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Ashes and Snow - by Gregory Colbert “Ashes and Snow is a celebration of the living masterpieces of nature. Since 1992 photographer and filmmaker Gregory Colbert has collaborated with more than 45 species around the world to create a 21st-century bestiary. "These images attempt to express the world not only through human eyes, but also through the eyes of a whale, an elephant, a manatee, a meerkat, a cheetah, or an orangutan.” text from Codex Ashes and Snow site ~ ~ ~ ~   "I think we desire the things we're afraid of. We court our fears." Sam Taylor-Wood > from article Art Girls Just Wanna Have Fun [NY Times] > photograph : Self Portrait Suspended 5 - by Sam Taylor-Wood books by Sam Taylor-Wood : Sam Taylor-Wood: Third Party   //   Sam Taylor-Wood   //   Crying Men ~ ~ ~ ~ In photography, in video and now in film, Shirin Neshat creates characters trapped between systems: Iran and the West, male-dominated society and womanhood, beauty and horror. "I have an obsession with my relationship with Iran and how that's been taken away from me.... Art is the only thing where I can completely be free and create this other world that allows me to become complete." > photo from Neshat's newest film, "The Last Word" - a man sits behind a long table, an ominous book in front of him. Identically attired men bring him more books... The man glares at her. "Do you know how much evidence we have against you?" he asks. The woman stares back. Her tears fall. Finally she begins to speak, but not to address the threats. Instead, in a chanting melody, she recites poetry.  Her voice, shaky at first, grows stronger. The men are transfixed. They stop their work and stare. The interrogator falls silent, his mouth slightly open. The woman rises. Having staggered her interrogators with the beauty of her words, she walks away. > from article: Trapped between two worlds - Displacement is at the heart of Iranian American artist Shirin Neshat's work. By Tyler Green, LA Times Oct 9 2005 > book: Shirin Neshat -- by Roselee Goldberg, Giorgio Verzotti

Patrick Demarchelier : I just shot the Pirelli 2005 calendar in Rio - portraits of twelve girls (who all happen to be supermodels). I wanted it to reflect the beauty of women who have a pretty spirit, and capture their spontaneity and emotions. [Who are some of the artists who have inspired you to be a photographer?] I love the work of Irving Penn. I collect his photographs and also collect many contemporary artists' work such as Andy Warhol, Basquiat, Francisco Clemente, Jeff Koons and Keith Haring.

[What has been your greatest accomplishment? I don't like that word "accomplishment." To me, in photography, that means you're finished, and once you attain that, you can't surpass that. I'm just starting, and I want to continue to create and improve. > SOMA mag. March 2005 > photographs : Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman and unknown model from his site demarchelier.net > books : Patrick Demarchelier Flowers - by Irving Penn

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.. .. Richard Avedon once described what he saw in many of the famous faces he photographed. "People -- running from unhappiness, hiding in power -- are locked within their reputations, ambitions, beliefs," he wrote in "An Autobiography, Richard Avedon" (1993) about his portraits of such tenacious survivors as Kennedy family matriarch Rose Kennedy, writer Truman Capote and pianist/raconteur Oscar Levant. Other images in the book -- of war victims and mental patients -- spoke to a different kind of portrait. "People, unprotected by their roles, become isolated in beauty and intellect and illness and confusion," he wrote. In the 1980s, Avedon took several photographs that were shocking for their time. Perhaps the best known was one in 1980 of Brooke Shields at age 15 striking a suggestive pose wearing skin-tight jeans for the Calvin Klein ad campaign, "Nothing Comes Between Me and My Calvins." /// A year later he photographed actress Nastassja Kinski lying nude on the floor, a python slithering from her toes to her lips. The photograph appeared in Vogue and was made into a poster that sold 2 million copies. ///

While few magazine editors or art directors who worked with him wanted to be quoted, many said he could be extremely difficult. "His ego is so overblown. He is self-centered to a fault. He loves his own work to the exclusion of all others," one of them told People magazine in 1994. Avedon himself told stories about the many hours that Kinski spent lying on the floor in his studio, waiting for the python to slither along her flesh, just so. // Seemingly inexhaustible through his 70s, Avedon lectured in the U.S., France and Germany, taught a master class at the International Center of Photography in New York City and was honored with prize after prize.  The most prestigious included lifetime achievement awards from the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 1989 and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2000. In 2001, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. > from obituary - Richard Avedon / 1923-2004 Looking at Fashion and Fame Through an Unsparing Lens -  By Mary Rourke, Los Angeles Times Oct 2 2004 > Avedon and 60s model Twiggy pose together before the opening of Avedon's show entitled "Evidence 1944-1994" at the National Portrait Gallery March 21, 1995. (Kevin Lamarque / Reuters) > photos at top : Nastassja Kinski ; Brooke Shields ;  Contralto Marian Anderson ...An Autobiography - by Richard Avedon

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I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present because we tend while living here and now to perceive only what is random and barren and formless about it. ... These are our symptoms and our monuments. I want simply to save them, for what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary. ~ ~ A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. Diane Arbus.........>>more photographs, quotes, books on page : Diane Arbus

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Margaret Bourke-White[1904-1971] What is amazing about Margaret Bourke-White's life is the number of opportunities she managed to get for herself. In photojournalism, getting where the action is. Being there when it happens, is a major part of the talent and, ultimately, the achievement.  And Bourke-White managed to get herself where things were happening when they were happening by working hard at being lucky and by her piercing intelligence and intuition.  She was able to sense the potential of a great story and to get the editors of Life to transport her to the hot spot on time.  An incredibly hard worker with legendary stamina and perseverance, she was also charismatic and, by all accounts, beautiful.  Inevitably, people wanted to help her, giving her story leads and access. (And she apparently had a sixth sense about who would turn out to be useful to her.)

Like most photographers, she had the ability to focus her personality on the getting of the photograph - by being persuasive, charming, persistent, manipulative, whatever it took.  On top of all this, she had an exalted view of the role of the photographer as witness and felt that "getting there" and sending back the word was a privilege and duty. This messianic view of her job must have given her a lot of energy. from review by Elsa Dorfman [originally published in The Women's Review of Books, March 1997] of book: Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography, by Vicki Goldberg left: Bourke-White atop a steel gargoyle protruding from the 61st story of the [then brand-new] Chrysler Building, photographing the New York City skyline -          from 1st book : ...Margaret Bourke White .........by Susan Goldman Rubin Margaret Bourke-White : Photographer

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For thirty years now I have been engaged with a single idea: to use my own body as a means of expressing our relationship to nature.  Just as rocks and trees have not changed much over time, so our bodies are not much different today than they were five hundred years ago; hands, fingers, toes, all those basic things are essentially the same.  This is one of the reasons why I aim for timelessness in my work. It also begins to explain some of the limitations I have set up for myself as a photographer.  I learned about limitations as a graduate student in an art history class at the Rhode Island School of Design. It was a quote from Georges Braque that nailed it. "Out of limitations, new forms emerge."  Six words, but they are so concise and precise. To know what it is that we want to do, Braque was saying, we had to know what it was we did not want to do, what it was we would never allow ourselves to do. If you happen to be an artist yourself, try it. What are your limitations? What will you never allow yourself to do?  Arno Rafael Minkkinen -- from his site photographs Dead Horse Point, 1997; Foster's Pond, 2000 - from gallery site ...book Body Land

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I want to make images that have open, narrative qualities, enought to suggest ideas about human limits. I want there to be a combination of the past juxtaposed with the modern.  I use nature to symbolize the search, saving a tree, watering the earth. In this fabricated world, strange clouds of smog float by; there are holes in the sky.  These mythic images mirror our world, where nature is domesticated, controlled, and destroyed. Through my work I explore technology and a poetry of existence.  These can be very heavy, overly didactic issues to convey in art, so I choose to portray them through a more theatrically absurd approach. Robert ParkeHarrison quotes and photographs from Twin Palms Publishers site Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison artist site ...book The Architect's Brother by Robert ParkeHarrison

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Brona Balfe reviews the book "Eva: Eloge De Ma Fille" So the first question must be - who is this woman writing a review of a book of photographs of a young woman in the nude or partially clothed?  Well, I'm a little more than just that description, a mother with one adult daughter and three sons, also a grandmother of a little girl through my daughter.  I have loved the dreamy eroticism of the work of such photographers as David Hamilton since my early teens, and recently I attempted to co-author a book about.. the eroticism of certain nude or partly clothed teenaged or pre-teen girls.  So, that is the shocking bit out. Having said it, I can add that I've found several other women prepared to admit an interest in the same genre -- not many mind you, and the few that did admit it, did so very reluctantly. Women as well as men can celebrate virginal beauty. But it goes much deeper than this, as most of the writers on this web site [Inquisition 21st century] have realized. We need to restore to eroticism its rightful sacredness. ///

Now, as I turn the pages of Eva: Eloge De Ma Fille, I see that Irina Ionesco has gone even farther than I had dared to go in my own imagination.  Some girls harbour a dark secret of fantasizing about being captured and put on display as objects for sale, a fantasy perhaps brought into being by being excessively warned at home about the dangers lurking abroad. Looking at the pictures of Eva, I saw a beautiful daughter dressed up, half-dressed, naked, unveiled and re-veiled. I saw her as a coquette, sometimes an angel, and sometimes a divine whore -- a delightful plaything.  Playing within a world created by a caring, loving woman, in Eva's case her mother, but it could equally be any woman, were it not for the society that has now criminalized such a game. > from Inquisition 21st century review > photos from publisher site: Alice Press ...Eva: Eloge De Ma Fille - by Irina Ionesco

 

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Herb Ritts  [1952-2002] earned international recognition as a fashion, celebrity and fine art photographer who helped define the image-conscious 1980s and '90s. "Herb had a sense of the iconic, he could either reduce or elevate a person of prominence to their visual essence," says David Friend, editor of creative development at Vanity Fair and former director of photography at Life magazine.  "Almost like a great caricaturist working with very few lines, or a great sculptor working with just the right tools, he was able to make that iconic representation of a person." Friend says Ritts captured his subjects because they felt comfortable with him. "Herb was a very generous, giving guy, and that comes through in his pictures. People felt relaxed, he was really able to get people to open up because they trusted him. You can feel that connection in his images." .... "I was a sales rep for my father's furniture company when I literally fell into photography," [says Ritts]. "I had a Miranda camera and started taking pictures of roommates and friends, and the one that put me in a place that got me published was Richard Gere.  "We had taken some pictures at the beginning of his film career, just prior to the [1978] release of 'Days of Heaven.' Richard mentioned to the publicist that I had taken some pictures that he liked and that my work should be considered with all the real photographers that were shooting him. They ended up in Vogue, Esquire and Mademoiselle, all in one month." from article 'This Looks Good' - The Late Photographer Herb Ritts, From  Beginning to End, by Mark Edward Harris, LA Times, Dec 7 2003 photos: center: Jodie Foster; right: Richard Gere, 1978 from Fahey/Klein Gallery site ...Mark Edward Harris. Faces of the Twentieth Century: Master Photographers and Their Work Herb Ritts: Work  // more photos from this book on page: photography: resources

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.. .. ...Miyelo is comprised of a series of large-scale, panoramic  photographs of a Lakota Ghost Dance....  The images record a re-creation of the dance that was originally performed by members of Chief Big Foot's band on December 29, 1890 near Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota.  The intent was to capture the event as a delirious remembrance, an ephemeral dream. Accompanying these and other related images is extensive literary and historical documentation of the period during which the Ghost Dance originated, leading up to and beyond the tragic massacre at Wounded Knee. ... Part of the proceeds from the sale of Miyelo books will be donated by  to the SuAnne Big Crow Boys & Girls Club of Pine Ridge, South Dakota. image and summary of book from publisher site: Perceval Press

.. .. I wanted to get the feeling of moment. But I wanted to capture the feeling rather than a simple document.  And by using this technique, by using a long exposure like this, it sorta made them blend into the landscape and become transparent... Viggo Mortensen - about creating photographs for his book Miyelo - from interview article: Viggo Mortensen on photography, art and politics, HouseOfTelcontar.com, Oct 09, 2003 books by Viggo Mortenson - writings, paintings, collages, assemblages, found objects, photographs: Coincidence of Memory  /  Recent Forgeries  /  SignLanguage

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Portraits  -by Steve McCurry Magnum photographer Steve McCurry never set out to take portraits. Critically acclaimed and recognized internationally for his classic reportage, over the last 20 years he has worked for the "National Geographic" and other publications on numerous assignments: along the Afghan border, in Baghdad, Beirut and the Sahel.  McCurry's coverage of the monsoon won first prize in the World Press Awards, and was part of his portfolio when he was named Magazine Photographer of the Year in 1984.  In 1985, McCurry photographed an Afghan girl for the "National Geographic". The intensity of the subject's eyes and her compelling gaze made this one of contemporary photography's most celebrated and best-known portraits. [Phaidon Press statement]

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I am interested in harnessing and sculpting something completely noncorporeal.  Light is my primary material because it instills presence without physicality.  It can be easily taken for granted, yet when contemplated, light becomes a sense provoking opportunity for thought. I use commonplace lamps and hardware to create events with light. The contrast between the mechanisms and the images they produce explores the possibility of coexisting oppositions such as beautiful and banal, fugitive and accessible, mysterious and apparent.

I make sculptures to create a situation where the wondrous and the mundane can occur simultaneously.  I take photographs to capture that experience within a daily context.  I'm looking for the instant when light in its changing forms makes the ordinary remarkable. Julianne Swartz photograph: Horizon in Mist, Hudson (1999) image and statement from artist page on mixedgreens.com gallery site artist site julianneswartz.com

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