November 22, 2009

5 Copies of 2010's Worst Photo Calendar Slosh Out the LGF Door

The Web's worst high-functioning autistic photographer, Charles Foster Johnson, has made it possible for you, yes you, you lucky sod to actually stare at his vacant snapshots for an entire year. Yes, lucky dogs, it's Little Green Footballs - The LGF 2010 Photo Calendar!!!!!

"Now available at Lulu.com in time for Christmas and the New Year — the Little Green Footballs 2010 Calendar, featuring 13 beautiful high resolution versions of photographs I’ve posted at LGF. It's $24.99, Lulu.com handles all the printing and shipping, I get 10 bucks, and they get the difference. Not a bad deal for all involved."

"Not a bad deal..." if you favor pedestrian snapshots of flat color, a personal world that is utterly bereft of any human face, or snapshots chilled in the crippled sensibility of a person who has "the brain of a bass player" and the eye of an albino cave-dwelling newt.

Taken as a whole, this masturbatory exercise in pug-ugly photography is but the latest chapter in the never-ending saga, The Eternal Banality of the Photography of Charles Foster Johnson

Here's the stunning if risibly titled "October:"

johnsoshit.jpg

Cloud band, water band, sand band. All tonalities mushed down into one bland band of bullshit. You could get 100 of these anytime you drive by the beach at 25mph with the camera set on autodrive and pointed anywhere towards the sea. More than that the image itself, as the other images of this "calendar" have the same dull and affectless matte surface. It's "high resolution" that you wish were much, much lower. And when you try to look deeper in you find only greater shallowness.

These are the landscapes suicides see just before they pull the trigger.

There's a depressing sameness to this "world view:" people nowhere in sight, everything in sight held in the middle or far distance. Nothing gets close here unless it's the overwhelming visual cliche of a plant growing through a crack in a wall, a board, or a brain pan. Out of 13 images you get a photo of value in none of them.

The late and great photographer Robert Capa once noted, "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough." The Johnson Corollary might be, "If your pictures are more numbing than a five inch rod of rebar being nailed down the center of your spine, just shoot yourself."

One could go on, but the brute fact of the matter is that this "calendar" at $24.95 would be a waste of money at 25 cents and two Wheaties box-tops. It is low-grade crap wiped onto high gloss paper and the result is simply a series of wet smears.

On the other hand, the valuable part of Charles Foster Johnson's "photography" is that every time he posts one there's just that much less of his slatternly "prose" and cut and paste stories available to the world. A small mercy but one for which we must be eternally grateful.

UPDATE: The fawning comments of the loyalists at the link are even more amusing than the photographs. It's difficult to see how Johnson acolytes such as the slatternly Shamuta can manage to type with all two inches of Johnson's johnson embedded in her throat, but somehow she manages. Practice makes perfect I guess.

Posted by Vanderleun at November 22, 2009 10:41 PM
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"It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood." -- Karl Popper N.B.: Comments are moderated and may not appear immediately. Comments that exceed the obscenity or stupidity limits will be either edited or expunged.

I can't believe people still buy calendars. Nowadays, it is either digital for me or I print off single pages month to month and stick them on the frig. $24.95 is outrageous. But if I wanted to buy a calendar, I'd want eye candy, maybe one with hunky military guys, not Charles Johnson sand, sea, and sidewalks.

Posted by: Sara (Pal2Pal) at November 23, 2009 1:58 AM

Oh, eck! You may wish to change the URL to the Lulu webpage so we don't have to stop at LGF first. You just know he's collecting our IP addresses for . . . something or someone. Brrrr!!

Posted by: Joan of Argghh! at November 23, 2009 3:40 AM

I'm with Joan. No linkies for Jarles Chonston, ever.

Posted by: Askmom at November 23, 2009 3:53 AM

And for the ladies, don't forget LGF's "Hunks of the Internet" calendar, featuring Charles Johnson, Markos Moulitsas, Perez Hilton, James Wolcott and eight other heartthrobs of ambiguous sexuality!

Posted by: Gagdad Bob at November 23, 2009 7:00 AM

I have gigabytes of photos almost as bad as those on my hard drive. Cash Cow!

Posted by: Andy at November 23, 2009 8:17 AM

That caption beneath the rusty lock - Up Close and Impersonal . . . wicked, wicked, wicked. Loved it.

Thanks for the distraction.

Now back to Climate Gate.

Posted by: Cathy at November 23, 2009 8:33 AM

Gagdad, please let me know where to buy those calendars. I need several, let me see, there's MoDo, the WH resident Klingon, Ms. Mitchell, Kiss'n'tell Couric ... so many gifts checked off the list in so little time!

Posted by: Askmom at November 23, 2009 9:10 AM

I applaud your use of the adverb edition of "slattern". A wonderfully evocative word, woefully underused.

Posted by: Darleen Click at November 23, 2009 9:54 AM

I always wait until after Jan 1st, and get calendars cheap at the bookstore that way.

$24.99? That's comedy gold.

Posted by: Eric Blair at November 23, 2009 11:24 AM

Perhaps LGF has not heard if Photoshop. A few seconds in Camera Raw fix the mush of the sky, water and land. I highly recommend Scott Kelby -- he can show ya.

Posted by: ChiefTestPilot at November 23, 2009 1:03 PM

"These are the landscapes suicides see just before they pull the trigger."

Oh my, remind me to never show you my photo collection. Ouch!

Posted by: Rich Nelson at November 23, 2009 2:47 PM

Gerard, this is a masterpiece of satire. You've totally outdone yourself. Oh, wait... you've got to be kidding me! This is real?

I guess Excitable Chucky figures this is going to be a bad Christmas season for Amazon.com click-thrus.

Posted by: The Former LGFer Once Known as "Colonel Panik" at November 23, 2009 4:39 PM

Obama on the tube
LGF calendar on the wall...

Now lock the radio into one of those cool jazz muzak stations, get yourself a year's supply of Xanax, and get busy forgetting that 2010 ever happened. Oh wait. It hasn't started yet.

JWM

Posted by: jwm at November 23, 2009 6:17 PM

As for the October calendar, the distance precludes that the object at the distant interface 'twixt sand and sea is a person of any sort.

Deduction alone affords that it can but be an illegal sewage standpipe, spewing out filth and despoiling all who come within it's foul reach.

It can not be anything other than Charles' self-portrait.


Jim
Sunk New Dawn
Galveston, TX

Posted by: Jim at November 23, 2009 10:28 PM

So that's what they meant when they said, "loonar calendar."

Ceterum censeo it's a good thing everyone's treating the John as a joke. It was much less pleasant when, in the dim and not-so-distant past, people took him seriously.

Posted by: Richard Lund at November 24, 2009 8:08 AM

"Landscape suicides" -- very perceptive. CJ's photos are always soulless. Which is remarkable. Wouldn't you think that occasionally - accidentally, even - CJ would snap a photo with a bit of life in it???

But the gaze of CJ's camera sucks the life out of his subjects...vampire-like.

Posted by: Patty at November 26, 2009 6:31 PM