The Nasablad

What could be better?

Tom Sachs

BRILLIANT

Hank Schmidt in der Beek stands in the manner of a plein air painter surrounded by
mountain scenery and paints the pattern of his shirt on canvas. (Photos: Fabian Schubert)

See more here.

Eyjafjallajokull

If you haven’t gotten enough of Eyjafjallajokull and it’s ongoing eruption (I know I haven’t, it’s beautiful and so scary), here’s a collection of some images of the mountain collected by boston.com (<–clicking the link will bring you straight to the site.)

(Also, If you missed this story entirely here is a link to the Wiki page (and some information) about the volcano:

The eruption is thought to have begun on 20 March 2010, about 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) east of the top crater of the volcano in a popular hiking region called Fimmvörðuháls. This first eruption, in the form of a fissure vent, did not occur under the glacier and was smaller in scale than had been thought by some geologists.

On 14 April 2010 Eyjafjallajökull resumed erupting after a brief pause, this time from the top crater in the centre of the glacier, causing meltwater floods (also known as jökulhlaup) to rush down the nearby rivers, and requiring 800 people to be evacuated.^[4] This eruption was explosive in nature and is estimated to be ten to twenty times larger than the previous one in Fimmvörðuháls. This second eruption, which is ongoing, threw volcanic ash several kilometres up in the atmosphere which led to air travel disruption in northwest Europe for six days from 15 April and in May 2010, including the closure of airspace over many parts of Europe. ^[14] The eruptions also createdelectrical storms.^[15]. There are no signs yet of the eruption ceasing. )

Enjoy:

New Work

Here are three photographs from the book I made for my Fine Art Photography final (final final!) They’re really different than what I’ve been doing for the past couple of years, but I like this new direction.

I FINALLY launched my website last night. It needs a little work (let me know what you think) but I’m generally excited by the way it looks. It took me about 10 weeks to built it from scratch in Dreamweaver (I didn’t even know how to use Dreamweaver!) but I feel pretty accomplished. I plan to update it as soon as possible and work out the kinks after graduation (Which is in ten days!)

Anyways you can find me here at www.annaraugalis.com

Now you can cook what the Obama family eats! Here is a recipe shared with the world by the White House pastry chef, Bill Yosses:

White House Fruit and Oat Bars

Time: About 50 minutes, plus time for cooling

6 tablespoons grapeseed oil, or other neutral oil, plus extra for brushing pan

2 cups rolled oats

1/2 cup mixed seeds, such as pumpkin, sunflower and sesame

1/2 cup honey

1/3 cup dark brown sugar

1/3 cup maple syrup

Pinch of salt

1 1/2 cups mixed dried fruit, such as raisins, cherries, apricots, papaya, pineapple and cranberries (at least 3 kinds, cut into small pieces if large)

1 teaspoon ground cardamom or cinnamon.

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Line a 9-inch-square baking pan with parchment paper or foil, letting a few inches hang over side of pan. Brush with oil.

2. Spread oats and seeds on another baking pan and toast in oven just until golden and fragrant, 6 to 8 minutes, shaking pan once.

3. In a saucepan, combine oil, honey, brown sugar, maple syrup and salt. Stir over medium heat until smooth and hot. In a mixing bowl, toss together toasted oats and seeds, dried fruit and cardamom. Pour hot sugar mixture over and stir until well combined.

4. While mixture is warm, transfer to prepared pan, pressing into pan evenly with an offset spatula.

5. Bake until brown, 25 to 30 minutes. Transfer pan to a rack and let cool completely. Using the overhanging foil or paper, lift out of pan and place on a work surface. Cut into bars, about 1 1/2 inches by 3 inches.

Yield: 2 dozen bars.

See the entire article here at NYT.com

publishing publishing

Here is a PDF I made to help myself (and my photography class) understand the world of publishing. I did a lot of research on not only getting published but also doing your own publishing (stuff like e-Books) and being a publisher. If you’re at all interested, you can download it here:

AnnaPublishingPresentation

Enjoy!

(Lars Tunbjörk, Lawyers Office, New York, 1997)

Cleaning off my hard-drive today I found some old scans that I’ve never done anything with but I think are pretty funny. Here you go:

At the 2008 Jazz festival in Rochester, during summer transfer.

At Disney world (for the first time in my life) last year with my mom during our road-trip.

At a yard-sale in Boca Raton at a retirement community on the same road-trip with my mom in 2009.

A fascinating article about Christian Boltanski’s instillation piece at the Armory. Here’s a few excerpts:

The work, “No Man’s Land,” which opens to the public on Friday and runs through June 11, is centered on a five-story crane and a 25-foot-high mound of salvaged clothing rising from the floor of the Armory’s vast drill hall. Every few minutes, in an act meant to resonate with the arbitrariness of death and survival, the crane’s giant claw will pluck a random assortment of shirts, pants and dresses from the mound then release them to flap back down haphazardly. Visitors can watch the action — set to a ceaseless, reverberating soundtrack of thousands of human heartbeats — from ground level, standing amid dozens of 15-by-23-foot plots of discarded jackets that extend in all directions from the mound and that may evoke refugee or death camps. Behind the visitors, a 66-foot-long, 12-foot-high wall made from 3,000 stacked cookie tins will cut off views of the exit.

A reprise of an installation called “Personnes” that was shown at the Grand Palais in Paris in January, “No Man’s Land,” which was commissioned by the Armory, aims to inspire questions like “Why did my mother die?” and “Why am I still here?” Its large-scale exercise in futility ultimately points to a single fact, Mr. Boltanski suggested during a recent tour of the drill hall. “You can hold onto the clothes, and even the heartbeats of many, many people,” he said. “But you can’t keep anybody.”

Decades after he began his explorations of mortality, Mr. Boltanski now finds himself confronting his own more directly than ever before, and increasingly looking to his art not only for a way into it, but also for a way around. “The only way to fight dying is through legacy,” he said with conviction.

You can read the entire article here.

two quick plugs…

#1) The RIT Senior Fine Art Photography show opens this Friday night! Here is the information:

The Exhibit will be at the Siskind Gallery (On the top floor) of Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester NY. 421 University Ave.

The Opening is on 1st Friday, May 7th, 2010.
From 6pm to 9pm.

The Gallery will also be open every Saturday and Sunday from May 8th through May 22nd from 12pm to 5 pm.

Closing Reception will be May 22nd (Graduation Day)

If you can’t make it you can see the senior class’ work here and you can BUY the catalogue here.

#2) I work at the Cary Collection and this summer (June 9-12 2010) they’re holding a symposium that explore the Future of Reading. Really interesting stuff. What happens to books when we’re all using Kindles? Very important to the photography/art/media world. You can see the website here.

This three-day symposium at RIT June 9-12, 2010 will be organized around a central question: How will reading change in the next decade? With a target audience of 300-500 participants, the conference will feature provocative and challenging presentations by experts in writing systems, content creation, vision and cognition, typography, visual media, and display technology.

You should come!