Any life derailed is a tragedy, but Britney's life - a life lived out as much in photographs as in her music - has been accelerating out of control at an unbelievable speed. Last week's paparazzi chase - or perhaps more accurately attack - may however, turn out to be a cultural as well as a legal turning point. Legislation is now pending in California to limit the proximity a paparazzi can have to their quarry. To anyone who saw the televised chopper shots of photographers descending on Spears as she was leaving the mental ward where she had been forcibly held under California's 5150 law, it seemed like this could not happen a minute too soon. Let's wait and see.
Self-portrait with wife and models. Vogue Studio, Paris, 1981.
I just moved all my photo related boxes to an airy storage space in Long Island so long-buried things are coming to light. Last week I was going through a box of old documents and came across this brief 2003 interview with Helmut Newton which was to run on a failed precursor of this blog when Helmut's sudden death made it seem opportunistic. Five years later, Helmut's vitality and humor are what stand out for me.
HEMUT NEWTON Q&A. 2003.
Your about to be published autobiography stops in 1982. What have the readers missed?
Nothing! People who reach their goals are very uninteresting. What could I have written about the last 20 years? I met a lot of awfully boring Hollywood bimbos. I earned a lot of money. I fly only first class.
You don’t make it sound like much fun.
It would have been fun to say I f***ed her and I f***ed her, but my wife June and I have an agreement not to talk about such subjects.
So there’s never any jealousy?
I am feminist! If I finish a job abroad early, I always call June from the airport. I never want to surprise her. This morning I asked June to go look for my glasses. She asked “May I go through your pockets?” I find this is proper - even after 54 years of marriage.
Are you saying you are sometimes tempted?
I look at models like a farmer looks at his potatoes.
In your book, you paint yourself as an unusual child.
I was sickly and fainted a lot and I masturbated like a world champion! My mother was always fearful of my health so I was driven to school by a uniformed chauffeur to avoid germs. I was not allowed to touch a railing or to handle money. I was spoiled, unbearable, and an awful coward.
When you were 18 you fled Nazi Germany on a ship to Singapore. Yet your recollection of that time in history is “I screwed through the Mediterranean. I stuck with married women around 30 years of age.”
You must understand that for the Jews that ship was an island paradise because finally no-one could hurt us. Every evening there was dancing, drinking, f***ing. But I always found 17 year old girls less exciting than older women who were glamorous, sophisticated, and had sex appeal!
When you arrived in Singapore you had five dollars to your name, which you immediately spent in a brothel.
My sound financial sense told me there was no difference between having five dollars and being completely broke.
You never really talk about the Holocaust.
I have no animosity against the Germans. I will never forget or forgive but I find the Germans are the only ones who are seriously confonting their past. When I was offered the Great Federal Order of Merit, June said “You can’t possible accept it!” So I asked Billy Wilder and he said “You’ve got to take it!” I preferred listening to Billy.
As you say in your book, you achieved all your goals long ago. What still gives you pleasure?
I am old hypochondriac crapper who has to take 13 pills a day, but I still love cars. I drove a white Porsche with red leather seats when I could not even pay my rent. I recently acquired a red Corvette which was specially made for me in Detroit. It has flaming tongues on it. A f***ing great car!
This one was a real bolt from out of the blue! I had been reading snippets about Shelby Lynne's Dusty Springfield tribute album but hadn't heard any tracks until I went on iTunes and downloaded five songs. It took me a few days to listen to the tracks, but once I did I was hooked. This is one of those albums that becomes a whole new point of reference for your musical taste and knowledge.
In short, Shelby Lynne, who's been around for a while, is deeply rooted in country but with great range into other genres. Her first album was released in 1989 followed by albums on three different labels, so it was kind of an ironic joke when she won the Grammy for Best New Artist for her 1999 album "I Am Shelby Lynne".
Dusty Springfield was one of the first blue-eyed soul singers of the sixties whose hits included "I Only Want To Be With You", "Wishin' and Hopin'", "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me", and "Son of a Preacher Man:" She became one of the most influential singers in the business working with amongst others - Jimi Hendrix, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Elvis Costello, Sinead O' Connor, and the Pet Shop Boys. She died of cancer in 1999.
Shelby Lynne's Springfield album - "Just a Little Lovin'" - was produced by Phil Ramone who uncharacteristically strips down the music to the bare essentials, letting Lynne's voice and a slowed down jazz tempo bring new meaning, pathos, and focus to the lyrics. You get a good idea from this concert clip of "I Only Want To Be With You", but the title track on the album, given its relative obscurity in the pop archives, is the one that should really not be missed.
This doesn't look like a fair test, but bear with me....
After about three years of trusty use, my little Lumix FX9 broke. This is the camera I carry to art fairs and events and slip in my pocket whenever I need to snap something at better quality than my iPhone. It performed like a champ (in fact this was a camera Annie Leibovitz gave to all her friends when it first came out).
As someone who loves to buy new gadgets, this was an opportunity as well as a sadness, so off I went in search of the next great thing! As the FX9 has long been replaced by newer models, my criteria were that the camera had to slip into my back pocket and it had to take good pictures.
My first try was a little Sony which distorted straight lines so badly it went straight back to Best Buy. Next was the smallest Lumix which was just a little too small to handle easily and now lives happily in my wife’s handbag. I then tried the littlest Leica, the C-Lux 2 (also too small and noisy pictures) and the next size up in the Leica range, the D-Lux 3 (above) which is not only problematically large for a pocket camera but does just terribly in low light situations.
By this time I was properly mournful of my old camera and went on Amazon where to my surprise I found plenty of FX9s both new and used. So I ordered a barely used one for $149 and now I feel restored. Apart from revealing my psychosis, the whole point of all this is to recommend getting an FX9 while they’re still available. The "more pixels doesn’t necessarily mean better pictures" thing may not make sense logically but it does in practice.
P.S. I’m aware that I didn’t try any Canons. Something about their design just didn’t work for me. But any comments or recommendations on the best pocket size digital camera are welcome.
The last few days have been full of entrances into rooms where the picture(s) hanging on the wall were particularly and surprisingly effective. It started off in the office of Kate Lewis, the managing editor of SELF magazine, where I found myself face to face with this rare Yasuhiro Ishimoto poster. I’ve always been a huge fan of Ishimoto’s and know this picture well, but something about the scale, the white space, and the Japanese type made it click for me in a way I’d never felt before.
A day later I was helping to install an unusual holiday gift. A brother and sister had given their mother a set of commissioned silhouette portraits by Katherine Wolkoff of her ten grandchildren. After scouting out the apartment we decided they should flank the tall living room window as they could be hung vertically. So this is how we did it. Now imagine the room without the pictures.
Later that evening, I was sitting in the kitchen thinking about how I would blog on installations when our dog Jenny took up one of her favorite spots - lying on the couch by the breakfast table underneath a surprise birthday present from my wife – an Elliott Erwitt portrait of Jenny that generously expanded to include our children. I don’t think she’s posing, but it’s nice when art and life intersect!
Then yesterday I was back at Conde Nast helping Allure put together an auction to benefit The Skin Cancer Foundation. It’s always interesting to see what's on the walls there, and the collage (above) in senior editor Patricia Tortoloni’s office (below) was a Bumble + Bumble promotion on bold hairstyles that would not have been out of place on Richard Prince’s inspiration board!
One of the most striking new bodies of work I’ve seen recently is a series of photographs made by the 30 year old photojournalist Jehad Nga. Taken in a Somalian café and lit only by a single shaft on sunlight, the images illuminate their subjects in the clandestine manner of Walker Evans’ subway pictures or Harry Callahan’s “Women Lost in Thought”.
Nga was born in Kansas, but moved soon after, first to Libya and then to London. In his early 20s he was living in Los Angeles and taking courses at UCLA, when he came across the book "Digital Diaries" by Natasha Merritt. The book, a collection of sexually intimate photos made with a digital point-and-shoot, convinced Nga that he could become a photographer. One year later he was traveling through the Middle East taking pictures.
After one of these pictures was published in The Village Voice he moved to New York where he enrolled in one course to become an emergency medical technician and a second course on photography sponsored by the Magnum photo agency. By early 2003 he was back in the Middle East shooting regularly for The New York Times.
The Somalia series was shown at the M+B Gallery in Los Angeles last year and will be featured in the Red Room at the Bonni Benrubi Gallery in New York this summer. Look out for these sumptuously large and colorful prints.
Going to see David and Peter Turnley’s show “McClellan Street” at the Leica Gallery in New York (on through February) reminds me to share what I have always said is the best film ever made by a photographer – David Turnley’s “La Tropical”.
Vibrantly filmed in black and white, “La Tropical” tells the story of Havana’s extraordinary open-air dance club – a club that on crowded nights pulls in more than ten thousand people! Exploring the lives of a handful of the clubs dancers and regulars, the film examines Cuba’s complex race situation – all while immersing us in the heat and rhythm of the music and dancing that is the lifeblood of the country’s culture.
The trailer (below) is somewhat misleading. The film is richer and deeper than just a dance film but a whole lot livelier than “The Buena Vista Social Club”. And while it previously could only be seen on the festival circuit, it just became available on DVD.
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