#长文创作激励计划#
Penelope Umbrico, 18,297,350 photos of the sun at sunset on Flickr (partial) April 16, 2014 (2014), color print with duct tape, Penelope Umbrico, Denver Museum of © Art
Photographers create images that spark debates about place and idea ownership. To question the commemoration of an object that no one owns, artist Penelope Umbrico downloaded a set of photographs labeled "Sunset" from Flickr and created them into her work 18,297,350 photos of the sun from a sunset on Flickr (partial) April 16, 2014 (2014). Like a blurry spotlight in a sea of orange and vermilion, the sun captured by an amateur photographer makes the eyes impatient and erratic. Someone may have photographed the sun to commemorate a special day for the sun to witness, but the repetitive act of filming makes the spectacular spectacle bland and unremarkable. If we are all pocket photographers, where will this medium and its creators find room for innovation? Umbricho's approach is an exciting preview of the cutting edge.
Penelope Umbrico offers a radical reinterpretation of everyday consumers and local imagery. As the artist describes, she "works in the virtual worlds of consumer marketing and social media, navigating the endless flow of seductive images, objects, and information around us in search of decisive moments – but in these worlds, decisive moments are culturally absurd." Umbrico finds these moments in consumer goods mail-order catalogs, travel and leisure brochures, and the print pages of online sites such as Craigslist, eBay, and Flickr. By identifying and separating image types—candy-colored horizons and sunsets, books used as props—the comical and surreal nature of the universal language of consumerism and entertainment is reeled.
Penelope Umbrico explores the issues of representation typical of contemporary culture in a unique and challenging way, including how images can be used to construct and communicate consumer desires, and whether the increasing number of images we see online can help foster critical visual literacy.
"In her work, Umbrico often appropriates or reshoots existing images and, by collecting and exhibiting these images, and captioning them, in order to draw attention to the 'fortuitous relationship between photographs', thus proposing ideas that are very different from those intended by photographers or publishers of original pictures and narratives about photographs and photography."
——康纳•里施(Conor Risch),PDN,2011 年 7 月
Sun at Sunset from Flickr, 2006-present
541,795 Sun at sunset from Flickr (in part) January 23, 2006
2000 machine C-print photo details, 4 x 6 inches each
Artist Statement
In 2006, I started the "Sunset in Sunset" project on Flickr, when I searched for the most photographed topics on the photo-sharing site Flickr and found that "sunset" was the most popular (flagged), with 541795 hits in 2006. I find it strange that the sun, the archetypal giver of life and warmth, is eternal in our lives, a symbol of enlightenment, spirituality, eternity, all things that are out of reach and ephemeral, an omnipotent provider of optimism and vitamin D...... So universally photographed, it is now incorporated into the internet – this warm single object is replicated in the electronic space of the network and viewed in the cold light of the screen.
I collected the sunset images from Flickr with the clearest outline of the sun and cropped out of them. So far, I've made a total of 4500 4x6 pictures of the sun from these sunsets, which I upload to a consumer photo studio to print as 4" x 6" machine c-print photos. The title of each installation reflects the number of times I searched for "sunset" on Flickr while I was on the installation—for example, the first installation was 541,795 suns obtained from Flickr's sunset (partial) 01/23/06 in 2006; A year later: 2,303,057 suns from Flickr's sunset (partial) 09/25/07 - the (partial) in the title refers to the installation being only a fraction of the number of sunsets on Flickr at the time.
Examples of subsequent installation titles:
541,795 Suns (from Sunset) from Flickr (partial) 01/23/06
2,303,057 suns (from sunset) from Flickr (partial) 09/25/07
3,221,717 suns (from sunset) from Flickr (partial) 03/31/08
5,911,253 suns (from sunset) from Flickr (partial) 08/03/09
7,626,056 suns (from sunset) From Flickr (partial) 07/17/10
8,730,221 Sun (from Sunset) From Flickr (partial) 02/20/11
10,291,373Sun (from sunset) From Flickr (partial) 01/12/12
13,806,070Sun (from Sunset) from Flickr (in parts) 11/01/13
18,297,350 suns (from sunset) From Flickr (partial) 04/16/14
21,314,840 suns (from sunset) from Flickr (partial) 05/14/14
27,709,969 suns (from sunset) From Flickr (partial) 05/05/15
27,694,473Sun (from Sunset) From Flickr (partial) 05/11/15
30,240,577Sun (from sunset) From Flickr (partial) 03/04/16
… The title itself becomes a comment on the use of the growing webcam community and reflects the collective content there. Since this number only lasts for a split second, its recording resembles the act of photographing a sunset itself.
Perhaps the beauty of photographing a sunset is that when you're photographing a sunset, it's likely that millions of people are shooting at the same time. I love the idea of this collective practice, whether we care about art or not, we are involved in it, because we know that millions of people have done it before, and millions more will do it after. While the purpose of photographing a sunset may be to capture something fleeting or express an individual's subjective opinion (which turns out to be the opposite), through the technology of our usual cameras, we can experience the power of millions of panoramas that are shared in the same way and at the same moment. To claim to be an individual creator when photographing a sunset is to detach from this collective practice, thus negating one of the great charms of photographing a sunset.
2,303,057 Sun at sunset from Flickr (in parts) 09/25/07,2007
2,000 chromizer prints, 4 x 6 inches each
Installed at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, 2007
5,377,183 "Sun at Sunset" from Flickr (in parts) 4/28/09, 2009
1,440 chromogenic machine-printed photographs, each 4 x 6 inches
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) Installation view, 2009
8,146,774 "Sun at Sunset" from Flickr (in parts) 10/15/10, 2010nian
192 chromogenic machine prints, 4 x 6 inches each
Installation view of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, 2010
3,221,717 images of the sun and sunset from Flickr (in part) March 31, 2008, 2010
2,024 chromogenic machine-printed photographs, each 4 x 6 inches
New York Photo Festival Installation View, New York, 2008
28,534,323 sun photos from a sunset on Flickr (partial) 08/03/15, 2015
2,360 chromogenic machine prints, 4 x 6 inches each
Perez Museum of Art Miami installation view, 2015
5,377,183 "Sunrise from Sunset" from Flickr (partial) 04/28/09 (Felix Gonzalez-Torres in the foreground), 2009
988 chromogenic machine prints, 4 x 6 inches each
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art installation view, 2009
Recordings of the installation of "Sunset Sun" from Flickr, as well as recordings of people taking pictures in front of it.
Whether it's due to cognitive associations or perceptual adaptation to images, when we look at an image of the sun, our iris involuntarily contractes, just like looking at the actual sun. Perhaps there is a similar physiological response to the visual warmth of the image, similar to the actual warmth of the sun. In any case, it turns out that people want to take pictures before sunset, just like before sunset.
Installation drawing of the Pingyao Photography Festival, Pingyao, China, 2009
I found some photos (mostly from Flickr) of people taking pictures in front of my installation (like the sunset itself), from 2009 to 2014
I found some photos on Instagram of people taking selfies before installation at my Perez Art Museum in Miami. 2015 – 2016
Sun at sunset from Flickr / Airmail, 2009-present
"Sun at Sunset" from Flickr / Airmail is a collection of leftover "Sun" photos from the installation, which I have asked curators, friends, colleagues, visitors to mail to me in the form of postcards – digitally sourced "Suns" physically travel through the sky via airmail, crossing countries and borders, and recording on its surface the time and place, start and end of its destination.
Sun at Sunset from Flickr / Airmail, 2009 - Ongoing
Machine C printing, stamps, stamp ink, 4 x 6 inches each
Installation, Milwaukee Museum of Art, 2016
Copyright Sun / Screenshot, 2009-2012
The copyrighted sun/screenshot calls into question the claim to an image of something that is inherently impossible to own. I cropped the sun from a "watermarked" sunset picture on the photo gallery website. I use the descriptive tag of each image as the title of each "watermarked" sun I crop. These words encapsulate the collective narrative we weave around its context, and also show how many fragments I use from each image.
72 Copyright Sun/Screenshots, 2009-2012
数字 c-print，每张 5 x 7 英寸
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concerning
Penelope Umbrico is an American artist known for his work using images found in search engines and image-sharing sites.
Penelope Umbrico was born in 1957 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, and graduated from the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, Canada, in 1980. In 1989, she received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has served as a faculty member in Bard College's Summer MFA Program (Milton Avery Graduate School of Art) (chair of MFA's Department of Photography from 2004 to 2010) and is a core faculty member of the MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts in New York.