Blog About Photography

Sunset Park, 2005 by Debora Mittelstaedt

The photographers to be included in Remain in Light, the Photography Journal spearheaded by my pal Shane Lavalette and Karly Wildenhaus, have just been announced and a good looking site launched for the project.

The list is:

Andreas Weinand
Anne Lass
Coley Brown
Debora Mittelstaedt
Ed Panar
Estelle Hanania
Gustav Almestål
Hiroyo Kaneko
Kamden Vencill
Mark McKnight
Michel Campeau
Nicolai Howalt & Trine Søndergaard
Nicola Kast
Nicholas Haggard
Shawn Records
Raimond Wouda
Richard Barnes
Thobias Fäldt
Whitney Hubbs
Yann Orhan

It’s also going to include an essay by Tim Davis. That’s pretty sweet.

The New Yorker came on Tuesday, and the first thing I opened to was this elaborate Mastercard ad, which I have since taken the time to remove, scan and post here. The first page reads “ARE YOU SEARCHING FOR THE PRICELESS THINGS IN LIFE?” and something to effect of “maybe it’s on the next page.” It then opens to a spread of this Julian Schnabel painting (self portrait?). The back of that has an envelope pasted to it, which is a chance to win a commissioned Schnabel painting of youself, which opens to reveal that, alas, you did not win but should check out the Mastercard website.

Schabel, I think, is the kind of postmodern painter who started painting in order to make millions of dollars anyway, so why the fuck this ridiculous credit card ad and promotion? Good for him. I can’t imagine how many other magazines they could possibly run this thing in that would reach people that would actually give a shit about it though. Artforum aaand that’s pretty much it.

Also, when I first wrote this post before the whole thing got lost when my browser crashed, I said some kind of insightful stuff about the art market, but now I’m just going to say that that it’s a good thing Schnabel’s tightened up his game since ‘96 when he made Basquiat because that movie totally fucking sucked.

Cookie at Vittorio’s casket NYC, September 16, 1989, Nan Goldin

I was a train from Penn Station to New Brunswick, NJ a couple months back, and the woman sitting across the aisle from us got a phone call that brought word of a friends death. She was instantly overcome with grief. My instinct was to take a picture. I got out my camera, but Britt, my red-headed compatriot, was totally mortified. She asked me what I was doing with enough indignation in her voice for me to know that it wasn’t a question. I know it’s exploitive. And I obviously felt huge amounts of sadness for this person. But if Britt hadn’t been there, there’s a pretty good chance I would have taken it. Is that fucked up? 

Turquoise Marilyn, Andy Warhol, 1962

No, seriously. And it’s classified by the FBI. And it’s not an actual tape, obviously:

An illicit copy of the steamy, still-FBI-classified reel – 15 minutes of 16mm film footage in which the original blond bombshell performs oral sex on an unidentified man – was just sold to a New York businessman for $1.5 million, said Keya Morgan, the well-known memorabilia collector who discovered the film and brokered its purchase.

The footage appears to have been shot in the 1950s. When it came to light in the mid-’60s, then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had his agents spend two weeks futilely trying to prove that Monroe’s sex partner was either John F. Kennedy or Robert F. Kennedy, according to declassified agency documents and interviews, Morgan said.

The silent black-and-white flick shows Monroe on her knees in front of a man whose face is just out of the shot.

As long as there have sex there have sex tapes, I suppose, though it doesn’t sound like this one came about through Paris Hilton-esque circumstances. The FBI informant who ended up with this thing on the 50’s was a mobster, and it was made before Marilyn was famous. So that sounds like it really fucking sucked, and is  a paradigm far older than the celebrity sex tape.

I’ve taken a lot of pictures of Will over the four years we’ve been friends. If you’ve ever taken a look through the pictures on my site, you’ll have seen him many, many times. Even more on Flickr. He’s not a person, he’s the protagonist of a novel. I’m going to write about him sometime so you’ll know what I mean. And he makes for good picture-taking. I really should make a zine.