Photographer Tito Mouraz spent two years capturing these industrial rock quarries in Portugal, capturing it more as a space of wonder and beauty than a space of extraction and destruction.
Paul Berger captured these photographs in 1976-77 in a series called Mathematics. He took photographs of the mathematics department chalkboards at the University of Illinois, and while he was shooting, he “partially advanced the 120 film between exposures, the roll of film became not a series of distinct and isolated frames, but a series of multiple image strips which varied in length by the number of exposures that composed them. This way of using film is not in itself an innovation, but rather a stance on what a photographic image can picture.”
The New York Times recently started a tumblr blog called The Lively Morgue where they post photographs from the Times archive (estimated to include 5 to 6 million prints and 4 million negatives). Though the photographs are worthy of their own investigation, the Times is also publishing the back side of each photograph, which I found to be far more interesting. Here you see multiple layers of annotation, by multiple hands, before and after the photograph was published in the newspaper. As one who appreciates marginalia, process notes, and proofer’s marks, these back stories are absolutely wonderful. The Times describes and identifies the different layers of annotation:
A note about back stories: to enhance the photos’ value as artifacts and research tools, we’ll present an image of the reverse side of each print. In many cases, you’ll get to see how often the photo was used, in what context and at what size; the information provided by the photographer; and the information that made it into the published caption. An annotated reverse side of a photo from the morgue appears below, offering some clues about the kinds of notations you’ll see over and over again as you explore the Lively Morgue.
The Harriet Series: a type specimen translated for the web.
Lux: an experimental (and wonderfully typographic) film in the eighties using strobe effects.
A documentary film on Gregory Crewdson, filmed over a decade and being premiered this weekend at SXSW.
Futile Devices: An animated typeface by Nicolas Ménard
An incredible archive of cigar box labels.
A video that documents making a logotype out of 11,400 matches (to be burned in a later video).
A flickr set of vintage signage.
The Curator’s Code: a source code that enables better attribution of original sources as one curates and discovers on the web.
An in-depth interview on Art of the Title with David Fincher and Neil Kellerhouse on the title sequence and poster design for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Volume magazine published an interview with their designer, Irma Boom, on the differences between book and magazine design.
Lars Beller takes a discarded wood piece, like a supportive table leg or armrest, and creates these “Re-turned” birds. The packaging is quite nice as well.
I once wrote as an email subject line, “Edward Hopper paints how I feel.” It certainly sounds trite now, but there’s something about the way Hopper captures numbness that makes him one of my favorite painters. His subjects are typically isolated, either physically alone or emotionally alone. But most are positioned against the backdrop of the modern, urban city, where one should find connection with other people. One day, I’d like to study how light and windows function in his work, as well as how cinema and photography shaped his work. Hopper’s use of dramatic, cinematic light has also subsequently influenced directors, including Alfred Hitchock, who created a near replica of Hopper’s House by the Railroad as the Bates home in Psycho, and Terrence Malick in Days of Heaven.
I also found this incredible process sketch for Morning Sun below, where we see Hopper’s detailed anatomical revisions of light and color.
These are photographs by E.J. Bellocq, a photographer who captured New Orlean’s legal red district, known as Storyville, during the early twentieth century. Bellocq photographed portraits of Storyville prostitutes, some clothed, some nude, some masked, and some defaced. Though he died unknown, photographer Lee Friedlander discovered Bellocq’s negatives and was the main instrument for printing and exhibiting Bellocq’s work. Friedlander’s prints were exhibited by curator John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970, along with an accompanying catalog. These photographs come from a later book, Bellocq: Photographs from Storyville, published in 1996 with an introduction by Susan Sontag.
There is only a single subject per picture (except for one photograph of two champagne drinkers playing a card game) and Bellocq rarely comes in close to his subject. Typically, he photographs his subjects in full figure. Sontag comments: “Bellocq’s photographs belong to this same world of anti-formulaic, anti-salacious sympathy for ‘fallen’ women, though in his case, we can only speculate about the origin of that sympathy.” Despite the subject matter, it’s clear from the portraits that Bellocq had a certain level of access to these women, to such a degree that they would be at ease and comfortable in front of his camera. “Clearly, no one was being spied on, everyone was a willing subject. And Bellocq couldn’t have dictated to them how they should pose—whether to exhibit themselves as they might for a customer, or absent the customer, as the wholesome-looking country women most of them undoubtedly were.”
When I was first introduced to Bellocq’s work last fall, I was most haunted by the negatives that were deliberately scratched out, the woman defaced. No one knows who destroyed the negatives, but some critics guess that it was Bellocq himself in order to protect the identity of his subjects. Sontag similarly reflects on the defaced photographs: “The only pictures that do seem salacious—or convey something of the meanness and abjection of a prostitute’s life—are those on which the faces have been scratched out. These pictures are actually painful to look at, at least for the viewer. But then I am a woman, and unlike many men who look at these pictures, find nothing romantic about prostitution. That part of the subject I do take pleasure in is the beauty and forthright presence of many of the women, photographed in homely circumstances that affirm both sensuality and domestic ease, and the tangibleness of their vanished world.”
Looking through “Photographs from Storyville” this weekend, I was struck by how my background knowledge of the subject matter influenced my reading of the entire series. His photographs feature women in a range of dress and poses, and knowing that these were shot in a brothel changes our interpretation of each photograph, even when the women are fully clothed or simply playing a game. The image above, for example, is at once a beautiful collection and homage to a group of women. At the same time, there is a darker read, where this photographic collection is actually an advertising wall, where a customer can select a woman for purchase. Sontag argues that Bellocq’s work has value precisely because it is a series, a group of photographs instead of a single portrait: “Central to the impression the pictures make on us is that there are a large number of them, with the same setting and cast in a variety of poses, from the most natural to the most self-conscious, and degrees of dress/undress. That they are part of a series is what gives the photographs their integrity, their depth, their meaning. Each individual picture is informed by the meaning that attaches to the whole group.”
