I was reminded of these by the Bunny Yeager post. For a while now, Sports Illustrated has been sharing polaroids of swimsuit fittings. I’ve found that I like these photos a lot better than the super-slick, super-processed photos which SI actually publishes.
I think I’m reacting less to the lack of polish and more to the more-relaxed attitude in front of the camera. Goofy smiles. Sorta-poses but nothing too serious. Still working their angles but there’s just something more fun about these.
© Jing Huang, 2010s, Surrounding
Jing Huang, born in Guangzhou and now a resident of Shenzhen, China, was named as the recipient of the Leica Oskar Barnack Newcomer Award in 2011. Read an interview with him here.
Find more of Jing Huang’s work on his website and on flickr.
Something which came across tumblr and just grabbed me. Partly because it’s nice to see cat photography end up as art. But there’s also just something about these photos which I love.
Call it style. Call it taste. Call it whatever. It’s a way of looking at the world which I really dig. I enjoyed looking through the rest of his site.
And as someone who does all his black and whites in greyscale mode, I really should think more about toning. We live in a cool-grey world. It’s nice to see warm greys which aren’t trying to be all vintage.
No other teacher at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, nor nearly any other artist of the 1920s in Germany, an epoch so rich in utopian designs, developed such a wide range of ideas and activities as Moholy-Nagy. His work bears evidence to the fact that he considered painting and film, photography and sculpture, stage set design, drawing, and the photogram to be of equal importance.
Because I get excited anytime I run across something online which combines photography with other media. Not that any of this is new. But it’s still something we tend to forget a lot when we end up focusing on photography by itself.
I came across these on tumblr but they’re actually a complete series on David Simonton’s website too. I’m typically bleh on ruin porn but I’m a sucker for Ellis Island photos from this time period.* I’m not sure exactly why.
*I mentioned Phillip Buehler’s series in my original Ruin Porn post but that seems to have dropped off the web.
I think it’s because of a number of things which make this more than just ruin porn—not the least of which is the skill of the photographers involved. But Ellis Island is such a specific location with a specific use case and evocative place in our history that I can feel the ghosts more.
These aren’t just any old decaying buildings. The context and history is there, framing everything, especially since these also serve as the before images for the spiffy cleaned up tourist attraction it is today.
I’m not doing it to titillate anybody’s interests. I want to show off how beautiful my subjects are, whether it’s a cheetah or a live girl or two of them together. That’s more important to me than anything.
—Bunny Yeager, 1929–2014
Yeager always styled her own backdrops, props and costumes—often making objects and bathing suits from materials at hand. Her unique self-portrait techniques certainly foreshadow the work of contemporary artists Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura, known for their own masquerade-based self-portraiture.
Ms. Yeager, who took up her art by accident, was one of the world’s most celebrated photographers of female nudes and near-nudes of the 1950s and ’60s. She is widely credited with helping turn the erotic pinup — long a murky enterprise in every sense of the word — into high photographic art.
—Her Obituary in the New York Times
We lost one of the stars of Tumblr on Monday. It’s interesting to read the obits and think about how things have changed—both in the what counts as art and what counts as titillating departments. And how so much of both areas today reference these photos still.
It’s also a worthwhile reminder that so much of art now wasn’t art when it was first produced and how fluid those borders and classifications are. Especially in photography.
It’s easy to dismiss these as kitschy pin-ups. Because they are. But they’re so much more too. There’s self-representation. There’s the blurring of the line between photographer and model. There’s the idea of a safe space for the models to work away from any male gaze. There’s the fact that so much of her work appears to have harnessed a genuine sense of fun. There’s the fact that so much of this look (much of which is non-studio in daylight) is the kind of thing people are still trying to copy today.