Worth a thousand words

Photographs

From the despots in China.

God help all those marathon runners. Let’s hope their undetectable performance enhancing drugs carry the day for sports and Big Pharma.

What a cruel joke to hold an event meant to send a message of freedom in a brutal dictatorship with drug-fuelled ‘athletes’ breathing foul air.

This picture truly is worth a thousand words.

NYC Architecture – some snaps

Architecture

Rounding out the Manhattan thing.

Here are some snaps of New York architecture, taken over the years.


Guggenheim Museum, Fifth Avenue


Old and new


MoMA


SoHo


Park Avenue


The Look building reflected in the Helmsley Palace


Sixth Avenue

A fine primer on architectural style is How to Read Buildings – if you want to regale friends with the differences between an architrave and a muntin, this one is for you.

Here’s another worth checking out if Art Deco is your thing:


Manhattan on Manhattan

Photography

If you enjoy fine architecture and beautiful photography, you can enjoy one stop shopping in Woody Allen’s superb movie, Manhattan, thanks to the efforts of America’s greatest film maker and his cinematographer Gordon Willis. George Gershwin’s music rounds out this masterpiece. Here are some stills:

For once, monochrome – a usually pretentious and tired medium used as an excuse for mediocrity – works well here.

And, when you are done, contemplate Things That Really Matter, while on the couch:

My list for photographers?

  • HCB’s man jumping over the puddle
  • Anything by Norman Parkinson
  • Guy Bourdin’s outrageous fantasies
  • This month’s issue of Harper’s
  • Hoyningen-Heune’s stark compositions
  • Doisneau’s romantic Paris