[PHOTO DIARY] Postcard from Padova

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"Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?" -- E.H.

We have finished filming and now holiday has officially begun ... I've been laying by the pool revisiting The Old Man and the Sea, as the drum of essential relaxation kicks, cloaked in reverberation.  In two daisies we will drive south to the heal, where the land smells of mafioso. Photo and text by Dustin Lynn who is in Italy shooting another short fashion film for Corto Moltedo. 

Carlo Mollino: Un Messaggio dalla Camera Oscura

Born into a Turin architect and civil engineer’s family, Carlo Mollino studied art history and architecture and made a name for himself as a skier, racecar driver and aerobatic pilot, as an author and photo artist. Yet his international renown is primarily based on his work as a designer of furniture and exclusive interiors in the spirit of the gesamtkunstwerk – the German philosophy of total art. His organic language of forms was not least inspired by the form of the female body – as particularly evidenced by the part of his photographic work he always kept private: over 1,000 Polaroids portraying beauties of Turin’s night life in the nude in mise-en-scène settings. The pictures were part of the preparation of his “House for the warrior’s rest” (today: Casa Mollino), a villa in Turin on the Po River. An exhibition, opening at this month at the Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, will juxtapose furnishings of the villa with a selection of these Polaroids for the first time. It explores the boundaries and bridges between this universal artist’s male erotic imagination and his intellectual and artistic attitude. On view at the Kunsthalle Wien from August 31 to September 25.

No Thoughts Zine

Thanks to Portland, Oregon's MICHAEL DEMEO & ALYSSA NOCHES for sending over their current issue of the NO THOUGHTS ZINE which I received in the mail.  With a clean, 'fuck-you-do-it-yourself' attitude, their sixth issue of No Thoughts actually gives me lots of thoughts – none of them pure.  Limited to 250 copies, Demeo and Noches curates a "series on sensuality and nudity, presenting an elegant yet unpretentious collection that celebrates the human form" with photographers all over the globe. www.nothoughtszine.com

[ON VIEW] The photography of CORNEL LUCAS

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One of the pioneers of film portraiture Lucas began his career in the late 1930s with the help of his first sitter Marlene Dietrich. After a nervous start to the photo-shoot it ended well when Marlene famously said to him 'Join the club Mr Lucas.' He was not sure what she meant at the time but soon after the commissions started flooding in and Lucas became the photographer of choice for the British Film Industry. In the early 1950s he went on to set up the Pool Studio at Pinewood Studios in London England's equivalent of Hollywood's well run establishment at MGM studios. During his sixty-year career Lucas has photographed some of our greatest film stars both at the Pool Studio and on film locations all over the world. Marlene Dietrich was just the first of many famous faces he photographed. Brigitte Bardot, Joan Collins, Katharine Hepburn, Jean Simmons, Claudia Cardinale, David Niven, Dirk Bogarde, Alec Guinness and Diana Dors were all captured in his lens along with a long list of others. Stylish, glamorous and perfectly composed the photographs are a testament to both the photographer and the sitter. Lucas was quick to learn that his photographs were a key part to the actor's success, as Marlene Dietrich once told him: 'Mr Lucas I'm telling you now that a photograph to me is more important than film.' He was the master of the 12 x 10 large format plate camera, but also of light and shade. It is prevalent throughout his work, creating stunning, rich portraits, which are full of life and luminosity. As Lucas once said 'Light and shade made the image in its beauty.' Lucas has held numerous international and national exhibitions and was the first stills photographer ever to receive a Bafta in honour of his services to the film industry. Chris Beetles Fine Photographs in London is currently presenting a retrospective retrospective of Cornel Lucas' photography - on view until August 27.

WAR IS OVER, IF YOU WANT IT

A boy sits amid the ruins of a London bookshop following an air raid on October 8, 1940, reading a book titled "The History of London." (AP Photo) From Alan Taylor's photo retrospective entitled World War II in Photos presented in 20 parts on the Atlantic's web platform. "World War II is the story of the 20th Century. The war officially lasted from 1939 until 1945, but the causes of the conflict and its horrible aftermath reverberated for decades in either direction. While feats of bravery and technological breakthroughs still inspire awe today, the majority of the war was dominated by unimaginable misery and destruction. In the late 1930s, the world's population was approximately 2 billion. In less than a decade, the war between the nations of the Axis Powers and the Allies resulted in some 80 million deaths -- killing off about 4 percent of the whole world." [site]

 

The New Hieroglyphic Language of Light and Time

New Mexico, USA, 1975

Ernst Haas was one of those rare photographers of the 20th century imbued with a certain poetical sensibility.   Born in Vienna in 1921, Haas almost went into medicine, but his artistic inclinations led him to photography.  Haas was soon invited into the famous Magnum photo agency, the first invitation by the agency's founder's Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, and David Seymour.  Haas, like William Eggleston, was one of the first adopters of color photography and is largely credited with changing the medium as an artform altogether.  Ernst Haas was also profoundly prolific, traveling the world for assignments for magazines, but along the way he was building a personal portfolio of images the world has never seen – until now. Color Correction, a recently published monograph, exhibits a collection of never before seen photographs that are considered "far more edgy, loose, complex and ambiguous," and that Haas believed – in his own lifetime – people just wouldn't understand. 

New Mexico, USA, 1975

On Photography: Philosophy by Haas

Photography is a bridge between science and art. It brings to science what it needs most, the artistic sense, and to art the proof that nothing can be imagined which cannot be matched in the counterpoints of nature. Through photography, both artist and scientist can find a common denominator in their search for the synthesis of modern vision in time, space and structure. We can write the chapters in a visual language whose prose and poetry will need no translation.

The camera only facilitates the taking. The photographer must do the giving in order to transform and transcend ordinary reality. The problem is to transform without deforming. He must gain intensity in form and content by bringing a subjective order into an objective chaos. Living in a time of the increasing struggle of the mechanization of man, photography has become another example of this paradoxical problem of how to humanize, how to overcome a machine on which we are thoroughly dependent....the camera....

In every arts there is poetry. In every human being there is the poetic element. We know, we feel, we believe. As knowers we are like the scientist relating through logical determination. As feelers, we are like poets relating the unrelated through intuition. As believers, we are only accepting our human limitations. The artist must express the summation of his feeling, knowing and believing through the unity of his life and work. One cannot photograph art. One can only live it in the unity of his vision, we well as in the breadth of his humanity, vitality, and understanding....

There is no formula – only man with his conscience speaking, writing, and singing in the new hieroglyphic language of light and time.

Text by Ernst Haas

Intro Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Color Correction by Ernst Haas (Steidl) 

Route 66, Albuquerque, New Mexico

The late LUCIAN FREUD & DAVID DAWSON in Beijing

The current exhibition at Faurschou Gallery in Beijing presents British painter Lucian Freud and his assistant David Dawson, who is himself a painter and a photographer. The exhibition juxtaposes one of Lucian Freud’s principal works – the masterpiece David & Eli (2003-4) – with ten photographs taken by David Dawson at Lucian Freud’s studio between 2004 -2006, giving us a unique glimpse into the every-day life of one the late great artist. On view until August 14, www.faurschou.com

Forbidden Fruit: Recently Acquired Photographs

Portland, OR—Charles A. Hartman Fine Art is pleased to present a group exhibition of several excellent recently acquired works. Selections Two includes new paintings and photographs by gallery artists as well as a number of modern and vintage pieces recently added to the gallery’s extensive inventory of photographic masterworks. Works by gallery artists Hayley Barker, Jason Langer, Daniel Robinson, Camille Solyagua, Eva Speer and Mark Steinmetz are presented alongside classic photographs by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Frantisek Drtikol, André Kertész, Willy Ronis, Aaron Siskind, Josef Sudek, Brett Weston, Garry Winogrand and others. www.hartmanfineart.net

An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus

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Diane Arbus, Sword Swallower

"Diane Arbus was one of the most brilliant and revered photographers in the history of American art. Her portraits, in stark black and white, seemed to reveal the psychological truths of their subjects. But after she committed suicide in 1971, at the age of forty-eight, the presumed chaos and darkness of her own inner life became, for many viewers, inextricable from her work....William Todd Schultz's An Emergency in Slow Motion reveals the creative and personal struggles of Diane Arbus. Schultz veers from traditional biography to interpret Arbus's life through the prism of four central mysteries: her outcast affinity, her sexuality, the secrets she kept and shared, and her suicide. He seeks not to diagnose Arbus, but to discern some of the private motives behind her public works and acts. In this approach, Schultz not only goes deeper into Arbus's life than any previous writer, but provides a template with which to think about the creative life in general."  An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus is to be release on August 30th [.....]