Saturday, March 10, 2012

Trucks carrying

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Trucks carrying the large, precast concrete letters of Mansilla+Tuñón’s Fine Arts museum of Castellón in order of their display in 1999. Previously, today.
“As they moved through the landscape and the towns, the five letters formed a word. The emergence of a word, an intruder, implies a culturization of landscape through thought. A culturization in motion that leaves no lasting mark. An ephemeral action, limited to four hundred and forty kilometres and ten hours of travel.”

Friday, March 9, 2012

Untitled Film Stil

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If you follow art at all you already know that Cindy Sherman takes pictures only of herself, but she always insists she doesn’t make self-portraits. True enough—it would be more accurate to say that for the past 35 years, she’s been producing a portrait of her times as they flow through the finely tuned instrument of her baroque psyche. Again and again in her spine-tingling retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City—it runs there from Feb. 26 to June 11, then travels to San Francisco, Minneapolis and Dallas—you also discover she’s made a portrait of you.
Growing up in a New York suburb, Sherman loved to play dress-up. In 1977, when she was 23 and just out of Buffalo State College, she started playing it with a vengeance. For three years, she photographed herself in costumes, wigs and settings that drew from the deep pool of movie images in which we’re all immersed from childhood. In what eventually grew to a series of 70 “Untitled Film Stills,” she took on the role of career girl, housewife, siren and woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Six years before Woody Allen got there, she became the Zelig of the collective unconscious, the heroine with a thousand faces.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Beatles

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“Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.
It’s getting hard to be someone but it all works out, it doesn’t matter much to me.
Let me take you down, ‘cos I’m going to Strawberry Fields.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hung-about.
Strawberry Fields forever.”

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Kellett Autogiro

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Using Cierva and Pitcairn designs, the Kellett Autogiro Company of Philadelphia, PA, produced its own autogiros in the 1930s, which made use of a larger blade area, simplified landing gear, and wider fuselage to accommodate side-by-side seating. Interested in a slow flying aircraft that could observe enemy forces and direct artillery fire, both the American Army and Japanese War Office purchased Kellett autogiros in the 1930s. Thrilling armchair adventurers across the nation, Admiral Richard E. Byrd flew a Kellett K-3 on his Antarctic Expedition of 1933-1934.

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

filming of the short

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Director Marshall Neilan, Thelma Todd, Guinn ‘Big Boy’ Williams and ZaSu Pitts take it easy during filming of the short ”Catch as Catch Can”, 1931.

Monday, March 5, 2012

What really happened

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What really happened…
From our previous post, this is the inaugural edition of a planned series of “Behind the Picture” galleries, LIFE.com offers some of the marvelous photographs Bourke-White made that have been long associated with the Great Depression — that LIFE actually published in the aftermath of the Great Ohio River Flood of 1937. In addition, a number of equally powerful, unpublished images from the same assignment — pictures that never made it into the magazine, but that nevertheless commemorate a great photojournalist, and the dignity of a people enduring what must have felt, at the time, like an age of unending troubles.
(read more here)

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Liu Zheng

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Liu Zheng, A Rural Boy in School Uniform, Fengxiang, Shaanxi Province, 2000.
© Liu Zheng, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.
The stunning work of photographer Liu Zheng is also in Yossi Milo’s latest exhibition, First-Look. Head on over to their website for more details.

Friday, March 2, 2012

Going on a Bummer Vacation

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The Polish coastline is about 500 km long. On it, there are several sandy beaches, some cliffs and a few villages that are now largely populated by depressed fishermen.

Poland was pretty happy when it was allowed to join the European Union, but ever since it’s been in the EU big boys club, the welfare of the fishing families has got shittier and shittier. Many are forced to sell their boats and open new businesses, or go looking for work elsewhere, meaning that the only people left in the villages are destitute fishermen who don’t have boats.

And what’s a fisherman without a boat? Just a sad guy in a cap who smells faintly of the one thing that he wants most, but cannot have.

Photographer Tomasz Lazar, who was born in Szczecin, a town just 100 km from the Baltic Sea, sent us this set of photographs.

I know we’re not usually big on artsy, black and white shots of gloomy things, but come on, this is Eastern Europe, people there are born seeing black and white.
See more: Going on a Bummer Vacation



Thursday, March 1, 2012

Dancers

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Dancers, Mott Haven, August 1979, from the Faces in the Rubble series
Photo Credit: David Gonzalez






Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Adolf Hitler

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Proof That Hitler Had an Illegetimate Son?
New evidence has emerged to support the controversial claim that Hitler had a son with a French teenager, the French magazine LePoint reported on Friday.
The man, Jean-Marie Loret, claimed to be the Fuhrer’s son in 1981, when he published an autobiography called “Your Father’s Name Was Hitler.” He died four years later aged 67, not being able to prove his family line.
But Loret’s Paris lawyer, François Gibault, told the French magazine that a number of photographs and documents can now support the claim.
He also revealed how Loret got to know about his parentage.
keep reading
Image: Hitler with a daughter of Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, 1933 (killed by her parents the day they both committed suicide). Credit: Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive)/Wikimedia Commons.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Sasha Pivovarova

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 Sasha Pivovarova by Craig McDean

Monday, February 27, 2012

Yale Joel

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© Yale Joel / Getty Images, Nov. 1951, People race from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during an air raid drill
Yale Joel began his career as a professional photographer when he was 19 years old, served as a combat photographer during World War II, and several years later became a member of the famous LIFE magazine photography staff.

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Jet Airliner

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I’ve been looking at just tons of photography this past week and my eyes hurt it’s been a blast. Fall is a very exciting time for photo geeks- all the galleries turn the lights back on, and a new season of photo books hit the racks. I’ve got several on my wish list, but one I most covet is Josef Hoflehner’s Jet Airliner. What beats pictures that are square, black-and-white, have babes and planes? I mean, come on?!
Hoflehner has a ton of other great work as well- check it out. He does love the stark square, and I love his consistency. Creamy, dreamy pictures.


Saturday, February 25, 2012

Singboaids street

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Award-wining photographer Fan Ho has won 280 awards from international exhibitions and competitions worldwide since 1956. Ho has been elected Fellow of the Photographic Society of America, Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, England; Honorary Member of the Photographic Societies of Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Brazil, Argentina, Singapore and etc, and was honored with One-Man-Shows in the above countries. Ho’s works can be seen and have been published in many International Photographic Annuals all over the world.

Source

Friday, February 24, 2012

Lovers by Weegee

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Lovers by Weegee
There is a very extensive Weegee exhibition called Murder Is My Business at the International Center of Photography right now. It’s pay what you want every Friday from 5-8pm.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

New York City

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New York City — For us here at LIFE, it’s the place we call home.
From the countless images of the Big Apple stored away in its unparalleled archives, LIFE here presents a small selection of classic black-and-white photos that show off the the spirit, the architecture, the culture (high and decidedly low) of Gotham — visual testaments to a city that, through darkness and in light, remains one of a kind.

(see moreLove Letter to NYC)

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Le Secret

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Le Secret, Eglantine et Laurence
photo by Jean-Philippe Charbonnier, Paris 1979

Monday, February 20, 2012

I'm the shit

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Sunday, February 19, 2012

John Malmin

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© John Malmin, ca. 1969, A sea of Volkswagen vehicles
A sea of Volkswagen vehicles – mostly the famous Beetle model — sit at Terminal Island after unloading from a ship. In 1969, Beetle sales in the United States peaked at 367,607. By 1977, the model had been discontinued — annual sales having dropped below 50,000.  Taken from the Goodyear blimp, this image by staff photographer John Malmin was published as stand-alone art in the Jan. 13, 1969, L.A. Times. 
The Volkswagen was officially named the KdF-Wagen by Hitler when the project was officially announced in 1938. The name refers to ‘Kraft durch Freude’ (‘Strength Through Joy’), the official leisure organization of the Third Reich. After World War II, the car was known as the Volkswagen Type 1, but became more commonly known as the Beetle.
Just before the start of the Second World War, Tatra had ten legal claims filed against VW for infringement of patents. Although Ferdinand Porsche (who developed the car) was about to pay a settlement to Tatra, he was stopped by Hitler who said he would “solve his problem”. Tatra launched a lawsuit, but this was stopped when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, resulting in the Tatra factory coming under Nazi administration in October 1938.

“Er läuft und läuft und läuft…” - Volkswagen commercial, 1960s:

Saturday, February 18, 2012

Frank Oscar Larson

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Frank Oscar Larson: 1950s New York Street Stories

 

Frank Oscar Larson (1896-1964) was born in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, of Swedish immigrant parents and lived in Flushing, Queens most of his life. As an adult, Larson spent his days at a branch of the Empire Trust Company (now Bank of New York Mellon), working his way up through the ranks from auditor to vice-president, and spare time on weekends taking photographs of street life throughout New York City. He was an accomplished photographer who eloquently documented 1950s Chinatown, the Bowery, Hell’s Kitchen, City Island, Times Square, Central Park, and much more. This exhibition is compiled from thousands of negatives recently discovered stored away in his daughter-in-law’s house in Maine in 2009. Soren Larson, his grandson and a television news camera man and producer, has been scanning and printing the 55 year old images found stored in over 100 envelopes filled with mostly medium format, 2-1/4 x 2-1/4″ negatives, and neatly noted by location and date in Larson’s own hand.
According to Soren Larson, “Photographs dating back to the 1920s attest to the fact that he was always the family shutterbug. But it wasn’t until the early 1950s that Frank’s passion for photography blossomed. By 1949 both of his sons had left home, and perhaps this new situation, no longer having kids at home freed him up on the weekends to delve into photography with a passion.” For the next ten years, weekend expeditions around New York with his beloved Rolleiflex Automat Model 4 camera around his neck, produced thousands of images which he developed in a basement darkroom. Some were printed and entered in photography competitions where he won awards, but most remained undiscovered until the cardboard box of negatives that had been packed away since Frank’s death in 1964, was found.
Larson was an avid, empathetic observer of the life of the streets, and in his eyes, the mundane becomes miraculous. Larson documents the changing face of New York City in Under the El, Park Row, perhaps a subtle self portrait taken in a dramatically composed photograph under the El just prior to its being demolished. Times Square and Chinatown were some of his favorite haunts, at once photogenic and atmospheric, alluring and even alien. Times Square was notoriously illuminated by countless numbers of incandescent light bulbs on the theater marquees and advertising signs. A state of “permanent daylight” made the use of flash unnecessary at night, allowing the photographer to merge into the crowd. Larson achieved a great intimacy and immediacy in unguarded, candid shots such as the evocative, worm’s eye view of Johnny Guitar 1 taken in front of the Brandt’s Mayfair theater showing the film of the same title starring Joan Crawford, and the eerie Ticket Booth at the Brandt Lyric theater, the ticket taker’s face neatly framed in a small round hole in the curved glass booth, masked with dark sunglasses against the blinding lights.
The everyday person is honored in candid portraits of “working stiffs” — policemen, shoe repair men and shoeshine boys, chefs, painters, souvenir and balloon sellers, and husky men hoisting beer barrels – as honest an appraisal of the human condition as any photograph taken by Walker Evans, Atget, Robert Frank, Berenice Abbott or Brassai. In Grand Central Station’s waiting room, a father muses with a doll and boxed gifts next to him on the bench, reveal a solitary moment in the urban maelstrom of rush hour in Midtown. Portraits of children at play in Flushing or Williamsburg recall familiar images by Helen Levitt and Diane Arbus in their fresh directness. Other striking and timeless images such as AP Window show business men huddled in front of the day’s news at the AP Building at Rockefeller Center in 1955, taken just blocks away from Larson’s daily work at the Empire Trust Company, while in School Girls, four pretty young women relax outside in an intimate, almost vulnerable portrait.
Personal memorabilia and family photographs include a charming shot of Larson’s sons, Franklin and David, taken at the Kodak Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair where they are posed for the “Kodak moment” with a miniature Trylon and Perisphere. Sadly, on the way to visit the New York World’s Fair in 1964, Larson suffered a stroke and passed away, of complications suffered in WWI due to exposure to mustard gas as a young man.
Larson’s own camera equipment – two Rolleiflex Automat Model 4 cameras using 2-1/4 x 2-1/4″ medium format film, lens, filters and light meter, will be included in the exhibition as well.
The extraordinary body of work in Frank Oscar Larson: 1950s New York Street Stories is having its New York debut at the Queens Museum of Art. In addition, The Queens Museum of Art is honored to have been selected to receive a donation of prints from Frank Oscar Larson’s photographic archive for their permanent collection. We are pleased to exhibit sixty images in this introduction to New York audiences in February 2012.
Frank Oscar Larson: 1950s New York Street Stories has been curated by Louise Weinberg, Archives Manager.
Frank Oscar Larson: 1950s New York Street Stories is supported in part by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts.

Friday, February 17, 2012

Second Painting

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Second Painting
Thomas Hawk

Sunday, February 12, 2012

City of Shadows

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When hotel cleaner ‘Harry Leon Crawford’ was arrested and charged with wife murder, he was revealed to be in fact Eugeni Falleni, a woman and mother, who had been passing as a man since 1899.
In 1914, as ‘Harry Crawford’, Falleni had married the widow Annie Birkett. Three years later, shortly after she announced to a relative that she had found out ‘something amazing about Harry’, Birkett disappeared.  From the fantastic collection City of Shadows.

Friday, February 10, 2012

Eve Arnold

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If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.”—Eve Arnold
Photographer Eve Arnold, who died Thursday morning at the age of 99, is probably best remembered for her celebrity photographs of Marilyn Monroe, made over the span of a decade from the early 1950s to those taken on the set of the movie star’s final film, The Misfits. But Arnold also traveled the world to make equally exceptional photographs of the poor and disposed.
Arnold, the daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1912. In the late 1940’s, she studied photography—alongside Richard Avedon—under inspirational art director Alexei Brodovitch at the New School for Social Research in New York. Her first photo story documented African-American fashion shows in Harlem and the project would lead directly to her being granted unprecedented access by Malcom X to document the Black Muslims and the way they worked over the next two years.
In the early 1950’s, she began working for the photo news publications of the day, first for Picture Post, then Time and Life magazines. And in 1957 she became the first woman photographer to join Magnum Photos.
She will perhaps be best remembered for her exceptional photographs of people: the famous, politicians, musicians, artists —among them Malcolm X, Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Jacqueline Kennedy and Monroe. “I look for a sense of reality with everything I did,” she once said. “I didn’t work in a studio, I didn’t light anything. I found a way of working which pleased me because I didn’t have to frighten people with heavy equipment, it was that little black box and me”
But it is the long term reportage stories that drove Arnold’s curiosity and passion. She traveled extensively to make work on regions that had been off limits to the west—to China, Mongolia, the Soviet Union, and also to Cuba, South Africa and Afghanistan. In 1971 she made a film, Women Behind the Veil, going inside Arabian harems and hammams.
Arnold continued to work for respected publications, most notably the Sunday Times color supplement. In 2003 she was honored with an OBE in recognition for her services to photography. Her work is renowned for its intimacy. Whether photographing celebrity or the everyday, Arnold’s portraits are magical, memorable and enduring.

Honolulu Conference

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Honolulu Conference on the Vietnam War
President Lyndon B. Johnson (2nd from right) arriving at St. Augustine Church for services. Congr. Spark Matsunaga (left of LBJ) and an agent holding umbrellas.
February 6, 1966

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Charles Dickens

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Dickens, Charles John Huffam (1812-1870), probably the best-known and, to many people, the greatest English novelist of the 19th century. A moralist, satirist, and social reformer, Dickens crafted complex plots and striking characters that capture the panorama of English society.
Dickens's novels criticize the injustices of his time, especially the brutal treatment of the poor in a society sharply divided by differences of wealth. But he presents this criticism through the lives of characters that seem to live and breathe. Paradoxically, they often do so by being flamboyantly larger than life: The 20th-century poet and critic T. S. Eliot wrote, "Dickens's characters are real because there is no one like them." Yet though these characters range through the sentimental, grotesque, and humorous, few authors match Dickens's psychological realism and depth. Dickens's novels rank among the funniest and most gripping ever written, among the most passionate and persuasive on the topic of social justice, and among the most psychologically telling and insightful works of fiction. They are also some of the most masterful works in terms of artistic form, including narrative structure, repeated motifs, consistent imagery, juxtaposition of symbols, stylization of characters and settings, and command of language.
Dickens established (and made profitable) the method of first publishing novels in serial installments in monthly magazines. He thereby reached a larger audience including those who could only afford their reading on such an installment plan. This form of publication soon became popular with other writers in Britain and the United States.
II Early Years
Dickens was born in Portsmouth, on England's southern coast. His father was a clerk in the British Navy pay office a respectable position, but with little social status. His paternal grandparents, a steward (property manager) and a housekeeper, possessed even less status, having been servants, and Dickens later concealed their background. Dickens's mother supposedly came from a more respectable family. Yet two years before Dickens's birth, his mother's father was caught embezzling and fled to Europe, never to return.
The family's increasing poverty forced Dickens out of school at age 12 to work in Warren's Blacking Warehouse, a shoe-polish factory, where the other working boys mocked him as "the young gentleman." His father was then imprisoned for debt. The humiliations of his father's imprisonment and his labor in the blacking factory formed Dickens's greatest wound and became his deepest secret. He could not confide them even to his wife, although they provide the unacknowledged foundation of his fiction.
Soon after his father's release from prison, Dickens got a better job as errand boy in law offices. He taught himself shorthand to get an even better job later as a court stenographer and as a reporter in Parliament. At the same time, Dickens, who had a reporter's eye for transcribing the life around him, especially anything comic or odd, submitted short sketches to obscure magazines. The first published sketch, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk" (later retitled "Mr. Minns and His Cousin") brought tears to Dickens's eyes when he discovered it in the pages of The Monthly Magazine in 1833. From then on his sketches, which appeared under the pen name "Boz" (rhymes with "rose") in The Evening Chronicle, earned him a modest reputation. Boz originated as a childhood nickname for Dickens's younger brother Augustus.
Dickens became a regular visitor at the home of George Hogarth, editor of The Evening Chronicle, and in 1835 became engaged to Hogarth's daughter Catherine. Publication of the collected Sketches by Boz in 1836 gave Dickens sufficient income to marry Catherine Hogarth that year. The marriage proved unhappy.
III Literary Career
Soon after Sketches by Boz appeared, the fledgling publishing firm of Chapman and Hall approached Dickens to write a story in monthly installments. The publisher intended the story as a backdrop for a series of woodcuts by the then-famous artist Robert Seymour, who had originated the idea for the story. With characteristic confidence, Dickens, although younger and relatively unknown, successfully insisted that Seymour's pictures illustrate his own story instead. After the first installment, Dickens wrote to the artist he had displaced to correct a drawing he felt was not faithful enough to his prose. Seymour made the change, went into his backyard, and expressed his displeasure by blowing his brains out. Dickens and his publishers simply pressed on with a new artist. The comic novel, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, appeared serially in 1836 and 1837 and was first published in book form The Pickwick Papers in 1837.
The runaway success of The Pickwick Papers, as it is generally known today, clinched Dickens's fame. There were Pickwick coats and Pickwick cigars, and the plump, spectacled hero, Samuel Pickwick, became a national figure. Four years later, Dickens's readers found Dolly Varden, the heroine of Barnaby Rudge (1841), so irresistible that they named a waltz, a rose, and even a trout for her. The widespread familiarity today with Ebenezer Scrooge and his proverbial hard-heartedness from A Christmas Carol (1843) demonstrate that Dickens's characters live on in the popular imagination.
Dickens published 15 novels, one of which was left unfinished at his death. These novels are, in order of publication with serialization dates given first: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-1837; 1837); The Adventures of Oliver Twist (1837-1839; 1838); The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839; 1839); The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841; 1841); Barnaby Rudge (1841); Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844; 1844); Dombey and Son (1846-1848; 1848); The Personal History of David Copperfield (1849-1850; 1850); Bleak House (1852-1853; 1853); Hard Times (1854); Little Dorrit (1855-1857; 1857); A Tale of Two Cities (1859); Great Expectations (1860-1861; 1861); Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865; 1865); and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished; 1870).
Through his fiction Dickens did much to highlight the worst abuses of 19th-century society and to prick the public conscience. But running through the main plot of the novels are a host of subplots concerning fascinating and sometime ludicrous minor characters. Much of the humor of the novels derives from Dickens's descriptions of these characters and from his ability to capture their speech mannerisms and idiosyncratic traits.
A Early Fiction
Dickens was influenced by the reading of his youth and even by the stories his nursemaid created, such as the continuing saga of Captain Murderer. These childhood stories, as well as the melodramas and pantomimes he saw in the theater as a boy, fired Dickens's imagination throughout his life. His favorite boyhood readings included picaresque novels such as Don Quixote by Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes and Tom Jones by English novelist Henry Fielding, as well as the Arabian Nights. In these long comic works, a roguish hero's exploits and adventures loosely link a series of stories.
The Pickwick Papers, for example, is a wandering comic epic in which Samuel Pickwick acts as a plump and cheerful Don Quixote, and Sam Weller as a cockney version of Quixote's knowing servant, Sancho Panza. The novel's preposterous characters, high spirits, and absurd adventures delighted readers.
After Pickwick, Dickens plunged into a bleaker world. In Oliver Twist, he traces an orphan's progress from the workhouse to the criminal slums of London. Nicholas Nickleby, his next novel, combines the darkness of Oliver Twist with the sunlight of Pickwick. Rascality and crime are part of its jubilant mirth.
The Old Curiosity Shop broke hearts across Britain and North America when it first appeared. Later readers, however, have found it excessively sentimental, especially the pathos surrounding the death of its child-heroine Little Nell. Dickens's next two works proved less popular with the public.
Barnaby Rudge, Dickens's first historical novel, revolves around anti-Catholic riots that broke out in London in 1780. The events in Martin Chuzzlewit become a vehicle for the novel's theme: selfishness and its evils. The characters, especially the Chuzzlewit family, present a multitude of perspectives on greed and unscrupulous self-interest. Dickens wrote it after a trip to the United States in 1842.
B Mature Fiction
Many critics have cited Dombey and Son as the work in which Dickens's style matures and he succeeds in bringing multiple episodes together in a tight narrative. Set in the world of railroad-building during the 1840s, Dombey and Son looks at the social effects of the profit-driven approach to business. The novel was immediately successful.
Dickens always considered David Copperfield to be his best novel and the one he most liked. The beginning seems to be autobiographical, with David's childhood experiences recalling Dickens's own in the blacking factory. The unifying theme of the book is the "undisciplined heart" of the young David, which leads to all his mistakes, including the greatest of them, his mistaken first marriage.
Bleak House ushers in Dickens's final period as a satirist and social critic. A court case involving an inheritance forms the mainspring of the plot, and ultimately connects all of the characters in the novel. The dominant image in the book is fog, which envelops, entangles, veils, and obscures. The fog stands for the law, the courts, vested interests, and corrupt institutions. Dickens had a long-standing dislike of the legal system and protracted lawsuits from his days as a reporter in the courts.
A novel about industry, Hard Times, followed Bleak House in 1854. In Hard Times, Dickens satirizes the theories of political economists through exaggerated characters such as Mr. Bounderby, the self-made man motivated by greed, and Mr. Gradgrind, the schoolmaster who emphasizes facts and figures over all else. In Bounderby's mines, lives are ground down; in Gradgrind's classroom, imagination and feelings are strangled.
The pervading image of Little Dorrit is the jail. Dickens's memory of his own father's time in debtors' prison adds an autobiographical touch to the novel. Little Dorrit also contains Dickens's invention of the Circumlocution Office, the archetype of all bureaucracies, where nothing ever gets done. Through this critique and others, such as the circular legal system in Bleak House, Dickens also investigated the ways in which art makes meaning and the workings of his own narrative style.
A Tale of Two Cities is set in London and Paris during the French Revolution (1789-1799). It stands out among the novels as a work driven by incident and event rather than by character and is critical both of the violence of the mob and of the abuses of the aristocracy, which prompted the revolution. The successful Tale of Two Cities was soon followed by Great Expectations, which marked a return to the more familiar Dickensian style of character-driven narrative. Its main character, Pip, tells his own story. Pip's "great expectations" are to lead an idle life of luxury. Through Pip, Dickens exposes that ideal as false.
Dickens's last complete novel is the dark and powerful Our Mutual Friend. A tale of greed and obsession, it takes place in an ill-lit and dirty London, with images of darkness and decay throughout. Only 6 of the 12 intended parts of Edwin Drood had been completed by the time Dickens died. He intended it as a mystery story concerning the disappearance of the title character.
IV Final Years
The end of Dickens's life was emotionally scarred by his separation from his dutiful wife, Catherine, as the result of his involvement with a young actress, Ellen Ternan. Catherine bore him ten children during their 22-year marriage, but he found her increasingly dull and unsympathetic. Against the advice of editors, Dickens published a letter vehemently justifying his actions to his readers, who would otherwise have known nothing about them.
Following the separation, Dickens continued his hectic schedule of novel, story, essay, and letter writing (his collected letters alone stretch thousands of pages); reform activities; amateur theatricals and readings; in addition to nightly social engagements and long midnight walks through London. His energy had always seemed to his friends inhuman, but he maintained this activity in his later years in disregard of failing health. Dickens died of a stroke shortly after his farewell reading tour, while writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
V Achievement
Dickens's social critique in his novels was sharp and pointed. As his biographer Edgar Johnson observed in Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (1952), Dickens's criticism was aimed not just at "the cruelty of the workhouse and the foundling asylum, the enslavement of human beings in mines and factories, the hideous evil of slums where crime simmered and proliferated, the injustices of the law, and the cynical corruption of the lawmakers" but also at "the great evil permeating every field of human endeavor: the entire structure of exploitation on which the social order was founded."
British writer George Orwell felt that Dickens was not a revolutionary, however, despite his criticism of society's ills. Orwell points out that Dickens "has no constructive suggestions, not even a clear grasp of the nature of the society he is attacking, only an emotional perception that something is wrong." That instinctive feeling becomes so moving in the novels because Dickens made the injustices he hated concrete and specific, not abstract and general. His readers feel the abuses of 19th-century society as real through the life of his characters. Underlying and reinforcing that illusion of reality, however, is a rich and complicated system of symbolic imagery resulting from superb artistry.
Through his characters, Dickens also touched a range of readers, which was perhaps his greatest talent. As his friend John Forster wrote, his stories enthralled "judges on the bench and boys in the street" alike. The illiterate, often too poor to buy installments themselves, pooled their pennies and got someone to read aloud to them.
Near the end of the serialization of The Old Curiosity Shop, crowds thronged to a New York pier to await the ship from London carrying the latest installment. As it came to the dock people roared, "Is Little Nell dead?" The pathetic death of the novel's child-heroine, Nell Trent, became one of the most celebrated scenes in 19th-century fiction. Such public concern over Little Nell's end guaranteed that Dickens's social message would be heard, not only by his avid readers, but also by those in power.
Dickens was a careful craftsman, with a strong sense of design; his books were strictly outlined. Any current notions that Dickens's novels are long because he was paid by the word, or sloppy because he wrote them under pressure of monthly deadlines, are simply untrue. What organizes Dickens's stories is sometimes not apparent at first glance, although it makes sense in novels that emphasize character. It is the logic of psychology, the tensions and contradictions of our drives and emotions, which Dickens plumbed, laying side by side the best and the worst of the human heart. This is a very different logic from the order of realism that rests on common sense. Dickens detested common sense, seeing in its seeming obviousness a form of tyranny.
The theater was a crucial influence on Dickens's work. As a young man Dickens tried to go on stage, but he missed his audition because of a cold. Not only did Dickens later write comic plays, melodramas, and libretti (words for musical dramas), he was also often involved in amateur theatricals for good causes, and spent his last two decades reading his own stories to packed audiences. Dickens's readings were as much a sensation in England and America as was his writing, and they proved as profitable. The readings revealed the part of the man that made him a practiced magician and hypnotist as well.
Dickens's love of the theatrical makes his works lend themselves readily to media adaptations. Motion-picture or television versions exist for almost every one of them. A Christmas Carol was one of the earliest to be adapted, first appearing as the silent film Scrooge (1901), directed by Walter R. Booth. The most notable adaptations include A Christmas Carol (1938), directed by Edwin L. Marin and starring Reginald Owen, and, probably the most famous of all, A Christmas Carol (1951), directed by Brian Desmond Hart and starring Alastair Sim. A later production titled Scrooged (1988) was directed by Richard Donner and starred Bill Murray. David Lean directed the most famous of the many versions of Great Expectations (1946). The film Oliver! (1968), a musical based on Oliver Twist and directed by Carol Reed, won six Academy Awards. Nowadays people are probably more familiar with the many BBC television miniseries productions of Dickens's works.

Monday, February 6, 2012

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Saturday, February 4, 2012

Monochrome

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Throughout the mid to late 1970s and upwards, Hiroshi Sugimoto packed up a folding 4x5 camera & tripod, surreptitiously entered matinees (and, one can only presume, evening film events) and documented the interior of movie theatres across the United States. He would open the shutter just before the ‘first light’ hit the screen and close it after the credits finished rolling and before the house lights came on. Using this method he was able to invert the subject/object relationship of the movie theatre and use the film itself to illuminate the proscenium and interior. This content, largely unaddressed critically, is what lends the images their incredible power — along wtih the natural fascination of being made privy to the photography’s divine birthright — allowing us to see the normally invisible, to experience a finite collapse of time.

Friday, February 3, 2012

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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32nd President of the United States 

 Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on January 30, 1882.

 

The Early Years

Franklin D. Roosevelt was born in Hyde Park, New York on January 30, 1882. He was the son of James Roosevelt and Sara Delano Roosevelt. His parents and private tutors provided him with almost all his formative education. He attended Groton (1896-1900), a prestigious preparatory school in Massachusetts, and received a BA degree in history from Harvard in only three years (1900-03). Roosevelt next studied law at New York's Columbia University. When he passed the bar examination in 1907, he left school without taking a degree. For the next three years he practiced law with a prominent New York City law firm. He entered politics in 1910 and was elected to the New York State Senate as a Democrat from his traditionally Republican home district.
In the meantime, in 1905, he had married a distant cousin, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, who was the niece of President Theodore Roosevelt. The couple had six children, five of whom survived infancy: Anna (1906), James (1907), Elliott (1910), Franklin, Jr. (1914) and John (1916).
Roosevelt was reelected to the State Senate in 1912, and supported Woodrow Wilson's candidacy at the Democratic National Convention. As a reward for his support, Wilson appointed him Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1913, a position he held until 1920. He was an energetic and efficient administrator, specializing in the business side of naval administration. This experience prepared him for his future role as Commander-in-Chief during World War II. Roosevelt's popularity and success in naval affairs resulted in his being nominated for vice-president by the Democratic Party in 1920 on a ticket headed by James M. Cox of Ohio. However, popular sentiment against Wilson's plan for US participation in the League of Nations propelled Republican Warren Harding into the presidency, and Roosevelt returned to private life.
While vacationing at Campobello Island, New Brunswick in the summer of 1921, Roosevelt contracted poliomyelitis (infantile paralysis). Despite courageous efforts to overcome his crippling illness, he never regained the use of his legs. In time, he established a foundation at Warm Springs, Georgia to help other polio victims, and inspired, as well as directed, the March of Dimes program that eventually funded an effective vaccine.
With the encouragement and help of his wife, Eleanor, and political confidant, Louis Howe, Roosevelt resumed his political career. In 1924 he nominated Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York for president at the Democratic National Convention, but Smith lost the nomination to John W. Davis. In 1928 Smith became the Democratic candidate for president and arranged for Roosevelt's nomination to succeed him as governor of New York. Smith lost the election to Herbert Hoover; but Roosevelt was elected governor.
Following his reelection as governor in 1930, Roosevelt began to campaign for the presidency. While the economic depression damaged Hoover and the Republicans, Roosevelt's bold efforts to combat it in New York enhanced his reputation. In Chicago in 1932, Roosevelt won the nomination as the Democratic Party candidate for president. He broke with tradition and flew to Chicago to accept the nomination in person. He then campaigned energetically calling for government intervention in the economy to provide relief, recovery, and reform. His activist approach and personal charm helped to defeat Hoover in November 1932 by seven million votes.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Monday, January 30, 2012

Sunday, January 29, 2012

Uggie the dog

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        Uggie mencuri pertunjukan, dan hati penonton di mana-mana, sebagai sahabat dalam Artis itu. Tapi tidak semua orang begitu bersemangat untuk memiliki dia di Roundtable Oscar. Plummer mengeluh bahwa Cosmo, Jack Russell terrier dari Pemula, belum mendapatkan cukup perhatian musim ini. "Kami memiliki anjing lebih baik," katanya.

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Friday, January 27, 2012

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Hindenburg

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Several months before the disaster at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station, the German airship Hindenburg is photographed at the very same location.


Wednesday, January 25, 2012

David Maljkovic

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David Maljkovic

Mengingat david Maljkovic yang menggabungkan serangkaian adegan Frame yang  diambil dari film Orson Welles 'Trial (1962) dengan pemandangan yang diambil dari lokasi syuting asli di Zagreb.