Forbidden

When someone tells me I'm not allowed to take a picture, I tend to take it as an affront and a challenge. I haven't looked into the actual legality of the situation yet, but I'm pretty sure there's nothing wrong with photographing the former TWA Terminal at JFK (above) as I tried to
do before I was waved down, or in the various stores, museums, and establishments who routinely tell you, "Photography is not allowed". With the advent of tiny digital cameras and cell phone cameras it's pretty hard to stop it anyway, but here are some samples of my recent surreptitious camera work.

This from Juicy Couture in Beverly Hills, after they would not sell my daughter the bathing suit on the display dummy.

This from the revelatory August Sander show at The Getty, about which more later. The title for this is "The Photographer after a Nap"!

This from Katsuya - a fantastic Philippe Starck designed restaurant in Brentwood. The tricky thing here was that Robert Downey Jr. was sitting at a table to the left of the frame and I was trying to get the graphic on the wall while respecting his privacy as a diner!

From a recent series taken in Brazil.

From the series "Italy".

From the series "Band Camp".

Greg Miller

I am in Los Angeles this week so I’ll do my best to keep posting. On
the plane over I was reading TIME Magazine when I was stopped by
the full page picture by Greg Miller (above). It’s from their current
cover story on childhood obesity.

I have known Greg since 1988 when he was photographing for the magazine 7 Days and have always been a big fan. Since then he has had a highly successful career mixing editorial and advertising work but he’s very much a picture person’s photographer. I e-mailed him when I landed to congratulate him on the TIME pic and find out what he was up to and he told me he just received a Guggenheim Grant to photograph around his hometown of Nashville. Patience and virtue have been rewarded!

For a further look at his work, his website is rich with good pictures.

From a recent series taken in Brazil.

From the series "Italy".

From the series "Band Camp".

Weekend Video

After posting "Chasing Pavements" by Adele as a Weekend Video two weeks ago, I was pleased to receive an e-mail from "Federico" pointing out that Adele had also covered the same Bob Dylan song I had featured a few weeks previously - "Make You Feel My Love". As both a completist and a great appreciater of this kind of serendipity, I'm happy to make it this weekend's video, and I hope you enjoy.

Cool Stuff!

A year ago, I stopped into Tusk - a terrific leather goods store a few blocks from the gallery - and ended up in conversation with Hiten Manseta, the owner. I was bemoaning the fact that I couldn't find a backpack that was both ergonomic and didn't look like a school bag. Anyway the result was that I ended up designing what we dubbed ”The Flatpack” for them – a thin nylon and leather backpack that rides close to your body and carries a laptop up to 15” in size. After Departures Magazine featured it, they quickly sold most of their stock, and I just found out there are only a few left in brown and black. It’s not cheap, but it’s been a lifesaver for me and my back.

The other Tusk product I can’t live without is a little leather case I use to carry my pocket digital camera. Because they keep introducing new product, this one is also nearly sold out, in fact it’s not even on their website. But if you call up and ask for it, they have a few left in their stockroom. It’s incredibly light and soft unlike most other camera cases which bulk up with unnecessary protection and defeat the notion of pocket-sized. (Squeezed flat it’s 3” x 5” so it’s only good for the smallest cameras that are around 2” x 4”.)

I've arranged a special offer for The Year in Pictures readers. If you call the store and give them the code "Danziger" you will receive a 10% discount on whatever you buy. 1.888.GET.TUSK. (438.8875.)

Paul Fusco Opening

Things don't always go smoothly. The frames for the Paul Fusco "RFK Funeral Train - Rediscovered" exhibition arrived on Friday with the wrong plexiglass (They were supposed to have Atrium plexi - a u.v. protecting, non-reflecting plexi that costs about $300 per frame!) However, all was set right and now the show is up and ready for its grand opening tomorrow night from 6-8 p.m..

By then the heat wave should have broken, we'll have the gallery nicely air-conditioned, and cold beer ready to be served. (One of my quirks - to serve little cans of beer instead of the nasty wine you usually get at openings.) So I look forward to seeing all local The Year in Pictures readers at 521 West 26th Street. There's no such thing as an opening that's too crowded!

Caption Caption

Trouble in Paradise

Detail - see full image below text.

For almost 40 years Richard Misrach has been producing photographs of the American West focusing on man's relationship and impact on his environment. His extended series “Desert Cantos” explored many aspects of the American desert with subjects ranging from fires and floods to military-scarred terrain to luscious skyscapes.

More recently he has turned his attention to the water with a series he titled “On the Beach” photographing the ocean, sunbathers, and swimmers from a hotel balcony in Hawaii. Shot on his 8x10 inch view camera, the photographs yield exquisite detail and sense of light. But Misrach did not intend them to be just pretty pictures.

As he explained, "My thinking was influenced by the events of 9/11, as well as by Nevil Shute's 1950s Cold War novel "On the Beach". I was drawn to the fragility and grace of the human figure in the landscape. For me, the work is both a celebration of our survival and an elegy. Paradise has become an uneasy dwelling place; the sublime sea frames our vulnerability, the precarious nature of life itself."

While some of these photographs have been exhibited over the past few years, an exhibition of 19 of these photographs, some as large as 10 feet wide, has just opened at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. and is the first time that this many works from this series can be seen together. It’s a stunning and disquieting view of trouble in paradise.

Weekend Video

Given the popularity of my post on the various tribute versions of Mariah Carey’s “Touch My Body” found on YouTube, I thought I’d snoop around to see what versions of the current summer hits were popping up. To my surprise, so many of the tributes were good, I had
to resist any cheap shots and focus instead on three astoundingly strong performances.

Above – Colin Jennison backed by his brother taking a hack at Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” two days after it's release.

Below – Salicia singing Rihanna’s “Take a Bow” and 12 year old Jessica Sanchez’s version of “Bleeding Love” by Leona Lewis.

Let Freedom Bling

Following my previous post on Andrew Bush’s “Vector Portraits”, I just came across Shirin Aliabadi’s car series, “Freedom Is Boring, Censorship Is Fun”. In Aliabadi’s pictures, the subjects are young Iranian women who in spite of the oppression of Islam seem to be having a good time. It’s a welcome revision to our view of the Middle East.

Aliabadi’s latest series, “Miss Hybrid”, pokes fun at the current fashion and beauty trends among fashionista Iranians, where the current vogue is for blond hair, light-colored contact lenses, occasional facial piercing and most importantly, surgical nose tape. (It's like the current trend for faux glasses.)

“Miss Hybrid” Aliabadi suggests, should be seen as an alternative beauty manifesto positing that natural beauty is unfair, elitist and irrelevant while artificial beauty and the need to transform into someone else via cosmetic intervention can be regarded as a healthy exercise in cultural rebellion and global integration. Now that's an original and radical concept!

Two pictures from the "Miss Hybrid" series.