Sunday, September 17, 2017
Friday, December 23, 2016
Mario Testino - Photography:A Gallery of Men
“The way men are seen in photography, in fashion, and the way that men look at pictures of themselves has changed in recent years. It is a subject that has come into focus: The masculine image, a man's personal style, changing attitudes to the male face and body.” - Mario Testino
From Rio to London, Cusco to Seville, Mario Testino is renowned for his free-spirited chronicles of dress and demeanor. In SIR, his largest book to-date, the influential photographer presents over 300 photographs in his search to define the allure of men.
Featuring an essay by Pierre Borhan, an interview with Patrick Kinmonth, and many previously unpublished works from Testino’s archive of thousands, this book traces the evolution of male identity over the past three decades. Costume, tradition, gender play, portraiture, photojournalism, and fashion collide as Testino observes masculinity in all its modern manifestations: through the dandy and the gentleman, the macho and the fey, the world-famous face to the unknown passerby.
Every photograph represents a unique point of view, and a new visual connection between photographer and sitter. With Josh Hartnett for VMAN (2005), Testino evokes the fall of Helmut Berger in the abyss of Luchino Visconti’s The Damned. Studies of Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Jude Law and Colin Firth are as candid as they are curious. David Beckham, David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards feature for the courage they have taken in redefining male identity. Through a kaleidoscope of guises, these portraits define a period in which men’s changing role, style and appearance has never escaped Testino’s eye and impeccable intuition.
Saturday, July 9, 2016
Discovering ‘The World of Apu’
Rediscovering Satyajit Ray, in New York
‘It was odd, but in a strange way, right, that it was in the West that I was falling in love with him.’
Sharmila Tagore and Soumitra Chatterjee in ‘Apur Sansar’ (The World of Apu).
The other day, on a visit to New York, I watched Satyajit Ray’s The World of Apu (1959) at Film Forum in a restored print. The World of Apu is the third installment of the eponymous Apu trilogy, which tracks the coming-of-age of a young Bengali boy from his impoverished rural family to his life in the big city; it is considered one of the lodestars of world cinema. I had never seen the movie. I had watched Pather Panchali, the first installment of the trilogy, years ago, on a dusty TV screen in Park Slope, and found it boring, and since then I had avoided Ray. But the multiple screening times at Film Forum played on my conscience. Finally an American friend, a scholar of American decolonisation, convinced me to go.
The pavement in front of Film Forum, on a street that has never given up the ghost of industry despite its centrality in the West Village, was full of people slouched in a line. I felt unaccountably nervous as a representative of the filmmaker’s country in the crowd. Most of the people in the audience were white and old. They had the gaunt look of people who have seen all the important movies and can now only look forward to reruns. A couple – friends of my friend, an Italian journalist who covers Brussels and his Indian-Irish wife who is an editor at a newspaper – came out of Aparajito, the second film, which had just ended. They looked stunned and a little bored and when we joked that they should see the third one with us, they withered away into the night.
The halls of Film Forum are narrow. One has the sense of being constantly pressed in even after one has found one’s seat. When you get up, the entire row xylophones up as you pass; only one side of each row has an exit. The movie came on with its staticky, jerky print familiar from the Criterion Collection. A world swam into view. The World of Apu is the story of a struggling writer in 1950s Calcutta. The writer is young; he is an orphan; he has just graduated from college. In the first scene, we see a professor encouraging Apu to keep writing stories; in another, Apu’s landlord upbraids him for not paying his rent even as Apu shaves with the enthusiasm and glee of Buck Mulligan in Ulysses, finally retorting that he doesn’t pay because, “It’s a sign of greatness.” He has a cheerful soft face which smiles and laughs at the wrong times; there is something a little unnatural about him.
In the first few scenes, my own discomfort reached a boiling point. I didn’t find the opening funny at all. In fact, I found it clichéd and poorly acted. Hadn’t I seen this type of plot, about this kind of solitary character, a million times in the West? Why then were people laughing at his every word? Was it out of a tickling familiarity or condescension? I wanted to tell them to stop, to judge the art from my country on the same standard they judged theirs. But then I started laughing too.
The movie begins in Apu’s grimy room, but soon ventures out into the cells of Calcutta, where he seeks a job to support his ambition. His first visit is to a dingy primary school; here a bunch of lounging corrupt men send him packing when they hear – or don’t – that he is overqualified for the job. “But I got that before Intermediate,” he says of the Matriculation degree they demand. “What did the advertisement say?” a toothless teacher shoots back. Next Apu finds himself at the office of a pharmaceutical bottling factory. He is so eager to accept the job that the hiring clerk, who can clearly see Apu’s artistic sensibility stamped on his face, tells him to go have a look at the workplace first. Apu comes across a morose group of men in a tiny room gluing labels on vials. There is the grating sound of glass on glass.
As the visual language of the film establishes itself, one learns that the awkwardness is part of the plan. The movie is darting the way it does because it is about to swallow, like a snake, an enormous plot development: Apu’s sudden marriage to a woman whose wedding he is attending as a casual guest. This scene is so surprising and so delightfully weird that one just shakes one’s head in disbelief. Only a person as awkward and divided as Apu could have agreed to go ahead.
At this point my self-consciousness about audience, about the people around me, fell away. I was entranced.
The rest of the movie is a meditation on young love, on how it quickly develops and falls apart, and it brought tears to my eyes as well as to those of the Americans sitting next to me, who began wiping the spaces under their glasses. And I began to see too how Ray’s movie, in a way, was in direct conversation with the West and the people in this hall. In one of the first scenes in the movie, we see Apu fingering books by HG Wells on his shelf; later, when he goes for a walk with his friend Pulu, who will be accidentally instrumental in his sudden marriage, Apu talks about Keats and Dostoevsky as if they’re next of kin (bringing to mind a softer version of the famously self-regarding line spoken by Jeff Daniels in Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and The Whale: “Kafka was one of my predecessors.”). All these things establish a Western flavor in an Eastern world; of Western ambition reaching past the shanties and pig-infested train tracks. But slowly the world of 1950s Bengal reasserts itself. Superstition and marriage close in on him; death takes away his wife; society maxes out his ambitions. What is Apu if not a crazy dreamer from the start? But the magic of the movie is to envelope him in its charm – and its tender Ravi Shankar score – and ennoble him.
Ray himself would have been conscious of the West’s gaze on him and his work. It was in New York that he first made his name – Pather Panchali, his debut feature, ran for eight months here – and it was in New York, perhaps, that he had the largest audience (and continues to, judging by the swelling crowds awaiting the next screening of Aparajito when we came out). These movies were never big in India. They were art-house fare and in India to be arty is to be commercially doomed. When I was growing up, Ray was never mentioned in my Punjabi household; even now his name retains the flavor of old photographs. I had to come to the West to discover him and now it was in the West that I was falling in love with him. I felt this to be odd, but I also felt this, in a strange way, to be right.
- Karan Mahajan
‘It was odd, but in a strange way, right, that it was in the West that I was falling in love with him.’
Sharmila Tagore and Soumitra Chatterjee in ‘Apur Sansar’ (The World of Apu).
The other day, on a visit to New York, I watched Satyajit Ray’s The World of Apu (1959) at Film Forum in a restored print. The World of Apu is the third installment of the eponymous Apu trilogy, which tracks the coming-of-age of a young Bengali boy from his impoverished rural family to his life in the big city; it is considered one of the lodestars of world cinema. I had never seen the movie. I had watched Pather Panchali, the first installment of the trilogy, years ago, on a dusty TV screen in Park Slope, and found it boring, and since then I had avoided Ray. But the multiple screening times at Film Forum played on my conscience. Finally an American friend, a scholar of American decolonisation, convinced me to go.
The pavement in front of Film Forum, on a street that has never given up the ghost of industry despite its centrality in the West Village, was full of people slouched in a line. I felt unaccountably nervous as a representative of the filmmaker’s country in the crowd. Most of the people in the audience were white and old. They had the gaunt look of people who have seen all the important movies and can now only look forward to reruns. A couple – friends of my friend, an Italian journalist who covers Brussels and his Indian-Irish wife who is an editor at a newspaper – came out of Aparajito, the second film, which had just ended. They looked stunned and a little bored and when we joked that they should see the third one with us, they withered away into the night.
The halls of Film Forum are narrow. One has the sense of being constantly pressed in even after one has found one’s seat. When you get up, the entire row xylophones up as you pass; only one side of each row has an exit. The movie came on with its staticky, jerky print familiar from the Criterion Collection. A world swam into view. The World of Apu is the story of a struggling writer in 1950s Calcutta. The writer is young; he is an orphan; he has just graduated from college. In the first scene, we see a professor encouraging Apu to keep writing stories; in another, Apu’s landlord upbraids him for not paying his rent even as Apu shaves with the enthusiasm and glee of Buck Mulligan in Ulysses, finally retorting that he doesn’t pay because, “It’s a sign of greatness.” He has a cheerful soft face which smiles and laughs at the wrong times; there is something a little unnatural about him.
In the first few scenes, my own discomfort reached a boiling point. I didn’t find the opening funny at all. In fact, I found it clichéd and poorly acted. Hadn’t I seen this type of plot, about this kind of solitary character, a million times in the West? Why then were people laughing at his every word? Was it out of a tickling familiarity or condescension? I wanted to tell them to stop, to judge the art from my country on the same standard they judged theirs. But then I started laughing too.
The movie begins in Apu’s grimy room, but soon ventures out into the cells of Calcutta, where he seeks a job to support his ambition. His first visit is to a dingy primary school; here a bunch of lounging corrupt men send him packing when they hear – or don’t – that he is overqualified for the job. “But I got that before Intermediate,” he says of the Matriculation degree they demand. “What did the advertisement say?” a toothless teacher shoots back. Next Apu finds himself at the office of a pharmaceutical bottling factory. He is so eager to accept the job that the hiring clerk, who can clearly see Apu’s artistic sensibility stamped on his face, tells him to go have a look at the workplace first. Apu comes across a morose group of men in a tiny room gluing labels on vials. There is the grating sound of glass on glass.
As the visual language of the film establishes itself, one learns that the awkwardness is part of the plan. The movie is darting the way it does because it is about to swallow, like a snake, an enormous plot development: Apu’s sudden marriage to a woman whose wedding he is attending as a casual guest. This scene is so surprising and so delightfully weird that one just shakes one’s head in disbelief. Only a person as awkward and divided as Apu could have agreed to go ahead.
At this point my self-consciousness about audience, about the people around me, fell away. I was entranced.
The rest of the movie is a meditation on young love, on how it quickly develops and falls apart, and it brought tears to my eyes as well as to those of the Americans sitting next to me, who began wiping the spaces under their glasses. And I began to see too how Ray’s movie, in a way, was in direct conversation with the West and the people in this hall. In one of the first scenes in the movie, we see Apu fingering books by HG Wells on his shelf; later, when he goes for a walk with his friend Pulu, who will be accidentally instrumental in his sudden marriage, Apu talks about Keats and Dostoevsky as if they’re next of kin (bringing to mind a softer version of the famously self-regarding line spoken by Jeff Daniels in Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and The Whale: “Kafka was one of my predecessors.”). All these things establish a Western flavor in an Eastern world; of Western ambition reaching past the shanties and pig-infested train tracks. But slowly the world of 1950s Bengal reasserts itself. Superstition and marriage close in on him; death takes away his wife; society maxes out his ambitions. What is Apu if not a crazy dreamer from the start? But the magic of the movie is to envelope him in its charm – and its tender Ravi Shankar score – and ennoble him.
Ray himself would have been conscious of the West’s gaze on him and his work. It was in New York that he first made his name – Pather Panchali, his debut feature, ran for eight months here – and it was in New York, perhaps, that he had the largest audience (and continues to, judging by the swelling crowds awaiting the next screening of Aparajito when we came out). These movies were never big in India. They were art-house fare and in India to be arty is to be commercially doomed. When I was growing up, Ray was never mentioned in my Punjabi household; even now his name retains the flavor of old photographs. I had to come to the West to discover him and now it was in the West that I was falling in love with him. I felt this to be odd, but I also felt this, in a strange way, to be right.
- Karan Mahajan
Thursday, February 25, 2016
Never Lost His Punk Spirit
Jean-Charles de Castelbajac is best-known for his confrontational approach to fashion. His outfits have graced everybody from Andy Warhol to Lady Gaga, and over the years he has often been the designer of choice for the most creative, and by proxy the most rebellious.
What you may not know is that he is also an accomplished painter and live artist, with a furiously productive output. He tours with the French group Mr No, painting live and performing onstage. And you can always tell where he's been in Paris, and indeed the world, by the faded chalk drawings of angels and friends that he leaves on building walls — like friendly graffiti.
De Castelbajac's latest exhibition, The Phantoms of Eden, opened this month in the luxury resort of Eden Rock in Saint Barths. We caught up with him at his French home to speak about the show and much more.
How did the collaboration with Eden Rock come about?
I always wanted to go to Saint Barths. It’s a place where the past encounters the modern and the Caribbean. This meeting, and in fact the collaboration with Eden Rock, came about through my Parisian gallery, Nuke. For me the idea of evoking ghosts in Eden was a perfect situation. The exhibition is beautiful. Can you tell us a little about the act of making it?
The process of this exhibition has been quite long. I started to paint four months ago in small format. The link between it all was the evocation of ghosts: the ghosts of my innocence, the ghosts of my childhood, and the ghosts of the friends I’ve lost. All of this brought me to a land I’ve never known, closer to the invisible. When I arrived in Saint Barths, I started to paint a big fresco, in conjunction with my paintings. It’s all about accident, and the evocation of lost innocence.
Ever since I’ve known you, I’ve seen you draw on walls with chalk. Can you remember the moment this materialized?
The first time I remember drawing with a chalk on a wall was in Casablanca when I was six years old. So, a very little boy! After that, I was totally fascinated by the work of Keith Haring in the subways of New York. Around 1992 or '93, I started to draw angels on the walls of Paris. Now, I always have a chalk in my pocket! It’s a form of prayer I suppose, a poetic gesture, and I love the idea of ephemera.
These large-scale immediate drawings are ‘phantoms’ and yet they hold all of the parts in place. Do you feel they are an important part of your working process?
The wall drawings are very particular for me because they are always unprepared. They are totally inspirational. So, when I start them, I paint with music on [electro music, generally] and I don’t know where the painting is going to take me. I cannot stop before I finish. It’s like a form of trance. I am in sync with the painting and every face appearing, every animal, has a kind of shamanic link to me. It is as if phantoms are appearing, yes. The first part of the process is to build the primary colors in shapes, like circles, arcs, or crosses, that I consider as ‘heraldic’ figures. Then I paint in black over it, and everything becomes almost religious.
Does your approach differ between your art and your fashion?
The very big difference between my art and my fashion is not the inspiration. It’s to do with the process. Fashion is an industrial process, and it takes up to six months to prepare a collection. The fundamental difference is, to me, that fashion is there to answer questions. It is something to protect, to make people beautiful, and it is functional. Art has no particular function, just the fantastic function of creating mystery, or creating hope, or asking questions.
Today it seems pop culture has mixed with the classical arts and its preoccupation with sex, life, and death. Do you feel there are no boundaries anymore between the high and the low?
I have never seen any boundaries between low and high art. I was educated by popular culture, by advertising, calligraphy, coats of arms, flags, and toys. My first memories of being fascinated by color were the ideas that the fire truck was red, and that safety belts on the plane were yellow. All of these things have remained strong in my subconscious. In high culture, like in Paulo Coelho, or Francis Bacon, the techniques and the crystallization of actions — for instance, the way in which Bacon painted Pope Innocent X — fascinates me. I have a strange memory that appropriates and kidnaps things, and makes them mine. After that, it becomes all about technique. I am fascinated by the technique and the act of painting. Sometimes I look at my work and I think, "Who has inspired me? Is it Fernand Léger, Miró, Kandinsky, or is it Keith Haring or Lichtenstein?!" But certainly, my biggest inspiration is the strength of image. These images can come from popular culture or high art. I think this is because I come from the generation of the logo: a cigarette packet, the Lucky Strike packet, the Players packet, the Esso logo by Raymond Loewy.
I remember you telling me once that rappers in the 90s wore your cartoon sweaters like coats of arms. This re-appropriation has always been present in your fashion. How does the cartoon relate to your art practice?
Roy Lichtenstein used to say that the cartoon was the most important symbol of the new age. For me, the cartoon is like a ghost. it is an icon that's totally empty but can be filled with the feelings you give it. So, the cartoon is a big link between my fashion and my art. I see it like a contemporary feeling of a medieval time. So I was very pleased when people like LL Cool J interpreted my cartoons, like they would interpret a coat of arms for the King Of England! It’s a strong appropriation that the rap scene has taken from my work, and I sell many of the paintings to the artists of the rap scene.
There’s been a lot of fashion talk recently about punk. I said to a friend over Fashion Week that, to me, you were one of the most ‘punk’ creators. Do you feel an affinity with punk?
There is a song from the English pop band Wave Machines that asks, "Where is my punk spirit?" And honestly, I have never lost it. The idea of punk was so strong for me when I met Malcolm McLaren in the 70s, the idea of daring and never minding what the critics think. It’s a defiant attitude that for me is essential. My position, and my creations are always transversal, using and mixing territories, no matter the opinions of others. That’s my punk attitude.
I saw images of a dress you painted live in the Villa Polaroid space. You told me once about the furor you caused when you made your first ‘painted’ dresses. Could you recall this story for us?
In the 80s I created a symbolic dress that I called Robe Tableau, or canvas dress. Every artist I approached — Miquel Barceló, Gérard Garouste, Annette Messager — was asked to interpret this dress. At the time it was a big scandal because fashion and art were not linked in this way at all. We had a big fashion-art show in the FIAC and people were strangely surprised. But, I never painted personally on this dress. So, in Saint Barths, after a seven-hour live fresco painting, Ai Canno arrived with a white dress and I started to paint an angel on her, signaling the end of the cycle, painting myself on the dress. At one point I took her hair and used it to wipe across the paint, and to make drip forms on the angel, and this act was so strong and unfamiliar. That’s what I prefer: to perform. I love also to paint all alone in my atelier, but I love live art. It is the most rock ’n’ roll thing in my life.
- Posted Aug 13, 2013by Anthony Stephinson
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
MICHAEL O'NEILL ON YOGA: THE ARCHITECTURE OF PEACE
It’s taken yoga several thousand years to journey from a handful of monasteries dotting the Himalayas to the myriad studios of London, Lower Manhattan, and beyond. Whether bathing with holy men in the Ganges or joining the chorus of a thousand voices chanting “om,” photographer Michael O’Neill decided to devote himself to experiencing and recording the world of yoga at this critical juncture in its history.
From November 7 – January 2016, TASCHEN Gallery will exhibit MICHAEL O’NEILL. ON YOGA: THE ARCHITECTURE OF PEACE, the first major photographic exhibition on the subjects of yoga and meditation and O’Neill’s first show in Los Angeles. Opening on November 7 to a crowd of over 500 people, including art enthusiasts, passionate yogis, and O’Neill’s friends, collaborators, and subjects, the exhibition features 80 photographs alongside a selection of artifacts documenting O’Neill’s journey and the history and of yoga through the ages. The photographs celebrate both the rich lineage and the international reach, locating beauty and learning with young boys practicing the little known discipline of Mallakhamba at the wrestling grounds of Kochi as much as with some of the most influential yogis our time such as B. K. S. Iyengar, Shri K. Pattabhi Jois, and Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa and meditation masters His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama and S. N. Goenka. Says O’Neill: “All I wanted to do was to pay homage to yoga’s classical lineage and understand this unique moment before it slips away.” The result is a powerful photographic tribute to an age-old discipline turned modern, global, and mindful community of 250 million practitioners.
All of the prints in this exhibition are archival pigment prints made by Adamson Editions, one of the world’s foremost digital ateliers, founded in 1979. David Adamson and his team have collaborated with some of the most interesting and influential artists working today, including Chuck Close, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Jenny Holzer, Robert Longo, and Kiki Smith.
Michael O’Neill (b. 1946) has photographed the cultural icons of his time, from Andy Warhol to the Dalai Lama over nearly 50 years for publications including the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. For the last decade he has immersed himself in the culture of yoga, turning his lens on the origins and essence of this ancient and timeless spiritual practice.
From November 7 – January 2016, TASCHEN Gallery will exhibit MICHAEL O’NEILL. ON YOGA: THE ARCHITECTURE OF PEACE, the first major photographic exhibition on the subjects of yoga and meditation and O’Neill’s first show in Los Angeles. Opening on November 7 to a crowd of over 500 people, including art enthusiasts, passionate yogis, and O’Neill’s friends, collaborators, and subjects, the exhibition features 80 photographs alongside a selection of artifacts documenting O’Neill’s journey and the history and of yoga through the ages. The photographs celebrate both the rich lineage and the international reach, locating beauty and learning with young boys practicing the little known discipline of Mallakhamba at the wrestling grounds of Kochi as much as with some of the most influential yogis our time such as B. K. S. Iyengar, Shri K. Pattabhi Jois, and Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa and meditation masters His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama and S. N. Goenka. Says O’Neill: “All I wanted to do was to pay homage to yoga’s classical lineage and understand this unique moment before it slips away.” The result is a powerful photographic tribute to an age-old discipline turned modern, global, and mindful community of 250 million practitioners.
All of the prints in this exhibition are archival pigment prints made by Adamson Editions, one of the world’s foremost digital ateliers, founded in 1979. David Adamson and his team have collaborated with some of the most interesting and influential artists working today, including Chuck Close, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Jenny Holzer, Robert Longo, and Kiki Smith.
Michael O’Neill (b. 1946) has photographed the cultural icons of his time, from Andy Warhol to the Dalai Lama over nearly 50 years for publications including the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. For the last decade he has immersed himself in the culture of yoga, turning his lens on the origins and essence of this ancient and timeless spiritual practice.
Thursday, January 14, 2016
Astronauts-Series
Inspiring us right now: Spanish photographer Cristina De Middel's The Astronauts series, to go on view at Foam museum in Amsterdam. Not just a clever word mash-up, astronauts were a real thing — sort of. With grand delusions of jumping into the 1960s space race between the US and the Soviet Union, the little African nation of Zambia began a program — that never got off the ground — to explore the realm of the stars, starting with colorful spacesuits and fish bowls for helmets. Or at least that's how De Middel re-imagines it in square Polaroid form, based on vintage photographs. - (c) hint
Thursday, October 8, 2015
Ghosts in the Machine Gun
For the project, Ziman commissioned six Zimbabwean craftsmen to produce a series of replica AK-47s, bullets, and clothing using traditional African beading and knitting techniques. He then took the guns and their creators to a derelict district of Johannesburg to photograph the results. With their rainbow-colored guns and outfits, the men appear both strong and weak, ominous and feeble. They are made to seem willing participants in, yet indifferent to, the glorification of gun violence that occurs across the African continent — and, as we know all too well, in places closer to home.
Ghosts — including the photos, ersatz guns and bullets — will go on view at C.A.V.E. Gallery, 1108 Abbot Kinney Blvd, Venice, Los Angeles, February 8 - March 2, 2014. All proceeds will go to Human Rights Watch against arms trafficking.
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