Mistaken Landscapes

Mistaken Landscapes, 2024

Magazine, 8.5×11 in, 200 pages

The images comprising Mistaken Landscapes were made with an iPhone while traveling on Shinkansen bullet trains in Japan between 2014 and 2023.

High Dynamic Range, or HDR, has been an iPhone option since the Model 4 came out in 2010. When HDR is enabled, the camera quickly takes three images each time you press the shutter button—one underexposed, one at the correct exposure, and one overexposed. The three exposures are combined, yielding a single image with an increased dynamic range of color and contrast.

Although the three HDR exposures are made almost instantaneously, the Shinkansen travels up to 300 km/h (186 mph); consequently, the view out the window shifts during the image-making process. Although brief, the lag time between the first and last exposure causes inaccurate imagery alignment, with areas of misregistration appearing as a featureless, flat, gray tonality.

As viewed from a speeding Shinkansen, the landscape streaking by already seems unreal; however, the slippage generated by the HDR shifting pushes the images into territory bordering on abstract and hallucinatory. This selection, pulled from 11,417 images, manifests a range of scenes from urban to rural and a spectrum of misregistration from subtle to severe.

Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock vs Brad Pitt "Mistaken Landscapes" Audio

This audio playlist was created for the Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock vs. Brad Pitt at sunset (approximately 8:36 PM) screening of Mistaken Landscapes at All Star Fine and Recorded Arts (film described in detail below). The film was projected onto a large window facing the street from inside the gallery. Visitors could follow a link on their smartphones to this audio track, then listen to the soundtrack while viewing the visuals from outside the space.

Forming a counterpoint to the rhythmic shifting of the distorted visuals, the audio of this film is constructed from recordings made while sitting still on the balcony of a Tokyo apartment. As with the HDR images that don’t precisely combine, the addition of sounds—a child’s tantrum in the courtyard, a neighbor’s koto lesson, rice cooking, and an answering machine message from FedEx—enhances the surreal qualities of the film and foregrounds the contrast between movement and stasis, outside and inside, travel and home.

The star actor in this film is the visual/aural landscape itself.

0:00 A distant rock concert, birds, a truck with a speaker 

3:13 Rice cooking 

4:14 A tantrum in the courtyard 

5:09 An answering machine message about a missed delivery 

6:04 A speech in the middle of the night, a sudden arrival 

7:32 Stray Dog 

8:08 A murder of crows 

9:30 Wind 

9:52 Yuyake Koyake (Sunrise, Sunset), a child (animal?) having a tantrum, crickets 

10:22 A passing jet, a siren, a koto lesson, a baby crying 

11:54 Cicadas, cicadas breaking the recording device 

12:36 A baseball game, crows, a hit, crickets, crows 

15:16 Rain, a bird, a birdcall, a bird responds, an assessment 

15:53 A passing jet, Yuyake Koyake, Yuyake Koyake echos 

16:41 An unhappy refrigerator 

17:14 A voice from a speaker, a truck, briefly a scooter, the voice continues

Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock vs. Brad Pitt at Sunset

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tonight 8/5/2022: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock vs. Brad Pitt at sunset (approximately 8:36 PM) at All Star Fine and Recorded Arts: 3022 E 35th St, Minneapolis, MN 55406 Instagram. Listen to the audio here. Live Zoom link click here Meeting ID: 867 4296 5027. View a book version of the film here.

All Star Fine and Recorded Arts is not scared to go up against the big guns. So, we are proud to announce that Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock’s film, Mistaken Landscapes, shot from Shinkansen Bullet trains in Japan over six years, will drop on August 5th, the same release date as Bullet Train, a new action comedy starring Brad Pitt.

Based on the 2010 Japanese novel Maria Beetle by Kotaro Isaka, Bullet Train (filmic value yet unknown) is not to be confused with the extraordinary 1975 thriller, The Bullet Train, starring the legendary Ken Takakura and Sonny Chiba. Regardless—Takakura, Chiba, Pitt—we stand our ground.

Like the big motion picture companies, we, too, will bring a sampling of Japanese landscape into American theaters; however, our version emerges from the heartland minus the comedy, less predictably and more abstractly. Mistaken Landscapes will be projected onto the gallery window from inside All Star Fine and Recorded Arts, inverting space and turning the interior of this Minneapolis gallery into a view of the passing Japanese terrain. The corner location and visibility from pedestrians and drivers ideally places All Star Fine and Recorded Arts as the conduit between travelers on different continents.

About the film: the images comprising Mistaken Landscapes were made with an iPhone while traveling on Shinkansen bullet trains in Japan between 2014 and 2020 and exploit the iPhone’s High Dynamic Range capabilities.

High Dynamic Range, or HDR, has been an iPhone option since model four came out in 2010. When HDR is enabled, the camera quickly takes three images each time you press the shutter button—one underexposed, one at the correct exposure, and one overexposed. The three different exposures are combined, yielding a single image with an increased dynamic range of color and contrast.

Even though the three HDR exposures are made almost instantaneously, the Shinkansen travels at speeds up to 300 km/h (186 mph); consequently, the view out the window shifts during the image-making process. The brief lag between exposures causes inaccurate imagery alignment, with misregistration areas appearing featureless, and gray.

As viewed from a speeding Shinkansen, the world streaking by already appears unreal; however, the slippage generated by the HDR shift pushes the images into territory bordering on hallucinatory. This selection, pulled from 11,417 images, manifests a range of scenes from urban to rural and a spectrum of misregistration from subtle to severe.

Forming a counterpoint to the rhythmic shifting of the distorted visuals, the audio of this film is constructed from recordings made while sitting still on the balcony of a Tokyo apartment. As with the HDR images that don’t precisely combine, the addition of sounds—a child’s tantrum in the courtyard, a neighbor’s koto lesson, rice cooking, and an answering machine message from FedEx—enhances the surreal qualities of the film and foregrounds the contrast between movement and stasis, outside and inside, travel and home.

The star actor in this film is the visual/aural landscape itself.

The Plan

The Plan

Spotify Playlist, 439 songs, approximately 26 hours.

Created for the Marble Hill Camera Club.

Of course, everyone was utterly fascinated by the foreign exchange student who joined the high school film club.

This unknown variable in the domestic rabble added a distinct element of style to the mix. It ratcheted up the competitive intensity of the arguments that took place after and sometimes throughout the screenings. Occasionally, the exchanges became so spirited that we had to pause the movie to untangle the dispute. Unfortunately, this process invariably led to further disagreements, as the image frozen on the screen became yet another inflammatory topic to spark debate. Some simple fool would interrupt the current melee and blurt out an absurdity like, "Stop—look at that—Antonioni couldn't construct a frame like that in his wildest dreams!" An incendiary burst like that could take forever to manage, and I suppose, in retrospect, that one should never join any organization without carefully weighing who the participants might be, especially if membership is free and you will be meeting in a small windowless space.

We watched movies on a barely functioning audio-visual cart VHS player squeezed into a dark storage room packed with all manner of forgotten items. The television’s tube had, without a doubt, lived several lifetimes past its expiration date, so that the faint screen made even contemporary films look old, which was fine by us. That relic was a beacon of future possibility, on which we observed tantalizingly unknown worlds while surrounded by mutilated wood desks, half-functioning instruments, abandoned dioramas, broken props, and the lost-and-found box's eternally unclaimed contents.

The smell of that space was unforgettable to anyone who entered, even if only briefly. Many generations ago, someone had left something on top of the clanging radiator, and it still gave off a burnt, waxy aroma. That smell, combined with the distinct perfume of the ditto machine's duplicating fluid and this new spectral fragrance, saturated everything. At one point, we proudly thought we had been moved and overwhelmed by mature emotion from the swelling romantic crescendo of Bernard Hermann's score for Vertigo; however, most likely, we were only buzzed from the fumes.

We sent out meaningful glances and conspiratorial winks in this half-lit educational morgue, not yet having realized that there is nothing quite so confusing and counterproductive as an amateur conspiratorial wink. Our imaginary film festival sequencing ricocheted off the peeling walls, hopefully reaching its intended recipient—the import. These fanciful cinematic playlists never came close to their mark; however, releasing them into the wild was just enough at the time to keep the illusion of something happening alive. We imagined connections forming spontaneously, with our vaguest sentiments precisely understood without resorting to actual, specific language. These mixes were simultaneously both our thumbprints and also appeals.

Recollecting those late Thursday afternoons in February, I am compelled to reassemble the specifics of my plan and share them with you. We never determined the potency of our effort because we never implemented The Plan, as you can imagine. My fantasy setlist is now shrouded in an aniline purple haze and so far removed from my current life that it might as well be from an alternate cosmos. Nevertheless, film by film, it should reasonably well sketch out a juvenile psyche under the spell of moving pictures, both domestic and foreign. At the very least, you can bank on the fact that the mixtape will run for over twenty-four hours, and with that, my surrogate will serve as your intimate companion for the waking and sleeping hours of your day.

I look forward to spending time with you in that small, dark place where we imagine what we hear.

A Rough Sketch

In 1939 when my father was just five, he and his older brothers—the eldest only some seven years his senior—left their home in Corona, Queens, and trekked adventurously across the Grand Central Parkway to the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. After sneaking under a fence and ripping his knickers in the process, my father proceeded to get his foot caught in a revolving door entrance to an exhibit.

After many hours and fruitless attempts to liberate his foot, the police dismantled the entire door to free him. Shaken but unharmed, they questioned my father about his name and where he lived. His brothers were hiding a short distance away, repeatedly imploring him, “Don’t tell him your name—don’t tell him your name!” Despite the ice cream bribe, somehow, my father didn’t crack and give up his identity.

Every time I have been to the Queens Museum panorama (the site of the fair) with my father, I have heard this story, notable for its consistency, if not its plausibility. How this little gang made it to the fair, how he wasn’t permanently injured, and how they managed to escape from the police have never been clarified; nevertheless, the repetition encouraged a suspension of disbelief over time. So much so that whenever I have been to see the panorama by myself, I have found myself mulling over the details and, even more suspicious, found myself telling this story repeatedly to my son.

 

Gary Monroe
Photographs: South Beach 1977–1986
Curator: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock & Joseph Lawton

The Ildiko Butler Gallery
September 1, 2020—January 15, 2021
Fordham University at Lincoln Center 
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue 
New York, NY 10023

Link

Fordham University's Ildiko Butler Gallery is pleased to present the photographs of Gary Monroe. Exhibited here are twenty-one gelatin silver prints made between 1977 and 1986 in South Beach, Florida, of the elderly Jewish community.

In Gary's words: South Beach was remarkable when I photographed there, which was almost daily. Actually, it was for a longer period, but that decade constitutes my being committed to making visual sense of life there. It was where Jewish people came to be together in their later years. In its way, it was a sacred place. These were the Jewish of the 'Greatest Generation,' Holocaust survivors among them; refugees from the cold northeast; working-class retirees. The average age was well into retirement. Ten years later, the Art Deco movement and other forces, including Miami Vice, and economic development, caused the demise of the old-world traditions long before attrition would have taken its toll. The lifestyle vanished as if it had never happened.

Gary Monroe, a native of Miami Beach, received a master's degree in fine arts from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1977. Since 1984 he has photographed throughout Haiti, Brazil, Israel, Cuba, India, Trinidad, Poland, France, Russia, Egypt, and in his home state of Florida. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Florida Department of State's Division of Cultural Affairs, Florida Humanities Council, and the Fulbright Foundation. Gary's publications include The Last Resort, Florida Dreams, Life in South Beach, Miami Beach, and Haiti. He is also the author of numerous books, including The Highwaymen: Florida's African-American Landscape Painters, Harold Newton: The Original Highwayman, and Silver Springs: The Underwater Photographs of Bruce Mozert. Recently he has been photographing the impact of corporate-driven planning on the Florida landscape.

Image Credit: Gary Monroe, Sixth Street by Washington Avenue, 1978

Landscape Photographs

Landscape Photographs
Featuring work by Gabriel Blankenship and Brian & Gareth McClave
Curator: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock

The Ildiko Butler Gallery
September 1, 2020—January 15, 2021
Fordham University at Lincoln Center 
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue 
New York, NY 10023

Link

Fordham University is proud to present a new exhibition, Landscape Photographs, which brings together work from American artist Gabriel Blankenship and British artists Brian & Gareth McClave. This exhibition's straightforward title might lead one to presume images that conform to traditional expectations for landscapes—beautiful, transcendent, or sublime; moreover, accessible, and understood within the genre's history. The landscapes depicted here are undoubtedly related to the world we know, although the information is translated and parsed in potentially unfamiliar ways. Both Blankenship and the McClaves observe and take inspiration from the world around us, then process and present their information in carefully managed integers.

With Gabriel Blankenship, we see an array of ordinary suburban rooftops, clouds, powerlines, and foliage with different croppings and color schemes. On the one hand, these views are somewhat general, appearing related to a loose snapshot aesthetic filtered through video game technology. Yet, they are engineered and controlled at the smallest decision-making level, and selectively built up pixel by pixel into iconic images. A tension exists between the extreme control exercised during the image construction and the deceptively casual results. Ultimately, these scenes distill and precisely articulate some of life's quotidian details.

Brian & Gareth McClave utilize computer technology as Blankenship, though their images are abstract in a different manner. The digital slow-scan software that they developed records a picture over time and presents vertical slices of imagery. We view each image both in its entirety as well as chronologically when moving through the image bands from left to right. What might appear initially as a form of digital interference, or potential file corruption, turns out to be discreet stages in the construction of the image. The increments of a time-based narrative are visible, as well as the event in its entirety.