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.