secretarisvogel: 06/01/2012

24 juni 2012

Chernobyl Exhibition

DarkOPtics: Chernobyl's Zone of Alienation

Chickering, 1902

Mme. Bianca Lyons by E. Chickering, 1902. Image from the U.S. Library of Congress.

23 juni 2012

Een stelletje in een zandkasteel versierd met swastikavaandeltjes, omstreeks 1940.

Via annefrank.org
© Ullstein Bild

21 juni 2012

1958. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

1958. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
MAGNUM/Philippe Halsman
Via Philippe Halsman - Personalities.

20 juni 2012

Title: [J. N. Maskelyne's automaton, "Zoe"]
Description: Shows John Nevil Maskelyne whole-length, standing next to a figure of a girl seated on a stool drawing, figure is supposedly an automaton. William George Alma (1904 - 1993) was a magician, collector and manufacturer of magic apparatus.
Subject: Maskelyne, John Nevil, 1839-1917.
Subject: Magicians -- England Robots -- England
Image number: P.340/NO.169
Format: photograph : gelatin silver ; 11 x 8 cm.
Managed by: Item held by State Library of Victoria
Collection or series: IspartOf W. G. Alma conjuring collection. Photographs
Date or place: [ca. 19--]
Reproduction rights: State Library of Victoria.
Via: Picture Australia.

Dobrý voják Švejk

John Heartfield
German, 1891–1968
The Good Soldier Schweik [Dobrý voják Švejk], 1936
Letterpress
20.8 x 13.5 cm
Gladys N. Anderson Fund, 2009.502
Via The Art Institute of Chicago

Appleton & Co

Appleton & Co
Horton Lane &
58&60 Manningham Lane
Bradford

Thomas William Appleton, was born in 1828 in Yarm, Yorkshire and was the son of a miller. He is shown in the 1861 Census to be living at 15 Brunswick Place, Bradford.

In 1859 Thomas opened a photographic studio in Horton Lane Bradford. The business first appears in Kelly's directory in 1861 and for another 50 years Thomas William Appleton and later Richard James Appleton, his son, ran a studio from there. Richard Appleton was an innovator and entrepreneur and invented the Cieroscope which allowed him to show a film of the Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee celebrations to tens of thousands of people in Foster Square, Bradford on the very same evening as Queen Victorias parade had taken place in London. This was a remarkable achievement at the time. The story is told by the Telegraph and Argus.

(Appleton & Co - Leeds and Bradford Studios)

Маяковский. Про это. – 1957

19 juni 2012

Woman looking into mirror (1870)

Unidentified Photographer

DESCRIPTIVE TITLE: Portrait of a woman looking into mirror

ca. 1870
tintype with applied color
10.0 x 6.5 cm.
Museum Collection
GEH NEG: 3420
78:0829:0013
Via George Eastman House.

Flickor vid runsten

Flickor vid runsten i Herstabergs park. Inskriften lyder: Vibern reste denna sten efter Solva, sin broder.
Via Riksantikvarieämbetet.

Тамара Платоновна Карсавина

Provenance: The von Üxküll-Gyllenband family archive.

Tamara Karsavina (Тамара Платоновна Карсавина)

Confederate soldier Lawrence "Laurie" M. Anderson

Title
Confederate soldier Lawrence "Laurie" M. Anderson

Image Number: RC11475
Year: 186-
Series Title: Reference collection

General Note
Laurie M. Anderson of Tallahassee was a member of the Bradford Light Infantry, Florida Battalion, Company A. He died April 7, 1862, at the Battle of Shiloh.

General Note
The 1st Florida Volunteer Infantry fought at the Battle of Shiloh, April 6-7, 1862.

Via State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.

Tens-Kwau-Ta-Waw, the Prophet, 1837

Tens-Kwau-Ta-Waw, the Prophet, 1837
E. C. Biddle, Philadelphie
Estampe
Code de référence : RG 2-344-0-0-70
Archives publiques de l'Ontario, I0009202

The Cheapness and Americanness of the Tintype

"We find that the word tintype was widely used from early on; and it is the only word generally recognized today. How did this come about? None of the literature, past or present, gives an adequate explanation for the misnomer. We can speculate that tintype derives from tinplate, the name of the thin iron sheet used by the tinsmith to construct his wares.
The manufacturers of ferrotype or tintype plates also used tinplate, coating it with black enamel and photographic emulsion. It was a short leap from tinplate to the alliterative tintype. I believe that tintype replaced ferrotype and melainotype because it is short and catchy, because it sounds American and cheap."

America and the Tintype
Steven Kasher
With essays by Geofffry Batchen & Karen Haltunen
ICP/STEIDL, 2008
ISBN 978-3-86521-686-1

18 juni 2012

Horowitz – François-Marie Banier

François-Marie Banier:

I never thought I would photograph Horowitz. Neither so close, nor for so long. He couldn’t bear people coming near him. If you ventured to do so, he would reply either with a bark or with one of his pet phrases: “That’s none of my business”, or “I don’t care.”
At Christmas once, in the late 1960s, I was invited to his home in Connecticut. I was twenty, he was past sixty. His old-fashioned elegance, his pronounced nose, his sharp eyes and the knotted form of his lips reminded me of the tricks of those sad clowns who keep on endlessly smashing plates over their head to make the kiddies laugh. That night, the guests were all very careful. He would take advantage of any awkward remark to spark a furore and storm back up to his room. He would make his wife, Wanda Toscanini, pay for the ruined Christmas Eve by waging war on her for months.
Horowitz asked me a whole host of questions which I answered, avidly taking in his night-owl eyes. I tried to focus on each feature of this face – half-tortoise, half-parrot, with elephant ears. Some might find them frightening. According to the legend, he played with his fingers flat. Volodia shrugged. “For Mozart, they are perfectly round. My piano teacher in Kiev used to say that if you can’t catch a note with your hand, you must jab at it with your nose.” Did this Frankenstein in a tuxedo keep a spare, longer pair of hands in his room? His playing, his lyricism in the Liszt sonata had saved me from so much sadness. But that night he played nothing. When I left, though, he did give me two records, one a Chopin and the other a Scriabin. “What’s with them, clapping like mad at the end of the concerts? I’m not doing anything special, just sticking to the tempo, that’s all. It’s all written on the score. The hardest part is the pedal. I had a teacher just for that. In Russia, in those days, there was a teacher for everything: harmony, notation…” Fifteen years went by without a chance to see him again.
Then one day in New York, at six in the evening, I opened the door to Mortimer’s. There they both were, dining alone. Wanda asked me how long I was staying in New York. “Two weeks.” “Our first free moment is in sixteen days’ time, isn’t that right, Volodia?” “ That’s none of my business.”
I knew Marcel and Elise Jouhandeau well. They loathed each other. But out of all that vinegar they could really fizz. Memories of Satie, the inventions of Max Jacob, their taste for issuing diktats about literature – all were reasons for crossing swords. They were brilliant. I had read The Dance of Death several times. In the darkness of Strindberg’s theatre, the dialogues, however nasty they may have been, really shook you up. Here, the silence between the pianist and his wife was deadly. I was face to face with the hell of Toscanini-Horowitz. Their daughter, Sonia, had told me about it in Paris. Before she cut her throat.
Three days later, Horowitz agreed to take lunch and we laughed together like schoolboys. He told me about his life in the United States surrounded by these people who are enthusiastic about everything. He wasn’t playing much, half an hour a day. If that. “But my fingers are in good shape. My mind, too.”
They took me to their home. To the first floor, in the drawing room protected by a Japanese screen with gold leaf, where his famous piano stood watch. “What do you want me to play?” “The Liszt sonata.” “It’s long, and then there’s a fugue in it.” From that day up to his death, he played everything for me, and yet I photographed him in New York’s Steinway Hall, with his hands in the air, in emptiness, with only the parquet below him, making that magical musical gesture that could have conjured up even his instrument.
How, why did I tame them, love, fight – choose them? My role in getting him back on stage and getting him to cross the Atlantic to Europe thirty-four years after his last journey is both anecdotal and somewhat miraculous, with its fair share of suffering. We three were not easy characters.
He was the father, the example I wish I had had. His one-word motto was: DISCIPLINE. Often he gave me this piece of advice, which I have followed: “Write from morning to evening.”

(Via)