Entries Tagged 'Photography' ↓

A joint submission from the “I Learn Something New Every Day” and “That’s Why Women Can’t Stand Men” Depts. of MEDIA ASSASSIN, above: Photo of actress Anne Hathaway, found during an unrelated search, linked to the web site of—get this—Sideboob.org.

Motto: “A whole new view on breasts!”

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Affianwan, Calabar South, Nigeria, 2005 (Photo by Phyllis Galembo)

Photographer Phyllis Galembo burrows deep into what she calls “the transformative power of costume and ritual” by shooting large-format chromes of revelers and worshippers in remote parts of Nigeria, Haiti, and other Caribbean and African countries.

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If you can see this, you’re probably a proton: Large Hadron Collider

Whether you believe that, today, the world ends, or, in a scientific sense, it begins, you’ll agree that it was because, on this day, the start button for the biggest machine ever made got pushed.

The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, began operation today.

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Whether you love the theater or not, it remains one of the truly, cruelly most ironic dates in the history of the performing arts: Early on the morning of January 25, 1996, after that evening’s final dress rehearsal, Jonathan Larson, 35, the writer and composer of Rent, died in his West Village apartment of an aortic aneurysm.

The play was scheduled to begin its Off-Broadway run the next night, incidentally almost 100 years to the day after the debut of Giacomo Puccini’s opera, La Bohème, which inspired it.

Rent opened on Broadway’s Nederlander Theater quickly afterwards, in the spring of that year. As all now know, but Larson never would, Rent became an astounding success, was made into a film, won several Tony awards, and received the Pulitzer prize. It closed this past Sunday, after nearly 13 years and over 5,000 performances, the seventh-longest running play in Broadway history.

In this somber recollection, Sara Krulwich, who photographed Larson for The New York Times, only to receive the call from her editor as her film was being processed that the composer had died, talks about what she saw that night, as well as the day that Rent won the Pulitzer, sharing her memories of a great talent cut down far too soon.

Madonna, 49, left; Dame Helen Mirren, 62, right.

What can one possibly add to this otherworldly image of Golden Rays migrating off the coast of Mexico?

As amateur photographer Sandra Critelli said in the UK’s Daily Telegraph, via BoingBoing,

“It was an unreal image, very difficult to describe. The surface of the water was covered by warm and different shades of gold and looked like a bed of autumn leaves gently moved by the wind.”

No, Sandra. You described it perfectly. Thanks for photographing it even better.

The Treacherous Three, Norman Thomas H.S., 1981 by Joe Conzo

Fascination with hip-hop’s history is growing, as a generation that never saw it comes of age. Because of this, photographers who had the pluck to take pictures of the then developing scene are experiencing a renewed interest in their work. (I’ve even been the beneficiary of this new regard, enjoying my own show, last summer, of pictures taken mostly on Long Island, during the White Castle days of what would become Public Enemy.)

Today on my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, July 11, at 2 pm ET, I’ll be speaking with Joe Conzo, whose pictures of formative hip-hop sextet the Cold Crush Brothers form the basis of seminal urban work in his book, Born in the Bronx; Janette Beckman, a British photog who, arriving here in NYC during the early ’80s, having exhausted punk, found fresh! inspiration shooting Run-DMC, Boogie Down Productions, and others (The Breaks: Stylin’ and Profilin’ 1982-1990); and Jamel Shabazz (Seconds of My Life), whose touching portraits, mostly of Black New Yorkers, have drawn comparisons to James Van Der Zee and Gordon Parks.

They’ll be briefly preceded by a conversation with Coloradoan jazz singer Rene Marie, whose controversial performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” ten days ago has drawn so much ire.

You can hear the ideas of these thoughtful innovators by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, you can check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, check out our archive for up to two weeks after broadcast.

Edelgard Clavey, 67, December 5, 2003, then one month later

What is death?

Or, let me ask it this way: When, one moment, a person is alive, then, a moment later, they die, what has “happened,” or changed? Where have they, the person you knew and loved, “gone”? What is it that makes the difference between a person that you love and touch, and the shell you avert?

Questions of this sort inevitably course through one’s mind when contemplating German photographer Walter Schels’s and collaborator Beate Lakotta’s earthy, profoundly emotional portraits of terminally ill patients, before, and, their very first pictures, shortly after dying. (Thanks to very.fm for the heads up.)

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I can see Gayle King from here: New York’s Hearst Building (57th St. and 8th Ave.), home to O Magazine and others, and its GTA IV twin

With the April 29 release of Rockstar Games’ (and, full disclosure, my former employer’s) Grand Theft Auto IV now nearly a month behind us, many are raving over the game’s raucus gameplay and sophisticated storyline. Still others are flabbergasted by the company’s reported game sales of over 6 million copies sold in the first week, including 3.6 million the first day, for a gross of half a billion dollars the first seven days of release, beating analyst projections widely. (These also beat Microsoft’s Halo 3 numbers, ’til now the biggest release. Little-known fact: In 2004, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas also beat Halo 2‘s sales with, much the same, little fanfare.)

But whether you love video games, like I do, detest them, like my wife does, or are a voice actor for the GTA IV who doesn’t believe Take 2, Rockstar’s parent company, paid you enough, like Michael Hollick, if you’re New Yorkers playing GTA IV, there’s one thing you can all agree upon: The striking sense of verisimilitude with which the game overwhelms the player.

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Further proof that, especially planetarily, there’s no accounting for taste: The above ad, notes Boinkology, for Tom Ford Sunglasses, has been banned in Italy by that country’s Institute for Advertising Self-Discipline (IAP).

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