Victoria Olsen's Blog, page 13

Still Motion

[image error]Ruven Afanador, Mil Besos 2009Ruven Afanador is another fashion photographer, but his ethnographic interests are clearly different from Penn's.  He has just released a book of photographs of flamenco dancers, called Mil Besos or A Thousand Kisses.  It celebrates the fierce sensuality of flamenco and the drama of its female dancers.  The image at left is a good example of that as the women appear to be dancing and fighting at the same time.  Dance photography is a difficult genre: the frozen m...

Another Vanishing

Irving Penn died last week and there is a very nice audiovisual homage to him on The New York Times website,[image error]Irving Penn, "Commis--Larue, Paris," 1950. which itself commemorates an exhibit of his work now at the Getty Museum through January 10th.  Penn was best known for his fashion photography, but the portrait at right shows another side.  Taken in 1950-1, while in Paris shooting for Vogue, this series documents the tradespeople of Paris and London, who were disappearing as their industries ...

Last Looks

 

[image error]Robert Frank, "U.S. 90," The AmericansHaving looked at Robert Frank's first shot for The Americans last week, it makes sense to turn to his last shot this week.  It shows us where he began this project and where he ended it. If that first photograph documents a social moment, the last one shows a personal moment: the photographer's wife and son at the end of a long road.  With its off-center headlight and the car sliding out of the frame, the composition is classic Frank.  Yet there are...

Eyes Wide Shut

I went to the Robert Frank exhibit at the Met yesterday.  It was too crowded to really enjoy it, and the ordering of the images was chaotic, but the photographs are worth looking at for as long as possible.  Frank took the 80+ photographs of The Americans over several road trips in 1955.  The image here is the first one of the series, published as a book with an introduction by Jack Keroauc.  At the exhibit this photograph was examined for the psychological/sociocultural implications of that ...

Lightless

[image error]www.stevenkasher.comHow does one photograph darkness?  Or night-time?  Or anything else that occurs away from the light?  The history of photography reveals many answers to these questions, from Nadar's experiments with magnesium lamps in the catacombs of Paris to George Shira III''s night-time photographs of animals, which appear in the same National Geographic photographic archive as this image.  One hundred and fifty images originally published in National Georgraphic Magazine are now on d...

Landscape with Twisted Metal

In honor of the anniversary of 9/11 I post this Joel Meyerowitz photograph, taken as part of a commission to document the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks.  Meyerowitz is best known for his careful use of color in landscape images. He's a sky and sea guy.  But this work took him out of his elements and gave the man-made destruction a needed beauty and order.  Here the twisted arc of metal in the foreground echoes the delicate curves of the Winter Garden's arched roof in the...

Storied Splendor

[image error]http://www.lauramcphee.comAdmire this well-composed and engaging photograph of a Calcutta store by contemporary American photographer Laura McPhee.  The lovely near-symmetry of the paired windows, with the colors almost aligned and the vertical and rectangular shapes perfectly balanced.  The orange pieces in the window are also anchored by the coral color in the background, but the image is visually flattened by the glass windows, the shallow perspective, and the abstract forms.  The whole...

Beneath Our Feet

[image error]I saw Olafur Eliasson's waterfalls in New York harbor last year, but I preferred the landscape photographs in his MOMA show.  This image, one of a Cartographic Series in the Brooklyn Museum, is a lovely example of how abstract and complex those photographs can be.  The recurring visions of glaciers and fjords are subtly textured and slightly varying.  The palettes tend to be fairly limited, but within them, how much variety!  These landscapes disorient us in place and scale: are they near or far

Woman, Too

[image error]The Chelsea Gallery Cheim & Read is now showing an exhibition by women artists that is getting a lot of attention.  Called "The Female Gaze: Women Look at Women" it includes a variety of art works by a variety of women artists.  It's a good chance to re-view artists you think you know and discover new ones.  Here is a photograph by Hellen van Meene, whose work I've never seen before, which struck me forcefully.  The texture is beautifully represented -- from smooth skin to sheer curtain to solid

Angles of Motion

I was led to Denise Bellon's work through a documentary by her daughter, Yannick Bellon, and Chris Marker, the experimental French filmmaker. Called Remembrance of Things To Come, it is a fascinating film-essay filled with Bellon's still photographs. Rather than chronicling her life or documenting her "subjects" year by year, the film evokes a mixture of memory, art, and affection through narration and the juxtaposition of images, even sometimes superimposed on one another.

[image error]The work itself is pow