Weekend Video

Lindsay Lohan and Bert Stern's recreation of his famous Marilyn Monroe "Last Sitting" pictures in New York Magazine last week brought over 20,000,000 viewers to the mag's website - making it the most viewed picture spread in the world.

Picking up on the theme of homage, above is a clip from Jean-Luc Godard's "Le Mepris". (How great that J.Lu. is becoming such a regular!) Below - the homage/ad from Chanel and a short "making of" film by Bettina Rheims. In this case Stern seems more guilty of ripping himself of than Chanel does of Godard, where their upfront commercialism and the phallic mischief of the product placement make for a surreal mix of art and business.

Then as a special bonus - the original French trailer for the movie. Have you ever seen a better trailer? Better film-making? (To explain this odd image below, the plot of the movie revolves around the making of a film adaptation of Homer's Odyssey.)

Sandy Volz

As promised, one more German photographer. I came across Sandy Volz’s pictures in an exhibition of work by the students of Peter Bialobrzeski at the Bremen School of Art. (Bialobrzeski is himself a favorite of mine having produced some of the most interesting pictures of figures in landscape in his book “Heimat”.) Anyway, for the student show, Volz made these unusual pictures of human interaction titled “Hearts of Darkness”. You can’t quite tell what’s going on. I get the feeling it’s a moment of conflict between two people who know each other well, but it could be open to any interpretation. However, there’s an extraordinary level of technical expertise in the large (50 x 70 inch) prints as well as a striking physical and psychological intensity.

w3

Wait to Walk

I seem to be caught in a German photo-warp right now - Helmut Newton, Albrecht Tubke, Juergen Teller – and much more to come, I promise. Today’s discovery is Florian Bohm. A 39 year old German living in New York, Bohm takes the familiar DiCorcian concept of modern color street photography, narrows it down to the single moment of people waiting to cross the street, and repeatedly nails it. He’s not breaking any new ground but the self-imposed restriction of photographing entirely on the streets of New York gives the work a consistency and an immediacy, and there’s a nice flat quality to the light that helps pull it all together. The pictures above and below all come from Bohm’s book “Wait to Walk” published last year by Hatje Cantz.

Save the Elephants

I sat down with a big pile of new magazines and papers yesterday and before I even got to any editorial, I was discomfited by the new Hermes ads in which elephants (how original!) with colorful painting around their eyes were used as props.

A few minutes later, the inspiration for this – Avedon’s famous “Dovima with Elephants” popped up in the New York Times “Evening Hours” section, seen being admired by an anonymous viewer at the Park Avenue Armory Art show. I believe a print in this size now sells for close to $1 million.

Moving on through the Times, the Sunday Magazine (praised by me last week for their Ryan McGinley portfolio) committed double imitation – not only using elephants as props for an 8 page fashion spread, but stealing the title “Trunk Show”, from Bruce Weber’s infamous elephant tribute shot in 2005 for W Magazine. (In Weber’s shoot at least the pastiche was front and center as some of the biggest names in fashion created original couture for the elephants themselves. And Weber, a known animal lover, donated the proceeds to a charity whose mission is to help save Asian Elephants.)

But enough with the elephants – O.K.?


Avedon's "Dovima with Elephants".

From the New York Times Magazine.

Chanelephant fashion by Karl Lagerfeld - shot by Bruce Weber

Weekend Video

With the focus on oratory and politics, I thought it was worthwhile to go to the source. Needless to say, You Tube has dozens upon dozens of different versions of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but after viewing many of them, I felt this version – just a still image with background music composed by "Paul from Stoke, U.K." – was simply the most powerful.

NOT The Sartorialist

Earlier this month I received this e-mail:

Dear members of the gallery,
Im an German photographer. I've seen your currend exhibition, and it could be, that you are interested in my work. Please have a moment to check out: www.tubke.info. If you want, I can send my book to you, or I can come over to see you, which would be great. Last year I was in an group exhibition at the Tate Britain "How we are, photographing Britain", curated by Val Williams. I attached one of my portraits for you in this email. I'm looking forward hearing from you,
best wishes,
Albrecht Tübke


As I usually do when people send me a link, I took a look. My immediate reaction was that the pictures were way too close to The Sartorialist’s work to be of any interest to me, but the surprising thing was the pictures were pretty good!

I e-mailed back to that effect in reply to which Mr Tubke then followed up with a phone call where we had an interesting conversation. Tubke’s process is quite the opposite of Sart’s. He chooses a location and waits endlessly for the “right” person to come by and inspire him. (Sart’s a hunter, Tubke’s a gatherer.) Tubke works thematically shooting specific series one at a time and he's much more of a traditionalist - shooting on film, engaging with the traditional gallery/museum axis, and dealing much more with archetypical typologies (city folk, country folk, twins) whereas one of the great elements of Sart’s work is how much and in how many ways it deals with the here and now.

Anyway, I told Tubke I would be happy to post something about his work and see what response we got from the blog. So please enter a comment. And dealers, feel free to contact Mr. Tubke if you would like to show his work.

tubke pix 2

tubke pix

Juergen Teller

While any Juergen Teller show is a significant event, his current exhibition “Ukraine” at Lehmann Maupin seems to have tiptoed into town. I was certainly late off the mark and missed an opening where the gallery had hired my favorite street food vendor, the Hallo Berlin food-cart, to dispense bratwurst. Darn! Anyway without any advance word I wasn’t sure what to expect when I went to see the show last week.

The surprise begins the moment you walk in the door where an installation of display cases dominate the space while just a few photographs dot the walls. The genesis of the show was a state commission to shoot images of the Ukraine for the Venice Bienniale, but as the press release notes: “In Teller’s Kiev the membrane between harsh economic reality and obtainable fantasy is surprisingly thin and these pictures represent a place where beautiful girls wait to be discovered in a place where the desire for luxury has reached a fever pitch.”

Mixed in with a diverse selection of recent work, the show is really just an update of what Teller has been up to, and it amply shows Teller’s greatest strength – the ability to make an arresting picture with little of the production support usually relied on by successful fashion photographers. He’s great at girls, he’s great at snapshots of the famous with a titillating edge, but there’s a sneer that’s been in his work since the beginning that’s in danger of getting out of hand.

That said, there are plenty of good pictures, the best of which I thought was a simple but arresting photograph of the model Lily Cole perched on a rock. I don’t know if Teller has ever seen the famous Maxfield Parrish it echoes, but I never thought I’d ever compare the schmaltzy populist American illustrator (whose work at one time hung in one out of every three homes in America) with the brazen and decadent favorite of the art-meets-fashion elite.

JT1

Important Moments in Blog History - Part I

This past Saturday the Blogfather (a.k.a. Jorg Colberg author of Conscientious) came to visit Danziger Projects and see The Sartorialist exhibition - now in its last week for anyone who has missed it so far. I tried to record the momentous event in a photographic tribute to Irving Penn's corner portraits and Sart's own trademark style!