Casting Shadows

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two pieces with surreal overtones from the exhibit Shadow and Light, a retrospective of the work of photographer Bill Brandt (1904-1983), at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Considered one of the great masters of black-and-white photography (the “pre-eminent British photographer of the 20th Century,” according to the New York Times), his dark and moody images of wartime England were recently (and astutely) described by the writer Ariella Budick as “lyrical grime.” In later years, Brandt liked to focus on the eyes of artistic notables, such as painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet, above left, in a photograph from 1960. (Seaford, East Sussex Coast, from 1957, is shown right). The exhibition traces the evolution of a multifaceted photographic legacy, and is on view through August 12.

Mirror Image

Italian photographer Fausto Podavini was awarded first prize in the “Daily Life – Stories” category at the 2013 World Press Photo Contest last week, for his deeply moving portraits from a series called “Mirella,” a wife’s quiet and determined journey as caregiver for a husband suffering from Alzheimer’s. The photos, including the reflective (in more ways than one) and compositionally striking entry shown above, taken in 2010, capture stark moments from
a poignant end-of-life experience.

Collective Creation

A phantasmagoric flock of starlings creates its own kind of Rorschach test in the sky — and a bit of art, too — in an image taken on January 24, 2013 over the southern Israeli city of Netivot. (Video of the event here.) This spellbinding natural phenomenon turns out to have a quite beautiful name, “murmuration,” which refers to the uniquely collective behavior exhibited by starlings. Likened to metals becoming magnetized, murmurations and their patterns have both baffled and dazzled naturalists throughout time. A couple of theories posit that these spontaneous aggregations are a result of socializing instincts amongst the species, as well as the possibility of safety in magnitude, as the birds scare off potential predators due to their sheer numbers. Regardless of the scientific explanations, the overall impression is one of a fluid aerial canvas, a sublime reminder that the power of nature can be as deeply affecting as any work of art…

 (Photo: Amir Cohen / Reuters)

Watching a Window

An image that many Malaysian Catholics believe resembles the Virgin Mary appears in a seventh-floor window at a hospital near Kuala Lumpur, in a photograph taken on November 11, 2012. The onlookers in front of the clinic in the city of Subang Jaya grew large enough to potentially interfere with essential medical services, prompting officials to announce that the panel would be moved to a church to be evaluated by religious authorities. (Adding to the mystery, some claimed that the figure could not be detected from inside the hospital walls, but could only be seen from outside the facility.) The glass was transported to the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes in the nearby town of Klang over the weekend.

(Photo: Reuters)

Into the Sky

I came across this photograph, taken of the Eibsee Lake in Bavaria, Germany on September 24, 2012, and found it so richly dimensional in its composition and evocative on several levels that I felt compelled to post it. What look like clouds (and they are, in a reverse trompe l’oeil kind of fashion) are actually reflections of clouds in the water, where a platform looks ready for someone to dive (or descend) into the “sky.” The image seems to create some subliminal sort of expectation without meaning to; it’s a juxtaposition that’s moodily dreamlike and lingers in the memory. An incidental piece of art that just happened to cross the wires on a run-of-the-mill news day…

(Photo: Karl-Josef Hildenbrand / AFP / Getty Images)

Pop Culture Musing for a Thursday 9/6/12

Famed sunglass manufacturer Ray-Ban is celebrating its 75^th anniversary this year, and though the ad campaign exhorts consumers to “be part of the legend” (post your own photos and all that), I think I’ll mark the occasion with four real legends looking
gorgeously iconic in their R-Bs…

Follow the Piper

Flutist Simon Desorgher is seen inside one of the walk-in inflatable structures that comprise England’s Colourscape Music Festivals, this one at the Holburne Museum in Bath last week. Multisensory experiences suffused with all shades of the rainbow, the spaces envelop visitors in cocoon-like environments that are a trippy mix of vibrant colors, light and sound, with the overall intention of providing a unique platform for contemporary British music. An idea created by artist Peter Jones in the ’70s, the current event in Bath will be followed by the flagship Colourscape Festival on Clapham Common in south London September 15-23.

(Photo: Matt Cardy / Getty Images)

Hues of Holi

A celebration that encompasses a tumultuous spectrum of colored powder, scented water, and sheer exhilaration, the “Holi” festival, shown here in an image that looks more like a painting than a photo, taken in Heidelberg, Germany on August 12, 2012, is one of many that have crossed over in time and place to Europe (and around the world) from their homelands in South Asia. An ancient commemoration that usually welcomes the beginning of spring for those of the Hindu faith, Holi has been embraced in several German cities, where revelers immerse themselves — and each other — in a prismatic array of pigments as part of events that have come to be known as “Festivals of Color.” (The largest in the western hemisphere takes place in Spanish Fork, Utah, where this year’s festivities drew over 80,000 in March.)

(Photo: Fredrik von Erichsen /AFP/ Getty Images)

Hot Spot

The lyric from a famous Police song — “There’s a little black spot on the sun today” — takes on artistic meaning in this photograph of cells on the surface of the sun, captured as Venus (right) transited the center of our solar system in June of this year. Astro-photographer Peter Ward, who titled the photo “King of Pain,” after the pop classic, was the winner in the high-resolution category at the David Malin Awards — named for a British-born chemist and microscopist whose groundbreaking techniques led to his reputation as the “godfather” of Australian night-sky photographers — presented in New South Wales, Australia last week. “King of Pain” was also runner-up in the overall competition; more remarkable images from this year’s event can be seen here.

Quite a Match

A representative from Madame Tussauds puts the final touches on a stunningly lifelike wax figure of Spanish tennis ace Rafael Nadal, unveiled at London’s Regents Park on 5/23/12. The real “Rafa” is currently defending his title at the French Open in Paris, where he hopes to break Bjorn Borg’s record of six singles championships.

(Photo: Andrew Cowie / AFP/Getty Images)

Small World

In keeping with the street art/strange art theme I’ve been drawn to lately, I came across an English artist with the aka of Slinkachu, whose work kind of overlaps that of another British artist I previously wrote about, Ben Wilson, in its idiosyncrasy. Slinkachu (actually a blog title, as the former art director doesn’t like to reveal his real name) modifies tiny human figures taken from model-train sets and places many of them in unexpected settings, and, as with Wilson, turns your notions of the most mundane realities upside down.

Easily overlooked (and designed that way), the transient tableaus are usually destroyed by the elements (or unknowingly stomped upon), though some are absconded with by passersby…if they see them, that is. (Photographed close up, the miniaturist “installations” look like worlds unto themselves; viewed from afar, they’re as insignificant as ants on a molehill. Most of the figures are no larger than two inches.)  Imagination is definitely on display in the pieces shown here, of which I find difficult to pick a favorite. The island made out of an abandoned tennis ball? The skateboarder inside an orange peel? Rowing in spilt milk?

Unconventionally creative, Slinkachu’s mini-portrayals have dotted the landscapes of several cities in Europe, and harbor an almost existentialist sentiment, according to the artist. “The feeling of being ignored and overlooked, of feeling small, is a universal one,” he told the UK’s Observer last year. “It is as easy for us to fall through cracks in the pavement in a big city as it is for the ‘little people’.”

For now, photographs of the now-you-see-’em-now-you-don’t creations appear in an exhibition titled Material Matters at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London through July of next year.

Puzzle Me This

A man strides atop a giant jigsaw of a self-portrait of artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), spread out in an area measuring over 3,000 square feet, in Nuremberg, Germany, 5/3/12. (For the record, the full title of the original painting is Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight Years Old Wearing a Coat with Fur Collar…whew!) The huge creation, composed of 1,023 (oversized) pieces, will be reassembled in Moscow’s Red Square next month, in recognition of the historic relationship between Russia and Germany. It’s not the first undertaking of its kind in the painter’s birthplace of Nuremberg: a similarly massive project that recreated Dürer’s Portrait of a Young Venetian Woman
was constructed in 2005.

(Photo: Timm Schamberger / AP)

Lens Crafter

Seeing the work of L.A.-based photographer Alex Prager in a recent issue of New York magazine, I couldn’t help but be drawn to its weird vibe of retro unease, with pictures that serve as minidramas that conjure a bit of Cindy Sherman colliding with Alfred Hitchcock. The photos in Compulsion, the series from which they are taken, are lingeringly eerie, leaving the viewer both shaken and stirred.

Her photos are staged almost like a motion picture, providing the basis for “only about 40 percent of the image,” Prager told New York. “I’m using it as a foundation, in the same way a painter might: adding clouds, adding a car.” She actually bought the Chevy in 2:00 P.M., Interstate 110 (below right) and submerged it in water before digitally “sinking” it into the original photograph; the final image remains similarly lodged in the mind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With photos already in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney, Prager, 33, has also branched off into film (a natural progression one would say), and a short piece, La Petite Mort, can be seen along with Compulsion at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and London until the end of May.

Easter Bloom

An apple tree is adorned with 10,000 Easter eggs in the German city of Saalfeld, a tradition begun in 1965 (with a mere 18 eggs) by a local resident, Volker Kraft. The Eierbaum (as it’s called in German) has blossomed into an annual event over the years, drawing thousands of visitors from around the region. The eggs — many crocheted, painted, or embroidered with pastoral and religious scenes by Kraft’s wife Christa and daughter Gabriela — are months in the preparation; storing them has become a bit of a problem, though, and this Easter may see the last of new creations for the now-famous arboreal attraction.

 (Photo: Martin Schutt /AFP/Getty Images)

A Drop of Art

Finding art in the unobvious always intrigues me, and photographer Red Huber of the Orlando Sentinel did just that when he mixed a little imagination with creative photo techniques to come up with some surprisingly lovely, almost lyrical, images of drops of water as they strike the surface in a pan of water. Adding sprinkles of food coloring to his palette completed the artistic effect.

The technical details: “I used various types of lighting equipment…and timed the shutter release for the exact moment of the ‘splash’,” says Huber. “Some photographers have used automated shutter releases that use laser-beam triggers, but I wanted the challenge and the certain level of skill required to capture the action manually.”

The end result is reminiscent of fluid sculpture, quite beautiful in its aqueous disarray.

Occupy Ice

Inside an igloo that served as a base for dissenters at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF), which wrapped up on January 29 in Davos, Switzerland.

(Photo: Johannes Simon / Getty Images)

Out of Focus

New Year’s Day # 5074

In one of several similarly themed images taken in the early 2000s, New York City-based photographer Bill Jacobson captures some of the moodiness and uncertainty that often accompanies the start of a new year.

The Hidden Life of a Nanny

The story of a heretofore unknown photographer, much of which remains a mystery, will eventually be folklore, not only because her talent remained in the shadows until after her death at age 83 – but for the unlikely fashion in which her work came to see the light.

In a twist on one of those masterpiece-found-in-the-attic tales, a Chicago real-estate agent named John Maloof came across a box of negatives at an auction in 2007. Hoping they were historic photos of his Portage Park neighborhood, he paid $400 and stored the 30,000 negatives away for later review. When he took a look, what he saw, though not what he expected, was captivating – prompting him to hunt down what turned out to be another 70,000 pictures. When he posted some of the images on Flikr, his instinct regarding the greatness of the pieces was confirmed; hundreds of e-mails followed.

The creator of those photos, Vivian Maier, had died shortly before Maloof could contact her after his big find. (It wasn’t until 2009 that he discovered her name, scribbled on an envelope buried in one of the batches of film.) It turned out she had been a nanny for several affluent families in the Chicago area throughout the ’50s to the early ’90s, toting her Rolleiflex on assorted trips and outings, quietly capturing just some of the images now featured in the book Vivian Maier: Street Photographer  — released this month and compiled by Maloof after the incredible acclaim that followed their widespread dissemination on the Internet, along with subsequent exhibitions in Norway, Denmark, and England.

In approaching Maier’s work, one is struck by the naturalistic similarities to the craft of the Depression-era photographer, Walker Evans: the second-in-time spontaneity, the cut-to-the-heart facial expressions, the prosaicness of the everyday street scene taken to a sublime level. Maier photographed people from all walks of life, young and old, black and white, rich and downtrodden. Like all great street photographers, she understood that moments matter. And the expansiveness of what would now be called her portfolio shows that her curiosity about what lay behind those moments never wavered.

Her pictures are not titled and can just be described by their subjects – faces, places, and instants that only an outstanding eye could grasp: the simple sidewalk scene of a group of women shot from the waist down, with a pair of rotund legs unexpectedly revealed by a sudden burst of wind; a quizzical glance by a bystander at a man inexplicably attired in a hat, jacket, and boxer shorts; an aging, wealthy doyenne in mink, her haughty look implying impatience with the camera.

There’s irony in the fact that Maier’s newfound reputation owes itself to the networking of the digital age. Described as a highly private woman, she never made a point of sharing her secret passion with anyone, and were it not for Maloof’s accidental discovery, and her photography subsequently going viral, the treasure trove would sadly have remained undetected – and unlauded. As it is, the Maier archives are a unique contribution to the annals of American photography.

[First published as Book Review: Vivian Maier: Street Photographer,
Edited by John Maloof, on Blogcritics.org.]