flashback: Beach House @ Muddy Waters (9/29/08)

in honor of their just-released new record Teen Dream which is utterly heart-melting, and their return to Santa Barbara in April (which now can't come soon enough).

check out: Elinor Carucci

not a new face by any means, i was recently reminded of Carucci as i was piling through notes from upper-div photo classes from my undergrad years. the photo above, "Amber Ring" is from her series "Closer".

like its name stridently and evocatively implies, the series consists of close-ups, traversing the closeness of the emotional knitting of her family and therefore what she wants us to deem 'close' to her. a bareness and a barrenness is at first what we are greeted with, but if we are allowed to delve deeper past a seemingly impenetrable aspect of our noses being thrushed into everything, by stepping back, we see that getting this close, this honesty, eschews vastly the pretensions of the Family Portrait and the Nude, and even the dogmatism of series' own title. we are then allowed a middle-ground where the stringent sentimentality of it all is indeed grazes in close proximity to our own.

check out: Shadi Ghadirian

"Ghadirian comments upon the daily repetitive routine to which many women find themselves consigned and by which many women are defined" (wikipedia)

i had made a mental note, and a note in my phone apparently, to do more research on this Iranian photographer after i first saw her work about a month ago. i was taken aback by the parallels between her work and mine, but very much admire how the starkness in her work is not tainted with a plaintive sentimentality. It is simple, not overbearing or condescending, and simplicity is its own message and its own means.

she doesn't have her own website it seems, so take it upon yourselves to make a mental note of your own.