Archive for the ‘photography’ Category
It’s a Metaphor
My students are writing their first papers of the semester now and struggling with Mark Doty’s essay “Souls on Ice,” in which Doty describes metaphors as “containers” for emotion, or tangible vessels for intangible ideas. This definition functions much like metaphors themselves: making the complex simpler, if not simple. Baseball, of course, is a game [...]
In: contemporary, film, photography · Tagged with: Bennett Miller, Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Mark Doty, metaphors, Michael Lewis, Moneyball, postaweek2011
Waaaay Beautiful
The title of Peter Weir’s last film, The Way Back (2010), is misleading. It suggests that the extraordinary journey of a handful of escaped prisoners from Siberia to India is all about returning home to something. And “way” is a wishy washy noun that is easily confused here with its jocular adjective: WAAAAY back! It’s unfortunate. The [...]
In: contemporary, endings, film, landscape, photography · Tagged with: Peter Weir, postaweek2011, The Way Back
An Eyeful
I’ve seen Blade Runner many times, but on my last, recent viewing I was most struck by a scene I had paid little attention to before. In this scene Deckard puts a photograph into an image reader and studies it. He is hunting replicants, machines made to look and act like humans, and this photograph once [...]
In: contemporary, film, gaze, photography · Tagged with: Blade Runner, Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas, postaweek2011, Ridley Scott
Ordinary Space
The exhibit From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis until January 2, features over a hundred photographs of ordinary, eccentric Americans from all over the country. But this is the one that grabbed me. I love how understated it is, especially next to its neighbors, the large-format men [...]
In: contemporary, photography, portraiture · Tagged with: Alec Soth, Walker Art Center
Back in Fashion
In honor of fashion week, I present Lillian Bassman, living legend. Bassman photographed fashion for Harper’s Bazaar and mentored Richard Avedon. Yet her work is more self-consciously artistic than most fashion photography and it fell out of favor after the 1960s. She left the field and threw away her negatives, but they were rediscovered to [...]
In: contemporary, fashion, photography, portraiture · Tagged with: Harpers Bazaar, Lillian Bassman