Archives for 2014

posted in November, 2014

in memphis

grant faint
One day in Memphis. A daily snap from Grant Faint.

royal ballet: osipova in giselle

Clip below is from last January, but always worth seeing again…

osipova 1 osipova5

alexey brodovitch: ballet

brodovitch ballet

alexey brodovitch ballet_2
From Alexey Brodovitch’s photobook Ballet, published in 1945.

Errata_Brodovitch_01

Errata_Brodovitch_02

Errata_Brodovitch_03
From the Errata Editions reprint of Ballet, 2011.

outside a soho nightclub, 1942

bill brandt
One more Bill Brandt.

today’s daily snap: in tokyo

tokyo grant faint
Snapped by Grant Faint.

london was ours

In London Was Ours: Diaries and Memoirs of the London Blitz, author Amy Helen Bell writes:

Diarists’ and memoirists’ descriptions of London during the Blitz were heavily indebted to modernist metaphors. Civilian writers used metaphors of reading, watching films and photography to link raids to the familiar, and to emphasize their own importance as viewers. Like the Crimean soldier and the Great War journalist in London, Londoners during the Blitz were awed, saddened and excited by what they saw during the Blitz, and by their own privileged position as witnesses. The use of modernist and surrealist imagery points to the new artistic and historical interrelationship between the spectator and the London they watched.

This is a fascinating book and I’ll be posting more excerpts as I read.

fred morley london was ours
From the book’s paperback cover: A milkman delivering milk in a London street devastated during a German bombing raid. Photo by Fred Morley. 

bill brandt blitz
Bill Brandt, 1940. Taking shelter in the Elephant and Castle tube station.

a penny for the old guy 2

Vienna, 1933. Bill Brandt.
bill brandt

The Hollow Men
Mistah Kurtz-he dead
A penny for the Old Guy

I.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

remember, remember the 5th of november

‘A penny for the Old Guy, miss?’ he asked as I exited Shepherd’s Bush tube station. The small, faceless effigy sat a few feet away with the boy’s friend, who seemed a silent partner in the enterprise.

rose

rose 96 halftone

today’s daily snap: halloween sky

grant faint daily snap
Canada/halloween sky. Daily snap for 31 October, 2014 from Grant Faint.