Vitro Nasu

Gloria Vanderbilt
Photo by Gordon Parks

How race is lived in America: Relations of Gordon Parks and Gloria

Vanderbilt: I was just actually looking in my diary, and Gordon and I met in April of 1954, and he came to photograph me for Life magazine. I was making my debut on the stage that summer.

Parks: Then later, when you had your exhibition, I came to photograph you again.

American photographer Richard Avedon (left, lighting a cigarette), American heiress and designer Gloria Vanderbilt, and American film director Sidney Lumet, sit at a table covered with glasses and bottles during a party for the premiere of the movie ‘East of Eden’ directed by Elia Kazan, 1955. (Photo by Getty Images)

Reinventions of Gloria Vanderbilt

Gloria V and Sidney Lumet

Gordon Parks photographed Gloria and Sidney Lumet on their wedding day, August 28, 1956.

Unseen Lartigue

Unseen photographs by Jacques Henri Lartigue in two exhibitions curated by Paul Smith and Michael Hoppen

Wes Anderson and Jacques Henri Lartigue

Wes Anderson openly acknowledged French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue1 as a source of creative inspiration.

Photo of Abel Gance by Lartigue (A silent film master who filmed Napoleon and Beethoven’s Great Love, among others.).

Jacques H. Lartigue

See more photos by Lartigue here

Jean Cocteau and Picasso 1955 – photo by Lartigue

Marie Curie’s
Sex scandal?
(photo by Fung Lin Hall from the supermarket rack).

Stephen Hawking (previous post)

See more March 14 birthdays here.

(Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer – photo by Alfred Eisenstaed)

Einstein and Tagore

On July 14, 1930, Albert Einstein welcomed into his home on the outskirts of Berlin the Indian philosopher, musician, and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. The two proceeded to have one of the most stimulating, intellectually riveting conversations in history.

Portrait of Francine Du Plessix Gray by Balthus and Man Ray.

(Francine with her parents) became a cover photo of her book “Them”.

Francine Du Plessix Gray passed away

Francine du Plessix Gray (1933–2019)

Francine du Plessix Gray, the French-American reporter, critic, novelist, and feminist known for her elegance and unsparingness in chronicling issues of the self and beyond, died in Manhattan on Sunday from complications of congestive heart failure. She was eighty-eight years old.

Gray’s upbringing was defined by both entitlement and loss. Born to a French father and a Russian mother in Warsaw’s French embassy in 1933, Gray emigrated from France to New York with her mother, Tatiana Yakovleva, after her father’s plane was shot down by fascists near Gibraltar in 1940. In New York, Yakovleva—once a muse for the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky—married socialite and future Condé Nast director Alexander Liberman and eventually became a prolific milliner for Saks Fifth Avenue. Gray recounted her complex childhood and family life in 2006’s Them: A Memoir of Parents, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Paris Review – Francine and sorrel soup.

Gore Vidal on “At Home With The Marquis de Sade – (A Life) by Francine Du Plessix Gray

“It was brilliant idea of Francine du Plessix Gray to re-create not so much the “Monster” who was to become, somber fate, an adjective but the actual man who spent so much of his time in prisons… thanks not only to his sexual capers but, also, to a real-life monster, his mother-in-law, who would have walked off with Les Liaisons Dangereuses had the author dared cast her.
“This is an elegant, enlightend Enlightenment study of a powerful sexual imagination trapped in the mere human body, not to mention the Bastille from which it would take a revolution to free him—and us, his unborn readers.”

Nina Leene died on Jan 1, 1995. (New Yorker – the Surreal World of Nina Leen)

Nobody knows how old the Russian-born photographer Nina Leen was when she died, in 1995. Judging from her obituary, information about Leen is scarce. She lived in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland before moving to the U.S., where she became one of Life magazine’s first female photographers, in the nineteen-forties. She shot countless assignments for the magazine, including more than fifty cover stories, and produced fifteen photo books. Her most well-known subjects were animals (including her dog Lucky), American women and adolescents, and the Irascibles, a group of abstract artists, including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.

Nina Leen bio with a photo of the Irascibles here .

A squirrel wearing a baby doll’s dress.

(Jacky with baby Caroline)

Nina Leen’s portrait by Gordon Parks.

Jocelyn and Marlon (sister and brother) in 1948 – photo by Lisa Larsen.

(Photo of Lisa Larsen by Rodney Williams)
Lisa Larsen won awards as “Life” photographer , died of breast cancer at age of 34.

Laos
photo by Lisa Larsen

(Marlon Brando 1948 – photo by Lisa Larsen)

Alfred Eisenstaedt – Chronicler of the Century was born on Dec 6, 1898.

(Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer – photo by Alfred Eisenstaed)

Monovision

Arnold Genthe (January 8, 1869 – August 9, 1942) was a German photographer, best known for his photos of San Francisco’s Chinatown, the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and his portraits of noted people, from politicians and socialites to literary figures and entertainment celebrities.

Self Portrait
Arnold Genthe(Wiki shows Jack London)

His photograph of the earthquake’s aftermath, Looking Down Sacramento Street, San Francisco, April 18, 1906, is his most famous photograph.

Greta Garbo
Introduction to Arnold Genthe

An example of Genthe’s portrait style can be seen in his 1925 photographs of Greta Garbo. Shot in Genthe’s New York studio, this series of photographs are dark and dramatic portraits of Garbo early in her American career, emphasizing her eyes and neck. Genthe credited his photographs of Garbo with launching the actress’s American career.

Lovely Edna
(Edna St.Vincent Millay 1914)

Ruth St. Denis in Omika, c.1913

Paris View – the Missing Images of Chinese Immigrants

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Long Beach, Long Island, New York, circa 1921. “Anna (Denzel) Duncan dancing.”

Helena Almeida (1934 – 25 September 2018) was a Portuguese artist known for her work in photography, performance art, body art, painting and drawing.

wiki

artnet

Helena Almeida
We Find Wildness (blog)

Art Seen Chicago

Tom Clark, 2010. Poet – photo by John Sarsgard

Beyond the Pale an extraordinary blog by Tom Clark.

Tom Clark Renowned Poet and Biographer dies in North Berkeley traffic collision.

Jacket Interview
(Tom Clark thought Ron Padgett was a far superior poet of my generation.. )
Ron Padgett and Paterson – (scroll down)

Samuel Beckett – My Family with extraordinary photos from Jakarta Indonesia here (from Tom Clark’s blog)

The Woman Who invented Robert Capa

Google Gerda
Google honors Gerda Taro, a pioneering female war photographer Gerda Taro

Widely considered the first female photojournalist to cover a war, she was also the first to die doing so.

Gerda Taro

(Photo of Robert Capa by Gerta Taro on the right)

Louis Armstrong working on his autobiography. (1958, Corona Queens – photo by Dennis Stock)

Dennis Stock :born July 24,1928, The Bronx, New York City, NY (Magnum Photos)

Louis and Billie Holiday (Previous post)

Simone

Simone Signoret and Yves Montand (An Oscar for 1960 film “Room at the Top” directed by Jack Clayton)

Billy Wilder

Jack Lemmon

James with pig photo by Dennis Stock

James Dean (previous post)

Dennis watched in horror as Jimmy took off his boots and climbed into a bronze casket. He crossed his arms and shouted, “Shoot.”
Dennis refused, saying that it was in bad taste, and suggested Jimmy get out of the casket before someone came in.
Implicit in the series of photos was Jimmy’s dark side, coupled with his desire to be close to his mother, who had died when he was nine years old.

Dennis Stock How he came to know and love the doomed screen idol.

Nusch Eluard
The combustive Nusch Eluard Born: June 21, 1906

René Char – Lucidity is the Wound Closest to the Sun

René Char with Picasso
Protesting with Picasso on the heights of the Mont Ventoux against the nuclear installations.

Resistance in Every way

obéissez à vos cochons qui existent;
j’obéis à mes dieux qui n’existent point.

obey your pigs who exist;
I obey my gods who do not.

Coffee & Cigarettes, Cafe Society

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Simone de Beauvoir – Paris with Sartre, Chicago with Nelson Algren.

(Picasso, Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus and Picasso’s dog)