Wearable Photography

Appealing photo-prints from  Agnès B ...

Jorma Puranen: Seeing the Light

Don’t you just hate it when you walk up to, say, a dark Rembrandt painting and instead of seeing, a work by the old master, you see a reflection of your old self?

Finnish photographer Jorma Puranen, not only doesn't mind reflection off a painted surface, he embraces it. Earlier this year at the Armory Show, I encountered his photographs of glare-frosted paintings, part of a series called "Shadows, Reflections, and All That Sort of Thing."  

Puranen photographs historic portraits as objects, emphasizing the reflective surfaces and aged paint. By obscuring the image, Puranen reveals a whole lot about how we see.

While looking at these ghostly apparitions it became clear how committed we are to our suspension of disbelief, when viewing traditional portraiture. Maintaining the illusion is so essential, that our brains automatically edit out any environmental factor that may interfere with our peering into the soul of the sitter. That is, the illusion of a sitter whose image our brain has allowed itself to be deceived into seeing.

All but the last two images here are from the website of the Helsinki School. The last two, are my photos of the pictures, from the Armory Show, where you'll see I had no choice but to embrace the glass.

PHOTOGRAPHIE Magazine

PHOTOGRAPHIE was an annual, special issue of the magazine Arts et Metiers Graphiques entirely dedicated to photography. There’s lots to read about AMG, the influential journal of all things print-related, at Modernism 101, where most of these images are from. There’s also a whole website about it at RIT.

What I particularly like about these photo annuals, aside from how beautiful they are, is that they feature no photography on the covers. The typography acts as master of ceremonies. It introduces the special guest and then gets out of the way.

Unfortunately, AMG founder Charles Peignot would definitely not approve of this post. He and his pals (like Le Corbusier, Jean Cocteau and A.M. Cassandre) formed Union des Artistes Modernes, a group "strongly against anything backward looking."


PHOTOGRAPHIE, 1947

PHOTOGRAPHIE, 1938

PHOTOGRAPHIE, 1932

PHOTOGRAPHIE, 1930

PHOTOGRAPHIE, 1931

PHOTOGRAPHIE, 1933-34

PHOTOGRAPHIE, 1935

PHOTOGRAPHIE, 1938

PHOTOGRAPHIE, 1939

PHOTOGRAPHIE, 1937

Picturing Coney Island

Reginald Marsh, 1936
Tempera on panel, 59” x 35”
Via artchive
"I like to go to Coney Island because of the sea, the open air, and the crowds—crowds of people in all directions, in all positions, without clothing, moving—like the great compositions of Michelangelo and Rubens." --Reginald Marsh

The New York Times took yesterday’s heat as the opportunity to run its annual Coney Island photo on today’s front page. I like to think of it as just the latest installment in the long tradition of depicting the famed beach over the years.

Wegee, 1940

“… a great jammed clutter of human bodies,” was how photographer Weegee once described midsummer Coney Island.

You can see this image really large here. Read about "Weegee’s Day at the Beach" in Smithsonian and see more Coney Island images by the photographer.

Fortune has posted "To Heaven by Subway," an article about Coney Island, from its August 1938 issue. The above painting is by Robert Riggs, who illustrated the story.

From the same era as the Marsh and Riggs

paintings, is this 1932 picture by Mabel Dwight.

Via FIGURATION FÉMININE

View of the beach from the air, Life, August 12, 1940.

Via Airdee scanzen

Reginald Marsh, Coney Island Scene, c. 1932.

University of Virginia

Reginald Marsh, Coney Island Beach, etching, 1934.

C&J Goodfriend

It looks like Marsh was actually standing in the water when

he painted In the Surf, Coney Island, 1946.

Via All Art News

In extreme heat, it was as crowded under the boardwalk as it was on the beach. Weegee, 1940.

George Tooker, 1947.

Christies

Lorenzo Homar, Muscle Beach – Coney Island, 1949
Princeton Library


Daily News, July 23, 2010.

Postcard, A Typical Crowd on a Hot Day at Coney Island, N.Y.

via Cardcow.com

Natural High Fashion

German photographer Hans Silvester has documented the Surma and Mursi people of southern Ethiopia and their creative DIY/haute couture tradition of body decoration. "Natural Fashion," a book of the photos was published in 2008 and there is a small show of these works in New York through January 8, at Marlborough Graphics, 40 W. 57th St.

The exuberance with which the tribe members employ animal, vegetable and mineral for mark-making and other adornment is stunning in its inventiveness and sophistication. The images, which celebrate the art and physicality of people who wear nothing but fingerpaint, flowers, and seedpods, are utterly enchanting. You might very well find yourself inspired to frolic in nature and take up crafting.

Or, alternatively (since you are probably dressed entirely in black), you’ll be mentally placing Silvester’s photographs within the universe of ethnographic images made by Irving Penn and Leni Reifenstal, or those we’ve seen in Vogue, National Geographic and modern advertising. Before you know it, you’ll be pondering post-structuralist anthropology, the Western gaze, and the entire artistic/fashionistic industrial complex.

Perhaps we simply are what we wear.














Much thanks to Vito Zarkovic for posting about "Natural Fashion" on his FB page. The images here and many more can be seen here.

The Bronx Riviera: Wayne Lawrence Photos

I love these portraits made at Orchard Beach in the Bronx by photographer, Wayne Lawrence. He manages to record precise levels of trust, confidence, and vulnerability in each subject. See the rest of the series here.