Archive for the ‘still life’ Category
Four by Four
The German photographers Hilla and Bernd Becher are justifiably famous for serial portraits of aging industrial structures. Like these watertowers, the work can easily be interpreted as commentary on a decrepit system: we see the literal ruins of capitalism’s faith in industrialization and vice versa. The photographs, repetitive and devoid of people, seem to be [...]
In: photography, still life · Tagged with: Hilla and Bernd Becher, watertowers
Senses Working Overtime
“To think through things, that is the still life painter’s work– and the poet’s. Both sorts of artists require a tangible vocabulary, a worldly lexicon.” The quote is from Mark Doty’s essay Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, but it could also apply to filmmakers and this polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky, taken in the early 1980s [...]
In: contemporary, film, photography, polaroid, still life · Tagged with: Andrei Tarkovsky, Mark Doty, Still LIfe with Oysters and Lemon
Two Tulips
June, and flowers are everywhere. The scent outdoors has been intoxicating, even in New York City, but there’s no conveying that online — so here’s an exquisite tulip instead. It is one of a flower series Robert Mapplethorpe photographed between 1978 and his death in 1989. You can view the whole series here. Yes, Mapplethorpe [...]
In: contemporary, photography, still life · Tagged with: flower, Robert Mapplethorpe
Cornered
I’m reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, slowly, and I want to pay some homage to Walker Evans’s photographs. This room was photographed by Evans in Alabama in 1936 during the summer that he and James Agee spent there living with tenant farmers. The idea was to profile one “typical” southern family for Fortune [...]
In: contemporary, photography, still life · Tagged with: James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Walker Evans