subject echo: picnic

well, it seems to be subject echo week; i'm not gonna fight it.

here's one more pairing that has always struck me as kin: Henri Cartier-Bresson's "Sunday on the Banks of the River Marne" (1938) and Nan Goldin's "Picnic on the Esplanade" (1973).

what a difference 35 years makes.

i first saw Goldin's photo in the Phaidon 55 book of her work. the caption reads: "This photograph, among the first Goldin made in colour, shows many of the features that made her one of the first and foremost exponents of the snapshot aesthetic. This Easter picnic by the river in Boston shows Goldin's 'family' at that time, one of the happiest periods in her life. She was living with a group of drag queens, her heroines, and had already amassed a huge body of black-and-white photographs of them. It shows her lifelong obsession with social rituals and the pleasures of communal life."

it's especially interesting to me to contrast these two photographs knowing that this was one of the first shots Goldin took in her transition from black and white to color.

it also strikes me that Cartier-Bresson's image observes the two picnicking couples from behind, while Goldin gives the viewer their own seat at the picnic. which is her seat. at first the photograph does not appear as intimate as the work she became known for, but in that way, it is intimate, because the viewer is called to break bread with the subjects. (and celebrate Easter with them.)

goldin times

on Thursday i asked: "any Goldin photos of Tilda out there?" and what did my doorstep receive this morning but a fashion spread of haute couture shot in Paris by Nan Goldin. most of the photos have that signature Goldin blur and feeling of up-all-night hothouse tragedy. they are pretty cool though. (and Tilda looks amazing in Galliano for Dior.)

they have an audio slideshow up with music from Klaus Nomi. the whole thing is really quite strange, like a New York Times fashion editorial version of the downtown 80's art scene, only with actresses shot in $50,000 dresses in Parisian hotels.

the hug and the brad

a couple of weeks ago i polled my friends. "what would you say is Nan Goldin's most iconic photograph?" ("...okay, okay, not counting the cover of Ballad," i would inevitably add.)

well, none of them said "The Hug," but for me it is so definitely "The Hug," and so, like, if they all refuse to parrot the right answer for the sake of a blogecdote, there's nothing i can do about that.

seriously, The Hug has all the essence of Nan Goldin wrapped up in one seeming snapshot: crazy love, sex, brutality, candor, tenderness, masculinity and femininity and an ambiguous merger of the two, those Kodrachromey colors... you get the drift. is there even more to say about The Hug? yes—Darsie Alexander apparently wrote a whole essay about the photo for the book Singular Images (which i sadly don't have, but clearly need). there isn't a whole book written about it yet, but perhaps in a way there is, since as Alec Soth pointed out, "The Hug" has been selected several times over as the cover image for novels (about love, loss and drama, i am sure).

i thought a fun photo project would be to attempt to reshoot The Hug over and over again. a whole series of attempted Hugs. well, i haven't gotten around to it.

but i keep seeing Rachael Dunville's photograph "The Brad" everywhere. it's the title image from her series Springville about her community in the Ozarks. i finally realized that it reminds me of "The Hug." not only the actual hug, but the intensity of the gaze, the reveal of skin, the gender play, the stiff ambiguity in the posture of the girl being hugged... (and one more thing... the mysterious white thing on the man's wrist in the hug is echoed—humorously, for me—in the yellow Lance Armstrong bracelet on the Brad.) overall, the image seems to tap into something kindred, though in a very different mode and format.

what do you think? any other Hug contenders out there?

(Joerg Colberg of Conscientious interviewed Dunville last month: check it out.)

famous photographers without websites: goldin, dijkstra, and mann

continuing the theme of photographers without websites, i thought i would point out just a few of the famous portrait photographers without official sites.

Nan Goldin is the mother to an entire generation of photographers inspired by her confessional, frank, self-chronicling approach to color photography. i'm not surprised that she doesn't have a website, but it's a shame that there isn't an amazing archive of her work available online. though maybe her work is best viewed in her great books, like the Ballad of Sexual Dependency... the photo on the left, of her ex-girlfriend Siobhan, is one of my favorites of hers. there's an interesting article about her here, in which she says of her subjects: "People feel that I'm narcissistic, voyeuristic or vicarious. Or they say I make the viewer vicarious. But I don't think so. I show my people in their full strength, staring back at you. They're not victimised by you. They're not objectified by you."

Rineke Dijkstra is another major fine art portraitist without a website, as Colin Pantall pointed out in the comments. as Colin said, and as is true for the other photographers in this category, she just doesn't need a website.

Image Makers, Image Takers has a cool interview with Dijkstra, available online where she talks about really concrete and practical stuff, from how she chooses subjects to whether she thinks photographers have to be technologically proficient...

Sally Mann is another one. i don't think a website is quite her style. luckily there are already some great resources about her work online, including videos from her episode of the show Art 21 and a small collection of YouTube videos... at left is one of Subjectify's all-time favorite subjects, Miss Jessie Mann.