Plagiarism in photography

There is a bit of a fuss going on at Conscientious and PDN over photographs that look very similar. I am less interested in debating how similar two images are and whether we can consider there to be plagiarism (although if you have a few hundred hours to waste, I imagine that you could devote them all to trawling the internet comparing images by fine art photographers and finding striking similarities), but there are some very interesting questions surrounding this issue in the context of photographic 'art' and hopefully I will manage to turn my thoughts on the subject into a post soon. In the meantime, here is my latest random online discovery of two images that look pretty similar.

Moment of sublime strangeness: Medvedev on photography

A little Friday fun for you: the Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, on a 7-minute rant on the nature of photography. I love the way this is all delivered straight to camera, as if he really wants every last Russian to know his thoughts on the subject. Would love to know who wrote this speech for him.

(via foodforyoureyes)

'Guerilla' COP15 exhibition

On my way to the Barbara Crane conference at Les Douches, I walked past a favourite local wall for street art. Alongside an interesting portrait of Sarkozy and Carla, there was a series of photographs of protests during the recent Copenhagen summit on climate change. I love this kind of random encounter and the chance to see photographs where you really don't expect them. More of this please (I've posted a couple more photos after the jump).

Mount Fuji

Mount Fuji appears to be popping everywhere at the moment: aside from the draw it still has for Japanese artists (Naoki Ishikawa, Ken Kitano, Masao Yamamoto) it also seems to be rippling more and more through the foreign art landscape. The renowned ukiyo-e artist, Hokusai's 36 Views of Mount Fuji inspired Jeff Wall's A Sudden Gust of Wind. In 2007 Julian Opie reinterpreted the Japanese woodcut in a series of video installations and, with his Fuji project, Chris Steele-Perkins undertook a modern day equivalent of Hokusai's journey. It is even starting to appear outside of Japan: in Alain Bublex's Mont Fuji et autres ponts the mountain goes walkabout, turning up in the US and France. In fact it is so ubiquitous that it followed me into the metro the other day.

I can't think of any other major landmarks from Asia that have clear symbolic meaning in the West. The Taj Mahal? The Great Wall of China? Although these are universally recognised, they don't have the same aura of mystique or the same depth of symbolism as Fujisan. Can anyone out there think of any symbols that resonate on a similarly global scale through the art world?

A slope with a view

There is a great story in yesterday's New York Times on a small neighbourhood group in Tokyo, the  Society to Protect Nippori’s Fujimizaka, that are trying to preserve one of the capital's last remaining views of Mount Fuji.  This is a classic David versus Goliath story, where a handful of OAPs from Nippori are struggling to preserve their beloved view of Fuji-san, which would would require "capping building heights within an elongated fan-shaped corridor three miles long and up to 1,000 feet wide" across the city, going up against the entire Tokyo property development world in the process. I love the absurdity of the idea of protecting a view in one of the world's most densely populated cities and the thought of just what Tokyo might look like in 100 years if they succeed. Sadly, they have already lost 1/3 of their view to a 14-story apartment block, but I hope that they do manage to hold on to the remaining 2/3 for a few years yet.