7.21.2010
Can it be this simple?
"What is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after." Ernest Hemingway
6.15.2010
Henri Cartier-Bresson
As I have been more intensely pursuing still photography, I have come across the work of some truly genius artists. From time to time, I would like to post the works of the men and women that inspire me to keep working on my own art.
A few weeks ago, I stumbled across a Time Magazine in the break room at work with a featured article on photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. I had never heard his name before, but his work immediately struck me. Cartier-Bresson had an amazing career spanning many decades and exploring many genres of photography. Below is the Time article as well as some of his photos that really stood out to me.
Time Magazine: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Big Picture
With 300 or so photographs, "Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century," a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, is, as Ed Sullivan used to say, a really big show. No doubt, nothing less would do to represent the vast scope of an artist Richard Avedon called, with just the slightest exaggeration, "the Tolstoy of photography."
But six years after his death at the magnificent age of 95, Cartier-Bresson proves that you can be one of the most famous names in photography and still be one of its greatest enigmas. For a few years in the 1930s, he was a fiercely dedicated avant-gardist, making pictures that were powerfully strange. Yet after World War II, he somehow became one of the biggest mainstream photojournalists, working for magazines that liked pictures to be plainly legible and not too subtly nuanced. And let's not even talk about inscrutable.
Born near Paris in 1908 to a prosperous family of thread manufacturers, Cartier-Bresson once hoped to become a painter. As it turned out, his gifts in that department were modest; no less a judge than Gertrude Stein took one look at his work and suggested he join the family business. Wealthy enough to do nothing in particular, he drifted for years, studying with the middling painter André Lhote and hanging on the edges of the Surrealist movement. Though his formal education ended at 18, he was a classic aesthete, bookish and art-obsessed, with fine-boned features and skin so fair that in Mexico a girlfriend gave him a Spanish nickname meaning "beautiful man with face the color of shrimp."
He was tougher than he looked. In 1930 he abruptly abandoned the stale confines of bourgeois civilization for the more primal realms of French colonial Africa. (Even in this, he was playing the artiste: think Gauguin in Polynesia or Rimbaud in Abyssinia. Among the French, the flight to primitivism was something of a creative-class tradition.) In the Ivory Coast, he lived for a year as a hunter, selling to villagers the game he killed. And without quite thinking of himself as a photographer, he also took pictures.
It wasn't until his return to France in 1931 that Cartier-Bresson made a crucial realization: through photography, he could achieve the goals of the Surrealists he so much admired. The MoMA show, which runs through June 28 and then travels to Chicago, San Francisco and Atlanta, is a career-spanning retrospective. But while Cartier-Bresson's Surrealist phase would be just a brief moment in that career, it was a crucial one.
MoMA's chief curator of photography, Peter Galassi, who organized this show, produced a brilliant little Cartier-Bresson exhibition in 1987 that made explicit the importance of Surrealism to the photographer's early work. Cartier-Bresson never joined the movement in any formal way and didn't even care much for the work of Surrealist painters like Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, who he thought simply illustrated contrived paradoxes. What excited him was the Surrealist attempt to bypass the rational faculties as a way to glimpse a deeper reality. In their struggle to circumvent the conscious mind, the Surrealists tried hypnotism, free drawing and automatic writing. It was Cartier-Bresson's great insight that his Leica was the most automatic instrument of all. If a photographer simply gave himself over to the chance encounters of the day and captured them at the right instant, a snapshot could drive straight to the heart of the uncanny. All the obsessions of Surrealist fantasy — shock juxtapositions, erotic concealments, dismembered anatomies — were at large in the ordinary life of the streets.
As his biographer Pierre Assouline once put it, in those years Cartier-Bresson used his camera "as a Geiger counter," a machine to register the secret pulse of the world. And there's certainly a whole world of crackling enigmas in Valencia, Spain, 1933, made at a bullring. On the right, a man's disembodied head signals to us from his frame within a frame. At center, a broken 7 presides in a semicircle that seems to emanate from his glasses. And at left, another man peers into a dark threshold. All it took to find these things was a click.
Cartier-Bresson worked most intensely under the spell of Surrealism for just three years, from 1932 to 1934. For the next three, he virtually stopped taking pictures while he dabbled in filmmaking. But by 1937, right after his first marriage, he took a job as a photographer for the leftist Paris daily Ce Soir, work that bent him to the disciplines and conventions of deadline journalism. He didn't like them much. When he left that job in 1939, with World War II looming, he left the world of salaried employment for good. By June of the following year, he was a prisoner of war in a German labor camp, where he languished for three years before escaping.Cartier-Bresson emerged from the war committed at last to the idea of himself as a photographer. His roots in Surrealism may have made him an unlikely candidate for the pivotal role he would soon play in the emergence of magazine photojournalism. But along with the photographers Robert Capa and David Szymin, known as Chim, he became a founding member of Magnum — one of the dominant photo agencies in the years when plush weeklies like LIFE and Paris Match paid big money for pictures. As Galassi points out in the show's catalog, of the great figures of early modernist photography — including André Kertész, Edward Weston and Walker Evans — Cartier-Bresson "is the only one whose work blossomed so fully after the war."
How did he make this unlikely transition? No doubt it helped that he learned to rely less on the complex geometry of his earlier work and moved toward a more direct style. What you also get less often in pictures from his later years is the mesmerizing oddity of those from the '30s. In a Cartier-Bresson from, say, 1960, you feel that you're seeing a recognizable world through an exquisitely attentive eye. In the earlier work, you're seeing another world altogether.
Yet he never entirely let go of that world. Even in the 1950s and '60s, a whiff of the surreal persists. How else to describe the artificial sky filled with artificial planes in World's Fair, Brussels, 1958? And it's unmistakable in Torcello, Near Venice, 1953, where the spiked prow of a gondola reads the dial of an arched bridge, while also bearing down on a running girl who is nearly identical to a figure in Giorgio de Chirico's Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, a painting the Surrealists revered.
Until he put down his camera in the 1970s to devote himself to drawing, Cartier-Bresson almost never stopped traveling. He was at the scene of some of the most important stories of his time — India in the final days of the British Raj, Beijing just before Mao's army entered. But his greatest gift was for pictures that didn't report anything more newsworthy than the erotic storm system of bodies in Coney Island, New York, 1946, or the domestic bliss of Bougival, Near Paris, 1956. An image of a man being greeted from the threshold of his houseboat by his wife, baby and dogs, it's a tour de force of art-historical synthesis. The collage-style juxtaposition of figures, the abrupt changes of scale between the man and what he's seeing: it's all very modern. But the supple line of the man's torso could have been drawn by Bronzino, while his wife and baby gently summon the long tradition of the Madonna and child — which is apt, since this may be the most succinct picture of heaven ever made. If it's true that Cartier-Bresson was the Tolstoy of photography, it's because he knew that the great pulse of his time flowed through the humblest places. © 2010 Time Inc.
Bresson's story is certainly inspiring. He had the kind of career most of us can only dream of. And his work? Even more inspiring. Below are some of his great shots, taken from Magnum Photos' website.
Valencia, Spain, 1933 (referenced in Time article)
World's Fair, Brussels, 1958 (also referenced in Time article)
Bougival, Near Paris, 1956 (referenced above as well)
FRANCE. Marseille. The Allée du Prado. 1932. I was walking behind this man when all of a sudden he turned around. (<--information about the photo from Bresson himself)
FRANCE. Paris. Place de l'Europe. Gare Saint Lazare. 1932.
Martine's Legs. 1967.
USA. New York City. Manhattan. Downtown. 1947.
ITALY. Abruzzo. Aquila. 1951.
GREECE. Cyclades. Island of Siphnos. 1961.
USA. Louisiana. New Orleans. 1947.
USA. Arizona. 1947.
ROMANIA. In a train. 1975.
USA. New Jersey. Model prison of Leesburg. Solitary confinement. 1975.
I could go on posting his images for weeks, but I'll leave it at that for now. Please check out more of his work at Magnum Photos' website, which is where I found these, and many more, amazing examples of Henri Cartier-Bresson's work.
A few weeks ago, I stumbled across a Time Magazine in the break room at work with a featured article on photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. I had never heard his name before, but his work immediately struck me. Cartier-Bresson had an amazing career spanning many decades and exploring many genres of photography. Below is the Time article as well as some of his photos that really stood out to me.
Time Magazine: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Big Picture
With 300 or so photographs, "Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century," a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, is, as Ed Sullivan used to say, a really big show. No doubt, nothing less would do to represent the vast scope of an artist Richard Avedon called, with just the slightest exaggeration, "the Tolstoy of photography."
But six years after his death at the magnificent age of 95, Cartier-Bresson proves that you can be one of the most famous names in photography and still be one of its greatest enigmas. For a few years in the 1930s, he was a fiercely dedicated avant-gardist, making pictures that were powerfully strange. Yet after World War II, he somehow became one of the biggest mainstream photojournalists, working for magazines that liked pictures to be plainly legible and not too subtly nuanced. And let's not even talk about inscrutable.
Born near Paris in 1908 to a prosperous family of thread manufacturers, Cartier-Bresson once hoped to become a painter. As it turned out, his gifts in that department were modest; no less a judge than Gertrude Stein took one look at his work and suggested he join the family business. Wealthy enough to do nothing in particular, he drifted for years, studying with the middling painter André Lhote and hanging on the edges of the Surrealist movement. Though his formal education ended at 18, he was a classic aesthete, bookish and art-obsessed, with fine-boned features and skin so fair that in Mexico a girlfriend gave him a Spanish nickname meaning "beautiful man with face the color of shrimp."
He was tougher than he looked. In 1930 he abruptly abandoned the stale confines of bourgeois civilization for the more primal realms of French colonial Africa. (Even in this, he was playing the artiste: think Gauguin in Polynesia or Rimbaud in Abyssinia. Among the French, the flight to primitivism was something of a creative-class tradition.) In the Ivory Coast, he lived for a year as a hunter, selling to villagers the game he killed. And without quite thinking of himself as a photographer, he also took pictures.
It wasn't until his return to France in 1931 that Cartier-Bresson made a crucial realization: through photography, he could achieve the goals of the Surrealists he so much admired. The MoMA show, which runs through June 28 and then travels to Chicago, San Francisco and Atlanta, is a career-spanning retrospective. But while Cartier-Bresson's Surrealist phase would be just a brief moment in that career, it was a crucial one.
MoMA's chief curator of photography, Peter Galassi, who organized this show, produced a brilliant little Cartier-Bresson exhibition in 1987 that made explicit the importance of Surrealism to the photographer's early work. Cartier-Bresson never joined the movement in any formal way and didn't even care much for the work of Surrealist painters like Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, who he thought simply illustrated contrived paradoxes. What excited him was the Surrealist attempt to bypass the rational faculties as a way to glimpse a deeper reality. In their struggle to circumvent the conscious mind, the Surrealists tried hypnotism, free drawing and automatic writing. It was Cartier-Bresson's great insight that his Leica was the most automatic instrument of all. If a photographer simply gave himself over to the chance encounters of the day and captured them at the right instant, a snapshot could drive straight to the heart of the uncanny. All the obsessions of Surrealist fantasy — shock juxtapositions, erotic concealments, dismembered anatomies — were at large in the ordinary life of the streets.
As his biographer Pierre Assouline once put it, in those years Cartier-Bresson used his camera "as a Geiger counter," a machine to register the secret pulse of the world. And there's certainly a whole world of crackling enigmas in Valencia, Spain, 1933, made at a bullring. On the right, a man's disembodied head signals to us from his frame within a frame. At center, a broken 7 presides in a semicircle that seems to emanate from his glasses. And at left, another man peers into a dark threshold. All it took to find these things was a click.
Cartier-Bresson worked most intensely under the spell of Surrealism for just three years, from 1932 to 1934. For the next three, he virtually stopped taking pictures while he dabbled in filmmaking. But by 1937, right after his first marriage, he took a job as a photographer for the leftist Paris daily Ce Soir, work that bent him to the disciplines and conventions of deadline journalism. He didn't like them much. When he left that job in 1939, with World War II looming, he left the world of salaried employment for good. By June of the following year, he was a prisoner of war in a German labor camp, where he languished for three years before escaping.Cartier-Bresson emerged from the war committed at last to the idea of himself as a photographer. His roots in Surrealism may have made him an unlikely candidate for the pivotal role he would soon play in the emergence of magazine photojournalism. But along with the photographers Robert Capa and David Szymin, known as Chim, he became a founding member of Magnum — one of the dominant photo agencies in the years when plush weeklies like LIFE and Paris Match paid big money for pictures. As Galassi points out in the show's catalog, of the great figures of early modernist photography — including André Kertész, Edward Weston and Walker Evans — Cartier-Bresson "is the only one whose work blossomed so fully after the war."
How did he make this unlikely transition? No doubt it helped that he learned to rely less on the complex geometry of his earlier work and moved toward a more direct style. What you also get less often in pictures from his later years is the mesmerizing oddity of those from the '30s. In a Cartier-Bresson from, say, 1960, you feel that you're seeing a recognizable world through an exquisitely attentive eye. In the earlier work, you're seeing another world altogether.
Yet he never entirely let go of that world. Even in the 1950s and '60s, a whiff of the surreal persists. How else to describe the artificial sky filled with artificial planes in World's Fair, Brussels, 1958? And it's unmistakable in Torcello, Near Venice, 1953, where the spiked prow of a gondola reads the dial of an arched bridge, while also bearing down on a running girl who is nearly identical to a figure in Giorgio de Chirico's Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, a painting the Surrealists revered.
Until he put down his camera in the 1970s to devote himself to drawing, Cartier-Bresson almost never stopped traveling. He was at the scene of some of the most important stories of his time — India in the final days of the British Raj, Beijing just before Mao's army entered. But his greatest gift was for pictures that didn't report anything more newsworthy than the erotic storm system of bodies in Coney Island, New York, 1946, or the domestic bliss of Bougival, Near Paris, 1956. An image of a man being greeted from the threshold of his houseboat by his wife, baby and dogs, it's a tour de force of art-historical synthesis. The collage-style juxtaposition of figures, the abrupt changes of scale between the man and what he's seeing: it's all very modern. But the supple line of the man's torso could have been drawn by Bronzino, while his wife and baby gently summon the long tradition of the Madonna and child — which is apt, since this may be the most succinct picture of heaven ever made. If it's true that Cartier-Bresson was the Tolstoy of photography, it's because he knew that the great pulse of his time flowed through the humblest places. © 2010 Time Inc.
Bresson's story is certainly inspiring. He had the kind of career most of us can only dream of. And his work? Even more inspiring. Below are some of his great shots, taken from Magnum Photos' website.
Valencia, Spain, 1933 (referenced in Time article)
World's Fair, Brussels, 1958 (also referenced in Time article)
Bougival, Near Paris, 1956 (referenced above as well)
FRANCE. Marseille. The Allée du Prado. 1932. I was walking behind this man when all of a sudden he turned around. (<--information about the photo from Bresson himself)
FRANCE. Paris. Place de l'Europe. Gare Saint Lazare. 1932.
Martine's Legs. 1967.
USA. New York City. Manhattan. Downtown. 1947.
ITALY. Abruzzo. Aquila. 1951.
GREECE. Cyclades. Island of Siphnos. 1961.
USA. Louisiana. New Orleans. 1947.
USA. Arizona. 1947.
ROMANIA. In a train. 1975.
USA. New Jersey. Model prison of Leesburg. Solitary confinement. 1975.
I could go on posting his images for weeks, but I'll leave it at that for now. Please check out more of his work at Magnum Photos' website, which is where I found these, and many more, amazing examples of Henri Cartier-Bresson's work.
Amazing video: Eel discovers oil spill
This article (which everyone should read-it's beautifully written) brought to my attention an amazing video that's come out of the Gulf oil spill. An eel discovers the spill and tries to understand:
I think this eel feels the way we all do: shocked, horrified, just trying to make sense of what he's seeing.
I think this eel feels the way we all do: shocked, horrified, just trying to make sense of what he's seeing.
6.12.2010
Karl Pilkington Quote of the Week
"You can get 5 million million atoms on the head of a pin. Atoms are dangerous enough - they are what makes the atomic bomb so powerful. So why store them on top of a dangerous sharp object like a pin? They're asking for trouble."
-From Karlology
-From Karlology
6.10.2010
Silly Kitties Vol. 1
Anyone who knows me knows how much I love cats. From time to time, I find pictures or videos of cats on the Interwebz that I just have to share.
Here's a video I found of a cat drinking water. This has to be the weirdest technique I've ever seen. The cat's nickname is Pretzel Cat, and I think I understand why:
Here's a link to some more cats with strange drinking techniques.
Here's a video I found of a cat drinking water. This has to be the weirdest technique I've ever seen. The cat's nickname is Pretzel Cat, and I think I understand why:
Here's a link to some more cats with strange drinking techniques.
6.09.2010
I love The Onion...
AND I think this is a fabulous idea. ;)
Source
Source
Obama To Make Reassuring Eye Contact With Every Last American
ROCKLAND, ME—In an attempt to convince an anxious populace that his legislative agenda is working and that everything is going to be all right, President Barack Obama embarked on a 50-state, 30,000-town tour Monday during which he plans to gaze assuredly into the eyes of each American citizen, one at a time.
"I know a lot of people out there are nervous. They're worried about unemployment, the oil spill in the Gulf, and whether or not I am making the right choices in Washington," Obama said during a rally at Rockland District High School. "To those Americans, I offer you this inspiring, confident gaze."
Obama then stepped down from his podium, walked into the 2,000-person audience, and peered comfortingly into each person's eyes. After taking 45 minutes to methodically work his way from the front row all the way to the balcony, and punctuating each look with a gentle pat on the shoulder, Obama returned to the stage, collected himself, and addressed the silent group before him.
"There," he said. "All better."
In their announcement of the "2010 Eye-to-Eye Tour," White House officials said that Obama will first spend two weeks making eye contact with the 55 million residents of the densely populated Northeastern states, looking into their eyes and, if necessary, offering them an encouraging head nod. Obama will then continue down the East Coast before taking on the tour's biggest challenge: gazing with confidence into the eyes of a hostile Southern electorate that largely rejects his policies.
Sources said in order to convince Southerners that the $787 billion economic stimulus package is working and that the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell is necessary, Obama will stare at them with a serious yet caring squint, give them a soothing smile, and, if necessary, mouth the words "trust me."
At press time, Obama was making his way down North Calvert Street in Baltimore, where he was earnestly looking into the eyes of 42-year-old construction worker Paul Hatfield.
"This is a way for the president to get out of the Washington bubble and really reconnect with the American people," Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said during a Tuesday briefing. "To be honest, I was a little hesitant about the idea at first, but then the president called me into his office, sat me down, told me to take off my glasses, and looked at me with the most reassuring expression I have ever seen. At that point I was sold."
In the past several days, more than 60 million citizens have had similar calming encounters with the president. Patrons at the Beefside Family Restaurant in Concord, NH, many of whom expressed concern that the country was more divided than ever, were placated Tuesday when the president went from booth to booth making eye contact with every man, woman, and child present. If diners attempted to avoid his glance, Obama maneuvered his head quickly but confidently until he made direct eye contact and held their gaze.
Obama also offered a self-assured stare to more than 24,000 out-of-work autoworkers in New Jersey; all members of the Vermont teacher's union; some 500 West Virginia coal miners; Philadelphia; attorneys and clients in the law offices of Blum, Horowitz, and Mertz; and Pittsburgh native and Hollywood actor Michael Keaton.
"I was waiting for the T when I felt a tap on my shoulder," Boston resident Jarrod Tomlinson, 36, said. "I turned around and it was the president of the United States. Before I could tell him that as a small business owner, I was a little worried that the new health care bill wouldn't offer me the subsidies necessary to provide my employees with coverage, he just grabbed both of my arms, looked into my eyes for maybe five seconds, massaged my shoulder briefly, and walked away."
"And you know what?" Tomlinson continued. "I think everything's going to be okay."
Though recent poll numbers indicate that Obama is slowly earning the trust of Americans throughout the country, some positive effects of his confident glance appear to have been negated by Vice President Joe Biden, who has been busy winking at every American citizen while pretending to shoot them with imaginary finger guns.
"I know a lot of people out there are nervous. They're worried about unemployment, the oil spill in the Gulf, and whether or not I am making the right choices in Washington," Obama said during a rally at Rockland District High School. "To those Americans, I offer you this inspiring, confident gaze."
Obama then stepped down from his podium, walked into the 2,000-person audience, and peered comfortingly into each person's eyes. After taking 45 minutes to methodically work his way from the front row all the way to the balcony, and punctuating each look with a gentle pat on the shoulder, Obama returned to the stage, collected himself, and addressed the silent group before him.
"There," he said. "All better."
In their announcement of the "2010 Eye-to-Eye Tour," White House officials said that Obama will first spend two weeks making eye contact with the 55 million residents of the densely populated Northeastern states, looking into their eyes and, if necessary, offering them an encouraging head nod. Obama will then continue down the East Coast before taking on the tour's biggest challenge: gazing with confidence into the eyes of a hostile Southern electorate that largely rejects his policies.
Sources said in order to convince Southerners that the $787 billion economic stimulus package is working and that the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell is necessary, Obama will stare at them with a serious yet caring squint, give them a soothing smile, and, if necessary, mouth the words "trust me."
At press time, Obama was making his way down North Calvert Street in Baltimore, where he was earnestly looking into the eyes of 42-year-old construction worker Paul Hatfield.
"This is a way for the president to get out of the Washington bubble and really reconnect with the American people," Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said during a Tuesday briefing. "To be honest, I was a little hesitant about the idea at first, but then the president called me into his office, sat me down, told me to take off my glasses, and looked at me with the most reassuring expression I have ever seen. At that point I was sold."
In the past several days, more than 60 million citizens have had similar calming encounters with the president. Patrons at the Beefside Family Restaurant in Concord, NH, many of whom expressed concern that the country was more divided than ever, were placated Tuesday when the president went from booth to booth making eye contact with every man, woman, and child present. If diners attempted to avoid his glance, Obama maneuvered his head quickly but confidently until he made direct eye contact and held their gaze.
Obama also offered a self-assured stare to more than 24,000 out-of-work autoworkers in New Jersey; all members of the Vermont teacher's union; some 500 West Virginia coal miners; Philadelphia; attorneys and clients in the law offices of Blum, Horowitz, and Mertz; and Pittsburgh native and Hollywood actor Michael Keaton.
"I was waiting for the T when I felt a tap on my shoulder," Boston resident Jarrod Tomlinson, 36, said. "I turned around and it was the president of the United States. Before I could tell him that as a small business owner, I was a little worried that the new health care bill wouldn't offer me the subsidies necessary to provide my employees with coverage, he just grabbed both of my arms, looked into my eyes for maybe five seconds, massaged my shoulder briefly, and walked away."
"And you know what?" Tomlinson continued. "I think everything's going to be okay."
Though recent poll numbers indicate that Obama is slowly earning the trust of Americans throughout the country, some positive effects of his confident glance appear to have been negated by Vice President Joe Biden, who has been busy winking at every American citizen while pretending to shoot them with imaginary finger guns.
6.05.2010
Karl Pilkington Quote of the Week
"This seems to be everyone's dream before they die, to swim with dolphins and whales, yet people are panicking when the news says global warming means that Britain is gonna be underwater by the year 2025. Do they want to swim with dolphins or not?"
-From Karl's book Karlology
-From Karl's book Karlology
6.04.2010
Horrifying images from the Gulf oil spill
By now, I'm sure everyone has seen images of animals suffering in the Gulf of Mexico, covered in oil. However, I saw a series of photographs last night that really struck me and brought tears to my eyes.
How heartbreaking these images are! I hope BP and the other companies responsible for the negligence that caused what is now the worst oil spill in US history are held more than accountable for their actions. And more than anything, I hope they are able to stop the spill and the slaughter of innocent creatures in the Gulf.
Source
How heartbreaking these images are! I hope BP and the other companies responsible for the negligence that caused what is now the worst oil spill in US history are held more than accountable for their actions. And more than anything, I hope they are able to stop the spill and the slaughter of innocent creatures in the Gulf.
Source
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