one piece

Strike a Pose

 Without photography, would Elvis and his gyrating hips have shocked America? Can you talk about Grace Jones without thinking of the Island Life cover? The photographers who collaborated with rock 'n' roll musicians injected the genre with glamour, grit, and sex appeal, and even today, one photograph has the power to catapult a musician to stardom. The Brooklyn Museum is now curating the first major museum exhibition devoted exclusively to rock photography: Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present, opens today, featuring 175 works from 105 photographers. The massive collection covers a range of media, from album covers to slideshows to music videos—don't miss your chance to check out some rare and never-before-seen images, like a Rolling Stones photograph by Philip Townsend or four Beatles portraits by Richard Avedon.

via: The Village Voice

'The Last Days of Pompeii in LA'

 Lily Simonson and Catherine Wagley, contributers to art:21 Blog -- have a new bi-weekly dispatch about art in Los Angeles.  

For our first dispatch from the LA art world, we visited the exhibition Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples, on view at LACMA until October 4. The show features sculptures, paintings, and tapestries that adorned the private villas of the Roman elite, and is accompanied by Eleanor Antin’s The Last Days of Pompeii (Season 2), a project that brings ancient decadence to SoCal. Thoughts about aged culture, contemporary art and the City of Angels prompted the following conversation:

Catherine Wagley: Here in LA, even authentic antiquity feels like faux antiquity. That’s why I avoid shows like Pompeii. I feel so limited as a viewer–I have no concept of Pompeii as a place that occupied a past era; instead, when I look at the artifacts on exhibit, I start thinking about decorations on the Getty’s fountains. But I actually enjoyed the LACMA show because it addresses this very conundrum.

Lily Simonson: Yes, there is virtually no history embodied anywhere in Los Angeles, and that is very unsettling. My neighborhood in Hollywood is overrun by European tourists taking pictures of the Walk of Fame and trying to get to the Hollywood Sign. Is that our Eiffel Tower? Yikes! Our history is all about cultural production and artifice, so everything begins to seem inauthentic or reproducible.

Anyway, I agree that LACMA gracefully embraced the incongruity of a show like this in Los Angeles, especially by juxtaposing the exhibition with Antin’s Pompeii series. In fact, the Antin piece at once underscored this cultural “mismatch” while highlighting the parallels between the opulent Hollywood Empire and the dangerously extravagant Romans. I’ve been thinking about the inclusion of the Art21-like video that documented Antin’s process making the Pompeii photographs. It made the work feel like a Hollywood production.

Read more here

"The Unknown Hipster"

Born French (naturally), Unknown Hipster moved to New York to become a painter, a poet, or anything (within reason) art world related. All that can be said is that Unknown frequently appears at fashionable and cultural events without being necessarily on the list.

How Film Titles Have Evolved

Before the cinematic title sequences of today’s films, pioneered by the likes of Saul Bass  and (more recently) Kyle Cooper, film titles were once a motionless work of art. In this ‘Now and then,’ we are pressing pause and exploring the art behind the film title.

Since the early days of cinema, artists have carefully designed film titles to captivate audiences and set the film’s mood. To bring attention to this often overlooked art form, Dutch graphic designer (and movie lover) Christine Annyas  has put together . The Movie Stills Collection The website collects and neatly organizes film titles by decade, from the 1920’s to present. To illustrate how film titles have evolved over the years, we've chosen some of our favorites from the collection.

Continue here: idsgn.org

Sartorial Selects

Scott Schuman has long been trailing the fashion-show caravan from Florence to Milan, Paris and New York City, photographing selected stylish folk and plenty of fashion world regulars for his blog, The Sartorialist.com, and becoming a sort of de facto cultural anthropologist along the way. 

His eye is discerning but it doesn’t discriminate: the quirky, the refined, the interesting, the elegant, the chic and the sometimes outrageous, all shot very simply on the street, come together in a visual history of the fashion business, marking our place in the timeline of style.

“The Sartorialist,” a hefty 512-page paperback hot off of the press from Penguin, is a clever nod to the democratic nature of his photography, more high school yearbook than highbrow coffee-table tome. It’s chock-full of photographs you will want to pore over with friends, searching for those you know — and maybe even yourself.

via: The Moment

Storefront Churches: Photographs by Camilo José Vergara

In the early 1970s, Camilo José Vergara was struck by the number and variety of houses of worship he encountered—both in buildings originally designed for other purposes, and in abandoned traditional churches. He recalls, "I quickly understood churches to be crucial to my project, and a separate study of them began to develop." Intrigued by Christ's ethnicity or color at a particular church, Vergara asked church elders about His representation; curious about the proper setting for worship, he queried pastors about their building plans; surprised by parishioners "drunk in the spirit," he followed them. 

Vergara and his camera have been an eye witness to worship in some of the nation's most distressed communities, including areas of Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York.  "In poor neighborhoods, houses of worship are plentiful and each has a unique identity.

link: National Building Museum

True Blood's Killer Main Title Opener -- By Digital Kitchen

Traces of Light

Vera Lutter's photography focuses on architectural or industrial landmarks and places with iconic resonance, from the abandoned Pepsi Cola Factory in Long Island City to the now defunct Battersea Power Station in London. Her depiction of these structures emphasizes their formidable stature while personifying their melancholic solitude and isolation. A haunting quality and ethereal tones dominate Lutter's images, reflecting the passing of time and signifying both the transient and the perpetual.

Vera Lutter 

July 24 - September 12, 2009

Gagosian Gallery (Beverly Hills)

“I sell architecture better and more directly and more vividly than the architect does” Julius Shulman (1910–2009)

 

Julius Shulman, whose luminous photographs of homes and buildings brought fame to a number of mid-twentieth century Modernist architects and made him a household name in the architectural world, died Wednesday night, reports Claudia Luther for the Los Angeles Times. He was ninety-eight.

Shulman, who had been in declining health, died at his home in Los Angeles, according to gallery owner Craig Krull, who represented him. Starting with Richard Neutra in 1936, Shulman’s roster of clients read like a who’s who of pioneering contemporary architecture: Rudolf M. Schindler, Gregory Ain, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Eames, Raphael S. Soriano, John Lautner, Eero Saarinen, Albert Frey, Pierre Koenig, Harwell Harris, and many others. His work was contained in virtually every book published on Modernist architects.

Shulman’s 1960 photograph of Koenig’s Case Study House #22—a glass-walled, cantilevered structure hovering above the lights of Los Angeles—became one of the most famous architectural pictures ever taken in the US. It was, as architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote in the New York Times, “one of those singular images that sum up an entire city at a moment in time.”

via: artforum news

Ace Hotel, Palm Springs

Set in the desert outpost of Palm Springs just east of LA, the Ace Palm Springs is a sprawling, high-design 1970’s throwback – recently renovated from a 1965 Howard Johnson motor Lodge. Entirely solar-powered (thanks to the 354 days of sunshine the Springs receive per year), the hotel is a lot more than just a sepia-toned, rough and ready take on the design hotel.

With spongy, tanned-leather seating, a rope-festooned lobby from costumier Michael Schmidt, a giant Swim Club pool, and rooms replete with vintage vinyl and Americana aplenty.

via: Wallpaper/Travel