Thursday, October 31, 2013

Suleman Anaya / The Return Sante D'Orazio

Работы известного фотографа Sante D’Orazio (98 фото - 7.65Mb)

The Return of Sante D’Orazio

A poster-child of the supermodel era, which he helped construct, the career of fashion photographer Sante D’Orazio seemed to burn out prematurely as a result of the excesses and pressures of the times. But with a new show at Christie’s, D’Orazio is staging his comeback and cashing in on some of his iconic images.
Left: Linda Evangelista; Right: Keith Richards | Photo: Sante D'Orazio
NEW YORK, United States — Sante D’Orazio typified an era. From the moment Andy Warhol gave the Brooklyn-born photographer his first job, D’Orazio became somewhat of a poster-child for the hedonistic fashion world of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Along with peers like Peter Lindbergh, Patrick Demarchelier and Herb Ritts, D’Orazio was part of a generation of photographers whose highly stylised, hyper-sensual imagery captured the pulse of their bullish time. This was the heyday of supermodels and of Azzedine Alaïa, a time when a voluptuous larger-than-life feminine ideal reigned supreme. Now, after a 7-year absence from fashion, D’Orazio is staging an exhibit of some of his most famous shots at Christie’s New York, a move meant to herald his comeback — and hopefully earn the photographer new commercial commissions.
D’Orazio’s covers for Allure magazine and his provocative nudes of models like Christy Turlington, Helena Christensen and Cindy Crawford, for the pages of Italian VogueInterview, and Vanity Fair, among others, are so representative of their time, that they fill entire threads on online forums like thefashionspot.com. They have also become collector’s items, a fact D’Orazio is leveraging with the private sale of large-format prints of some of his most iconic images. BoF reached the photographer at Christie’s space on the 20th floor of New York’s Rockefeller Center, as he was putting the final touches on his show, “Other Graces,” which opens on Monday.
D’Orazio’s career remained strong even after his trademark, overtly sexual style went out of fashion. In the early 1990s, when photographers like Corinne Day ushered in the grunge era in magazines and advertising campaigns, Sante D’Orazio found demand for his glossy work in Hollywood, where he shot the likes of Angelina Jolie, Michelle Pfeiffer and Keith Richards. “My pictures were more sensual and glamorous and the whole grunge movement and all that was just not my cup of tea. That is what dissuaded me from continuing to work in the fashion field because I just didn’t see women that way.”
Around 2005, however, after a major gallery show of explicit portraits of Pamela Anderson, things got quiet around D’Orazio. “I had been doing the fashion and beauty stuff and the portraiture and the celebrities for a good 25 years, so I had to stop all the commercial work.” D’Orazio, who had trained as a painter under Philip Guston in his youth, turned away from fashion, he says, in order to return to his more abstract, fine art work.
But his split with the system seems to have been motivated as much by burn-out as by a need to explore his neglected interests. Much is made of the pressure fashion designers face in today’s constant-output world, but as D’Orazio describes it, top fashion photographers are subject to similar strains: “The shootings consume you. There’s pre-production, production, post-production — and if you have four or five of those a week, they are all-consuming.”
It didn’t take long for his magazine and advertising work to dry up. Clients simply stopped calling, he recalls. “People think that you’re not into it anymore, and in many ways my head wasn’t, I was concentrating on other things. That basically was my commercial demise. After a couple of years it became hard to get work, because I had basically disappeared from the scene. The way it works is a lot of the commercial work starts with editorial work and when you’re not in the mix with people, at the fashion shows, socialising…. It is a political game as well, if you’re not in the scene, Paris-London-New York-Milan, and you’re not seen and you’re not showing up in editorial pages anymore, people just think you died.”
But D’Orazio claims he was very much alive, just preparing for his comeback. He is ready now, he says, and in some ways the Christie’s show is D’Orazio’s pitch to land commercial work again. “Now that I have discovered and developed a language for myself, I have a lot to go on that people have yet to see because it hasn’t been displayed anywhere. At the same time I miss a lot of what I did before, portraiture and beauty and editorial. And the truth of the matter is, at this point I have a lot more to give.” So far, D’Orazio says he doesn’t have any major editorial or advertising projects in the pipeline. “But I have a joy for it once again and I am going to approach this with a whole new vision. I’m excited about it.”
According to D’Orazio, eight of the forty-six prints in the show (each of which comes in editions of three and ranges in price from $55,000 to $120,000) have already sold to contemporary art and photography collectors, and that’s before the show has officially opened. That should be good news for the photographer, given that, apart from reigniting his commercial career, the sale also appears intended to finance the photographer’s livelihood. “I have been friends with so many great artists and collected their work over the years. For the last couple of years, it’s been Andy Warhol who has financed my life, or rather the sale of one of his canvases which I owned. It went for over a couple of million dollars.”
Other photographers, like David LaChapelle, have tried to cross over from commercial photography into fine art, with mixed results. For D’Orazio, right now, the question is whether he can cross over back into fashion.
Работы известного фотографа Sante D’Orazio (98 фото - 7.65Mb)
Работы известного фотографа Sante D’Orazio (98 фото - 7.65Mb)
Работы известного фотографа Sante D’Orazio (98 фото - 7.65Mb)
Работы известного фотографа Sante D’Orazio (98 фото - 7.65Mb)

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Zbigniew Dlubak / Structures



Zbigniew Dlubak
STRUCTURES
by Krzysztof Jurecki


Zbigniew Dłubak, Autoportret, ca. 1950, © Fundacja Archeologia Fotografii/Armelle Dłubak
Self-taught art theoretician, painter and photographer. His primary goal was for the latter two to gain recognition as two separate forms of artistic expression. Born on on the 26th of April,1921 in Radomsko, died on the 21st of August, 2005 in Warsaw.
During the Second World War, he studied photography and painting on his own in an informal setting. Even after he was taken as a prisoner of the Mauthausen concentration camp, he organised exhibitions of art at the camp. After the war ended and he was released from Mauthausen in1945 he returned to Poland, where he took an active part in the reconstruction of Polish artistic life after six years of foreign occupation. He became one of the cofounders of the art group Grupa 55. Between 1947 and 1949 he participated in the art work promoting the modern views of The Club of Young Artists and Scientists in Warsaw. Between 1953-1972 he was the editor-in-chief of the Fotografia monthly. In 1948 he was one of the organizers of the Contemporary Art Exhibition in Kraków. He cooperated with several Warsaw galleries - Krzywe Koło, Współczesna, Foksal and Remont, later with Wrocław’s :Permafo: and Seminarium-Foto-Medium-Art. In the years of 1965-1975 Dłubak worked a lecturer at the National Film School in Łódź and at the Higher School of Fine Arts in Łódź. Together with his students and alumni he founded the Warsaw Seminary group, which functioned between 1975 and 1981, striving to explore the theory of the rendering process
In the late forties he eagerly and successfully created works that referred to surrealism and abstraction (geometrical and allusive), less often to constructivism. During the time of social realism he tried to withdraw from artistic life, however he did make works that were inspired by this growing trends and wrote texts on photography exhibitions. During this period he also photographed his own series of anti-aesthetic urban landscapes.
Inspired by his own theories of existence and a short she'd story he'd written Dłubak executed a series called Existences 1959-66. These photographs were documentary in nature, drawing cutes from American photography from the Farm Security Administration era. In 1967 he presented hisIconosphere series, which became an important stepping stone in Polish photography on the road to breaking down the concept of artistic photography. He initiated a series of Exhibits of Subjective Photography in 1968 and the exhibition Photographers in Pursuit in 1971. In 1970 he began studying the symbolism of the body within Gestures series. He later became interested in the concept of contextual art, promoted mainly by Jan Świdziński. In the early 1980s he began living in Meudon outside of Paris, where he worked extensively on his art, before returning to Warsaw for the last years of his life.
In 1983 he began producing a series that blurred the lines between photography and painting. He worked on the Asymmetry project for several years and its ultimate shape was presented in 2003 as the artist’s individual exhibition at the Zachęta Art Gallery in Warsaw. The show corresponded with the constructivist explorations of Władysław Strzemiński and his Theory of Vision.
Dłubak’s portfolio of photography and painting was also presented that year against the works of Grupa 55 in 2003 at a show entitled Zbigniew Dłubak and Grupa 55 at the Museum of Art in Łódź. Dłubak is considered a great authority in post-war Polish photography , with his avant-garde practice shaping the inspiration for many generations of artists since the end of '50s through today.
Author: Krzysztof Jurecki, Museum of Art in Łódź, March 2004. Updated: August 2005. Translated by Jagoda Dziadek, January 2011.




Morfi Jang / Women



WOMEN
by Morfi Jang





Scott Foltz / Women in the water


Scott Foltz
WOMEN IN THE WATER




Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Alice Munro / I like looking at people's lives / Quote

Alice Munro
Ilustration by Triunfo Arciniegas

I LIKE LOOKING AT PEOPLE´S LIVES
by Alice Munro
BIOGRAPHY


I like looking at people’s lives over a number of years without continuity. Like catching them in snapshots. And I like the way people relate, or don’t relate, to the people they were earlier.... I think this is why I’m not drawn to writing novels. Because I don’ see that people develop and arrive somewhere. I just see people living in flashes. From time to time.

Geoff Hancock
“An Interview with Alice Munro”
Canadian Fiction Magazine, 43 (1982): 74-114.



Monday, October 28, 2013

The 100 best novels / No 6 / The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759)




The 100 best novels

writtein English


No 06

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

(1759)


Laurence Sterne's vivid novel caused delight and consternation when it first appeared and has lost little of its original bite

Robert McCrum
Monday 28 October 2013

Tristram Shandy and its author, Laurence Sterne, are so intensely modern in mood and attitude, so profanely alert to the nuances of the human comedy, and so engaged with the narrative potentiality of the genre that it comes as something of a shock to discover that the novel was published during the seven years war. In other words, it appeared during the annus mirabilis of that prototype of international warfare that saw stunning British military victories in India, Canada and the Caribbean, and established the first British empire that would send the English language around the world. Some of the raw ebullience of the national mood is mirrored in the slightly mad pages of this uniquely entertaining novel.
"Shandy" is a word of obscure origin meaning "crack-brained, half-crazy". Tristram himself says he is writing a "civil, nonsensical, good-humoured Shandean book". As such, it became a huge bestseller in the 1760s. Sterne became a celebrity, and made a fortune, fulfilling a deep ambition. "I wrote, not to be fed but to be famous," he once said. Success had come late. Born in Ireland in 1713, Sterne spent much of his life as a country vicar near York. (In the novel, Parson Yorick is an ironical self-portrait.) His work had the difficulties often associated with original work. The first two volumes of Tristram Shandy were rejected by the London publisher, Robert Dodsley, but, when privately printed, quickly sold out.

Like all subsequent bestsellers, Sterne and his book became the subject of fierce literary argument. The novel was obscene, preposterous and infuriating, the opposite of what a novel should be. The author was a "coxcomb", a vain and deplorable impostor, deficient in the good taste of a true artist. The notorious Black Page (between chapters 12 and 13 of volume I) was a silly stunt. And so on. Dr Johnson expressed the critical consensus when, in 1776, he boomed: "Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last."
But the good doctor was wrong. Tristram Shandy is odd; and it did last. Furthermore, it continues to exert a great influence on successive generations of writers. In the 1980s, magical realists such as Salman Rushdie rediscovered Sterne. Peter Carey, the Booker prizewinner, even acknowledged an influence in the title of his novel, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith.
The secret of Sterne's hold on his readers is that Tristram Shandy is a comic tour de force whose humour, of observation and incident, explodes on to every page from the hilarious moment, in chapter 1, when Tristram Shandy is almost not conceived in a bizarre episode of coitus interruptus. An abrupt vitality is Sterne's great contribution to the art of the novel. Adopting Fielding's omniscient third-person narrative, he cheerfully set about subverting any authorial omniscience by humorously reflecting on how little he, the author, knew of his characters or their predicaments. The critic Christopher Ricks captures Sterne's playfulness when he describes Tristram Shandy as "the greatest shaggy dog story in the language".
So what is it about ? The short answer is that it is about 600 pages (in my Penguin Classics edition), and that, despite its title, it fails to give the reader much of the life or any of the opinions of its hero. Shandy himself only gets born in volume IV. Much of the narrative is taken up by Unce Toby, a veteran of the wars against Louis XIV, and his obsession with siegecraft. When, at the end, Tristram's long-suffering mother asks, "Lord! what is all this story about?" Parson Yorick replies, "A COCK and a BULL – and one of the best of its kind I ever heard."


A Note on the Text:
The first two volumes were published in 1759 in York by Ann Ward (at Sterne's expense) having been turned down by Robert Dodsley. When the novel became a runaway success, Dodsley rushed out a second edition, with illustrations by Hogarth in April 1760, and then published volumes III and IV.
Sterne took a close interest in his publishers, and for the last volumes moved to Becket and De Hondt to get better terms. He enjoyed publishing his work serially, small octavo volumes of fewer than 200 pages. The full-length Tristram Shandyconveys none of the delight that the 18th-century reader could expect, collecting the novel, volume by volume from year to year.
Other Sterne Titles:
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)



THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)  
031 Dracula by Bram Stoker  (1897)
035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

Alice Munro / The Bear Came Over the Mountain / Short Story


The Bear Came Over the Mountain
by  Alice Munro
Fiona lived in her parents’ house, in the town where she and Grant went to university. It was a big, bay-windowed house that seemed to Grant both luxurious and disorderly, with rugs crooked on the floors and cup rings bitten into the table varnish. Her mother was Icelandic—a powerful woman with a froth of white hair and indignant far-left politics. The father was an important cardiologist, revered around the hospital but happily subservient at home, where he would listen to his wife’s strange tirades with an absent-minded smile. Fiona had her own little car and a pile of cashmere sweaters, but she wasn’t in a sorority, and her mother’s political activity was probably the reason. Not that she cared. Sororities were a joke to her, and so was politics—though she liked to play “The Four Insurgent Generals” on the phonograph, and sometimes also the “Internationale,” very loud, if there was a guest she thought she could make nervous. A curly-haired gloomy-looking foreigner was courting her—she said he was a Visigoth—and so were two or three quite respectable and uneasy young interns. She made fun of them all and of Grant as well. She would drolly repeat some of his small-town phrases. He thought maybe she was joking when she proposed to him, on a cold bright day on the beach at Port Stanley. Sand was stinging their faces and the waves delivered crashing loads of gravel at their feet.
“Do you think it would be fun—” Fiona shouted. “Do you think it would be fun if we got married?”
He took her up on it, he shouted yes. He wanted never to be away from her. She had the spark of life.

Sunday, October 27, 2013

Alice Munro / Face / Short Story


Face
By Alice Munro
BIOGRAPHY

I am convinced that my father looked at me, really saw me, only once. After that, he knew what was there.
In those days, they didn’t let fathers into the glare of the theatre where babies were born, or into the room where the women about to give birth were stifling their cries or suffering aloud. Fathers laid eyes on the mothers only once they were cleaned up and conscious and tucked under pastel blankets in the ward or in semi-private or private rooms. My mother had a private room, as became her status in town, and it was just as well, actually, seeing the way things turned out.
I don’t know whether my father saw my mother before or after he stood outside the window of the nursery for his first glimpse of me. I rather think that it was after, and that when she heard his steps outside her door she felt the anger in them but did not yet know what had caused it. After all, she had borne him a son, which was, presumably, what all men wanted.
I know what he said. Or what she told me he said.
“What a chunk of chopped liver.”
Then, “You don’t need to think you’re going to bring that into the house.”
One side of my face was—is—normal. And my entire body was normal from toes to shoulders. Twenty-one inches was my length, eight pounds five ounces my weight. A strapping male infant, fair-skinned, though probably still red from my unremarkable recent journey.

Saturday, October 26, 2013

Alice Munro / Boys and Girls / Short Story


BOYS AND GIRLS
by Alice Munro
BIOGRAPHY
    
My father was a fox farmer. That is, he raised silver foxes, in pens; and in the fall and early winter, when their fur was prime, he killed them and skinned them and sold their pelts to the Hudson's Bay Company or the Montreal Fur Traders. These companies supplied us with heroic calendars to hang, one on each side of the kitchen door. Against a background of cold blue sky and black pine forests and treacherous northern rivers, plumed adventures planted the flags of England and or of France; magnificent savages bent their backs to the portage. 

    For several weeks before Christmas, my father worked after supper in the cellar of our house. the cellar was whitewashed , and lit by a hundred-watt bulb over the worktable. My brother Laird and I sat on the top step and watched. My father removed the pelt inside-out from the body of the fox, which looked surprisingly small, mean, and rat-like, deprived of its arrogant weight of fur. The naked, slippery bodies were collected in a sack and buried in the dump. One time the hired man, Henry Bailey, had taken a swipe at me with this sack, saying, "Christmas present!" My mother thought that was not funny. In fact she disliked the whole pelting operation--that was what the killing, skinning, and preparation of the furs was called – and wished it did not have to take place in the house. There was the smell. After the pelt had been stretched inside-out on a long board my father scraped away delicately, removing the little clotted webs of blood vessels, the bubbles of fat; the smell of blood and animal fat, which the strong primitive odor of the fox itself, penetrated all parts of the house. I found it reassuringly seasonal, like the smell of oranges and pine needles. 

    Henry Bailey suffered from bronchial troubles. He would cough and cough until his narrow face turned scarlet, and his light blue, derisive eyes filled up with tears; then he took the lid off the stove, and, standing well back, shot out a great clot of phlegm – hss – straight into the heart of the flames. We admired his for this performance and for his ability to make his stomach growl at will, and for his laughter, which was full of high whistlings and gurglings and involved the whole faulty machinery of his chest. It was sometimes hard to tell what he was laughing at, and always possible that it might be us. 

Friday, October 25, 2013

Alice Munro / Runaway / Short Story



Runaway
by  Alice Munro
BIOGRAPHY

Carla heard the car coming before it topped the little rise in the road that around here they called a hill. It’s her, she thought. Mrs. Jamieson—Sylvia—home from her holiday in Greece. From the barn door—but far enough inside that she could not easily be seen—she watched the road where Mrs. Jamieson would have to drive by, her place being half a mile farther along than Clark and Carla’s.
If it was somebody coming to see them, the car would be slowing down by now. But still Carla hoped. Let it not be her.
It was. Mrs. Jamieson turned her head once, quickly—she had all she could do to maneuver her car through the ruts and puddles the rain had made in the gravel—but she didn’t lift a hand off the wheel to wave, she didn’t spot Carla. Carla got a glimpse of a tanned arm bare to the shoulder, hair bleached a lighter color than it had been before, more white now than silver-blond, and an expression that was both exasperated and amused at her own exasperation—just the way Mrs. Jamieson would look negotiating this road. When she turned her head there was something like a bright flash—of inquiry, of hopefulness—that made Carla shrink back.
So.
Maybe Clark didn’t know yet. If he was sitting at the computer, he would have his back to the window and the road.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

Alice Munro / Passion / Short Story

Eleanor
Chicago, 1954
Photo by Harry Callahan
PASSION
by Alice Munro
BIOGRAPHY



When Grace goes looking for the Traverses’ summer house, in the Ottawa Valley, it has been many years since she was in that part of the country. And, of course, things have changed. Highway 7 now avoids towns that it used to go right through, and it goes straight in places where, as she remembers, there used to be curves. This part of the Canadian Shield has many small lakes, which most maps have no room to identify. Even when she locates Sabot Lake, or thinks she has, there seem to be too many roads leading into it from the county road, and then, when she chooses one, too many paved roads crossing it, all with names that she does not recall. In fact, there were no street names when she was here, more than forty years ago. There was no pavement, either—just one dirt road running toward the lake, then another running rather haphazardly along the lake’s edge.
Now there is a village. Or perhaps it’s a suburb, because she does not see a post office or even the most unpromising convenience store. The settlement lies four or five streets deep along the lake, with houses strung close together on small lots. Some of them are undoubtedly summer places—the windows already boarded up, as they always were for the winter. But many others show all the signs of year-round habitation—habitation, in many cases, by people who have filled the yards with plastic gym sets and outdoor grills and training bikes and motorcycles and picnic tables, where some of them sit now having lunch or beer on this warm September day. There are other people, not so visible—students, maybe, or old hippies living alone—who have put up flags or sheets of tinfoil for curtains. Small, mostly decent, cheap houses, some fixed to withstand the winter and some not.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Alice Munro / Train / Short Story

Man
by Triunfo Arciniegas
Train
By Alice Munro

BIOGRAPHY



This is a slow train anyway, and it has slowed some more for the curve. Jackson is the only passenger left, and the next stop is about twenty miles ahead. Then the stop at Ripley, then Kincardine and the lake. He is in luck and it’s not to be wasted. Already he has taken his ticket stub out of its overhead notch.
He heaves his bag, and sees it land just nicely, in between the rails. No choice now — the train’s not going to get any slower.
He takes his chance. A young man in good shape, agile as he’ll ever be. But the leap, the landing, disappoints him. He’s stiffer than he’d thought, the stillness pitches him forward, his palms come down hard on the gravel between the ties, he’s scraped the skin. Nerves.
Illustration by Raymond Verdaguer
Illustration by Raymond Verdaguer
The train is out of sight; he hears it putting on a bit of speed, clear of the curve. He spits on his hurting hands, getting the gravel out. Then picks up his bag and starts walking back in the direction he has just covered on the train. If he followed the train he would show up at the station there well after dark. He’d still be able to complain that he’d fallen asleep and wakened all mixed up, thinking he’d slept through his stop when he hadn’t, jumped off all confused.
He would have been believed. Coming home from so far away, from Germany and the war, he could have got mixed up in his head. It’s not too late, he would be where he was supposed to be before midnight. But all the time he’s thinking this he’s walking in the opposite direction. He doesn’t know many names of trees. Maples, that everybody knows. Pines. He’d thought that where he jumped was in some woods, but it wasn’t. The trees are just along the track, thick on the embankment, but he can see the flash of fields behind them. Fields green or rusty or yellow. Pasture, crops, stubble. He knows just that much. It’s still August.