Art: how do you construct the world by looking?

Artist William Kentridge explores perception with his images -- and promotes fighting against entropy. As he explains in an interview with Belinda Luscombe in TIME (requires a subscription to read):

What did you mean when you wrote in your new book, Fortuna, that the job of the artist is to fight against entropy?
Entropy in its simplest form refers to the tendency of everything to collapse. If you smash a vase and throw the pieces in the air, they won't reland in the shape of the perfect vase. But the job of the artist is to smash the vase and then fashion something coherent out of those shards.

Artist Kentridge is definitely a thinking person's artist.  Look for it in the works below. To see an extended collection of his works, take a look at this MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) presentation of  his works:  "William Kentridge: Five Themes."  Click on Explore Themes to see the works (It's a flash presentation, so hard links aren't always available or don't work as expected).  Here's a sample from within the exhibit: "Thick Time/Soho and Felix: Sobriety, Obesity, and Growing Old."

Here's a glimpse of the artist in his studio and the piece he's working on, titled "Breathe":

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This next video, titled "Return," is part of a larger project, "Repeat."  Two things that are interesting about this work -- he designed it knowing it would not be watched (the video explains) and, as the piece rotates, now you see a recognizable form, now you see just pieces moving around.

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Artist Kentridge says about perception at Art21:

I’m interested in machines that make you aware of the process of seeing and aware of what you do when you construct the world by looking. This is interesting in itself, but more as a broad-based metaphor for how we understand the world.

-- Marge

Documentary photography

This post was inspired by photographer J.J. Bentley, who posts regularly to Google+.

JJ's work reminds me of that by Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank, and Elliott Erwitt.  Many of Dorothea's most memorable photos come from work done during the Depression.  Robert Frank traveled across America taking photos; his major work, a book titled The Americans, is said to have redefined photography and documented "the tensions between the optimism of the 1950s and the realities of class and racial differences. (Wikipedia, Robert Frank article) "  Elliot Erwitt is one of my favorite photographers included in the exhibit, "The Family of Man" (which is also available in book form).  This exhibit was shown worldwide and drew crowds wherever it was shown according to MoMA's blog, Inside/Out.  Here is an Erwitt photo from The Family of Man exhibit that is featured in an article in the New York Times blog Lens:

All of these photographers work in a field called documentary photography.

JJ's work is augmented with interviews of his subjects and comments on what he sees.  He has a website that's pretty cryptic; but his posts to Google+ are far more illuminating:

The Worthy Xavier:

The Unguarded:

Leave It on the Ground:

To me it's the substance of documentary photography that makes it beautiful.

-- Marge