Bathtubs, Vertigo, black church fans
Over is a journal of photography and visual culture. Now in its second issue, the magazine combines photography with academic essays. While the written material is lengthy, and can occasionally become a little verbose, the photographs themselves are lush, and unusual. Below, we’ve picked out three of our favourite features.
In ‘The Third Contact’, the two performance artists, Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming, photograph themselves in a bathtub. This image, alongside Yang Fudong’s ‘Dawn breaking — A Museum Film Project — Day 30’, illustrates a fascinating essay by Julie Chun about why China, despite being the second largest art market in the world, makes up only 1.2% of art photo sales.
‘Emblematic of Black Souls’, by artist and visual activist Irene Antonia Diane Reece, is a celebration of black church fans. “This series is one of many that holds the joy and pain I endure for my kin”, writes Diane Reece in her accompanying editorial. “I am not making something new, my work is the continuation of… what has already been created.”
The cover of issue two is a still from Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Twenty-two luscious, full-bleed pages in the middle of the magazine are devoted to other stills, printed by the photographer Jean Curran, who took the original technicolor dye imbibition print of Vertigo from 1958, and then printed it using the same dye transfer process by which the film was made. In the accompanying essay, Curran explores the role of colour in cinema, and how colour is used by Hitchcock as a tool to illustrate plot, themes and sub-plots.
