Victoria Olsen's Blog, page 12

The Whiteness of the Snow

[image error]Ray Atkeson, Timberline Lodge, 1945Back from Portland, where it snowed, to Brooklyn, where it is snowing. As the snow comes down it is light and lovely. It rests gently on the ground and muffles the city streets. It is briefly magical -- until the traffic starts up again. In Portland it was treacherous from the start, as cars slid across streets in front of us, and wheels churned on hills. Ray Atkeson's 1945 photograph of Mount Hood reflects both of these qualities. The whiteness of the snow ...

Shade and Sun

[image error]Roy DeCarava, "Sun and Shade," 1952.It's been a bad year for photographers.  Roy DeCarava, too, was lost this fall.  His best known work dates from Harlem in the 1950s and it represents potentially controversial material in a quiet and subtle way that is no less powerful. This image is difficult to read on screen, but the boy in the sun has a mirror image in the shade: another child running forward, pointing a gun. The two interact across the intangible line of light.

In this image DeCarava...

Portrait of the Artist as an Older Man

[image error]Larry Sultan, Dad on Bed, 1985.Larry Sultan, photographer, died yesterday. The New York Times published an obituary today that mentions this photograph, one Sultan took in a series of portraits of his parents during the 1980s. Sultan portrayed their suburban life in Southern California with a light touch of mockery, as here where the brief touches of bright color show up the otherwise unrelenting beigeness.

Interestingly, the father resists.  He described the sitting:

I'd get set, I'd get...

Naked on the Grass

[image error]Andy Earl, Bow Wow Wow, 1981.A museum exhibit of album covers would be pretty cool.  But until that happens we have the Brooklyn Museum's current exhibition on rock and roll photography, on display through January 31.  It's a fairly new idea as it is, and aims to reconsider this work as "art."  However, the use of these photographs to sell product is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in Andy Earl's image of the band Bow Wow Wow for the cover of their 1981 album.

The photograph is a masterful ...

Girl with Crayon

[image error]Dona Ann McAdams, from Garden of Eden (2002)I spent Thanksgiving in a VA hospital in Albany, keeping my father company after his surgery and watching the damaged and hurting people around us.  It led me geographically and emotionally to the work of Dona Ann McAdams, which is on view in Albany now. This photograph comes from her portfolio Garden of Eden (2002), which won the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor prize for documentary photography.  The image was taken by McAdams during an art class in...

The Greatest

[image error]Muhammad Ali, 1977There's an interesting show of Andy Warhol's polariod portraits of athletes now at the Danziger Gallery through December 12. I chose this one to write about because I have just watched Leon Gast's documentary When We Were Kings about the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire in 1974. It's a suspenseful story of how the dethroned Ali got the African public to root for him and came up with a surprise strategy to beat the younger, stronger Foreman. In the film Ali is charming and...

Land/Art

[image error]I've been watching Rivers and Tides, a terrific documentary about Andy Goldsworthy's work, because I intend to teach from it.  But it doesn't feel like work.  The camera pans slowly across snow, waves, grass, sky. Goldsworthy speaks in a lilting Scottish accent, slowly and calmly.  The effect is hypnotic and lulling.  And that's before you look at the art.

Here you see one of Goldsworthy's cones in a field beneath a tree on the campus of SUNY Purchase. Goldsworthy has left these markers, or...

Light + Paper

I've been wanting to post an abstract photograph for awhile, [image error]but haven't found one that inspired me.  This one, by Laslo Moholy-Nagy, is actually a photogram (1926).  Moholy-Nagy placed his hand and the paintbrush on light-sensitive paper and exposed it directly in the sun, without a camera or negative.  This image is unique in several senses: it is not reproducible and it documents the individual hand of the artist.  Clearly, Moholy-Nagy is making a claim here about photography's status as a...

Ladies and Gentlemen

[image error] This image is part of a new and novel exhibition of Victorian Photocollage at the Art institute of Chicago this fall.  It's an example of the kind of constructed photographs that upper-middle-class and aristocratic women in England made and kept in scrapbooks to show friends.  The collages are amazingly creative, with fanciful backgrounds in watercolors competing with the formal black-and-white cut-out photographs.  But they remain eccentric and somewhat odd too.  For instance, because the f...

Migrant Child

If you go looking to document social problems, you can't flinch when you find them.  Here is a particularly[image error] unflinching photograph by Dorothea Lange, taken as part of her work for the Farm Security Administration.  As the title "Damaged Child, Shacktown, Elm Grove, Oklahoma" suggests, this child was one of many displaced and relocated during the economic Depression and drought of 1936.  Lange is famous for her documentation of the human costs of the Depression, especially "Migrant Mother,...