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Photography is Easy
Leslie Thornton
2006, 4:30 min, color, sound
More Info
Description
Ordering & Fees
Documents
Titles by Leslie Thornton
+
Adynata
Another Worldy
Bedtime
Binocular Menagerie
Chimp for Normal Short
Have A Nice Day Alone
Introduction to the So-Called Duck-Factory
Jennifer, Where Are You?
Let Me Count the Ways: Minus 10, Minus 9, Minus 8, and Minus 7
Let Me Count the Ways: Minus 6
Novel City
Paradise Crushed
Peggy and Fred and Pete
Peggy and Fred in Hell: The Prologue
Peggy and Fred in Kansas
Philosophers Walk on the Sublime
Photography is Easy
Sahara/Mojave
SONGS One Two Three
Strange Space
The Fold
The Last Time I Saw Ron
The Problem So Far
There Was an Unseen Cloud Moving
Whirling
X-TRACTS
[Dung Smoke Enters the Palace]
Description
Ordering & Fees
Documents
Titles by Leslie Thornton
+
Adynata
Another Worldy
Bedtime
Binocular Menagerie
Chimp for Normal Short
Have A Nice Day Alone
Introduction to the So-Called Duck-Factory
Jennifer, Where Are You?
Let Me Count the Ways: Minus 10, Minus 9, Minus 8, and Minus 7
Let Me Count the Ways: Minus 6
Novel City
Paradise Crushed
Peggy and Fred and Pete
Peggy and Fred in Hell: The Prologue
Peggy and Fred in Kansas
Philosophers Walk on the Sublime
Photography is Easy
Sahara/Mojave
SONGS One Two Three
Strange Space
The Fold
The Last Time I Saw Ron
The Problem So Far
There Was an Unseen Cloud Moving
Whirling
X-TRACTS
[Dung Smoke Enters the Palace]
Photography is Easy
Leslie Thornton
2006, 4:30 min, color, sound
Documents
Leslie Thornton: Photography Is Easy
Press Release
Press Release for Leslie Thornton artist talk and screening at EAI in May 2008.
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\"short_desc\": \"Thornton continues her investigation of the production of meaning through media. Thornton and a companion are seen hiking through a desert, photographing and recording the journey. Shots of desert landscapes are overlaid with the artist's running commentary and text, as she investigates the porous boundaries between the still and the moving image.\",
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\"short_bio\": \"Refracted through archival material, texts, found footage and dense soundtracks, Leslie Thornton's rigorously experimental film and video work is an investigation into the production of meaning through media. Her epic project <i>Peggy and Fred in Hell<\/i> is an ongoing cycle of interrelated films, videos and installation environments. Exploring the aesthetics of narrative form as well as the politics of the image, Thornton forges a unique and strangely beautiful syntax, one that poses its critique at the same time that it mesmerizes and confounds.\",
\"long_bio\": \"Refracted through archival material, texts, found footage and dense soundtracks, Leslie Thornton's rigorously experimental film and video work is an investigation into the production of meaning through media. For Thornton, form and content are co-extensive, as exemplified by her epic project <i>Peggy and Fred in Hell<\/i>, an ongoing cycle of interrelated films, videos and installation environments focusing on two children who have been \\"raised by television.\\" Heterogeneous and open-ended, the series defies conceptions of masterwork, author, and the strictures of beginning, middle and end.\r\n\r\nThis resistance to categorization is informed by Thornton's concerns with language and her view of media as a linguistic system that is ideologically coded and subject to the controls of culture and the market. Her works are interventions on contested terrain, in which the stakes are conventions of reading and writing, legibility and transparency. For Thornton, the conventions of narrative and montage must not simply be renounced, but used as tools against themselves. \r\n \r\nThe result is a unique and strangely beautiful syntax, one that poses its critique at the same time that it mesmerizes, confounds and provokes. Thornton writes, \\"I see myself as writing with media, and I position the viewer as an active reader, not a consumer. The goal is not a product, but shared thought.\\"\r\n\r\nLeslie Thornton was born in 1951 in Knoxville, Tennessee. She studied with filmmakers Hollis Frampton, Stan Brakhage, Paul Sharits and Peter Kubelka at the State University of New York\/Buffalo, and with Richard Leacock and Ed Pincus at MIT in Cambridge, MA. She has been honored with numerous awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013, as well as the Maya Deren Award, the first Alpert Award in the Arts for media, a nomination for the Hugo Boss Award, two Rockefeller Fellowships, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Foundation, and Art Matters. \r\n\r\nThornton's film and media works have been exhibited worldwide, in venues including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Biennial Exhibition; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Rotterdam International Film Festival; New York Film Festival; capcMus\u00e9e, Bordeaux; Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley; and festivals in Oberhausen, Graz, Mannheim, Berlin, Austin, Toronto, Tokyo and Seoul, among many others. Her ongoing work <i>Peggy and Fred in Hell<\/i> was cited in several \\"Year's Best\\" lists, including the <i>Village Voice<\/i> and <i>The New York Times<\/i>, and she was the only woman experimental filmmaker included in <i>Cahiers du cinema's<\/i> \\"60 most important American Directors\\" issue. Thornton is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.\r\n\r\nThornton lives and works in New York City and Providence, Rhode Island.\",
\"bibliography\": \"Kenaga, Heidi. \\"The New American Cinema,\\" <i>Film Quarterly,<\/i> June 22 1999.\r\n<br><br>\r\nMilutis, Joe. \\"The Girls Without the Camera in Their Heads: An Interview with Leslie Thornton,\\" <i>Afterimage,<\/i> January 01 2000.\",
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