Fred Herzog, “Granville/Smythe” (1959)
The street photography of Fred Herzog pops with vibrant colors and rich, almost Eggleston-ian detail. Some of the closer range shots double as a document of mid-century fashion elegance, and almost feel like a precursor to The Sartorialist.
Claude Friese-Greene, The Open Road (1927)
1927, in color: Friese-Greene made this legendary travelogue based upon the Biocolour process developed by his father William. (Though this is only the illusion of true color — black-and-white film stock processed through colored filters and stained — it’s still startling to see the distant past looking so vibrant.)
My favorite image-based site on the web alongside If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats is this terrific blog, which compiles amazing images across time and cultures. To give you an example of what the site offers, there have been recent posts on Year of the Monkey postcards, vintage souvenir magician programs, Tibetan anatomical paintings, and so much more, all in luscious hi-res. But like If Charlie Parker…, Ephemera Assemblyman is really a triumph of curation, an education in photos and drawings.
William Mumler, Self-portrait (1861)
This is the first “spirit photograph” ever taken, where Mumler captured what appeared to be the ghost of his cousin (at the time, dead for 12 years). His spirit photographs became wildly popular during the 1860s, when families sought consolation for relatives killed during the Civil War. He was eventually exposed as a fraud, once several living people were identified as the “ghosts” looming in his photos. Mumler at least deserves credit for his revolutionary, expert application of double exposure — or, if you’re a believer, for documenting the supernatural…
The “West Coast Weegee,” Mell Kilpatrick moved to Southern California with his wife and kids in 1928 to find work as a coronet player, but bad oral hygene cost him both his teeth and his budding musical career. After a temporary gig as a film projectionist, he found work as an automobile accident photographer, first part-time for an insurance company and later (because of his stellar work) full-time at the Santa Ana Register.
Though he’s still relatively unknown today, his photos remain both gruesome and gorgeous, and raise plenty of hairy questions about aesthetics and spectatorship. (They’ll also bring to mind Ballard, Cronenberg, and The Normal: “See the breaking glass/In the underpass… Hear the crushing steel/Feel the steering wheel.”) Like a driver passing the accidents themselves, you won’t be able to look away.
Photograph from the multitalented Abbas Kiarostami, one of the world’s greatest filmmakers.
“I’ve often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us, unless it’s inside a frame. So I took my car windscreen as a frame, and I turned off the windscreen wipers so as not to wipe off the rain — I wanted the raindrops to remain on the glass. Everything we can see in the photographs – the yellow-brown, the green, the black – we owe to the light. It’s the reflection of the light on the raindrops that gives the pictures these subtleties and nuances.”
“Rain on lens
Rain on lens
Boom in frame
Boom in frame
All is ruin
Let’s take it again”
- Smog (aka Bill Callahan)
“Anesthesiologist | Ft. Worth , TX | 3-Person Household | Youngest son works on lobster boat in Alaska | Day after Thanksgiving, 2007”
From photographer Mark Menjivar, “You Are What You Eat” is a photo series celebrating the things people keep in their refrigerators. Thanks to Kate Brokaw for the tip.
“Untitled (pink umbrella),” Saul Leiter
It’s amazing to think Leiter and Eggleston’s beautiful early color photographs were initially considered so gauche.
A photograph by David Byrne, courtesy of his online journal, of a room designed by the great Christian Marclay (of A Record Without A Cover fame) from the Sonic Youth exhibition “Sensational Fix,” currently on display in Dusseldorf.
Byrne writes perceptively of the famed band, and the show: “This is closer to how they must see themselves — as the hyphenate legacy of both the Beat and performance art worlds, and the wacky fringes of pop culture — death metal, freaky cults, underground comics, vinyl junkies and the dark side of Madonna and Karen Carpenter. What’s nice about it is the thread that ties together the art world with the pop music world with the Beat poets and a million others — and it stretches through time, backwards, forwards and sideways. It’s also a world of fandom — in a way, Sonic Youth are impresarios presenting the work of others that they love.”
Stephen Shore, “Room 125, West Bank Motel, Idaho Falls, ID, July 18, 1973,” Vintage chromogenic print
Somehow, the ubiquitous influence of Shore’s photography still can’t diminish the power of his original works.
From photographer Michael Hughes’s charming ongoing project “Souvenirs,” where he replaces landmarks with cheap collectible ephemera. To quote David Berman from his great Actual Air, “Souvenirs only remind you of buying them.”
“Banh Mi So 1: #1 House Special - grilled pork, vietnamese salami, sliced pork roll, pickled carrots, cilantro, and cucumber on a baguette”
From the amazing new Tumblr Scanwiches, which, true to its name, offers nothing but computer scans of sandwiches. Delicious.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan, “Pigeons in Winter,” Istanbul (2004)
Ceylan is one of the leading lights of international film right now; his DISTANT and CLIMATES are two of my favorite movies of the 2000s. He’s also an incredibly accomplished still photographer, evidenced by the photo above. Click on it to see a full gallery of Ceylan’s stunning work.
From the New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery, a sterescopic photo of the Stuyvesant pear tree at the northeast corner of 13th and 3rd. Ave in New York. Peter Stuyvesant, director-general of the New Netherlands colony, brought the pear tree with him sometime between the 1640s and 1660s and planted it on his farm (now the East Village) where it stood for two centuries. The tree fell victim to a vehicle collision in the 1860s.
