The Vostok blog

Edwin Land once told me…
‘Those people who can stand at the intersection
of the humanities and science, the liberal arts and technology,
that intersection, are the people who can change the world’.

Steve Jobs

Yesterday Edwin H. Land, Polaroid co-founder and the brains behind the SX-70 would have turned 103. Quite a number.

I love this photo.

From left to right. George Nelson, Edward Wormley, Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, Charles Eames and Jens Risom.

Playboy Magazine July issue, 1961. It couldn’t be anywhere else.

You can read the original article here.

The first time I saw Robert Frank‘s photos for his project ‘The Americans‘ I got a glimpse of the connection between exhausting road trips and great photographs. Perhaps it has to do with the lack of sleep, the lack of good food, the monotony of endless roads that push your body –and your head– to the limit. After all, extreme fatigue does develop a sense of acute awareness and sensitivity that’s difficult to replicate with non-chemical (and may I say, legal) substances.

Unlike Frank’s compilation, Tina Bagué and Tori Morimoto‘s Japan Photo Project is less about Japanese society and more about the culture and beautiful landscapes of the country, less about capturing instants and more about knowing the right towns. But the veil of fatigueness-channeled perception is there. No question about it.

Plus, the JPP blog is the perfect traveller’s guide. In 365 days they visit all sorts of towns and meet all sorts of people. Next time I’m in the country, I’ll be sure to throw away my Lonely Planet and instead, read their blog carefully and save every single stop in a map.

A compilation of the photographs has recently been published. The book is called, ‘Japan’. Published in collaboration with the Catalan publisher, The Private Space, Japan’s first edition is officially sold out but, after December 8th you’ll be able to order the book here.

1980 photograph by Italian photojournalist Mario de Biasi part of the “Changing Japan 1950-1980” exhibition at the JCII Photo Salon in Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward. Open until October 30.

We’re big fans of Scott Schuman’s The Sartorialist, it’s great to see that the NYT Lens blog has recently given him some love. I wish we could embed the video/interview here but NYT image archive has no embedding options (FAIL). You can see it here.

I don’t want to find out that much more. I want to shoot them the way I see them. As opposed to really creating an essence of who they truly are; it’s my idea of who they are.

The words of a true aesthete.

I just came back from Tokyo where I had a great dinner with some local friends. I remember I found it surprising that they kind of competed about who had the best metro line close to his or her place. As a tourist I usually took the metro on non-rush hours so I didn’t see the point in that. Now I understand:

Tokyo metro can get veery crowded in rush hours and photographer Michael Wolf documented it in a funny/sad series of pictures of people getting steamed and compressed at the same time.

This is what’s wrong with flickr and why we made BlackVostok (among other reasons).

We’ve updated BlackVostok Theme fixing some bugs related to IE7 and Safari 4. It should work a bit smoother now.

Those who already purchased it will receive the updated file by email.

We have always wanted to tell stories with images but it has always been either too difficult or too expensive…

FIRST, WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH PIGMENTS

Man has always wanted to tell stories through images. It all started with cavemen and their paintings. Their language was probably not very rich in vocabulary but they knew they wanted to show others what their memories held and what populated their imagination. So they painted it. But access to pigments and the ability to paint on stone was limited to only a few.

THEN, WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH STONE

Sculpture, along with wall paintings (or glass) paintings were the way advanced civilizations (from mesopotamic to christian) represented visually the characters in their stories. Stories were told and not read for many centuries and sculptures would help people visualize their heroes, saints or divinities. Think of sculptures in palaces and churches where generals and saints were displayed in their epic endeavors. Also painted glass windows and mosaics of those who were powerful and where their power lied. Only the “official” artists had access to such expensive means and their stories were limited to what was the official version of the official story.

THEN, WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH PAPER

Paper was a very expensive technology until just a few centuries ago. It was difficult to manufacture and only a few lettered people had access to it: mostly scholars and monks, some of whom were specialized in miniature paintings illustrating the concepts explained in the books.

THEN, WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH INK

Newspapers slowly started to incorporate pictures in their stories but they tended to be small: sending them was techically complex and the ink was expensive. Stories had be told textually or with a few small photographs. Or at least until the 60s when photography became a commodity for magazines.

THEN, WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH CAMERAS

Photography allowed memories to last forever but, again, it was limited and expensive at the beginning. It took 100 years for that industry to make photography available to everyone. In the 70s people could only afford to have one camera per household. Then they were able to have relatively cheap photoalbums where the stories that mattered to them the most were stored: new born babies, marriages, adventures, trips… they were all narrations composed of visual memories. But still, you couldn’t share them easily.

THEN, WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH BANDWIDTH

Photos and images have always been part of the Internet, especially of the Word Wide Web, but the first modems were very very slow. You had to scan a picture (no digital cameras yet), you had to compress it, reduce its size and expect visitors to wait several minutes for the image to load. The standard was around 200 pixels wide for a rectangular picture. So, we had a medium that allowed us to share our messages with the world but the use of images was still scarce. Text was the only way to go.

THEN, WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH RESOLUTION

Digital images became widely available, everyone could create and share them. Bandwidth grew fast: size was no longer an issue. But… Monitors still didn’t have enough resolution to show pictures in all their glory. Remember when 800×600 was the reference when it came to website matters? Nothing bigger than that was allowed. It took us 10 years to start moving to 1024 pixels wide and even then there was some fear of using big format images. Powerpoint was there and allowed some to tell stories visually (most just used it for bulletpointed BS) but images were still just there to dress a good text.

THEN, WE DIDN’T HAVE THE SOFTWARE

Sure there is flickr now, and many others, but until not so long ago there was not a single piece of cheap software that allowed people to tell visual stories in a sequence of images. Just as we could do in a photoalbum, or a Powerpoint in fullscreen mode, attracting the viewer’s full attention. Images that ARE the message and not just the accompaniment. The Big Picture, at Boston.com got it but they didn’t make it sequential. The iPad did it with its image galleries but they weren’t shareable on the internet. We were almost there…

AND NOW…

We now have the bandwidth, the cameras, the screen size and the Internet. We all need to tell our stories, to show our projects, to be able to share our memories with pictures and videos. And we cannot pay a high price for it.

So we, at Vostok, have made it possible. It had to be done.

We created a tool that allows people to tell stories visually and to share them with the rest of the world. We also made it affordable. It’s a WordPress theme, it’s called BlackVostok – www.blackvostok.com and it’s just $16.

Now tell your story, take over the full browser window with your images and share them with the world.

BlackVostok
Here’s the website: www.blackvostok.com
Here’s the theme in action: www.blackvostok.com/test

So here it is, the best video of the volcano, by Sean Stiegemeier. It’s the only one that truly captures the beauty and fierceness of Eyjafjallajökull at the same time. In his words…

So I saw all of these mediocre pictures of that volcano in Iceland nobody can pronounce the name of, so I figured I should go and do better. But the flights to get over took forever as expected (somewhat). 4 days after leaving I finally made it, but the weather was terrible for another 4. Just before leaving it got pretty good for about a day and a half and this is what I managed to get.

Here is the video, (best in fullscreen mode)

Sean declared that he’d come back to Iceland to do some more shooting if he had a sponsor. We commented on his vimeo page suggesting him to open a Kickstarter project page to get the funding. Raise your hand if you’d donate a few bucks to fund his project.