v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Learning About Jack Youngerman

 

 

Reading The Slip made me hunt down information and art images from some of the artists in the book. Highly recommended.

Writer of The Slip, a book about the artist culture that developed in   in the mid-fifties, Prudence Peiffer writes a reminiscence Jack Youngerman, one of the artists who lived there with his family:

I began talking with Jack Youngerman three years ago, as research for a book on the artist community that emerged at Coenties Slip in downtown Manhattan in the late 1950s and early ’60s. What I imagined might be a few conversations turned into regular sessions: he was a generous philosopher of art. He’d moved out to Bridgehampton, on the East End of Long Island, full time in the ’90s, and it was there, in a kitchen that was always sunny and warm no matter the season, with a cuckoo clock singing the hours and his wife Hilary Helfant’s sculptures gracing the round table, that we talked about his childhood, his art apprenticeship in Paris, and his early days in New York City living in an old sailmaking loft by the East River, next door to Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Lenore Tawney, Agnes Martin, and James Rosenquist.

Youngerman grew up poor in Kentucky and didn’t see any art in person until he was 19. He was immediately smitten. He went to Paris in 1947 on the GI Bill to study art at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he met the fellow American Kelly. The two often played hooky, with the city itself as their school: visiting museums and cathedrals, seeing the paper cutouts of Henri Matisse at the Salon de Mais, and making pilgrimages to the studios of Constantin Brâncuși, Alberto Giacometti, and Jean Arp. Paris was just waking up from its World War II nightmare, and cafés were crowded with arguments about politics, the war, and art. Youngerman absorbed it all. He met Delphine Seyrig, an ambitious French student and actor. They fell in love quickly and were married.

Youngerman and Kelly discovered abstraction in France, in the art and artists that surrounded them and through a series of experiments with how to compose pictures through found images and chance operations. (See Youngerman’s beautiful Untitled drawing from 1953, above, in MoMA’s collection.) Kelly returned to New York first, hopeful that Abstract Expressionism, like a powerful storm front, had cleared the air for other kinds of abstract thinking. Youngerman followed with his wife and six-month-old son Duncan a few years later, with a promise from Betty Parsons that if he moved to New York she would show him at her gallery. On a tip from Kelly, they moved in next to him at Coenties Slip, settling into one of the illegal loft spaces in the oldest neighborhood of Manhattan, a spot so secluded that Youngerman spoke about going “back into the city” when they needed supplies. Well before loft-living became a signature of artists’ life in New York, the Coenties Slip group fixed up the rough warehouse spaces. Youngerman found furniture on the street and splurged on a picnic table from Sears Roebuck at the end of the subway line in Brooklyn. (In one of our conversations, he mentioned offhand that he still had part of that table, and pointed outside to the back porch, where the 60-year-old bench held pots of herbs.)

The friendships at Coenties Slip changed each of the artists there forever, and in turn changed American art history—how we now understand abstraction, Pop art, Minimalism, textile art. But that’s another story. Kelly was a particularly important figure for Youngerman, both from their time together absorbing so much art history in Europe and from the experiments and breakthroughs that each came to individually as artists making their way in New York. Youngerman would go on to work with sculpture and prints, but it was his paintings at the Slip that set the course of his thinking.

More

A Very Good Film

From NYRB, Nathaniel Rich writes about Ciro Guerra's great Embrace of the Serpent:

Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent, a finalist for best foreign film at this year’s Oscars, features the familiar fever-addled explorers, close-ups of vigilant jaguars and snakes baring their fangs, long pans of the jungle canopy, and indigenous tribesmen imparting portentous wisdom (“The jungle is fragile; if you attack her, she’ll fight back”). But the film is strange enough to resist the worst of the old clichés, which is to say it resists moral certainty. Guerra, a young Colombian director, shoots in a muted black and white (apart from a stunning montage in Technicolor during a climactic hallucinatory sequence), employs a counterintuitive narrative structure, and, most significant, empathizes not with the two white explorers whose misadventures drive the plot but with their indigenous guide, a profoundly conflicted figure who bears no resemblance to the customary noble or murderous savages.

The plot is based loosely on the stories of two scholars who traveled to the Amazon decades apart. The German anthropologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg (1872-1924) made several expeditions in the early twentieth century, and shot documentary footage that appears to have inspired Guerra’s sets and costume design. The Harvard biologist Richard Evans Schultes (1915-2001) lived in the South American rainforests in the 1940s and 1950s, becoming an expert on hallucinogenic plants and natural rubber. Guerra unites the two men through Karamakate, a shaman who is the last surviving member of a tribe destroyed by rapacious Colombian rubber plantation barons. In the Koch-Grünberg scenes, set in 1909, a skeptical young Karamakate (played by Nilbio Torres, a hunter who lives on the Vaupés River) agrees to help the feverishly ill anthropologist find the fictional Yakruna flower, the only known cure for his disease. (Koch-Grünberg did, in fact, die on one of his expeditions, but of malaria, in 1924.) In the Schultes scenes, set three decades later, the biologist begs the now hermetic, senile Karamakate (Antonio Bolivar, one of the last fifty remaining members of the Ocaína tribe) to help him find the elusive Yakruna for an equally selfish, but more cynical, reason. Guerra alternates between the two stories reluctantly, allowing each to expand and respire. The film’s pace is never slow but patient, lingering, accretionary, dilating with the logic of a nightmare.

A Poem by Ahlam Bsharat

 

Colonial soldiers,
what have they been doing
to my poetry all these years
when I could have easily killed them
in my poems
as they’ve killed my family
outside poetry?

Poetry was my chance
to settle the score with killers,
but I let them age outdoors,
and I want them to know decay
in their lives, their faces to wrinkle,
their smiles to thin out,
and their weapons to hunch over.

So if you, dear readers, see a soldier
taking a stroll in my poem,
trust that I have left him to his fate
as I leave a criminal
to his many remaining years,
they will execute him.

And his ears will execute him
as he listens to me reciting my poem
to grieving families,
he won’t be able to slink out
of my book or the reading hall
as the seated audience stares at him.

You will not be consoled,
soldier, you will not,
not even as you exit
my poetry event
with slumped shoulders
and pockets full of dead bullets.

Even if your hand,
tremulous as it is
from so much murder,
fidgeted with the bullets,
you will not
produce more
than a dead sound.

                                        —Ramallah

 

From The Baffler 2021

 

Fady Joudah's Poem that The New Yorker refused to Publish in 2021

 

Remove

 

You who remove me from my house
are blind to your past
which never leaves you,
yet you’re no mole
to smell and sense what’s being done
to me now by you.
Now, dilatory, attritional so that the past
is climate change and not a massacre,
so that the present never ends.
But I’m closer to you than you are to yourself
and this, my enemy friend,
is the definition of distance.
Oh don’t be indignant,
watch the video, I’ll send you the link
in which you cleanse me item after limb
thrown into the street to march where
my catastrophe in the present
is still not the size of your past:
is this the wall
you throw your dice against?
I’m speaking etymologically, I’m okay
with the scales tipping your way,
I’m not into that, I have a heart that rots,
resists, and hopes, I have genes,
like yours, that don’t subscribe
to the damage pyramid.
You who remove me from my house
have also evicted my parents
and their parents from theirs.
How is the view from my window?
How does my salt taste?
Shall I condemn myself a little
for you to forgive yourself
in my body? Oh how you love my body,
my body, my house.

 

 

Link to the story at LARB

 

From LA Riview of Books, a review by Eric Gudas  of Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon, a great book from last century that only recently is receiving the attention it so deserves:

NATALIA GINZBURG’S novel-cum-memoir, Lessico famigliare (1963), masterfully translated by Jenny McPhee as Family Lexicon, plunges its reader into a maelstrom of fart jokes, mimicry, conversation scraps overheard in childhood and repeated for decades, loudly bellowed parental edicts and epithets, invented idioms, puns, libretto excerpts, doggerel, and, occasionally, lyric poems. Often, Ginzburg remembers, their mother “recited poetry or sang” after dinner; at other times, the whole Levi family “had heated discussions over how ugly or good-looking someone was.” This cacophony of words sometimes verges on pure sound, as when the narrator’s father “let[s] out a long roar” in the shower each morning, or when her friend Lola eschews words for a “guttural and affectionate dove cry.” Gradually, a sense of time and place — Italy between the 1920s and ’50s — emerges from this barely controlled aural chaos, just as the hesitations and unfinished sentences of James Joyce’s Dubliners reveal glimpses of turn-of-the-century Ireland, or the brutally formal dialogue of Ivy Compton-Burnett, whose novels Ginzburg revered, gestures toward Edwardian social hierarchies. In the author’s “Avvertenza” (“warning”) that opens the book, Ginzburg states rather elliptically, “Even though the story is real, I think one should read it as if it were a novel, and therefore not demand of it any more or less than a novel can offer.” Indeed, Family Lexicon recalls the great modernists’ reimaginings of childhood — Joyce, Compton-Burnett, Katherine Mansfield, parts of Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience, and, farther back, Swann’s Way, which Ginzburg translated into Italian while in exile and then in hiding during World War II.

In her novel, Ginzburg, the daughter of a Jewish-born father and a Catholic-born mother — adamant nonbelievers and socialists both — grows up as the youngest of five siblings during Mussolini’s rise to power. The scene is Turin, home of an antifascist resistance movement into which Ginzburg’s family is increasingly drawn. The young Natalia Levi marries Leone Ginzburg, a Jewish Russian-Italian literary scholar active in the resistance, who will be killed in a Nazi prison before the war’s end, leaving his widow and their three children to return, eventually, to her parents’ home. (The chronological straightforwardness of my last three sentences differs totally from Ginzburg’s own mode of narration.) But it would be wrong to classify Family Lexicon as a historical memoir — say, My Childhood in Mussolini’s Italy — or the portrait of a writer as a young woman, since Ginzburg, one of Italy’s best known and most beloved postwar writers, ruthlessly downplays her own artistic development. In fact, Ginzburg announces that she has left out “much that concerned [her] directly”: “I had little desire to talk about myself. This is not in fact my story but rather, even with gaps and lacunae, the story of my family.”

Family Lexicon doesn’t so much narrate that story as immerse us in a language-world of dialect (Triestine and Milanese), memory (of Ginzburg’s own childhood, inextricable from her parents’ retellings of their childhoods), and, above all, conflict. When the Levis aren’t squabbling about their friends’ relative ugliness, they have “ferocious arguments over politics, which ended in tantrums, napkins hurled into the air, and doors slammed so hard the whole apartment shook.” McPhee’s translation expertly retains what critic Lorrie Goldensohn has called Ginzburg’s “own indelible voice-print,” a “tough, residual boniness carried over from the original sentences [that] gleams through even as they move in their new English sound.” That “voice-print” is intimately connected with her characters’ speaking voices, and in particular with a “brutal frankness” prized both in Ginzburg’s own family and subsequently in all of her writing, where it erupts on almost every page, often peppered with exclamation points. Family Lexicon is studded, for instance, with her father’s caustic barbs, including my absolute favorite, uttered at various times to different members of his family: “You’re bored because you have no inner life.” And in the novel’s leftist milieu, where characters accuse each other of being “bourgeois” time and again, Lidia Levi candidly and hilariously critiques herself: “‘If Stalin came to take away my maid, I’d kill him,’ my mother said. ‘What would I do without my maid? I, who don’t know how to do a thing?’”

More

At The Phillips

We went to see the Frank Stewart exhibition at The Phillips Collection and had a great time in its atmosphere.

Piracy and Streaming, Expanding the Reach of Arthouse

 

From Sense of Cinema, an Australian cinema newsletter, a provocative issue that you must read:

What do piracy and new technologies mean for cinema? With the decline of movie theatres and the emergence of new digital media over the past few decades, concerns over the death of cinema and cinephilia have been shared by many intellectuals and cinephiles. This concern finds its roots in Susan Sontag’s renown essay The Decay of Cinema (1996) in which she believes the essence of cinephilia is fundamentally tied to the experience of “going to the cinema” and being captivated in the dark movie theatre, ¹ and more recently, in David Bordwell’s apprehension that “films have become files.”² These viewpoints have sparked debates between older and younger generations of cinephiles from Western and non-Western countries regarding whether the postmodern digital and internet media could ultimately jeopardise the ontology and originality of cinema, or they herald a new era characterised by more diversified breed of cinematic practices. This dossier responds to the debate from the latter perspective by foregrounding the properties of piracy and the consequent development of new cinematic practices within a global decolonial frame. 

With the development of new technologies and operations (from videotapes, VCDs, DVDs, to more recently, the internet) over the past 40 years, piracy has played a crucial role in expanding the reach of underground, independent, and arthouse films to a wider audience. It has been instrumental in overcoming limitations imposed by local cinema infrastructure, including censorship, transnational boundaries, and financial constraints. If we move beyond the ethical, legal and economic considerations surrounding intellectual property rights and copyright infringement, in what context are pirated films circulated? What are the new horizons that piracy opens out? And to what extent does piracy transform our relationship with cinema? To this end, this dossier is dedicated to the heterogeneous piracy practices that are integral to an alternative film culture. This film culture, propelled by piracy, foregrounds on-demand film spectatorship and small-screen consumption, thereby challenging the prevailing cultural hegemony enforced by not only the local monolingual power but also global capitalist structures. 

In this dossier, the contributors outline diverse forms of film distribution and consumption associated with piracy across different geo-political contexts. All the contributions provide a critical perspective on power, capital and ownership. 

One of the main arguments presented in this dossier is the progressive democratic potential of piracy as a means to challenge pre-existing power dynamics. Amanda Robusti analyses how a pirate streaming service, Videoteca di Classe, becomes an anti-fascist force by circulating leftist films and bypassing the official distribution channels controlled by the far-right Italian government. In my article, I provide an overview of the way in which piracy has facilitated new filmmaking practices, grassroots cinephile culture, and public engagement in China, opening up new distribution and exhibition avenues “independent” from the official ideological discourse imposed by the Chinese Communist Party. Similarly, drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of “transgression”, Imran Firdaus pinpoints that film piracy in Bangladesh plays a radical role in democratising the distribution and exhibition of national culture, resulting in the emergence of a new cinephilia and the growth of independent filmmaking practices. 

Apart from transgressing the oppressive political forces, piracy as part of a postmodern flux cuts across national and cultural boundaries and fosters the hybridity of culture and commerce. In their empirical research of piratas (piracy vendors) in Colombia, Juana Suárez and Luisa González provide insight into the operation of the alternative distribution and consumption ecosystems in the country. These vendors break cultural and class barriers in disseminating films to metropolitan and regional audiences and filmmakers from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, thus expanding access beyond the intellectual elite circle and narrow economic circuits. 

More

Karl Berger Gone at 88

 

From WRTI and Michael West, news of Karl Berger's passing away and a good review of his accomplishments. A free musician with great musical sensibilities regardless of the genre. A mentor to many:

Karl Berger, a vibraphonist, pianist, composer, and educator who served as a mentor and father figure for generations of improvising avant-garde musicians, died on April 9 at Albany Medical Center in Albany, NY. He was 10 days past his 88th birthday.

His death was confirmed by Chuck ver Straeten, a former student and longtime family friend who was at Berger’s bedside when he passed. Ver Straeten tells WRTI that the cause of death was complications following gastrointestinal surgery.

Born and raised in Germany, Berger was part of the first wave of European musicians to pursue free jazz in the 1960s. His breakthrough came in ‘65, when as a vibraphonist he joined trumpeter Don Cherry’s band in Paris; the following year he traveled to the United States to perform on Cherry’s album Symphony for Improvisers. He recorded his own self-titled debut a few months later, and made his home in the States for the next six decades.

Along with Cherry, his résumé included work with bassist Dave Holland, drummers Jack DeJohnette and Ed Blackwell, and saxophonists Lee Konitz, Ivo Perelman and Ornette Coleman. Coleman was Berger’s primary inspiration (and later his mentor), an influence apparent in his vibraphone style: hard-swinging, informed by the blues, eschewing chords to tell a story in single-note lines that he sometimes doubled with his voice.

Berger was also an accomplished pianist, playing the keys with a more chordal and pensive style — but no less exploratory or melodic. “His musicianship was off the charts,” bassist Michael Bisio, another frequent collaborator, tells WRTI. “He was absolutely one of the most underrated musicians, maybe of all time.”

Berger’s most far-reaching achievement, however, was as an educator. Together with his wife, vocalist Ingrid Sertso, and Coleman, he co-founded the Creative Music Studio, producing workshops and concerts throughout the Woodstock area before purchasing a resort property in the Catskill foothills. CMS, which Berger served as longtime director, focuses on teaching improvising musicians to develop their own aesthetics, and to draw and mesh ideas from across genres, traditions, and international borders. From 1972 to 1984, it offered instructional workshops, master classes, multi-week intensives, and hundreds of live performances. In its prime it was considered a premiere school of contemporary creative music.

The organization’s facility in Woodstock, New York closed in 1984, but CMS survived in the forms of “World Jazz Encounters” workshops held throughout the world; Sertso Recording Studio in Woodstock (which Berger and Sertso founded in 2004); and more than 500 CMS concert recordings that are now archived at Columbia University Library.

Berger also taught at the New School, the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts, and University of Massachusetts Dartmouth for many years before reviving CMS in 2013, with Sertso as his co-artistic director. “What Karl and Ingrid created was such a unique place,” says ver Straeten. “It really brought together people from all over the world, created such a brotherhood and sisterhood. Karl was incredibly encouraging to everyone to just go exploring.”

“It’s a world,” Berger explained of his concept of music in a 2014 interview with Monk Rowe. “And once you go there, you’re in the world of spontaneity, and you’re no longer in the thinking world…. But everybody can go there. Everybody, whether you play or not.”

Karl Hans Berger was born on March 30, 1935, in Heidelberg, Germany. He began playing classical piano when he was 10, though encountering a live jam session by American musicians at age 14 redirected his interests.

In his twenties he landed a gig as house pianist at Heidelberg’s Club 54, where he got lessons in modern jazz from American soldiers. “The surrounding Army and Air Force stations had all bands,” he told Rowe. “In those bands played a few jazz musicians who later became pretty well known, such as Cedar Walton, or Lex Humphries, and Don Ellis. And they would all come to that club … and we would be playing every night ‘til five in the morning.”

After earning a PhD in musicology from the University of Berlin in 1963, Berger played with the likes of multi-reedist Eric Dolphy and saxophonist Steve Lacy before moving to Paris in 1965. After settling in New York with Sertso in 1966, he became a key figure in the avant-garde music scene, working behind Cherry, Roswell Rudd, Carla Bley, and John McLaughlin. He also built his own career as a leader in earnest, putting together multiple ensembles in both the US and Europe.

 

A Suspect List

 

From El Pais regarding Sight and Sounds Top 100 films of all time-I have issues with this crazy list:

There is no such thing as the greatest film of all time. Keep this in mind as you read the results of the survey conducted every 10 years by the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound magazine. Ever since 1952, Sight & Sound has polled critics, historians and filmmakers from all over the world and issued its list of the 100 greatest films of all time. The surprise number one knocked off past winners like The Bicycle Thief, Citizen Kane and Vertigo. Released in 1975, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was written and directed by Chantal Akerman when she was just 25 years old. It stars Lebanese-French actress Delphine Seyrig, playing a lonely Belgian housewife who barely speaks during the three-plus hours of the film.

Jeanne Dielman broke new ground in telling a fiercely feminist story. Akerman, who committed suicide in 2015 when she was 65, wanted to portray her outrage about female oppression. She did this by focusing her camera on a mother’s three mind-numbing days of household chores and mundane routines. When Akerman was asked what distinguished her films from those made by men, she replied: “The difference is that a man would never have made this film. They learn different values from the day they are born, and a woman washing dishes is not art.” A tireless cinematic experimenter, Akerman sought to shatter the prevailing societal portrayals of women.

Sight & Sound’s survey has rekindled a prickly debate that now must contend with our contemporary culture wars. This time around, the magazine conducted a much broader survey – 1,639 participants – including this writer. This is almost double the number surveyed in 2012, which in turn was much broader than the previous decade’s survey. While Sight & Sound says that this makes room for new sensibilities and gender and racial perspectives, the survey’s detractors argue that it’s a calculated strategy to precipitate a biased and opportunistic destruction of the cinematic canon.

Only two female filmmakers made Sight & Sounds’ previous top 100 lists – Akerman and Claire Denis, whose 1998 film Beau Travail climbed this year from 78th to seventh place. One of the biggest surprises of this year’s survey is the number of women who made the grade: Céline Sciamma, Agnès Varda, Jane Campion, Věra Chytilová, Julie Dash, Maya Deren and Barbara Loden. But pioneers like Dorothy Arzner and Leni Riefenstahl dropped off the list. More Black and Asian filmmakers are in the top 100, and an astonishing number of recent releases like Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

Killing off the forefathers

“There is a clear tendency to kill off the [cinematic] forefathers,” said Esteve Riambau about the top 100 list. A historian, critic and director of Barcelona’s Filmoteca de Catalunya film archive, Riambau said: “While the lists of the 1960s and 70s also killed off some of the forefathers, this one is genocidal, an indiscriminate and unjust extermination of the classics.” Riambau claims that the list is full of “political, generational and gender” biases, and has an obvious amnesia problem. “Does anyone really understand why Parasite is on the list, and not one film by [Ernst] Lubitsch or [Howard] Hawks? When the details of how everyone voted are released in January, perhaps we will be able to better understand this sham.” Riambau believes that shaking up the canon is necessary, and the broadly representative survey merits consideration. “But it demonstrates a complete disregard of cinema’s popular dimensions and an entrenched militancy and ghetto mentality.” The predominance of American and French language films on the list is, “a clear reflection of the cultural studies programs that American universities began offering in the 1980s,” said Riambau. Or as American literary critic Harold Bloom once put it, “Eskimo lesbian studies.”

American filmmaker and writer Paul Schrader (who wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver) was one of the first to criticize the survey results, which he thinks were distorted by political correctness and woke agendas. Schrader says this does a disservice to Jeanne Dielman, a film he admires and considers one of the greats. Veteran American film and literary critic Janet Maslin tweeted her support for Schrader’s critique and added that the survey reflects all the worst vices of “film students and Criterion Channel junkies… Good Lord, the world is much bigger.” On the other hand, The New Yorker’s Richard Brody praised the survey: “Despite regrettable absences (Cassavetes, for example)… [the survey] provides a more lucid view of film history.”

“It doesn’t seem to me that anything too serious has happened,” notes Josetxo Cerdán, director of Filmoteca Española, the Spanish Ministry of Culture’s film institute. “The silent films that have fallen off the list are An Andalusian Dog, Intolerance and Beyond the Dreams of Avarice. In these times, the absence of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance is understandable.” Just as Leni Riefenstahl’s enormous influence on cinema has been overshadowed by her affiliation with the Nazis, “Griffith’s racism has also impugned his place in the canon,” said Cerdán. He also thinks that including any recent film is highly questionable. “We need time to reflect and decide which films have lasting value and which ones don’t. To me, what is more indicative of the shifting perceptions of cinema is that Scorsese’s Goodfellas replaced his Raging Bull on the list, because Goodfellas is much more firmly embedded in the postmodern tradition.”

Manuel Asín, the artistic director for the Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival (Pamplona, Spain), says the diversity represented in the top 100 list is a sign that people are more knowledgeable about cinema. “Contemporary films incorporate more and more influences from the films from the past,” said Asín. The internet provides neutral and open access to the history of cinema, which has brought many forgotten gems to the forefront of best-film lists. “It will be interesting to get the detailed voting results to see which films just missed making the top 100, understand the general trends, and see how experimental cinema fared in the overall survey,” said Asín.

Mexican critic Fernanda Solórzano admits to having mixed feelings about lists that produce what she calls unnecessary controversies. “I understand that these lists are intended to be fun and provocative, but I don’t know if all this effort to establish a cinematic canon is worthwhile, even if the goal is just to shake things up. I think the laudable inclusion of more women voters undoubtedly influenced the outcome. As a female critic, it goes without saying that I’m glad to see many more women directors on the list. But as a voter, it puts me between a rock and a hard place. I didn’t vote for any of them [the women], which doesn’t mean that I’m not in favor of increasing awareness of their work. Had I known that the objective was to unearth underrated masterpieces directed by women, I would have voted for La ciénaga (or, The Swamp) by Lucrecia Martel.”

More

Some Portrait Advice from Todd Hido

Todd Hido

At LensCulture they've put up some practical advice from Todd Hido on some portrait essentials:

LC: In your opinion, what are some of the qualities that make some photographic portraits stand out and apart from ordinary photos of people? Can you offer some examples of great photo portraits that hold power for you?

TH: Richard Avedon’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe. It’s the epitome for me of an unguarded portrait. It was apparently taken at a moment when she didn’t realize she was supposed to be “on,” and it shows what I gather is the exact opposite of what it was she was trying to portray, most likely your typical flirty persona. But what it actually shows is a person that seems to be lost within themselves and looking very much inward.

Now, of course nobody knows what Marilyn was feeling at that moment and we all know that photography is the best truth teller and the best liar all at the same time. And things magically appear different when they’re photographed, as Mr. Gary Winogrand used to say. So that leaves us with what I believe is the most important part of photography, that is that we the viewers fill the photograph with meaning and we bring our own issues and concerns with us.

LC: As a teacher, what kinds of advice do you give your students when it comes to preparing for, and making, successful portraits?

TH: To be kind is most important. After that, be prepared with a plan of how you’re going to make the picture. An example in my case would be, every time I photograph somebody, I always scout out the spot I’m going to photograph them in and try to anticipate what the light is going to be like and modify it if needed.

Also, one other thing that is very important, is what the person will wear in the photograph. Wardrobe is obviously a very important component in photographs. You could either go with whatever it is they’re wearing if you’re bound to reality, but if you’re not, it’s very good to have the person bring several different things to wear because having the right clothing makes a tremendous difference. I usually opt for dark solids because it makes their face be what’s highlighted in the resulting portrait.

More