Photograms, photographs, and collages by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in the eponymous The Art of Light.
Photographs by Tod Papageorge, former director of the Photography Department at the Yale School of Art. These are part of a street photography series from New York in the sixties, now part of the collection at the Yale University Art Gallery.
Though Alexander Calder is known for his mobiles and public sculptures, he also created these wire portraits of iconic figures and close friends. I recently saw an exhibition of these portraits, and there’s a wonderful interplay between the dimensionality of the sculpture and the shadows they cast on the wall.
Below are some of the photographs that graphic designer and photographer Herbert Matter took of Calder’s work and his studio. Matter’s photographs are purposefully dark, focusing on the shadows and play of Calder’s work.
I’ve been researching photograms lately—here are a few photograms (or rayographs) by Man Ray and Lazslo Moholy-Nagy from Man Ray Rayographies and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: The Photograms.
I’ve been spending more time in the Arts Library this semester, and looking at Henri Cartier-Bresson Photoportraits was a treat amongst more theoretical reading. It includes hundreds of portraits that I had never seen before, including this fantastic photograph of Josef Albers.
Josef Albers
Alberto Giacometti
This is my seventh year at Yale, but until last semester, I had never visited The Cushing Center at the Yale School of Medicine library. Named for 1891 Yale College graduate Harvey Cushing—who is considered the “father of modern neurosurgery”—the collection displays more than 400 jars of patients’ brains and tumors.
Cushing was a fascinating character: he was dedicated to advancing the field of brain surgery at a time when most neurosurgery was fatal. He meticulously and obsessively documented each case, making drawings immediately upon leaving the surgery area, and most notably, photographing his patients both before and after surgery. While the brain specimens are on display in the gallery, the Center also shows a small sampling of the thousands of photographs that Cushing collected. Though no one knows who took the photographs (it was most likely several different photographers), they display a remarkable humanity that I find almost unparalleled for such a stark, scientific, subject matter.
The photographs have not been digitized yet, so I later went back and shot a few of the photographs on display.
Cushing himself, shot in the same manner as his patients.
A collection of Robert Adam’s photographs, from the Yale University Art Gallery online catalog and from White Churches of the Plains.
Amy Merrick is known for arranging and styling flowers, but she posts photographs on her blog and flickr stream that are wonderfully nostalgic, in terms of dress, architecture, color. They almost remind me of the New England farmhouse version of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life.