Swiss-born Robert Frank has a show at the Met and a film at Film Forum. He is 84 and lives in Manhattan. And no one has had a greater influence on photography in the last half-century.
Though he took many photos and made many films, his reputation rests almost entirely on a single book published in 1958.
The book (a collection of 83 black-and-white images of American life and now on view in a show at the Met) is an intimate visual chronicle of common people in ordinary situations drawn from several trips he made through his adopted country in the mid-1950s.
Frank's favorite photo in the book is this one...
Canal Street - New Orleans, 1955
He said of it, "It's rare that you have that movement and the variety of people on the street."
Philippe Séclier’s documentary showing at Film Forum is called: “An American Journey: Revisiting Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’” and retraces Frank's steps using a digital camera rather than a Leica.
in our Swedish Signs for Fridays Series. Sorry I need to go and make some coffee immediately...
in our Swedish signs for Fridays series... (he doesn't look like he is enjoying his hair raising choice of glasses much)
JonKoping: Galna Glasogon i neon (hope that isn't something rude because i just copied it from the website)
Anyway... an Ever-So-Slightly-Creepy Swedish Sign in our Swedish Signs for Friday Series.
[fixed link] IN slightly less creepy OTHER NEWS... a friend told me this funny story about when she went into Whole Foods. I had to draw it the minute we got off the phone--and here it is for your viewing pleasure. (I agreed to leave her nameless for her own fashion protection.)
(in our Swedish Signs For Fridays Series)
IN OTHER NEWS...
You can win a FREE copy or three of The Jesus Storybook Bible by going here or here. (Plus you can read an interview they did with me that's all about the book and writing it and the thinking behind it and stuff.)
Sign in Helsingborg. In our Swedish (even though I do actually speak not one word of Swedish as such) Signs for Fridays Series.
Doesn't someone need to rescue all of these toys?
Very cool photo essay by Glenna Gordon. Stuffed toys for sale in Monrovia, Liberia--furry frogs, bunnies, dogs, bears, blue elephants--and all of them teddies. More here.
(photo: Walker Evans Subway portraits)
For a few years I've been noticing three notes that play out on some NYC subway lines as the train leaves the station (you hear them on some 2, 4 and 5 lines). A NYT article uncovered what they are. They are the first three notes of the song "Somewhere" from "West Side Story".
"There's a place"... for us
how strangely fitting for New York City
a place for people from every corner of the globe
a place you come to find your place, to take your place
a place you fit when you don't fit anywhere else
And now to find there's a love song being sung to us
day and night, night and day, year in year out
from the ground under our feet
by subway trains underneath Broadway
there's a place for us
I love New York!
PS: big blog book giveway going on and your chance to get a free copy of Angry Conversations With God. More: here.
Children at Puppet Theatre. Paris, 1963
The photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, (1898-1995) was a master of disappearing. He was just over five feet tall, didn't carry a load of fancy equipment or make a big fuss so people tended not to take him seriously. If they even noticed him at all.
He used a 2 1/4" Rolleiflex "because you can hold a Rolleiflex without raising it to your eye; so they didn't see me taking the pictures." (note: that's the camera with the view finder on top)
He would then just be still. "I just kept motionless like a statue." he said. "They never saw me clicking away. For the kind of photography I do, one has to be very unobtrusive and to blend in with the crowd."
It takes humility and humanity to photograph like Eisenstaedt. To be able to disappear like that and let only your subject be the thing.
He took the famous photo of a sailor kissing a nurse on VJ Day in Times Square on August 15th, 1945.
Perhaps it's not unlike getting out of the way as a writer and letting the story through?
The most famous woman in the world photographed by the most famous photographer of the most famous in the world. Annie Leibovitz shoots the queen... very interesting stuff. you actually see the cultures clashing right in front of your very eyes. (And you can hardly blame the Queen. Is there, do you think, a more foolish thing to say to Her Majesty, dressed up in her full Imperial Royal Regalia?)
desperate doll spotted in Virginia early this morning.
(looks to me like a rough night.)
