I had not seen much of Ralph Gibson‘s work, only some of his peripheral projects – I knew his name well as he’s revered in the church of Leica and cult of Rodinal – then this evening I came by a used copy of his book Deus Ex Machina, and after flipping through it I had much more respect for what he’s put together over the years.  I was going to write some composition theory mumbo-jumbo that had crossed my mind, but then I saw this thorough interview with Gibson that covers all of that and more quite nicely.

photo: “Mary Ellen and Hand,” ©Ralph Gibson.

This image reminds me of that phenomenal French short La Jetée that I posted a little while back: here…in case you missed that one.

My friend, Kelly, sent me this video of Vik Muniz speaking for TED (which are often excellent talks if you’ve never seen them).

It’s welcome relief, and also I think rare, in the visual arts to see someone do work that is thoughtful and technically interesting but moreover that is inspired with humor.

Nice start to the day.

Met up with a stylist/fashion-ed yesterday for lunch and we were talking work; work work work: what’s new, what’s good, what’s fresh…you get the idea.  She told me to look at Miles Aldridge‘s work.  Not exactly a new name, but I’m thinking, the guy who shoots shiny for NYTimes mag?  She responds, yeah maybe, but look at his stuff, digital wah!, which I know you’re not into, but it’s fucked up, which I know you are into.  True and true…for the most part.

Given the post, I obviously did check out his work and obviously liked it.  I mean, how to make a watch sing:

photo: Minuit, Paradis, 2007. ©Miles Aldridge.

Now that’s not so much twisted as more digestably erotic, excellent nonetheless.  If you shoot sexy in fashion you’re pretty much coming from one of two similar but also disparate schools.  Newton, who made for a confluence of the erotic and style. Or Bourdin, who did the same with eroticism and discomfort.  Aldridge’s lineage is more of the latter.  The difference is that Bourdin’s work tunneled below the image to something more troubling.  There was an honesty to what he did, and much of his work then manages to transcend a sexually disquieted idea to a palpably troubling psychological event, to something that approaches the sick, but subtly so. (Not to say Aldridge’s work is superficial or dishonest, not at all, rather maybe I’m just pointing out in a round about way it’s contemporary traits.  Suggesting the possibility that our current culture may be more reserved and commercial than, say, the 1920s or 1960s in some manners.  We often associate the past with simplicity and a pietist nature and the the present with the opposite…consider that possibly we like to give ourselves undue credit in these regards, while culture and history ebb and flow.)  Old news though, as I’ve hashed Bourdin here before, as countless have elsewhere.

photo: for Vogue magazine, ©Guy Bourdin Foundation.

But, if you want to see some actual footage of him, which is as rare as anything, someone emailed me this show (in eight short parts) last week of Rankin recreating some classic work.  My first thoughts on the shows was a not getting the, why, but then I guess it’s for TV so that makes overall futilities excusable.  Never mind that though, b/c I think it’s worth a watch for the superb old footage alone…or for David Baily.

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A friend, Mr. Diggles, just posted this on his site and I had to heist it and put it here too.  Aside from the humor in this video, and maybe some troubling insights (but which I think are just kids being kids), it’s remarkable b/c it’s so visually well done.  At first I guessed it was something Jill Greenberg was up to given the lighting, but it turns out it was done by the photographer, Robbie Copper.  Originally posted at NY Times’ site (here).  There’s a text on Robbie Copper’s site explaining the project in further detail, which has much more depth than just this short video, worth reading if your interest is piqued.

video: ©Robbie Cooper.

Great stuff.

photo: from Immersion series. ©Robbie Cooper.

Being a few days old, this has probably already been discussed in web-o-land, but someone just sent me a link to this NPR On the Media episode discussing editorial portraiture w/ Martin Schoeller, Jill Greenberg, and Platon.

Here’s the MP3:

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audio: NPR’s On The Media, “Snap Judgments”, Noverber 28, 2008.

They summed it up right off the bat when they said it’s about money – I’d specify for the magazines and the photographers.  After all, I’ll hullabaloo with the best of them on art and integrity and.  But editorial remains a business (even if it’s the biz of getting tearsheets).  And the end of the day ethics of business is profit.

I came by this incredible apocalyptic (chic right now) sci-fi (ditto) film, La Jetée, over at Amy Stein’s blog.

To say this short film is visually remarkable is a remarkable understatement.  And further, the minimal creativity of it will make you long for a time when work like this was conceived, let alone completed.  It’s at once brilliant and beautiful, which are two things not easy to couple.  Needless to say, it got into my head b/c I’ve never really seen anything like it.

But watch it for yourself, here in 3 parts.  It might be one of the best half hours of your week.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

(Amy also mentioned on her blog that there is a book version of La Jetée‘s images with the narrative as text by MIT press (here).  My notion is that it’d be excellent.)

(Also, it occurred to me by the end that this short was the inspiration for 12 Monkeys.)

(And while we’re on the video blitz of gloom.  T.S. Eliot’s great poem “The Hollow Men” as recited by Marlon Brando (playing Kurtz in Apocolypse Now (Redux version), which makes sense, b/c one of Eliot’s main inspirations for “Hollow Men” was Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, which as you know was the basis of Apocalypse Now.  The film does leave out the opening line of Eliot’s poem, “Mistah Kurtz – he dead”):

“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper”
-final stanza of “The Hollow Men”

photo: T.S. Eliot at his desk, Jan 18, 1944. ©Bob Landry/Life Images.

…)

And it comes full circle, B/c the French film maker Chris Marker who did La Jetée also did a multimedia installation on Eliot’s “Hollow Men” titled OWLS AT NOON Prelude: The Hollow Men.  I’ve not seen it nor can I find it.

I was talking with a friend at W+K, and she was genuinely proud of the new courage spot they’d put out recently for Nike.  Click here to see it bigger.

Nike/W+K is one of the reigning kings of transcending product and making their product seem nearly intangible…or as tangible as being a hero in a Rocky Balboa manner of being, I guess.

( ).

This of course entails heaps of bathos, but so what.

video: Nike “Courage” tv spot, done by W+K Portland.

You could write a book on Winogrand and his short but unique life and the even more unique working process he had in creating what I think is a seminal and arguably one of the most representative bodies of classic American documentary photography ever produced.  What I find most appealing in his photographs is how full of life they are, not only in literal content, but that there is a also sense Winogrand’s brimming taste for existence in them.  Partially it comes from the archetypes that he was drawn to and how they effortlessly inspire narratives, but there’s more to it that that.  It’s as though you become Winogrand in the shots, you take on his gaze, you know his intelligence and humors, you feel as he did and see the narrative he sees.  This presence, the presence of the photographer, doesn’t ever shrink from the photographs, and thus the notion of the photograph as an artifact is also never lost.  So a strength of these photographs is that they’re clearly one man’s fiction, like they’re written in first person, opposed to most photographs that are in the third person voice.   This is amazing and bizarre to me b/c it is a specific and a rare thing.  Or at least it seems rare to me.  Like I said, a book could be written, or at least a many-paged Master’s dissertation.

Furthermore, as far as street work goes, I think anyone who has ever tried to or even succeeded in photographing daily life would be humbled by what Winogrand achieved.  I certainly am.

There’s a nice article on him, here, and for fun some pics of his M4, here.

photo: Untitled, 1950s. © Estate of Garry Winogrand

photo: American Legion Convention, Dallas, Texas, 1964. © Estate of Garry Winogrand

photo: World’s Fair, New York, 1964. © Estate of Garry Winogrand

(A side story I found interesting: when I was last at the MOMA I was with my friend, Benjamin.  He enjoys photography more than you’re average Joe but is by no means versed in it or attempts any sort of sophistication in regards to it.  In short, he enjoys whatever catches his eyes.  Well, there were prints from any number of the greats hanging on the walls, including a series of maybe 10 pictures that Winogrand had shot at the NYC Zoo and the Coney Island Aquarium.  If I recall they hung between Koudelka’s early work on the Gypsies and Diane Arbus‘ later work of the mentally handicapped Halloween outing.  Imo, the Winogrand work was much more layered and much more difficult to appreciate.  I’d have expected Benjamin to be drawn to Arbus’ otherness or Koudelka’s darkness.  Yet, I watched him pass quickly over those and then come to a stand still at Winogrand’s photographs.  He found them amazing.  I complimented his taste, but I also became aware of something commonplace in Winogrands work that makes it something that anyone can be awed by, lacking pretense of high-art-conceit, which is why, I guess, I consider him the American street shooter, of the people and for the people.  (Compare this to his more inaccessible contemporary Friedlander, who, btw, Benjamin didn’t take a second glance at…))

Finally, I caught this 2 part video at the 2point8 blog.  It’s a clip of Winogrand with Bill Moyers:

First part,

And the second,

First, I’ll admit that I’m pinching this find from Dossier’s blog.  I don’t spend enough time online to dig this stuff up on my own.  Speaking of pinching, this scene from John Schlesinger’s film, Midnight Cowboy is ripe to be ripped off and made into a fashion story.  (If you can do it.  Do it!  Play your cards right and you could build a fashion career on psychedelia right now.  Which would be as ironic as the new John Varvatos in the old CBGB space on the Bowery.  Sigh – alas, I think it’ll take an apocalypse of sorts (entirely feasible) before our post-modernist sensibilities of relative-truth and irony make the chance of a certainty – a sensibility unmistakable in this video clip – possible again.  Until then the safest bet is inaction, un-care, or insanity…or likely a mix of the three.  Or maybe there’s a fourth path too: engaging some Warhorlian high-intelligence.  (Wait though, Dylan did write “Lay Lady Lay” for this film and it didn’t make the cut, which for some probably critically flawed reason on my part makes me think sentimentalizing the past is always a fallacy, b/c I can only imagine the reason for a song like “Lay Lady Lay” to be rejected would be a crude reason.))   Check out this clip anyway, for me its like a feverish susurration, and a self-aware requiem of an era to boot.

video: Party scene from Midnight Cowboy, 1969.

Found this over at the PopPhoto blog, pretty heartwarming,

This is a recording of William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, as prevalent today as it was when he originally read it I believe.

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audio: William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Delivered, Dec 10, 1950 in Stockholm Sweden

photo: William Faulkner, Hollywood, CA, 1942. ©Alfred Eriss/Pix Inc./Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

At work:

“I have no ethics.”

Or are your ethics just bigger than the commonplace, Bruce?

The Imagist has a video post up of the model Natasa Vojnovic (w/Women) at work.

See the video here.

She’s tremendous, and I can’t iterate enough the affect a girl who moves like that and works that hard has on the final images. Models can make or break a shoot.

Down to brass tax, I want to photograph her.

Speaking of Sims and Natasa, here’s a peek of there up coming spread in V #52 (March, ’08). Styling by Karl Templer. And that (wicked) hair by Guido.

photo: model Natasa V. in V #52, © David Sims.

My respect for Steven Meisel (w/ Art and Commerce) and the consistent work he has produced and continues to produce can’t be overstated. And this video does nothing to dissuade that opinion. If anything, it reinforces it.

video: from Portfolio (1983) the movie.

Now insert ear to ear grin here b/c I honestly can’t tell if this was done in earnest or not. But regardless, and as absurd as the video is, a shot from a great editorial Meisel did recently shows that he, in fact, knows very well what he’s doing:

photo: “Supermodels Enter Rehab,” Vogue Italia, July 2007. © Steven Meisel.

“The maximum, that is what has always interested me.” – Joseph Koudelka

You’d think this quote is a tad hyperbolic, but I think it’s not so full of trope and more honest than one would presume coming from Koudelka. I was looking at two of his books today. Initially, I was struck by really nice prints (done primarily by Vojin Mitrovic at Picto labs in Paris), but then I just kept getting sucked deeper and deeper into Koudelka’s work. Maybe I was prone to profundity this afternoon, but I saw a great capacity for intelligence and vision that functions by transcending the everyday in his images.

Many of his picture’s – the less overtly photojournalistic ones mostly – rhythm and composition, brought to mind the sensibility Eggleston purported of a democracy of objects taking place within the photograph’s frame: a place where all things can be represented equally. Seems like a long shot putting the likes of Koudelka and Eggleston in the same sentence, but it crossed my mind. As a side note, this Eggleston picture is the sort of thing most photographers spend their life trying to accomplish; it’s perfect.

photo: Adyn and Jasper, by William Eggleston. © 2005 Eggleston Artist Trust

Though the comparison of Eggleston and Koudelka doesn’t go much further than that except for their dedication to the more panoramic of formats, 2:1 for Eggleston, 3:1 for Koudelka later in his career. I say the comparison falls off b/c I think Eggleston’s images tend to point you in a direction, suggesting what you’re to think or just being more implicit with their sense of irony. Maybe this is a function of the color, I don’t know? Koudelka, on the other hand, you sink into his images all the same, but they don’t guide you at all, more like they spin you around and then let you figure out for yourself where you are and what’s going on. What I’m referring to comes from a subtle sense of abstraction that is present in a lot of his work. His images of the wrist-hand-watch in the center of totally unrelated scene is a perfect example of how his work is good… Unfortunately, more of the work I’m referring to is his later panoramic images that are harder to come by, but if you can find a book of his you’ll see what I’m talking about.

photo: Czeckoslovikia 1968. © Joseph Koudelka

photo: Ireland 1972. © Joseph Koudelka

photo: Ireland 1976. © Joseph Koudelka

photo: Spain 1971. © Joseph Koudelka

Update: I guess it turns out, after talking with someone in regards to this post, that I just missed Koudelka speaking here in NYC early this April at the Aperture Gallery in Chelsea, moderated by photo critic Vicki Goldberg. I’m happy to say thanks to the internet I did find this mp3 recording of the talk courtesy of Max Pasion, which I’ll also stream here.

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Joseph Koudelka speaking at Aperture Gallery in New York City. April, 2007. Moderated by Vick Goldberg.

Update 2: some of those panoramas I was talking about from Koudelka’s book The Black Triangle. Hopefully it’ll make my Eggleston comment a bit more sane:

photo: From the book, The Black Triangle. © Joseph Koudelka

photo: From the book, The Black Triangle. © Joseph Koudelka