Weekend Video

Nouvelle Vague have always been extremely popular with readers of this blog, so for this weekend's video here's their version of "Love Will Tear us Apart" by Joy Division. There are a lot of covers of this song out there, but I definitely like this one best.

LATE ADDITION

As I was driving to work after posting the above, I heard this new single from Regina Spektor's forthcoming album "Far" (to be released next week). I'm somewhat of the mind that this video might take away from the song - but the song's a beauty and certainly unusual for a summer release!

Alejandra Laviada

From the series "Juaraz 56". Photo by Alejandra Laviada.

It's always exciting when one of the photographers you represent gets a major award, and I'm proud to share the news that Alejandra Laviada has been named the winner of this year's Descrubimiento Award - the star prize at PhotoEspana. According to the official press release:

Her 'photo sculptures', using ordinary objects that she rearranges in the places she finds them, fits this year's festival theme - 'the everyday' - perfectly.

Her work will now be shown at next year's festival.

She was selected from more than 1000 entries submitted, the best of which took part in portfolio reviews organised by the festival in Mexico City, Lima and Madrid. The jury included Susan Kismaric, curator in the photography department at MoMA in New York; Colette Olof, curator at Foam Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam; and Lesley Martin, executive editor at Aperture Foundation in New York.

So congratulations to Ms. Laviada, who is clearly headed for international stardom. And here are a few more pictures from her series - "Juarez 56".

Happy Birthday Mr. Penn!

Irving Penn – the surviving half of the pair of colossi who straddled the worlds of fine art and editorial photography for over half a century and whose influence remains undiminished turns 92 today. (The other half was of course Richard Avedon.) Like Ali and Frazier, Olivier and Gielgud, Federer and Nadal, Adam Lambert and Kris Allen, the counterpoint and implicit rivalry of two such great artists only served to elevate their accomplishments. Avedon was the id, the puncher, the provocateur. Penn was the ego, the counter-puncher, the sly fox.

There are so many different and intriguing bodies of work within each man’s oeuvre it’s hard to see how any single photographer could approach that range and innovation today. (The challenge for today's photographers is of course that the climb gets steeper, the innovative possibilities narrower, as the progression of art history marches on.)

Anyway, as just one example of Penn's unusual creativity and to honor his birthday, here are a selection of his “corner” portraits - a series of pictures made in the late 1940s and 1950s after Penn had the simple idea of placing two background flats together to form a corner into which his subject was asked to enter. It was, said Penn, a means of closing people in. “Some people felt secure in this spot, some felt trapped. Their reaction made them quickly available to the camera." he explained. As you can see, it became a visual Rorschach forcing the subject to wittingly or unwittingly reveal something inside of themselves by the way they reacted to their unexpected confinement. The variety of response and the permutations of composition are as broad and unexpected as the myriad facets of human nature.

Cloudy

As a longtime fan of cloud photos I was intrigued by the photo above, and the story below from A.P.:

Looking out the 11th floor window of her law office, Jane Wiggins did a double take and grabbed her camera. The dark, undulating clouds hovering outside were unlike anything she'd seen before.

"It looked like Armageddon," said Wiggins, a paralegal and amateur photographer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. "The shadows of the clouds, the lights and the darks, and the greenish-yellow backdrop. They seemed to change."

They dissipated within 15 minutes, but the photo Wiggins captured in June 2006 intrigued — and stumped — a group of dedicated weather watchers who now are pushing weather authorities to create a new cloud category, something that hasn't been done since 1951.

Breaking into the cloud family would require surviving layers of skeptical international review. Still, Gavin Pretor-Pinney and his England-based Cloud Appreciation Society are determined to establish a new variety. They've given Wiggins' photo and similar pictures taken in different parts of the world to experts and are discussing the subject fervently online.

"They (the clouds) were the first ones that I noted of this type and I was unsure which category to put them under," said Pretor-Pinney, author of "The Cloudspotter's Guide." "When we put pictures up online we list the category, and I wasn't sure how to categorize it."

Some scientists are skeptical. They argue that researchers who have long watched the sky haven't seen anything distinctly new for decades.

There are three main groups of clouds: cumulous, cirrus and stratus. Each has various sub-classifications built on other details of the formation.

Brant Foote, a longtime scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said the clouds photographed by Wiggins already fit into the existing cumulous classification.
But Pretor-Pinney, who never studied meteorology, believes the clouds merit their own cumulus sub-classification. He proposes they be called altocumulus undulatus asperatus. The last word — Latin for roughen or agitate — is a reference to the clouds' undulating surface.

Weekend Videos

So many good things to share this weekend.

Given the popular response to the "Where the Wild Things Are" trailer, here's a clip of the song they were using - Arcade Fire's "Wake Up". This performance is from Fashion Rocks in 2005 with guest David Bowie.

Next up, a time lapse film from "Blame Ringo" showing what happens on an average day at the Abbey Road crossing made famous by the Beatles. Nice song and interesting concept.

From photographer and video artist Naomi Leibowitz, a video titled "Tasting Rachael Ray". (For those outside the States, Rachel Ray is a television personality whose show "$40 a Day" consisted of her visiting a different city every episode and finding the best meals for under $40 a day.)

And last but not least, following our discussion about tilt/shift photography, here's some tilt/shift videography from Keith Loutit.

Happy viewing!

Transformative

The issue of what's "transformative" when an artist "borrows" a photo-
graph is much in the news these days. But here's the latest addition to my personal art collection - I just got an artist's proof of Jamie Reid's famous poster for the Sex Pistols. It's the sheer vitality of the picture I love, while 32 years on, what was shocking and offensive is now kind of cute. I don't know who took the original picture of the Queen. It looks very official so maybe someone can help out. As always it would be nice to credit the photographer. But by defacing the image with ransom note type lettering and placing it in the middle of the Union Jack I think Reid did achieve "transformation".

Scout Tufankjian

From the Obama Campaign, 2008. Photo by Scout Tufankjian.

I had meant to write about the photographer Scout Tufankjian a while ago after seeing her interviewed on CNN. Scout is a New York based photojournalist who I feel produced some of the best coverage of the Obama campaign. While we have never met, she particularly endeared herself to me when she publicly acknowledged the influence of Paul Fusco’s RFK Funeral Train pictures on some similar pictures she had taken. But as you’ll see on her website, which generously shares hundreds of pictures, she’s got an eye of her own and the skill to capture the moment over and over again.

I was looking at her website recently and came across this wonderful picture of a young Obama supporter – a great photograph on its own, but a remarkable echo of Alfred Eisenstadt’s famous shot from 1963 of children at a puppet theater in Paris. Entirely accidental, of course, which is the only kind of photo echo worth noting.

Children Watching St. George Slay the Dragon at the Puppet Theater in the Tuileries, Paris, 1963. Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt.

I'm posting quite a few of my favorite pictures below, but do take the time to visit Scout’s website to see more pictures. I can guarantee you it’s worth it. (For those still interested in the tilt-shift debate, I have a feeling some post-production was done on some of the pictures to focus the eye on what the photographer is interested in you seeing clearly, but I think this was done well and effectively.)

There are no specific captions on Scout's website, but the pictures descend chronologically from Iowa to Inauguration.