Come Back as a Flower
Archive for Inspiration
KID CUDI “Make Her Say”
This song and video has me torn. I will acknowledge that i find the lyrics to be a bit chauvinistic. But I can’t front on this video. Kid Cudi avoids the cliche pitfalls of the flashy, over stylized videos and opts to find beauty in the simple things like wavering balloons and transposing lines. This along with the analogous color harmonies, cinematography and editing create the perfect visual symphony.
TRUE BLOOD TITLES
I haven’t seen 2 seconds of this show but this is my favorite title design. the editing is seamless and I love the choice of the bleached images and the use of the polaroid transfers. I could have done without the maggot time lapse though.
TRUE BLOOD from Tiago Ribeiro on Vimeo.
Aïda Muluneh
ETHIOPIA: PAST/FORWARD BY AïDA MULUNEH
Aïda Muluneh is an award-winning photographer based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. In her photography book “Ethiopia: Past/Forward (Africalila, 2009,) Aida explores the country of her birth through, identity, personal journey and family nostalgia after a 30-year absence. In the book, Aïda’s dramatic photographs showcase her return to a society juxtaposed between past, present and future. The collection of photos is a visual journey that explores comparative study on the Ethiopian society, questioning the possible evolution of the nation’s culture and history.
With an introduction by Simon Njami (Curator/Author), each image captures elements of daily life, interiors and religious activity, while avoiding photojournalistic sensationalizing. Her black and white images evoke the classic approach to documenting emotions and framed moments in life. In particular, her photos in the book’s section “Islam in Ethiopia”, which illustrate and capture the role of women in Islam, are some of her most colorful images.
Regardless, of the setting, Aida’s book is a compilation on the complexities and magic of Ethiopia.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Ethiopia in 1974, Aïda left the country at a young age and spent an itinerant childhood between Yemen and England. After several years in a boarding school in Cyprus, she finally settled in Canada in 1985. After studying film at Howard University in Washington, D.C., she went on to work as a freelance photographer for The Washington Post. Then in 2003, Aïda was chosen to be part of the groundbreaking show “Ethiopian Passages: Dialogues in the Diaspora” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. Later that same year, she made an appearance in “Imágenes Havana,” a group photography exhibition in Havana, Cuba, that led to her directing “The Unhealing Wound, a documentary about Ethiopian children who were sent to Cuba on an education scholarship but became abandoned for over twenty years.
Aïda is also the founder of D.E.S.T.A FOR AFRICA, a non-profit cultural organization in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. D.E.S.T.A FOR AFRICA stands for Developing and Educating Society Through Art. It also means “happiness” in the Ethiopian language Amharic. D.E.S.T.A FOR AFRICA promotes cultural development through the use of photography by providing workshops, exhibitions and creative exchanges.
Aïda continues to teach photography and exhibit her work worldwide. A collection of her images can be found in permanent collections in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art and the Museum of Biblical Art in the United States. She is also the recipient of the European Union Prize for her work on Ethiopia in the 2007-7thRencontres Africaines de la Photographie, in Bamako, Mali.
Book Launch: The Cultural Center ZUIDERPERSHUIS
Antwerpen/Anvers, Belgium.
September 16, 2009
For a limited time, you can pre-order signed copies of the book. Your $50 purchase goes towards sustaining the DFA Photography Workshop in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia(www.destaforafrica.org). For further information send an email to mulunehinc@gmail.com.
That one.
Here’s an article from Filmmaker Magazine about my friend and former Howard classmate, DP Bradford Young. In addition to be one of the most awesome human beings on the planet, this legend in the making is the most consummate artist and photographer working right now.
Bradford Young
Growing up in Louisville, Ky., Bradford Young had his life planned out for him. It was expected, like all the males in his family, that after college Young would return home to take over the family business of running a funeral home. “I come from four generations of morticians,” says Young, 31. “But I was so interested in the arts, I always tried to figure out how I’d do the family business but also do art.” Spending a lot of his childhood in art galleries, attending local theater and listening to his uncle (folk musician Leon Bibb) playing blues at family events, Young itched to express himself. After his mother passed away in 1993 he moved to Chicago to live with his father and there he was introduced to photography through the tutelage of Pulitzer-prizewinning photographer John H. White, and later, when attending Howard University, began to get into cinematography. “I spent a lot of time [at Howard] thinking of images through photo journalism,” he says, “learning where the camera goes, where the right place for the camera to be, really being a custodian of the moment instead of just being ushered into the moment.”
With the funeral home a distant memory, Young received his MFA in ‘04 from Howard, and three years later his work garnered attention when he lensed Dee Rees’s short, Pariah, which won the Audience Award at the 2007 Los Angeles Film Festival. His profile continues to rise with the two distinctly different projects he shot that are currently on the festival circuit: Tina Mabry’s Southern family drama, Mississippi Damned, and Paola Mendoza and Gloria La Morte’s gripping immigrant story, Entre nos. Young says both films highlight his sensibilities on lighting. “I’m constantly battling this idea of reconstructive reality with artificial things,” he says. “I’m always concerned that my intrusion of technology will take audiences out of the moment, so my ideal situation is to shoot with available light.” He continues, “In Mississippi Damned I really tried to figure out ways to do scenes without focusing lights or aiming lights. I discovered black silks on that film and used them a lot. I continued that for Entre nos — there are these heartfelt conversations and there’s something about the essence of raw light in those scenes that sucks you in. It’s really hard to recreate that [feeling] with film lights.”
Currently working on Rees’s feature version of Pariah, Young tries to work constantly between features, whether it be on commercials, music videos, or even American Idol, as earlier this year he shot Alicia Keys visiting Africa for the show’s philanthropy segment. “I’m always concerned about not getting enough practice as a cinematographer,” he says. “I always want to practice how to lens situations but also interactions — getting to know new people and discovering things in them.” — Jason Guerrasio
Contact: bradfordyoung.com
