Words, images, colors, thoughts and whatnot by Bryan Byczek and occasional guests. Send submissions to TheExaltation@gmail.com, or our facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/TheExaltation
Finding Vivian Maier - a documentary
Watch the trailer above for the upcoming documentary about the fascinating story of Vivian Maier and her secret obsession with photographing and documenting the world around her. The almost unbelievable story unfolds as an enormous amount of negatives and undeveloped rolls of film were bought by chance at an auction. The results, over 100,000 images document decades of urban life and her own sense of identity. Can’t wait to watch this.
Learn more about the film at the official Vivian Maier website here.
Director Jennifer Baichwal and photographer Edward Burtynski have teamed up again to create Watermark, a film that explores out relationship to water. Of course, judging by the trailer alone, the star is truly Edward’s stunning photos and film work. I expect this to be as grand and cinematic as their previous project Manufactured Landscapes was.
Some absolutely stunning choices in this year’s shortlist for the 2014 Sony World Photography awards. I especially loved the drama and composition of the above entries – by Dan Kitwood, Wolfgang Weinhardt, and Boonie Cheung, respectively.
During the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, Esquire commissioned photographer Victoria Will to shoot some of the illustrious attendees, she decided to have them sit for “tintype” style portraits, a popular photographic process in the the 1860’s. The results are stunning and hark back to a time when images felt like they captured a subject’s soul. There’s a larger gallery of the magical photos including one of the last portraits of the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman.
A slow, methodical, deliberately paced visual meditation on human beings and their relationships with nature, technology and each other. Visitors is a documentary unlike anything else, even taking into respect director Godfrey Reggio’s previous documentaries, the epic “Qatsi” trilogy of Powaqqatsi, Koyaanisqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi. Here Reggio’s perspective is almost that of an alien anthropologist, discovering a new and often terrifying species – their fascination with spectacle, their dancing fingers swiping unseen devices, their mountains of discarded refuse, and juxtaposes them against primordial swamps, hovering birds and the patient, brooding visage of a lowland gorilla. And all of this is not only shot in gorgeous, sweeping, slow motion black and white, but also accompanied by a cinematic Phillip Glass score (an unseen character weaving throughout the film).
It’s a real sight (and sound) to behold on the big-screen and if you’ve ever been entranced by his previous films or even last year’s very good Samsara from Ron Fricke, then I’d strongly recommend catching Visitors in theaters while you can.
Recently caught the trailer for M. Bash’s ‘The Wait’ feature film, and it looks really promising. For those unfamiliar with M. he’s acted in indie movies like ‘Wendy & Lucy’ and ‘Paranoid Park’ and made a previous film, ‘Lying’, with Chloe Sevigny and Jena Malone who also star in ‘The Wait’. I love one of the first images in the trailer — a surreal scene of running horses and Chloe looks at a distant forest fire as a plane drops a blazing magenta fire retardant, cutting the sky.
At a glance these appear to be shots of giant oil refineries hard at work, but in reality, David and his team have carefully constructed small scale models built out of everyday objects, objects that are created out of, or with the aid of, petroleums. A fascinating series of images that are now hanging at the Paul Kasmin gallery in NYC until March.
