Rio
Posted: September 7, 2015 Filed under: Art, Photography | Tags: black and white, Brazil, feet, Gil Prates, moon, Mountains, Rio, rio de janeiro, sea Leave a comment
Wild Hair
Posted: February 21, 2014 Filed under: Art, Fashion, Photography, Sculpture | Tags: Africa, anthropoligical, b&w, black and white, hair, hairstyle, J.D. Okhai Ojeikere, Nigeria, ojeikere, sculptural, shapes, style, Venice Biennale, women Leave a commentThese stunning photographs are from the Hairstyle Series by the late Nigerian phototagrapher J.D. Okhai Ojeikere :
Wave
Posted: January 10, 2014 Filed under: Art, Photography | Tags: 1925, 20s, angles, b&w, black and white, body, curves, Frantisek Drtikol, nude, Wave, wave 2, woman Leave a commentGrete Stern
Posted: December 26, 2013 Filed under: Art | Tags: 1940s, black and white, drowning, eye, Grete Stern, hands, look, photomontage, reach, waves Leave a commentEmbrace
Posted: November 2, 2013 Filed under: Art, Photography | Tags: 1988, black and white, couple, hug, kiss, kissing, Leon Levinstein, love, New York, steps, street scene, untitled Leave a commentFilm Still
Posted: October 23, 2013 Filed under: Art, Photography | Tags: 1979, 70s, alone, American, black and white, Cindy Sherman, fiction, film, film still, New York, night, road, staged, suitcase, Tate, woman Leave a commentUntitled Film Stills is a series of sixty-nine black-and-white photographs made between 1977 and 1980. In them Sherman appears as fictitious characters in scenarios resembling moments in a film. She used vintage clothing, wigs and makeup to create a range of female personae which she then photographed in apparently solitary, unguarded moments of reflection, undress, or in conversation with somebody off-set and outside of the frame. The ‘stills’ are set in a variety of interior locations as well as outside in urban and rural landscapes. They were begun shortly after Sherman moved to New York city with the artist Robert Longo.
Sherman has commented:
In college I began to collect a lot of discarded accoutrements from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, more for my own personal wardrobe as well as for the sheer fascination with what those garments stood for. It was easy and cheap to collect all kinds of things in those days. I’ve always played with make-up to transform myself, but everything, including the lighting, was self taught. I just learned things as I needed to use them. I absorbed my ideas for the women in these photos from every cultural source that I’ve ever had access to, including film, TV, advertisements, magazines, as well as any adult role models from my youth. The resulting photo shoots were very brief. In those naïve days, I would sometimes take only about six shots for one scene and move on to the next, so that with one roll of film I could have six different set-ups.
(Quoted in Contemporary Art: The Janet Wolfson de Botton Gift, p.99.)
Initially Sherman photographed the Film Stills in the loft apartment where she and Longo lived. She took many of the pictures herself using an extended shutter release; others, particularly those set in outdoor locations, required a second person to take the photograph, such as her boyfriend, friends or family. Sherman’s father took #48, in which she appears as a vulnerable young woman waiting with a suitcase at the side of a darkening country road.
Real film stills are not stills from the actual film but are photographs taken to encapsulate aspects of the film for advertising purposes, to be shown on billboards or in magazines or newspapers. Sherman has explained that she titled this series of images ‘film stills’ ‘mostly because I was thinking of publicity stills like you’d see around 42nd Street, in boxes of hundreds of them for thirty-five cents each’ (quoted in Taylor, p.78). She has said that her intention was that they would ‘seem cheap and trashy … I didn’t want them to look like art’ (quoted in Tomkins, p.78). Like real movie stills Sherman’s images evoke events in possible narratives which the viewer may invent or interpret in different ways, suggesting an original which never in fact existed. Like all of Sherman’s photographic series, they provide a range of fictional portraits, usually of women, in which the artist operates as actress, director, wardrobe assistant, set designer and cameraman.
(From Tate)
A Trip to the Moon
Posted: August 12, 2013 Filed under: Art, Film | Tags: 1902, black and white, cinema, cinemagicians, early film, fantasy, la lune, magic, Melies, moon, science fiction, special effects, travel Leave a commentA Trip to the Earth:
Today the big adventure begins! Starting with Italy and Greece, eating good food, doing yoga, reading about Art.
Here are two cool videos from the start of the twentieth century by two pioneers of special effects, the Cinemagicians Georges Méliès and Segundo de Chomón.
Le Voyage Dans la Lune. Georges Méliès. 1902.
Excursión en la Luna. Segundo de Chomón. 1908.
Moonbow
Posted: May 11, 2013 Filed under: Art, Photography, Prose, Writing | Tags: Archipelago, black and white, island, itchy feet, lunar rainbow, Monique Roffey, moon, moonbow, night, ocean, rainbow, sea, travel Leave a commentJust finished reading Archipelago by Trinidadian writer Monique Roffey. One of those great books that gives you the itchy feet! Now I want to conquer not only land, but also sea. I also learned about a phenomenon I never knew existed, the “moonbow”, or lunar rainbow:
“The moon is high in the sky; there is the disappearing squall, and between the squall and the boat — a perfect hoop. Just like a rainbow, except the seven shades of colour are shades of grey and gauzy light, as though it is a rainbow in negative. A wide delicate arc stretches across the night, each end finishing in the sea…A rainbow before it has dressed itself.”