Victoria Olsen's Blog, page 9

Old New England

Jack Delano, "Connecticut Town by the Sea" (Stonington, CT, 1940)

In this Great Recession, we are constantly being reminded of the Great Depression. And when we think of the genre of Depression photos we tend to think of the migrant workers of the rural South and West, the food lines, and the close ups of human misery. But the Depression hit different parts of America differently, of course, and it was just as significant in the North, in cities, and among factory workers. The Farm Security...

Close Quarters

Thomas Annan, "Close no.11, Bridgegate, Glasgow," 1897.

Thomas Annan is best known for documenting slum conditions in Glasgow at the end of the nineteenth century. His photographs of the "closes" of the old city show the growing population, displaced from living on the land and recruited into factory work, squeezed into a new urban landscape. The buildings are literally close and Annan draws on perspective to emphasize the narrowing retreat of these alleys into dead-end space. Brick walls...

Four by Four

Hilla & Bernd Becher, "Watertowers, 1967-80."

The German photographers Hilla and Bernd Becher are justifiably famous for serial portraits of aging industrial structures.  Like these watertowers, the work can easily be interpreted as commentary on a decrepit system: we see the literal ruins of capitalism's faith in industrialization and vice versa.  The photographs, repetitive and devoid of people, seem to be hymns to a mechanized modern workforce.

But the towers are also beautiful objects in...

Black and White and Read All Over

I've been reading, and writing, about characters set against backdrops of texts, and here is a wonderful visual example of that juxtaposition. Photographer Carl Van Vechten often took portraits against geometric backgrounds, which creates a complex formal composition. It seems to set human variety within a grid of some kind.

Here the grid is especially interesting because it too is man made, or written. Yet Van Vechten disrupts our expectations that culture will be predictable and regular by m...

Senses Working Overtime

"To think through things, that is the still life painter's work– and the poet's. Both sorts of artists require a tangible vocabulary, a worldly lexicon."

The quote is from Mark Doty's essay Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, but it could also apply to filmmakers and this polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky, taken in the early 1980s and published in Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids in 2006. I found it online here, with a sample of others, equally beautiful. They all have the same grainy, still...

Performing on Paper

Yves Klein, "Untitled Anthropometry," 1960.

Yves Klein, the subject of a current retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. and the maker of this image, liked to compare his work to "ashes."  Creativity is often likened to an inner fire, and this work is the end product of an elaborate creative process.

Klein, a proto-performance artist, wanted art to be both distant and intimate and he solved this dilemma creatively. He thought of himself as the director of his work and used...

Side Lines

Here's something new: an entry about a photograph that you could actually buy and own.

Roger Ballen, "Place of the Upside Down," 2004.

Gallerist Jen Bekman's project, 20×200, offers a weekly artwork for sale in a limited edition for a minimal price (usually 200 works for $20 each). This was last week's image, but I love it. Roger Ballen is a contemporary photographer who draws on photography's realism to disorient us. Here, he plays with the line, typically a unit of drawing. From bottom to...

Smaller Than Life

Toni Frissell, "Dawn on the Oklahoma Track, Saratoga, New York, 1963"

In honor of the World Cup I looked for a woman sports photographer to discuss in this week's post. I came across Toni Frissell's work yet again, having stumbled on it while researching Frances Benjamin Johnston on the Library of Congress photographic collections site.  Frissell, like Johnston, gave her life's work to the nation's library before her death. Frissell had a fascinating career, beginning with fashion...

Two Tulips

Robert Mapplethorpe, "Tulip," 1985.

June, and flowers are everywhere.  The scent outdoors has been intoxicating, even in New York City, but there's no conveying that online — so here's an exquisite tulip instead.  It is one of a flower series Robert Mapplethorpe photographed between 1978 and his death in 1989.  You can view the whole series here. Yes, Mapplethorpe makes flowers erotic, echoing the formal and sensuous work of Edward Weston. But what else is there to say about this image?

I was s...

Personal Space

Tina Modotti, "Workers Parade," 1926.

I went to see "Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography" at MoMA with my father last weekend. Born in 1926, like this photograph, he is an artist and a man made feminist by the accident of three daughters. This show, drawn from the museum's own collection and on display until March 21, 2011, is accessible and inclusive. Never polemical, it just put a lot of interesting work on the walls and let us look at it.

This is one of my favorite Tina...