On Thursday I did some work as an event photographer at the opening of an art exhibit by Venice artist Jay Mark Johnson at the Ace Gallery in Beverly Hills. He’s doing some very cool digital photography using a jerry-rigged slit camera, which has been traditionally used for taking photos to determine the winners of too-close-to-call horse races. Depending on the way it’s used, the results are either these incredible images of expanded and compressed objects, depending on their speed, set against colorful backgrounds of horizontal streaks or, as in the top photo, flattened 360-degree views, similar to the way a globe is flattened into an atlas. That particular image is taken from the center of a ferris wheel. I enjoyed seeing the work, and as a photographer, watching the way others interacted with it. Despite the size of the prints – some were more than 10 feet wide – people were constantly coming up within inches to examine them and try to figure out what they were seeing. If you’re anywhere near Beverly Hills in the next 6 weeks I definitely recommend swinging by the Ace to check them out.
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