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When looking at last years prize winners for the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery in London, I came across this image, by Hendrik Kerstens. I really like how he’s made the plastic bag look like a sculpture. It’s so simple, but a very strong image that kept popping up in my mind since I saw it. The girl in the photographs is Kerstens daughter.
“Hendrik Kerstens was born in 1956 in The Hague, Netherlands. Winner of the 2001 Dutch Panl Award Kerstens is a self-taught photographer who initially turned to a model close at hand, his daughter Paula. Since starting to photograph Paula in 1995 Kersten’s work has been exhibited in over 40 exhibitions across Europe and the United States. In his portraits Paula is always depicted as being austere, serene and illuminated with a characteristic ‘dutch’ light. In September he will open his first solo New York exhibition at the Witzenhausen Gallery. Kersten’s short-listed portrait was conceived in New York when he noticed the excessive amount of plastic bags given away in shops. As a humorous reaction to this environmental problem he photographed the plastic bag in the style of a seventeenth century cap.”
My favorite academic has to be my sister, Caroline Blinder, who currently teaches English and American Literature (& some film and photography) at Goldsmiths College. She is a wonderful person with a thoughtful and kind personality. And she is also very creative, albeit she rarely has time to do her own fiction or photography.
Some of her writings on photography..:
‘Another kind of Patriotism: Robert Frank’s The Americans’, in Sas Mays, ed. Photography and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005)
‘Love Under the Sky: On Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac’, in Rui Carvalho Homen and Maria de Fatima Lambert, eds, Writing and Seeing: Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005)
‘Between the Unimagined and the Imagined: Photographic Aesthetics and Literary Illumination in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, In: Wim Tigges,ed. Moments of Moment: Aspects of the Literary Epiphany (Amsterdam/Atlanta: DQR Studies in English Literature Series, June 1999)
‘The Transparent Eyeball: Emerson and Walker Evans’, Mosaic, a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, Vol. 37, No. 4, Dec. 2004.
‘Looking for Love in all the Wrong Places: Brassaï’s Photographs in André Breton’s Mad Love”, Photography and Surrealism Vol. History of Photography, Aug. 2005.
‘All Things either Good or Ungood’: American Pictures Revisited in Jacob Holdt’s United States 1970-1975, in Deutche Börse Photography Prize 2008 (London: The Photographers’ Gallery, 2008).
Forthcoming this year:
‘Alfred Stieglitz’s Cameraworks and 291′, in Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker eds. The Modernist Magazine Project (Oxford: OUP, 2009).
Not So Innocent: ‘Vision and Culpability in Weegee’s Children’, in Jeanne Perreault ed. Histories/ Stories / Photographies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
“Memento Mori: Artifacts and Still Lives in the work of Wright Morris” in Photography and Literature, ed, by Mick Gidley (London: Peter Lang, 2009).
Hopefully we can get her to post some writings on here!
Cunningham is mainly known as a director, but he’s a man of many talents – and definitely someone who has inspired me.
When I was 19 I worked as a runner for a London production company that Cunningham had just signed up with. He was 24 and just starting out as video director.
“Chris Cunningham is an acclaimed English music video film director and video artist. He was born in Reading, Berkshire in 1970 and grew up in Lakenheath, Suffolk.
The video collection The Work of Director Chris Cunningham was released in November 2004 as part of the Directors Label set. This DVD includes selected highlights from 1995–2000.
In 1989, Cunningham worked at Spitting Image, building animatronic robot arms and sculpting caricatures for the TV series. In 1990 he worked on sculpture and animatronics for the film Alien.
After seeing Cunningham’s work on the 1994 film version Judge Dredd, Stanley Kubrick head hunted Cunningham to design and supervise animatronic tests of the central robot child character in his version of the film A.I. Cunningham worked for over a year on the film A.I., before leaving to pursue a career as a director.
Earlier work in film included model making, prosthetic make-up and concept illustrations for Hardware and Dust Devil with director Richard Stanley, as well as Nightbreed. In 1990–1992 he contributed the occasional cover painting and strip for Judge Dredd Megazine, working under the pseudonym Chris Halls, the surname of his stepfather.
Cunningham has created photography and cover artwork for various people including Bjork’s All Is Full Of Love, Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker and Come to Daddy.
In 2008, Cunningham produced a fashion shoot for Dazed & Confused using Grace Jones as a model to create “Nubian versions” of Rubber Johnny.[6] In an interview for BBC’s “The Culture Show”, it was suggested that the collaboration may expand into a video project.
In November 2008, Cunningham followed on with another photoshoot for Vice Magazine.”
Grace Jones by Chris Cunningham
Originally uploaded by ֹDazed & Confused Mag
When I’m in a cinema, I often feel like I’m completely transported to a different space. If the movie is good, I’m in serious danger of being dissolved.
Here’s a list of some of my favorite films: I’ve tried to list the less known ones.
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)
Pandoras Box/ Die Büchse der Pandora(1929)
M! (1931)
Rain (1932)
Freaks (1932)
The Thin Man (1934)
Of Human Bondage (1934)
Danmarksfilmen (1935)
Pépé le Moko (1937)
La bête humaine (1938)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Citizen Kane (1941)
The Big Sleep (1946)
Monsieur Verdoux (1947)
White Heat (1949)
Stray Dog/ Nora inu (1949)
The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
The African Queen (1951)
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
Le notti di Cabiria (1957)
Touch of Evil (1958)
Vertigo (1958)
Hidden Fortress/ Kakushi-toride no san-akunin (1958)
À bout de souffle /Breathless (1960)
La jetée (1962)
Here’s La jetée from start to end on google:
Repulsion (1965)
Blow Up (1966)
C’era una volta il West / Once Upon A Time In The West (1968)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Don’t Look Now (1973)
Chinatown (1974)
Professione: reporter (1975)
Brazil (1985)
Labyrinth (1986)
Grave of the fireflies/ Hotaru no haka (1988)
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Dead Man (1995)
Princess Mononoke /Mononoke-hime (1997)
Lost Highway (1997)
All about my mother/ Todo sobre mi madre (1999)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
Lilja 4-ever (2002)
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)
Dead Man’s Shoes (2004)
to be continued…
Martin Parr‘s been incredibly productive and published a ton of books. I love his sense of humour and the way he captures the ordinary and the extreme, a sort of concentrated englishness. Looking for the point of vulnerability of society, as I think he puts it here:
“Martin Parr (born 23 May 1952 in Epsom, Surrey) is a British documentary photographer, photojournalist and collector. He is known for his photographic projects that take a critical look at modern society, specifically consumerism, foreign travel and tourism, motoring, family and relationships, and food.
Parr wanted to become a photographer from the age of 14 and cites his grandfather, an amateur photographer, as an early influence. From 1970-1973 he studied photography at the Manchester Polytechnic. In 2008 he was made an Honorary Doctor of Arts at MMU (the former Polytechnic) in recognition for his ongoing contribution to photography and to MMU’s School of Art. He married Susan Mitchell in 1980 and is father of a daughter named Corinne Manion (born 1986).
Parr began work as a professional photographer and has subsequently taught photography intermittently from the mid-1970s. He was first recognised for his black and white photography in the north of England (Bad Weather (1982) and A Fair Day (1984) ) but switched to colour photography in 1984. The resulting work, Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton, was published in 1986. Since 1994 Parr has been a member of Magnum Photos. Recent work has included a collaboration with designer Paul Smith in Ilford, capturing people wearing Smith’s Autumn/Winter 2007 collection.”
I first became aware of Joel Sternfeld when he was shortlisted for The Citigroup Photography Prize at The Photographers Gallery in London, in 2004. They were showing some very odd travel sceneries, like this one of an exhausted renegade elephant, from June 1979.
Later I went and got Stranger Passing signed by Sternfeld.. I felt so nervous as I was waiting in line, when I finally got there, I managed to tell him, that I wanted to copy him. He wrote in my book: “To Alex, with all good wishes for your photography. Picasso said, “I never borrow – I steal.”
“Joel Sternfeld, (b. 1944, New York City), is widely regarded as one of the most influential and important fine-art color photographers in the world, noted for his large-format documentary pictures of the United States and establishing color photorgaphy as a respected artistic medium. He has many works in the permanent collections of the MOMA in New York and the Getty in Los Angeles. He has also “raised” and influenced an entire generation of color photographers including Andreas Gursky who borrows many of Sternfeld’s techniques and approaches.
Sternfeld earned a BA from Dartmouth College and teaches photography at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. He began taking color photographs in 1970 after learning the color theory of Johannes Itten and Josef Albers. Color is an important element of his photographs.
Another book, On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam (1997), is about violence in America. Sternfeld photographed sites of recent tragedies. Next to each photograph is text about the events that happened at that location. From 1991-1994 Sternfeld worked with Melinda Hunt to document New York City’s public cemetery on Hart Island [1]. A book, “Hart Island” was published in 1998 [2]. Sternfeld has also published books about social class and stereotypes in America (Stranger Passing [2001]), an abandoned elevated railway in New York (Walking the High Line [2002]), and a book titled Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America ([2006]). A new book containing close-up portraits of delegates debating global warming at an United Nations conference in Montreal, titled When It Changed, is currently slated for publication in July 2007.”
This short film about photographer Stephen Shore is part of the reason I decided to start a blog, even though I’m years behind, the blog is dead and long live the micro-blog. You should watch the film if you have any interest in photography. It was made by Jay Cornelius & Donna Golden/ Docere Digital Studios.
“Stephen Shore (born 1947 in New York City) is an American photographer known for his deadpan images of banal scenes and objects in the United States, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography.
Stephen Shore was interested in photography from an early age. Self-taught, he received a photographic darkroom kit at age six. He began to use a 35mm camera three years later and made his first color photographs. At ten he received a copy of Walker Evans’s book, American Photographs, which influenced him greatly. His career began at the early age of fourteen, when he made the precocious move of presenting his photographs to Edward Steichen, then curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Recognizing Shore’s talent, Steichen bought three of his works. At age seventeen, Shore met Andy Warhol and began to frequent Warhol’s studio, the Factory, photographing Warhol and the creative people that surrounded him. In 1971, at the age of 24, Shore became the second living photographer to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”
I’m a huge fan of William Eggleston. His images have this sort of poetic imperfection about them, the way the objects are positioned slightly off beat, curious, beautiful, fragile. It took ages for Eggleston to get the recognition he deserved (or even commercial success).
“William Eggleston (born July 27, 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee) is an American photographer. He is widely credited with securing recognition for color photography as a legitimate artistic medium to display in art galleries.
Egglestons father was an engineer who had failed as a cotton farmer, and his mother was the daughter of a prominent local judge. As a boy, Eggleston was introverted; he enjoyed playing the piano, drawing, and working with electronics. From an early age, he was also drawn to visual media, and reportedly enjoyed buying postcards and cutting out pictures from magazines. As a child, Eggleston was also interested in audio technology.
Eggleston’s early photographic efforts were inspired by the work of Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank, and by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’.
Eggleston began experimenting with color in 1965 and 1966; color transparency film became his dominant medium in the later sixties.
Eggleston’s development as a photographer seems to have taken place in relative isolation from other artists. In an interview, John Szarkowski of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) describes his first, 1969 encounter with the young Eggleston as being “absolutely out of the blue”. After reviewing Eggleston’s work (which he recalled as a suitcase full of “drugstore” color prints) Szarkowski prevailed upon the Photography Committee of MOMA to buy one of Eggleston’s photographs.
In 1970, Eggleston’s friend William Christenberry introduced him to Walter Hopps, director of Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery. Hopps later reported being “stunned” by Eggleston’s work: “I had never seen anything like it.”
Eggleston’s mature work is characterized by its ordinary subject-matter. As Eudora Welty noted in her introduction to The Democratic Forest, an Eggleston photograph might include “old tyres, Dr Pepper machines, discarded air-conditioners, vending machines, empty and dirty Coca-Cola bottles, torn posters, power poles and power wires, street barricades, one-way signs, detour signs, No Parking signs, parking meters and palm trees crowding the same curb.”
William Eggleston in the real world. 2005 documentary by Michael Almereyda
God Damn That’s A Good Looking Blue”: Winston Eggleston on William Eggleston, from 2008. Film and interview directed by: Douglas Sloan Courtesy.
