Walker Evans and graffiti

More Walker Evans and graffiti.

Favorite photographic subjects: graffiti, dogs, people drinking and smoking, snapshots of couples.

Least favorite: landscapes.

Birthday themes: Walker Evans and Graffiti

Not necessarily together.

Here is a photograph from the Met's database. 1937 November-December taken in New York City.

Banality and all its charms

Weegee understands. He could never make a commercial photograph of a girl running on a beach. Or a girl running on a beach with a ball. Or a girl lying on a beach with a ball. For the publishing industry, the variations of the girl on beach are infinite.

Not Weegee though. He liked a nice guy drinking a beer caught in a meaningless but pleasurable moment. But because he was Weegee, he makes the moment have meaning.

Copyright belongs to the ICP but the digital image is from the Metropolitan. Don't know the date. Maybe 1930's.

early morning rush sixty wall street tower

early morning rush sixty wall street tower

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museum of modern art

museum of modern art

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Phantom Photographs

My favorite photographs capture something or someone but just a little bit of that or them. Not too much documentation please. Just a glimpse of something or other. Phantoms photographs. I spend hours looking for phantom images. Probably due to an encounter with a photographer of spirits and a love of trick film/photography. Much too much time spent searching for images that document the in between, the trick, the frame by frame, the phantoms. It is always exciting to find a new one.

I found this image on the ICP website. Miroslav Tichy, undated. Owned by his foundation.

occasion for diriment

occasion for diriment

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I would like to become better versed in the Waite Tarot deck but find Arthur Edward Waite's book The Pictorial Key to the Tarot obtuse and difficult to read. The descriptions of the individual cards are coherent but his preface and introduction is unreadable. Its possible the introductory texts are slights and criticisms to other scholars/participants of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn that I am missing. I suppose like most scholarly texts Waite is addressing a very specific audience who would recognize the references he is making to various occult groups of the time and their various beliefs and digressions from each other.

In the introduction on page one, he speaks about the inconsistencies in the texts written about the cards, "I do not think that there is a pathology of the occult dedications, but about their extravagances no one can question..."

He describes the cards as "the true Tarot is symbolism; its speaks no other language and offers no other signs. Given the inward meaning of its emblems, they do become a kind of alphabet which is capable of indefinite combinations and make true sense in all."

Its the connection of the cards to each other I find difficult to decipher. The relationship of the cards to each other is what confuses me.

Here is a very early Tarot card of The Fool. This card might have been intended for playing games rather then telling a person's fortune. Wikipedia says it is from Yale University. Comfortably out of copyright. Oddly enough, the Waite cards are still under copyright through U.S. Games Systems.

Class, beauty, sexy

All intertwined. Today we see so many images depicting the dynamics between social class and beauty, social class and sexuality.

henry taylor author of philip van artevelde

henry taylor author of philip van artevelde

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Wrong Man

In my last post, I accidentally mixed social documentarians. I was speaking of Milton Rigovin, the social documentary photography who documented the effects of the declining steel industry in Buffalo. But my mind thought and then typed Lionel Rogosin. My mind frequently mixes and matches names and places, people and purposes as it sees fit.

One Christmas, I gave my father a copy of Rigovin's The Forgotten Ones. At the time, my father's explanation to me regarding the declining steel industry and its consequential effect on the African American community in Buffalo seemed too simplistic to me. After the work ran out, some of the men who worked in the steel factories abandoned their families. To my father, the answer was simple. To take away a man's livelihood and leave him with the inability to support his family left him impotent (my words not his). To my father, it meant taking away his manhood and purpose for being. Simple. When you have nothing to offer, why would you stay?

Buffalo, New York

I can never find images that articulate Buffalo for me. Library of Congress documents the industrial hey days. Grain mills, Erie Canal, World's Exposition and the Catholics. Lionel Rogosin takes care of the rest. I like his photographs but they do not document my own history. His portraits document something diminishing in Buffalo. Eventually it would all go to hell. His photographs reflect the death of the industrial age for African Americans but my father and his ilk still were hanging on. Suburban ranch housing and the white folk blue collar work force still had a tiny piece of the Buffalo pie. Benefits, pensions and salaries to comfortably support a family. So I found this broad. The fleshy, good humored types who littered my childhood. She was at the picnics, on the beach gossiping with my aunt, attended my parents parties, paid me no mind, laughed loud, drank a lot, ate a lot and more or less lived a lot.

It isn't out of copyright. Its from the Library of Congress. 1943.

la comtesse reclining in dark dress with chain around

la comtesse reclining in dark dress with chain around

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Procrastinating, procrastinating

I am most content when I am alone in my apartment with nothing but time to putter. Quite happy really to weave in and out of my private thoughts and daydream encounters while leafing through my culinary and photography books. I should be out and about, meeting and greeting to fulfill my duties as a resident of New York City. Instead, I am sitting on my couch writing to myself on a blog.

The Met had a photography exhibition in 2000 titled "La Divine Comtesse": Photographs of the Countess de Castiglione. I love photography exhibitions curated outside the themes of authorship or historical context but find it doesn't always work very well (i.e. MOMA's Into the West photography exhibit, some amazing and important photographs but thematically, it didn't line up so well).

The exhibition page states the photographs "stands out as the first historical encounter of photography and narcissism." But these photographs are also documentation of an encounter with photography and fantasy. How amazing it would to spend your days living within your own daydreams. To have the freedom to live fully in your own delusions as opposed to the delusions of others.

"In the old days they didn't even use tables and chairs. They sat on beer crates and ate off the tops of beer barrels. You'd be surprised how much fun that was. Somehow it made old men feel young again. And they'd drink beer out of cans, or growlers...The men ate with their fingers. They never served potatoes in those days. Too filling. They take up room that rightfully belongs to meat and beer." Joseph Mitchell, "All You Can Hold For Five Bucks."

Photograph is one of the best illustrations I have found of the type of beefsteak Mitchell describes. The photograph is titled "Beefsteak dinner at Reisenwebers to honour H.H. Rogers & Mark Twain" and dated April 1908. It is in the public domain.

lady ottoline morrell

lady ottoline morrell

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Lady Ottoline Morrell

A brief correspondence resulting in very little has come and gone. Maybe its still here but it lost its initial spark. To please more myself then the correspondent, I searched for photographs to illustrate our conversation about D.H. Lawrence and Balzac. The Met's database produced not one photograph of Balzac or D.H. Lawrence and all the Library of Congress could offer were caricatures of Balzac which wasn't what I was going for at all. Instead, I found a striking portrait by Aldolph de Meyer of the Lady Ottoline Morrell taken around 1912. I wanted to send this beauty to my pen pal but I felt it wasn't appropriate to our conversation. But I was wrong. A friend and potential patron of D.H. Lawrence, Lady Ottoline Morrell was the prototype for Lady Chatterley.