Victoria Olsen's Blog, page 14
August 11, 2009
Weems in Wonderland
Where to start? With the formal composition of triangular elbows that complement the vertical line of faces within a circular frame? With the tongue-in-cheek reference to Lewis Carroll and his [image error]close-ups of Victorian girls in their nighties? With the pun on whiteness implied by the title "Mayflowers from Maydays Long Forgotten"?
This photograph by Carrie Mae Weems is beautifully composed, with the three gazes directed in three different directions. Strikingly, the central girl looks directly a
August 4, 2009
Air + Water
Hiroshi Sugimoto's photographs have always fascinated me, in part because they are conceptual art at its best: they get you thinking and keep you thinking, but they are beautiful and mysterious in the meantime. Last year I saw his 7 Days, 7 Nights series at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea and was awestruck. The massive images, all of seascapes differing only slightly in tone and detail, forced me to experience seeing in a new way. To look closely at somethin[image error]g so large, to discriminate between
July 23, 2009
Who Knows?
Some photographs resist the easy relation of form and content in context. Roland Barthes talks about this in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography[image error]Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. He wr
July 13, 2009
Pretty Wars
Photographer Gerda Taro is ready for her close up. She's getting one now at the Mus[image error]eu Nacional d'Art Catalunya, though there again her work is linked to her partner Robert Capa's. Perhaps that's inevitable. They make a good story as well as a good photograph. Both are best known for their images of the Spanish Civil War. Together these two young progressive Jewish reformers from Germany and Hungary (respectively) changed their names and changed the course of photojournalism.
This image at right w
July 6, 2009
Handiwork
Just back from Lisbon, where I saw a beautiful photograph by a contemporary Portuguese photographer named Helena Almeida. It is one of several of her works in the Berardo Collection of modern art, but the only one on display.
[image error]Estudo para Dois Espaços (Study for Two Spaces) (8 fotografias a p/b), 1977.
In the gallery the eight images are laid out in a long horizontal line and they don't seem as readily paired as they do here. But there the linear progression implied a story more than this arrange
June 26, 2009
A Stranger
I admit Frazer Bradshaw is a friend of mine. Or the husband of a very close friend, which averages out to the same thing. His feature debut, Everything Strange and New, had its NY premiere this week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's new film festival and I went to see it last week. Blogging about a film is a first for me, but Frazer commented in the Q and A that he built this film from visual moments and framed shots in terms of their composition as stills, so it seemed relevant to pick one
June 13, 2009
Three Mouseketeers
Musicians Sparklehorse and Danger Mouse have collaborated with filmmaker David Lynch on an crea[image error]tive package called "Dark Night of the Soul." I call it a package because it combines music with a book of Lynch's photographs, but there is no album in the usual sense. The package ships with a blank CD on which you can record the audio you download. At least for now. The photo to the right is from the NPR article, but Lynch's photographs are on display until July 11th in Los Angeles too. Most of
June 8, 2009
Darkness Visible
[image error]Robert Adams, "Colorado Springs, Colorado," 1968.
"The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think."--Virginia Woolf, 1915
Last week I went to hear a lecture at Fordham University by the writer and thinker Rebecca Solnit. It was called "Woolf's Darkness" and extended Solnit's idea from her book Hope in the Dark: that darkness as a place of mystery and uncertainty has a positive value. To have hope one must tolerate uncertainty and understand that some thi
May 28, 2009
Child's Play
The funny thing about photography, still, is that the children you see here will always be playing just like that, when the adults they became have moved on, and the photographer who took the picture has passed away. Helen Levitt died this year at age 95. The photograph is about 70 years old. The kids are....eight? And they always will be.
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Where are the adults in this image? Their invisibility is a statement about children on the street without adequate supervision, about society's prioritie
