Kodakism

"Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies." Diane Arbus

Great interview (read here) of genius cinematographer Robby Müller by Lindsay Amos. (Sydney, 1993)

Müller has been working with Wim Wenders since 1969 and has also collaborated with many other renowned directors on international productions, most notably “Breaking the Waves”, “To live and die in L.A.”, and several Jim Jarmusch movies including “Ghost Dog” and “Dead Man”

Dina Goldstein

After SNL’s brilliant sketch “The Real Housewives of Disney” (watch here) comes another striking (and ironic) take on fairy tale princesses. 

With her latest series “Fallen Princesses”, Vancouver photographer Dina Goldstein shows us what happens when reality takes over fantasy.

 ”I explored the original brothers Grimm’s stories and found that they have very dark and sometimes gruesome aspects, many of which were changed by Disney. I began to imagine Disney’s perfect Princesses juxtaposed with real issues that were affecting women around me, such as illness, addiction and self-image issues. […] In all of the images, the Princess is placed in an environment that articulates her conflict.” Dina Goldstein

…and they lived happily never after. Enjoy!

“You press the button, we do the rest.” 

“You press the button, we do the rest.” 

Francesca Woodman  - The “anti-portrait” prodigy

Thanks to the SFMOMA’s current exhibition & the recent release of Scott Willis’  documentary “The Woodmans”,  Francesca W.’s brief but incredible body of work has seen a revival.

Often recognized as the last true Modernist photographer, Woodman began taking photographs at the age of 13. Mostly known for picturing herself nude in empty architectural settings, her photographs actually reveal her hiding from the camera. 

Woodman’s tragic suicide at the age of 22 has often shaped the way people have looked at her work. “There has been a tendency to dramatize and sensationalize Francesca’s work because of the tragic events of her life”, says her father. 

To this day, many critics still disagree over the meaning of her work. Some argue that it is narcissistic and adolescent, whilst other believe that her simple (yet complex) images successfully manage to deconstruct the photographic process. 

When asked by a friend why she obsessively photographed herself, Woodman replied: “It’s a matter of convenience, I am always available.”

One of Woodman’s biggest admirer is contemporary photographer Cindy Sherman, who claims to have been “mesmerised with her history”. She adds, “We were both in New York at the exact same time, living in the same neighbourhood, close in age and circumnavigating the same art world, both expressing ourselves through photographing ourselves. Yet we never met or knew of one another. […] She had few boundaries and made art out of nothing: empty rooms with peeling wallpaper and just her figure. No elaborate stage set-up or lights. Her process struck me more the way a painter works, making do with what’s right in front of her, rather than photographers like myself who need time to plan out what they’re going to do.”

Enjoy 

Ryan McGinley is a superstar photographer who clearly needs no introduction. 

Catapulted to fame in 2003 at age 25, Ryan became the youngest photographer to get a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work is known and praised across the world as one of the most poignant celebration of youth and freedom in photography. 

I first became acquainted with his work in 2008, whilst interning at XL Recordings on the release of Sigur Rós’limited edition book, Hlemmur. The band had used one of McGinley’s photo (‘Highway’) for the cover of their fifth album Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust. Since then, I have been fascinated by his photographs, which are incredibly poetic, hopeful, and slightly euphoric. 

I recently found a great description of McGinley’s work in a 2007 New York Magazine article on artist Dash Snow (read here), which stated that  “People fall in love with McGinleyʼs work because it tells a story about liberation and hedonism: Where Goldin and Larry Clark were saying something painful and anxiety producing about Kids and what happens when they take drugs and have sex in an ungoverned urban underworld, McGinley started out announcing that “The Kids Are Alright,” fantastic, really, and suggested that a gleeful, unfettered subculture was just around the corner—’still’—if only you knew where to look.”
Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency had a huge impact on McGinley. He once said “I could relate to it so much - it was about New York, it was about downtown, it was about a bohemian lifestyle and it fel very close to home”. He also drew inspiration from Terrence Malick’s masterpiece: Days of Heaven. 
It was quite difficult to choose just ten of his photographs for this post. Luckily he just released his first retrospective monograph entitled You & I.

Also - for those wondering - McGinley shoots 35mm film and makes his photographs using Yashica T4s and Leica R8s.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he starts makings movies soon… Though when photographer Ron Schuman asked him about his plans for the future, McGinley replied “I think that my ideas will start to change as I do.  I’d still like to make a movie, but I don’t think I’m ready just yet.  My master plan is to do two more years of these road-trips with some smaller projects in between, and then I’ll start to focus on film. I had a long discussion with Gus Van Sant about making movies the other day, and he said, ‘You gotta do it.  Just start looking at the stuff you’ve already done, and instead of having a camera that makes photographs, have a camera that makes films.’  I always film everything anyway, especially photo-shoots, so I think I’ll start by editing that footage and then take it from there.”  (Here is the full interview)
Enjoy! 

Sylvia Plachy: “A photograph for me is something I feel rather than see”

Sylvia Plachy is an incredible photographer from Hungary who immigrated to the United States in 1958, and began taking photographs in 1964. She is best known for pictures in the Village Voice, although her work has appeared in over 50 major publications. She also happens to be Adrien Brody’s mother (you can read a poignant article she wrote about him here)

According to Avedon, Kertesz & Wenders

-Richard Avedon: “She makes me laugh and she breaks my heart. She is moral. She is everything a photographer should be.”

- Wim Wenders: “She showed me that photographs can do all sorts of things that I never thought of.”

- Andre Kertesz: “I have never seen the moment sensed and caught on film with more intimacy and humanity.”

I highly recommend her book “Goings on About Town”. In the meantime, you can watch a short interview here.

Seigei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii

My friend Jason sent me a link this morning of incredible Russian photographs in color from a hundred years ago. I have been starring at them for the past half hour and I still can’t believe how amazing they are. Here’s more about them:

With images from southern and central Russia in the news lately due to extensive wildfires, I thought it would be interesting to look back in time with this extraordinary collection of color photographs taken between 1909 and 1912. In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images. The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time - when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun. Collected here are a few of the hundreds of color images made available by the Library of Congress, which purchased the original glass plates back in 1948.

Have a look at the rest of them here.

Alex Prager strikes again!

“Touch of Evil: Cinematic Villainy From the Year’s Best Performers” an incredible series of video portraits directed by Alex Prager for The New York Times. Watch them all here.

Marian and Vivian Brown The San Francisco Twins (April 2008)  Looking through my hard drive yesterday, I stumbled upon this photo I took a couple years ago… These women are spectacular, more about them here.

Marian and Vivian Brown The San Francisco Twins (April 2008) 

Looking through my hard drive yesterday, I stumbled upon this photo I took a couple years ago… These women are spectacular, more about them here.

Words of wisdom from Roger Deakins, one of my favorite cinematographers:

Things usually work out better than you plan. When you’re shooting a film you’re so close to it, it rarely lives up to your expectations while you’re there. You always want it to be better, more perfect. When you see a cut, maybe two or three months later, you come to it fresh. It’s generally much better than you thought it would be.

Someone said to me, early on in film school… if you can photograph the human face you can photograph anything, because that is the most difficult and most interesting thing to photograph. If you can light and photograph the human face to bring out what’s within that human face you can do anything.

All I’ve ever wanted to do is take stills of people, or take documentaries about people, and try to express to an audience how somebody lives next door. You know what I mean? Just how similar we all are as individuals.

On a film like ‘Serious Man,’ without a huge budget, you’re on a tight schedule and shoot when you have to, even if the light isn’t exactly what you want. If you do a digital intermediate (DI) you can change the lighting, the saturation and the contrast. You can do a lot without spending the money to go to an effects house. — on preferring to do post-production on a film electronically

The prep period is especially important. Joel and Ethan Coen and I really enjoy it. By the time we’re on the set, we’re discussing not what we’re doing that day but rather something we’re doing later that may be a problem.

The photographs above are taken from his 1972 Beaford, N Devon series.