Irina Werning: Back to the Future

Irina Werning, Back to the Future series: Maartje in 1990 and 2011, Amsterdam

Irina Werning, Back to the Future series: Oscar in 1978 and 2010, Buenos Aires

Irina Werning, Back to the Future series: Lucia in 1956 and 2010, Buenos Aires

Irina Werning, Back to the Future series: Cecile in 1987 and 2010, France

Irina Werning, Back to the Future series: Lulu and G in 1980 and 2010, Buenos Aires

Irina Werning, Back to the Future series: Giorgio in 1982 and 2011, Paris

Irina Werning, Back to the Future series: Carol in 1960 and 2011, NY

Re-creating old photographs of yourself seems to be something that has become rather trendy around the web lately: check out zefrank’s Young Me/Now Me project, childhood photos of comedians recreated for this article in the Guardian, or the Age Maps series by artist Bobby Neel Adams, just to name a few.

Working squarely in this vein, Argentinian artist Irina Werning has become something of a web sensation with her Back to the Future series. Although the concept might not be particularly unique, her artful execution of the re-created photographs makes her work stand out from the crowd. Werning’s incredible attention to detail, sensitive re-creation of colour and light, and careful selection of engaging source photographs makes her series a delight to browse. I’m not convinced she’s really accomplishing anything particularly profound in these photographs, but they are pretty dang interesting to look through. It’s also fascinating to think about the reasons why these past/present  photographic projects are so popular right now, and what it might say about the cultural obsession with nostalgia and our personal sense of connection to the past.

WWII wedding dress made from a life-saving parachute

From the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

This is by far the coolest wedding dress I’ve ever heard of, made in 1947 from a nylon parachute which saved the groom’s life during WWII. (Now in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum).

In 1944, an American B-29 pilot named Maj. Claude Hensinger was returning with his crew from a bombing raid over Yowata, Japan, when the plane’s engine caught fire. After using his parachute to safely jump from the doomed aircraft, the chute further helped him to survive by providing shelter until he was rescued. After returning home from war to Pennsylvania, he proposed to his girlfriend Ruth in 1947, and she used the life-saving parachute as material for her wedding dress. Modelled on a dress which appeared in Gone With The Wind, the skirt uses the original parachute strings, which Ruth pulled up in the front to create the train effect in the back. 

Internet Archaeology: the best of 90s internet graphics

As a child of the late eighties, I am amongst the youngest group to remember a time before the ubiquity of the internet. We will be the last ones left to tell the next generations of a quaint time when we used real encyclopedias to find information for school projects, when birthday invitations had to be delivered instead of Facebooked or emailed, when you actually had to go to the bank to find out your account balance. We grew up at the same time the world-wide web did.

Maybe this is why I am so captivated by Internet Archaeology, possibly one of the coolest internet projects I have ever come across. Internet Archaeology trawls the depths of the web, seeking to “explore, recover, archive and showcase the graphic artifacts found within earlier Internet Culture”. Their mission is the collection and preservation of early JPGs and GIFs, often crudely created in MS Paint for homemade sites like the ones on Angelfire or the now defunct GeoCities web-hosting service.

Canaries playing pianos: an incredible installation by Robert Gligorov

Robert Gligorov, "Dollar Note", 2006-07. Piano, glass birdhouse, canaries, feed.

Dollar Note is an incredible installation by Robert Gligorov, which features a bird cage full of canaries, mounted on two vertical pianos positioned back to back. As the canaries fly from perch to perch, their weight on each post strikes a piano key. Through the twin pianos, the birds thus create a companion melody to their own tuneful chirps.

Knit Meat by Stephanie Casper

Stephanie Casper, an advertising and design student at the Pratt Institute in New York, has created these witty knitted meat sculptures, perfectly presented on grocery store styrofoam trays and plastic wrap. All the classic trappings of the butcher shop are there: sausage links, t-bone steak, roast chicken, fish head and ham on bone. What I like about these works is the simple delight in the visual, without bring too earnest or preachy. They also make me a bit nostalgic for the days I spent in high school wrapping meat at my part-time job in a wonderful little family grocery store.

(See links to more imaginative knitting after the jump…)

EJ Bellocq and the Storyville prostitutes

Storyville was the legendary red-light district of New Orleans, which famously legalized prostitution between 1898-1917. After its abolition in 1918, the buildings were almost entirely torn down, from the expensive high-class mansions to the cheap “cribs”. Today, little remains of this once “unofficial American capital of vice”, where madams had the status of local celebrities and the first notes of jazz were played.

Some of the only visual evidence that exists from Storyville are these haunting images of prostitutes, taken by an obscure photographer named E J Bellocq in the first two decades of the 20th century. These photographs were a secret side project of Bellocq, who made his living photographing far more banal things like landmarks and ships for local companies. Hidden in a sofa until after his death, Bellocq was made internationally famous in the 1970s when artist Lee Friedlander got his hands on Bellocq’s glass negatives and reprinted the images as part of a major show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Women Laughing Alone With Salad

This rather amusing compilation of stock photography from The Hairpin demonstrates a silly convention in commercial advertising: “Women Laughing Alone With Salad”. (See also: Women Struggling to Drink Water, This Pile of Bills is Making Me Touch My Head and Men Laughing Alone With Fruit Salad.) Like a word repeated until it begins to sound bizarre and nonsensical, these familiar generic images begin to feel weird and unsettling when viewed in succession.

Suicide landscapes by Philip Braham

At first glance, the work of Scottish photographer Philip Braham seems to be a simple series of postcard-pretty (albeit slightly haunting) black & white photographs of Scottish landscapes. But, much like Scotland itself, beyond the surface lays something darker.

Sadly, beautiful Scotland has one of the highest suicide rates in Europe, almost twice the rate of the rest of the UK. Inspired by the high-profile case of Irene Hogg, a Scottish headmistress who ended her life after a critical school inspection, Braham began following cases of suicide reported in the media and documenting the sites as sacred spaces. Calling his project Suicide Notes, each landscape is a haunting photographic monument to a real person who committed suicide there.

The Disciples: James Mollison’s portraits of music fans

James Mollison, The Disciples series: Dolly Parton concert, Wembley Arena, London, 19 March 2007. "Dolly Parton is the most successful female country artist in history, with a trademark look- blonde wig and astonishing 40-inch bust- originally based on a prostitute in her home town. Some fans carried off the look with conviction, and for others the wig was just a party touch.”

James Mollison, The Disciples series: Oasis concert, Manchester Stadium, 3 July 2005. "The look of the band- hair brushed forward and green army jackets- had clearly influenced their loyal fans, mainly men in their 20s and early 30s. It felt more like a crowd at a football match than a concert. People arrived there already drunk and there was an atmosphere of latent violence."

James Mollison, The Disciples series: Missy Elliot concert, Hammersmith Apollo, London, 28 November 2005. "...The crowd were predominantly committed hip-hop fans, ranging in age from their teens to their 30s....we went for the girls who styled themselves along the lines of the star. It turned out that Missy had injured her ankle, and she performed that night in a blinged-up electric granny-cart."

James Mollison, The Disciples series: McFly concert, Kings Dock, Liverpool, 9 July 2005. "Bedroom-poster teenybopper sensations McFly were 'the leading light of Britain's boy-band scene'...The audience of girl was incredibly young- some as young as three and the oldest about 14.”

James Mollison, The Disciples series: Björk concert, Hammersmith Apollo, London, 10 & 14 April 2008. "On my way to the concert, I felt a sense of regret that I hadn't photographed her fans ten years earlier, when Björk was at her most avant-garde. But the crowd at Hammersmith turned out to be edgier and more alternative than I had imagined."

Exploring the idea of the modern-day tribe, English-Kenyan photographer James Mollison staked out arenas and music venues to photograph fans at popular concerts. Curious about the fact that many seemed to dress or look like their music idols (was this conscious or unconscious?), he picked out concert-goers with similar traits, clothing or physiques. The result is The Disciples, a series of group portraits which reveals a fascinating cross-section of music subcultures. But they are not perfectly neutral or objective images: Mollison seems to have handpicked fans who best fit in with his pre-formed ideas about the types of people who attend these concerts. In that way, is this project really about photographing modern-day music tribes, or about creating them? Either way, these pictures are compelling studies in contemporary culture.

Last meals of death row convicts by James Reynolds

Last Suppers series by James Reynolds. A variety of fruit requested by Louis Jones Jr, executed for kidnapping, rape and murder in Indiana in 2003.

Last Suppers series by James Reynolds. KFC requested by John Wayne Gacy, executed in Illinois in 1994 for the rape and murder of at least 33 teenage boys between 1972 and 1978.

Last Suppers series by James Reynolds. A single olive requested by Victor Geguer, executed in Iowa in 1963 for the kidnapping and murder of a doctor.

Last Suppers series by James Reynolds. A single cream cracker and six bottles of Coca-Cola requested by James Hudson, executed in Virginia in 2004 for the shotgun slayings of three relatives over a feud about maintenance of a shared driveway.

For a while now, I’ve had this weird idea of hosting a series of macabre dinner parties which serves the last meals requested by convicts on death row. (Although I think I might need to find more twisted friends first). Seems British artist James Reynolds finds the dark psychology of these last meals as fascinating as I do. His series Last Suppers features just that: the last suppers of American death row killers, presented un-dramatically on standard orange prison trays.

Why did the inmate choose those particular foods? What do they say about that person? Why does this last supper ritual exist at all, and what does it say about our relationship between human life and food? What was it like to eat these foods knowing they were about to die? The kinds of questions provoked by Reynolds’ slick and graphic images reveals the morbid curiosity around death and crime that I think most people secretly harbour. And that, for me, is the most interesting aspect of his work: not necessarily what it reveals about the minds of criminals, but what it reveals about the dark preoccupations of our own minds.