Ordinary finds

John White: “The broiling of their fish ouer th’ flame of fier”, 1577-90

John White (c. 1540 – c. 1593), was an English artist, and one of several early “Virginian” settlers who sailed with Richard Grenville in 1588 to the modern day coast of North Carolina. During this journey he made numerous famous drawings with watercolour of the landscape and native peoples. These works are significant as they are the most informative illustrations of a Native American society of the Eastern seaboard, and predate the first body of “discovery voyage art” created in the late eighteenth century by the artists who sailed with Captain James Cook. They were later engraved by Theodore de Bry and became widely known; all the surviving original paintings are now in the print room of the British Museum. (Wiki)

Nobuyoshi Araki: From Erotos, 1993 - Gelatin silver print

Tom Wesselmann: Sunset Nude (1960 Judy), 2002 - Oil on canvas © The Estate of Tom Wesselmann. Photo: Jeffrey Sturges

Via: Haunch of Venison, New York

Jonathan Meese: Mutter mit roter Brille und roetlicher Perlenkette, 2004 - Oil on canvas © The artist. Courtesy of Leo Koenig Inc. and private collection, New York.

Via: Haunch of Venison, New York

David Salle: With All Due Respect Sir, We Need Modesty Blaise, 2009 -
Oil on linen and cotton fabric © The artist. Courtesy the artist and Mary Boone Gallery.

Via: Haunch of Venison, New York

Rita Barros: Arthur Miller at the Chelsea Hotel

“Photographer Rita Barros pays homage to that hotbed of bohemian culture in Fiftee Years: Chelsea Hotel (Camara Municipal de Lisboa / Cultura, $36). Barros’s book includes photos of past and current residents such as Gregory Corso, Dee Dee Ramone and Virgil Thomson. And since Barros herself is a longtime resident, she knows whereof she shoots.” - From Barros’ web-site

Rita Barros: Iggy and the Eye (after Magritte), ca 1980

Barros’ web-site

Mona Kuhn: b&w, 1996-2002 

Bio: “Mona Kuhn was born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1969, of German descent. She earned her degree in the United States from Ohio State University. Since 1998, she has been an independent studies scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited, and is included in public and private collections, internationally and in the United States. Kuhn’s first monograph, Photographs, was debut by Steidl in 2004; immediately followed by, Evidence, published by Steidl and released in Spring 2007. In 2007 Mona was a visiting artist at The Pasadena Arts Center, where she taught a portfolio class to advanced students.  Mona Kuhn has lectured about her work at the Cincinnati Art Museum, North Carolina Museum of Art, Georgia Museum of Art, and the International Center of Photography in NYC.

The images appearing in Evidence were photographed entirely in France, where she resides each summer. In the last year, Mona has been working in a new series, to be published by Steidl (Fall 2009). Her upcoming book, titled Native, is an unfolding visual story with images taken in her native country Brazil. Currently, Mona lives and works in Los Angeles.” (Site)

Anni Leppälä: From the series Seedlings, (Corner), 2005 - C-print on aluminium

My interest towards photography is closely related to time in the past tense, to the possibility of being able to make a moment motionless, to make something stand still. That something has existed, and has now been set in static state. There is a certain aspect of lost moments and a feeling of letting go when looking at photographs. They exist at the intersection of the momentary and the constant, between the fleeting feeling of being alive and consciousness of the moments passing by.

In my pictures, attempts in recognising and lighting of obscure and vague movements, are made visible. I want to approach the momentariness of living through constancy. The paradox is that when you try to conserve or protect a moment by stopping it, by photographing it, you inevitably lose it at the same time. I am interested in exploring these contradictions and borderlines between things, how distance relates to closeness.

Symbolic meanings are essential in my works. I am interested in how the concrete surface of reality and photographs relate to metaphorical things that can be found underneath. I try to trace those kinds of occasions of seeing when words dissolve and scatter apart, objects and incidents intensify into symbolic language, silent information and intuitive interpretation. What fills the room behind the picture, allows one to step closer. Thoughts of incompleteness and insecurity are also important to my works.

Objects and spaces can occur to be like transparent routes between the inside and the outside, between the seen surface and unconscious content. Museums and miniature rooms become entrances to each other. Balance and its fragility, delicacy are present simultaneously.

How to stop a feeling, a memory? By binding it to visible objects, facades of material things, attaching it to a room´s walls, the surface of photographs. Like translucent skin with unforeseen memories beneath. (Artist’s statement)

Anni Leppälä: From the series Seedlings, (Red Blanket), 2004 - C-print on aluminium

(Portfolio)

Dylan in front of LSD Partners…

Alexander Hesler: Woman at a Mirror, 1856, half plate
Collection of Matthew R. Isenburg

“The Daguerreian artist should possess quick perceptive powers; an eye for the beautiful, which will enable him at a glance to decide on expression and position.… The picture should express feeling, thought and intelligence.… It is the “everyday,” “home” expression, which renders the picture an object of admiration in the familiar circle where it is to be appreciated.” —”The True Artist,” Daguerreian Journal, August 1851

On July 9, 1922, Johnny Weissmuller broke Duke Kahanamoku’s world record on the 100-meters freestyle, swimming it in 58.6 seconds - thus becoming the first man to break the one-minute barrier. Weissmuller went on to win 5 Olympics Gold Medals and set 67 World Records.

It was however in the movies that Romanian-born, German-Hungarian Weissmuller would earn his main claim to fame, esp. via his twelve Tarzan films.

Above: A shot of Weissmuller in his first film appearance, an uncredited cameo as a fig-leaved Adonis in the Ziegfeld Follies flick Glorifying the American Girl from 1929 - a pre-Code movie, showing glorious Technicolor nudity…

Duke Kahanamoku, the Hawaiian swim star Weissmuller beat in the Amsterdam Olympics, is also credited as the person who popularized the sport of surfing, known only on Hawaii at the time…

“I have never seen snow and do not know what winter means. I have never coasted down a hill of frozen rain, but every day of the year where the water is 76, day and night, and the waves roll high, I take my sled, without runners, and coast down the face of the big waves that roll in at Waikiki. How would you like to stand like a god before the crest of a monster billow, always rushing to the bottom of a hill and never reaching its base, and to come rushing in for a half a mile at express speed, in graceful attitude, of course, until you reach the beach and step easily from the wave to the strand?” - Duke K.

Franz Boas (July 9, 1858 – 1942) was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the “Father of American Anthropology”. Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did post-doctoral work in geography. He is famed for applying the scientific method to the study of human cultures and societies, a field which was previously based on the formulation of grand theories around anecdotal knowledge. (Wiki)

“Boas challenged the prevailing nineteenth-century race-based, evolutionary approach to culture, which considered white Western industrialized societies the pinnacle of human progress. Boas separated race from cultural factors in his theories and laid the groundwork for cultural relativism, which requires that a culture be understood on its own terms, without a hierarchy ranking some cultures as better or more advanced than others.” (Source)

Photo: Franz Boas in Ruth Benedict’s living room, undated - Gelatin silver print.

Ottorino Respighi (July 9, 1879 - 1936, heart attack) was an Italian composer, musicologist and conductor. He is best known for his orchestral Roman trilogy: Fontane di Roma - “Fountains of Rome”; Pini di Roma - “Pines of Rome”; and Feste Romane - “Roman Festivals”. His musicological interest in 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century music led him to also compose pieces based on the music of this period.

And then there are the songs that Pavarotti helped gain longevity:

Luciano Pavarotti, accompanied by James Levine: Navicata, recorded 1988

Mervyn Peake (July 9, 1911 – 1968) was an English modernist writer, artist, poet and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books, a trilogy of strange surrealist and fantastic tales of a boy’s life in the huge castle of Gormenghast. Peake also ilustrated numerous books, showing a taste for the grotesque, painted, and wrote plays and (nonsense) poetry.

AUNTY FLO

When Aunty Flo
Became a Crow
She had a bed put in a tree;
And there she lay
And read all day
Of ornithology.

Mervyn Peake’s oil painting of his wife Maeve Gilmore (c. 1940), herself an artist…

An oil painting by Maeve Gilmore, 1940, depicting music and a vertebra from a beached whale found by Mervyn Peake.

Bill Brandt: Mervyn Peake at his Frith Street, Soho flat, 1943.

A couple more Bill Brandt shots on OF: 1 2

Mervyn Peake: THE TROUBLE WITH GERANIUMS

The trouble with geraniums
is that they’re much too red!
The trouble with my toast is that
it’s far too full of bread.

The trouble with a diamond
is that it’s much too bright.
The same applies to fish and stars
and the electric light.

The troubles with the stars I see
lies in the way they fly.
The trouble with myself is all
self-centred in the eye.

The trouble with my looking-glass
is that it shows me, me;
there’s trouble in all sorts of things
where it should never be.

We mark the on-going Tour de France cycling event, and honour Federico Bahamontes, The Eagle of Toledo, who won the 1959 version of the Tour.

Bahamontes was a sensational climber who dominated his period, winning the mountain classification six times in the Tour. An anecdote tells how in his first Tour appearance in 1954, he destroyed the competition on one of the major climbs then stopped for ice cream and waited for his competitors.

Lee Hazlewood (July 9, 1929 – 2007) was an American country and pop singer, songwriter, and record producer, most widely known for his work with guitarist Duane Eddy during the late fifties and singer Nancy Sinatra in the sixties.

Hazlewood had a distinctive baritone voice that added an ominous resonance to his music. Hazlewood’s collaborations with Nancy Sinatra as well as his solo output in the late 1960s and early 1970s have been praised as an essential contribution to a sound often described as “Cowboy Psychedelia…” (Wiki) 

“To understand Lee Hazlewood is to understand the difference between country and western. Country is a Nashville thing; western has no center (it’s even bigger than Texas). Country is tight; western is loose. Country is about everyone coming together; western is about being an individual, alone.

Lee Hazlewood understood western — he was born just outside of Tulsa, OK, raised all over the Southwest, and originally based in Arizona when he began his career. Hazlewood’s songs weren’t narratives, like the stories that country music was so fond of. They were picturesque, like scenes from movies. (As such, they were exceptionally well written, directed, and shot.) While the official country music version of western still looked back to the ’30s and ’40s, Hazlewood’s characters were dark, gritty, and anything but heroic, anticipating the shady sense of right and wrong, the realism, and the complex motives of the Sergio Leone or Sam Peckinpah westerns. (Ennio Morricone could hardly have missed the wonderfully evocative production tricks Hazlewood employed on many of his songs.)

Hazlewood’s voice, parched and plain but expressive, evoked the easy dexterity of the cowboy. His knockout productions could be dry or florid — Thurston Moore dubbed them “country exotica” — but they matched the feel of the desert, where there are stark contrasts between high and low, dry and wet, or colorful and washed-out. The production always fit the song; Hazlewood was using one of the Western world’s most advanced studios and had at his disposal some of its greatest practitioners, including arranger/conductor Billy Strange.

Even his effects recalled the Southwest, with a heavy use of echo bouncing around the mix as if the music were within canyon walls, the harmony vocals behind him usually high and haunted, and the metallic rustling of guitars or chains giving an acrid taste to his songs. (Early in his career, his productions hit the charts in part because of their sound; while Sam Phillips used a stairway at Sun Records for echo, Hazlewood employed a length of rusty pipe.)” (From the fine AllMusic article on Lee)

Photo of Lee & Nancy - see also: 1

David Hockney (b. July 9, 1937): Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy. 

“Contemporary British artist David Hockney combined a number of individual reference photographs and studies of different aspects of this scene to create this very large composition depicting his friends Mr. and Mrs. Clark at home with their cat, Percy.”

Tate Gallery, London, England. 

Last year’s birthdya Hockney on OF: 1

David Hockney: A Closer Grand Canyon, 1998 - oil on 60 canvases (81x291 in. overall) (Source)

“David Hockney has often been regarded as a playboy of the art world. He has had lascivious relationships, and he has run among strange and crazy artistic circles. Yet he has always retained a sense of stability in his life through his constant and tireless devotion to his work. Hockney is an artist that has always enjoyed success and praise, facing little to no hardship in his career. What is interesting about his life is not the problems he has encountered, but the strides he has taken to bypass much human suffering and malaise.” (From artist’s web-site bio)

Minor White (July 9, 1908 - 1976), here shot while photographing in Portland, Oregon, 1938…

“White earned a degree in botany with a minor in English from the University of Minnesota in 1933. His first creative efforts were in poetry, as he took five years thereafter to complete a sequence of 100 sonnets while working as a waiter and bartender at the University Club. In 1938, White moved to Portland, Oregon. There he began his career in photography, first joining the Oregon Camera Club, then taking on assignments from the Works Progress Administration and exhibiting at the Portland Art Museum.

After serving in military intelligence during World War II, White moved to New York City in 1945. He spent two years studying aesthetics and art history at Columbia University under Meyer Schapiro and developing his own distinctive style. He became involved with a circle of influential photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams; hearing Stieglitz’s idea of “equivalents” from the master himself was crucial to the direction of White’s mature post-war work.

The “equivalents” of White were often photographs of barns, doorways, water, the sky, or simple paint peeling on a wall: things usually considered mundane, but often made special by the quality of the light in which they were photographed. One of his more popular photographs is titled Frost on Window, a close-up of frost crystals on glass. However, in regard to an equivalent, the specific objects themselves are of secondary importance either to the photographer or the viewer. Instead, such a photograph captures a sentiment or emotionally symbolic idea using formal and structural elements that carry a feeling or sense of “recognition”: a mirroring of something inside the viewer. In an essay titled “Equivalence: The Perennial Trend”, White described a photographer who took such pictures as one who “…recognized an object or series of forms that, when photographed, would yield an image with specific suggestive powers that can direct the viewer into a specific and known feeling, state, or place within himself.” (Gantz) Because of the way in which he wanted his photographs to be experienced, White was very particular with regard to the both technical aspects of his art and the quality of the images he produced (Lemangy, 192). To transmit his messages—to ‘direct the viewer’—White employs a variety of methods; he creates symbols to represent emotions, he accompanies his images with text or places them in sequence.” (Wiki)

Minor White: ‘Pacifc, Devil’s Slide, California’, 1947

Often while traveling with a camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the horizon of a moment, too late to expose film, only time enough to expose our hearts. - Minor White

Previously on OF: 1

Minor White: Nude, Portland, Oregon, 1940 - Gelatin silver print © The Trustees of Princeton University. All rights reserved.

“From a background in botany and documentary photography, White developed into an artist whose extreme personal investment in the metaphorical significance of photographic form wrought beautiful images swathed in spirituality. He was especially adept at photographing the male nude. Here, as was typical of White, the body’s contours and volumes breathe warmth throughout the image, so that it pulsates with life without attenuating into pure erotica or kitsch. White’s talent for such a transformation permeated all of his work, no matter what the subject—barn, landscape, human form, street scene—so that the spirit and spirituality of living inhabited every corner of his images.” (Source - Metropolitan Museum)

“White was a closeted bisexual man and felt tormented through much of his life by his then socially-unacceptable feelings for young men. Much of this erotic turmoil expressed itself in his post-war subject matter and style, and in his spiritual search for peace and simplicity. Several of his photographs of male nudes are considered to be the masterworks of the genre, but were only published in 1989.

On his death White was hailed as one of America’s greatest photographers. He is remembered largely for his ideas about the spiritual in photography. His influence can be seen in the work of students of his such as John Daido Loori, a photographer and Zen master. At the current time, 2007, there are several signs of a renewed wider interest in his work and life.” (Wiki)

Robin Schwartz (b. July 9, 1957): Bozo on the Steps, Hoboken, New Jersey, 1987 - gelatin silver print on paper

(Artist’s site) (Bio - PDF)

Elmer Bischoff (July 9, 1916 - 1991): Two Bathers, 1960 - oil on canvas (Smithsonian)

“Two Bathers is a classical scene filtered through the abstract expressionism that dominated American art after World War II. Bischoff covered the canvas with hot reds, greens, and cool blues, and his liquid paint gives the women the same substance as the landscape. We perceive them as figures and as clusters of skillful marks in a network of brushstrokes. The distance between the two women, the stillness of their bodies, and strong contrasts of light and shadow lend the image the sharpened, poetic quality of memory. Painting the figure, as Bischoff and other Bay Area artists chose to do throughout the 1950s and 1960s, challenged the prevailing idea of what art ought to be. These California artists felt that pure abstraction could not convey all they wanted to express, and returned to images of the human body. Bischoff taught as he painted, avoiding the party line of powerful critics and allowing his students the freedom to paint from life.” - Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006

Roberta Williamson (b. July 9, 1949): You’re Perfect, 1998 - hand fabricated, pierced, formed, soldered, bezel set sterling silver, crystal, lithograph, paper, ink, polychrome, steel, plastic, carnelian, brass, and wood (Smithsonian)

“As Lauren’s body curved she was no less perfect to me. She was so beautiful, so sweet, so wonderful … Through her I have learned to see the perfection in so many people and things that I missed before. We all feel less than perfect for whatever reason—-I now know it’s so easy to change that perception because it’s in our own mind.” Roberta Williamson, 1999

You’re Perfect is one in a series Roberta Williamson calls “I kiss your back each night in my mind.” When this brooch was made, Williamson’s teenage daughter, Lauren, recently had undergone an operation to correct the lateral curvature of her spine. You’re Perfect expresses the artist’s unconditional love for her daughter and refers to Lauren’s first day at school after her surgery, when she bravely revealed her scar to classmates and jokingly tested the magnetism of the steel rods fused to her spine. Williamson challenges the idea of perfection in this piece by using an image of a large fly and an imitation fly pin, both of which remind the viewer that what is ugly to one is beautiful to another.” - Smithsonian label