TARYN SIMON show opens this weekend at Gagosian in LA.    An amazing fashion photographer turned art photographer Taryn is worth checking out.    A little backround//   Her first book, The Innocents (2000-2003) is amazing and definately made me take an interest in her work.    In the mid nineties she also did a funny fashion story with all the hasidic jewish salesmen and studio guys that ran Adorama in NYC-  it was brilliant and I can't believe she got them to do it.    I loved those guys.   Her new work is pretty amazing too.

Here is her press release. ALL work and release Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

Nuclear Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility, Cherenkov Radiation, Hanford Site, U.S. Department of Energy, Southeastern Washington State
Submerged in a pool of water at Hanford Site are 1,936 stainless-steel nuclear-waste capsules containing cesium and strontium. Combined, they contain over 120 million curies of radioactivity. It is estimated to be the most curies under one roof in the United States. The blue glow is created by the Cherenkov Effect which describes the electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle, giving off energy, moves faster than light through a transparent medium. The temperatures of the capsules are as high as 330 degrees Fahrenheit. The pool of water serves as a shield against radiation; a human standing one foot from an unshielded capsule would receive a lethal dose of radiation in less than 10 seconds. Hanford is among the most contaminated sites in the United States.
2005/2007
Chromogenic color print
37 1/4 x 44 1/2 inches framed (94.6 x 113 cm)
Ed. of 7



"What is not known, rarely seen, possesses a form of occult glamour, and it is that black beauty which [Simon] so brightly, and brilliantly, reveals."
--Salman Rushdie

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by Taryn Simon. This will be the first viewing of her series An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar in Los Angeles.

In this body of work spanning over four years, Taryn Simon confronts the obstacles facing public access to expert knowledge by offering entry, via photography to a selection of restricted or rarely discovered sites across the United States. The resulting series is an exposé of the unseen realities beneath the surface of modern American culture. Simon documents subjects from a wide span of cultural sub-headings, including nature, science, government, and religion. Her photographs range from eccentric to haunting, from a copy of Playboy written in Braille to a portrait of a cancer ridden patient fighting for the right to end his life. She uses a large format view camera when conditions permit, and each of her compositions is accompanied by a text explaining subject and context. The addition of word to image underscores Simon's dual role as voyeur and informant. An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar reveals that for every visible facet of American culture there is an obscured recess equally fundamental to the framework of a national identity.

Taryn Simon was born in New York in 1975. She is a graduate of Brown University and a Guggenheim Fellow. Simon's photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo shows at: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007); Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2004), P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2003); High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2006); and Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt/Main (2007-2008). Permanent collections include: The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her photography and writing have been featured in numerous publications and broadcasts including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, CNN, BBC, Frontline, and NPR.

Ok, the godmother of cool contemporary art (or atleast one of them) has got to be Louise Bourgeois.    She is so cool and talented.   This was an artist with balls.   With a big personality and positive ego to match Duchamp's the nonogenarian (97), was one of the first women out there to bring us the penis sculpture and do it elegantly.    She is a mentor and icon that all of us should know and appreciate.    Thank god we live in a time when a woman's art can open a world class museum.   Her massive spider sculpture greeted art lovers at the TATE Museum in London when it opened.  (Portrait: Robert Mapplethorpe)

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. She studied art at various schools there, including the Ecole du Louvre, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Académie Julian, and Atelier Fernand Léger. In 1938, she emigrated to the United States and continued her studies at the Art Students League in New York. Though her beginnings were as an engraver and painter, by the 1940s she had turned her attention to sculptural work, for which she is now recognized as a twentieth-century leader. Greatly influenced by the influx of European Surrealist artists who immigrated to the United States after World War II, Bourgeois's early sculpture was composed of groupings of abstract and organic shapes, often carved from wood. By the 1960s she began to execute her work in rubber, bronze, and stone, and the pieces themselves became larger, more referential to what has become the dominant theme of her work--her childhood. She has famously stated "My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama." Deeply symbolic, her work uses her relationship with her parents and the role sexuality played in her early family life as a vocabulary in which to understand and remake that history. The anthropomorphic shapes her pieces take--the female and male bodies are continually referenced and remade--are charged with sexuality and innocence and the interplay between the two. Bourgeois's work is in the collections of most major museums around the world. She lives in New York.   (Source for this paragraph is PBS.org)













































































Spider currently at Guggenheim de Bilbao

For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
Cheim & Read, New York  |  Hauser & Wirth, London
Louise Bourgeois on the Art21 blog

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/bourgeois/index.html

Every night my daughter and I read together.    This has been a ritual since she was a little baby.   Now that Nova is 7 we choose our books together and she is starting to read to me.      Our recent favorites are fun for parents too.    Tricycle Press does some great children's books.  Ten Speed Press  Their books are thoughtful, intelligent, witty and worldly.

Making Cents by Elizabeth Keeler Robinson
illustrations by Bob McMahon

This is a complicated subject for little ones and the book makes it fun, exuberant and
entertaining.   Packed with cool facts about currency.   A great math tool to start a little investor on the path to saving money, not just spending it.


G is for Googol   A Math Alphabet Book
by: David M. Schwartz and illustrated by Marissa Moss


super cute and funny.   A great way to teach mathematical  terms like "unit" and "obtuse".

What the World Eats by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Alusio

A fantastic photo book accompanied by stories about the families and how they live.    

Every day, millions of families around the world gather--at the table or on the floor, in a house or outdoors--to eat together. Ever wondered what a typical meal is like on the other side of the world? Or next door? Cultural geographers Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio visited twenty-five families in twenty-one countries to create this fascinating look at what people around the world eat in a week. Meet a family that spends long hours hunting for seal and fish together; a family that raises and eats guinea pigs; a family that drinks six gallons of Coca-Cola a week.

This enthralling glimpse into cultural similarities and differences is at once a striking photographic essay and an essential study in nutrition and the global marketplace. (review courtesy of press release)

Before photography there were painters and illustrators.    The beginning of magazine publishing had a great renaissance in pin up art.   Some of the legends were Vargas, Pearl Frush, Earl MacPherson, Edward Runci.     The women were illustrated beautifully in gorgeous fashions and elegant poses.   There was also a genre of pulp pin up art, a bit sexier, darker and more "dangerous".   Think Bettie Page.

References to this imagery are everywhere in photography nowadays, most peeps just don't know it.   The styling and poses have inspired many great photographers including Patrick Demarchelier, Carleen Cerf, James White, Bruce Weber and Steven Meisel.   Below is a shot by Matthew Rolston that ran in Sept. 2008 Vanity Fair.   You almost can't tell it's a photograph.   

 

I knew I wanted a pin up tattoo for a long time.   For years the work inspired me to photograph women beautifully and I wanted a pin up that was "me" so to speak.   The challenge was finding one that worked on my forearm, which is the spot I wanted it. 
  The shape had to be long and lean to work.    After much research I settled on the work of Gil Elvgren.
Gil Elvgren site

One of my favorite photographer's is Bunny Yeager.    She is best known for her beautiful pin up art and photographic collaboration with Pulp icon Bettie Page .      Bunny was a model (she's the blong here)  in the 1950's and like many model's after her (Ellen Von Unworth most notably), she went on to become a photography legend.     Bunny has inspired me and many others to become a photographer.  Her style, composition, lighting, energy and attitude defined the look of beauty and pin up photography in the 1960's and 1970's.    (When Playboy was good and about pretty pictures)

She has many books (avail. at Amazon.com) and her images taken in the 1960's and 1970's are iconic and timeless.   Like a beautiful woman, her photographs get more timeless as they age.
Bunny Yeager website

Even before Bunny Yeager was old enough to be a Pin-Up Girl, she wanted to be one. As a young teen, she kept scrapbooks of glamour poses of popular film stars like Rita Hayworth, Betty Grable, Lana Turner, Jane Russell, and Marilyn Monroe.

She studied the works of a number of artists who specialized in calendar art, learning the poses they painted of their models, the Peek-a-Boo poses that portrayed beautiful young models as happy, playful women who would be fun to be with, (The girl next door) certainly desirable, but not threatening to any man's ego. Using these "lessons", she became Florida 's most photographed model with her photos appearing in newspapers and magazines all over the world.

Because she knew how to pose well, after she changed careers and became a professional photographer, she was able to work with many young girls who had never modeled before, molding them into popular pin-up models. She discovered Maria Stinger ( Miami 's Marilyn Monroe), Bettie Page (Legendary Pin-Up of all time), Lisa Winters, a Playboy Playmate and Playmate of the Year, Carol Jean Lauritzen (for Howard Hughes, a legend himself), and many other young beauties.  (last two paragraphs taken from Bunny's bio on her website) please hit link to read more about this amazing woman.

In 1959 she was chosen "Photographer of the Year" and shortly after she was selected as one of the top ten women photographers in the U.S. . She continues to live and work in Miami , Fla. discovering and photographing pretty girls on the beach and in her studio.  All images in this post are by Bunny Yeager.   Bio information by Bunny Yeager.

At LACMA in LA are the iconic photographs of Philip-Lorca diCorcia.        (Affectionately referred to as PL in photographic circles)   I love the Hustler series, still my favorite and one of his first series.    He also had 1000 Polaroid's on display on little shelves.    That was cool.   The Polaroid is a dying breed- more and more collectible.      Im not that impressed by PL's new work, but he's still a photographic icon. Im including the stripper series as well.   A new vision in lighting of this oft photographed group.  Not to be missed.

PL alternates between informal snapshots and iconic quality staged compositions that often have a baroque theatricality.[4] Using a carefully planned staging, he takes everyday occurrences beyond the realm of banality, trying to inspire in his picture's spectators an awareness of the psychology and emotion contained in real-life situations.[5] His work could be described as documentary photography mixed with the fictional world of cinema and advertising, which creates a powerful link between reality, fantasy and desire.

Brent Booth, 21 years old, Des Moines, Iowa, $30

During the late 1970s, during diCorcia's early career, he used to situate his friends and family within fictional interior tableaus, that would make the viewer think that the pictures were spontaneous shots of someone's everyday life, when they were in fact carefully staged and planned in beforehand.[7][8] He would later start photographing random people in urban spaces all around the world. When in Berlin, Calcutta, Hollywood, New York, Rome and Tokyo, he would often hide lights in the pavement, which would iluminate a random subject in a special way, often isolating them from the other people in the street. His photographs would then give a a sense of heightened drama to the passers-by accidental poses, unintended movements and insignificant facial expressions.[9] Even if sometimes the subject appears to be completely detached to the world around him, diCorcia has often used the city of the subject's name as the title of the photo, placing the passers-by back into the city's anonymity.[10] Each of his series, "Hustlers," "Streetwork," "Heads," "A Storybook Life," and "Lucky Thirteen," can be considered progressive explorations of diCorcia's formal and conceptual fields of interest. Besides his family, associates and random people he has also photographed personas already theatrically enlarged by their life choices, such as the pole dancers in his latest series.  (Wikipedia:source) Images Pace McGill gallery

If you have ever been to Los Angeles or plan on visiting I highly recommend reading City of Quartz by Mike Davis.

Mike offers a cyberpunk vision of Los Angeles from the eyes of a scholar written like a noir novel.   It is a riveting book and a must read for anyone interested in urbanization.   True brilliance.    (If you like Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy you will love this)

  Other books by Mike Davis I recommend:

Ecology of Fear and Planet of Slums

Planet of Slums  is especially timely since it talks about the history of disease, the environment, and population growth in the cities that we can't control.        If you are interested in the human footprint and society as we know it today-Read Mike Davis.

All these books are available at Amazon.com

A little about Mr. Davis, courtesy of Random House, Inc.

A former meatcutter and long-distance truck driver, Mike Davis has taught urban theory at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, was a fellow at the Getty Institute, and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.  He was born in Fontana, a suburb of Los Angeles, and now lives in Pasadena.

I don't know about you, but I had no idea that Hyena's were so big and ferocious looking, in cartoons they always appear so scrawny.     At the same time I didn't know they could be trained like dogs to perform tricks for money or even kept as loving pets.  In their makeshift nuzzles they look like small tigers or leopard like creatures from a bygone age.    The amazing Pieter Hugo has captured a side of African portraiture never seen before.   His lighting and color is truly remarkable, the juxtaposition of the urban settings only adding to the strength of the portraiture.      I'm not sure, but they look like they were shot with a Hasselblad.    The photos bring dignity to these brave men that train and work with these animals in war and poverty torn Nigeria.    The portrait of the little girl nuzzling the Hyena is incredible and tender at the same time.    The Hyena's were shot in 2005 and the Baboons in 2007 mostly in Nigeria.   I also love the unique sense of style the Hyena tamers are rocking.    Custom made chains adorn the Hyena necks and skirts that look like streetwear kilts are worn by these masculine, fierce looking men.  Some of the baboons have custom outfits.   The portraits are majestic and regal.   All Pieter's work is amazing.   His portraits of African children are also super strong.   I'm running out to buy this guy's work.     Never seen anything like it. Pieter's site


Pieter Hugo is a South African-based photographer. He has produced three monographs: Looking Aside (2006), Messina/Musina (2007) and The Hyena & Other Men (2007). Upcoming solo exhibitions are with Yossi Milo Gallery in New York and Gallery Extraspazio in Rome in November 2007. Recent group exhibitions include Reality Check: Contemporary art photography from South Africa 2007 at Galerie der Stadt Sindelfingen, travelling to Museum and Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz; An Atlas of Events at Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (2007); Faccia A Faccia: Il nouvo ritratto fotografico at FORMA, Centro Internazionale di Fotografia, Milan (2007); the 27th São Paulo Bienal (2006); and Street: Behind the cliché at Witte de With, Rotterdam (2006). He was included on ReGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow, 2005-2025 (Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne, and Aperture, New York), an exhibition identifying 50 young photographers who will be considered great by 2025, accompanied by a book published by Thames & Hudson. He won first prize in the Portraits section of the 2006 World Press Photo competition, and was selected as the Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art 2007, with an exhibition touring South Africa until July 2008.


Pieter's book- is out now.
THE HYENA & OTHER MEN
(Prestel 2007)

Photographs by Pieter Hugo
Text by Adekotunbo Abiola.

New York

Yossi Milo Gallery
525 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
Contact: Yossi Milo, Alissa Schoenfeld
Phone: +1 212 414 0370
www.yossimilo.com
mail@yossimilo.com

Let me fan out for a minute here on the incredible Michael Roberts.     His children's books are quirky, fun, witty, colorful and graphic.     He makes fashion fun for the kindergarten set and his wacky women are cool and contemporary.     I love his sensibility.   My daughter and I read his books for hours.

Guy Bourdin is my favorite fashion photographer.  His work is collected, revered and imitated all over the world.    His technical brilliance, sense of color and setting created beautifully creepy sexually charged images.   A hotdog never looked so good.
 

















1950 saw Bourdin have his first show of drawings and paintings at Galerie, Rue de la Bourgogne, Paris.   Soon after he was showing photographs in 1952 with an introduction by Man Ray.    His first fashion photographs were published in French Vogue in 1955.    The legend had found his forte.


 Bourdin's ad campaigns and creative collaboration with Charles Jourdan, which started in 1967 and ended in 1981, are some of the most iconic fashion advertising images in history.    Creating incredibly seductive imagery was Bourdin's legacy. His staged narratives and fine attention to detail created glamorous images with an undercurrent of danger and erotic pleasure.


In the 1970's Advertising campaigns for Claude Montana, Issey Miyake , Versace, Loewe, and Bloomingdales accompanied his fine art museum shows and editorial work.
























He shot for all the top fashion magazines including Italien and British Vogue, Vogue Homme and Harper's Bazaar.   Numerous advertising and photography awards followed including the Infinity Award presented by Annie Liebovitz from ICP in NY.


Sadly this photography genius died in Paris in 1991 at the age of 62.     
He will live on with his art and his images in my mind forever.
His fine art prints are available through Pace McGIll gallery.   Elton John owns twelve prints.  
His books are available at Amazon.com and Fine art bookstores all over the world.

Guy Bourdin website