Check it out, my new Tumblr site. No registration, no fees, no exams. Pure pleasure.
Collecting
June 07, 2009
May 25, 2009
April 18, 2009
April 06, 2009
Just Signed up for 8tracks.com
I just signed up for 8tracks.com and created my first playlist of music. (Thanks for the info, Russo.) You can check out the playlist, free, without signing up or registering, etc., here. I look forward to creating more playlists in the near future.
I used my photo below as the avatar for that particular playlist. OK, this photo has a general connection to any playlist; however, it has, perhaps, a more specific connection--given the word "interesting" and the price of "$1.99"--to the changing ways music is now available, as opposed, say, to the CDs at brick and mortar stores.
March 14, 2009
Three Postcards from the Exceptional Collection at Fotofolio
Fotofolio is a superior publisher of postcards. Amazing catalog. Here are three cards from my collection.
First, a 1955 portrait of Sophia Loren by George Daniell:
Second, the model-turned-photographer, Ellen von Unwerth, gives us "Nudes in the Royalton, New York," 1992:
Finally, Patricia Arquette, from the Chelsea Hotel, NYC, 1992, as photographed by Bruce Weber:
Two "Freecards" from GoCard: Milk & Amtrak
Here's Tyra Banks for the milk campaign in 1996:
And this freecard from GoCard is an ad for Amtrak:
February 08, 2008
The Silent Majority Who Can Speak If They Only Will
No matter what the great Henry David Thoreau said about voting, you
should vote. It doesn't have to be a playing with right and wrong, "a
sort of gaming...with a slight moral tinge to it." Don't we know by
now that change is always difficult? We must imagine ourselves happy,
pushing that rock up the hill. Voting is one thing you do that one
day--one thing among others--to nudge the sludge.
January 25, 2008
Nudity Alert!
Yes, there is nudity, again, in The New Yorker, the current issue on the stands, January 21, 2008, pp. 60-67 (and not only on the stands, but, gasp!, in private homes as well!). The nude woman who served in 1930 as a model (and a student and a paramour) to a famous photographer--Man Ray--and whom you can see in this particular issue of The New Yorker is Lee Miller. And she, herself, became a famous photographer. Read the article for more on her life; she was the proverbial free spirit. I had forgotten, and Judith Thurman, the author of this essay on Miller, reminds me, that Jean Cocteau, "looking for an actress with the features and aplomb of a Greek statue," selected Miller to play the lead in his film The Blood of a Poet. (While I'm always interested in a nude photo of a beautiful woman, honesty demands that I tell you how much I prefer Miller's photo with no human being in it at all on page 61--Portrait of Space--to Man Ray's "topless" photo of her on p. 60.)
Is the nude shot of this woman--and the very fact that she sat for Man Ray's photograph--a much more comfortable idea given the fact that she was also a woman who worked behind a camera with distinction? For many it is. Should it be? I think not. More credit to her for this excellence as both model and photographer, but these are separate fields, and excellence in being a model shouldn't be denigrated because excellence there is also complicated and difficult. Not just anyone can be a model. By saying this, I do not merely mean that not just anyone "looks" like a model: I mean not just anyone can do what a model does. Some people have the "look," but they cannot model.
I offer the following words on the photo of mine below. I worked with a professional model. She's a college graduate, by the way. Is the topless shot of this woman a much more comfortable idea given the fact that she was already, at the time of posing, a woman who had graduated from college? I think not, though I would wish a college education for everyone interested in working for one. And, no, she's not someone I knew when she was a student in college, much less someone I ever taught. I paid her modeling rate. I have her signed "model release form" on file. I was thinking of Georgia O'Keeffe as I worked on this shot in Photoshop: I was thinking of her watercolor titled Evening Star III. My model from Seattle was the star I was photographing on that particular evening when we shot in Portland. O'Keeffe, as you know, painted many flowers (a traditional but also a suitably innocuous subject that pleases many viewers for what it is not, not what it is); however, O'Keeffe also said this about painting flowers: "I hate flowers. I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move." My model could move, stand still, pose, think, converse, participate intelligently as a fellow artist in the shoot, and set her own modeling fee (more expensive than roses). Georgia O'Keeffe, many of those who valorize her as a feminist heroine in art do not know, also modeled nude...for her paramour, Alfred Stieglitz. Those beautiful nude photographs are not hard to find, though they're not in this particular issue of The New Yorker. Maybe next week.
