Another neo-Hopper.
I actually had to use the LCD screen to frame this, as the lens was zoomed to maximum, invalidating my glued-on optical viewfinder.
A recurring theme for me is the loneliness of the big city, crowded as it may be. You have to love the native widescreen format of the LX-1 for this sort of thing.
Scenes in San Francisco.
The master is everywhere to be seen.
A painting that would not exist without photography.
In 1980 I had just moved to New York. Dead broke. But that didn’t stop me from making my first visit, the first of many, to the Museum of Modern Art on West 53rd Street with but one goal in mind. To see the greatest anti-war painting ever created.
When Franco’s fascists recruited the Nazi war machine for a trial run in killing innocent civilians in 1937, it was a photograph in the Times of London that spurred a famously apolitical painter to action.
Even the isolationist Times, which was the appeasement mouthpiece of British Prime Minister Chamberlain, couldn’t hush the story up, and was forced to run pictures of burning buildings and general mayhem in the paper.
Pablo Picasso saw the pictures and read of how one quarter of the town’s 7,000 inhabitants perished in a couple of hours.
After the bombing, April 26, 1937
June, 1937. The Picasso.
MoMA did a pretty poor job of displaying the work, given its enormous size – some 23 x 11 feet. Only later did they add space but, by that time, Guernica was gone, back in Spain where it belongs. Picasso had sent the painting to New York for safe keeping until such time as Franco died, a happy event which finally took place in 1975. MoMA tried mightily to hang on to the piece – it was, after all, a huge money maker for them – but lawyers prevailed and it moved back home in 1981. Sadly, Picasso, who died in 1973 saw neither the death of the tyrant or the return of his work.
It remains the single greatest anti-war work ever and, had it not been for those photographs in the Times, may never have been painted.
Picasso, ballsy as ever, spent the war years in occupied Paris, with postcards of his master work in his apartment. When the Nazis harassed him, asking “Did you do this?” he replied “No, you did”.
The Renaissance lives!
The Great American Corporation has many herd instincts, including mind-numbing group get-togethers and a love of flying that probably accounts for $100 per barrel of oil. Two of the many things I am delighted not to have to do, having left this kind of organization years ago.
However, I got a haunting reminder of those horrid days a couple of months ago when Delta Airlines’s computer mailed me a reminder that my remaining 12,000 miles of frequent flier time- and oil-wasting miles were about to expire. Well, 12k gets you nothing other than magazine subscriptions, so I signed up for a bunch. Who knows, the advertisements may provide fodder for photographic ideas.
As I was shaving this morning, and idly flicking through the pages of one of these (my mailman probably hates me as I got a dozen subscriptions, all told!), I came across a real corker. A double-page ad In ‘Men’s Vogue’ for the aptly named Renaissance Hotels (Marriott) which is nothing more or less than a very amusing recreation of Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’.
Here’s the original:
And here’s the advertisement which I stitched together as best as I could in PS CS2:
The brooding figure slumped at the desk (Heraclitus acted by Michelangelo) has been replaced with the slumped businessman (another victim of frequent flying), Diogenes (to the right on the steps) has become a young woman clutching a cellphone. Plato (Leonardo) and Aristotle, entering through the portal, have morphed into pair of amoral (is there any other kind?) lawyers. The floor inlays in the foreground are identical. The boy on the far right is delivering tax deductible booze at the taxpayers’ expense.
And so on.
Great fun and thanks Renaissance Hotels. Maybe next time you would like to actually credit the team which made this fabulous recreation?
More information about who-is-who in the Raphael can be found here.
Our boy is six
For the annual portrait of our son Winston, I decided to try Vermeer lighting this year. There is little new under the sun when it comes to portraiture. Winston is six years old.
Vermeer used window light often in his portraits, with the darker side of the face rotated towards the viewer. As I prefer the control that comes with studio lighting, I used umbrella flash to emulate the effect. Here’s the result:
The black background Vermeer used would be too harsh for our young subject, but for contrast I opted for Winston’s karate outfit. The gold-coated umbrella was used on the shadow side, the silver, one stop brighter, on the bright side. I moved the dark side light far enough to Winston’s right side that only one flash reflects in his eyes – the main light on the left. It seems Vermeer was a Novatron fan too! Aperture 2 (Trial version) was used to process the RAW original.
Read more about my highly portable studio flash outfit here.
Obviously you know which subject I find to be the most beautiful.