Photo of the Day: Matt Albiani
Book of the Day:
Mirror of Venus by Wingate Paine with words by Francoise Sagan & Federico Fellini
Wingate Paine, 1915 – 1987, was a member of a Mayflower New England family with ties to law, banking and the ministry. He broke from those traditions and became a Marine captain, connoisseur of French wine, devotee of Hatha-Yoga and finally a gifted photographer and filmmaker. Described as his “visual valentine to feminine beauty,” Paine’s series of female nudes were published in his 1967 book Mirror of Venus.The book represents the culmination of his photographic career.
Wingate Paine has photographed love. Francoise Sagan and Federico Fellini have created a dialogue. She speaks for her sex, he for his.
Photo of the Day:
Robert Nesta Marley, Nov 1.1979 by Nigel Scott
Book of the Day: The Wedding by Boris Mikhailov
Challenging and provocative, Mikhailov’s photographs document human casualties living in post communist Eastern Europe after the demise of the Soviet Union. They are unflinching and ruthless depictions of poverty and the homeless (also known as Bomzhes) living in the margins of Russia’s new economic regime without social support or care. This series presents a simulated wedding between two homeless people often naked and in sexual poses, set amongst their own surroundings.
Mikhailov’s photographs, often presented in these wry even humorous situations, only add to the absurdity of this tragic life. The onlooker experiences feelings of empathy and disgust as they guiltily absorb the content of these engaging yet horrifying pictures, peering into an unknown world of madness, destitution, longing and death in an un-redemptive portrait of outcast humanity.
“The Wedding” is bound in imitation of a traditional wedding album, with faux-leather and gold-debossed lettering designed by calligrapher John Stevens. It is further finished off with a text by Adrian Searle.
Photo of the Day: Jean-Philippe Piter
Book of the Day: Terry Richardson: Mom & Dad
There s little need to say anything about Terry Richardson as everything has already been said! But once again, with this stunning series of images Terry delves deeply and indiscriminately into the world with his camera revealing the all too personal nature of his life… his family life. Terry s images don t desist to shock, be it following his colourful yet frail mother or tracking his father s life and the decline of his mental health though his last days…. Terry s camera has no boundaries, no judgement, just the simple truth of the snapshot, an intimate portrait of his family and in turn more or less a self-portrait of Terry Richardson the son. The double book in a sleeve is immaculately art directed by Suburbia Media and comes in the usual limited edition.
Photo of the Day: Tail Fin by Randall Mesdon
Book of the Day: Terry O’neill
Terry O’Neill is one of the world’s most celebrated and collected photographers. No one has captured the frontline of fame so broadly - and for so long. For more than 50 years, he has photographed rock stars and presidents, royals and movie stars, at work, at play, in private. He pioneered backstage reportage photography with the likes of Frank Sinatra, David Bowie, Sir Elton John and Chuck Berry and his work comprises a vital chronicle of rock and roll history. Now, for the first time, an exhaustive cataloguing of his archive conducted over the last three years has revisited more than 2 million negatives and has unearthed unseen images that escaped the eye over a career spanning 53 years.
Similarly, his use of 35mm cameras on film sets and the early pop music shows of the 60s opened up a new visual art form using photojournalism, to revolutionise formal portraiture. His work captured the iconic, candid, and unguarded moments of the famous and the notorious - from Ava Gardner to Amy Winehouse, from Churchill to Nelson Mandela, from the earliest photographs of young emerging bands such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to her Majesty the Queen at Buckingham Palace. O’ Neill spent more than 30 years photographing Frank Sinatra, amassing a unique archive of more than 3,000 Sinatra negatives. Add to that the magazine covers, album sleeves, film poster and fashion shoots of 1,000 stars, and Terry O’Neill - comprises the most compelling and epic catalogue of the age of celebrity.
Terry O’Neill has worked for the most prestigious magazines in the world including Time, Newsweek, Stern, Bunte, Figaro, The Sunday Times, Vanity Fair, People, Parade, Vogue and many others. And his award launched to showcase the work of young emerging photographers is now one of the most highly prized global competitions in art. The Royal Society of Arts has honoured him with the rare Centenary Medal for his lifetime achievement. Only a dozen have ever been awarded in recognition of ‘outstanding contributions to the art and science of photography.’
Photo of the Day:
Surfer with Ancient Board by Wayne Levin
Book of the Day: Past Forward by Vincent Fournier
“In the first place, my work was fed with the world of childhood, with some sort of buried memory where reality and fiction are becoming confused, even merge somehow, a world in which things don’t even have a name yet. I remember stories which could have existed, stories in which the truth is dangerously flirting with the false, all together serious and absurd, amusing and disquieting, past or future.
I choose the material, in a narrative and aesthetic purpose, which will enable me to build a story, a narration. It can be places, situations, people that I use as clues, some alibi to compose and create a scene, to embody some imagined situation, between the fiction and the document as always.
In the second place, I organize my stories like accidents, waiting for an ending that never comes. It is then up to the watcher to guess, thanks to his own thoughts and imagination, to rebuild and reconstitute the story he had imaged. The whole performance suggests a coherent story. It is the structured composition of my images, in which each part is in close relation with the whole, that partakes of this intention. The second glance often makes things lose their obvious nature and insertion.
It is in this perspective that I favor large format color prints, making high detailed image processing possible, in order to restore a scale ratio in which the singular experiences the general.
What I also find extremely appealing is the aesthetic world of science, machines, geometric patterns. A huge part of my inspiration is to be found in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris. Personally, I see them as two sides of the same coin.Gradually, scientific and technological utopias have enriched my work. Whether belonging to some past memory, such as Brasilia, or representing some projection of the future, such as the improved version of the living, these utopias share a common dream. These impossible places enable us to imagine the extreme and the unforeseeable as new starting points. They create a breaking point, opening up the horizon of the multiple.”
_Vincent Fournier
