Category Archives: photography

Brigitte Courme photographie

 

Brigitte Courme photographie

In 1969 Balthus starts to draw from photographs taken by himself and by Brigitte Courme (1934-1982) . Shown above is a picture by Brigitte Courme.

Balthus was a French artist of Polish origins whose work was figurative at a time when modern art was surrealist and abstract in nature, making him one of the first anti-modernists. His distinctive brand of nymphesque erotica (Thérèse rêvant, 1938) with lesbian overtones (The Guitar Lesson, 1934) has been influential to many present day erotomaniacs. Detractors accuse him of pedophilia and pornography but Balthus insisted that his work was not pornographic, but that it just recognized the discomforting facts of children’s sexuality.

Image sourced here

The artificiality of the image, its gloss rather than its reality

Via “Don’t you ever come down?” come The films of late Guy Bourdin on YouTube

Guy Bourdin (2006) – Alison M. Gingeras
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Exhibit A: Guy Bourdin (2001) – Luc Sante
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

More text on Bourdin over at my page and pictures over at Flickr.

Also, this picture a very good illustration of Bourdin’s fascination with disembodied limbs, what I like to call independent body parts in fiction, of which I’ve blogged here.

Trivia: Madonna was sued in 2004 for using the copyrighted work of the late French fashion photographer Guy Bourdin in her music video for the American Life track “Hollywood”[YouTube]. It was claimed she reenacted poses from at least eleven of the late photographer’s erotically tinged photos. Madonna settled the copyright lawsuit out of court.[4]

The most haunting image of the Holocaust

Having found Five explanations for the jump cuts in Godard’s Breathless made me research other work by the author Richard Raskin and I ended up with finding one of his books on the photograph shown above. The extended essay/book is called A Child at Gunpoint [Amazon] and it documents one of the iconic pictures of the twentieth century. For a long time it was unknown who the boy in the picture was. It has been recently suggested that it was Tsvi Nussbaum. For an online analysis of the identity of the people in the photograph, see here.

In the introduction to the book the publisher writes:

Widely regarded as the most haunting image we have of the Holocaust, the photo of a young boy with his hands up being driven from the Warsaw ghetto has served as a touchstone for everyone from the Nuremberg prosecutors to Elie Wiesel, and from Susan Sontag to revisionist ranters on the web.

What makes this picture so ‘haunting‘ is that it involves children. The most famous picture of the Holocaust is probably this one. Searching for Child+Holocaust at Google brings up this.

 

Carlo Mollino: Photographs 1956-1962

Carlo Mollino: Photographs 1956-1962 (2006) – Carlo Mollino
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

This came out last August. It concerns the photography of Mollino before his polaroid period. While nowhere near cheap, these Mollino photography anthologies are a good investment. The 2002 polaroid edition now commands prices between 300 and 700 euros (although the Hammilton gallery claims to sell it for 37 British pounds).

Book Description
The Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino held photography dear–it was one of his great passions and favorite means of expression, and an excellent way to enjoy another great passion, women. The photographs gathered here were all set in one of Mollino’s private apartments, which he refurbished especially for this purpose. An advocate of retouching, as documented in his treatise The Message from the Dark Room, Mollino also painted on his photos or negatives. Most of what appears here has been revised, most bodies sculpted and reshaped, and visibly so now that time has altered the color of the prints, revealing his handiwork. This portfolio, spanning from 1956 to 1962, ends just before Mollino’s Polaroid work of the 60s. It was made using a Leica and color negative film, and has never been published before.

Digression: also check these Google galleries of the photography of Inez van Lamsweerde, Sze Tsung Leong and Manuel Alvarez Bravo.

Notes on modernism

Literary Modernism and Photography: (2002) – Paul Hansom
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See also Sara Danius book on how modernism was influenced by new media in general.

Review
“Although literary modernism is famously associated with probing interiority while photography is two dimensional , the two moved into prominence concurrently, intersecting in ways that these essays explore. The volume considers documentary uses of the image; the relation between photographers’ aesthetics and their deployment of images; photography as a literary trope; and the transition into postmodernism.”–American Literature

Book Description
The developments in narrative experimentation that marked the modernist period in Europe and the United States provide an interesting crossroads with the development of visual representation during the same time. In this collection of fourteen original essays, scholars from a variety of disciplines explore the ways in which the photograph became a vital emblem of the transformative processes of modernism, offering a new aesthetic and psychological model for the new zeitgeist. The interdisciplinary methodology of Literary Modernism and Photography melds literary, cultural, and photographic theories to offer a challenging literary framework for this period. The essays address the problems surrounding the photograph’s ostensible “factuality”-its presumed ability to represent the real world-and suggest the difficulties inherent in aestheticizing the real into fictive forms, while also examining how the photograph shaped and reflected the new, modern artistic self-consciousness of figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, Vanessa Bell, and Willa Cather. If literary modernism heralded a re-visioning of the world, then the photograph was the concrete rendering of this new vision.

A positive review of John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses

WHEN IT IS published in the United States, John Carey’s polemic The Intellectuals and the Masses will probably startle reviewers. It certainly caused a flap when the British edition came out in the summer of 1992. Though an Oxford professor, Carey is a blunt literary populist: he argues that the fundamental motive behind the modernist movement in literature was a corrosive fear and loathing of the masses. Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset, George Gissing, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, T S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and Graham Greene all strove to preserve a sense of class superiority by reviling the mean suburban man. They convinced themselves that the typical clerk was subhuman, bestial, machinelike, dead inside, a consumer of rubbishy newspapers and canned food. The intellectuals had to create this caricature to maintain social distinctions in an increasingly democratic and educated society. Many of these writers ultimately disposed of the masses through fantasies of wholesale extermination, usually rationalized on eugenic grounds. –Jonathan Rose quoted in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), this copy sourced http://www.autodidactproject.org

See also: modernism – low modernism – mass culture

An article on postcards in relation to modernism:

The very definition of Modernism has always been contentious. Did it begin with the advent of photography, which liberated the visual arts from the obligations of realism, or was its starting point the experiments in the application of color by such Post-Impressionist painters as Cézanne, van Gogh and Gaugin? Did Claude Debussy’s gradual abandonment of tonality, the cornerstone of Western musical composition since J.S. Bach, lead inevitably to Arnold Schoenberg’s polytonality and the sound experiments of Webern, Stockhausen and Cage? Do the honors of introducing non-representational theatre belong to Pirandello, to the German Expressionists or to the Italian Futurists? And where do Kafka, Musil, Svevo and Joyce fit in? –Anthony Guneratne via http://www.co.broward.fl.us/library/bienes/postcard/modernism.htm [Nov 2006]

See also: modernism – low modernism – mass culture

Approaching Nowhere: Photographs (2006) – Jeff Brouws

Approaching Nowhere: Photographs (2006) – Jeff Brouws
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Jeffrey T. Brouws (born 1955) is an American photographer whose work captures the social experience and cultural relevance of classic American iconic images, from highway landscapes of run-down motels and neon-lit gas stations to carnival scenes of small-town sideshows. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Brouws [Oct 2006]

Synopsis
Like many Americans who grew up during the spread of sprawl – with its predictable landscape of housing developments, shopping malls, interstate highways and big-box construction – acclaimed photographer Jeff Brouws is drawn to places that still embody the vernacular past as well as to those that starkly portray the soulless, franchised American landscape. This collection of evocative images of buildings and places seen from the American road began as a cultural geography of Main Streets and became a visual critique of the myth of upward mobility that created this car-centred, paved-over universe. Some images look outward to the edges of suburbia where sprawl is encroaching upon nature. Others turn inward, documenting the devastated inner cities. All of them reflect the complex beauty and desolation of visual life in America today.

Sade / Surreal (2001) – Various

Sade / Surreal (2001) – Various
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Found the excellent German non-fiction book titled Sade / Surreal. Der Marquis de Sade und die erotische Fantasie des Surrealismus in Text und Bild. It is a 2001 book on Sade published by Tobia Bezzola, Michael Pfister, Stefan Zweifel with text by Michel Delon, Ursula Pia Jauch, Tobia Bezzola, Jacques Mayer and Stefan Zweifel.

Porte de sortie du parc des plaisirs, de la chasse du Prince
One of the many illustrations that grace the book above, image sourced here.

Why is it excellent. Lots of illustrations. I will give the list of all the work I was not familiar with:

See also: Sade – surrealism

Rephotographing Atget

Rue de la Colonie (1900) – Eugène Atget
Image sourced here.

Via gmtPlus9 (-15) (a blog which combines old weird america music with modernist art) comes a project called Rephotographing Atget:

Lens Culture… Rephotographing Atget – photos and text by Christopher Rauschenberg.

On a 1989 trip to Paris, I suddenly found myself face to face with a spiral-topped gatepost that I knew very well from a beautiful photograph by Atget (the photograph on the left). I rephotographed his gatepost from memory (the photograph on the right) and wondered how many other Atget subjects might still be holding their poses.” Also… Paris: Eugène Atget and Christopher Rauschenberg, and exhibition at the International Center Of Photography which ends on the 27th. — gmtPlus9 (-15)


It reminds me of a similar project involving the New York re-photographs of Berenice Abbott by MrJumbo.

The Chelsea Hotel (1936) – Berenice Abbott
Image sourced here.

The Chelsea Hotel (2000) – MrJumbo
a 2000 mimic of a Berenice Abbott photograph by MrJumbo
Image sourced here.

That there are more links between Atget and Abbott is attested by:

In 1925, Abbott discovered the photography of Eugène Atget and helped him gain international recognition for his work. —MrJumbo

And:

Fellow photographer Berenice Abbott is given much credit for the recognition which Atget’s photographs received after his death in 1927. One year before his death, Abbott, then an assistant to Man Ray, met with Atget and conserved many of his negatives. When Atget passed away, Abbott raised enough money to acquire 1,500 of his negatives and 8,000 prints. She spent the next forty years promoting his work in America, elevating it to be recognized as art, above its original reputation as simply photographic documents. In 1968, Eugene Atget’s work was collected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Berenice Abbott has commented regarding Atget: “He was an urbanist historian, a Balzac of the camera, from whose work we can weave a large tapestry of French civilization.”–Wikipedia [Jan 2006]