Archive for the ‘portraiture’ Category
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
The Dancer and the Dance
The last post got me thinking about how one art represents another — as in photographs of musicians there or photographs of dancers here. In this case photography seems to submit to dance: the lighting that may have been artistically manipulated instead looks like simple stage lighting. Graham doesn’t look “posed” by Cunningham, but rather [...]
In: dance, photography, portraiture · Tagged with: dance photography, Imogen Cunningham, Martha Graham
Black and White and Read All Over
I’ve been reading, and writing, about characters set against backdrops of texts, and here is a wonderful visual example of that juxtaposition. Photographer Carl Van Vechten often took portraits against geometric backgrounds, which creates a complex formal composition. It seems to set human variety within a grid of some kind. Here the grid is especially [...]
In: photography, portraiture, surrealism, text · Tagged with: Carl Van Vechten, Man Ray
One Woman, Two Women
I saw the massive, impressive Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit at MoMA this weekend. On display until June 28, it was eye-opening in many ways. I thought I knew Cartier-Bresson’s best work, but there was much that was new to me there: the frankly emotional war work, the photo-essays for ’50s magazines, and even some lovely landscapes. [...]
In: photography, portraiture · Tagged with: Henri Cartier-Bresson, MoMA, Spain