Can’t stop looking at Lee Friedlander photos. His use of frames within frames (windows, doors, mirrors, television screens), creating an additional layer of mystery about what’s happening inside and outside the image’s border, very much appeals to the rectangulist in me.
Photography
The Last Ships
We visited Newcastle’s Laing Gallery on the weekend and accidentally stumbled upon The Last Ships; an entire room of Chris Killip’s photography documenting the rise and fall of the shipbuilding trade in the North East of England in the 1970s. It is of course stunning, this pair of images being particularly devastating. Only grumble: for some reason it’s barely signposted in the gallery in any way.
Raúl Cañibano
“My intent was to document a way of life that could fade as the years pass and the changes that are taking place as society develops. What I wished to accomplish was to capture the nobility, familiarity, and kindness of the Cuban farmer.” There’s a striking cinematic boldness to Raúl Cañibano’s work – not to mention a whole load of delicious grain that you can almost taste. The Photographers’ Gallery has a collection of his shots available as prints and I need them all.
Erich Hartmann
Scrolling through Erich Hartmann’s work on Magnum’s site, this shot from 1984 stopped me in my tracks. Simply titled Pair of shoes on deck, Caribbean, it’s both wonderfully calm and really damn harrowing. There’s so little detail, nothing to imply what may lie beyond the boundaries on the frame – where are they, where have they gone – so the mood is entirely down to whatever the reader brings to it, like some kind of Rorschach test.
Björk Nero
No particular reason for sharing this 2007 Juergen Teller portrait of Björk eating at Spaghetti Nero, Venice. It appeared on my Pinterest yesterday and … look at it. This is my star sign, this is my favourite Pokémon, I need to watch whatever movie this isn’t a still from.
Jen Ervin
The Arc, a gorgeous collection of work shot on polaroid and experimental film by photographer Jen Ervin in the woods of her native South Carolina between 2012 and 2019. Collected in a rather lovely looking monograph from Aint-Bad.
Sinéad
Sinéad O'Connor by Jane Bown, 1992. Incredible. Captures so much about her with so little. From this collection of Bown’s work on The Guardian, covering the pop culture gamut from Beatlemania to Björk.
Rebel Sounds
An honour to have designed Joe Mulhall’s new book Rebel Sounds, coming from Footnote in September. Photograph of The Specials fans at Leeds Carnival in 1981, by the great Syd Shelton.
Magdalena Wywrot
Pestka, Magdalena Wywrot’s stunning new collection of black and white photography is … hang on, where’s the blurb … “a gravity-defying, through-the-looking-glass portrait of the life of a mother and her adolescent daughter, a series of time-lapse dispatches seemingly beamed from a hermetic space station suspended high above a planet (and Krakow, Poland) where time is literally standing still”
Tony Ray-Jones
A few years ago, working on the cover for the first edition of John Boughton’s Municipal Dreams, I had the pleasure of poring over RIBA’s collection of Tony Ray-Jones photos of 60s/70s United Kingdom. Ultimately we went in another direction, but I return to those pictures all the time. This one – Blackpool, 1969 – popped up on my feed the other day, and … wow.
Angel in New York
There’s still so much treasure to be found on Flickr (aka the social network that forgot to stop being), such as this collection of 60,000 images of New York scenes shot by Anthony Angel (1906-1967), bequeathed to the Library of Congress. SIXTY THOUSAND. And yet there only appear to be a couple of dozen here. Hopefully they get around to digitising some more.
Monroe x Erwitt
Marilyn Monroe during the filming of The Misfits by Elliott Erwitt, 1960. Sad to hear of Erwitt’s passing this week – he leaves behind an incredible body of work. Maybe it’s time to clear some shelf space for that copy of The Misfits: Story of a Shoot that I’ve been promising myself for years.
Marc Alcock
Marc Alcock is a British photographer based in San Francisco. I love this shot, discovered via one of my regular trawls through the visual wonderland that is Artsy, but his book California Topiary also looks great, capturing the curious flora-architecture of his adopted home.
Grace
Still finding my footing, rhythm, what-have-you on Threads. You know what they say, when in doubt, start a thread of Grace Jones photos! One of those artistes whose modelling career is almost as significant as their musical one (see also: Björk, Kylie) – I particularly love this 1979 portrait by Richard Bernstein. I’ve tried instigating a Follow Friday thing too, much like our ancestors did back in the day.
Kylie x Farrow
In lieu of a monograph that absolutely needs to exist, I regularly crawl Farrow Design’s instagram account. Struggling to think of a designer/studio that has played a more prominent part in my musical or professional life. Great to see the original polaroid that featured on the cover of her fabulous 1999 photo book: “Her fan club members were asked to send in memorabilia which we then photographed. One day she walked in and put on a wristband from a fan and we decided on the spot that we had our cover, Kylie’s arm life size.”
Yufan Lu
I mentioned Yufan Lu’s WePresent essay on the rising trend of cosmetic surgery in China in a previous post, but some of the images popped up on one of my various feeds this week (no idea which one … so hard to keep track these days), and there’s just something utterly captivating about them.
Juno Calypso
Juno Calypso is a wonderfully named British photographer who takes self-portraits of her alter ego ‘Joyce’. Found this one on FEUTEU, but there’s loads more on her website. Great signature by the way.
Underpass
Can’t stop looking at this photograph Moose Allain shot while out and about. So many little details, such fantastic composition. The graffiti dwarfed by its concrete canvas reminds of Lee Madwick’s art.
Priscilla
Jenny Theolin
Love this photograph by Jenny Theolin of a 2,500 year-old sculpture found on Delos. Not sure who he is or why he looks like that – a little bit Bacon, a little bit Voldemort – but I’ve had him on my desktop for several weeks now, a kind of memento mori.
