I Like To Watch: A photographic record of cats transfixed; self-referential cats; cat Witnesses of Our Time; cat onlookers; cats gazing stupidly at infinity; lightly hypnotized brainpan-fried cats; feline couch potatoes; cats afflicted by the staring disease; briefly and easily amused cats; UN observer cats; guilty bystander cats. All in all, an extremely important investigation into the perennial question of how to hold a cat's attention. [
Click on "Cats", funnily enough.]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Jun 21, 2004 -
10 comments
The Vertically Inclined Photographer: Shooting Paris, Rome, the French Riviera and the Loire Valley from a low-flying plane is
Patrick Durand's photographic obsession. It's an interesting
flat alternative to
Horst Hamann's [
click on "Gallery" and go to "New Verticals"]
tall vertical New York. There's something very exciting about looking at familiar sights from an unfamiliar point of view. [
Both sites very, perhaps too Flash.]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Jul 4, 2003 -
14 comments
Guy Bourdin, Photographer Extraordinaire, 1928-1991 He was the most controversial of the not-really-fashion fashion photographers. "
Too sexy, too necro, too sado, too gratuitously violent, too misogynist", they said.
Now he's on the verge of a big
retrospective, opening Saturday at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London; being
exhibited at
leading galleries; lauded in the
NYT and the object of a website as
excellent as the
one in my
main link. [
These last 3 links go directly to the portfolios.] I just hope - being old enough to remember being severely scolded by my parents for collecting the photographs he published in my generation's
vademecum, the since-degraded French magazine
Photo - that these far more politically correct times (specially in increasingly intolerant, hygienist and puritanical America) won't prove to be even less welcoming of his work than his
own times were.[
*sigh* Probably still NSFW, though most of his work was flipped through by our mothers in Vogue magazine more than 20 years ago...]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Apr 15, 2003 -
3 comments
Light, Secret Places And Books: Photographer
Sean Kernan's startling and beautifully literary interpretation of Jorge Luís Borges is based on his
The Secret Books album and was
reviewed on
The Garden of Forking Paths, that definitive, ever-fascinating Borges website. It's a small consolation for those, like me, who would have have liked to be in Barcelona today for the opening of the
Cosmopolis exhibition, which celebrates the stormy, but enduring identification of Borges with Buenos Aires. The relationship between writers and places is always interesting whenever they grow into each other to the point of almost
becoming each other. Joyce is Dublin; Kafka is Prague; Pessoa is Lisbon. What other, less obvious identifications are there? Is the relationship more like mutual cannibalism, mythical reinforcement, a touristy marketing scheme or the peaceful symbiosis it's generally made out to be?
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Oct 30, 2002 -
40 comments
Facing Time: A family's yearly
self-portrait from 1976 to 2002 is both uplifting and unsettling; a bit like human life itself. How does one separate the morbid fascination with aging from the spiritual joy of growth? Not to mention the element of voyeurism... [
From ZoneZero, via Eclectica.]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Oct 14, 2002 -
30 comments
Ralph Gibson's Interchange allows us to create pairs of his dark, lyrical photographs by selecting them from two different stacks. The results are starkly beautiful yet surprisingly coherent. Gibson is often criticized as cold, brainy and aestheticizing, but fans like me love his photography all the more for it. His website isn't nearly as smooth and collected, but it contains a generous helping of recent work. The
ex libris and
l'histoire de france series are also outstanding: rich and luscious surfaces and fetishes, obsessively stared at and almost erotically immobilized. The
gotham chronicles photographs look like a new departure, if perhaps just a tad too
recherché.[
Those who'd prefer to navigate the site from scratch should go straight to the front page, of course.]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Aug 25, 2002 -
15 comments
Life Is A Magazine, Chum... Come to the Magazine! A lot of us grew up with
Life Magazine and there's a certain nostalgic/narcissistic pleasure in looking at the cover of the
week you (if you're over 30, that is) or your parents were born in. Their
wacky and
classic covers are also worth checking out, even though there are some inevitable repeats. Oh - and never forgetting their astonishing
classic photographs, of course.
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Aug 9, 2002 -
18 comments
A Generous Brazilian Helping Of Cartier-Bresson's Photographs: His work is so vital it's unusually monitor-friendly. This 1999 Brazilian website includes many hard-to-find photographs, interestingly divided by location(Europe, America, India). There's also a nice selection of his classic images on
Photology.com's commercial site and an avaricious but compelling set of portraits of writers
here, courtesy of a Eastman Kodak-sponsored exhibition. [
As far as I can tell, they're all copyright-cleared. Bring your old Leicas out...and despair!].
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Jun 17, 2002 -
14 comments
