Posts Tagged “Adam Marcinek”

In book club this month: Man Booker prize winner The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.  Halfway through, enjoying it.  Also see Adiga’s piece in the New Yorker and the discussion of White Tiger over at the Mutiny.

Picked up at the Central Square Theater: Alan Lightman’s latest, Ghost.  None of Lightman’s later work has spoken to me as powerfully as Einstein’s Dreams, but this one is interesting.  We’ll see how it goes.

Sitting on my desk at work because I’m too busy doing business to read books about doing business: Marty Neumeier’s The Designful Company.  Yes, I’m aware of the perilous nature of that working/reading situation.

On my headphones at work: Art Farmer Radio via Last.fm.  Serious hard bop with Art Farmer and artists that Last.fm thinks are similar or related.  So far, they do a very good job of programming with no commercials and high reliability.

In the blog reader: Apaertment Therapy’s family of blogs, but mostly the main feed.  Great for decorating inspiration, DIY ideas, IKEA hacks, color ideas, and generalized design porn.  Almost too much to keep up with now that they stopped recycling old posts in best-of bits.

On the blog radar: Adam Marcinek’s blog.  You may remember my random run-in with Adam last year. He’s got a new blog that promises an image a day from this up and comer.  So far he’s 2 for 2, and I’m looking forward to more.

Tonight I had the privilege of hearing (and seeing) Photographer Arno Minkkinen speak at the Photographic Resource Center’s Polaroid Spotlight Lecture. If you haven’t experienced Minkkinen’s photographs, please immediately go outside and prance around naked in the snow. Or buy one of his books right away. Your choice.

Plenty of others have analyzed and praised his photographs better than I can, and I’m sure many will for years to come. I’m going to try and reproduce an anecdote that came from Arno the teacher, something I’m calling the Minkkinen Helsinki Bus Station Theory. It goes a bit like this:

When you’re a student or otherwise starting out, your work – be it photographic or otherwise – will probably resemble that of an influential practitioner who came before you. Wanting to be original, you’re likely to try and break away from that influence. And you’ll probably end up showing some other influence.

Ready for the heady metaphor? Good. Here it comes.

Pretty much every bus line in Helsinki starts at the central bus station. And many bus lines travel the same route for some distance from the central station before eventually diverging. If every time you see that your bus is traveling along another line’s route, you go back to the central station and get on a different bus, you’ll never get out of town.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but at dinner after the lecture, I found myself seated across from Adam Marcinek, a local photographer. I recognized the name because I had bought one of his prints at an auction a couple of years ago, a piece that reminded me a lot of the work of Aaron Siskind. Of course it’s not fair to either artist to dwell too much on one phase or type from their varied bodies of work. I certainly can’t afford a Siskind, but I wonder what my Marcinek will be worth when Adam finds his bus’ final destination. I’m enjoying it right now in any case.

<->

Adam Marcinek, Untitled 2004 <-> Aaron Siskind, Kentucky 5

I’m not sure if I’ve done justice to Arno’s anecdote or his philosophy, but I hope the germ of the idea gets through to those who need it. If you happen to stop by the PRC’s Student Show, you can try and figure out what bus lines those kids are on, and also marvel at how far out of town some are already. When you’re done making nekkid snow angels, get over there – the show closes March 16.