Archive for the ‘text’ Category
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
Light and Motion
In 1909 Thomas Edison visited Mark Twain at his house in Connecticut and made the film you see before you. The intersection of these two great men, and their respective fields, at the same place and time is tantalizing. You see the familiar figure of Twain shambling around his house, then playing cards with his [...]
In: film, text · Tagged with: Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf
Once Upon a Time in New York
The text is what draws me into this piece of Berenice Abbott’s long-gone New York, though the image is beautifully composed. The squared off windows seem like pages filled with text, as the menus and billboards and signage cover so much glass that it would be impossible to see through to the inside anyway. The [...]
In: photography, street life, text · Tagged with: Berenice Abbott, New York City
Darkness Visible
“The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.”–Virginia Woolf, 1915 Last week I went to hear a lecture at Fordham University by the writer and thinker Rebecca Solnit. It was called “Woolf’s Darkness” and extended Solnit’s idea from her book Hope in the Dark: that [...]
In: contemporary, mental illness, photography, text · Tagged with: Rebecca Solnit, Robert Adams, Virginia Woolf
Two Tributes
Greta Garbo received two magnificent tributes: first the portrait at right by Edward Steichen (1928) and then the essay “The Face of Garbo” by Roland Barthes (1957). What is perhaps most interesting is that photo and text pay tribute to the same quality: the almost divine perfection of Garbo’s face and the tiny flaws that [...]
In: photography, portraiture, text · Tagged with: Edward Steichen, Greta Garbo, Roland Barthes