Night At The Museum

Patrick Robinson of The Gap. Photo: Tommy Ton for style.com.

As anyone in the business will tell you, there's nothing harder than shooting the red carpet at an event. But when vogue.com gave the assignment of covering Monday's Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute gala to Tommy Ton, he had the intelligence to move away from the pack and the eye to capture a more relaxed and interesting point of view. Here are a small selection of his pictures - the rest can be seen here.

Mila Kunis

Alexa Chung

Chanel shoes

Lady Gaga performing inside the Met.

I did say I was going to refrain from posting my own pictures ... but as I was walking the dog the night before the above event, I passed the Met just as they were erecting the canopy for the gala. It all seemed so surreal and strangely lit I hussled home to get a camera to record the scene.

I ♥ Marilyn Minter - Part 2

A week ago, I had the pleasure of going with Allure Magazine’s Picture Editor, Nadine McCarthy, to Marilyn Minter’s studio for a pizza lunch. Nadine had commissioned Minter before, and as alert readers will remember I have already raved about Minter’s work. (Click here) but I had never met the artist and Nadine had never been to her studio.

It was quite an experience! The minute you walk into the studio, you feel you’ve gone through the looking glass and entered an artsy version of Santa’s workshop. There’s a merry bustle of activity as young assistants and painters go about their work.

It wouldn’t be giving anything away to say that much of the painting is done by assistants (mostly her former students) who Minter has trained in her specific painting technique which consists of layering enamel paint on aluminum and then finishing it off with fingertips to soften the paintbrush lines. But the basis of all of Minter’s recent work is all photography and her trademark pop color images of mud splashed stilettos, glittery facial features and body parts are pinned up all around the large studio.

It takes a particular talent to come up with something as fresh and distinctive and timely as Minter’s work and the more I look at it, the more important and accomplished I feel it is.

Minter, meanwhile, is a bundle of energy, charm, intelligence, and extroversion. Completely without pretension or vanity – when I asked if she felt any kind of association with that other famous alliterated Marilyn she replied – “I was born in 1948 when nobody even knew who Monroe was!”. I asked if she would autograph a skateboard of my daughter’s – one of three she designed for Supreme – and she immediately zoomed off to find just the right red marker with which to sign it in a way that was both beautiful and personal.

She was also happy to let me snap away, so I can share these pictures with you.

Marilyn Minter and Nadine McCarthy.

Saturday in New York City

Back in New York (nearing 90 degrees) and biking to work I was stopped in my tracks by the sight of sunbathers on The Great Lawn. I'll get back to real photography next week!

The Following Morning ...

L.A. - looking very sci-fi to me.

From my iPhone - L.A.

To my pleasure and surprise, when I checked in to the Sunset Tower Hotel, I was informed I was being upgraded to a suite with a balcony and city view. But best of all, when I got in from dinner, the view from my room was this spectacular moonrise over L.A.!

Welcome!

More on the excellent but exhaustive Henri Cartier-Bresson show at MoMA to come - but as I sit in the Jet Blue terminal waiting for my flight to L.A., I ask you - "Is this anyway to greet people at the entrance to a photography show?".

Kick-Ass

This weekend I went to see "Kick-Ass" which turned out to be one of the most enjoyable movies I've seen in a long time. Best described as teen comedy meets Quentin Tarantino, it kept me riveted with its film-making brio, story telling, interesting characters, and sheer entertainment value.

I usually find movies derived from comic books predictable and boring, especially in the plot lines of the villain who is trying to take over the world/destroy our hero. But "Kick-Ass" has a much more engrossing conflict, dimensional characters, and two genuinely interesting and talented young leads.

The movie is generating some controversy over the fact that Chloe Moretz, who plays the profanity spewing, villain slicing and dicing, Hit-Girl was 11 when the film was shooting. And I have to respect that many people might be offended by an 11 year old greeting bad guys with the c-word before killing them all. So that should be the litmus test of whether you see the film or not.

(With that warning, if you want to see what I'm talking about - click here.)

From The Sartorialist

For the last couple of months, The Sartorialist has been soliciting contributions from his readers of stylish snapshots from their family albums. The results, as you can see are both sartorially and photographically quite impressive!

I'm being lazy and haven't added the captions that identify and in many cases add charming anecdotes or recollections to the pictures - but if you're curious - just got to The Sartorialist and browse backwards.

FACEBOOK HELP - PLEASE!

Many people have written and posted to tell me that they have tried to link to this blog on Facebook only to be told that "the site contains material that has been reported as inappropriate by some people".

Does anyone know how to fix this? Does anyone know how this might have happened? Would posting something like an Edward Weston nude have triggered this? Any Facebook honchos out there who can help?

Thanks,
James.

The Photographer Is Also Present

I don’t think that there’s any question that the art world event of the moment is the exhibition, “Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present” at The Museum of Modern Art. A retrospective of work by one of the pioneers of peformance art, the centerpiece of the show is Ms. Abramovic herself, who sits silently at a table in the museum’s atrium, facing an empty chair. She’s scheduled to sit there all day, every day, for the run of her show. The museum estimates that she will sit for 716 hours and 30 minutes. Visitors to the show are welcome to sit opposite her for as long as they want and while most sit for about 15 minutes I gather some people, mindless of the lines behind them, have sat it out with Ms. Abramovic for the entire day.

Unremarked on is that a photographer working for MoMA has been there to record every interaction, taking a picture of each participant and noting the time they spent in the chair. The photographer, Marco Anelli, has posted all these pictures to flickr and there’s a slide show on MoMA’s own website – both worth looking at. It’s clearly a feat of endurance in it’s own right and it has the fascination of putting a face to the world of art lovers as well as capturing something of what the experience means to them. It’s a nice addition to the school of discrete observation pioneered by Walker Evans and Harry Callahan and once you get going clicking through the different faces, you'll find it quite addictive.

The artist, Marina Abramovic. Day 16. 600 minutes.

13 minutes.

386 minutes.

75 minutes.

10 minutes.

Outerland

Some projects take their time. Allison Davies’ “Outerland” is a body of work begun in 1998 when Davies was an MFA photo grad at Yale and which she has continued to work on ever since. It sees the world through the eyes of a solo planetary explorer in what appears to be a lonely but still sublime post-apocalyptic future. Part narrative, part landscape, it’s “The Little Prince” for the 21st century – a wordless visual inquiry into the mysteries of life.

Photographed all over the world, from Iceland to Argentina, the genesis of the series came from Davies’ fascination with movie locations and sci-fi films like “Planet of the Apes” and “Logan’s Run”. (An interesting sidebar to the work was that it inspired the title of Gregory Crewdson’s seminal show “Another Girl, Another Planet” – an exhibition that thrust many of the '90s women constructed narrative photographers into the limelight, but somehow omitted Davies.)

12 years in the gestating, Davies' photographs have finally been published by Charles Lane Press in a book that’s as spare and luminous as its subject. With a first edition of only 700, “Outerland” is not only likely to be an instant collector’s item, but as volcanic ash filters its way through the atmosphere - a prescient look at the fragility of the planet.

A Jetsonesque self-portrait of the artist.

Weekend Video

Showing what you can do with stop-motion film-making, this short by PENStory was made after shooting 60.000 pictures, making 9.600 prints and re-shooting over 1.800 pictures.

Opening Tonight!

Don't forget we have an opening tonight.. And the Schaller show looks extraordinary, so don't miss it! 534 West 24th Street. 6 to 8 p.m.