November 07, 2005

Clifford Ross

Clifford Ross spoke to us on Tuesday about some of the projects he's been working on lately. Probably the salient part of his work to me is the fact that he built the world's highest-resolution camera. It's a revised old WWII aerial-photography camera. He used it to take a bunch of pictures of a mountain landscape in Colorado.

The pictures are pretty amazing, but I'm not sure if I would say that they are artistically inspiring. I went with Abby, an old friend from high school who is living in New York, and Allison, a friend of a friend of mine from Pomona, to Mr. Ross's exhibit opening in Chelsea last Saturday. His photographs (about 12 feet wide by 6 feet high), at first glance, appear to be simply highly detailed landscape photos. But when you're standing far away I don't think you have the visual acuity to really see how crisp they are. It's when you lean in inches away and you realize that the level of detail in the image overall is still just as crisp on the centimeter scale that you see what's so amazing about them.

I was more inspired by Mr. Ross's demeanor when he spoke to us than any of the content of his lecture. He mentioned several times that he knew very little about technology, and it did emerge as he was explaining how certain parts of his projects worked that he did in fact not know much about technology. In spite of this, he had created some amazing, technologically advanced work. I was curious how he had done so, and tried to pay attention for that when he was speaking.

What I took away was that he had a really good attitude toward what he was doing. He knew what he was interested in, and he had the self-confidence to blindly follow it even if there were lots of facets to it that he didn't know yet. Clifford understood the importance of collaboration, too. He seemed to be full of questions and very willing to listen to someone else's opinion.

Link to Clifford Ross's website.

Posted November 7, 2005 11:00 PM. Categories: Week 9 | Permalink