subject echo: magnum contest (and the terror of beauty)

Alec Soth, blogging again over at the Magnum Photos blog, proposed a contest this week: match an image from the Magnum archive with a famous painting from art history.

it's a good game to play in between hitting refresh on all the news sites today...  and the commenters have some pretty great suggestions already.

above, fun with Steve McCurry and Caravaggio.   

i suppose these two images of Medusa continue this week's ugly/beauty theme.  after all, Melville (and many other poets and writers) have celebrated Medusa's "beauty strange with horror allied," while Structuralist mythologist Jean-Pierre Vernant describes Medusa as a symbol of where "the strange beauty of the feminine countenance, brilliant with seduction, and the horrible fascination of death, meet and cross."  my classicist friend points out that the Greeks were always crazy for terrible beauty.  and so am i—hot stuff.

subject echo: "nothing is more fascinating, complex, ugly and beautiful than human beings"

i was struck by Michele Abeles' creepy, artificial, and awesome portraits, which i saw on iheartphotograph.

Yale MFA grad Abeles says: "I am drawn to portraiture because nothing is more fascinating, complex, ugly and beautiful than human beings."

the subject and approach (and sheer blondness) conjured up references for me to Katy Grannan's subject Nicole from her project "Another Woman Who Died in Her Sleep." (discussed previously here, and shown below.) it is interesting how both subjects convey blank despondence and abjection with a similar, limited set of symbols (studios, skinnyness, fake-glamour, wigs, whiteness, beach, etc.).