Trucks carrying

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.”

Untitled Film Stil

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.

Beatles

“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.”

Kellett Autogiro

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.

filming of the short

 

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.

What really happened

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)

Liu Zheng

 

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.

Going on a Bummer Vacation

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

Dancers

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