So Where Have You Been, Meg Dolan?

So, it's been a while. A very very long while. Tarot project was a flop. First I shot some preliminary photos with models. Then on advice that I took way to personally, I decided to build 3D models of Tarot cards and photograph those, then I changed them more into kind of bas-reliefs, which I hated hated hated working on. We had a guest crit with James Welling (photograph below from his Glass House series), and he voiced some discomfort with the form the Tarot had taken, that echoed what I had been thinkging about it all along. He said he liked my older mythology-based work, and told me not to ditch the horse that got me here. And somewhere around here, I discovered my new found love of Photograms, which I hadn't even thought of since my photo class in high school.



And then my house burned down over Thanksgiving, and I took incompletes for my classes, and now I'm struggling through a hybrid bas-relief photogram Tarot project just to get credit for that class, even though I still hate it.

I do however love my new photograms. See Below. All based in mythology, possibly with accompanying small prose poems to contextualize them in relation to my life, and often to reinterpret them. This is a preliminary test for Daphne and Apollo.



I also documented our house fire, and continue to document the process of recovery. I'm very happy with those photos as well.



Look for a major website revamp soon. And more photograms. Mmmm, mmm, good. Also if anyone has a Hurdy Gurdy they'd like to donate to me, I would appreciate it forever. I'm quite stuck on them lately.

Back at School

Shooting my first wedding tomorrow. Super nervous and excited. Hopefully all prepared. I didn't take that picture up there, but I sure hope the wedding is just that awesome. Stuff about senior project coming soon!

Tarot-spiration Files

I've been keeping a folder on my desktop. Anytime I find something I want to apply to my senior project, I stick it in there. Most of the pictures are "do"s, but there are a few "don't"s in there as well. Here's a sample, with my thought behind each photo:


This is Death from The Particle Tarot, by Dave McKean and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Although this is a thousand times more digitally altered than I would like my deck to be, I enjoy the strange beauty. Also how much of the frame is taken up by the face instead of the entire subject.


This card comes from one of the few photographic tarot decks I was able to find online that didn't make me cringe. It's called The Healing Tarot, by Rev. Jennifer Elizabeth Moore. It gives me hope that maybe being thrifty and on a low-budget can still give me interesting and symbolically significant pictures.


This is the Tower card from Bea Nettles' The Mountain Dream Tarot. I'm concerned about how I'm actually going to pull off the tower card. I don't want to build something, but I'd also like to have a minimal amount of actual background in the cards.


This is a possible solution to my Tower problems. This is from The Golden Tarot of Klimt by A.A.Atanassov. While there is still a building present, it is more focused on the falling figures. I'll work on that.


I found this signage-based minimalist interpretation of the Major Arcana through a google search, and have not been able to find any actual information on it. It appealed to the graphic designer in me and made me laugh.


This is the Strength card from the SPILL Performance Tarot deck, which was a collaboration between the SPILL Festival in London, and a variety of collaborating artists listed on the page linked above. I would put all their names here, but there are literally about 30 of them. I really liked the interesting composition in this card. It stood out a lot to me.


This is the Star from the Silver Era Tarot, by Aunia Kahn and Russell J. Moon. I like the composition and interpretation once again. The editing and consistency in the rest of the deck that I have seen is not perfect, but they got published, so that gives me hope.


Joel-Peter Witkin's La Giovanissima. I really like the simple textured background and the softness of the exposure.


This is the Temperance card from il Sentiero dei Tarocchi by Giovanni Pelosini. It is a strictly Major Arcana deck, and in every card these two friends are dressed the same. I thought it was hilarious, as well as well interpreted and beautifully colored.


This is the 8 of Wands from the Tarot of the Boroughs, shot on location in New York by Courtney Weber and George Courtney. I was interested in the fact that although this is the 8 of Wands, there are no Wands present in the photograph. I don't think I'll go with that (it would make reading harder and I don't want text on them) but it's interesting to know that that option does exist.


This is the Magician card from the Parfait Amour Tarot deck by Will Parfitt. It's another strictly Major Arcana deck. I'm really enjoying what he's doing with long exposure in this photograph. I don't know if I necessarily want to do that, but I like the ethereal effect.


This is a great picture of Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer that I really liked. Maybe I can adapt that composition into my Lovers card?


I don't remember the name of this deck, but I liked it a lot. It's all piece of scrap metal and junk that have been rearranged to make pictures. It's really awesome.


I'm also considering a Lovers composition like this. I can't find where I found this.


Erwin Olaf's Chessmen series. I like the simply constructed mish-mashed props and the idea of reconceptualizing a common and already highly-interpreted subject matter.


Erwin Olaf's Blacks series. I actually thought that this was an interpretation of the Major Arcana the first time I looked at it and it actually sparked this whole project.


This is the Temperance card from the Carvin Rinehart Tarot. It's still in progress, but is yielding some beautiful things. It's probably my favorite photographic tarot out there, and completely stunning.


These are the stars of Harry Potter going into King's Cross in their aged makeup to shoot the Epilogue to Deathly Hallows. I liked the whole bagfaces imagery. I'm not sure where I could use it, but it stuck with me.

I like the incorporation of other screen shots of this performance piece into the main one. For a while I was thinking of using other printed photographs in the actual set up of the cards as background or whatnot. Then I started thinking that maybe that wouldn't look so great. But this is kind of related to that though process.

This is the album cover to Cecillia Bartoli's Sacrificium. I have been unable to discover who the cover artist is, but I enjoy the way the photograph is very undersaturated, and could be in black and white except for the ruddiness on the statue. I think I'm going to go for something like that. I love black and white, but I don't want to be Bea Nettles.

Summer Update 3

We walked/biked/drove-when-Heather-got-heatstroke from Minneapolis to Chicago. I'm so proud of us. The 16G card I bought specifically for the trip corrupted on the second day, but I ran file recovery on it and got some really really neat stuff. I'm very excited about it! Thank you again to everyone who donated. You're all marvelous!Here's my favorite one:


Pretty neat, huh? Since I have nothing to do for the next three weeks until school starts, I'll most likely be starting a daily blog with a photo and a story behind it on our Squat Gallery blog as soon as I sort through all of them.

My internship with Heidi is quickly drawing to a close. Check out the sweetness that is my editing skills on one of her recent photographs in these screencaps:

(before)

(after)

Fixing that cymbal was really hard (due to the circular pattern), and gave me the greatest sense of accomplishment I've had all summer. The sense after the walk was very much tainted by ligament pain.

I've also been researching for my senior project tarot deck. While I was browsing the internets and collecting inspiration for my own deck, I came across an artist named Carvin Rinehart, an Indiana painter and photographer who apparently has all the same photographic interests as me. He did his own tarot deck, and also does tableaux based in mythology, both biblical and classical. I'm so excited that I'm not the only one! Below is his St.Lucy the Martyr.


And this is the book I've been doing most of my research in. It's great. It's got sections explaining the Major Arcana in depth, the entire deck in depth, the tarot in relation to mythology, and all sorts of nerdy stuff. It's really helping.

I think this week I'll do a really quick photo series. I'll get back to you on that.

Summer Update 1

Finals FINALLY ended. I'm home for the summer now. I got a job photographing groups of ballerinas (ages 2-17). I love it way more than I should. I always wanted to be a dancer and I get along great with kids. It's awesome. It's also on location, so it's not cooped-up and boring, and requires much less cleaning in the long run.

It's also kind of like walking into a Degas sometimes:


I'm pretty sure I'm going to take adult ballet classes when I get back to Minneapolis.

Our Kickstarter project is going really well. We're past 75% funding as of today. Hooray! If you'd still like to donate here's the link: KICKSTARTER - Impressions of the Midland: A Photographic Walk from Minneapolis to Chicago.

I started my internship with Heidi Norton. It's super fun and there's tons to get done. She's great person and a wonderful photographer.


I'm also considering options for my senior project, and I think I want to make a Tarot Deck. Below are two fabulous photographic tarot projects:

"Mountain Dream Tarot" by Bea Nettles.


And "Vertigo Tarot" by Dave McKean.

And finally, I'm pretty sure I worked out all the bugs on the website this time. There were a bunch of pictures not showing up in Firefox, but hopefully everything is well now. Also, I removed last names from the web text in "The Best Evidence is in Black and White" due to subject request. Apparently the page was showing up pretty high in the Google search, which is good because it means people are going to the site, but not so good because it means that people's horrible angry moment selves could be revealed, with names. But I did it, even though I'm fairly certain that Sophie Calle wouldn't take down the last names....

But the names are still there in the pictures. So I guess it's a good compromise.