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Another of Carl Van Vechten’s excellent photographs, at Yale’s Beinecke Library’s Extravagant Crowd exhibit… Susan Reed, September 30, 1945 “The daughter of Daniel Reed, a successful entertainer, actor, director, and playwright, red-haired folk singer Susan Reed spent much of her childhood surrounded by entertainers. Though she was raised predominantly in South Carolina, she traveled frequently with her father and was exposed at a young age to the entertainment industry in New York, Los Angeles, and Hollywood. Guests in the Reed household often included accomplished singers, dancers, and musicians; it was her father’s friends, the influential folk musicians Carl Sandburg and Huddie Ledbetter, who first introduced Susan Reed to American folk music. She received her earliest lessons in the tradition from some of its finest practitioners.” (More…)

Another of Carl Van Vechten’s excellent photographs, at Yale’s Beinecke Library’s Extravagant Crowd exhibit…

Susan Reed, September 30, 1945

“The daughter of Daniel Reed, a successful entertainer, actor, director, and playwright, red-haired folk singer Susan Reed spent much of her childhood surrounded by entertainers. Though she was raised predominantly in South Carolina, she traveled frequently with her father and was exposed at a young age to the entertainment industry in New York, Los Angeles, and Hollywood. Guests in the Reed household often included accomplished singers, dancers, and musicians; it was her father’s friends, the influential folk musicians Carl Sandburg and Huddie Ledbetter, who first introduced Susan Reed to American folk music. She received her earliest lessons in the tradition from some of its finest practitioners.” (More…)

Eve Arnold, ‘Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses’, Long Island, 1954. “This is so sexy, precisely because it’s Marilyn reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. She doesn’t have to pose, we don’t even need to see her face, what comes off the photo is absolute concentration, and nothing is sexier than absolute concentration. There she is, the goddess, not needing to please her audience or her man, just living inside the book. The vulnerability is there, but also something we don’t often see in the blonde bombshell; a sense of belonging to herself. It’s not some playboy combination of brains and boobs that is so perfect about this picture; it is that reading is always a private act, is intimate, is lover’s talk, is a place of whispers and sighs, unregulated and usually unobserved. We are the voyeurs, it’s true, but what we’re spying on is not a moment of body, but a moment of mind. For once, we’re not being asked to look at Marilyn, we’re being given a chance to look inside her.”Jeanette Winterson in Solitary pleasures — female writers choose their favourite pictures of women reading. Stumble It! Now visit Eyecorner Press!

Eve Arnold, ‘Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses’, Long Island, 1954.

“This is so sexy, precisely because it’s Marilyn reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. She doesn’t have to pose, we don’t even need to see her face, what comes off the photo is absolute concentration, and nothing is sexier than absolute concentration. There she is, the goddess, not needing to please her audience or her man, just living inside the book. The vulnerability is there, but also something we don’t often see in the blonde bombshell; a sense of belonging to herself. It’s not some playboy combination of brains and boobs that is so perfect about this picture; it is that reading is always a private act, is intimate, is lover’s talk, is a place of whispers and sighs, unregulated and usually unobserved. We are the voyeurs, it’s true, but what we’re spying on is not a moment of body, but a moment of mind. For once, we’re not being asked to look at Marilyn, we’re being given a chance to look inside her.”

Jeanette Winterson in Solitary pleasures — female writers choose their favourite pictures of women reading.

Stumble It!

Now visit Eyecorner Press!