Away until early Oct for work, so there’s going to be very little to no action here.
Until then.
All’s quiet work wise and at the same time insane out-on-the-town wise with fashion week in the apogee of it’s swing. I’ve been laying relatively low, a few smaller parties, a few quiet dinners, no posts here…
Sometimes it’s good to take it in.
I was going to post on Marc Jacobs’ incredible job this season, but I was beat to it, here. I don’t know who styled the show, but they got’er-dun in a major way
photo: Marc Jacobs’ S09 line.
Hey there again, so there’s a hope that you’d know this, but only seeing these online I’m not so sure, so I want you to, I want to make jarringly clear to you, the imperativeness to know this: that each of these people is an extension of me, and I of them. There is nothing, and I mean nothing, voyeuristic, or parodic, or deriding in these, no shell of sarcasm or hyperbole. No, they are offered with incredible tenderness…unimaginable really. Do you see this? Or at least can you believe this? For all that goes into them, I still worry it is lost b/c of stunted capabilities, on my part of course, not yours, b/c of my limited reach.  Often it feels like a scream-whisper on a windy day, that for all the effort and intent dissipates to bad-noise and then nothing before the count of one-Mississi… Imagine near-tears near my eyes when I work one these, as it’s something much like that.
Apologies for authorial trespassing and arm twisting.
Here you go:
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
I’ve been having a certainly wonderful and kind of ecstatic email conversation with the author Haven Kimmel. We started on the topic of Avedon and Ezra Pound, but quickly found ourselves immersed in topics as various a Faulkner and God, insomnia and work, Milanese art collectors and, then of course, wedding gowns, taxidermic lions in the rearing-ferociously position and inordinately sized dogs in the sleepy-supine position, and, so on and so forth. At some point in the conversation Haven pointed to the Southern photographer John Rosenthal. Excellent! Needless to say, knowing my proclivities, you’ll quickly understand why I think this is brilliant work, or to quote Haven, “ambrosia.”
photo: Wilmington, North Carolina, 1977. © John Rosenthal
And of this second picture I’ll quote Kimmel again who explained the print to me, “Rosenthal was walking through a cemetery in Wilmington, NC, and he came across this man digging a grave. It turns out it was the family’s cemetery for three generations, and they allowed no machinery over the graves, so everything was dug by hand. Bellamy [the gravedigger] was a man of intense pride and dignity. Rosenthal asked him if he could take a photograph of him, and Bellamy, ‘You may take one.’ And this is it:”
photo: Pine Hill Cemetery, Wilmington, NC, 1990. © John Rosenthal
I feel like the universe just grew.
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008
I know nothing about him except given the date on this work he must be relatively young. I heart the paper negs. Maybe there’s an aspect of only on the surface to his work that borders on the cliche, but maybe this isn’t as much a criticism of his work as much as my ability to take it in in it’s internet form, diluted that is. I like it though b/c you can see an honest attempt to strum at some deep chord, rescuing some recessed moldy part of the memory where the dream and the history condense like a fog of obscure, primitive knowledge.
photo: Striped collar, Autumn 2002. © Edward Dimsdale.
photo: Road, East of England. © Edward Dimsdale.