Joe Stevens documents surviving vans in the southwest and captures a bit of living space harking back to 70s America. A marvelous study in American design asthetics, color and its surrounding environment that also provides a little getaway into warmer realms, especially with current temperatures outside.
So that’s it: Our first application for development funding for THE AMERICAN BACKROOM. As always up to the last minute, up until the moment the pick-up guy stood waiting in the door, we’ve been working on an application for project development funding with last minute changes and finishing touches. But finally: Send-off! Keep your fingers crossed! It’ll be about six weeks to get any results back…
For those of you who wanna know a little more: An application like this doesn’t just include the application form, but also a detailed project description, a budget, a company profile, biographies and filmographies, a development plan, mood boards and images, letters of intent from crew and distributors and some other stuff… so that’s a 70 page application plus a DVD with work samples, a mood reel and a couple of our tilt-shift shots we did for testing last fall in the US. All in all you have to send in 16 copies of the whole package. Here you can get a little glimpse of our tilt shift shots. This is when we had just finished the DVD for the application and tested it in a stand-alone player…
Visual History at its best. A must-read: Los Angeles, Portrait of a City (Amazon Affiliate Link). Kevin Starr, Jim Heimann and David Ulin take more than 600 photographs on 570 pages to tell the history of greater Los Angeles. As can be expected from Taschen they did a marvelous job picking the pictures and putting them together. The whole book manages to convey (at least some of) the spirit of living in L.A. throughout the “ages” and to show even lesser-known aspects of the city as well as a couple of its rough edges. Flipping through it you’ll soon realize that there’s a lot more to the city of angels than what can be seen at the movies.
Over at Skyscrapercity.com they have collected many many great pictures from the Los Angeles before time, at least before my time… from the fifties, fourties, thirties, twenties, heck, some of them are even older, yet. Great stuff indeed!
Post-apocalyptic movies like “I am Legend” use special effects worth millions of dollars to create worlds that have long become part of reality in Detroit. In the ruins of Motown Yves Marchand und Romain Meffre, photographers from Paris, France, have found monuments they compare to the pyramids of Gizeh, the Colliseum in Rome or the Akropolis in Athens. The result of their photography is creepy and beautiful at the same time and provides us with another set of insights into an America that can rarely or never be seen.
Ruins are the visible symbols and landmarks of our societies
and their changes, small pieces of history in suspension.
The state of ruin is essentially a temporary situation that happens at
some point, the volatile result of change of era and the fall of empires.
We’re lost. Somewhere between Santa Fe and… well, practically nothing (apart from the border of Utah maybe). We took one wrong turn and rolled on and on for about an hour and a half before we even knew we were no longer on our route. There’s shrubbery everywhere. As far as the eye can see. At least as far as the snow-covered mountains we can make out on the horizon. Shrubbery anyway. There’s no better way to express it. For half an eternity we feel we’re driving along shrubbery. There’s not much forest in the Carson National Forest, as far as we can tell.
We end up in El Rito. Long before we see the first buildings we can see the single white letter “E” painted on a mountain side in the distance. At first glance El Rito has not much to offer than a long winding main street with traditional adobe buildings lined up to the right and left. We make a stop at El Llano Bar. There are two vintage gas pumps in front of it that are – let’s say – in an advanced state of decay. The sign above the door is a little too big and the rivets that keep it in place are amazingly irregularly placed on the wall. It is crooked. At first glance one might take the rivets for bullet holes. They are not. Just rivets.
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