I’m currently assembling a very small edition bound portfolios of an edit of NYC street photography that will represent that body of work to date, 50 prints to be exact (more on these when a few are finished). The name of the edition will be, Unreal City. This is a slide-show presentation of those 50 pictures. So, please, take a minute, dim your lights, turn up the sound, and let it creep around you.
Thanks, and I hope you enjoy.
This is interesting: this print was just delivered as a loan to The Museum of Sex in NYC for their exhibition on rubbers, on view Dec 1st through April, I believe.
photo: Used Condom 2008 (from NYC Remnants), 40×50″ archival pigment print, edition of 3, by Graeme Mitchell.
Here.
The last to go of the greats of the previous century of photography; Irving Penn who, like Avedon and Newton and Strand and etcetera, we’ll all forever, forever stand in the long shadow of. B/c the man LIVED:
So take a picture for him today. So pour a drink for him tonight.
“When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.” -William Butler Yeats
This blog has been a great exercise, but I’m taking an indefenite leave from posting here. I may throw up the occasional new work or NYC Journal posting, and I may revisit the blog idea with my work in a different form down the road, but for now my picture making ideas are focused elsewhere. Thanks!
There is a lot of art I love, most of what is considered good I can manage to find some bit of sanctuary in, or come to some sort of terms with, but on the other hand, when I consider owning art, or decorating with it (a completely hypothetical consideration, as I neither own nor decorate with it in any manner as of yet) there’s really remarkably little I’d be genuinely interested in. (Of course this is aside from photography). So it is surprising even to myself to admit that I could enthusiastically imagine a Jeff Koons‘ “Balloon Dog” in my foyer…or front yard. (A glorious (and gloriously priced) middle finger to nearly any neighborhood association).
photo: Jeff Koons “Balloon Dog” on the roof the the MET, ©Lloyd Ziff (in NYMag, here)
I can’t help but marvel at most of his larger installations. They’re beautiful in their grotesqueness. Adorably troubling. Like a child’s dream after going to Coney Island then watching Gilliam’s, Brazil.
photo: still from Terry Gilliam’s film, Brazil.
What’s attractive about that, about some subaltern-figment-of-the-psyche getting it’s say in huge colorful steel? Well I’m not sure exactly. Except to say that there’s a lightheartedness to it, a punctuated absurdity, a “b/c I can,” and there’s sometimes not enough of that in life that isn’t fabricated/fed to us, that is honest like art is.
I’m bringing this all up b/c Koons is speaking at Strand bookstore downtown on April 13. Details, here. If you live in NYC, and can sweat the crowd, I’d check it out. (Although, last time I was there Eliot Erwitt was signing books and, maybe, 15 people showed up, which sorta depressed me (is this what it comes to?) but that’s another story.)
Damn, I’m leaving again. Stepped in NYC for a week, shot like one roll on the street, discussed a fashion story with a stylists that we were going to get going, then got called out West for another commercial job.
Will be out for about two weeks. Telling you this is getting old, right…
Now, complaining about any money job these days would be wrong, so I bite my tongue about having to vanish again, and I just keep pics like these open on my desktop, small, in the corner, to keep things legit, to keep sanity legit.
photo: Untitled, 1971, ©Kohei Yoshiyuki.
(Meisel did a play on Yoshiyuki’s park photos for Vogue Italia. Supposedly it was too much, (see it, here). And while I prefer the original, as is most often the case, still a fine fash ed.)
photo: Nude, Seaford, East Sussex Coast, 1957, ©Bill Brandt.
(As far as I can remember, I’ve yet to see a fashion take on Brandt’s work. Ripe to be done though. Ripe. Inez, maybe?)
photo: Brooklyn School Children See Gambler Murdered in Street , 1941, ©Weegee.
(Wow)
All of those are from the Moma collection btw.
Enjoy. Will keep you posted.
There’s a nice write up on Mike McGregor, Taj Forer and I in the current Kodak Propass magazine.
You can check it, here.
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
).
Going to be in St Barts working this week. Then in London for fashion week. So there won’t be anything here for a bit.
I’ll try to come back with some pics and a good story.
‘Til then.
One of the canons of the contemporary American canon, John Updike, died yesterday.
photo: “Massachusetts – John Updike, 1962. ©Dennis Stock / Magnum.
“We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.”
-John Updike
…though I much prefer,
“Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.”
-John Updike
For those of you who didn’t hear, Andrew Wyeth passed away last Fri. Christina’s World is the one painting I’ll always stop to visit with when at the MOMA.
RIP
photo: “PENNSYLVANIA—Painter Andrew Wyeth, 1991.” ©David Alan Harvey/Magnum.
Concentrating on a few shoots right now.
In the meantime, this is that something swell:
photo: Avedon, Penn, and Newton, from left to right, © unknown, found here.
My friend, Benjamin pointed out that this blog turned two years old today. So happy birthday, site. If you click on the categories nyc journal, family, or inspiration, I’ll think you’ll quickly recognize what’s kept this thing going; that is: a love for learning and sharing; there’s never been any motivation or strategy beyond that, and I hope to keep it that way.
And a random pic, b/c a post isn’t a post w/o a picture.
photo: © Graeme Mitchell 2007
all rights reserved by Graeme Mitchell © 2010
