Posts Tagged ‘culture’
17
Mar
2010
The Apology Line
How to exorcise your indiscretions, or what art from the 80’s has to do with modern guilt.
In 1980, conceptual artist Allan Bridge began his Apology Line project — a telephone hotline, where anonymous callers could unburden themselves from their guilty confessions on an answering machine. Two decades before PostSecret and a quarter century before We Feel Fine, the project pioneered crowdsourced layman voyeurism and went on to collect hundreds of daily confessions for over fifteen years. It was featured in the most groundbreaking cultural commentaries of the day, from an article in then-toddler Wired to an early episode of This American Life.
Though Bridge’s original tape anthology, The Apology Line: Uncut Gems From Year Zero (1980-1981), is long lost in the analog ether, after a few hours of relentless poking around the intertubes, we were able to uncover the only surviving digitized recording of the project, which you can download for your listening pleasure. Uncomfortably honest, sometimes funny and often shocking, these anonymous confessions offer a raw slice of human complexity, with all its tortured tribulations and daily dramas.
But something much richer than a digital recording is taking the project’s legacy into the present era.
In 2007, UK filmmaker duo James Lee and William Bridges revived The Apology Line, launching it across the UK and inviting Britons via posters, flyers and newspaper articles to call the anonymous line and unload whatever is weighing them down. They then made a short documentary about it, which went on to grain critical acclaim across the film festival circuit, showing at Sundance and Cannes in 2008 and being awarded at the Prix UIP Best European Short Film at the Cork International Film Festival.
Now, the team behind The Apology Line is using Kickstarter (which we so love) to bring the project to the US. Their goal is to collect confessions from Americans all over the country, eventually unleashing an art exhibition beginning in New York and traveling all over America.
You can pledge anything from $5 to $100 and help create an avenue where we can safely scratch the itch of guilt for lunching on someone else’s sandwich in the office fridge and telling grandma you’re abstaining until marriage. In exchange, you’ll get a varying magnitude of voyeurism fixes with randomly selected apologies from stranger.
Go ahead, microfund the apologetic exorcism of guilt. You won’t be sorry.
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16
Mar
2010
Bruce Gilden on the Other Side of The Camera
What Coney Island mobsters have to do with Haiti and the smell of New York City streets.
Bruce Gilden is easily the most iconic street photographer of our time, particularly notorious for his merciless and indiscriminate use of the flash. Rich and raw at the same time, his portraits live inhabit the strange and mesmerizing world of orchestrated spontaneity.
This short WNYC documentary about Gilden and his approach to street photography reveals as much about his creative angle as it does about his delightfully prickly and irreverent personality as the tables take a rare turn and put the master of urban voyeurism in front of rather than behind the camera.
I use flash a lot because flash helps me visualize the feelings of the city — the energy, the stress, the anxiety that you find here.
Gilden’s photographic bluntness is beautifully balanced by his more subtle but no less meticulous eye for the intricate character of the city, its nooks and subcultures and wonderfully awkward idiosyncrasies.
If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, then it’s a street photograph. You feel like you’re really there.
Gilden’s photoessays and portfolio on the Magnum Archive (the recent sale of which is another fascinating story) are also a treasure worth ogling.
And while all of his books are an absolute must-read for photography and cultural anthropology enthusiasts alike, we find the 2002 Haiti particularly powerful in light of the recent tragedy — a graphic portrait of all that was and a surreal prophet of all that was to be.
Psst, we’ve launched a fancy weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
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