Go Figure

Traditional life drawing and figurative oil painting has long been considered a fusty 19^th century art forms. In his pictures Manchester based artist Mark Demsteader proves otherwise.

There is something graceful, intimate and sensual about his images of contemplative female beauty that prove you don’t have to be abstract or conceptual to be contemporary.

They remind me of a more abstract John Singer Sergeant, while in no way turning away from the modern world. According to his bio Demsteader’s work has sparked a renaissance of interest in traditional life drawing”

As they say everything old is new again.

 

Don McCullin: Hero for All Time

For a long time Don McCullin has been a hero of mine. Not just because of his powerful images, many of which have the power to bring tears to my eyes (a rare occurrence for me) but because of the example he gives us in how to live a moral life.

We often bandy about the word hero about a sports star say or a film actor  but when we examine the object of our admiration we find them to possess a unique talent but an entirely ordinary soul.There is no sacrifice made or dilemma faced that any of us might not come across in our daily lives.

Yet for a few men and women bravery and compassion are the very basis of their existence. One might almost say it was their very reason for being alive in the first place. Don McCullin is just such a man. Never has the phrase ‘to lead by example’ been more apposite.

Just read his excellent autobiography ‘Unreasonable Behavior’ and you’ll see what I mean. Here is a man who with no education, money and connections pushed himself into some of the world’s most dangerous places and came back with images that bear witness to man’s inhumanity to man.

On several occasions he was close to death but even the threat of his own extinction did not stop him returning to the world’s most unforgiving places.
From war torn Africa to Vietnam, McCullin’s camera was there.

I have just watched the staggeringly moving and powerful new documentary about the man called simply, ‘McCullin’.

Very people can stand in front of a locked off camera framed from the waist up and just talk about their experiences and make it utterly gripping.

This is not due to the telling of overly embellished and dramatic stories but to the simple honesty and essential decency of the man.

You’re listening to someone who does not spare himself to get to the truth of a situation.

Perhaps that would explain the amazing variety and power of his imagery.

From homeless men on the streets of London to landscapes of the Somerset countryside to the war photography on which he made his name, picture after picture speaks to us.

Even images of lighter subjects like the English enjoying what we laughing call a summer, are brilliant and surprisingly for a man associated with such deep and serious subjects, very funny.

Everyone should see this documentary and everyone should own a book of McCullin’s images if only to remind ourselves that in a world that for many is a place of pain and torture, at least one man is prepared not to shut his eyes to their suffering.

Picture Purrfect

Edward Weston

As every photojournalist knows the hardest thing in creating candid imagery is getting access. Koudelka’s Gypsies and other such photo stories are years in the making and taking.

But when all else fails there’s always cats.

There they are sitting around obligingly just waiting to be immortalized by the great photographers of the age.

I amused myself by finding one cat image for many of the mediums most renowned practitioners or should that be cat-itioners.

Mark Steinmetz

Brassai

Gjon Mili

Willy Ronis

Édouard Boubat

Nat Farbman

Leonard Freed

Martine Franck

Willy Ronis

Daido Moriyama

Anders Petersen

Jacob Aue Sobol

Edouard Boubat

The Girl and the Pussycat

Never work with children and animals is a dictate that’s been roundly ignored by photographer Andy Prokh.

He took a series of images featuring his daughter and her much loved pet cat that I recently came across.

There seems to be a trend for this type of thing in photography recently. I’ve seen a series featuring a small boy and his pet French Bulldog and a slightly older boy and his considerably larger Newfoundland dog.

I find this series more artfully done than either of the aforementioned efforts, being charming without being cloyingly sweet.

Wipeout Wonders

I love surfing photography and I love underwater photography. So when I saw Lucia Griggi’s underwater shots of surfers I was in seventh heaven.

A passionate surfer as well as photographer she has a great connection with her subjects and with the sea, giving you the sense of both the surfers grace and the awesome power and majesty of the ocean.

She explains “It is about being connected with the waves and moving alongside the surfer under the water. Feeling its energy and initiating the movements of the surfer.”

Though it’s a cliché I kept having the lyrics from the Beach Boys ‘Feel Flows’ running through my head when I was looking at her images,

Unfolding enveloping missiles of soul
Recall senses sadly
Mirage like soft blue like lanterns below
To light the way gladly

Young Blood

The photo series ‘Young Blood’ by Erika Larsen, about the next generation of American hunters, shows the importance of keeping an open mind when choosing a subject to do a photo essay on.

Many might have tried to judge the children in these images but Larsen chooses to try and understand instead. The result is an empathetic and quintessentially American photo essay showing the strange relationship Americans have with their guns, which appears to start early in many places in the country.

In defense of her young hunters, Larsen says the following.

 

‘I spent a year and half traveling across the United States looking
 for its next generation of hunters and the children I found put a young face 
on an ancient practice. Along the way I joined many hunting expeditions
 and sought the perspective of child hunters.

The faces reveal America’s youth connecting to hunting’s storied past.
Many children today while away their time with video games, television 
and movies. These young hunters take a different path.
For them, the thrill is learning to follow their instincts and
 being immersed in nature.’

It’s hard to argue with that though personally I’d rather they interacted with nature through the viewfinder of a camera rather than the sight of a gun.

The Place Beyond the Pines

Families. Can’t live with them can’t shoot them. Some drive you to storm from the dining table screaming ‘I hate you! I hate you!” because you can’t get your ears pierced. Other families have rather more serious difficulties.

‘The Place Beyond the Pines’ centers on the later kind.

It’s a gripping multi-generational tragedy that deals with the consequences of our actions for those around us and those that come after us.

In brief and without giving too much away, Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling) is a motorcycle cage rider who turns to bank robbery to support his son by Romina (Eva Mendes)

This fateful decision brings him into contact with cop Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper) with tragic consequences.

Cross becomes the center of the plot from this point on and seems on the surface to be as good as Glanton was bad.

However as the film develops we begin to see that both men are flawed as Cross reveals himself to be a less than effective father, a fact that comes into play during the last segment of the film which takes place 15 years after the initial action.

Cross has by this time sired a wildly out of control son, A.J., who in a strange twist of fate is rather reminiscent of Glanton. In marked contrast to Luke Glanton’s boy, Jason, who has now grown to be the ‘good’ son.

This, with the inevitability of Greek Tragedy, leads to the final scenes of violent confrontation.

In the wrong hands with the wrong cast this could have been an almighty mess but it isn’t in no small part to Gosling who seems to be rapidly turning into Steve McQueen.  In ‘Drive’ he played a fiendishly skillful racecar turned getaway driver. In this he plays an amazingly skillful motorcyclist.

Not content with aping McQueen’s own passion for motoring, he’s also busy developing a very minimalistic McQueen approach to dialogue.

In this film we’re lucky to get more than two words out of him, words that are likely to be delivered with a quite enormous pause between them (I wonder if he’s the same in real life. If you asked him his name would you have to wait a minute for him to get one of the two words out of his mouth before waiting a further 60 seconds for the rest of it)

Yet it works. Brilliantly. The tension created by Goslings dysfunctional character is often unbearable. Every time he’s on the screen we’re waiting for him to damage himself or somebody with his tightly coiled, barely repressed rage at the world.

It’s a performance that is almost, and sorry for this over used phrase, ‘Brandoesque’. Several times during his performance I’d had to cover my eyes out of fear for what was going to come. I only ever do that during horror films, so that perhaps best expresses the power of his performance.

Eva Mendes as his poor abused wife is also surprisingly good. There is of course the natural cynicism that comes with seeing the gorgeous, pouty Mendes suddenly looking all unmade up and dowdy…but still pretty hot for all that. Yet the honesty of the performance wins us over.

Bradley Cooper, who takes charge of the second segment of this strange and beautifully conceived plot, has his work cut out keeping the film on the rails post-Gosling but he does it with the sheer power of his niceness. If Gosling is McQueen, Cooper is a blue collar Jimmy Stewart, a likeable regular guy who knows right from wrong, a boy scout in man’s clothing. Or so it appears. But eventually we see this goodness as a type of self-righteousness that will not only sell-out bad cops but also his wife and son in the pursuit of this ‘good’.

I’ve read that some have seen the film as a comment on the failings of contemporary America but on this level the film doesn’t really work for me as the flaws of the main characters are too universal and timeless. The story might have taken place in many western countries over the past 50 years and still retained verisimilitude.

For me the message of the film, if there is one, is it’s impossible to life a live that doesn’t have bad consequences for someone, no matter how hard we try. All we can do is admit our mistakes and move on.

Just like Jason Glanton who rides off into the west on his newly brought motorcycle in the film’s final scene to an uncertain future..

The Silence of Dogs in Cars

Dogs trapped in cars; a subject that would send many screaming for the reinstatement of hanging.

Photographer Martin Usborne has taken a different view. He has trapped dozens of dogs in cars quite deliberately in order to get this quite poignant series of images, ‘The Silence of Dogs in Cars’

The resigned looks and sad stares of these poor mutts perhaps remind us of own more human predicament of having to put up with so much that we are powerless to change.

Coney Island Baby

To live in New York in 1940’s is to have been in the right place at the right time. To be holding camera made it even righter.

Just take the example of Coney Island native, Harold Feinstein. He started taking photographs at the tender age of 15 in 1946.

At 17 he joined the legendary Photo League and become a pioneer of New York street photography. Edward Steichen was an early supporter of his work, while his good friend W. Eugene Smith said of him

He is one of the very few photographers I have known, or have been influenced by, with the ability to reveal the familiar to me in a beautifully new, in a strong and honest way.

Never a true word was written. Feinstein’s work stands the test of time and has that easy charm that comes of being able to empathize with your subjects.

There’s nothing flashy or showy in his pictures and for that reason like Helen Levitt in later periods he is able to capture the singular spirit of New York City and its inhabitants.

The Downward Spiral

Having spent many nights gripped by series like The Killing (the Scandinavian version) and The Bridge (another Danish export) I was delighted to find a new European crime series to keep me up at nights

Engrenages, otherwise known by its English title ‘Spiral’, is a French detective series currently available to stream on Netflix (which is fast becoming my main destination for TV viewing rather than cable.)

It’s sort of cross between ‘The Wire’ and ‘Law & Order’ and features a fine cast of characters, from the deeply flawed detective Laure Berthaud to the deeply moral and deeply handsome prosecutor Pierre Clement to my own personal favorite, stunning Josephine Karlsson, a lawyer with only a passing acquaintance with concept of doing the right thing.

The first two series are perfectly serviceable and entertaining pieces of crime drama but it’s the third series really ups the anti by doing what all great series do. It sticks to a theme that it explores in several different plot lines. In this case we might say that theme was the difficulty of doing the right thing in a world that is profoundly wrong.

Each person’s attempts to stay honest is challenged and ultimately comprised to the extent that all the main characters be they cops, lawyers or judges end up being only marginally less corrupt than many of the criminals they attempt to convict.

The idea of cops and criminals being similar to one another is a theme that’s been explored in many crime dramas but the adept way its handled in Spiral constantly surprises and challenges us by playing with our own perceptions of whether a character is ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

In this way it parts company with ‘Law & Order’ in that it is more than happy to reveal our favorite characters are a little less perfect than we had been led to believe.

Perhaps more than anything it’s this willingness to go beyond good and evil that makes the series thoroughly European as opposed to American.

It exposes the characters moral failings without feeling the need to condemn them. These are after all just human beings just like us who are trying to get by in a world hell bent on making it as hard for them as possible.

 

 

 

 

Outsider Art

 

I often think that sometimes in order to take unique images of a society it helps to view it through the eyes of an alien.

For example it might be argued that Robert Franks’ images of America benefit from the fact that he’s Swiss.

While Garry Winogrand’s images of the American west gain something from his native New Yorker roots.

Bill Brandt, whose exhibition ‘Shadow & Light’ is currently showing at MoMA, is another case in point.

Brandt was born in Hamburg and only settled in England in his late twenties.

He become fascinated by the British class system and captured it beautifully in his depiction of servants at work for the rich and his images of the upper classes at Ascot.

When you see these and other images of 1930’s and 40’s Britain you are reminded of just how much your view of your own country from this period is informed by Brandt’s vision.

If he had just done this alone, it would have been a major achievement but Brandt also did a series of images that sent the benchmark for the abstract nude.

Not forgetting his landscapes of the British countryside or his images of people sheltering from German bombs in the Underground during the war.

In fact I could go on because the list of beautiful and startling images that Brandt took are legion.

Interestingly he not only took his images he also developed and printed them, believing that only the person taking the photo could really know how he wanted them to look.

In other words he was a consummate craftsman as well as highly inventive visual artist.

Before coming to Britain he traveled throughout Europe, so it’s entirely possible that he could have ended by documenting pre and post war France instead (he actually spent time working for Man Ray in his studio.)

I’m sure British photography is very glad that he didn’t.

Risk: The Lesson of Robert Frank

‘You are free and you risk something by taking a photograph. It’s not taking a snapshot of your sister. You risk because this is maybe not the way people think one should photograph. So you go out on a more different road. There is a risk involved in that. And I think if an artist doesn’t take risks, then it’s not worth it.‘ Robert Frank 2007

This is a great quote I came across in an interview with photographer Robert Frank in 2007. In 1957 he changed the way we think about photography with his book ‘The Americans’ which eschewed the typical themes to create a wholly unseen vision of the country. ‘If an artist doesn’t take risks it’s not worth it’ should be a mantra every creative person lives by.

There are many great artist who know how to create something technically perfect but very few that make us see the world in a different way. As you can see from these photographs, Frank was one of them.

Make Homosexuals Marry

Why should heterosexuals be the only ones to endure marriage? For too long gays have gone around having single fun while poor married heterosexuals suffer in silence.Well, this video shows what their in for. And I for one say it’s about time they suffered like the rest of us.

 

 

The Face of the Age

For nearly twenty years Mark Story has been travelling the world taking pictures of centenarians. In that time he’s amassed over 15,000 portraits. Rather than take pictures of his subjects in their environment Story has chosen to shoot just the face on a deep black background and lights to emphasize the subjects wrinkles, which when you’re past 100 are somewhat extensive. Some portraits make us see the beauty of aging others the horror of it. All make us face our own mortality.

Fleur du Mal

Sayaka Murayama is a London based Japanese photographer with a thoroughly distinct look and feel.

She definitely utilizes her heritage to create startlingly avant-garde images.

The work sort of reminds me a little of her countryman Araki and fashion photographer Paolo Roversi, while at the same time feeling utterly unique.

Flowers and nature seem to play a big part in much of her work but in a way that suggests more the decay or perversion of nature rather than a celebration of it.

It’s all very fin de siècle and very beautiful at the same time.

She’s definitely one of the most distinct voices in contemporary fine art and fashion photography that I’ve come across.

‘Say Cheese, Mr. Fox’

It seems Tim Flach isn’t alone in taking distinctive animal portraits. Morten Koldby has had as similar idea and has done a series of shots depicting the almost human expressions of our animal cousins.

It’s almost as if these animals were children going to have their photos taken by the school photographer.

Meet the Benetel’s

Christian Benetel

Alexandra and Christian Benetel have more in common than a family name. This brother and sister share the same passion for photography and at a young age are starting to create some distinctive portraits.

By turns dream-like, vulnerable and pensive their images have a similar look and feel and suggest a view into a very private fantasy world.

Alexandra Benetel

Even though neither sets of images look like Cindy Sherman you can see her influence in the whole notion of using the self as a canvas to present ideas of the world. Alexandra Benetel has even spoken about becoming someone else and taking ‘on a role’ in her photographs.

Like the more surreal self-portraits of Kyle Thompson I expect to see many more interesting images come out of the Benetel family.

Christian Benetel

Alexandra Benetel

Christian Benetel

Alexandra Benetel

Christian Benetel

Alexandra Benetel

ChristianBenetel

Alexandra Benetel

ChristianBenetel

Alexandra Benetel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Proud Flesh

What is it about southern artists and decay? Whether it’s photographers like William Eggleston or writers like Flannery O’Conner, the south seems to be a great place to show things going a little to seed.

Of course decay and death needn’t to be moldy and unpleasant it could be beautiful in the right hands like those of photographer Sally Mann.

Having famously taken her intimate pictures of her children, she now turns her lens on long time husband, Larry who suffers from muscular dystrophy.

There have been many painters over the centuries who have chosen female lovers as there subjects, so it’s interesting to have the tables turned and see what happens when a women looks at the ageing object of her affections.

Mann makes her subject appear by turns mysterious, vulnerable and tender.

Some of the poses feel almost feminine and are a little reminiscent of Bonnard’s images of his wife Marthe in that they portray the intimacy between subject and photographer. It’s clear that no one could no this human being better than Sally Mann.

Naturally all these large format images are beautifully constructed with an attention to detail and a sense of style that turn potentially commonplace imagery into a meditation on mortality.

Landscape in the Abstract

Vittorio Senna, Ansel Adams and a few others apart, I’m not big on landscapes. It’s such a familiar medium it’s very hard to make things seem different.

Which is why I admire and totally respect Michael Kenna. His black and white landscapes are instantly recognizable and instantly distinctive.

Kenna photographs at dawn or at night using exposures of up to 10 hours. Resulting in haunting ethereal images like these.

 

Dumb Ways to Die

Very, very occasionally I see an ad that I find genuinely entertaining. This charming and funny little film done for the Melbourne Metro system in Australia is one of them.

Sense of smile

Fashion photography can be astoundingly stupid. Vacuous models placed in ever more idiotic situations and poses.

How refreshingly to remember their were also photographers like Norman Parkinson who possessed a great sense of style but also a great sense of humor. A Sense of Smile one might say.

His work produced mainly in the fifties and early sixties has that wit I associate with an Evelyn Waugh novel, something that is beautifully done but doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Parkinson embodies this spirit with his fun, inventive, tongue-in-cheek work.

 

The Art of Fine Dining.

 

What is it the makes something truly exceptional?

Discipline? Creative flair? Imagination? Hard work? All of them obviously but the degrees to which they are mixed together will vary according to the ideas of the individual practitioner

One man’s recipe for perfection is another’s recipe for disaster.

This is only to clearly shown in two wonderful documentaries about food that I’ve seen over the last six months

One is ‘Jiro Dreams of Sushi’, the other ‘El Bulli: Cooking in Progress’.

What makes them so interesting is the different routes each head chef takes to make his restaurant world class.

The decisions made are as much cultural as their personal.

For Jiro Ono, head chef at the world’s premier sushi restaurant, Sukiyabashi Jiro in Tokyo the key to success is exactitude. Everything from the setting of a table to the boiling of rice must be done perfectly. Nothing is left to chance and everything is done to pre-existing ideas about what makes sushi ideal.

In this world there is no room for interpretation but you can be sure that what are you being served will be to the highest possible standard

By contrast Ferran Adria of El Bulli in Barcelona views the creation of food as a constantly evolving process with no right or wrong answers beyond that special ‘feeling’ that certain dishes bring him.

Like his Japanese counterpart, he makes sure each dish is artfully presented but he will also accept a certain degree of imperfection.

At one point an oil-based cocktail is served which none of the guests care for. No problem, it will be modified or perhaps removed from the menu as only by such trial and error can new things be invented

After all El Bulli used to serve its guests 35 dishes over 3 hours so there would certainly be something to delight them. I say used because sadly the restaurant is now closed. Which might be testimony to the pressure of constantly evolving new dishes each season (the restaurant would close down for six months in order to create the coming seasons dishes)

No matter for whether you’re a foodie or just someone involved in creating anything, these films represent an inspirational and insightful look on what it takes to make something beautiful.

Self-Love

Taking a self-portrait can be a tricky business. Somehow you never seem to be able to make yourself look as debonair and sophisticated as you know you truly are in real life

Kyle Thompson had no such worries it seems. He has just completed a yearlong photographic project featuring nothing but images of himself.

What could have been a work of supreme egotism turns into a quite a fun and engaging series of images with Kyle putting himself in some unusual places and positions.

Django Unchained: Sweet Release

 

Some of the scenes that Tarantino has created over the years are firmly etched in my memory. Be it the Kahuna burger scene in Pulp Fiction or the ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs.

However sometimes his films feel like two or three world-class scenes with some other bits around them (see ‘Inglourious Basterds’)

It’s almost as if the power of the scenes pull me out of the movie in a weird sort of way.

In ‘Django Unchained’ I think he gets the balance just right. It has fine performances and cool scenes but also a pretty coherent story that pulls you in.

There are some great turns like Don Johnson as a white suited plantation owner and Samuel Jackson as an ‘Uncle Tom’ man servant, but at the center is Christopher Waltz as a bounty hunter.

Even though Jamie Foxx is our Siegfried-like hero, it’s Waltz that steals the show with his dandified diction and crisp unexpected violence.

Naturally the film has come in for some criticism for its depiction of slavery, though I would point out that much of what you see in the film actually happened for real. Making it fair game for a filmmaker to bring out into the open. If you find that makes you uncomfortable, here’s an idea: why not devote yourself to making sure it never happens again anywhere else in the world?

One final thought on the film is that he represents a true center of modern filmmaking. On the one hand you’ve got loud idiotic films like ‘The Avengers’ on the other painfully slow art house offerings like ‘The Master’ that tries to suggest slow pacing is a substitute for thought.

In the middle you have films like ‘Django Unchained’. Fast paced, sexy, Dirty Harry style revenge fantasies done with some wit, that put you firmly on the side of the morally right while allowing you to have a bit of fun into the bargain.

I wish there were more films being made like this today. If there were I would approach a visit to the cinema more in a spirit of expedition than trepidation.

UK Youth

Janette Beckman’s pictures of young Britain in the late seventies and early eighties make me nostalgic for a time when there was still a spirit of youth rebellion, and a person could be in a band and actually make it a bit of money.

Poster Power

A few years ago graphic artist Albert Exergian did a series of minimalist posters for famous TV series. I think they still hold up and it makes wonder why people don’t do more limited edition graphic images like this.

They’re simple and charming and require just a little thought to work out, making them all the more rewarding.

And This Year’s Winner Is…..

I Thought this was wonderful and super simple by Olly Moss. Oscars for each year are altered to reflect that year’s winner. It’s worth looking at. Just click to enlarge

Never Underestimate the Power of Voiceover

 

Ok, it’s nine minutes long but I promise that it’s 9 minutes well spent. An entertaining intelligent and fun short film that deserves the awards showered upon it.

<p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/58150375″>VOICE OVER (English subtitles)</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/kamelfilms”>Kamel Films</a> on <a href=”http://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

How the Other Half Lived

If you’re going to have a skill, getting on with rich people is one of the better ones to have. It allows you to share in their wondrous lifestyle and in the case of photographer Slim Aarons, gives you ample opportunity to preserve their opulence for posterity.

In our cash strapped times some of the images may make you sick with envy, though many of you will probably ask yourself, as I did, is it really wise to seat a small child on a golden throne? Then allow yourself the satisfaction of imagining just what a horror she would have turned into over the years.

Ahh the pitfalls of immense wealth.

Ace in the Hole

It’s about time the outrageous monopoly of cable TV stations was challenged and finally Netflix have come up with a viable alternative

Their streaming of the excellent ‘House of Cards’ is a masterstroke.

How many would pay 100 bucks for a decent cable package each month, when 11.99 gets them unlimited films and now possibly original TV series that are designed for adults rather than teenagers?

Even if it was 25 or 30 a month I might go for that with just a few pieces of quality TV that allowed me to ditch the wall-to-wall dreck I get on cable.

As I understand it, stations like HBO make cable companies like Time Warner take on absurdly unwatchable channels that make finding programs you actually want to watch like searching for morality on Capitol Hill.

I welcome the possibility of switching off cable and switching on Netflix streaming if ‘House of Cards’ is what it’s going to bring me.

The series is based on a British TV series of the same name that I remember well.

I have to say the American version is better

Kevin Spacey’s performance is masterful. He brings just the right amount of highly considered malevolence to the part.

Robin Wright as his wife is equally perfectly cast. Her character is that are thing these days, a woman who can be both ambitious and ruthless while still expressing human vulnerability.  Something that requires real acting skill to pull off and writing chops to create.

The other key reason for the series superiority from the British original lies in the fact that it takes place in Washington rather than London. We know how much there is at stake in the most powerful country in the world, so it makes the level of duplicity seem somehow merited. We can almost root for Kevin Spacey’s character to overcome his more upstanding colleagues because well, that’s what it takes to make things happen in the capital.

As I understand it Netflix have committed to another 13 episodes of this great show and are also planning on releasing a new series of ‘Arrested Development’ I hope they get the rewards for their efforts.

After all, anything that gives me an opportunity to stick it to Time Warner has to be welcome.

 

Rust and Bone

If I told you of a film where the lead character loses her legs in a bizarre accident involving a killer whale and is befriended by a bare knuckle boxer with a 5 year old son who learns the importance of a tenderness and love through his crippled lover, you might want to reach for a sick bucket.

Yet somehow the potentially schlocky romance at the heart of ‘Rust & Bone’ works beautifully. Jacques Audiard, the man responsible for two of my favorite films of the last decade, ‘The Beat my Heart Skipped’ and ‘A Prophet’ directed it.

Audiard has cast superbly with Marion Cotillard as the legless lover and Matthias Schoenearts as her boxing beau.

Cotillard resists the temptation to overact and instead conveys worlds simply with her gaze, while Schoenaerts is utterly convincing as an uneducated violent man who learns importance of love.

Interestingly Audiard actually adapted this film from a collection of short stories by Canadian author Craig Jackson, taking bits from various tales and melding them to create a world that is wholly his own.

It’s a place where men are men, which without women, is a huge problem for them and everybody else.

It’s often been said that ‘Hell is other People’ but in Rust & Bone’ redemption is other people.

Only through a significant other can we begin to be whole and understand our flawed view of the world.

In short, the message of ‘Rust & Bone’ is that the world may hurt but people can heal.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

Flowers and me have an ongoing war. Let’s just say I haven’t got what is termed in England ‘green fingers’. I’m pretty sure I could kill a cactus inside two weeks.

Terri Weifenbach is clearly someone who doesn’t have such a hostile relationship with nature.

For 30 years she’s been turning her camera lens on plants, flowers and gardens to create a subtle and beautiful vision of the outdoors.

These soft focus pictures manage to be pretty without being sappy and transform the average country lane or suburban garden in to something almost dream-like, as if we’d stumbled across some secret treasure hiding in plain sight.

Only Connect: Lessons from ‘The Bridge’

 

 

A body is found on the Oresund Bridge connecting Denmark to Sweden. On further examination it’s discovered that this body has been cut in half and even more strangely the two halves belong to two different people.

So starts the latest finely worked crime drama from Scandinavia ‘The Bridge’.

It turns out that these two unfortunates aren’t the only people who aren’t working that well together.

Everyone in ‘The Bridge’ has trouble connecting with everyone else. Be it the Danish detective Martin Rohde or his Swedish counterpart Saga Noren who have to work through cultural and personality differences

Or for that matter, Rohde and his son who have grown apart after his divorce. Not forgetting Asperger-like Noren and practically everyone she comes into contact with.

What’s interesting about ‘The Bridge’ is how it explores these themes. The idea of two cops who have to work together but don’t get along is one of the oldest tropes in the book.

Yet the writers of ‘The Bridge’ avoid active hostility between the two protagonists. We can see Martin quite likes Saga but their work practices are rather different. The methodical play by the rules approach of Noren is contrasted with the more unorthodox approach of Rohde

Avoiding a further cliché the unorthodox approach is not the one that always proves the most effective.

In fact, as the series continues we can see how one partner begins adopting behavior once associated with the other. Like any good relationship Noren and Rohde are learning from each other.

These lessons are echoed throughout the series. One person after the other learns what is important to them and how best to relate to it.

Even Noren, who ends the series by arranging a date.

Subtle, intelligent and intriguing the ‘The Bridge’ is yet another

Searching for Sugar Man

We’ve all heard the stories of famous artists who are never discovered until long after they’ve gone to that great studio in the sky.

We take some comfort from knowing that eventually they have got their just reward but that view is quickly tempered by the reality that they would have died feeling that they’d failed.

Wouldn’t it be great if just for once we were able to redress the balance and catch the creator of a forgotten masterpiece before he vanished from this earth? Let him know ‘That thing you made that we thought sucked balls? Well we were wrong. It’s awesome!”

‘Searching for Sugar Man’ is just such an uplifting story, an amazing and unlikely tale of long lost Detroit musician, Sixto Rodriguez, who is tracked down by rabid fans in another part of the world.

For it turns out that his brilliant album ‘Cold Facts’ was a huge hit in of all places, apartheid South Africa.

White South Africans grow up with the album as the soundtrack to their young lives. Yet despite it’s massive success no one knew a thing about the artist. State control of media made it all but impossible to get information and it was only years later when two obsessive fans began the hunt for the man everyone assumed had committed suicide.

As Rodriguez sold about 6 records in America very few their could be of any help at all. Yet such is the power of fan worship, our intrepid South African explorers didn’t give up and eventually discover their hero alive and well and living in Detroit

It helps that the man they find is one of the nicest and most genuine human beings ever to grace the earth. There is not a shred of rancor or bitterness in his demeanor. Here is a man comfortable in his own skin that has achieved the one thing we all want, to leave something behind us outside of our families that the rest of the world admires and values.

For any that haven’t heard the album and it’s great follow up ‘Coming from Reality’, the best way I can describe the sound is this is what happens when Bob Dylan and Stevie Wonder have a love child.

Listen for yourself and once you’ve done buy the albums and rent the movie. At the very least you’ll revel in this uplifting story, which shows you that sometimes life can be surprisingly wonderful.

 

 

Train Dreams

Train Dreams offers us a view of a vanished and forgotten pioneer America through its protagonist Grainier. He lives through much of the twentieth century but his twentieth century is rather different from that you’ll find in the History Channel. The Great War, The Beatles, Roosevelt, Hiroshima, Martin Luther King and D-Day never happened in Grainier’s world. He lives out in the remote Northwest never living far from the train tracks on which run the Spokane International express that goes from Idaho to Washington State.

His world is full of Indian superstitions where wolf boys roam but in this world the possibility of the supernatural seems strangely possible.

It’s the outside world that seems fictitious with its flying machines and Elvis Presley.

Much of the time Grainier is working on jobs that will make this untrammelled wilderness obsolete as if he is the ally of his own gravediggers. We might mourn it’s passing but also acknowledge that this world in which he chooses to live like a virtual hermit, is cruel and savage as well as beautiful.

It is a world that that creates the fire that takes away his wife and daughter and wrecks his body with it is demand for hard physical labor.

In wilderness maybe the preservation of the world but it also contains the destruction of a man.

Denis Johnson

The language is terse but the images often darkly poetic. In one episode an Indian gets drunk and is run over by several trains, his body collected in small pouches by his tribe. In another a biplane arrives and for the unseemly cost of $4 dollars confers upon Grainier the magic of flight.

Interspersed with these powerfully poetic moments are passages of comedy where back woodsman clumsily attempt to ask women for their hands in marriage and a ‘Palace of Pulchritude’ arrives with a dark offering of welcome sin.

It’s a wholly self-contained and believable world that tells you more about pioneer America in 116  pages than most authors could manage in a 1000.

Down the Rabbit Hole

Length doesn’t always equate with depth. One of the best works of fiction I’ve read in the last year clearly prove that point

The novella ‘Down the Rabbit Hole’ by Juan Pablo Villalobos tells its tale from the point view of a Mexican child, Tochtli, who’s father just happens to be on the verge of running the nation’s largest drug cartel.

The beauty of using the child as narrator of this type of story is obvious.  Here is a person who looks to adults to shape his moral worldview. Yet what do you do when the worldview presented to you is anything but moral?

You try and justify it to yourself because if adults are telling you that’s its ok to kill and torture and sell drugs, well then it must be, even though somehow you don’t feel quite right about it.

The child’s unease comes out through a constant undiagnosed stomach pain. It’s a symptom of his huge anxiety that he is fearful of acknowledging for then he would be like the man who wet himself when tortured, ‘a faggot’.

Even when his father tries to do something nice for him like going to Liberia to buy an African Pygmy Hippopotamus for his private zoo, the animal dies and the boy has to be content with the animal’s head mounted on his bedroom wall.

This simple terrifying symbol twists the memory of childhood into something grotesque. It also leaves us wishing the book were a lot longer. Here is a world authentically that of a child but a child who happens to be trapped in hell.

 

 

 

 

Shot in New York

 

Sometimes a photo is about so much more than what it depicts. Such is the case with William Klein’s 1954 image.

What we literally have is an image of child pointing a toy gun at the photographer. The look on his face is one of aggression, his face screwed up like a man about to deliver a punch. By his side an angelic looking blonde child looks on with an innocent look, as if the emotions the boy depicts are unknown to him.

Of course in reality the boy with the gun was undoubtedly playing. His expression a parody of how he imagines a gun-wielding psycho might look.

Yet to the viewer the gun is real and the threat of violence palpable. The innocence of the boy’s sidekick only serves to exaggerate the boy’s ill intentions as we imagine them. He also disturbs us further with his slightly upturned gaze, suggesting this is someone he looks up to.

When we are told that this image is taken in New York in the fifties we read even more into the image. Now it is a symbol of a society in breakdown where even the children carry guns. It plays on our understanding, received through numerous articles and films, of what New York is supposedly like.

If we take an even wider view we begin to see that it is not just NYC that is symbolized in this picture but also America.

The idea of a populace obsessed with guns and gun ownership, a land of cowboy gunslingers and serial killers, is hot wired into this snapshot.

Sandy Hook, Columbine and Aurora seem nascent in this moment. It’s a photograph that is totally linked to the nation in which it was taken. In many ways it’s the perfect picture that expresses the stunning ability of a solitary image to capture a story that would take a novel’s worth of words too express.

Home Scary Home

For many of us the word home brings up ideas of something cozy and welcoming, a flickering far places, the tail of a wagging dog, the smile of a loved one or perhaps comfortable armchair.

Not so Todd Hido. I don’t know what an earth was going on in his family but his haunting images suggest something empty and ominous, like your home was the Bates Motel.

Even the streets that lead to these lonely isolated suburban dwellings feel like highways or more accurately back roads to hell.

When we venture inside things don’t get any better. Glowing TV screens bring to mind Poltergeist and any human figures featured are sexualized but in a way that makes them feel lonely and isolated like islands on wintery seas.

However whether or not we’d like to call one of these dwellings home, we would probably want to call one of his prints ours.

Like all great artists his images are moody, evocative and entirely distinctive. I just wouldn’t want to live there.

For those interested I found this great interview with Hido in Horn Magazine.

http://www.ahornmagazine.com/issue_6/interview_hido/interview_hido.html

All at Sea.

Alessandro Puccinelli likes water quite a bit. It’s inspired him to create this stunning array of seascapes that capture every facet of the sea, from violent storms to becalmed surfaces.

The calmer images remind me a little of Roman Loranc or Hiroshi Sugimoto, while the color work bares the hallmark of another sea obsessive, JMW Turner.

 

Another artist I think of when looking at his images is Ansel Adams, for the way he returns to the same subjects again and again and allows the subject to speak to him rather than impose his vision on it.

On his website, Puccinelli says the following ‘The sea brings me clarity of thought, its waves, as described by Jack London, are the knights of the infinite sea army, ‘ bearing simplicity, elegance, power and freedom’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Diego Uchitel: Polaroids

Following in the footsteps of Guy Bourdin and Carl Molino, Argentinean born fashion photographer Diego Uchitel has done a cool collection of Polaroid images featuring everyone from Sofia Coppola to David Bowie.

I’m a sucker for this kind of low res feel, particular when contrasted with the highly finished photo shopped imagery we see in most fashion magazines.

Hero

The return of David Bowie got me searching for old clips of the Thin White Duke performing some of his timeless back catalogue.

It’s hard to beat him when he’s on form.

 

 

Brazilian Space Soul or Tim Maia the Funky Alien.

Did you know that love is really the answer? Or that people need to be free? If by some remote possibility you didn’t listen to some Tim Maia. He’ll very soon set you straight.

Tim may not be the most profound pop star who ever lived but this funky, soulful 1970’s Brazilian makes up for it with some tight grooves and a quite wild hairstyle.

Many of you may have been ignorant of his existence before this post but I am here to spread the word about the Afro headed one.

World Psychedelic Classics Volume 4 have recently issued a collection of his more accessible tracks and it’s a great primer for fans of Brazilian music and seventies soul and funk.

I’m not sure of why he is considered psychedelic apart from his strange assertion that human beings are really aliens from another world, which suggests at the very least some heavy, heavy drug intake and at worst a high degree of madness.

Then again a similar belief didn’t stop Mitt Romney running for President.

Maybe if he’d been as funky and far out as Tim Maia he would have won.

Anyway I include a link to tracks from the album, as well as a link to the Amazon page which will allow Tim Maia to quietly blow your minds.

http://www.amazon.com/World-Psychedelic-Classics-Nobody-Live/dp/B00133KEF4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1358090213&sr=8-1&keywords=tim+maia

<p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/41878872″>An Introduction to Tim Maia</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/luakabop”>Luaka Bop</a> on <a href=”http://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

The Great Photographer Smackdown

For some reason best known to the curators at the Tate Modern they’ve decided to hold a joint exhibition on to vastly different but highly influential photographers with distinct philosophies of their trade.

The result of course is that people feel honor bound to pick a favorite.

William Klein

Klein is up first and his work is even more wonderful in large format than it is in the books of his work I possess.

For me he’s one of the top ten street photographers of all time because he does something few would dare to do. Get super up close and personal with his subjects.

As Capa said if you’re pictures aren’t good enough you’re not close enough and Klein seems to have taken this idea to the streets allowing his subjects to get right up in his grille.

Most people are scared to take candied shots at any distance. Klein displays a particular lack of fear like a soldier bayoneting a victim.

For me this aggressive approach makes him the quintessential New York street photographer, as NY is a city that is always in your face, just like Klein.

William Klein

Of course his skill didn’t stop when he left New York. His pictures of Rome are astounding and capture the spirit of the people, something only a deeply empathetic being can do.

Oh and it f that wasn’t enough Klein is also a superb fashion photographer, artist and film maker

Indeed the last skill was unknown to me until I attended this exhibition and I left deeply impressed with his abilities, as was Stanley Kubrick who declared admiration for his fashion satire ‘Who is Polly Magoo?’

Moriyama

 

Now Moriyama. Here is a man who takes photographs not as way of crafting artful moments form reality but as a way of making sense of the world around him. The results can be wildly uneven as many image only really work in the context of other pictures.

That said when he hits he really hits, creating strange gritty images that highlight the world’s alien nature.

He seems like a man with a deep sense of discomfort with the world around him. His camera acts as both a protection from reality and way of understanding it.

Moriyama

I also think his work suffers from my own shortcomings in that I lack an understanding of the society that these images spring from.

Still I do like his style and count him as one of the first names that comes to mind when I’m looking to create darker rougher street imagery.

Moriyama

So if have to pick, its Klein by a unanimous decision with no knockdowns.

 

Moriyama

William Klein

Do the Space-Girl Dance

There’s a reason this Raquel Welch video has got over a 1,900,00 hits on YouTube and it’s not an appreciation of modern dance…

Face of Forgiveness

Hallelujah! We’re saved. Well from bad photography anyway, thanks to Steve Katzman’s fine series ‘Face of forgiveness’

Taken during the Nineties and noughties, these images of Christian revivalists at the height of religious ecstasy are dramatic and highly emotional. I came across them in, of all places, a trendy London music shop and I’m very glad I did.

They have the feel of religious paintings and perfectly capture the fervor of religious faith.

Katzman was raised a conservative Jew and his outsider’s eye uncovers the strange otherworldly quality of the believer.

It’s not going to make me pray for salvation but it does make me want to take some pictures. Amen to that.

Owning Kerouac

All through the later part of this year I have had an inexplicable Jack Kerouac obsession. I’ve read virtually every book he’s written as well as listened to a number of audio books like Deever Brown’s memoir of taking a road trip with Kerouac in the sixties and Allen Ginsberg’s reading of The Dharma Bums (which is strange in itself. A man reading a book in which he is a character…)

As part of this newfound love I’ve read the new biography of the man from ex-lover Joyce Johnson.

It’s only the first volume, as it finishes just as ‘On the Road’ is about to be published but is thoroughly fascinating. Not least because Johnson is making her bid to define whom Kerouac was and will be to the world.

She appears to pour scorn on the idea that Kerouac was gay (even though many sources suggest he was bisexual) and retells much of the mythology around the man in a way that sometimes leaves no room for alternative interpretation

By comparison the oral history ‘Jack’s Book’ edited by Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee, allows for contradictory ideas about a scene in Jack’s life assigning him varying motivations for his actions according to who is telling the tale.

I much prefer this approach as it allows us to keep multiple Kerouac’s in circulation both good and bad. Jack the Angel-Headed Hipster, Jack the Mother Lover, Jack the Drunk, Jack the Anti-Semite, Jack the Jazz Lover, Jack the Bebop Prose King and Jack the Lonesome Traveler.

Sometimes definition is reduction and our desire to know for sure blinds us to the complexities of a real human life. The truth of Kerouac’s life is particularly important to our understanding of his work as he is a largely autobiographical writer who intended all his novels to form one great book that covered all aspects of his life, from his childhood in Lowell to his travels around America. Originally he didn’t even intend to change the names of the people who formed the basis for ‘On the Road’ but was forced too for legal reasons by his publisher.

‘The Voice is All’ is still essential reading for all Kerouac buffs though not quite as essential as Joyce Johnson’s other great contribution to Kerouac scholarship, her memoir ‘Minor Characters’ which I recommend wholeheartedly.

Of course I also encourage others to read more of his distinctive work. Kerouac is a true original, who though hard to read at first, yields great rewards for those persevere.

 

Torture Test

On September 2011 I was standing on the streets of downtown Manhattan watching the Twin Towers fall. It was a highly emotional day that will live in the memory of anyone who happened to be there, not least because anyone with a brain cell could see what all this would lead too.

More patriotism, more jingoism and more armed response, though at that time no one was envisioning not one war but two as a result of the attack.

From books like the ‘The Looming Tower’ by Lawrence Wright to novels like the ‘Falling Man’ by Don Delillo to documentaries like ‘Standard Operating Procedure’, the attack and the wars it led too have brought us some fascinating and thought provoking art.

‘Zero Dark Thirty’ is the latest addition to the cannon and perhaps the most controversial of any of them.

As you have probably read US Senators, including torture victim John McCain, have written to Sony complaining about the film for its depiction of torture.

Having watched the film last week I can see their point. The problem to me is that Kathryn Bigelow is a brilliant action director.

She’s proved this time and time again in films like ‘The Hurt Locker’ and ‘Point Break.’

However, this story also requires something a little more cerebral. Something you get for example in a series like ‘Homeland’ where people’s motivations are revealed and the drama comes from tension between characters as well as pure action.

If we look at another investigative drama ‘All the President’s Men’ we see how director Alan Pakula, who has very little action to speak of, still manages to make the mundanity of the search riveting.

Zero Dark Thirty’s high points by contrast are pretty much exclusively the action scenes and by extension the torture scenes. These rely on the same build up of tension as the invasion of the compound, as we wait to see what pain will be inflicted on the victims.

Showing torture may not be to everyone’s taste but it still is necessary to show, as it undoubtedly happened during the search of Bin Laden. To not show it would be to ‘whitewash’ the hunt.

What is strange is that nowhere in the film is there any discussion of the rights or wrongs of such actions. Surely even if you concluded that you believed in torture you’d still have a conversation discussing the morality of the action?

I can’t believe that viewers would have found discussions of the rights and wrongs of torture boring. Without such scenes we are left feeling that torture is OK and essential to get the information you need.

In the end their absence reduces the film to a gripping but essentially empty thriller.

Animalia

Taking pictures of animals is a popular hobby. Just look at the number of nature photographers on flickr.

The problem you face is always how to tackle an overly shot subject in a new way.

Henry Horenstein offers us a unique view of the animal world that eschews the typical portrait shot in favor of images that make animals seem strange and otherworldly, much as they must have done when man first came into contact with them.

Bats claws, elephant feet and zebra skin all become fresh and mysterious in Horenstein’s pictures.

He also captures something of the personality of subjects that I’d never even considered had a personality.

For example, his extraordinary image of an octopus, it’s eye looking at us over a tangle of legs.

His website ‘Animalia’ offers further examples of his talent

http://www.animaliabook.com/gallery.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zambian in Space

The Zambia National Academy of Space Research is not perhaps as well known as NASA. It’s failure to put anyone on the moon, entirely down to the United Nations refusal to lend them $700 million and the pregnancy of it’s one and only potential cosmonaut.

Cristina De Middel attempts to make more of us aware of the whole subject of African space travel with her retro series based on the failed Zambian space program of the mid sixties.

The pictures are some of the more memorable I’ve seen recently but then with a subject like that how could you possibly fail.

Heaven on Earth

Fernando Moleres has just won the prestigious Tim Hetherington Grant for his project ‘Waiting for an Opportunity’ in which he document’s the harsh realities of juvenile justice in Sierra Leone.

However, on viewing his website another series caught my eye.

‘Men of God’ focuses on monks of various faiths who are searching for spiritual peace and connection with their own god.

The hushed world captured in these images is in stark contrast to our own hurried urban existences, which gives them a certain resonance and power.

They also have that painterly quality that reminds me of old religious paintings you find in some southern European churches.

 

 

 

 

 

Fifty Shades of Sexy

For along time I’ve felt that the ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ has been lacking a certain something. And at last it has been revealed to me what that something is; the dulcet tones of Gilbert Gottfried reading this magnum opus of soft porn.

Now that is sexy, as I’m sure you’ll agree when you watch this promo. After all, who else could say the word ‘vagina’ like him?

Overgrown and Growing on Me

I have to say that having blown hot and cold on moody crooner James Blake I’m now very definitely warming to his off-kilter and atmospheric style.

On the previous album I felt it to be so abstract as to be almost not there. I’d play the whole album without really registering anything but his cover of the Feist track ‘Limit to your love’.

On his new album Overgrown he’s added some tunes to the mix and created something that is both affecting and ‘sticky’. I’ve played a dozen times or more already and am finding each listen reveals something new.

In 2011 he collaborated on a track with Bon Iver and somehow that fits. He’s less of the musical producer who plays with studio technology that I had at first thought he was and more of a contemporary singer songwriter.

I read somewhere that Joni Mitchell turned up at his gig in California and he revealed himself to be a big fan of hers which again, listening to this new album makes total sense.

Naturally his latest effort won’t be as well received as the last simply because that shock of the new has gone but it’s been replaced by something altogether more deep and artful.