| Written by Ann Levin, Associated Press |
Thursday, 26 August 2010 02:13
 Robert-Falcon-Scotts-Hut |
|
NEW YORK, N.Y. – The Museum of Modern Art’s photography collection is so rich that it can present virtually the entire history of the medium using only images taken by women and in many cases, of women. It’s instructive to realize that whatever genre or style in which men worked, even industrial photography, women were doing the same. The show is organized chronologically, beginning with a gallery of 19th and early 20th century photographs that illustrate the two traditions of documentary and pictorial photography. For much of photography’s 170-year history, women have expanded its roles by experimenting with every aspect of the medium.Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography presents a selection of outstanding photographs by women artists, charting the medium’s history from the dawn of The show continues with a stunning array of photographs by European artists in the 1920s and 1930s, including Ilse Bing’s 1931 “Self-Portrait in Mirrors,” which shows her looking straight at the viewer and in profile at the same time, an illusion made possible by using her camera as a third eye. the modern period to the present. Including over two hundred works, this exhibition features celebrated masterworks and new acquisitions from the collection by such figures as Diane Arbus, Berenice Abbott, Claude Cahun, Imogen Cunningham, Rineke Dijkstra, Florence Henri, Roni Horn, Nan Goldin, Helen Levitt, Lisette Model, Lucia Moholy, Tina Modotti, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems, among many others. The exhibition also highlights works drawn from a variety of curatorial departments, includingBottoms, a large-scale Fluxus wallpaper by Yoko Ono. The most compelling in the first category is a series of photos taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston at the all-black Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), founded to educate former slaves. At the other end of the spectrum are the self-conscious, artistic photographs by Gertrude Kasebier, known for her symbolic, soft-focus images of Victorian motherhood such as the 1899 “The Manger” and 1904’s “The Heritage of Motherhood.” And since the art world seems to be having a Picasso moment, with major shows in museums and galleries and the record-breaking sale of one of his paintings at auction, be sure to look at an untitled work from 1930 by Picasso’s lover and muse Dora Maar, a highly regarded artist in her own right. It shows a woman from the rear with her long black coat lifted up in the wind. The show continues with a stunning array of photographs by European artists in the 1920s and 1930s, including Ilse Bing’s 1931 “Self-Portrait in Mirrors,” which shows her looking straight at the viewer and in profile at the same time, an illusion made possible by using her camera as a third eye.  Ilse-Bing-Self-Portrait-New You’ll also want to spend time in front of two prints by French photographer Germaine Krull, whose beautifully composed images of urban landscapes show that women could do muscular photographs of architectural structures as well as any man. Although Dorothea Lange is among the best-known U.S. photographers, male or female, the curators have rightly devoted an entire wall to almost 20 of her photographs, all the subjects girls and women. They range from her iconic Depression-era picture “Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California” to the poignant image of Japanese-American children saying the pledge of allegiance soon after President Roosevelt ordered the relocation of 120,000 Japanese-Americans into grim camps in the West. The mid-to-late 20th century is represented by MoMA’s newly acquired colour photographs of New York street life by Helen Levitt, best known for her work in black and white, and uncomfortable but affecting images by Austrian-born Lisette Model and Diane Arbus. Witty wallpaper just outside the entrance shows close-ups of human buttocks, reproduced from a 1960s-era film made by Yoko Ono. The images look vaguely human up close but resolve into a pillowy abstraction when seen from a distance. And as you leave the show, “29 Palms: Mortar Impact,” a large, black-and-white photograph by Vietnamese-American photographer An-My Le, depicts a few clouds of smoke rising from the barren desert floor, framed by the distant peaks of a rugged mountain range. It suggests the bleakness of war, hints at U.S. engagement in Iraq, and in its simplicity and clarity, is a work of stunning beauty. The sixth gallery of the exhibition will close on Aug. 30, and the other five will remain on view through 21 March, 2011. Visit on the Net: http://www.moma.org/ |
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
MoMA presents “Pictures by Women – A History of Modern Photography
August 26, 2010Ipad App Flexfolios
August 24, 2010here is a neat new app for the IPAD which seems to be a must have for the on the go photographer. i am not an IPAD user nor do i think i’ll be one in the future. but for some people i can see the use for this app Flexfolios
it was developed by a fellow i know emmanuel faure and antoine verglas and seems to work like a charm. one can order it directly for flexfolios or through the apple itunes store. it even has a utube video here showing it’s use.
The Man Who Made Robert Mapplethorp
August 24, 2010| 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 |
Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz’ at KW Institute
August 24, 2010for those people who’ve kept up with my eclectic postings know this i some of my all time fav films. it’s a long one for sure 16 hours. i first saw it on PBS when they were a public educational television station, now they are just a tape playing house showing safe nature films and raising money to line the executives pockets. i’ve been there done that. has anyone who’s seen the replacement of Bill Moyers and Now know
On March 17, 2007, KW Institute for Contemporary Art will open Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz – An Exhibition. The show will present this unusual and fascinating work in a way that enables visitors to choose their own mode of approach. In fourteen separate rooms, the episodes and the epilogue of Berlin Alexanderplatz will be screened in permanent loop. In addition, all the episodes will be shown in chronological order and full length on a central big screen. Visitors can thus decide how they approach Berlin Alexanderplatz: they can divide its unusual length up into pieces, watch episodes several times, or return to the exhibition whenever they like, as the entrance ticket entitles holders to repeated visits. The parallel screening of all the episodes in one place will highlight Fassbinder’s impressive visual idiom and his artistically challenging, free and innovative use of images.
The epilogue to Berlin Alexanderplatz marks a high point in Fassbinder’s creative work, combining visual and narrative planes in a complex collage that anticipates contemporary artistic positions. The exhibition also presents stills from the film’s 224 scenes. Moreover sketches from Fassbinders storyboard will be on view for the first time ever. A further, highly personal document are the tapes on which Fassbinder himself recorded his script for the film and which have never previously been made accessible to the public.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue (in German; approx. 600 pages), edited by Klaus Biesenbach, with essays by Susan Sontag and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The catalogue includes extensive illustrations. Furthermore the publication contains the complete screenplay as well as the biography, blbliography and filmography. Curator: Klaus Biesenbach.
KW Institute for Contemporary Art is regularly listed among Germany’s foremost modern art institutions and attracts international media coverage. KW has no collection of its own but instead views itself as a laboratory for communicating and advancing contemporary cultural developments in Germany and abroad by means of exhibitions, workshops and resident artists’ studios, as well as by collaborating with artists or other institutions and by commissioning works.
Founded in the early 1990s by Klaus Biesenbach and a group of young art enthusiasts, the institution is located on the site of a abandoned margarine factory in Berlin’s Mitte district. It symbolizes, perhaps more than any other institution, the city’s development into a center of contemporary art in the decade after the fall of the Wall. As well as presenting the first solo shows or major new projects of outstanding international artists such as Doug Aitken, Dinos & Jake Chapman, Paul Pfeiffer, Santiago Sierra and Jane & Louise Wilson, KW also introduced emerging new artists from Berlin and elsewhere in Germany to a wider public.
Visit KW Institute for Contemporary Art at: www.kw-berlin.de
The Work Office (TWO) is now hiring!
August 22, 2010—–Inline Attachment Follows—–
_______________________________________________
opportunities mailing list
opportunities@chashama.info
http://lists.chashama.info/mailman/listinfo/opportunities
for all you video artist, video-dumbo seeking submissions
August 13, 2010video_dumbo is an international festival for contemporary video art. We are seeking submissions for the 2010 edition, as part of the Dumbo Arts Festival, September 24-26 2010.
Our focus is on contemporary video art. We are looking for:
A. single channel work for the screening programs
B. video installations [single/multi channel and interactive software]
NOTE: For video installations the selected artists are responsible for the installation, production costs and all the equipment required for your work to be exhibited. Sorry we are unable to provide extra equipment.
The festival panel will make a final selection of works after the entry deadline. If your work is selected, you will be notified by e-mail by August 30, 2010. The screening copy of your work as a .mov file (in a DataDVD) or in miniDV format will need to be delivered to the festival office no later than September 10, 2010 . Entrants are responsible for shipping costs. Please do not use fiber envelopes.
There is no entry fee. Submission deadline: August 21, 2010.
SUBMIT NOW AT WWW.VIDEODUMBO.ORG
If you have any questions regarding the application process send an email to: videodumbo@gmail.com
hot summer relief, night time swim
August 12, 2010awhile ago we were invited out to the hamptons to a friends house to get away from the city, it’s always nice to explore new places and see different suroundings. so we gladly jumped in the car and drove out to the hamptons traffic jam. that’s what it become once you exit the LIE onto Rt 27.
i haven’t been out to hamptons in years and even then traffic was slow but manageable now it’s totally unbearable i don’t know how people stand it, no matter what time of day or night. oh well
we stayed in the barn, all the animals had been moved out by the time we got there. breakfast table and chairs set out for company.
the house was lovely surrounded with flowers all around the yard
but we arrived in plenty of time to wander around the town and see the sights have an ice cream cone before dinner. nice to be a grown up isn’t it?
sunset
dinner was lovely nice time had with friends sharing fine food and wine. i wonder who was it that first discovered wine making? What would this world be like without google even though they and verizon are trying to put roadblocks on the internet having questions answered is cool.
Certainly wine, as a natural phase of grape spoilage, was “discovered” by accident, unlike beer and bread, which are human inventions. It is established that grape cultivation and wine drinking had started by about 4000 BC and possibly as early as 6000 BC. The first developments were around the Caspian Sea and in Mesopotamia, near present-day Iran. Texts from tombs in ancient Egypt prove that wine was in use there around 2700 to 2500 BC. Priests and royalty were using wine, while beer was drunk by the workers. The Egyptians recognized differences in wine quality and developed the first arbors and pruning methods. Archeological excavations have uncovered many sites with sunken jars, so the effects of temperature on stored wine were probably known. see wine pros
but after the dishes were cleared and coffee served the swimming pool beckoned under the clear starry night. we all rushed off to change and splashed into the pleasantly cool waters. i am not very quick to pick up my camera, something i might have to learn, but i am more about being part of rather than looker on, if you know what i mean.
but because of the loveliness of the setting i wanted to linger on the memories longer that my mind could be trusted. only a few came out but i did like them anyways.
mary being silly
that’s why i love her
m&l racing
another friend
friend
but this is one of my favorites below. i call it ‘ swimming off world ‘
swimming off world
while these images aren’t perfect and wouldn’t make any of the people’s scrapbooks because you can’t see faces i hope that sometimes my work captures the feeling of the moment. would i make the cut at life magazine if it were still around, i don’t think so.
i call this blog fuzzypictures because what with the advent of auto focus cameras, yes i have a few myself, it’s not about a fine focused image. yes i do have a few around here somewhere but sometimes it’s just not important.
Vogue “ITALIA” Takes On The Gulf Oil Spill
August 12, 2010With Photographer Steven Meisel
Written by Lisa Orkin Emmanuel, APWriter
Wednesday, 11 August 2010 01:51
Vogue Italia’s August issue features an all black-clad Kristen McMenamy on a sinister, tar-slicked beach. : Photo by Steven Meisel
Vogue-Italia-August-Cover
MIAMI (AP).- The model is in black, prone and dirty on jagged rocks, netting draped around her legs like a dead sea creature. There she is again, lying on her back in a feathered dress, and in close up, her hair and face sleek with oil. A stirring photo spread in the August issue of Vogue Italia was inspired by the Gulf oil spill, leaving readers wondering if the magazine crossed from evocative to insensitive. Editor-in-Chief Franca Sozzani understands the debate stretching from blogosphere to beaches and said the motivation is straightforward. “The message is to be careful about nature,” she said by telephone from Milan, Italy. “Just to take care more about nature. … I understand that it could be shocking to see and to look in this way these images.”
The spread, featuring Kristen McMenamy, is titled “Water & Oil” and was shot in Los Angeles by a leading fashion photographer, Steven Meisel. In another of the photos, the gray-haired McMenamy is covered in oil, spitting up water while clutching her neck.
Water-and-Oil-Steven-Meisel-Vogue-Italia
Virginia Contreras of Navarre, Fla., said the photos were making light of the disaster. “I think they are making light of the oil spill. Everyone isn’t going to the beaches and people have lost their jobs here because of the oil,” she said.
Sozzani said the shoot reflects the magazine’s effort to “find an idea that comes from real life. … There is nothing political. There is nothing social. It’s only visually. We gave a message but in a visual way.”
Some bloggers weren’t pleased. Dodai Stewart, deputy editor of Jezebel, called the spread inappropriate. “I didn’t feel it made a statement,” she said in an interview. “I felt that they used the oil spill as a backdrop. There was one picture that had feathers. … What makes a stronger statement about oil-slicked birds is an oil-slicked bird.”
Miranda Lash, curator of modern and contemporary art at the New Orleans Museum of Art, said artists should be free to take on any topic. “When I look at it, I feel pain. It evokes pain and a feeling of loss and sadness because this is going to hurt my region for a very long time,” Lash said.
Beth Batton, curator of the permanent collection at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, Miss., said in an e-mail that the spread humanizes the condition of the Gulf coast animals and environment. “Looking at Steven Meisel’s photographs, you know something is terribly wrong because, as sensual as the images are, the human mind understands the toxicity of the oil that has coated model Kristen McMenamy’s skin, hair, and feathery gloves,” she said.
On Twitter, type in keywords Vogue Italia and you’ll get various opinions.
Brandie Hopstein, who lives in New Orleans, tweeted about the shoot after seeing the photos days ago. “There is this oil spill going on. It’s not going to be slipped under the rug,” she said. “I happen to love the shoot.”
Angelia Levy of Silver Spring, Md., tweeted that the spread was “kind of iffy, but it’s provocative.” She said she wasn’t offended, and questions whether an American magazine would have run it. “There is no way that would go down,” Levy said. “It seems distant for them so they can afford to have models rolling around in oil.”
While we’re not sure, we have to assume Meisel shot this spread as a response to the environmental tragedy that is the 107-day old Gulf oil spill. And while the irony of using clothing worth thousands of dollars that was probably flown halfway around the world for the shoot is not lost on us, we can’t help but think that if this isn’t art, we don’t know what is….said Art Knowledge News
By: Lisa Orkin Emmanuel, Associated Press Writer / Associated Press Writer Melissa Nelson in Pensacola, Fla., also contributed to this report.
courtesy Art Knowledge News
Richard Avedon’s Lively Fashion Images at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
August 12, 2010Richard Avedon’s Lively Fashion Images at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Written by Vincent Baldino
Wednesday, 11 August 2010 01:53
BOSTON, MA.- Richard Avedon (1923–2004) was the man who brought fashion photography to life. Instead of perpetuating static images of human mannequins posing stiffly in magazines, Avedon depicted his models as real women whose energy and exuberance complemented their modern lifestyles. Considered one of the great image-makers of the 20th century, he redefined fashion photography and his lasting contributions are explored in the traveling exhibition Avedon Fashion 1944–2000, a major retrospective devoted exclusively to his work in this medium. On view in the Foster Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), from August 10, 2010, through January 17, 2011, the exhibition highlights approximately 140 objects, including photographs, magazines, engravers’ prints, and contact sheets that span almost six decades of his successful career.
Richard-Avedon-Seymour-Versace
Avedon Fashion 1944–2000 examines Avedon’s years as a photographer who helped shape the image of the fashionable woman, drawing from thousands of pictures he took as staff photographer for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. It unfolds by decade, with the greatest emphasis on the classic work from the 1950s and 1960s, when Avedon’s distinct vision of the ideal American woman revolutionized magazine photography.
“Richard Avedon was one of the greatest photographers of all time, who forever transformed the way we look at fashion. The MFA is delighted to be able to showcase his supremely stylish and important work,” said Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Richard Avedon – Veruschka, dress by Kimberly, New York, January 1967. – © Richard Avedon FoundationThe exhibition begins with elegant, romantic, and lively images taken in Paris, where he visited extensively from 1947 to 1965 on assignment for Harper’s Bazaar.
Richard-Avedon-Veruschka
Despite the bleakness of the post-war years, Paris still represented the height of sophistication, and Avedon infused his photographs with a sense of optimism, helping the City of Light reclaim its position as the capital of the fashion world. The photographer created imaginative narratives—sometimes continued through several issues of the magazine—highlighting couture collections and featuring his favorite models: Dorian Leigh, her sister Suzy Parker, Sunny Harnett, Dovima, Carmen, Elise Daniels, and even his wife, Doe Avedon. He took these smartly outfitted women out of the studio and photographed them in French locales: Daniels, dressed in a Balenciaga suit, watching street performers in the Marais district in 1948; Harnett, in an evening dress by Grès, playing roulette at the Casino in Le Touquet, France, in 1954; and Parker, draped in a Grès gown, sitting near cancan dancers at the Moulin Rouge in 1957. Avedon’s famous night scenes in Paris, which began in 1954, broadened his creative range. Like movie sets, the complex fashion shoots he directed used generators to light up entire city blocks, allowing him to capture stylish bon vivants enjoying Parisian nightlife.
During his early years at Harper’s Bazaar, fashion photographs by Avedon were more than just a vehicle to market luxurious clothing to post-World War II American women—they were the embodiment of a dynamic lifestyle. His expressive images celebrated spirited women laughing, jumping, and dancing—even roller skating in Paris—all while wearing the most beautiful clothes.
“Those candid snapshots were in direct contrast to what was being done. I came in at a time when there weren’t any young photographers working in a free way. Everyone was tired, the war was over, Dior let the skirts down, and suddenly everything was fun. It was historically a marvelous moment for a fashion photographer to begin. I think if I were starting today, it would be much harder,” said Avedon in 1965.
The son of a women’s clothing store owner (Avedon’s Fifth Avenue), Avedon became fascinated with fashion photography as a boy. As a young man, he joined the Merchant Marine (1942–44), where he was assigned to the photography division. After leaving the service, Avedon enrolled in design classes at the New School for Social Research taught by Alexey Brodovitch, the art director of Harper’s Bazaar. In 1944, at age 21, Avedon joined the magazine, primarily as a photographer for Junior Bazaar. Shortly thereafter, he became an official staff photographer, working with the now legendary figures Carmel Snow, Brodovitch, and Diana Vreeland.
During the height of his career, Avedon became fashion photography’s most influential and prolific practitioner. His style was energetic and playful, with a flair for the dramatic, and while Avedon’s location shoots were groundbreaking, his major studio shots were also ingeniously inventive. The photographer illustrated the excitement of the “new look” of Dior—featuring cinched waists and voluminous circle skirts—by showing his model twirling on a Parisian street (Renée, “The New Look of Dior,” Place de la Concorde, Paris, August 1947). He developed the “Avedon blur” using variable focus, a technique creating a subtle background scene while highlighting the model in the foreground, as seen in an image of a well-turned ankle showing off a fur-trimmed bootie in front of the softly visible Eiffel Tower (Shoe by Perugia, Place du Trocadero, Paris, August 1948). Avedon also liked to show models “behind-the-scenes”—sitting at a café, seemingly in tears (Elise Daniels, turban by Paulette, Rue François-Premier, Paris, August 1948); assessing an outfit in the mirror (Dorian Leigh, evening dress by Piguet, Helena Rubenstein’s apartment, Île Saint-Louis, Paris, August 1949); or shown within the backdrop of a studio set (Suzy Parker, evening dress by Dior, Paris, August 1956). In many of his photographs, dogs and other animals share center stage with the models—Dovima in a Balenciaga suit and Sacha, an afghan, sitting next to one another outdoors at the Café des Deux Magots, Paris (1955), or Dovima in a Dior evening dress, shown alongside elephants at the Cirque d’Hiver (1955)—one of the photographer’s many iconic images.
Avedon was one of the most engaging image-makers of the 20th century. He revolutionized fashion photography with his dynamic images that set an ideal of the modern American woman. His enormous success led to great fame, and the status he attracted helped define the role of the high-profile fashion photographer that we are familiar with today,” said Anne Havinga, the MFA’s Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Senior Curator of Photographs, who is responsible for the show in Boston with Emily Voelker, the MFA’s Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Assistant Curator of Photographs. The exhibition was curated by Carol Squiers, curator, and Vince Aletti, guest curator, for the International Center of Photography (ICP), in conjunction with The Richard Avedon Foundation, New York.
Richard-Avedon-Stephanie-Seymour
Avedon’s innovative approach enlivened the vocabulary of fashion photography, and even made him famous. The 1957 movie musical Funny Face is loosely based on Avedon, who served as the visual consultant for the production. Starring Fred Astaire as “Dick Avery,” a photographer working in New York and Paris, it co-starred Audrey Hepburn as his muse, a model chosen for her spirit and intelligence. Avedon’s own models were not only beautiful, but also embodied the idealized American woman, who had wit, personality, confidence, and a sense of adventure. They also reflected Avedon’s awareness of social and cultural changes. He was the first major photographer to use models of color, such as China Machado, a Portuguese-Chinese beauty he featured in the 1950s, or Donyale Luna, a sinewy model of African, Mexican, Egyptian, and Irish descent he worked with in the 1960s. His images elevated many of his models to celebrity status, especially in the 1960s and ’70s, when he worked with Jean Shrimpton, Lauren Hutton, Anjelica Huston, Twiggy, Penelope Tree, and Veruschka. In the 1980s and ’90s, his photographs helped bring supermodel fame to Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, and Stephanie Seymour.
Avedon Fashion 1944–2000 includes a wide range of photographs that document the 1960s era, when advances in technology and demands for social reform became part of the evolving modern American experience. Among them are Avedon’s pictures of models wearing the “mod” fashions of the period at Cape Canaveral near an Atlas missile, or in the spacesuit-inspired fashions of André Courrèges, as seen in the famous April 1965 Harper’s Bazaar, the magazine’s 20th anniversary edition, which Avedon guest edited. The cover featured a Pop Art-inspired photograph by Avedon of Shrimpton in a day-glo pink helmet—the same photograph that appears on the cover of the exhibition’s catalogue, Avedon Fashion 1944–2000 (Abrams, New York, 2009). The photographer also embraced changing social mores with his forays into imagery that included nudity, or were discreetly erotic, as seen in his depiction of a suggested “ménage a trois” (Natty Abascal and Ana-Maria Abascal with model Helio Guerreiro, bathing suit by Brigance, Ibiza, Spain, September 1964).
In 1966, Avedon joined Vogue, where Vreelend had become its editor-in-chief. He captured the youthful brashness of the 1960s and turned Brooke Shields, Isabella Rossellini, and Barbra Streisand into fashion icons. With Vreeland’s approval, he also sought out quirky, unconventionally beautiful models, such as the wide-eyed waifs Penelope Tree and Twiggy, for his compelling photographs featuring Pop Art and “mod”-inspired fashions. Avedon’s work was included in most issues of Vogue until the mid 1970s. Vreeland was dismissed from the magazine in 1971, but Avedon stayed on, taking every cover photograph after 1980 until he quit in 1988. Avedon also photographed many imaginative advertising campaigns during his long career for clients including Versace, Calvin Klein, and Dior. In 1992, he was named the first staff photographer for The New Yorker, where his post-apocalyptic, wild fashion fable “In Memory of the Late Mr. and Mrs. Comfort,” featuring model Nadja Auermann and a skeleton, was published in 1995. In these later years, Avedon continued to contribute to Egoïste, a journal of fashion and the arts, where his photographs appeared from 1984 through 2000. He also pursued his own work as a portraitist, photojournalist, and the author of photography books until his death in 2004. His innovations are still evident in portraiture and fashion photography today.
Visit the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston at : http://www.mfa.org/
posted from Art KnowledgeNews
so many other things on the list, new photoshoot look see
August 5, 2010but i am dancing as fast as i can, trying to keep up with this lightspeed life of mine as the sun has sent an unusually fast corona mass ejection of a large cloud of charged plasma toward earth creating beautiful auroras over parts of the planet. see nasa link
but i am looking through a photoshoot that mary wehrhahn did on fri with a traveling nude figure study model keira grant who’s pictures are posted below. any photoshoot is an opportunity to learn something about the craft which mary and i did. mary is looking for emotion emitting people for her series inner sanctum and all that glitters.
i am trying to add to or just finish my cave dwelling adam and eve series which really hasn’t been posted on my web site which is under construction. well i thought keira would make a lovely addition. but as you’ll see here, lovely pictures but something doesn’t work which i’ll try and point out. not that keria did anything wrong, she didn’t but it her training and my total lack of seeing that’s the problem.
part of doing these shoots is to learn how to direct the models or participants in order to get what i am looking for, sometimes the magic works sometimes it doesn’t. so you can be the final arbitrator and i’ll just add my commentary and see what develops.
here are the first ones letting mary work with her gold cloth, i lit the space with tungsten softboxes for her and flash for me. i was trying out my tota umbrella on my white lightning 1200’s. key light here 1200 with 216 on reflector and tota umbrella softbox back.
keria with gold cloth
notice the placement of her hands and how she uses her feet, more on that later but it seems this is a fine art model style, me not being a fine art model i wasn’t aware of this nuance.
keria nude
now after this image i should have just sat down and rested.
after the shoot i asked mary if she got anything and she said not too much but some over and under exposed ones she liked. some days are like that. during this section was mostly me backing away from my take charge personality and letting mary direct the model. but i did fool around while waiting my turn.
keria semi nude
here i took off reflector and added some blackwrap to a front 1200 because i don’t have any barndoors nor did i want to fool around with setting flags. working in movies i’ve learned to work fast never wanting to be the person or department to hold up production. very big no no. below is a more traditional light cropping.
female semi nude
but again notice her hands and feet. the thumbs extended away from the hand forming a V and her feet curled away from her body pointing down or away in this case. this isn’t a problem really more about style or form.
but in this next series it’s not something that i am looking for. maybe i am just picky and seeing something that others don’t notice. here i switched over to tungsten with strip box overhead gelled and 750 zip light fill.
keria's nude back
here again are the hands, notice the V. while the feet are again pointing away from the body. she does have a lovely back and cute tush which adds to the overall form and line of the figure.
another image this time sitting.
keria sitting
i remember a discussion keria and i had about the style i wanted from her as she showed me her pointed feet saying how this was fine art modeling to which i replied ‘i wanted a more natural look’. we did discuss what this series was about and who i thought she was as a character. during some of the poses i told her exactly what i was looking for, emotion, which was hard for her to do. models aren’t actors as their training is so different, so asking someone to do something they are not use to nor trained for is difficult.
it’s not about a pretty body but the emotional impact the image has, either through the tension in the body’s hands or face. i like to tell a story with my images beginning in the viewers mind, i want them to think. if the work does that then i’ve got them.
keria kneeling
this is one of the first shots in this series and really works. so any complaints i have about her really come right back to me. she was an all around trooper and really tried to give me a successful session. did i get something i can use and did she give me what i asked for? who knows
life is just stuff and then more stuff. the problem is to be able to live with just the stuff that’s here now and forget about the stuff from yesterday.
so if you’ve gotten this far maybe you’ve gained an insight to my work, if you have, fine. at least no animals were hurt in the creation of this post.
Fuzzypictures's Weblog 