Victoria Olsen's Blog, page 11

Once Upon a Time in New York

[image error]Berenice Abbott, "Blossom Restaurant, 103 Bowery, Manhattan, October 3, 1935."The text is what draws me into this piece of Berenice Abbott's long-gone New York, though the image is beautifully composed. The squared off windows seem like pages filled with text, as the menus and billboards and signage cover so much glass that it would be impossible to see through to the inside anyway.  The text, then, becomes a sort of skin masking any interiority.  This impression is emphasized by the sole...

Sun Bathers

[image error]Miroslav Tichy, "Untitled."More from ICP this week: going to see the Atgets (below) and the surrealist visions of Paris, which were the star attractions there, I stumbled on this work by Miroslav Tichy. The Czechoslovakian Tichy, who is mostly unknown here in the U.S., has been photographing his small village for decades and produces striking, seemingly "artless" images like the one here. Of course there is "art" all over it, as the proximity of the surrealist work makes especially clear...

Atget's Ancien Regime

[image error]"Hôtel de Marquis de Chantosme, 6 rue de Tournon," 1900 (Printed 1900-1927), International Center for Photography.You may recognize this elegant photograph as one of Eugene Atget's portraits of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Paris. Atget specialized in these still, pristine, balanced compositions of windows and doors, storefronts and cobblestones. Few people live in his Paris, though there is every sign of human civilization.  An exhibit at the International Center for Photography, entitled "...

Opening Doors

Browsing photograph archives in search of an image for this week, this early print struck me.  Or rather, its[image error]William Henry Fox Talbot, "The Footman," 1840 caption struck me: "The Footman.  The earliest photograph of a human figure on paper by William Henry Fox Talbot." Though Fox Talbot is known for his pioneer photographs of his home, Lacock Abbey, and solar prints of flowers and leaves, it is curious that his first known attempt at a portrait was of a servant.  Here the man is almost an...

Rock of Ages

[image error]I've made this photograph as large as possible on purpose: to approximate its impact.  And also, perhaps, to play again with scale, which the photographer Edward Burtynsky manipulates here too. This is one of his "manufactured landscapes," to quote the title of Jennifer Baichwal's documentary about his work.  Burtynsky is best known for documenting the human impact on nature, at oil rigs, cement pits, mines, and, here, a marble quarry in Italy. Despite the apparent social critique, the...

Eyeless

We've been looking at iconic female photographers (Arbus, Sherman)[image error] in class and it seems time to turn to Sally Mann. Yet I feel tired of the standard questions about her family photographs. That's their business. Browsing, however, I came across this self-portrait that astonished me. I am familiar with Mann's wet collodion work, images she prints on large glass plates using the same early photographic techniques as Julia Margaret Cameron. But here was a photograph both like and unlike...

Moon Memory

[image error]Vik Muniz, "Memory Rendering of Man on the Moon," (1990)In class this week we're looking at originals and copies.  Today we listened to songs that my students suggested alongside their cover versions.  One student said that one difference between the two versions was always one's own associations with each.  That is, memories can get in the way of a "pure" experience.

Here, Brazilian artist Vik Muniz interrogates the original and the copy from the opposite direction. What if we made art from w...

Fifty Years Ago

[image error]William Claxton, from Jazzlife (1960)In 1960 photographer William Claxton accompanied German musicologist Joachim Berendt on a tour of the jazz hotspots of America. The result was their collaboration on Jazzlife, an illustrated catalogue of known and unknown jazz musicians in their own homes and clubs and streets, playing and picnicking.  Many of the images, like this one, convey the mood of jazz as much as its people and places.  Jazz juxtaposes symmetry and asymmetry, complexity and...

Central Pastoral

 Bruce Davidson, Central Park, 1992.[image error]The pastoral is an underappreciated genre.  I love this photograph by Bruce Davidson, one of a series he made of Central Park.  In text and image the pastoral relies on harmony and balance.  Here the reflecting lake provides a natural reason for that balance.  It fills the center of the composition and it creates symmetry through mirroring, particularly of the bridge.  Look at the reflected buildings: the line of symmetry divides the photograph roughly in h...

Baby/Face

[image error]As I was prepping for my spring semester teaching film students I read an article by Judith Butler on the Diane Arbus retrospective, "Revelations," that toured the country in 2005.  I was impressed by Butler's ability to shift between describing the images and advancing an idea about them (not an easy task, as my students could tell you).  This image was included as an example of one of many Arbus shot of subjects with their eyes closed. It stuck with me.

The photograph is all Arbus: the...