Weimaraner guy.
The Weimaraner is a doleful looking fellow, occasionally used by police forces when they are out of German Shepherds. German, of course.
William Wegman has made a living out of snapping his Weimaraners and he just did a splendid layout for Bloomberg Business on Xmas gifts. The images are hilarious and outrageous, and any dog lover will enjoy them. Click the image.
Superb image.
From the long running Patek Philippe advertising campaign, what father would not want this for his son?
Amateur snapper, famous name.
Those who grew up with Peter Sellers’s comedy saw the early surreal radio work with Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan (‘The Goons’) for the BBC gestate into the dark comedy of Kubrick’s ‘Dr. Strangelove’ and later into the slapstick money maker that was the Inspector Clouseau series of movies made by Blake Edwards.
His performance in Kubrick’s masterpiece (Kubrick only made masterpieces) is notable for the fact that Sellers acted three rôles – the US President, the RAF officer and, most memorably, the crazy German scientist, Dr. Strangelove, modeled on the no less crazy real life clone, Edward Teller, the proponent of pre-emptive nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union. Sellers was also set to play the bomber pilot charged with nuking Moscow, but evaded the part claiming injury to an ankle. There are many versions of this story, but that seems to be the most credible, for you could not possibly have two personalities more different than those of Sellers and Kubrick. The one spontaneous, with a quicksilver wit which dictated that one take was all his short attention span could tolerate. The other cerebral, plodding, intense, leaving nothing to chance and thinking a dozen takes par for the course. Sellers simply wanted out, so feigned the injury. Quite how these two collaborated to craft the greatest black comedy made is a mystery, but we should all be grateful they did. At the conclusion Kubrick remarked that “Sellers is the only actor you pay for four parts and get three”.
Strangelove’s prescription for surviving the coming holocaust, in the obligatory heavy German accent:
The last few minutes of Strangelove contain some of the greatest tragicomedy ever put on the screen in a movie with great performances all round. The closing line “Mein Führer, I can walk!” constitutes a perfect ending to a perfect movie.
Sellers, like many of his ilk, suffered the curse of the comedian, forever insecure and worried that his fame might fade along with his wit. He really should not have worried, having a genius for self reinvention. Once as a kid I recall him on a BBC consumer show where he called in for a job interview affecting an Indian accent – he was roundly turned down – then seconds later called again, this time in perfect BBC English (like they used to speak until populism reared its ugly head), and got the interview. This debunking of bigotry has stayed with me all these years. No-one has equalled Sellers’s genius for mimicry.
There’s an excellent documentary on Sellers’s interest in photography where much of the content was provided by his burgeoning archives, for Sellers was a committed snapper and movie maker from the earliest days of his success. He invariably had the latest in gear and such was the man’s character that he gave generous gifts of hardware to many friends. Now a UK web magazine named Creative Review has published an interesting piece on his photography and you can see more by clicking the image below.
No competition.
Your chances of taking wild animal pictures as good as those made by Art Wolfe are precisely zero.
Whether it’s remote dollies, drones, aircraft, you name it, Wolfe has been at it 40 years and no piker on ‘safari’ has a remote chance of equalling his 40 years of applied skill in the business.
In the brief video – click the image – he asks whether it has all been done before? From the amateur, weekend snapper’s perspective the answer to that question is the same as it was 50 years ago. A resounding ‘Yes’. A few specialists like Wolfe change the landscape and the amateur is far better off buying their images and videos than wasting money on a trip to some godforsaken hole without antibiotics or clean drinking water. Best enjoyed from your sofa at home.
Surreal master.
Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert has been with Magnum forever and worked there during HC-B’s time. I rather fancy that had HC-B ever understood color, this is the sort of work the French master would have been producing during his greatest period, the surreal one pre WWII.
