Kodakism

Michael Wesely My friend Clara just sent me a link to a great...

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 12:51:15 -0400

My friend Clara just sent me a link to a great photographer I didn’t know! Just thought I’d share his work on here.

“The German photography artist Michael Wesely has created the longest exposuresn to date. Using large format cameras (4x5 inches) he captured the light of his objects for up to 3 years in monochrome or colour.

The shots below are of the re-construction of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The photos were taken using 8 cameras positioned at various places around the construction site. These shots were exposed for 34 months between 2001-2004. Whatever technique he’s using, I think it’s safe to assume he’s left a wake of envious photographers eager to learn his secrets. According to Michael, he could do exposures for up to 40 years.

The sun traces in the sky give the images a beautiful, painting-like feeling.”

Enjoy!

Great interview (read here) of genius cinematographer Robby...

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 11:52:20 -0400

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...

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 12:30:00 -0400

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.”

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 07:18:00 -0500

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

Francesca Woodman - The “anti-portrait”...

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:16:00 -0500

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...

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 04:36:00 -0500

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...

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 07:09:21 -0500

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...

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 08:25:00 -0500

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...

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 08:24:00 -0500

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...

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 01:52:00 -0500

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...

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 11:08:00 -0500

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.

Here are a few shots from my incredibly talented friend, Simon...

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:57:00 -0500

Here are a few shots from my incredibly talented friend, Simon Marsham. I wish he would shoot more, I can spend hours looking at his blog(s).

Here is his Flickr, Tumblr, and his site I Hardly Know Her.

Along with his friend Cherry Styles, Simon also writes about other photographers on his blog NOT CONTENT.

Enjoy

For the longest time, I wondered if Annie Leibovitz had ever met...

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 09:22:00 -0500

For the longest time, I wondered if Annie Leibovitz had ever met Diane Arbus when she was still alive. Since they both knew Susan Sontag quite well, I thought maybe they had. I loved the idea of both photographers talking together… The idea of the great Diane Arbus giving tips to a young and ambitious Annie Leibovitz.

A few days ago, I decided I wasn’t going to live in the dark any longer and so I Googled the following words: “Leibovitz, Arbus, ever met?”

Stupid, I know.

Still, I needed to know.

The first result that appeared was this amazing 1998 interview of Annie Leibovitz by Anna B. Bohdziewicz at the Warsaw’s Hotel in Poland.

ENJOY

- Have you ever met Diane Arbus?

- I never met her but I knew people who knew her. I remember coming to New York in the seventies to live there. When I was walking dawn the streets I remember thinking - oh! Diane Arbus had it so easy, there is like Diane’s Arbus picture every single corner in New York! That is a bit simplified with Diane’s Arbus work becauseDiane Arbus really knew people she photographed and became friends with them and went into the cave, sort of speak… She was a very, very important photographer because she was taking pictures of people that we as a society did not want to look at. Not that we didn’t want to look at them, we didn’t even see them.

- She committed suicide. Do you think it was because how deep she went into the subject?

- I think it’s so complicated. It was not just because of one thing. She was always very troubled. One could read all kinds of things into it. Did you read the Patricia Boss book about her?

- I read a quite thick biography of Arbus but I don’t remember the author.

- I did not want to read it but I read it and then I wished I could read more… I think that she probably felt comfortable with people she was photographing maybe more so than with other people. Is the question that she saw these people and got so depressed that she killed herself? No…

- No, no, no…

- She saw those people because she related to them, and she probably really enjoyed them, they were real friends … Anyone who lives in New York knows that this is perfect New York. That’s why when I first moved to New York at every corner I could see Diane Arbus picture. But I would not even see these people unless I looked into Diane’s Arbus pictures. I would mentally not been looking at these people.

- Richard Avedon in his book “The American West” tired to repeat Diane’s Arbus work?

- He wished. He whished… He wanted to be Diane Arbus, very bad… He was criticized because he wanted to be Diane Arbus, but it is perfectly all right. I think he did a great work in the West. He is very, very honest about how and what he did and why he did it. He was totally impressed with Diane Arbus and admired her, embraced her. Her douthers, Amy and Doon, are his best friends right now. How can one not amire his work embracing that brilliance. He could never be Diane Arbus but he could certainly integrate in his work what he saw there in her work. And we all do that, we all do that! That what’s wonderful! There’s nothing wrong with that. We all live in this world and we all feed of each other. That’s part of it. It’s great, it’s great! You know…

Read the rest of the interview here.

Leibovitz / Williams / Monroe Annie Leibovitz shot Michelle...

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 08:42:00 -0500

Leibovitz / Williams / Monroe

Annie Leibovitz shot Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe for Vogue last October.

What do you think?

I’ve read a lot of hostile comments online, but I think the photos work great. You can read Michelle Williams’ interview here and watch the trailer for “My Week With Marilyn” here.

Jill Greenberg “Glass Ceiling” (2011) Jill...

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 20:22:42 -0400

Glass Ceiling - Jill Greenberg

Glass Ceiling - Jill Greenberg

Glass Ceiling - Jill Greenberg

Glass Ceiling - Jill Greenberg

Glass Ceiling - Jill Greenberg

Glass Ceiling - Jill Greenberg

Glass Ceiling - Jill Greenberg

Glass Ceiling - Jill Greenberg

Jill Greenberg “Glass Ceiling” (2011)

Jill Greenberg’s interest in feminist art can be traced back to the year 1989, when the photographer wrote her senior thesis for the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) on “The Female Object”. In this project, she denounced the impact and predominance of the “panoptical male gaze in the female consciousness”.

Since then, Greenberg’s work has been strongly influenced by issues of “what is tolerated by women in our culture”. The idea behind this series - entitled “Glass Ceiling” (2011) - came from a promotional shoot in which Greenberg was asked to photograph members of the US Olympic Synchronized Swim Team in high heels.

This odd combination highlights these athlete’s sexuality whilst restraining their ability. Are these women breaking through the tension glass? are they trying to grasp for air?

As said in a recent press release regarding the exhibition, “The result is a sadly relevant series of shots depicting women struggling to keep head above water in a context defined by the constraints pressed upon them by others.”

Breathe.

Amy Winehouse by Hedi Slimane

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 22:15:08 -0400

Amy Winehouse by Hedi Slimane

World renowned photographer Howard Schatz sits down with actor...

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 22:03:00 -0400

World renowned photographer Howard Schatz sits down with actor Jason Schwartzman.

It’s priceless.

Writer/Director/Photographer
Howard Schatz: www.howardschatz.com

Videographer/Editor
Justin Grazioli: www.jgraz.com

Lee Towndrow: I was watching The National’s Fake Empire...

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 15:15:00 -0400

Lee Towndrow:

I was watching The National’s Fake Empire video the other day and realized how great the cinematography was. I looked up Lee Towndrow’s work and really liked it. I only put a few pictures on here, but make sure you visit his website. I don’t know much about the photographer, I just wanted to share a little bit of his talent with you.

In his own words, Lee Towndrow…

“… was a designer upon starting out. Made album covers. Was moved by kissing robots to become flame*artist. Built a darkroom, made bread (the kind you eat). Moved to Buenos Aires to try to grow up. Learned Spanish, loved, lost. Worked with great artists. Made photos, made feature films. Still making a life.”

Words of wisdom from Joel Meyerowitz “What I think is so...

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 23:22:00 -0400

Words of wisdom from Joel Meyerowitz

“What I think is so extraordinary about the photograph is that we have a piece of paper with this image adhered to it, etched on it, which interposes itself into the plane of time that we are actually in at that moment. Even if it comes from as far back as 150 years ago, or as recently as yesterday, or a minute before as a Polaroid color photograph, suddenly you bring it into your experience. You look at it, and all around the real world is humming, buzzing and moving, and yet in this little frame there is stillness that looks like the world. That connection, that collision, that interfacing, is one of the most astonishing things we can experience.”

Play Time by Jacques Tati (1967) I was wasting time on Tumblr...

Thu, 26 May 2011 21:40:16 -0400

Play Time by Jacques Tati (1967)

I was wasting time on Tumblr yesterday when I stumbled upon a post by “whenwewerecool”, showing stills from Jacques Tati’s Play Time. I was 7 years old when I first saw this movie and I have not seen it ever since. I remember the images vividly though, and looking at a few of them again yesterday compelled me to do this post.

Tati was a genius in many ways. If you haven’t had the chance to see his work, both Play Time and Mr. Hulot’s Holiday are available on Netflix instant. I chose a few stills from the film to show you. As you can see - and as Radiohead would sing - “everything (is) in its right place”.

One last thing, I was reading about his unique style on his wikipedia page and I thought I’d share a few sentences with you.

Tati wanted the film to be in color but look like it was filmed in black and white; an effect he had previously employed to some extent in Mon Oncle. Predominant colors are in shades of grey, blue, black, and greyish white. Green and red are used as occasional accent colors: for example, the greenish hue of patrons lit by a neon sign in a sterile and modern lunch counter, or the flashing red light on an office intercom. It has been said that Tati had one red item in every shot.

Enjoy, and make sure you follow whenwewerecool!

For more screenshots of the film, click here.