Garden (1932) - Hannah Frank
Hannah Frank is a versatile and productive Glasgow artist - she turns 100 today!
Seated Figure, 1989
You're viewing everything posted on August 23, 2008
Bill Brandt, Rene Magritte, 1966, gelatin silver print. © Bill Brandt Archive LTD
Brandt (British, b. Germany 1904-1983) once wrote, “Photography is still a very new medium and everything is allowed and everything should be tried.” Although driven by historic periods and events, Brandt’s endless invention and continual search for ways to expand the medium makes his work fresh and timeless. So strong was his presence during the middle of the twentieth century that histories of photography often imply that he was the only photographer in Britain during that period.
“No other British photographer has made so many memorable photographs as Bill Brandt. He excelled in all fields -social scenes, Surrealism, night photography, wartime documentary, landscape, portraiture and the nude,” writes Mark Hayworth-Booth, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Nude
Aug. 23 is the birthday of Edgar Lee Masters (1868 - 1950), author of the singular collection of poetry, Spoon River Anthology (1915). The book consists of epitaphs for the citizens of the fictive small-town Spoon River, all spoken in the dead person’s own voice…
Jonathan Swift Somers:
AFTER you have enriched your soul
To the highest point,
With books, thought, suffering,
The understanding of many personalities,
The power to interpret glances, silences,
The pauses in momentous transformations,
The genius of divination and prophecy;
So that you feel able at times to hold the world
In the hollow of your hand;
Then, if, by the crowding of so many powers
Into the compass of your soul,
Your soul takes fire,
And in the conflagration of your soul
The evil of the world is lighted up and made clear—
Be thankful if in that hour of supreme vision
Life does not fiddle.
Malvina Reynolds was born on this day in 1900 (d. 1978). She is best known as the writer of the rather annoying ditty about conformism, ”Little Boxes” (recorded by Pete Seeger and many others, recently including Devendra Banhart) - a song which grows on you after one or two listens and then is hard to get out of your system. Recently the drama-comedy TV-series Weeds has been using different recordings of “Little Boxes” as the theme song, a new artist performing it over the opening credits every week…
I liked River Phoenix in Gus van Sant’s My Private Idaho
River was born Aug. 23 1970 and died stupidly just 23 years later…
Francesca Woodman was a talented photographer whose innovative representations of the human body have been very influential in feminist photographic art.
Woodman killed herself in 1981 by jumping to her death from a loft window in New York. She was 22.
Tseng Kwong-Chi: New York, New York (World Trade Center) (TKC-3) (1979)
His most famous work is his self-portrait expedition, East Meets West, also called the “Expeditionary Series.” In the series, Tseng dressed in what he called his “Mao suit” and sunglasses, and photographed himself in front of iconic tourist sites of the West including Notre Dame de Paris and the World Trade Center.
New York, New York (Empire State Building) (TKC-5), 1979
Tseng died in 1990…
Wordle of the day: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’
Vieux Farka Touré, inheritor of the musical talent of his father Ali Farka Touré and the long Malian griot tradition…
Vieux plays Karaw, his father’s composition on his father’s guitar…
It is the dark anniversary of the execution of Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927…
