| Written by Roger Finch |
| Tuesday, 24 August 2010 01:33 |
 Sam Wagstaff TheCollector New York City – Mr. Sam Wagstaff was one of the first private art collectors to start buying photographs as early as 1973, long before there was a serious market for them. His photography collection came to be regarded not only for its scholarship. It was also original and unorthodox, and turned out to be extremely valuable. Mr. Wagstaff sold it to the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1984 for $5 million, a fortune at the time, establishing that institution’s collection of photographs, now among the finest in the world. But the Wagstaff mystique deepens around his relationship to Robert Mapplethorpe, his lover, to whom he was also mentor and career impresario. Mr. Mapplethorpe, 25 years his junior, was the bad boy photographer who scandalized the National Endowment for the Arts with his formal and highly aestheticized homoerotic photographs, which were given a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art in 1988, securing his legacy. Still, obscenity charges were brought against the Cincinnati Museum of Art when it mounted an exhibition of Mr. Mapplethorpe’s work in 1990. Mr. Wagstaff himself affectionately called him “my sly little pornographer.” Mr. Mapplethorpe, a young artist from a working-class neighborhood in Queens, was making elaborate constructions with beaded jewelry when he and the patrician Mr. Wagstaff, who had been a well-known curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, met at a party in Manhattan in the early 1970s. Throughout the film, interviews with more than a dozen people who knew them both provide an intimate and anecdotal picture of their lives, both individually and together. In particular, Patti Smith, the poet and rock star, offers tender descriptions of her friendship with both men. Ms. Smith’s friendship with Mr. Mapplethorpe began in 1967 when they were both art students at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. They were living together near the Chelsea Hotel in the early 1970s when Mr. Mapplethorpe first brought Mr. Wagstaff to meet her. “Sam came in and seemed totally at home in my mess,” she recalls. “We liked each other immediately. He had such a great sense of humor and had such a nonpretentious and nonsanctimonious spiritual air.”
 Robert Mapplethorpe Ajitto Dominick Dunne met Mr. Wagstaff when they were both young men in New York, and he talks about the dichotomy between Mr. Wagstaff’s life in the closet in the 1950s and his more public profile later with Mr. Mapplethorpe. “Sam Wagstaff was the New York deb’s delight,” he says in the film. “He was probably one of the handsomest men I ever saw. Tall and slender and aristocratic-looking. And he was funny. And he was nice. And the girls went absolutely nuts over him.” Gordon Baldwin, a curator at the Getty Museum, recalls in the film that Mr. Wagstaff was proud of his aristocratic background and says Mr. Wagstaff told him more than once that his family had owned the farms where the Metropolitan Museum is now, at the time of the Revolution. “It was pretty clear that he came from a starchy background,” he said. Mr. Wagstaff certainly made up for lost time. In the early 1970s, he “became an eager participant in the excesses of the age,” says Joan Juliet Buck, the writer who narrates the film with a lofty voice, reading adulatory, if not lapidary, biographical prose that delivers the facts about Mr. Wagstaff’s life in a tone aimed at, well, posterity. He was “always in rebellion against his conservative and upper class background,” she notes. “He often held drug parties in his Bowery apartment,” Ms. Buck says at one point, as if holding her nose at the very idea. “He used drugs for sex and he liked the alternative perspectives they offered.” Philippe Garner, a director of Christie’s in London and a friend of both men, says in the film: “My guess is that Robert gave Sam the courage to explore areas of his personality, to savor a darker kind of lifestyle than he would have done on his own. He unlocked a dark genie within him.” Despite Mr. Wagstaff’s sybaritic activities and his relationship with Mr. Mapplethorpe, unconventional at the time, he managed to amass a world-class photography collection and also to shape the other man’s career. From the humble Polaroids Mr. Mapplethorpe was making when they first met to his more provocative and refined photographs, which now command $300,000 a print at auction, the influence of Mr. Wagstaff’s taste and aesthetic sensibility on his work is undeniable.
 Robert Mapplethorpe Stardom The film’s title, “Black White + Gray,” has several meanings. Most, if not all, of the photographs in the Wagstaff collection were black and white. Most of Mr. Mapplethorpe’s best-known work is black and white too, and many of his nude subjects were African-American. But more specifically, the title refers to an exhibition called “Black, White and Gray” organized by Mr. Wagstaff as a curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum in the early 1960s. The show included works by Barnett Newman, Ellsworth Kelly, Ad Reinhardt and Jasper Johns, among others. The show “sent shock waves through popular culture and heralded fashion’s embrace of Minimalist aesthetics,” Ms. Buck says in her narration. At the time Vogue magazine published an eight-page feature on James Galanos’s couture, with Mr. Wagstaff’s exhibition as the backdrop. “Back in the 1960s, curators like Sam, Frank O’Hara and Henry Geldzahler were much more like artists than a lot of curators on the scene are today,” Raymond Foye, the publisher of Hanuman Books, an independent press, says in the film. The film’s narration tends to cast Mr. Wagstaff in nothing less than Olympian terms: “His aesthetic underscores an unequal vision grounded in passion, intelligence, sexuality and clever financial speculation,” Ms. Buck recites as rare self-portraits by Mr. Wagstaff are shown. “He had few rivals in his time. And none at all today.” The intimate, never-before-shown photographs of Mr. Wagstaff and Mr. Mapplethorpe throughout “Black White + Gray” make great social anthropology, and the interviews with Ms. Smith, Mr. Dunne and others give depth and warmth to an otherwise stiff, if earnest, portrait. Both Mr. Wagstaff and Mr. Mapplethorpe died of AIDS, Mr. Wagstaff in 1987 and Mr. Mapplethorpe in 1989. One snippet of footage shows a shy and endearing Ms. Smith reciting a short poem of hers in an interview on the BBC in 1971: “New York is the thing that seduced me. New York is the thing that formed me. New York is the thing that deformed me. New York is the thing that perverted me. New York is the thing that converted me. And New York is the thing that I love too.” . . . By Philip Gefter |
Archive for the ‘photography presentations’ Category
The Man Who Made Robert Mapplethorp
August 24, 2010more Keira Grant nudes
August 17, 2010sometimes i make myself sick doing things and not really paying attention to what i am doing. well so far that’s exactly what i’ve been doing today.
first mistake is having missed the PDN digital contest which closed monday. I had a very nice image i wanted to submit but needed to clean it up a bit. oh well, lets move on to today where i wanted to go through the Keira Grant shoot
keira grant
and send some images she has requested but these images she’s never seen so this is also for her as much as it is for you
keira thinking
i retouched 7 images. had to move a open eye to one of them which i liked better than the closed eye she had in that take. so time to resize them and save for the web. i have an photoshop action for that, to save me time. well i ran the action thinking it would save the jpegs to my desktop and i’d drag and drop where i wanted them later.
keira streching
what i really did was resize the tiffs and save them as tiffs and not jpegs. so now i have some small tiffs which are useless and small jpegs which i can use for the web. ugh
making myself more work instead of less. what do they say ‘ if i didn’t have bad luck i’d have no luck at all’
keira praying
maybe this is what i should be doing to the Adobe gods, i wonder if it would really help? this old agnostic probably would get hit by lightning.
waiting for the gift
angel wings flapping
i can’t hear myself thinking because the sun is streaming in here through the window telling me to go outside.
keira sitting
so what i need to do is just finish this posting up and move on to finding car parts as the xr7 money pit has gone to the paint shop and begin shooting the wedding rings so invitations can get designed and go out in the mail.
Adobe Lightroom 3 ‘Installation failed’
July 20, 2010the other day my package came including my Lightroom 3 update and like all kids i just wanted to try it out as soon as possible. so i put the dvd in the ‘puter running the latest snow leopard, won’t work on mac pro running tiger, and hit the install button.
Installation failed, now i am not the best at keeping years of passwords some going back a long time. so i pull out my scribbled notes of passwords, i am lucky to be able to read notebook but it fits into my life, make mental note redo note-book to be legible.
tried again and same results Installation failed so this time i am getting the idea something is wrong and i might need help. pull out the notebook again to look up adobe id & password. go to adobe’s web site and look under support and find my telephone number to call and do promptly press all the right numbers to speak with an agent only i am not speaking with the right kind of agent so they transfer me to technical support where i meet ravi.
ravi has me go through all the procedures he has written in the book he reads as he periodically puts me on hold but none of them work. so we connect via acrobat so he can see my screen, way cool. then we go poking around my hard drives >library etc looking for stuff that’s not there. now he believes me. all this takes a lot of time and we’ve got an opening to go to. but i feel we are making progress.
ravi wants me to download a copy of Lightroom 3 which i finally do. talks me through loading it using my serial number which is good and low & behold my LR 3 comes up showing my LR 2 catalog. at first ravi wanted me to just install LR3 and ignore my catalogs which i wouldn’t do as i’ve done a lot of work cleaning out unwanted images from these catalogs and didn’t want to screw things up again.
well up comes this photo
nude male in cave
in LR3 catalog. ravi said “do you mind if i say something?” i had no idea what he would think of a nude male or my work but hey i am game so i said ” sure not at all.” his comment blew my mind by him saying something like this as i was in awe of his words and some what taken by surprise” this the most beautiful image i’ve ever seen.”
i wondered why he’d never seen my work hanging in a gallery and bought it. oh well he’s half way around the world, i wondered what time it was there? maybe i touched him also as to other possibilities. just two people meeting over the internet for a moment in time. life is like that.
i thanked him for his comment as we then continued on with adobe business and case numbers etc. he said adobe will send me another dvd hopefully this one will work. i’ve never had a problem with an install disk before, but there are always first times for everything.
ravi made my evening a bit pleasanter, how powerful are a few kind words spoken to one another spoken from the heart. i carried his thoughts with me to the opening, more on that later.
Art Hamptons this weekend July 9-11, 2010
July 7, 2010The International Fine Art Fair
ArtHamptons returns as one of the highlights of the Hamptons summer season. Now in its 3rd successful year, ArtHamptons has established itself as one of the top new art fairs in America. Expect to see a mesmerizing display of post-war and contemporary art, presented by a renowned lineup of international galleries. It’s all assembled in a museum-like setting. There’s important art pieces for every budget and level of art collector. It’s all here for you, from paintings, works on paper and printed editions to photography, art glass, ceramics and sculpture.
This year ArtHamptons moves 2 blocks west to Sayre Park’s 5 bucolic acres. The site is located between Bridgehampton Commons and the Hamptons Classic field, just 1 block north of Montauk Highway on Snake Hollow Rd.
the real exciting news for me is that HP will be showing their new printer software allowing the Z3200 series to create large format negatives, thanks to tyler boley for this information for this rob galbraith link. see more information at http://www.hp.com/go/designjet. woo hoo
a very interesting Gallery out there this year is the Emmanuel Fremin Gallery who has invited us the the opening preview party benefiting Longhouse Reserve.
emmanuel has always been very supportive in our creative efforts and represents us in some markets. thank you.
Elisa Cooper of Elisa Contemporary Art also sent us an invitation to see some of her artist at Art Hamptons and a free pass to see the show. we first met her at Red Dot Art fair this year, she has some very interesting artist.
Summer in the Hamptons at ArtHamptons – July 8-11th.
We’ll be in Booth #439
The art world will be converging in Bridgehampton and we’ll be there with new works from Suzan Woodruff, Wayne Zebzda, and Rosalind Schneider.
Waterscapes, Landscapes and imagined worlds by LA Artist Kimber Berry, Maui surfing legend, Pete Cabrinha and Hawaii artists Carol Bennett and Connie Firestone. And we’ll be debuting new artists including Allison Gregory.
This year, in a new location at Sayre Park (154 Snake Hollow Road) in Bridgehampton, ArtHamptons will feature over 80 galleries and be host to a number of special events.
Be sure to join them at Booth #439.
Fair hours are:
Thursday, July 8th 6-9pm – Opening Preview Party
Friday, July 9th 11 am – 7pm
Saturday, July 10th 11 am – 7pm
Sunday, July 11th 11 am – 6pm
For a complimentary Day pass courtesy of Elisa Contemporary Art, click here.
Suzan Woodruff, a fourth generation native of the American West was born in Phoenix, Arizona where, from an early age, she was imbued with her love and awe of nature.
She is considered one of the co-leaders of the “Flow Movement” in Los Angeles. Suzan’s abstract expressionist paintings are deeply informed by the forces of nature and physics and appear to draw inspiration from patterns found in natural phenomena observed from life.
Using thinned acrylic pigments, and a specially designed table, Suzan’s paintings form rills, deltas, waves and eddies. They appear as voluptuous, sensual landscapes, cloudscapes, seascapes, dunescapes and all sorts of natural spaces – even bodyscapes. Her elegant fields of flowing color blend Zen serenity and human passion.
Suzan’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in the US, Canada, Europe and Asia. She was recently featured in a two-person exhibit of Flow Painting at the Art Factory in Budapest, Hungary.
Wayne was born in Hartford Connecticut and started his journey out west attending the San Francisco Art Institute on a full scholarship as a painting major. With day jobs in construction, he also developed a facility with tools of a different trade, and eventually shifted to producing sculptural and installation works, as well as his carbon smoke drawings.
Wayne’s work communicates a deep sense of delight in the face of the absurdities of life and he loves to create art from the everyday objects we encounter (including the Cross Walk Man sign).
According to Wayne, the process for his Carbon Smoke drawings is as follows:
“I have to move continuously while the smoke pours out of the torch. If you have ever seen the film footage of Jackson Pollack painting it is a similar continuous movement, his with drips, mine with smoke and the added possibility of catching the drawing on fire. I enjoy the immediacy and physicality of drawing. The welding torch has the pressure turned down low which makes it sooty/smoky. Working back into the drawings with erasures and brushes reveals what’s underneath and a clear fixative sets the soot in place (hopefully) and yes, I have burned the paper and will again.”
Wayne currently lives and works on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai.
Wayne is committed to making art accessible to a wide audience, and has been involved in numerous Art in Public Places projects and commissions for the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture in the Arts. His work has been exhibit and collected throughout the US including New York, Chicago, San Francisco and in Hawaii.
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if this isn’t enough activity for a weekend we have added one more event and are off visiting another photographer friend on the north shore to have dinner and relax looking at the sunsets maybe even clicking a few shutters along the way over the sounds of passing seagulls who aren’t drenched in oil yet.
what we do to this world and ourselves seems criminal to me. oh well, maybe next time we’ll get it right.
Surfs up at ‘Swell’ ; a survey of surf-themed art at 3 galleries in chelsea
July 4, 2010 |
 |
| Written by Jacqueline Miro |
| Sunday, 04 July 2010 02:00
|
| NEW YORK, NY.- Nyehaus, Friedrich Petzel Gallery and Metro Pictures present “SWELL” —curated by Tim Nye and Jacqueline Miro—a survey of surf-themed art that opened July 1st at the three locations in Chelsea. Each gallery focuses on a different aspect of this work, Metro will be exhibiting many of the core group of Venice Beach artists associated with Light and Space or Fetish Finish (many of them surfers) including DeWain Valentine, Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses, as well as the Ferus Gallery artists Craig Kauffman, Ed Ruscha, Wally Berman, Bruce Conner, and Llynn Foulkes, and associated L.A. artists John McCracken, Ken Price, Joe Goode, George Herms, Tony Berlant and Helen Pashgian.
Dave Hickey, in a recent essay writes: “In its initial vogue, these works spoke directly to a new kind of artistic decorum—less aggressive than pop, less ideological than Minimalism, and less maidenly than post-painterly abstraction. It had a kind of gallantry—the cool courtesy of a well-born rake. California Minimalism created a gracious, social space in its glow and reflection; it treated us amicably, made us more beautiful by gathering us into its dance. It still does this today, so I am not amazed by the renewed interest in this work. I am still amazed, however, that my beach-bum pals could have created such a capacious and courtly art, although beach bums, I suppose, have dreams like everybody else.”
In its early experimental stages, the “L.A. Glass and Plastic” group and the “Cool School” referenced the movement that would eventually be known as Finish Fetish. The growing industrialization of the West Coast also influenced many of these artists to produce objects that were completely handcrafted, yet were so seamless and streamlined that they seemed to be machine-made, thus removing the focus from the artist’s handling of the materials and placing it on other aspects of the viewing experience. “Gone were the emotion-laden brushstrokes and thickly layered abstract surfaces that spoke of serious art world issues,” art historian Boton Colburn once stated. “These were replaced by cool, smooth, transparent finishes rife with references to California culture and environment.” The artists included in the exhibition represent a cross-section of those sharing these expressive ideas, technical information, and even materials, primarily working in Venice and Los Angeles in the 1960’s and 70’s. this is especially poignant this weekend as large swells hit the california beaches. estimates are in the 8′ to 13′ swells with dangerous rip tides. http://www.nws.noaa.gov/alerts/ca.html High Surf AdvisoryVentura County Coast (California)COASTAL HAZARD MESSAGE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE LOS ANGELES/OXNARD CA 209 AM PDT SUN JUL 4 2010 ...LARGE SURF AND DANGEROUS RIP CURRENTS EXPECTED TO DEVELOP ACROSS SOUTH AND SOUTHWEST FACING BEACHES THIS MORNING AND PERSIST THROUGH AT LEAST TUESDAY... CAZ040-041-087-041800- /O.CON.KLOX.SU.Y.0023.000000T0000Z-100707T0000Z/ VENTURA COUNTY COAST- LOS ANGELES COUNTY COAST INCLUDING DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES- CATALINA ISLAND- 209 AM PDT SUN JUL 4 2010 ...HIGH SURF ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 5 PM PDT TUESDAY... A HIGH SURF ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 5 PM PDT TUESDAY. A STRONG STORM SYSTEM NEAR NEW ZEALAND HAS PRODUCED A LARGE LONG PERIOD SOUTHERLY SWELL. THIS SOUTHERLY SWELL ENERGY HAS ALREADY REACHED THE SANTA MONICA BASIN BUOY WITH A 20 SECOND PERIOD AND WILL CONTINUE NORTHWARD ACROSS THE SOUTHERN AND CENTRAL COASTAL WATERS THIS MORNING. THE LONG PERIOD SWELL AND ASSOCIATED SURF IS EXPECTED TO BUILD QUICKLY THIS MORNING...THEN PEAK THIS AFTERNOON INTO MONDAY. DURING THE PEAK OF THE EVENT...BREAKERS OF 5 TO 8 FEET WILL BE COMMON ACROSS SOUTH AND SOUTHWEST FACING BEACHES OF LOS ANGELES AND VENTURA COUNTIES...WITH LOCAL MAX SETS UP TO 10 FEET POSSIBLE ACROSS FAVORED SOUTH TO SOUTHWEST FACING LOCATIONS. THE SANTA BARBARA COUNTY SOUTH COAST SHOULD BE MOSTLY PROTECTED FROM THIS LARGE SWELL DUE TO THE CHANNEL ISLANDS. PEOPLE PLANNING TO HEAD TO THE BEACHES DURING THE REMAINDER OF THIS FOURTH OF JULY WEEKEND SHOULD BE AWARE THAT THIS LARGE SWELL WILL LIKELY ARRIVE RATHER SUDDENLY THIS MORNING...POTENTIALLY CATCHING BEACH-GOERS OFF GUARD...AND WILL BE CAPABLE OF SWEEPING PEOPLE OFF THEIR FEET ACROSS THE SURF ZONE...ROCKS...AS WELL AS JETTIES AND BREAK WALLS.BEACHES EXPECTED TO BE MOST IMPACTED BY THE SURF INCLUDE THOSE FROM MALIBU WESTWARD THROUGH SOUTHERN VENTURA COUNTY INCLUDINGZUMA BEACH...AND SOUTH FACING BEACHES OF LOS ANGELES COUNTY NEAR THE ORANGE COUNTY LINE. THERE WILL BE DANGEROUS RIP CURRENTS AS WELL WITH THIS EVENT... ESPECIALLY ACROSS SOUTH TO SOUTHWEST FACING BEACHES SUNDAY THROUGH AT LEAST TUESDAY. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... A HIGH SURF ADVISORY MEANS THAT HIGH SURF WILL AFFECT BEACHES IN THE ADVISORY AREA...PRODUCING RIP CURRENTS AND LOCALIZED BEACH EROSION. |
1st thursday in Dumbo
July 2, 2010last night mary and i went over to dumbo to see her postcard exhibit in ‘Wish you were here 9’ at A.I.R gallery as we had missed the actual opening of the show. the show runs from 6/23 thru July 18 at the gallery located 111 front street, Brooklyn ny.
sign
from the press release: A.I.R gallery is pleased to announce Wish You Were Here 9, on view in Gallery III from June 23- July 18 2010. the proceeds from this exhibition od this postcard-sized works support our mission to advance the status of women in the arts and benefit the A.I.R Fellowship program for emerging and underrepresented artist.
wish you were here 9
mary & postcard
so if you’re in the neighborhood do stop in as there is some really wonderful affordable art work with lots sold so far with lots to be sold. it’s really nice to see how others have dealt with the size restrictions and used their creativity. i’ve always been impressed with how others create, it makes me think about how i might solve the problem and how different someone else solves the same problem.
that evening ‘the 1st Thursdays in dumdo the galleries are open late so we wandered around the hallway down to the Amos Eno gallery to see a group show where i met an artist who’s work i linked to here on fuzzy Marina Reiter. i had missed her solo show ‘Endless Summer’ but we had a chance to talk to her tonight. life is really wonderful once you get out into it.
marina reiter
no that’s not her work in the background but a good picture of her, see below or her web site.
Marina is a painter who works in oils, something i had started when i painted. i love her work, maybe it’s the musically of it or the cleanness, something not often found these days in this messy world. talking to her is a joy because she gives one attention not like so many other artist at these kinds of affairs where they are looking around to the next person to talk to about themselves.
art truck
quite a crowd
wandering around we found an artist using her imagination as to showing her work not quite on the street but close to it. her name is Orianne Cosentino and she’s a painter. that’s her signing the truck wall. so it’s pretty wonderful just being out and about seeing all there is to see.
after a couple of sips of wine and the time of night hunger creeps up on one so we went off to find a place to eat. i had passed by a very cute place at 55 Water Street during nyp festival called 55 water street. i was very disappointed in the food, so much so i’d never eat there again. the provincial stuffed chicken i had was over cooked with a canned tomato sauce spiced with hot sauce and lumpy mashed potatoes. mary had a mediocre penne in a cream sauce.
windy night for eating lobster
but we were luck we weren’t trying to eat a lobster outside as was this woman on a windy evening. mary found this shot looking through the window venetian blinds. they did finally move inside, guess it got too much for them.
so life can be interesting even when not the best, the important thing is for one to be there now.
so long for now lots of other news will have to wait because i’ve a meeting to go to.
if you’ve got some spare change, why not attend Polaroids auction
June 18, 2010
adams Tetons & Snake river
“Tetons and Snake River” by Ansel Adams is one of the many images to go under the hammer later this month. Photo by Ansel Adams.
“Over a thousand photographs from the Polaroid Collection, which includes images from some of the biggest names in photography, like Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe, will be put up for auction later this month.
Famed auction house Sotheby’s will put 1,200 historic photos under the hammer as part of Polaroid’s court-approved bankruptcy sale. The sale will include the most comprehensive collection of Ansel Adams photographs (400 Polaroid and non-Polaroid images) ever sold.
“It is the largest and best collection of works by Ansel Adams to ever come on the market, representing a broad spectrum of most of his career,” said Denise Bethel, Sotheby’s photography expert.
Masterpieces such as Adams’ “Bridalveil Fall” (valued at up to $100,000) and the massive “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” (valued as high as $500,000) will go to the highest bidder. The sale also includes Dorothea Lange’s iconic Depression-era “Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California,” which is valued at up to $80,000.
Working as a consultant for Polaroid, Adams helped build the company’s photography collection by acquiring works from masters like Lange, Weston and Imogen Cunningham, as well as those of contemporaries whose work he admired.
Many of the most well-known photographs from the 16,000+ images in the Polaroid collection will go up for sale, and they are expected to fetch a total of over $7 million. Sotheby’s will showcase the images for six days before they are auctioned on June 21-22 in New York.”
thanks to karin & raoul for this post
hollywood portraits photographers auction
June 16, 2010well it seems we, you and i, missed an education here but we can still take a look at the catalog of images here.
Auction of the World’s Largest Collection of Original Vintage Glamour Photography
JEAN HARLOW
CALABASAS, CA.- George Hurrell’s iconic portrait of Jean Harlow on a white bearskin rug created for Vanity Fair magazine now spearheads the largest auction of Glamour Photography in art history. The original camera negative, as well as a custom print of this incomparable photograph is regarded as Hurrell’s most important portrait and is estimated to sell for well over $20,000. The multi-million dollar Michael H. Epstein and Scott E. Schwimer collection, which contains tens of thousands of the best examples of Hollywood fine art, will be auctioned by Profiles in History March 26-27, 2010. Worldwide bidding begins at 12:00pm (noon) PST both days.
i’ve always loved hollywood portraits and have a few books of them myself. this auction of George Hurrell works and his life always amazes me. how i’d love to be able to produce work like this. to think these images were printed way before photoshop was born.
there were postproduction skills such as photographic printers, guys and gals, though maybe it was an all boys club, who only did printing. the softness of the faces, another lost art of filters, maybe a good lecture to visit next photo expo. but what ever the effect just makes my knees weak.
for more info on this collection see here.
thanks to art knowledgenews.com
B&H Insights: a new blog with some useful information
June 5, 2010In a perfect world you don’t need a filter. Your lens, even the most basic of kit lenses, comes pre-coated to minimize flare and color aberration. And when not in use, every lens comes with a lens cap that protects the front element of your lens and never ever unknowingly falls off your camera as you stroll down the boulevard. But we don’t live in a perfect world so forget about all of the above. (And by the way, I think you just lost your lens cap)
Unlike film cameras, which are limited to an ever-dwindling choice of Daylight, Tungsten, or B&W film stocks, most all digital cameras can be programmed to a number of (usually) accurate preset color parameters. Custom white balance is a simple, menu-driven chore for most digicams, and there’s no shortage of affordable, easy-to-use white-balancing devices.
And while I’m a big proponent of getting things right the first time, in-camera, it’s still reassuring to know you can tweak your efforts days, weeks, months, or years after the fact in Photoshop, especially if you shoot RAW or better yet, RAW+JPEG. As for color and other ‘creative’ filters, many of these filters can be easily mimicked electronically using any number of digital filter kits we carry at B&H. So the question of the day is, in a digital world, who needs glass filters?The simple answer is … you, me, and everybody else running around with a camera. And the reason we need filters is because most unfiltered images fall short of what they can and should be in terms of clarity, contrast, saturation, and overall detail. But before we get into the details, let’s cover a few of the basics.
Civill Rights exhibit at International Center of Photography
May 25, 2010
NEW YORK, NY.- A new exhibition at the International Center of Photography, IPC, offers an innovative view of the Civil Rights Movement and the catalytic social role played by changing portrayals of African Americans in the 1950s and ‘60s. Through a rich juxtaposition of visual images—including photographs, television and film clips, magazines, newspapers, books, pamphlets and posters—the exhibition shows how strategic interventions in these mediums of visual culture helped to transform prevailing attitudes toward race in America. The exhibition, organized by guest curator Maurice Berger, is titled For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, and will be on view through September 12, 2010.
Fuzzypictures's Weblog 