Vitro Nasu

Elliot Erwitt

Elliott Erwitt: The photographer who got the best out of Castro, Kerouac, and Monroe

Interestingly, his greatest inspirations are Modigliani’s poetic paintings and the Italian Neorealist movies of Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica and others. “[The style’s] not chichi, but real and direct, which I hope I’ve manifested in my photos,”
he says.

Jack Kerouac 1955

(The Red List – see more here)

One of his books is titled. Son of Bitch, 1974. Photographs of dogs.

Elliott Erwitt wiki (b. 26 July 1928 Paris, France)

Erwitt served as a photographer’s assistant in the 1950s in the United States Army while stationed in France and Germany. He was influenced by meeting the famous photographers Edward Steichen, Robert Capa and Roy Stryker. Stryker, the former Director of the Farm Security Administration’s photography department, hired Erwitt to work on a photography project for the Standard Oil Company. He then began a freelance photographer career and produced work for Collier’s, Look, Life and Holiday. Erwitt was invited to become a member of Magnum Photos by the founder Robert Capa.

As a documentary filmmaker he made “Arthur Penn the director“.

Irezumi
(Directed by Yasuzo Masumura)

“This painting shows your future,” Seikichi said, pointing to the woman under the cherry tree — the very image of the young girl, “All these men will ruin their lives for you.”— “The Tattooer” by Junichiro Tanizaki

Manji
(Ayako Wakao, Funakoshi, Kyoto Kishida)
Manji directed by Masumura.

The Key to Junichiro Tanizaki
(See a trailer of Berlin Affair, and Makioka Sisters and film still of the Key – previous post)

O-Yu Sama

Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi

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Baron Raimund von Stillfried, also known as Baron Raimund von Stillfried-Rathenitz, was an Austrian photographer.

(See more photos )here.

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Japan times book review of Baron Raimund von sillfried – a pioneer photographer.

Baron Raimund von Stillfried, a 19th-century pioneer of photography in Yokohama, was the first in Japan to recognize the new medium’s potential as a global marketing tool. Adept at producing theatrical souvenir photos, Stillfried also took the first ever photograph of Emperor Meiji and shocked Vienna when he imported Japanese teenage girls to the city to work in a mock teahouse.

Portrait of Emperor Meiji by Von Stillfried

More about Enigmatic Emperor by Donald Keene here.

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Baron Raimund von Stillfried, Furniture Shop, hand-coloured albumen silver photograph, c. 1875,

Gonzo (Levity links)

Quotes

America… just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

With Ali

When Hunter met Muhammad

Interviewing Ali was easy. Just turn up and you would be granted a killer quote. Few sportsman have been as skilled at performing for the media. Yet Thompson didn’t want to be just another reporter dutifully quoting the gospel according to Ali. He wanted to break through the familiar grand facade.

“I was still shaking hands with Bundini when I realised where I was — standing at the foot of a king-size bed where Ali was laid back with the covers pulled up to his waist and his wife, Veronica, sitting next to him… I felt like I’d been shot out of a cannon and straight into somebody else’s movie.”

Here was a tribute from France, a brilliant and amazing flash inspiration piece from France. (The piece is titled Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.)

Hunter’s Fear and Loathing album

Paris Review: interview (the art of journalism)

Happy birthday Woody Guthrie!

Robert Crumb (previous post Birthday bean effect)

Woody Guthrie~ All You Fascists Bound To Lose (Youtube)

Bound for Glory

July 14 (also a birthday of Ingmar Bergman.. who cast David Carradine in Serpent’s Egg .. Carradine and Elliot Gould were the only 2 Americans to appear as lead actor in Bergman films)

Bound for Glory was directed by Hal Ashby

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Dennis Oppenheim – Parallel Stress, ten minute performance piece, 1970

Intended partly as a protest against the minimalist fixation on the essence of the object, this piece tested the capacity of the artist’s body to suspend itself from fingertips and toes between two masonry walls. The performance repeated the same position on the stomach in the notch between two gravel hills. Photographs were taken at the greatest stress position prior to collapse.

Via

Dennis Oppenheim An artist who moved heaven and earth

From his Minimalist earthworks created in remote places in the 1960s to Pop-Surrealist public sculptures for urban settings in the 1990s and 2000s, Dennis Oppenheim was dedicated to the proposition that art should be open to the world rather than cloistered in galleries and museums. So it is appropriate that he should be this year’s featured artist at the Storm King Art Center in the Hudson Valley, where sculptures by Alexander Calder, Sol LeWitt, Louise Nevelson, Alice Aycock and scores of other artists dot the beautiful, 500-acre landscape of hills, fields and forest.

Created an archive for Dennis Oppenheim.

Cones on Park Ave.

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Rain : photo by Abbas Kiarostami, 2007 (Purdy Hicks Gallery, London)

via Eyewash Tom Clark

Abbas Kiarostami
via Palermo

Abbas dies via the Gurardian

Abbas Kiarostami, the multi-award-winning Iranian director whose 1997 film Taste of Cherry was awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival, has died aged 76.

Abbas Kiarostami (wiki)

His trademark Via

Scenes that take place in or around a car
Direct quotes from Persian poetry
Mixing fantasy and reality to employ a metaphoric form
Shoots his films mostly with non-actors and without any script
The use of panoramic long shots
Minimalism
Poetic cinema language
Mixes fact and fiction
Minimal plots with non-dramatic style
Inviting audience to take part in the narrative
The recurrent image of zigzagging roads

Upon accepting a prize at the Cannes Film Festival for Taste of Cherry (1997), he received a hug and kiss from presenter Catherine Deneuve. Since public physical contacts between members of the opposite sexes, who are unrelated to one another, are banned by the Islamic government in Iran, Kiarostami’s home country, he didn’t return to his Tehran home for a week.

Like Someone in Love – Trailer (youtube)

Wim Wenders, Takeshi Kitano, Abbas Kiarostami and Walter Salles at Cannes- 20 May 2007.

Michael Cimino died at 77..

Although he directed a few films in the decades after “Heaven’s Gate,” Cimino kept a low profile, and plastic surgery made him almost unrecognizable. He resurfaced at the Cannes Film Festival for a screening of his 1996 film “Sunchaser.” He appeared at Cannes again in 2007 for his final film venture, a three-minute contribution to the multi-director anthology “Chacun son gout.” He obliquely addressed the rumor that he was transitioning into a woman, saying there were many false rumors about him, part of a “personal assassination”; he said if a detractor wants to prevent a person from working, the next best thing is to “destroy them personally.”

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Michael Cimino IMDB