Priests and Poets

I’ve been going through boxes of photographs trying to organize my collection and just came across this print (above) - the second print I ever bought. (The first was Joel Meyerowitz’s “Dairyland”.)

I remember what appealed to me at the time - not just the kinetic motion, but the potential motion that lay ready to spring to life. The hoop about to be rolled, the cat about to pounce, the dog who could at any second start chasing a chicken. It’s a rarely seen image, especially compared to Giacomelli’s more famous pictures of seminary students playing in the snow, or the image below that appears to be snow but is actually a bleached out courtyard, but it has passed the test of time with flying colors.

At one time Mario Giacomelli was close in stature to Henri Cartier-Bresson, but some unwise deals and an over-saturation of prints created a bad case of over-exposure. He died in 2000 before the market had caught back up with him. He's still highly undervalued.

Born in 1925 in Senigallia, Giacomelli was a self-taught photographer inspired by the neo-realist films of
 Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini. His subjects ranged from the landscape of southern Italy and life in the rural villages, to hallucinatory photographs of the elderly (shot in a nursing home where his mother worked) and pilgrimages to Lourdes. He made aerial shots of bathers 40 years before Richard Misrach and rented tractors to carve lines out of the hills anticipating the earthworks of the 1970s and 80s. He had range.

He said about his photography, “I try to photograph thoughts”, but what he really photographed were dreams.

A Shot in the Dark

Last Friday my daughter had her 13th birthday party and at her request we brought a Polaroid camera. That Polaroid is going to discontinue making film has been much in the news lately, although less noticed is the fact that the company actually stopped making the cameras a year ago. It all seems to signify an end of an era as emotively as the passing of the Walkman or brick size mobile phones, but what I noticed in my brief moment as a tween party paparazzo, was how much the Polaroid camera specifically contributes to the event.

One of the things I’ve learned from working with The Sartorialist is how important the approach is. Make the right approach with your camera in front of you and you’re much more likely to get a good picture than if you suddenly whip it out. Bring out a Polaroid camera and everyone’s ready for fun! (And you're no longer the intruding parent, you're now just support staff.)

The other thing I noticed as I was pretty much shooting in the dark (you can’t see much through a viewfinder in dance light conditions) was how beautiful the randomness of the hastily grabbed moment is. It was the revelation of street photography that the chaos of everyday life was just as arresting as the compositional order of the decisive moment, but as always - getting to experience the progression of art historical aesthetic development through your own family snaps is always an unexpected pleasure!

Weekend Video - Cat Power

I was listening to Public Radio today as I was driving to work and Frank Sinatra came on. You don't hear a lot about Frank these days, although this new cover version of "New York, New York" by Cat Power from her latest album, Jukebox, is getting a fair amount of airplay. The clip is from a recent appearance on the BBC2's "Later... with Jools Holland" - a show the famously stage shy singer has been appearing on regularly and with an unusual degree of comfort over the years. That Power chooses to pretty much ignore the original tune is something you'll either applaud or bemoan.

Then Power, again, on "Later... with Jools Holland" in 2006, singing my favorite of her songs "The Greatest".



And lastly, this video of "Lived in Bars" directed by Robert Gordon which has a freshness and sweetness that contrasts nicely with the lyrics.

Tim Davis

The most embarrassing genre of photography I can think of is pictures of comedians - humor and photography being strange and usually awkward bedfellows. So I always appreciate a series of photographs that seem genuinely funny. Such are Tim Davis’s new pictures - “My Audience” – in which he records the audience (or lack of) that come to hear him at various talks and book signings.

Davis has had an interesting career to date. Known initially for his pictures of paintings, in which the way light fell on the canvas brought new meaning and perspective to usually well-known museum pieces, Davis then went on to become more of a social commentator of modern American life. He’s clearly a colorist, but with a deadpan view of the world. His big project prior to the audience series was a book “My Life in Politics” which looked at a conflicted America at the turn of the millennium. (One of my favorite pictures was the interior of a Mexican restaurant with an inspirational mural of Martin Luther King above which were the words: “One People, One Nation, One Taco, One Destiny”.)

But back to “My Audience” which is both situational and self-deprecating. Not only do the empty chairs often outnumber the full, but Davis manages to capture what seem to be pretty true to life expressions for anyone who’s been in a similar situation. And the series only gets funnier as it moves along. It will be interesting to see what’s next for Davis, but it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if he finds himself becoming an American Martin Parr.

EXUBERANCE!

On my morning dog walk, I rounded the corner of 90th and 5th to find this vibrant new sign advertising the upcoming show at the Cooper Hewitt. Having decorated my room as a teenager with these kind of posters, I’m a sucker for pyschedelia, but what really struck me about the display was the word “exuberant’ in the exhibition title. In fact it stopped me in my tracks because it’s not only a word that’s rarely used these days, but a quality that seems less and less evident in art and life today. And it's missed.


One block later as I was passing the Guggenheim Museum, a Spanish tourist was energetically launching herself in balletic leaps in front of the building making me wonder if an exuberance epidemic had broken out. Then a few steps later I looked up to find this giant hanging of a detail of Ernst Kirchner’s “Dancers” promoting the Guggenheim’s “Berlin to New York” show.




If this weren’t enough, my last stop of the morning was at Keith de Lellis’s new gallery on Madison Avenue where I was struck by this underwater portrait which turned out to be an Art Kane of Sonny and Cher from the early 70s.

So the question I was left with was: is exuberance all around and I was just missing it, or did I momentarily fall into some Bermuda Triangle of exuberance? (FYI – a quick journey around Chelsea in the afternoon yielded no exuberance sightings.)

Their Majesties

When Annie Leibovitz photographed Queen Elizabeth last year, a misleadingly edited trailer for the BBC documentary, “A Year with the Queen”, suggested that the Queen walked out after Annie asked her to take off her crown for the picture. I happened to be in London at the time, and the British papers had a heyday with reports of how the crass American had dissed Her Majesty. But as this recently released full sequence shows, the Queen not only stayed, but Annie got amazingly strong pictures, especially given the constraints of the shoot.

For some reason, people always seem to want to take potshots at Annie. However, like the BBC had to do when they admitted misrepresenting the Leibovitz/QE2 shoot, it's time for these critics "to apologize to Annie Leibovitz for any upset they may have caused."

Bruce Springsteen

Flipping through USA TODAY, my eye was caught by this photograph of Bruce Springsteen by Danny Clinch. It’s been interesting to watch Springsteen age both as a musician and a performer because he’s managed, not unsurprisingly given his integrity and his genius, to remain his own person. Sartorially and cosmetically he’s made adjustments – the only place I’ve ever seen him in the flesh other than at concerts is at Barneys – but thank goodness he’s refrained from dyeing his hair, getting a face lift, etc.. I particularly liked the mood this picture caught and the fact that while Springsteen isn’t trying to look young, he’s still cool.

Then there was an unexpected bonus! The article promised that if you clicked through to the paper’s website you would see the Boss’s playlist. Unfortunately the link they gave didn’t work, but after much digging and more hard work I found it. So for all Bruce Springsteen fans, here it is:

Alan Vega - Dujang Prang
Amos Milburn – Chicken Shack Boogie
Antony and the Johnsons – My Lady Story
Beach Boys – Sloop John B
Beau Jocque & the Zydeco Hi-Rollers – Just One Kiss
Beausoleil – Chez Seychelles
Beck – He’s a Mighty Good Leader
Beth Orton – She Cries Your Name
Big Mama Thornton – Bumble Bee
Bluerunners – Ghost of a Girl
Voodoo Mens & Voodoo Dolls
Big Head
Bob Dylan – Dear Mrs. Roosevelt
Grand Coulee Dam
Blood In My Eyes
Diamond Joe
Dixie
Lonesome Day Blues
Bob Dylan & Mavis Staples
Gonna Change My Way of Thinking
Bob Dylan and The Band – Million Dollar Bash
Bob Neuwirth – Beautiful Day
Everybody’s Got a Job to Do
Sweet and Shiny Eyes
Bob Neuwirth with Peter Case – Travelin’ Light
Bobby “Blue” Bland – If You Could Read My Mind
Bright Eyes and Emmy Lou Harris – We Are Nowhere and This Is Now
Bryant’s Jubilee Quartet – I’ll Be Satisfied
Bukka White – Fixin’ to Die Blues
Bull Moose Jackson – I Know Who Threw the Whiskey (In the Well)
Calexico – Across the Wire
Guero Canelo
Charlie Rich – Life Has its Little Ups and Downs
Chris Whitley – Living With the Law
Big Sky Country
Chuck Berry – I Got to Find My Baby
Too Much Monkey Business (Live)
Chuckwagon Gang – As the Life of a Flower
Clara Ward – Packing Up
Creedence Clearwater Revival – Cotton Fields
Midnight Special
Dave Van Ronk – Spike Driver Blues
David Baerwald – Why
The Crash
Dixie Hummingbirds – City of Gold
Doc Watson – Tom Dooley
Doc Watson and Frosty Morn – Working Man Blues
Dock Bogs – Pretty Polly
Dorothy Love Coates – Strange Man
Evan Dando – Hard Drive
Francesco Di Gregori – Non-Dirie Che Non-E’ Cosi
Gary Davis – Samson and Delilah Reverend
Gene Vincent – Baby Blue (Live)
Green On Red – Sea of Cortez
Hamell On Trial – Oughta Go Around
Hank Dogs – Hollywood
Hank Williams – Lost Highway
J.D. Crowe and the New South – Long Journey Home
Jackson Browne – Linda Paloma
James McMurtry – Out Here in the Middle
Jawbone – Get Rhythm
Jay Farrar – Feed Kill Chain
Barstow
Jeff Tweedy, Jay Bennett, and Roger McGuinn – East Virginia Blues
James Alley Blues
Jesse Malin – Queen of the Underworld
Jim White – Static On the Radio
Jimmie Driftwood – Battle of New Orleans
Jimmie Rodgers – My Blue Eyed Jane
Jimmy Cliff – Time Will Tell
Sufferin’ In the Land
Jimmy Martin – Hit Parade of Love
Jimmy Reed – Take Out Some Insurance
Joan Baez with Bob Dylan – It Ain’t Me Babe
Joe Ely – Saint Valentine
Ranches and Rivers
Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros – Ramshackle Day Parade
Coma Girl
John Cale – Things
John Jackson – John Henry
Frankie and Johnny
John Lee Hooker – Jump Me One More Time
John Prine – Clay Pigeons
John Sebastian & The J Band with Geoff Muldaur – Minglewood Blues
Johnny Cash – I Hung My Head
Kate & Anna McGarrigle – Was My Brother In the Battle
Kate & Anna McGarrigle with Rufus Wainwright – Better Times Are Coming
Kermit Ruffins – Black and Blue
Kris Kristofferson – Loving Her Was Easier
Me and Bobby McGee
Lee Williams & The Spritual QC’s – When You Gonna Wake Up
Leonard Cohen – Everybody Knows
Linda Ronstadt & Emily Lou Harris – Valerie
Link Wray – Black River Swamp
Take Me Home Jesus
Take My Hand (Precious Lord)
Loretta Lynn – Portland Oregon
Los Lobos – On a Night Like This
Anse Imo
Los Pregoneros Del Puerto – El Ahualco
Louis Armstrong & His Hot Five – St. James Infirmary
Love – Alone Again Or
Lucinda Williams – Ventura
Mahalia Jackson – God’s Gonna Separate the Wheat From the Tares
Marion Williams – I Just Can’t Help It
Maura O’Connell – Poor Man’s House
Mavis Staples – Hard Times Come Again No More
Michelle Shocked – One Piece at a Time
Mississippi John Hurt – Candy Man
My Morning Jacket – Death is the Easy Way
Nas – Bridging the Gap
Neko Case – Train From Kansas City
Wayfaring Stranger
Soulful Shade of Blue
This Little Light
The Tigers Have Spoken
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Right Now I’m A-Roaming
Nicky Thomas – Love of the Common People
Old 97’s – Barrier Reef
Patti Scialfa – Valerie
Paul Robeson – Joe Hill
Percy Sledge – Dark End of the Street
R.E.M. – Nightswimming
Rainy Day – I’ll Keep It With Mine
Ralph Stanley – On Death
Ramblin’ Jack Elliott – Roll On Buddy
Rance Allen – When He Returns
Rank & File – Lucky Day
The Conductor Wore Black
Coyote
Richard & Linda Thompson – I’ll Tag Along
Robert Mitchum – Ballad of Thunder Road
Robert Plant & Strange Sensation – Somebody Knocking
Rod Stewart – Girl From the North Country
Rodney Crowell – The Rock of My Soul
Roger McGuinn – I Dream Of Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair
Roger McGuinn with Frank and Mary Hamilton – The Brazos River
Roger McGuinn with Odetta – John the Revelator
Sail Away Lady
Roger McGuinn with Pete Seeger – Alabama Bound
Ron Sexsmith – Lebanon, Tennessee
Comrade Fill No Glass For Me
Ry Cooder – Jesus on the Mainline
Sam Cooke – Touch the Hem of His Garment
Just For You
Setah – One More Cup of Coffee
Sleater-Kinney – Promised Land
Slim Dunlap – Hate This Town
Social Distortion – 99 To Life
Song Dog – Days of Armageddon
Soul Stirrers – Jesus Gave Me Water
Steve Earle – Hardin Wouldn’t Run
Swan Silvertones – My Rock
Sweet Honey In the Rock – Run, Mourner, Run
T-Bone Burnett – River of Love
Annabelle Lee
Tarbox Ramblers – Oh Death
The Band – Long Black Veil
Blind Willie McTell
The Blasters – Hollywood Bed
The Byrds – It’s All Over Now
Oil In My Lamp
Chestnut Mare
I Am a Pilgrim
The Chambers Brothers – People Get Ready
See See Rider
The Clash – This Is England
The Everly Brothers – Abandoned Love
The Flying Burrito Brothers – Sin City
The Handsome Family – Far From Any Road
Fallen Peaches
The Jesters – Cadillac Man
The National – About Today
The Pogues – Dirty Old Town
The Body of an American
The Sleepy Jackson – Miniskirt
Thea Gilmore – I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine
Todd Snider – Play a Train Song
Tom Paxton – Pastures of Plenty
Tony Joe White – Saturday Night In Oak Grove, Louisiana
Van Morrison – Sweet Thing
Victoria Williams – Summer of Drugs
Warren Zevon – My Ride’s Here
Ourselves To Know
Whiskeytown – Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Tonight
Will T. Massey – I Ain’t Here
Wiskey Biscuit – Santa Ana River Delta Blues
Wood – Straight Lines
Stay You
Woody Guthrie – Hard Travelin’

Weekend Video - Contempt

Lindsay Lohan and Bert Stern's recreation of his famous Marilyn Monroe "Last Sitting" pictures in New York Magazine last week brought over 20,000,000 viewers to the mag's website - making it the most viewed picture spread in the world.

Picking up on the theme of homage, above is a clip from Jean-Luc Godard's "Le Mepris" featuring Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli. (How great that J.Lu. is becoming such a regular!) Below - the homage/ad from Chanel and a short "making of" film by Bettina Rheims. In this case Stern seems more guilty of ripping himself of than Chanel does of Godard, where their upfront commercialism and the phallic mischief of the product placement make for a surreal mix of art and business.

Then as a special bonus - the original French trailer for the movie. Have you ever seen a better trailer? Better film-making? (To explain the odd image below, the plot of the movie revolves around the making of a film adaptation of Homer's Odyssey.)

Sandy Volz

As promised, one more German photographer. I came across Sandy Volz’s pictures in an exhibition of work by the students of Peter Bialobrzeski at the Bremen School of Art. (Bialobrzeski is himself a favorite of mine having produced some of the most interesting pictures of figures in landscape in his book “Heimat”.) Anyway, for the student show, Volz made these unusual pictures of human interaction titled “Hearts of Darkness”. You can’t quite tell what’s going on. I get the feeling it’s a moment of conflict between two people who know each other well, but it could be open to any interpretation. However, there’s an extraordinary level of technical expertise in the large (50 x 70 inch) prints as well as a striking physical and psychological intensity.

Wait to Walk

I seem to be caught in a German photo-warp right now - Helmut Newton, Albrecht Tubke, Juergen Teller – and much more to come, I promise.

Today’s discovery is Florian Bohm. A 39 year old German living in New York, Bohm takes the familiar DiCorcian concept of modern color street photography, narrows it down to the single moment of people waiting to cross the street, and repeatedly nails it. He’s not breaking any new ground but the self-imposed restriction of photographing entirely on the streets of New York gives the work a consistency and an immediacy, and there’s a nice flat quality to the light that helps pull it all together. The pictures above and below all come from Bohm’s book “Wait to Walk” published last year by Hatje Cantz.

Save the Elephants!

I sat down with a big pile of magazines and papers yesterday and before I even got to any editorial, I was discomfited by the new Hermes ads in which elephants (how original!) with vast amounts of paint around their eyes were used as props.

A few minutes later, the inspiration for this – Avedon’s famous “Dovima with Elephants” - popped up in the New York Times “Evening Hours” section, seen being admired by an anonymous viewer at the Park Avenue Armory art show. ( A large print of "Dovima" now sells for close to $1 million.)

Moving on through the Times, the Sunday Magazine (praised by me last week for their Ryan McGinley portfolio) committed double imitation – not only using elephants as props for an 8 page fashion spread, but stealing the title “Trunk Show”, from Bruce Weber’s infamous 2005 elephant shoot for W Magazine. (In Weber’s pictures the pastiche was front and center as some of the biggest names in fashion created original couture for the elephants themselves. At least Weber, a known animal lover, saw fit to contribute to Elephant Family - a charity whose mission is to help save Asian Elephants.)

But enough with the elephants – O.K.?


Avedon's "Dovima with Elephants".

From the New York Times Magazine.

Chanelephant fashion by Karl Lagerfeld - shot by Bruce Weber

Weekend Video - I Have a Dream

With the focus on oratory and politics, I thought it was worthwhile to go to the source. Needless to say, You Tube has dozens upon dozens of different versions of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but after viewing many of them, I felt this version – just a straightforward still image with background music composed by "Paul from Stoke, U.K." was the most powerful.

NOT The Sartorialist

Earlier this month I received this e-mail:

Dear members of the gallery,
Im an German photographer. I've seen your currend exhibition, and it could be, that you are interested in my work. Please have a moment to check out: www.tubke.info. If you want, I can send my book to you, or I can come over to see you, which would be great. Last year I was in an group exhibition at the Tate Britain "How we are, photographing Britain", curated by Val Williams. I attached one of my portraits for you in this email. I'm looking forward hearing from you,
best wishes,
Albrecht Tübke


As I usually do when people send me a link, I took a look. My immediate reaction was that the pictures were way too close to The Sartorialist’s work to be of any interest to me, but the surprising thing was the pictures were pretty good!

I e-mailed back to that effect in reply to which Mr Tubke then followed up with a phone call where we had an interesting conversation. Tubke’s process is quite the opposite of Sart’s. He chooses a location and waits endlessly for the “right” person to come by and inspire him. (Sart’s a hunter, Tubke’s a gatherer.) Tubke works thematically shooting specific series one at a time and he's much more of a traditionalist - shooting on film, engaging with the traditional gallery/museum axis, and dealing much more with archetypical typologies (city folk, country folk, twins) whereas one of the great elements of Sart’s work is how much and in how many ways it deals with the here and now.

Anyway, I told Tubke I would be happy to post something about his work and see what response we got from the blog. So please enter a comment. And dealers, feel free to contact Mr. Tubke if you would like to show his work.

Juergen Teller

While any Juergen Teller show is a significant event, his current exhibition “Ukraine” at Lehmann Maupin seems to have tiptoed into town. I was certainly late off the mark and missed an opening where the gallery had hired my favorite street food vendor, the Hallo Berlin food-cart, to dispense bratwurst. Darn! Anyway without any advance word I wasn’t sure what to expect when I went to see the show last week.

The surprise begins the moment you walk in the door where an installation of display cases dominate the space while just a few photographs dot the walls. The genesis of the show was a state commission to shoot images of the Ukraine for the Venice Bienniale, but as the press release notes: “In Teller’s Kiev the membrane between harsh economic reality and obtainable fantasy is surprisingly thin and these pictures represent a place where beautiful girls wait to be discovered in a place where the desire for luxury has reached a fever pitch.”

Mixed in with a diverse selection of recent work, the show is really just an update of what Teller has been up to, and it amply shows Teller’s greatest strength – the ability to make an arresting picture with little of the production support usually relied on by successful fashion photographers. He’s great at girls, he’s great at snapshots of the famous with a titillating edge, but there’s a sneer that’s been in his work since the beginning that’s in danger of getting out of hand.

That said, there are plenty of good pictures, the best of which I thought was a simple but arresting photograph of the model Lily Cole perched on a rock. I don’t know if Teller has ever seen the famous Maxfield Parrish it echoes, but I never thought I’d ever compare the schmaltzy populist American illustrator (whose work at one time hung in one out of every three homes in America) with the brazen and decadent favorite of the art-meets-fashion elite.

Important Moments in Blog History - Part I

This past Saturday the Blogfather (a.k.a. Jorg Colberg author of Conscientious) came to visit Danziger Projects and see The Sartorialist exhibition - now in its last week for anyone who has missed it so far. I tried to record the momentous event in a photographic tribute to Irving Penn's corner portraits and Sart's own trademark style!

Weekend Video - Ryan McGinley

I was an early supporter of Ryan McGinley’s snapshot/verite/street/ hippy/color style going so far as to suggest he join Magnum when I
was the director in 2003. But he’s done just fine on his own, thank you! At 24 Ryan McGinley was the youngest artist ever to have a solo show
at The Whitney. Then last year he was awarded ICP’s “Young Photographer of The Year” award.

Kathy Ryan, the New York Times Magazine’s picture editor, was another early supporter commissioning McGinley in 2004 to do a portfolio of photographs of the U.S. Olympic swim team. Quite naturally, McGinley shot them underwater. Since then he has been a regular for the magazine and last week they ran 28 pages of his pictures of Oscar nominees in their annual “Breakthrough Performances in Film” portfolio. (Where their unforced plein-air inventiveness put Vanity Fair's over-produced behemoth to shame.)

As with every portfolio, there were great pictures and some merely good ones, but the most intriguing thing in this multi-media age was the accompanying film clip from the Times’ website. It not only gives an interesting insight into McGinley’s process, but shows that he might just be as good a video artist and film-maker as he is a photographer.