Paul Sahre is so freaking good. Here’s his poster for the 30th anniversary of AIGA, “The Dawn of Mac,” which I am sorely tempted to purchase.
Girl in a Circus Wagon
Sisters
Three Farmers
Pastry Cook
Group of Circus People
This may be one of my longest posts yet, but after looking the library’s copy of August Sander’s Citizens of the Twentieth Century: Portrait Photographs 1892-1952 I couldn’t help but post what is actually a small sampling of Sander’s work. His unique body of work begins to show how we immediately read types based on dress, the physical body, and location. I almost resisted including the original captions with this sample, because I think some professions subvert one’s initial read of the photograph.
Susan Sontag’s On Photography gives some context to Sander’s work: “It was not so much that Sander chose individuals for their representative character as that he assumed, correctly, that the camera cannot help but reveal faces as social masks. Each person photographed was a sign of a certain trade, class, or profession…
“Sander’s look is not unkind; it is permissive, unjudging. Compare his 1930 photograph ‘Circus People’ with Diane Arbus’s studies or circus people…People face Sander’s camera, as they do in Arbus’s photographs, but their gaze is not intimate, revealing. Sander was not looking for secrets, he was observing the typical…
“It’s hard to imagine an American attempting an equivalent of Sander’s comprehensive taxonomy. The great photographic portraits of America—like Walker Evans’ American Photographs (1938) and Robert Frank’s The Americans (1959)—have been deliberately random, while continuing to reflect the traditional relish of documentary photography for the poor and the dispossessed, the nation’s forgotten citizens…American photography was rarely so detached…Sander didn’t know he was photographing a disappearing world.”
Beautiful collages by book designer John Gall.
A New Yorker video on Sylvia Beach Whitman, the owner of Shakespeare and Company in Paris.
1000 Frames of Hitchcock: A Wiki that has separated each of Hitchcock’s 52 major films down to 1000 still frame images.
Ten Dollar Fonts: a collection of experimental sans-serif typefaces.
A slideshow of Andy Sandberg playing iconic tennis players and moments.
A nice resource on how to dye Easter Eggs naturally.
The Yale University Art Gallery recently published an book of Lee Friedlander’s self-portraits from 1958 to 2011. I’ve become increasingly drawn to his self-portraits where his reflection in store windows, his shadow, or a double exposure of images, creates overlapping compositions that collapse the space between his own body, his reflection, and the surrounding scene. There’s an element of discovery in the photographs, and they speak to how photography as a medium can capture these natural overlays with a more objective vision.
I recently read Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Painting Photography Film, and he describes photography as a medium that “can either complete or supplement our optical instrument, the eye…The secret of their effect is that the photographic camera reproduces the purely optical image and therefore shows the optically true distortions, deformations, foreshortenings, etc., whereas the eye together with our intellectual experience, supplements perceived optical phenomena by means of association and formally and spatially creates a conceptual image. Thus in the photographic camera we have the most reliable aid to a beginning of objective vision.” Similarly, Susan Sontag argues in On Photography that “Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision.”
Triboro is a design studio in New York that seems committed to formal and typographic experimentation even when part of a larger commercial, client-based structure. Their website of 77 web buttons reflects endless experimentation and play with a variety of forms. I also appreciated their “leftovers” section of their website, where they have compiled unpublished sketches, type treatments, illustrations, and other formal experimentations that may or may not have made it to the final round.
Below is their typeface design Cidre, a hand-painted typeface that reminds me of the custom typefaces in Godard’s films.
The Times Magazine published a feature on Stella McCartney last week, including these photographs of her at work in her London studio. Aren’t the overhead shots wonderful?