The Fourth of July seems a good day to upload a new video, ‘Star Spangled Burger’ – it’s a companion piece to Flag of Concealment which I made earlier this year.
A lot of my stuff is related to other things I’ve done, which is either a case of mining a rich theme (sic) or flogging a dead horse – but over time I can see how interests and ideas develop and one thing begets another. Anyway – enough of the self analysis on onto the back catalogue…
The new video uses footage I took a few years ago in Washington DC, of the Marine Corps Monument and a McDonalds drive-through. At the time I was getting material related to three projects. Firstly, ‘A White Flag on the Moon’ – a booklet [read the pdf here] about the use of the Stars and Stripes in art, which got me interested in Joe Rosenthal’s famous Iwo Jima photograph (which the Marine Corps monument is based on) and to make a video documentary with Cat Gregory ‘The Trouble With Icons’ – about how the photograph was pressed into service after 9/11.
Secondly, whilst in Washington I to see the original Star Spangled Banner and the ‘Enola Gay’ – the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. I’d written a couple of articles about how photography (or the lack of it) had influenced how this event was understood
‘Picturing Armageddon #1’ and ‘Picturing Armageddon #2’ which themselves came from an background piece to an exhibition I’d seen at The Open Eye Gallery ‘Strangely Familiar’. Lastly (if you’re still following) the footage of the flag fluttering over the McDonalds drive-through was taken in case it could be used in the off/on project about fast-food-as-a-metaphor-for-something-another that is ‘Yum’ (a little book) and ‘Yummier’ (a pile of fake Polaroids).
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