Sunday Favorites

Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe,
which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out
a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for
instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves



Peter Lindbergh, Malgosia Bela, 2008

Photographing the Photographer

Who photographs the photographer?

André Kertész, Self-portrait, 1927

Moon

you'll be beautiful in my manner

John Adams Whipple, View of the Moon, Feb 26, 1852 (Daguerreotype )

__________________________


The Moon’s Favors

Meanwhile, in the expansiveness of her joy,
the Moon filled all of the room like a phosphoric atmosphere,
like a luminous poison; and all of that living light thought and said:
“You will be eternally subject to the influence of my kiss.
You will be beautiful in my manner.

You will love what I love and who loves me:
water, the clouds, silence, and the night; the immense, green sea;
formless and multiform water; the place where you will not be;
the lover you will not know; monstrous flowers;
perfumes that make you delirious; cats who swoon on pianos,
and who moan like women, with a hoarse, gentle voice!

Charles Baudelaire

__________________________

Black & White - Masks, Rites and Transformations II (The artists)

I like contradictions. We have never attained the infinite variety and contradictions that exist in nature. Tomorrow I shall contradict myself.
That is the one way I have of asserting my liberty, the real liberty
one does not find as a member of society.

Man Ray



Kati Horna, Remedios Varo, wearing a mask made by Leonora Carrington, 1957

Black & White - Sunday Favorites

I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses

Julio Cortázar


Larry Fink

Black & White - Masks, Rites and Transformations I

All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks
in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity

Friedrich Nietzsche



Irving Penn, Three Asaro Mud Men, New Guinea, 1970

Animals in Art - Doug Aitken

watch the video below

Black & White - Horses

The New York that I had come back to was not my old New York. I used to wander around the streets disconsolately, until one night during a blizzard, I happened to see a man watering a couple of steaming horse-car horses, and I thought, “Well, there at any rate is the human touch.” That made me feel much better.

Alfred Stieglitz



Alfred Stieglitz, “The Terminal, New York” (1892)

Black & White - The Poetry of Rain

Robert Doisneau, M. Barre’s Carousel, 1955

Black & White - Mirrors

Man is a mirror for man.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Brassaï, Juan-les-Pins, aux Folies-Bergères, 1932

Animals in Art - Nadine Rüfenacht

from the series "Le Curée de Lilith"

Visible - Invisible IV

Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals being as a whole.

Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? 1929



Ed Ruscha, Your Space #1, 2006

Kim Keever - Imaginary Landscapes

The real world is much smaller than the imaginary.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Britta Jaschinski - Zoo

We need animals. Animals don't need us, but we need them.
We constantly look for any kind of connection we can possibly get to them.

Britta Jaschinski

Gábor Kerekes

The scientists of the old times had tried to cath the unknown in its base, they had been sure it could be defined using their own subjective systems of symbols.

Gábor Kerekes, 1995

from the series "Orientation"

The very deep and the very small

I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things ...

... that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind —of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.

H.P. Lovecraft

Visible - Invisible III

The world is so complicated, tangled, and overloaded that to see into it
with any clarity you must prune and prune.

Italo Calvino (from: If on a Winter's Night A Traveller)



Luke Elwes, Refugia 2006 (oil on linen)

Michael Schnabel - Cages

A Cage went in search for a bird.

Franz Kafka, Collected Aphorisms


Photographic series of empty zoo cages (2000-2002)
by german photographer Michael Schnabel

Animals in Art - Roger Ballen

Many people say my work is quite disturbing. 

I am so pleased to hear that. What a great thing!

Animal Abstraction, 2002

Artist's statement:

I have been shooting black and white film for nearly fifty years now. I believe I am part of the last generation that will grow up with this media. Black and White is a very minimalist art form and unlike color photographs does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive. Black and White is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality.

My purpose in taking photographs over the past forty years has ultimately been about defining myself. It has been fundamentally a psychological and existential journey.

If an artist is one who spends his life trying to define his being, I guess I would have to call myself an artist.

Roger Ballen

Animals in Art - Roni Horn - Bird

bird presents the culmination of Roni Horn’s long-running photographic series of taxidermied Icelandic wildfowl. Photographed at close range against white backgrounds (as though obeying the conventional format of studio portraiture) the birds are viewed from behind, their unique physiognomies and markings resulting in inscrutable shapes and patterns on the photographs’ surfaces. Despite the singular form of the title, the birds in this series are presented in pairs, images that are hung side by side one another highlighting the differences and similarities between the two. The gesture of doubling — as an aesthetic and conceptual strategy — has been a recurrent motif for Horn since 1980, a tool that invites careful scrutiny from the viewer, altering the dynamic of the work.

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