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Christopher Makos Polaroids

 

Christopher Henry Gallery presents Christopher Makos Polaroids, an exhibition of 55 original vintage SX-70 Polaroids. Much more than photographs, Makos’ Polaroids are, in fact, precious artifacts - historic one-of-a-kind mementos from the 70s and early 80s, an era famously celebrated for its decadence but less often noted for its remarkable innocence. 

Decades before the age of flatbed scanners, digital cameras and desktop printers, Polaroid cameras had the unique ability to capture private, unreproducible moments in time - it was a seductive producer of images that developed magically before your eyes in the privacy of your own hands. Calvin Klein reminisced, “No one was afraid of being photographed back then because it was more likely a picture would end up in the back of someone's drawer than on Facebook, YouTube or the front page.  

 

'Iris Barry: Re-View'

 

 At the time of The Museum of Modern Art’s founding in 1929, there were no dedicated film programs in U.S. cultural institutions, film societies and festivals were few and far between, and American film culture consisted almost entirely of new studio releases. Yet by the mid-1930s MoMA had already begun to experiment with curated film screenings, organized by MoMA’s first film curator, Iris Barry. 

Iris Barry: Re-View comprises films Barry originally selected for the historic screenings at the Wadsworth Atheneum, along with the Mae West vehicle She Done Him Wrong (1933), a controversial acquisition—now hailed as a cinema classic—that almost singlehandedly undid the establishment of the MoMA Film Library.

 

  

 

Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change

 

The first comprehensive retrospective of Eadweard Muybridge brings together 300+ vintage photographs, albums, stereographs, lantern slides, glass negatives and positives, camera equipment, patent models, Zoopraxiscope discs, proof prints, notes, books and other ephemera -- as well as his famous stop-motion photo sequences. 

Corcoran Gallery of Art

Apr. 10-July 18, 2010 

via: artnet.com

Wi-fries

via: The Hub 

Semana Santa

 

Magnum presents dramatic scenes of hooded penitents in procession and displays of Easter pageantry taken during Holy Week throughout the world.

Semana Santa or Holy Week is the observation dedicated to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This observance is celebrated all over the world from the last week of Lent and the week before Easter. 

via: Magnum Photos

 SPAIN. Sevilla. Holy Week. 1972. 

© Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos

'A Preppy Primer Revisited'

 

Three decades after “The Official Preppy Handbook” was first unleashed into bookstores, a follow-up called “True Prep” is in the works — hoping to reignite preppy fervor, update the mindset and explain just what it means to be a Chip or a Muffy in a Barack world.

The original volume, a slim, plaid-covered paperback that poked fun at the gin-soaked polo-shirt and loafer-wearing set, started out as a piquant bit of mockery but, like “Liar’s Poker,” a bestseller about bond traders, and “Wall Street,” the movie in which Michael Douglas declared greed to be good, it ended up being adopted as a kind of guidebook for those who wanted in.

The book sold 1.3 million copies, many to aspiring prepsters who wanted to know where to shop, what to wear and how to fully appreciate what it called “the virtues of pink and green.”

Among those buyers was Chip Kidd, one of the industry’s best-known book designers, who loved the original as a teenager growing up near Reading, Pa., where he attended public high school and adored topsiders. The handbook, he said, “changed my life.”

Now he has teamed with the editor and one of the writers of the original volume, Lisa Birnbach, for the follow-up, due out in September. “As a fan, that is why I kind of instigated this whole thing,” he said of the new volume. “I wanted the next book.”

The blogosphere is filled with fans eagerly awaiting the new book. The first handbook “was like a bible to us,” said Alice Richardson, 44, who blogs about preppy things at “Summer Is a Verb” (summerisaverb.blogspot.com).

via: The New York Times

‘Ash Wednesday, New Orleans’

In the first installment of “Continental Picture Show,” the photographer Alec Soth explores cycles of sin and redemption in the aftermath of Mardi Gras. 

'April Fools' Day Facts: Behind the Laughs'

The origins of April Fools' Day are shrouded in mystery, experts say.

The most popular theory is that France changed its calendar in the 1500s so that the New Year would begin in January to match the Roman calendar instead of the start of spring in late March or early April.

However word of the change traveled slowly, and many people in rural areas continued to celebrate the New Year in the spring. These country dwellers became known as "April fools."

Alex Boese, curator of the Museum of Hoaxes in San Diego, California, who has studied the holiday's origin, disagrees with that interpretation.

"[The French] theory is completely wrong, because the day that the French celebrated the beginning of the year legally was Easter day, so it never really was associated with April first," he said.

"Traditionally it was only a legal start to the year—people in France did actually celebrate [the New Year] on January first for as long as anybody could remember."

Boese believes instead that April Fools' Day simply grew out of age-old European spring festivals of renewal, in which pranks and camouflaging one's identity are common.

Read more here.