horz:

tommynease

May 27, 2012, 11:20am  Comments

insalatadiparole:

Edouard Boubat  ^

May 25, 2012, 11:12am  Comments

bremser:

Thomas Albdorf, Blue Dot [2]

(Source: mpdrolet)

April 17, 2012, 11:13pm  Comments

darksilenceinsuburbia:

László Moholy-Nagy. 7 A.M. (New Year’s Morning).

“Moholy-Nagy was a painter before he became the major proselytiser of the new vision at the Bauhaus, and he was both of these before he was an active photographer. His experience with the abstract organization of pictorial space and with the school’s design curriculum clearly inform this photograph. A less sophisticated artist would not have seen that a picture could be hung on such a minimal scaffold of small incidents, traces, and shadows, precisely related.”

Via The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

April 09, 2012, 10:52pm  Comments

bremser:

Andrés Marroquín Winkelmann, Zapallal | Yurinaki

April 06, 2012, 1:46pm  Comments

unfinished-photography:

Ōtsuji Kiyoji - 大辻清司, Yasuhiro Ishimoto - 石元 泰博, Japan

(Source: bremser)

April 03, 2012, 6:27pm  Comments

jumblepusher:

Ansel Adams. “Aspens, Northern New Mexico”. 1958. New Mexico, USA.

April 01, 2012, 7:57am  Comments

jennilee:

William Eggleston (Self-Portrait)

William Eggleston Talks…

Reminiscing With the Father of Color Photography

In the spring of 1994 William Eggleston visited Los Angeles to shoot a portfolio of Hollywood. Journalist Kristine McKenna escorted him around town, and they had several in-depth conversations, some in his room at the Chateau Marmont. These are excerpts from those tape-machine recordings, which are compiled in the new book William Eggleston For Now. .

March 17, 2012, 11:11pm  Comments

lecollecteur:

Double Self-Portrait with Daughter Doon, a 1945 photograph by Diane Arbus (born 14 March, 1923; died 26 July, 1971)

(Source: mhsteger)

March 14, 2012, 4:28pm  Comments

lecollecteur:

Claire Yaffa, undated, Portrait of Henri Cartier-Bresson

“I was able to photograph Henri Cartier-Bresson because of the graciousness of Martine Franck. As I rang the bell to their apartment, overlooking the Tuileries, to say that I was nervous would be a complete understatement. The door opened for me and there was Martine — beautiful, warm and welcoming. She talked with me first and said no way should I use flash.

She then introduced me to Cartier-Bresson who was sitting at a table in their apartment. I was surprised there were no photographs of his or Martine’s on the walls, but there was the Leica camera next to him on the table. I asked if I could photograph them together and they graciously agreed. I witnessed the love and closeness they shared with one another.

They went on their terrace and when he was tired and had enough of me, he smiled and waved me away. He was tired when I was leaving and I took this photograph of him as he was rubbing his eyes.”

(Source: burnedshoes)

March 09, 2012, 8:33am  Comments

lecollecteur:

Nobuyoshi Araki’s wife Yoko, taken on their honeymoon. She died of cancer in 1992.

“Maybe I only had a relationship with her as a photographer, not as a partner. If I hadn’t documented her death, both the description of my state of mind and my declaration of love would have been incomplete. I found consolation in unmasking lust and loss, by staging a bitter confrontation between symbols. After Yoko’s death, I didn’t want to photograph anything but life - honestly. Yet every time I pressed the button, I ended up close to death, because to photograph is to stop time. I want to tell you something, listen closely: Photography is murder.”

- Nobuyoshi Araki

(Source: tamburina)

March 06, 2012, 10:23pm  Comments

hpolleyphotography:

Yosemite Falls, by Ansel Adams, 1979, SX-70 Polaroid

I knew that Ansel worked with Edwin Land during Polaroid’s development (the ultimate beta-tester), but this is the first of his images I’ve seen. From the Smithsonian article Seven Famous Photographers Who Used Polaroids.

March 03, 2012, 10:15pm  Comments

bremser:

Eleanor Callahan, wife of Harry Callahan has died at 95. She was the subject of one of the most significant portrait series in photography, which is perfect because Eleanor was anonymous to most people. There are probably more great portraits of Eleanor Callahan than of Marilyn Monroe.

The Callahan marriage was not the type of artist-muse relationship that they make movies about. It seems she made no effort to be a compelling model. She is never trying to create persona or convey personality, yet she is always present. So many famous portraits that result from the male-female artist-muse relationship are portraits of a dancing bear. In the Eleanor portraits a woman doesn’t need to be poked and prodded, twisted and overacting to be fascinating.

The MOMA’s web site has a fairly good selection of the photographs. The recent Steidl book on the series is wonderful. What’s incredible is how many genres there are in the series. Completely natural (in bed, naked with child), stark minimalist line drawings, a day out on the town, abstract expressionist deconstruction of the human form, bucolic summer poems, even some that feel like the New Topographics.

above: Harry Callahan, Eleanor, Chicago, 1949

March 01, 2012, 10:47pm  Comments

The Helsinki Bus Station: let me describe what happens there.

Some two-dozen platforms are laid out in a square at the heart of the city. At the head of each platform is a sign posting the numbers of the buses that leave from that particular platform. The bus numbers might read as follows: 21, 71, 58, 33, and 19.

Each bus takes the same route out of the city for a least a kilometer stopping at bus stop intervals along the way where the same numbers are again repeated: 21, 71, 58, 33, and 19.

Now let’s say, again metaphorically speaking, that each bus stop represents one year in the life of a photographer, meaning the third bus stop would represent three years of photographic activity.

Ok, so you have been working for three years making platinum studies of nudes. Call it bus #21.

You take those three years of work on the nude to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the curator asks if you are familiar with the nudes of Irving Penn. His bus, 71, was on the same line. Or you take them to a gallery in Paris and are reminded to check out Bill Brandt, bus 58, and so on.

Shocked, you realize that what you have been doing for three years others have already done.

So you hop off the bus, grab a cab (because life is short) and head straight back to the bus station looking for another platform.

This time you are going to make 8x10 view camera color snapshots of people lying on the beach from a cherry picker crane.

You spend three years at it and three grand and produce a series of works that illicit the same comment: haven’t you seen the work of Richard Misrach? Or, if they are steamy black and white 8x10 camera view of palm trees swaying off a beachfront, haven’t you seen the work of Sally Mann?

So once again, you get off the bus, grab the cab, race back and find a new platform. This goes on all your creative life, always showing new work, always being compared to others.

What to do?

It’s simple. Stay on the bus. Stay on the f*cking bus.

Why, because if you do, in time you will begin to see a difference.

The buses that move out of Helsinki stay on the same line but only for a while, maybe a kilometer or two. Then they begin to separate, each number heading off to its own unique destination. Bus 33 suddenly goes north, bus 19 southwest.

For a time maybe 21 and 71 dovetail one another but soon they split off as well, Irving Penn is headed elsewhere.

It’s the separation that makes all the difference, and once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire (that’s why you chose that platform after all), it’s time to look for your breakthrough.

Suddenly your work starts to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it.

Your vision takes off.

And as the years mount up and your work takes begins to pile up, it won’t be long before the critics become very intrigued, not just by what separates your work from a Sally Mann or a Ralph Gibson, but by what you did when you first got started!

You regain the whole bus route in fact. The vintage prints made in twenty years ago are suddenly re-evaluated, and for what it is worth, start selling at a premium.

At the end of the line—where the bus comes to rest and the driver can get out for a smoke or better yet a cup of coffee—that’s when the work is done. It could be the end of your career as an artist or the end of your life for that matter, but your total output is now all there before you, the early (so-called) imitations, the breakthroughs, the peaks and valleys, the closing masterpieces, all with the stamp of your unique vision.

Why, because you stayed on the bus.

- Arno Rafael Minkkinen

(Read More)

February 15, 2012, 11:25am   Comments

`I know what love is’

In 1936, in the midst of an unrelenting workload and the near-demise of his marriage, legendary landscape photographer Ansel Adams suffered a nervous breakdown. After a stay in hospital, desperately in need of escape, Adams then returned with his family to the one place where he could find solace: Yosemite, California.

Some months later, as his health returned, he wrote the following beautiful letter to his best friend, Cedric Wright.

June 19, 1937

Dear Cedric,

A strange thing happened to me today. I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that related to those who are loved and those who are real friends.

For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.

Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all spiritual and physical things. Children are not only of flesh and blood — children may be ideas, thoughts, emotions. The person of the one who is loved is a form composed of a myriad mirrors reflecting and illuminating the powers and thoughts and the emotions that are within you, and flashing another kind of light from within. No words or deeds may encompass it.

Friendship is another form of love — more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptance of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.

Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of Things, it is more than kindness which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.

I wish the thundercloud had moved up over Tahoe and let loose on you; I could wish you nothing finer.

Ansel

February 15, 2012, 12:17am  Comments