Fine Art From Google Earth

The nice people at "The Big Picture" have created a new source for fine-art photography: Google Earth, best known as a global spying technology for everyone who isn't working for the NSA. Who knew that Glengarry Glen Ross salesmen in southwest Florida were creating modern-day Incan Nazca lines, perhaps to direct ancient astronauts returning to Earth? I say if developers are going to turn swampland into partially completed residential developments, the least the world should get from it is astonishing visuals.

Near Fort Meyers

Southeast of Bonita Springs

South of Port Charlotte

North of Fort Meyers

Tony Curtis, 1925-2010

Curtis at home in Los Angeles, 1960, by Dennis Stock

 Movie stars are remembered for their film work, but also, in some case primarily, through still photos. Curtis is memorable for both. The Magnum Photo blog has a nice collection of stills taken by the agency's photographers, including the 1960 shot above by Dennis Stock. And then there is one of my favorite celebrity portraits, a shot by Annie Leibovitz that reunited the cross-dressing male leads of "Some Like It Hot."

Curtis and Jack Lemmon, by Annie Leibovitz, 1995

As for the films, Curtis happened to appear in two (at least...suggestions of others?) that were filled with the wittiest and venomous dialog...ever? Most the obits about Curtis today mention "Some Like It Hot" first, and of course it's final line is movie legend. But my favorite Curtis film is "Sweet Smell of Success," in which he used his native New York accent to create Sydney Falco, a demeaned and demeaning press agent looking for lunch at the lower end of the show-business food chain in New York. He is, as Burt Lancaster's brutish newspaper columnist J.J. Hunseker says, "a man of forty faces, not one, and none too pretty." Sometimes a photo is enough, but when Hunseker turns to Falco and says, "Match me, Sydney," it's all about the words.

Prize-Winning Photos of Devil Rays, Pit Vipers...and the Urge to Preserve

Florian Schultz's photo of devil rays in the Sea or Cortez

 Until today, the only devil ray I'd ever seen was at Yankee Stadium a few years back, when the MLB team from Tampa Bay came to town. You can't see that sight anymore, because they're just the Rays now, and, as it turns out, you'd have a very hard time seeing an actual devil ray—the kind that swim in the ocean—because they are "near threatened," according to the International Union for Conservation. (The devil rays are apparently vulnerable to gill-net fishing.) So the photo above, taken by German photographer Florian Schultz in the Sea of Cortez near Baja California, is a wonder. It was also the overall winner of the Environmental Photographer of the Year contest sponsored by the London-based Chartered Institution of Water and Environment Management. 


There are so many photography contests sponsored by environmental groups, and they remain vital and popular. I can say from experience that landscape and nature are the most popular subjects for amateur photographers, probably because nature is relatively accessible, and because there is a fundamental link between the urge to take a picture and the instincts of conservation. Both are meant to preserve something.

Photographs, which communicate instantly and across the boundaries of language, are also awesomely effective tools. It has been so since the Sierra Club started producing its famous calendars back in the 1970s.

Here two other highlights from the contest:

Gray Seal in the Baltic Sea, by Kaido Haagen

 The shot above, of a gray seal poking its head through underwater plant life, was taken by an Estonian photographer, Kaido Haagen, near the Estonian island of Vilsandi. The photo below, showing a hummingbird facing off with a green pit viper, was taken by Hungarian photographer Bruce Mate.

Hummingbird, say hello to green pit viper

The Bloody Truth Behind the "True Blood" Cover of Rolling Stone

High Concept: Naked bloody vampire sex

Let's do some role-playing: You're the photo editor of a big entertainment magazine that comes out a couple times a month, and your biggest job is to make sure that each of those issues has a spectacular cover.  You line up the right celebrities, the right photographers, and the right ideas, and you hope pray that you'll end up with an image that will A) Sell; B) Sell; C) Sell; D) Not totally offend a large number of people; and E) be kind of great. If possible.

Now let's say you've got the stars of "True Blood", an HBO TV series about vampires, blood, and naked-bloody vampire-sex, in a Los Angeles studio with photographer Matthew Rolston. What do you want them all to do? What are the words you could use to describe your intentions? Here's a hint: Say you want something "high-concept, but simple, and attention-grabbing." Really, I've done it. Works every time.

"I heard that, and I thought right away, 'Oh, "True Blood"...naked, and covered in blood," says Rolston, who did indeed shoot the recent cover of Rolling Stone that featured undead "True Blood" stars Alexander Skarsgard, Anna Paquin, and Stephen Moyer undressed and covered in stage blood.

High-concept? Check. Simple? Check. Attention Getting? You're the big-time photo editor...what do you think?

Avid "True Blood" bloggers went crazy for Rolston's gory vampire sandwich. For fangirls of the series, Christmas came early. Yes, Hollywoodreporter.com declared the image NSFW but that only meant people across America would be staging work stoppages to look at the photo. People.com said the cover had taken the show's famed raciness to a new level.The AtlanticWire maintained its decorum by calling the picture "rather erotic." Ryan Seacrest just didn't like it at all.

When I talked with Rolston (look for him to make an appearance on "America's Next Top Model" tonight), he was understandably thrilled by the attention. One of legends of Hollywood photography, he has been shooting for Rolling Stone for 30 years, and he showed that he can still pull a shocker out of his bag of visual tricks. But he said the cover almost didn't happen, because when editors and art directors say "high-concept, simple, and attention-grabbing," they usually don't have naked bloody vampires in mind.

New York, by Anonymous, for the Anonymous

The Main Concourse of Grand Central Station, by Anonymous

 After getting a preview of the new Taschen book New York: Portrait of a City, I decided I'd finally figured out who the greatest photographer of all time was. That photographer is named Anonymous.

Many, many, many of the images in the book were made by said photographer, including the 1929 photograph of Grand Central Station above. I found that fact fitting, even comforting. The picture, which the book credits to the New York Mass Transit Museum, captures the sublime isolation New Yorkers surround themselves with every day, even in crowds. Especially in crowds. (E.B. White put it this way: "New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation.")

The book is a big (560 pages), tumbling mix of history, archival imagery, and photography by photographers who are anything but anonymous: Alfred Stieglitz; Alvin Langdon Coburn, Paul Strand, Berenice Abbott, Carl Mydans, Paul Himmel, Louis Faurer, Saul Leiter, Joel Meyerowitz, Bruce Davidson, Cornell Capa, Dennis Stock, Sylvia Plachy, Ernst Haas, Elliott Erwitt...you get the idea. Many cities are photographed; New York, along with Paris, has long been one of the centers of photography. It has been well documented, shall we  say. In that sense, the history of New York and the history of photography go hand in hand.

Nonetheless, it was the images attributed to anonymous photographers that attracted my gaze most, perhaps because I didn't know them as well. The photographs also reminded me that it's in the anonymity of daily life that New Yorkers create and recreate the city. By and large photographs of New York are photographs of people. (Yes, skyscrapers...but those merely as symbols for what people build.) Here's another one the images the book attributes to anonymous:

Mulberry Street, 1900, by Anonymous

When I look at this, I wonder at all those anonymous lives, and I wonder who all those people were looking at, and how that anonymous photographer got them to hold still.

Reconciling Ernest Withers, and Other Flawed Heroes

Withers's famous 1968 photo of Memphis sanitation workers

 For the past week or so I've been following the news stories about Ernest C. Withers, the photographer famed for intimately documenting the segregated South and the civil rights movement. His "I Am A Man" photograph, showing a demonstration by Memphis sanitation workers in 1968, stands as a landmark in documentary photography.
    As we know now, because of a two-year investigation by the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Withers was also an FBI informant.
    How do we reconcile those two Ernest Withers: The intimate of Dr. Martin Luther King and the FBI confidential informant coded as ME 338-R?
    What do we think now when we see his pictures? Do the facts of a journalist or artist's life change what we have come to understand as the intent of his or her work?
    Huge, huge questions. I'm puzzled and will be for a long, long time. You?
    The New York Times poked around the issue in the essay on artistic intent that it ran yesterday. Focusing on the Withers issue, it went to a few curators and historians for opinions and neatly set out some opposing views. The Times article quoted Deborah Willis, chair of the photography and imaging department at New York University, who knew and was mentored by Withers. She said "the photographs, I believe, will prevail; it doesn't change the images."  Brett Abbott, curator of an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles called "Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography Since the Sixties," said however that the news about Withers's work for the FBI "might prompt some scholars to sift back through...Withers's work to re-evaluate it...."
     Actually I'm wondering whether the question about Withers's photographic legacy is as important as the question about Withers the secret agent. How can you evaluate the one without understanding the other?
    A couple of generations of photographers came of age with the deepest regard for Withers—a regard that went beyond professional admiration, beyond his work. I found this lovely memoir by the thoughtful and talented Eric Meola, and after reading it I found myself wondering if we are nurtured by the work our heroes do or the lives they lead, and the struggle we inevitably feel when heroes betray.
    After I read the Times article yesterday, I looked up the obit the paper ran in 2007 when Withers died. Was there some fact there that would help explain why he chose to lead a double life? Was it interesting that Withers worked for three years as one of the first nine Afrian-American police officers in Memphis? Who can connect the dots of a man's life? Perhaps a historian; more likely a novelist—someone like John le Carre, a specialist in matters of men who live double lives. Things often end badly in his books.

Visual Week in Review: The Jets punt, Pinhole "Moonrise," Lost Laughton; and More...

Before the NFL games get started today and I shut down the blogging department for a few hours, let's look back fondly at some of the good, bad, and ugly visual news of the past week.

1. SPORTS: JETS PUNT
And why not start with football, since the New York Jets dominated not only the back but also the front pages of New York City's tabloids...again.

This time it was because the team's star wide-receiver Braylon Edwards was charged with a DUI after being stopped in his car in Manhattan early Tuesday morning and blowing a .16, which is twice the legal blood-alcohol limit in our fair state. The tabloids did what they had to do, which was to deliver the message the Jets put out. The organization was red-faced, with large head coach Rex Ryan fuming (now there's a mental image). But Edwards will be dressed for today's big game against division rival Miami Dolphins. His punishment? He won't start. Some commentators attacked the decision; the Jets GM Mike Tannenbaum said the team couldn't do anything to Edwards since he is innocent until proven guilty, which conveniently won't happen until after the season ends. Sports has officially become as cynical as New York state politics, which also made the front page  of the Daily News. What a nice juxtaposition.


2. ART: "MOONRISE" WITH HOLES
Like New York state politics, the art world is also filled with believe-it-or-not stories. Have you heard the one, for instance, about the Polaroid employee who used a mural-sized print of Ansel Adams's famous image "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico" as a dartboard?

"Moonrise," with moon but without darts

This amazing tidbit comes from the most recent edition of "The Photograph Collector" newsletter, which has a fulsome story about the auction of the vaunted Polaroid Collection of photography last June in New York. Editor and writer Stephen Perloff rightly calls the auction, which brought in $12,467,638, an "unmitigated triumph" for Sotheby's, and for the creditors of the old Polaroid Corporation, a one-time enlightened example of American capitalism that became as obsolete as New York's moderate Republicans.
    One of the lots offered was the "Moonrise" mural, which had hung in the Polaroid HQ cafeteria. Back in the 1960s, long before most people dreamed that there might one day be an art market for photography, a Polaroid employee used the mural as a dartboard ("presumably," writes Perloff, "aiming at the moon as the bull's eye." Alas for said employee, the moon was never hit, though numerous holes were made in the darkened sky around it.)
    Later Polaroid had conservator Robert Lyons repair the damage. At the auction, an anonymous bidder picked it up for $518,500, just above the mural's estimate of $300,000-$500,000.


3. LOST CHARLES LAUGHTON
The New York Times's amazing "Lens" blog this week highlighted portaits made at the newspaper's own photo studio back in the 1920s and 1930s, when, "if you wanted your picture in The New York Times—and almost anyone promoting a Broadway play or a charitable ball or an Antarctic expedition wanted to be pictured in The New York Times—you wouldn’t wait for us to come to you. You’d come to us."
     Among the images featured was this 1932 photo of actor Charles Laughton, who was opening in the play "The Fatal Alibi" at the Booth Theater.

Charles Laughton as Hercule Poirot. Or Gomez Addams?

 The play was based on Agatha Christie's novel "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd," and Laughton was portraying her famous detective Hercule Poirot. (Without changing clothes he could have stepped into the role of Gomez in the current production of "The Addams Family," and, you know what, that would have been brilliant, except that the play is soooo bad.) Sadly, the blog doesn't identify the photographer. But it did include a photo of the paper's old studio. What a place!

The gone but not forgotten Times photo studio

4. PATTERSON ROCKS SNL
Back to New York state politics. You know how bad it has gotten here? I realized last night, when I saw Governor David Patterson on Saturday Night Live, that we're gonna miss him when he's gone. That's how bad it's gotten. Patterson killed when he joined Seth Meyers and Fred Armisen, who does that  so-evil-why-am-I-laughing? impression of our blind governor. Here's a still that is just funny all by itself:

Meyers, Armisen, and Patterson. Or is that Meyers, Patterson and Armisen?

Patterson scolded SNL for its wicked lampooning of his disability: "You have poked so much fun of me for being blind that I forgot I was black!"
    Now we're going to have to choose between charisma-challenged Democrat Andrew Cuomo and darkhorse-crackpot Tea Party/Republican Carl Paladino. As Armisen/Patterson put it on SNL: "It's like dinner at Olive Garden. No matter what you get, it's gonna be a greasy mess."