Photography by Matthew Scott

The following images are taken from an ongoing project, titled Observing: Venice, by photographer Matthew Scott. Venice Beach is, of course, one of a handful of mythic places in America – Haight Street, Coney Island, Times Square, Las Vegas, Hollywood – where the American experience has historically played out in larger-than-life and non-traditional ways. These have always been the magnets of America’s misfits, marginals, and “freaks”, places  of transience where anything could happen and something always does. Since moving to Venice, Scott has been observing his new, if temporary, home and its inhabitants. Or, as he puts it, “I’m trying to figure out my life and theirs.” What is revealed is an aspect of Venice’s eccentric myth, but only around the edges. More central is a peaceful quietness, a comforting, if banal, normalcy. Instead of training his lens on the boardwalk, he focuses on ordinary people living ordinary lives.

<div class="aligncenter"><div class="imageframe centered" style="width:830px;"><a href="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/bartekpogoda_page1.jpg" rel="lightbox[pics4099]" title="Girls from the Outside – Zanzibar, 2008."><img border="0" src="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/bartekpogoda_page1.jpg" alt="bartekpogoda_page1" width="830" height="405" class="attachment wp-att-4103" /></a><div class="imagecaption"><em>Girls from the Other Side</em> – Zanzibar, 2008</div></div></div>
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<div class="imageframe alignright" style="width:830px;"><a href="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/pagoda_page2.jpg" rel="lightbox[pics4099]" title="Ethiopia, 2008."><img border="0"src="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/pagoda_page2.jpg" alt="pagoda_page2" width="830" height="405" class="attachment wp-att-4106" /></a><div class="imagecaption">Ethiopia, 2008.</div></div>
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<div class="aligncenter"><div class="imageframe centered" style="width:830px;"><a href="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/bartokpogoda_page5.jpg" rel="lightbox[pics4099]" title="Catholic Church – Kanyakumari, South India 2005. "><img border="0" src="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/bartokpogoda_page5.jpg" alt="bartokpogoda_page5" width="830" height="405" class="attachment wp-att-4115" /></a><div class="imagecaption"><em>Catholic Church</em> – Kanyakumari, South India 2005. </div></div></div>
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<div class="aligncenter"><div class="imageframe centered" style="width:830px;"><a href="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/bartokpagoda_page6.jpg" rel="lightbox[pics4099]" title="City Trash Dump – Phnom Penh, Cambodia 2004. "><img border="0" src="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/bartokpagoda_page6.jpg" alt="bartokpagoda_page6" width="830" height="405" class="attachment wp-att-4119" /></a><div class="imagecaption"><em>City Trash Dump</em> – Phnom Penh, Cambodia 2004. </div></div></div>
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<div class="aligncenter"><div class="imageframe centered" style="width:830px;"><a href="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/bartokpagoda_mongolia.jpg" rel="lightbox[pics4099]" title="In the Steppe – Mongolia, 2004."><img border="0" src="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/bartokpagoda_mongolia.jpg" alt="bartokpagoda_mongolia" width="830" height="405" class="attachment wp-att-4122" /></a><div class="imagecaption"><em>In the Steppe</em> – Mongolia, 2004.</div></div></div>
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<div class="aligncenter"><div class="imageframe centered" style="width:830px;"><a href="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/bartekpagoda_page3.jpg" rel="lightbox[pics4099]" title="Left: Blue Lagoon, Iceland. 2008. Right: Utila, Honduras. 2006"><img border="0" src="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/bartekpagoda_page3.jpg" alt="bartekpagoda_page3" width="830" height="405" class="attachment wp-att-4127" /></a><div class="imagecaption"><strong>Left</strong>:Utila, Honduras. 2006 <strong>Right</strong>: <em>Blue Lagoon</em>, Iceland. 2008. <strong></div></div></div>

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Images by Joyce van den Berg

Today, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, much of the former border between the East and West is still a no man’s land. A painful reminder of times past, the barren strip of land lies untouched, as though someone witnessed something horrible there and swore to never speak of it again.
     Inspired to change this, landscape artist Joyce van den Berg set up the exhibition New Light on No Man’s Land, currently on display at the German Center for Architecture (DAZ) in Berlin. The exhibition shows precisely where the restricted area used to be and how it has changed, and proposes to transform the “landscape of trauma” into a dynamic and organic recreation area.
     Van den Berg wants to construct two bicycling tracks and reseed the ground so that new plants can grow where there is now little else but sand and gravel. The sandy terrain used to be regularly flattened in order to make it easier for the border guards to spot the fresh footprints of East Berliners fleeing to the West.

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Sin título / Untitled (prelude to sumer), 2005

I first became friends with Dr. Lakra a few years ago when I went to his studio in Oaxaca to get a tattoo. Stepping inside, it was like walking into a baby devil’s playpen: there were toys and dolls and weird shit everywhere, stuff he used in his art. Books, paintings, postcards and stickers covered the walls. We cleared a space on the floor so he could get to work on my flesh.
     Once finished, when he refused payment, I gave him a couple of poster-size photos of mine instead for him to intervene on, knowing that was one of his preferred mediums. He’d spent years tattooing skin, why not tattoo paper? At first, he just did it for fun, but soon the scrapbook turned into a unique body of work which I wrote about for PLANET several years ago. Now, RM Editorial has published a book of one of his collections of magazine interventions, titled Health and Efficiency.
     With an all-black velvet cover and beautifully printed inside, Health and Efficiency is a sexy little book. The pieces are all derived from a pile of old nudist camp magazines he picked up in Brick Lane market in East London. In the original clippings nubile porcelain-white maidens pose puritanically next to ponds and lillies. But in Lakra’s versions they have sailor tattoos and get skewered by monochrome skeletons and mugwumps. On the surface, the tattoo-scratched images appear gaudy and comical, like doodles in a textbook. But if you engage them, the shapes and figures he inserts have a mythical underworld quality.

Chattanooga

Last summer, PLANET writer Sarah Coleman covered Steidl’s re-release of Robert Frank’s The Americans to commemorate its 50th anniversary. This landmark collection of photographs was first released in France in 1958 — no American publisher would touch it — and only after its European success was it released Stateside in 1959.
     Fifty years later, three of the most respected art museums in the country are marking the anniversary of The Americans with a traveling exhibition. Like Frank’s original journey, funded by a Guggenheim grant, this museum show zig-zags across the country, starting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and then moving on to San Francisco’s MoMA, where it’s currently showing, and heading back east to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in the fall. The show, which contains the original 83 photographs in the same order as they appear in the book, harks back to a country of segregated buses, drive-in movie theaters and mink stoles. Swiss-born Frank’s photos expose a culture deeply divided, from the devoutly religious South to the pioneer spirit of the West to the glittery socialites of Manhattan. In other words, not much has changed.

Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans” runs through August 23rd at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and runs September 22–December 27, 2009 at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

sfmoma.org