It’s rare anymore that I take the time to mention inspirations like a movie, but I was so taken back by Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Women in the Dunes that I could not not share it. I guess it was a relatively big art house hit in the 60s and 70s. and the story itself is a beautiful parable on existence, absurdity, reality, meaning, and struggle in the existential vain of that era (Beckett, Camus, Sartre), and while I think it remains as relevant today philosophically, the truly mesmerizing aspect of this film is the cinematography by Hiroshi Segawa. It is incredible, inspired, and along w/ Soy Cuba and The Third Man, one of the most beautifully photographed black and white films I’ve ever seen. From the stark nature of light and shadow, to the visceral treatment of the human form alongside the nearly surreal visual personification of the sand itself, the film comes alive in the filming. Four stars and some thumbs and what have you.
photo: still from The Woman in the Dunes, 1964
photo: still from The Woman in the Dunes, 1964
photo: still from The Woman in the Dunes, 1964
photo: still from The Woman in the Dunes, 1964
photo: still from The Woman in the Dunes, 1964
photo: still from The Woman in the Dunes, 1964
photo: still from The Woman in the Dunes, 1964
It’s not news that I like Japanese photography from the 60s and 70s (see posts, here, here, here, here). Why is for much the same reasons I return often to French New Wave cinema. Call that reason a stripped down aesthetic which verges on a sensual brutality. Nearly able to chew on it. But what saves it from being trite w/ brutality, is a delve headfirst into the subconscious – wait, no, subconscious might prompt something psychoanalytic. That’s too much for here. But by subconscious I mean the very deepest and most uncontrolled and most fundamental mechanisms taking place in our minds. I guess it’d be easiest to just call it, our dreams. (Makes me think of Joyce writing in Ulysses, “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”) It’s a documentation of an entirely different sorts, and it makes the work not brutal, but rather almost unbearably human and gentle.
I’m not informed enough to make theories on the reasons, the whys of parallel creative evolutions, but just look at Shomei Tomatsu’s work and then go watch Chris Marker‘s short film, La Jetee (here). Breathe deep.
photo: still from Chris Marker’s film La Jetee
Or, make a literal French to Japan connection w/ Hiroshima Mon Amour by, Alain Resnais (like Marker – and also Agnes Varda – one of the Left Bank New Wavers).
photo: still from Alain Resnais’ film Hiroshima Mon Amour
There isn’t going to be order here though. Ramblings. B/c what I really wanted to do was just list some old Japanese photography. The inspiration being a well done new book out by Aperture Foundation called Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s, which reminded me recently how important this work is.
Jun Morinaga, namely his book River: It’s Shadow of Shadow:
photo: from River by Jun Morinaga
photo: from River by Jun Morinaga
(These tiny and poor jpegs are not doubt not representative of the quality of this work – this stuff is not easy to find on the internet…a fact that gives me a little hope this morning.)
Masahisa Fukase, and his series Solitude of the Ravens:
photo: from Solitude of the Ravens by Masahisa Fukase
photo: from Solitude of the Ravens by Masahisa Fukase
photo: from Solitude of the Ravens by Masahisa Fukase
Tetsuya Ichimura, who’s work is almost impossible to find online, but he’s done a number of books, all now very rare I think:
photo: from Salome by Tetsuya Ichimura
photo: from Salome by Tetsuya Ichimura
photo: from Salome by Tetsuya Ichimura
Nobuyoshi Araki, who we all know as a photographer of gorgeous flowers and gorgeous bound women, but his book Sentimental Journey reveals a side of him little known. This older work is, again, almost non-existent online.
photo: from Sentimental Journey by Nobuyoshi Araki
Eikoh Hosoe, who I’d not heard of until just recently:
photo: by Eikoh Hosoe
And a few more obvious ones I’ve touched on before on this site and who are very well known, Shōmei Tōmatsu,
photo: by Shōmei Tōmatsu
For God’s sake, now that (↑) is photography.
photo: by Shōmei Tōmatsu
and Daidō Moriyama:
photo: by Daidō Moriyama
A friend recently offered me a simple and apt definition of good art, saying it “is something people want to experience again…after seeing it they immediately want to relive it, and then again and again.” This work then, to me, is good art.
Yes Yes. Tremendous.
Dropped by and shot a few rolls on the set of The Other Guys for New York Magazine:
photo: Will Ferrell on the set of The Other Guys, NYC, 2009. ©Graeme Mitchell.
photo: Mark Walberg on the set of The Other Guys, NYC, 2009. ©Graeme Mitchell.
photo: Movie extras on the set of The Other Guys, NYC, 2009. ©Graeme Mitchell.
photo: Andy Buckley on the set of The Other Guys, NYC, 2009. ©Graeme Mitchell.
photo: Suicide dummy on the set of The Other Guys, NYC, 2009. ©Graeme Mitchell.
Il Conformista, by Bernardo Bertolucci, is one of the most amazingly shot films I’ve ever seen.
Ever.
Period.
I see in it everything from Lynch’s central oeuvre to Missoni’s FW09 campaign.
photo: still from Il Conformista
and Lynch…
photo: still from David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.
photo: still from Il Conformista
Lynch again…
photo: still from David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.
photo: still from Il Conformista
Missoni…
photo: Missoni FW 09 campaign, ©Steven Meisel.
——
On a seperate note, get to ICP to see the Avedon show!…or if you can’t make it, at least you can see the NYTimes multimedia feature, here.
I was having a super late post-party supper with a group from Tank while in London and the fash ed started talking about this really far out stuff and, as you’d guess, my interest piqued. It was a film. I won’t belabor the specifics here, but will only repeat what she said, it is amaaaaazing, then said again after a dramatic pause to assure my full attention, amaaaaazing. So I watched it. It’s called The Holy Mountain, by Alejandro Jodorowsky, and, I agree, it is most certainly incredible, but…wow.
video: trailer to The Holy Mountain
Nearly makes Barney’s Creamaster Cycle seem par for, er, normal.
video: Trailer for Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle.
On a completely different note, standing applause for Visionaires #56 solar-powered book. Putting up a good fight for why the printed magazine/book will always have it’s place.
photo: from Visionaire 56, ©Richard Burbridge
photo: from Visionaire 56, ©David Sims
Director, Cary Joji Fukunaga for Interview, May 09.
photo: Cary Joji Fukunaga, Brooklyn, ’09. ©Graeme Mitchell.
Oh, and I just caught Cary’s new film, Sin Nombre (here). I was speechless, really incredible work for a debut at the ripe age of 30.
Photo Assistant: Aaron Binaco
Fashion Editor: Miguel Enamorado
Grooming: Daniel Martin (w/ The Wall Group)
Location: Brooklyn, NY
I know I’ve been mentioning films a lot here, but movies are very influential to my work, as I think they can be for many photographers. So bear with me…but, I watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s, Stalker last night and my jaw was like hanging to my lap for the entire 2hrs. Geeked! Remarkable…no, a brilliant film. I’d never seen any of Tarkovsky’s work and had no idea what to expect, so it totally side-swiped me. Yeah, it’s sorta an old-arty film, so it takes some gear shifting, but it’s not French New Wave, so don’t drug yourself just yet.
photo: still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film, Stalker.
Now I need to see Tarkovsky’s, Mirror and Solyaris.
photo: still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film, Mirror.
Still, I appreciate that it’s not for everyone. Talking movies while on set today I lit up and got really excited about having seen Stalker and I could tell pretty quickly nobody cared to hear me wax on about it, let alone log into netflix for it…
…so if it’s not your bag, here’s a link to some crackin-beats: Pete Tong Essential Mix. (FYI, download button is towards bottom of the song list.) Thanks Mr. Diggles for that link; he’s my defenitive line to all things techno and all things Hi-Tech.
Segue.
Saw this gorgeous Lanvin look in the windows of Bergdorf’s the other day and immediatly sent it to a stylist on messanger:
“Me: LOOOOVE this Lanvin look!
Her: Love it and love each and all things Lanvin.
Me: Sigh”
(BTW, feel like you’re a photographer that gets the photos but is dumb on the clothes, well the Bergdorf windows are about the best crash course in fashion you’re going to find.)
For those of you who didn’t hear, Helen Levitt passed away last week. She was a slightly lesser known but no less wonderful NYC street photographer who did a lot of work circa 1950s. Her person and career gives me a heartfelt grin, since photography, and especially street photography, is so much a boy’s club, that I love that a women came and conquered her own place in it. There’s a NPR interview with Levitt, here.
That last picture made me think of this phenomenal film I saw while away, Killer of Sheep. Really really turned my mind around in a way that I didn’t expect, and it was so remarkably shot that I went back and watched a lot of it again w/o sound. The phrase, far out, describes that quite perfectly. Try it…if you want.
It makes me want to begin to shoot motion.
BTW, I’m back, and while I don’t expect you to be excited, after having been traveling the last 6 of 7 weeks for work I’m glowing to be home and to get back to life here. I’ve been shooting for Adidas, Interview, Dazed. I can’t share anything ’til stuff goes to print. Mostly I’m excited to be back to get personal projects going and some fashion stories.
Oh, and on the topic of fashion, I want to point to the story Sebastian Kim did for Numero in this month’s architecture issue. Excellent. I enjoy his work b/c it’s rare to see heavily conceptual work done so, well, uh, well…or with such taste. (There’s actually an older interview with him, here, which is worth reading if you’re starting as a photographer b/c he had a rather unique start to his career having assisted both Avedon and Meisel for extended periods.)
I promise some posts to come soon. Promise. Got back from London and had 3 shoots pile onto my phone while I was still on the tarmac. Hit-ground-running-stumbling-correcting-cont.running. You get the idea. And I’m looking at this pile of Tri-x on my desk that ‘s begging for a long rodinal soak. Sigh. Sigh again. B/c alas, digital does beckon even I…
I wallow in self-disgust at the notion of doing a post on not posting, but just know web-land that I’ve not abandoned you! So log off and go shoot or do whatever it is you do to get your scooter going, and I’ll see you back here before you know it.
(BTW, I’ve been way interested in the aesthetic of older sci-fi for a little while now, something that the cold, gray architecture in London further set off, so a movie list for homework until I can lay down a real post:
1) Jean Luc Godard’s Alphaville:
2) Roman Polanski’s Repulsion
3) Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls
).
I wanted to share this link to interviews of photographers by Frank Horvart. I skimmed the Newton one, which was good, and Sieff is always erudite and deep (French after all…). I’d expect the same of Witkin.
Super short post, but they should be good reading for awhile.
Oh, and a movie: someone sent me some segments of a flim William Klein did in 1986 called Contacts. Worth digging up if you can find it.
Oh, and speaking of Helmut and back to the topic of yesterdays post of Avedon’s sartorial sense, check out the snakeskin belt (↓)!
photo: Helmut Newton. ©David Hurn/Magnum.
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.
Things have been slow here b/c I was knocked flat down by the flu for nearly a week. Just shook the last remnants. Getting back to it.
So, to begin, last night I went to the Aperture Gallery for an opening for Luigi Ghirri, an Italian photographer who worked in color, sort of along the lines of Eggleston and Parr, or even Shore and his likes, but Ghirri’s work has a succinct surreal and meta-fictional-layered-realities-thing going on that really pulls you in and spins you around. I was rubbing my eyes like I was in a house of mirrors. A few people commented on how this surrealism was specifically European – and I agreed that an American couldn’t have done it so effortlessly and authentically, not without heavy irony (or tackiness), maybe this is b/c Europe’s heritage lies in all the old ideas of painting, while America’s photographic sensibility lies in Realism…
photo: “Rimimi,” 1985, from Paesaggio Italiano. ©Luigi Ghirri.
photo: “Rome,” 1979, from Diaframma. ©Luigi Ghirri.
After that we headed to a film, Let the Right One In; well, it’s literally a Swedish vampire movie, but I thought it was much more of a love story. Really really worth finding and seeing. There’s an American remake coming out soon, but how anyone could possibly remake this…I mean even the Swedish language seems perfect for the film. One of the better films I’ve seen in awhile.
video: clip from Let the Right One In
(Update: I went back and specified above “America’s photographic sensibility”, adding photographic, b/c I wasn’t clear to begin with that I’m talking specifically photography. Sparked b/c I had a long winded discussion with a friend who argued about my suggesting that there was different sensibilities in different cultures/countries, as I recently made a similar comment in a post on Japanese photogaphy. They seemed to take it as sort of jab at their patriotism, which is not what I meant at all…admittingly, I don’t often do an excellent job of speaking my mind and keeping my foot out of my mouth, but I’ll stand by this comment…even though generalizations are meant to be over a beer at the bar top b/c exceptions are always rife. In this case, after I told my friend I was talking only photography, they simply said, Dusseldorf school and Germany. …Point taken. But still, look at Ghirri’s book. Then look at Eggleston’s (they’re compared and Eggleston writes the forward to Ghirri’s book). It’s like speaking Italian and then speaking colloquial-american-english. What do you think out there in internets land?)
Antonioni‘s 1966 film Blow Up‘s influence on a generation of to-be photographers is probably old news to most of you, but to those youngsters who haven’t seen it or heard of it, it’s worth researching and seeing. Or at least ask any photographer in their 50s about it, b/c they’ll most likely get a big grin and tell you how this film was the reason they became a photographer. It’s an excellent portrayal of the mod-swinging-London heyday when photography was just taking off in advertising, and shooting was cool as hell, easy, and you made grips of money doing it (based directly on David Bailey‘s lifestyle). You can imagine when this hit the 1960′s countryside every twinkle-in-their-eye boy decided it was their calling.
On a not so simple level, despite the easy to the point of boring plot, it’s a difficult and irksome film that you’re probably most likely to catch in a film theory class in University. It took me two viewings to appreciate the not so noticeable levels of meaning weaved through the film. Or you can just watch it to sigh and smirk at the glory days gone in the fashion biz.
And if you’re a jazz fan, the soundtrack is by Herbie Hancock.
photo: movie poster for Blow Up
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.
“I am Cuba” was a film done as Cuban social propaganda in the sixties, which I won’t pretend to know anything about, politics that is…or the sixties. It was funded and shot by the Russians, and it is an absolute must see if you’re into beautiful and trippy film experiences. Incredibly long takes, wide angles, huge huge pans and cable cam shots, all black and white, a camera that NEVER stops moving. I’ll just say, that half way through I was exhausted b/c I had numerous ideas tumbling around in my head inspired by the film. For more specific details on the movie read here.
My personal suggestion is put the film on, turn the volume off on the tv, turn on some Air, and just let it go.
still: from I am Cuba
still: from I am Cuba
still: from I am Cuba
still: from I am Cuba