Creativity

Ruth Ansel is one of today's greatest graphic designers. In a career that began as an assistant to Marvin Israel, she has been the art director of Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, House & Garden and Vogue, and designed books for Richard Avedon, Peter Beard, and Annie Leibovitz amongst others.

We’re old friends, having worked together at Vanity Fair and on many subsequent gallery projects, but every time I visit her apartment I am pulled in by the feeling that this is what creativity looks like. Her home/work environment is neat as a pin, but visual ideas sprout off every surface. In one room are the mini-layouts of a book in progress celebrating Elsa Peretti’s career. In another room - shelves of pictures given, bought, picked up on travels, sent by friends, or created on assignment. Somehow, there is abundance without clutter! Energy and calm.

I don't believe any magazine has ever photographed it - so, given my love of environment and installation, I thought I would share these snaps.

A Big Question

Kate Hutchinson (whose work I was alerted to by Joerg Colberg) is a Montreal based photographer who has done something quite simple but revolutionary. In her series, “Why am I marrying him?” she has turned the camera on her fiancé with an affectionate, but objectifying view that one sees frequently in men’s pictures of women, but rarely the reverse. She could have tweaked it by making it the simple declarative “Why I am marrying him.” (which I think is what she’s saying with her pictures) but the question is both provocative and sane.

The pictures intrigued me and so I e-mailed Ms. Hutchinson to ask a few biographical details, largely to do with the identity and reaction of her fiancé to the pictures and the status of their marriage plans. I received this reply:

Thank you for your interest in my work. Encouragement from strangers is always a bonus in this life.

I have been thinking about your questions this weekend and have been trying to understand why I didn't feel that I should answer them. First off I think that it is a great sign that you are interested in these personal details. The pictures and the character represented in them must intrigue you and leave you wanting to know more. Perhaps you feel that if you knew this person's vital statistics you would gain insight into why they act the way they do.

But that is not the purpose of this work. This is not a documentary project about a certain person. In fact it definitely would have to be disqualified from the documentary category since most of the images were directed. If it were a documentary then it would make perfect sense for all the facts about the person and the situations that he is in be made known to the viewer. Instead this project is meant to be the sketch of a personality. It is meant to shine a light on the typical early 30s North American white male, and how he interacts with the world around him. Many of my photos deal with this crucial juncture in a man's life, where he is still trying to find his way in life and is not yet ready to let go of his younger ways. A bit of a coming of age. Therefore, in my mind, to say: this is Chris who does such and such a job, takes away from the work's ability to stand in for every man. As well, I wish to leave the viewer wanting more. I want them, like you, to be intrigued by this character. I hope that this intrigue will lead them to create their own fictionalized story about the character in the photos. Then they can then make it their own and relate it to their lives and the people that they know.

Lastly I would like to stress the importance of this work's being made up of many portraits of the same person. To me the single portrait can be a very useful document of the sitter and can give us insight into one aspect of their personality; but I do not feel that it can come anywhere close to telling us about who they really are. Every person has many different personalities and ways of being. To even come close to showing these different elements, a photographer must study the sitter and follow them for a long period of time, capturing their different ways of being, and landscapes in which they live, along the way. For me, when trying to work in this way, it only makes sense that only those that are closest to me and that I am with on a daily basis are my chosen subjects.

Never one to let things rest so easily, I responded:

Thank you for your reply, which I completely respect. Given the title I still think the question of when (as opposed to why) is relevant.

Harry Callahan's pictures of Eleanor, to which I'm happy to relate your pictures, are not diminished by any biographical facts.

Best wishes,
J.D.

Kate’s reply:

We are getting married in May and have been together 7 years, if that helps. I do hope to continue this project after the wedding though. I think that I will always be photographing Chris and trying to understand him better so I don't really see the wedding as an end date. I love the Eleanor series and am completely flattered that you would relate the two.

Thanks,
Kate.

It’s nice when people can articulate so clearly what they think about their pictures. And congratulations and every best wish to Kate and Chris!

Weekday Update

A couple of updates on recent posts:

Before going away on holiday last month, I mentioned I was hoping to read “Pictures at a Revolution. Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood” by Mark Harris. It’s an account of the five films nominated for Best Picture at the 1968 Academy Awards and their journey from concept to the awards ceremony. (The five were: Bonnie and Clyde, Dr. Doolittle, The Graduate, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and In the Heat of the Night, but I have no intention of spoiling the ending.)

Anyway, I just finished the book – and enjoyed every one of its 426 pages. It’s a thoroughly engrossing, incredibly well researched, and never less than page-turning read. If you come away with one thing, it’s the mind-boggling difficulties every single one of the films faced in getting off the ground, and the tenacity and commitment of the creative teams behind each project.

A friend recently remarked that this blog was getting a bit caught up in the ‘60s. I understand her point, but to me 1968 keeps becoming a more and more interesting and watershed year, especially in the life and culture of the United States. Books like this just add to the history of better known events like the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the start of peace negotiations in Vietnam, and the election of Richard Nixon. So expect more ‘60s posts in the near future unless I hear objections. And please let me know what you would consider your watershed year.

Another recent video post featured Shelby Lynne and her new album of re-interpretations of Dusty Springfield standards, Just a Little Lovin’. Shelby Lynne was performing in New York City this past Friday and on a whim I went to see her. Suffering through one of the worst (and longest) warm-up acts ever, I was ready to leave before Shelby even performed, but was I glad I stuck it out! Her Springfield renditions have grown even deeper and more personal since the album was released and the selection of her own previous hits, none of which I knew, became instant downloads. She has a magnetic stage presence – tough on the outside but vulnerable inside, a little bit white-trashy, a lot world weary, but totally in control. (You can read a lot about her in the picture above.) And I should not forget to mention the incredible virtuosity of her band.

She’s done in New York, but her concert schedule over the next month has her criss-crossing the country playing in about 5 different locations every week. Don't miss her (or her new record).

Weekend Video - Casey Knowles

Casey Knowles is the now 18 year old girl who was featured in Hillary Clinton's infamous "3 a.m." ads, credited with maintaining Clinton's dwindling lead in Texas. (The stock footage, shot when Knowles was 10, was licensed by Getty Images.) As it turns out Knowles is not only an Obama supporter, but a caucus captain, a precinct delegate, and potentially even a convention delegate for her home state of Washington. In this video, released by the Obama campaign, she gets to speak for herself.

We Love the 90s!

Woman wheeling down Sunset Boulevard at 34 mph in Beverly Hills on an afternoon in the summer of 1990

Andrew Bush’s “Vector Portraits” – a series of pictures taken while driving alongside his subjects on the roads and freeways of California – was one of the signature photographic series of the 90s. Original, perceptive, and with a fresh conceptual twist, it explored the culture of Los Angeles as well as issues of privacy, danger, and the American dream.

Now, after a decade in which the pictures were slowly slipping from public sight, Yale University Press is about to publish a selection of 70 photographs along with an interview by Jeff Rosenheim, one of the Met’s brightest curators. (The book comes out next week.)

Bush took the pictures by mounting a 4x5 camera and simple strobe on the passenger side of his car and remotely snapping the picture while driving at speeds up to 70 miles per hour. Photographed when Bush is directly across from them, the subjects are framed by the car window to make a separate picture within a picture.

Deadpan titles record not only where and when each photograph was taken, but information about speed, weather, etc. These captions give a faux-scientific aspect to the work, recalling Ed Ruscha's books of the late 1960's in which Ruscha photographed and catalogued such commonplace symbols of Los Angeles as parking lots, palm trees and gas stations.

Despite their humor, Bush's pictures make for fascinating socio-psychological documents. The car is, after all, a unique area of personal space - half public, half private. And as much as we may be what we eat or wear, we are also what we drive.

Man heading south at 73 mph on Interstate 5 near Buttonwillow Drive outside of Bakersfield, California, at 5:36 p.m. on a Tuesday in March 1992

Woman heading northwest at 67 mph on U.S. Route 101 near Santa Barbara at 2:33:38 p.m. in the early 1990s

Man traveling southbound at 67 mph on U.S. Route 101 near Montecito, California, at 6:31 p.m. on or around the 28th of a summer month on a Sunday in 1994

Man and woman passing through the intersection of Cahuenga and Hollywood boulevards, Hollywood, at 33 mph on February 14, 1997

Man rolling along (and whistling audibly) on U.S. Route 101 at approximately 55 mph on a summer day in 1989

Woman meandering at differing speeds through various parts of Pacific Palisades, California, while singing, before noon on a weekend day in the early part of 1997

Spanning the Globe

While it was a chilly 36 degrees when I was walking the dog this morning in Central Park, those two great harbingers of spring – the Yankees home opener and the flowering of cherry blossoms in Japan – are in unusual sync this year.

A friend in Tokyo alerted me to o-hanami (the time of flower watching) and the proliferation of live cherry blossom cams throughout Japan. This one from the Chiyoda ward of Tokyo has a nice big picture, while this site links you to 135 different live cams throughout Japan. (Please note that if you click during the day in the US it will be nighttime in Japan. New York is 14 hours behind Tokyo.)

Meanwhile Melky Cabrera almost single-handedly won the opener for the Yanks with two amazing catches and a homer in the 6th to tie the game at 2-2. (The Japanese letters in the background of the Yankee Stadium picture are another of those unusual visual coincidences.)

And that’s the news….

Be There (or be square)

I can safely predict that the place to be in New York this week (if not this entire spring) will be the Team Gallery opening of new work by 30 year old photographer Ryan McGinley. The show, called "I Know Where the Summer Goes", runs from the opening on the 3rd of April through the 3rd of May. Team Gallery is located at 83 Grand Street between Wooster and Greene.

The title of this exhibition, taken from a song by Belle & Sebastian, is more than just a piece of poetic musing. McGinley does, in fact, know where his summers go. In the summer of 2007, as has been his recent practice, he travelled across the United States with sixteen models and three assistants, shooting 4,000 rolls of film. From the resulting 150,000 photographs, he narrowed down the work to some fifty images to be shown at the gallery.

The inspiration for the project were amateur photographs culled from nudist magazines of the 60s and early 70s. McGinley would sit with his models and look through pictures, discussing the mood he was hoping to capture that day. A specific itinerary was chosen to bring his troop through a range of photogenic landscapes and carefully planned activities. The artificial constructedness of the project allowed for situations in which the models could both perform and be caught off guard. The resulting pictures of young men and women playing in the great outdoors are both innocent and erotic, casual yet calculated.

At one point in McGinley's meteoric career, the question many people had was whether he was a Nan Goldin wannabe or actually had something original to say - an interesting question in the light of yesterday's post. He seems to have found his place in the great outdoors bringing a much needed breath of fresh air (no pun intended) to the increasingly stultified genre of constructed photography. The sky has become one of his great subjects to which he brings yet another fresh point of view. Finally, his equal interest (photographically speaking) in both men and women is a surprisingly rare and refreshing occurrence.

Accidents Will Happen

A couple of weeks ago, I was blogging about the photographer Tim Davis and mentioned in passing his series of photographs of paintings in which the play of light on the varnish gives the original work new photographic meaning. Then yesterday I went to the Met to hear Scott Schuman speak on a panel about fashion and blogging. With a few minutes to spare I took a quick spin around the second floor and came across one of my favorite paintings that had unexpectedly been relocated. I pulled out my camera and took a picture not realizing that the flash was on (a big no-no as the Met guard was quick to tell me). However, in the instant I saw on the viewfinder what I had captured, I realized I had made a Tim Davis!

Does this picture have any validity? Based on a position I've taken many times, the answer is absolutely and unequivocally no. Which is frustrating - because as objectively as I can judge it I think it's a pretty good picture, but without context, history, background, etc., it has little meaning. Much of its meaning, in fact, comes from Davis's prior insight and work.

I recently saw a photographer as a favor to a friend and he came in to the gallery, young, confident, and with a totally mediocre portfolio. I made an effort to be as polite as possible. At the end of his presentation he pulled out a little envelope and with a flourish showed me a group of snapshots of sky, horizon, water. At this point I thought it would be doing him a favor to point out that this notion (the appreciation of the ever changing but always formal abstraction of horizons) had been ably expressed by Joel Meyerowitz and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Unless he had some radical new insight into how to re-imagine this kind of picture he was unlikely to end up with a one person show in New York. He looked at me incredulously and as though explaining it to some idiot said "But this is The Ganges."!

(FYI - my picture is on top and Davis's below.)

Weekend Video - Touch My Body

The catchiest song of the moment, Mariah Carey’s “Touch My Body”, has a video so excruciatingly bad there was no option but to resort to the Warholian tribute videos that blossom on You Tube like a thousand flowers! And it would be fun to get some reader response with a vote for best rendition.

The lyrics are not always easy to decipher but as you can see from the brief transcription below, they’re about as up to date as they can be.

If there's a camera up in here
Then it's gonna leave with me
When I do (I do)
If there's a camera up in here
Then I'd best not catch this flick
On YouTube (YouTube)
'Cause if you run your mouth and brag
About this secret rendezvous
I will hunt you down.

A final warning - if you listen to all the versions posted, it's impossible to walk around without the song on perma-loop in the back of your head.

Not Just a Pretty Picture

I was browsing Artnet and came across two pictures which I presumed were Julius Shulman photographs. I was trying to figure out where they were showing until I realized it wasn’t the pictures that were being sold, but the actual houses!

While interest in Ezra Stoller and Shulman’s photographs (the two great photographers of modernist architecture) continues to grow, the boom market in 20th-century design has now brought entire modernist houses to the auction block! The top photograph is Richard Neutra’s 3,200-square-foot Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, a glass, steel and stone structure designed by Neutra in 1949 as a desert getaway for Philadelphia department-store magnate Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr. (who was also the client for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater a decade earlier). The house is estimated to sell for $15 million-$25 million, and is included in Christie’s big evening sale of postwar and contemporary art on May 13, 2008. The home was purchased for $1.9 million in 1993 by Brent and Beth Edwards Harris, who spent another $5 million on a five-year-long restoration. The couple is divorcing.

The second picture is Louis Kahn’s Esherick House in Philadelphia, which is being sold by the Wright auction house in Chicago at its design sale on May 18, 2008. The two-story, 2,500-square-foot, one-bedroom structure, located in the Chestnut Hill area of Philadelphia, carries a pre-sale estimate of $2 million-$3 million. The house is being sold by Dr. and Mrs. Robert Gallagher, who bought it in 1981. For the sale, Wright has published a deluxe catalogue with photographs by Todd Eberle.

Happy house hunting!

Bored...

Back from Costa Rica – a remarkably beautiful country, safe and friendly. As it was a family vacation our emphasis was on beaches, hiking, and animal spotting, but one of the interesting sidebars of this kind of holiday is observing your fellow travelers. At one hotel in particular (the otherwise exemplary Hotel Arenas Del Mar) the dining room was filled with so many couples who never spoke to each other or made eye contact I felt I had fallen into some kind of alternate Martin Parr universe. (Oddly enough the next hotel, the famous eco-lodge, Lapa Rios, was exactly the opposite with affectionate couples and animated families.) But I couldn’t stop thinking about Parr’s wry photographs of non-communicating couples and as soon as I hit the first wireless hotspot I went straight to Magnum’s website and pulled up these pictures from Parr’s 1993 catalog “Bored Couples”.

Parr is truly in a league of his own as a colorist, photojournalist, humorist, and social observer. When he first joined Magnum, the old guard predicted the beginning of the end, but Parr has pulled the organization kicking and screaming into the 21st century with a realization that the insignificant moment has its own importance and that the fine art and photojournalistic ends of the spectrum don’t have to be in opposition.

“Bored Couples” is one of about 40 books or catalogs Parr has published on subjects ranging from bad weather and British food to sleeping Japanese commuters and sunburned tourists. Another of Parr’s memorable projects consisted of being photographed in vernacular style by a global cross section of local small-time studio photographers. It’s the least vain self-portrait project of all times! But back to bored couples –it’s Parr’s particular genius to realize that as truly terrible as many of the things are that his Magnum colleagues photograph, the tiny tortures of a humdrum existence, such as sitting at a table with nothing to say to the person you share your life with, are not inconsiderable. Fortunately this was not the case with our Costa Rican holiday!

On the Road

Photograph by William Eggleston.
Courtesy Wiliam Eggleston Trust & Cheim and Read.

I'm off to Costa Rica for a vacation with my family, so I won't be posting for a week or so. In addition to the rain forest and a country that's totally new to me, I'm looking forward to catching up with some DVD's I've had out from Netflix since Christmas and the book "Pictures at a Revolution. Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood" by Mark Harris, which has had some pretty fabulous reviews.

Talk to you soon...

The Producers

One of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies, "Shakespeare in Love". To set the scene:

The plague has closed down London's theaters and Shakespeare’s producer, Philip Henslowe (played by Geoffrey Rush) is being threatened by Fennyman, the investor he has found to bankroll his productions.

HENSLOWE (Sputtering - as one of Fennyman’s goons holds a knife to his throat): .... Allow me to explain about the theater business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.

FENNYMAN: So what do we do?

HENSLOWE: Nothing. Strangely enough it all turns out well.

FENNYMAN: How?

HENSLOWE: I don’t know. It’s a mystery.

GOON: (Tightening his grip on Henslowe.) Shall I kill him Mr. Fennyman?

As Henslowe readies himself for imminent torture, the town crier appears.

TOWN CRIER: The theaters are re-opened by order of the master of the revels. The theaters are re-opened....

Henslowe is visibly relieved as the goon relaxes his grip.


I offer this scene as the closest parallel to the gallery business. Strangely enough it always seems to turn out well!

I recently had to postpone a show in order to accommodate the publication of a book. This left me with a hole in my schedule and nothing I liked to fill it with. I knew, however, that something always happens.

In this case, however, the schedule was so tight I was beginning to consider the option of simply extending the current show when walking along Madison Avenue last week I ran into the dealer Keith de Lellis.

DE LELLIS
I was just thinking about calling you.

DANZIGER
Do tell me, why?

DE LELLIS
I have some photographs I thought might interest you for a show. They’re a group of vintage prints by Rudy Burckhardt of pictures he took for Leo Castelli of Jasper Johns paintings.

DANZIGER
How many are there?

DE LELLIS
About 30.

DANZIGER
When can I see them?

And this is the story behind my next show “Jasper Johns – Black and White. Photographs by Rudy Burckhardt.” Opening April 12.

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!