like Douglas Adam’s “increasingly inaccurately named” Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy trilogy in five installments: it just keeps adding new parts. But I will stop after this one, I promise…

But I thought it might be useful, for you and me, to summarize some of the insights and tools we’ve found so far. And there is still the question, why I thought that just these artists from a different culture should guide my way.

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A Tale of Five Painters – Part VI

August 1, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In A Tale of Five Painters

Hasegawa Tōhaku

In the year 2000 an exhibition in Zürich, Switzerland was dedicated to a single Japanese painter, or even: a single painting of that artist. That painting, in reviews of the exhibition, was hailed as an equal to da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and as the most important Japanese ink painting. That is quite some hyperbole, not often seen in describing Asian works of art. Still, I think, it was deserved. And if you have read the articles in this series so far, you are well prepared to see it as well, because everything we have found so far, now comes together in one single picture.

What I am talking about is Hasegawa Tōhaku’s (1539-1610) Shōrin-zu Byōbu (“Pine Forest”). As an exception, it might be worth this time to spend a few lines on Tōhaku’s biography. Born in the country side, he became a professional painter at the age of 20. He came from a painting school named Kenō, which specialized in colourful, golden-leaf covered paintings for the rich and mighty. This brought him to the court of the ruling Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

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