Hooray for student holidays. I’m about to go into school and work alone in the classroom. We had a very chill weekend—hung out with my family, woke up early Saturday and patted ourselves on the back, tried Chick Fil A’s breakfast (two thumbs up), bought bread, carrots, macaroons, and dark chocolate at the farmer’s market, bbq outside, slept in, went to Easter vigil, bought books, and picked up a copy of Lula at Issues. A few of my favorite pages:
One of the best feelings is coming across a movie/artist/song after a few years of the movie/artist/song’s name eluding you. You’re only holding onto a fuzzy image or the first few letters of a creator or creation, with the work settling stubbornly on the tip of your tongue. So when I was in Issues, the local magazine shop, and the saw a photo of Alessandra Sanguinetti on the cover of Cabinet, I might’ve let out a yelp. Early in college, my Photo I instructor showed us the Sanguinetti series The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams, and I remember falling in love with the soft light, the rich color, and the compelling relationship—visually and emotionally—between the two young cousins. And maybe most of all, I admired the way she captured the transition from childhood to adolescence without being too heavy and cheesy, but rather with restraint and sensitivity. Fast forward a few years to today: I was surprised to see that the series continued into their adulthood and documented marriage and motherhood.
I thought this excerpt was interesting:
In 1839 William Henry Fox Talbot coined the phrase “the art of fixing a shadow” to describe his negative-positive photographic process that became the basis of the photographic medium. Since then critics and historians have written at length about the metaphorical role photography plays in preserving the past and halting the fleeting moment. Childhood is a very brief period of personal development and discovery, perhaps even more so for Guille and Belinda where the onset of adulthood comes at an early age. The enigmatic dreams and fantasies from the fertile imaginations of Guille and Belinda might have gone unobserved if not for Sanguinetti’s efforts. Through this archive of images, which are as inexplicable as the imaginations that choreographed their content, this fleeting shadow of youth is preserved.
Excerpt from Contact Sheet 120, Alessandra Sanguinetti: The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams. via lightwork.org
I wish I could hibernate in bed for a week.
Denis Darzacq, Hyper No.20, 2007. 50 x 40″.
Denis Darzacq’s Hyper exhibition, at the Laurence Miller Gallery, ventures into the supermarket. Obviously this isn’t your average grocery store. Bodies pause mid-air near the frozen food, bend at freak angles, levitate toward the top shelves. But why, of all places, in this place? Darzacq seems to be casting his solitary souls into Andreas Gursky’s famous panorama of merchandise.
Andreas Gursky,99 cent, 1999. 6′ 9 1/2″ x 11′.
Too many choices and desires overwhelm us, Gursky’s rainbows of sugar and plastic tell us. Putting people in the foreground, not things or crowds, Darzacq renders this same feeling in a more haunting style. There’s something empty and creepy about our zombielike urge to accumulate, and here that emptiness and creepiness is given form: the subjects are tractor-beamed skyward by unseen forces; their faces swivel mysteriously away from us; a sickly fluorescent light refrigerates every composition; the aisles are cleared, you suspect, even of sound. These tableaux vivants, like those of Gregory Crewdson, remind you that the ordinary world we’ve taken for granted is, on closer inspection, a good deal more surreal than we notice.
Denis Darzacq, Hyper No.3, 2007. 50 x 40″.
The story of Dennis Stock (1928-2010) is intertwined with the story of cool. Such is the fate of a virtuoso photographer who, present at the right time and the right place, potently documented America’s passage from strait-laced postwar gloom into the fiery emotions of the misfit mid-century. His portraits hinted at the blooming counterculture: a dissenting, introspective crowd equally given to brooding loneliness and ecstatic reverie. It is no exaggeration to say that, for one, his 1955 shots for Life magazine helped craft the myth of James Dean. While shooting a visual essay on the actor not long before his fatal car accident, Stock snapped the legendary, and legend-forging, image of Dean in Times Square, strolling what Life called the the Street of Broken Dreams. As Adam Gopnik saw it: “bearing the weight of a generation on his shoulders.” With his hunched posture, enveloped in his overcoat, and that squint, that cantilevered cigarette, he looked uncannily like Albert Camus. Shielding himself from the rain, seemingly the last citizen of New York, Dean was the picture of the existential loner.
Invited on to the set of Billy Wilder’s film Sabrina, Stock displayed his talent for capturing moments of vulnerability, when artists conscious of publicity and image fleetingly let their guards down. Here we see Audrey Hepburn resting on a car window, lost in thought, perhaps, casting her famously gamine gaze downward. “She was very un-Hollywood, which was the key to the whole thing,” Stock remembered. “She wasn’t glamorous. She didn’t try to be glamorous.”
The spirit of the age was available in his portraits: you could sense the national mood shifting. In 1968, freezing a moment of abandon on Venice Beach, he expressed the libertine freedom of that time. A woman stood, back to the camera, against a sea of youth rapt by music, simultaneously an individual and part of something larger. It’s no surprise that his philosophy of photography was refreshing and vital–“To be able to continue an attitude of childlike discovery into adult existence can only be perceived as a gift toward the individual’s spiritual survival”–and it spoke to both the joy of artmaking, and its place in a full life.
Stock worked for the prestigious Magnum agency for six decades. They gather more of his work here.
These images from Lyell and Urban Outfitter’s fall 09 lookbook have been on my mind ever since I first saw them. Don’t they pair well together?
left side: Lyell shot by Tamara Schlesinge.
right side: UO shot by Estelle Hanania.
Levi’s wants you to feel that there’s something American about denim, and something deeply American about theirs in particular. (The Marlboro Man has done his part.) The company makes a poetic case in their recent Go Forth campaign, launched around July 4, with the help of Portland ad legends Wieden + Kennedy, who enlisted rising stars Ryan McGinley and Cary Fukunaga.
The “O Pioneers” spot is exuberant, full of activity. Not only does the camera whip around with Scorsese speed, dropping with the waterfall or sailing over the meadow, but the bodies twirl and careen forward, too, in explosions of motion that do call to mind some kind of pioneer restlessness. Using old Smithsonian wax cylinder recordings of (what we believe, want to believe, is) Whitman’s own voice reciting “Pioneers! O Pioneers,” the union of text and image stirs up an excitement that winningly connects the wild-hearted, hipster Generation O back to the Lincoln-era rhetoric of self-reliance and awe at nature.
The “America” spot draws its text from Whitman’s likewise titled “America.” It is night, again, and we’re out among the trees and lakes. The city doesn’t exist in this world, the daydream nation of country-boy turned metro-artiste Ryan McGinley, it seems, not in the form that we know it. The black and white photography, like the light of the fireworks, is a kind of equalizer: it finds visually common denominators. Against the hanging tension of the Final Fantasy song in the background, the vitality of the subjects—shirtless kids and suited businessmen, backflipping and flexing and chasing through waves of grain—is even more obvious. The snap of the final firecracker silences the violins, breaks the tension, and concentrates our attention on the handwritten go forth at the end. A great ad.
Irving Penn has passed away. He had a knack for turning Chanel’s adage — elegance is refusal — into a style that might be called, paradoxically, lushly minimal. With the fewest possible elements, he could coax out the drama of interior life.
His early work was marked by a curious backdrop. He stuffed his subjects, many of them art-world royalty, into a tight corner. The claustrophobic setting enabled Penn to assert a kind of cruel power that, by showing how people responded to their surroundings, told us about their demeanors. In his words: “This confinement, surprisingly, seemed to comfort people, soothing them. The walls were a surface to lean on or push against.” As an exception, you have Georgia O’Keefe, slanting subtly, who felt so reduced by the converging walls that she demanded her photo be destroyed. As confirmation, you have Marcel Duchamp, a dapper picture of composure and self-possession, whose puffing pipe signaled that he relished the enclosure.
Marcel Duchamp, New York, 1948
Gradually he shifted from his corners to a cloudily anonymous backdrop, a sooty swath of medium gray that threw his subjects forward toward the viewer. This was his signature style in the 1950s. Moving his camera much closer, he exalted the face and eyes as matrices of expression. Often casting a sideways light on his sitters, he hinted at the complexity that lay behind the face, orchestrating a clash of light and shadow that reflected some inner twoness. They also read as a truce between revelation and mystery. John Szarkowski compared two famous images:
Penn’s famous portrait of Picasso, with the great cyclopean eye, the bullfighter’s cape, the ethnic hat, the dramatic lighting, etc., seems to this viewer a marvelous triumph of skill, an admirable act of legerdemain, but something less than a true portrait, if one takes as a standard the picture of S. J. Perelman, for example. This is the record of a collaborative disclosure, or discovery, of a self.
Pablo Picasso, Cannes, France, 1957
S.J. Perelman, New York,1962
In the end, many of my favorite Penn photographs weren’t portraits at all. His images of cigarettes stood out to me as alchemical: lead into gold. Szarkowski had a theory about them: “The lipstick on the dead cigarette butt, the beetles, flies, stains, mice, raveled carpets and moldering walls that recur with such frequency in Penn’s work might be explained as a quiet dissent from the general model of perfect elegance that prevailed at Vogue during Penn’s early years there.” His still lives attempted something else. They gave form to his painterly ambitions by not relying on the camera alone, but on principles of art. They sought to arrest time’s movement, to preserve life’s color from decay simply by lending living things, through surprising placements and pairings, the soft touch of eternity.
Still Life with Watermelon, New York, c. 1947
The Diana Mini is a shrunken version of the Diana F+, offering both the vintage square format and the budget-friendly half-frame option, allowing you to pack two photos into one frame. What better way to save in these tight times?
Going through old film scans. Bedroom at Hill Street taken with a pinhole camera.