Category: portraiture

Pablo Neruda: “Wet was the Light”

Photographer Unknown, (Wet was the Light), Model Unknown

“Green was the silence, wet was the light,
the month of June trembled like a butterfly.”
― Pablo Neruda

Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, known best by his pen name Pablo Neruda, was a Nobel Prize winning Chilean poet and diplomat. He became known nationally as a poet when he was thirteen years old, writing in various styles. He wrote surrealist poems, political manifestos, historical epics, an autobiography, and love poems of great passion. Often considered the national poet of Chile, Neruda wrote the collection “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair” in 1924 at the age of twenty. The poem above is from his collection “100 Love Sonnets”, published in 1959.

Richard Avedon: “The Force of It Grows So Strong”

Faces of Man: WP Photo Set Six

“I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense. . .symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people cone to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller- to find out how they are. So they are dependent on me. I have to engage them. Otherwise there is nothing to photograph. The concentration has to come from me and involve them.

Sometimes the force of it grows so strong that sounds in the studio go unheard. Time stops. We share a brief, intense intimacy. But it is unearned. It has no past. . .no future. And when the sitting is over- when the picture is done -there is nothing left except the photograph. . .the photograph and a kind of embarrassment. They leave. . .and I don’t known them. I have hardly heard what they have said.

If I meet them a waek later in a room somewhere, I expect they won’t recognize me. Because I don’t feel I was really there. At least the part of me that was. . .is now in the photograph. And the photographs hava a reality for me that the people don’t. It is through the photographs that I know them. Maybe it is in the nature of being a photographer. I am never really implicate. I don’t have to have any real knowledge. It is all a question of recognitions.”

― Richard Avedon

 

Omar Victor Diop

Omar Victor Diop, “A Moroccan Man (1913)”, 2014, Self-Portrait from the “Diaspora” Series

Senegalese self-taught photographer Omar Victor Diop’s portraits capture the diversity of modern African societies through the portraiture of its inhabitants by layering genres, color, and patterns to create stunningly vivid imagery. Grounding his practice in his childhood experiences in Dakar, Diop sites influences ranging from American popular culture to Arabic music.

Diop’s first conceptual project “Fashion 2112, The Future of Beauty”, featured at the Pan African Exhibition of the African Biennale of Photography of 2011 in Bamako, gained rapid recognition, which led him to committing to photography exclusively. In his series ” Studio of the Vanities”, he captures the young entrepreneurs of Africa’s urban culture, including fashion designers, visual artists, and models. Diop thoughtfully selects the backdrops, patterns, and apparel to emphasize his model’s personality and cultural attributions, while also collaborating with the subject on these decisions to portray an accurate portrait of their individuality.

Omar Victor Diop’s “Project Diaspora” is a series of elaborately stage portraits of himself in various historical guises. These are based on actual paintings form the 15th to the 19th centuries, but also refer to the contemporary world, even the world of football. The image above was based on an original 1913 painting by Catalan painter and watercolorist José Taprió y Baró, a close friend of painter Marià Fortuny with whom Baró shared an interest in Orientalism.

“It started with me wanting to look at these historical black figures who did not fulfil the usual expectations of the African diaspora insofar as they were educated, stylish and confident, even if some of them were owned by white people and treated as the exotic other. Individuals such as Albert Badin, a Swedish court servant in the 18th century or Juan de Pareja, who was a member of Velázquez’s household in the 17th century. I wanted to bring these rich historical characters into the current conversation about the African diaspora and contemporary issues around immigration, integration and acceptance.” -Omar Victor Diop, The Guardian, 2015

Insert Image: Omar Victor Diop, “The W/African Railway Strike 19”, 2017, “Liberty” Series, Color Print

Cinga Samson

Paintings by Cinga Samson

Educated in a shared art studio of South African painters in his early twenties, soon after deciding to dedicate his life to art, Cinga Samson has recently established himself as an important new voice in contemporary painting. His oil works on canvas manifest echoes of what he describes as the superstitions and spirituality integral to his upbringing in the town of Ethembeni and its surrounding countryside.

Desire, aspiration, and celebration of identity drive much of Samson’s work, for which he draws inspiration from fashion, heritage, and the works of Paul Gauguin and Andrew Wyeth, among others. Samson’s process incorporates the use of sketches and photo shoots; he carefully selects elements within a composition to be replaced with others in order to achieve a sensual equilibrium between the real, the imagined, and the accentuated.

The recipient of the 2017 Tollman Award for the Visual Arts, Cinga Samson  exhibited at the Armory Show, New York, in 2018.

Jordi Chicletol, “Jonatan Oliva”

Jordi Chicletol, “Jonatan Oliva”, Photo Shoot for Kaltblut Magazine

Barcelona nightlife connaisseur and radio program journalist, photographer and event promoter, Jordi Chicletol is audiovisual content creator and expert in contemporary phenomena and its manifestations. He is a collaborator of the In-Edit or Moritz Feed Dog festivals and responsible for the Chicletol Curated Sessions at the Apolo Club and other venues in Barcelona. Curator of youFonic performances and its panel discussions, Chicletol will also be teaching, with model and agitator Jon Gómez de la Peña, the visual communication workshop.

Danny Ferrell

Paintings by Danny Ferrell

Danny Ferrell is an artist living and working in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2014 he received a BFA from Penn State University in drawing and painting, and an MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016. Ferrell is represented by the Marinaro Gallery in New York City and Galerie Pact in Paris. He is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University, where he teaches drawing and painting. Ferrell has exhibited in New York City, Pittsburgh and the New England area.

Danny Ferrell was born in Flint, Michigan, and spent his formative years in rural Pennsylvania. In this deeply conservative area, most residents placed religion above all other virtues; the result was anyone deviating from religious law was treated as a herald of immorality. Ferrell’s love for other men violated the cultural norms, forcing him to conceal his identity as a gay person from those in the public sphere.

Consequently, his work represents fantasies and fears about the Other in the form of the queer male experience. By creating code homoerotic images of ubiquitous scenes that could appeal to mainstream audiences, the work is both universal and human. Ferrell admires Cadmus and Tooker and follows their lead to bring together the epic and banal in his work.

Bruce Weber, “Ian Mckellen and Friend”

Bruce Weber, “Ian McKellen and Friend (Peter Johnson)”

This image taken by Bruce Weber of Ian McKellen and Peter Johnson is from Weber’s book “The Chop Suey Club”  published by Arena Editions in 1999.

This book presents Bruce Weber’s collection of photographs mostly of Peter Johnson, a young man he met while shooting at a wrestling camp. Taken over a series of years, the photographs evolve in scope and involvement as the subject ages and grows more comfortable with the camera. It is a fascinating study of not only a young man coming of age, but of a photographers relationship with one subject over a period of time. Although an art photography book, the book’s compact size gives it a feel of a private journal rather than a glossy coffee table book. Published in a small edition, copies of the book are rare.

Robert Fulford: “Form and Order”

Photographers Unknown, Faces of Man: WP Photo Set Five

“The anthropologist Clifford Geertz says that humans are ‘symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking’ animals. In our species, he says, ‘the drive to make sense out of our experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and as pressing as the more familiar biological needs.’ To Geertz, a human being is an organism ‘which cannot live in a world it is unable to understand.”
― Robert Fulford, The Triumph of the Narrative

 

Agnolo Di Cosimo

Agnolo Di Cosimo (Agnolo Bronzino), “Saint Sebastian”, 1533, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain

Agnolo Di Cosimo, known as Agnolo Bronzino, was a prominent artist of the second-wave of Italian Mannerism in the middle of the sixteenth century. Born to a poor Florentine family in 1503, he started his art education at the age of eleven as a pupil of Raffaelino del Garbo, a Renaissance painter from Florence. In 1515 Bronzino undertook an apprenticeship in Florence with the man who would become his biggest artistic influence and, some say, adopted father: Jacopo Carucci, better known as Pontormo.

In 1525, Pontormo called upon his pupil Agnolo Di Cosimo to help with what would be Pontormo’s masterpiece, the  “Deposition from the Cross”. This altarpiece was painted in the Florentine church of Santa Felicità. Pontormo was commissioned to decorate the entire church with frescoes; in a testament to Pontormo’s trust in and affection for his pupil, Pontormo enlisted Di Cosimo to assist in the work.

After the Siege of Florence in 1530 which reinstalled the Medici family as rulers, Agnolo Di Cosimo fled to Urbino. There he was commissioned by the Duke of Urbino to paint a nude Cupid above an arch of the Imperiale vault. He was also commissioned by a prince of Urbino to paint his portrait. As Di Cosimo became known for his portraits, he became the official portraitist for the Medici family members. Di Cosimo is known mostly for these portraits, perhaps his greatest contribution to Italian Mannerism.

Agnolo Di Cosimo’s painting technicus is extremely controlled and meticulous, with immaculate attention to detail..His brushstrokes appear non-existent, which give his works, particularly his portraits, an extremely realistic, almost life-like appearance. Di Cosimo used the tehnique of chiaroscuro to bring attnetion to the light-colored figures in the painting, pushing them forward against the dark background. Chiaroscuro is an effect of contrasted light and shadow created by light falling unevenly or from a particular direction on the subject of the painting.

 

William Gass: “I Can See You for Miles”

His Butt: Beguiling the Senses and Enchanting the Mind: Photo Set Twenty-Nine

“As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks, I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour”
― William Gass

Alan Bennett Ilagan, “Dusty St. Amand”

Alan Bennett Ilagan, “Dusty St. Amand”, Date Unknown, Photo Shoot

Alan Bennett Ilagan is a freelance writer and amateur photographer who resides in upstate New York. A graduate of Brandeis University, Ilagan has been published in Instinct, xy magazine, Windy City Times, Q Northeast, Metroland, commUNITY, and ‘The Project for a New Mythology.’ He contributed to Michael Breyette’s ‘Summer Moved On’ and ‘Illustrated Men.’ He has been profiled in Unzipped, Genre, Diversity Rules! Magazine, and Upstate Magazine and has worked with photographers Steven Underhill and Dennis Dean.

Richard Avedon, “Edward Gorey”

Richard Avedon, “Edward Gorey”, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, October 18, 1992.

This photograph by Richard Avedon was used for Joan Acocella’s article entitled “Edward Gorey’s Enigmatic World” for the December 10, 2018 issue of the New Yorker.

For those Edward Gorey fans, which I admit to having been one since the time I could read, I highly recommend reading Acocella’s wonderful article about Gorey’s life, wit, and new biographical books now published.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/edward-goreys-enigmatic-world

 

Susan Sontag: “A Man Lives Through His Face”

Photographers Unknown, Faces of Man: A Collection: WP Set Four

“Women do not simply have faces, as men do; they are identified with their faces. Men have a naturalistic relation to their faces. Certainly they care whether they are good-looking or not. They suffer over acne, protruding ears, tiny eyes; they hate getting bald. But there is a much wider latitude in what is esthetically acceptable in a man’s face than what is in a woman’s. A man’s face is defined as something he basically doesn’t need to tamper with; all he has to do is keep it clean. He can avail himself of the options for ornament supplied by nature: a beard, a mustache, longer or shorter hair. But he is not supposed to disguise himself. What he is “really” like is supposed to show. A man lives through his face; it records the progressive stages of his life. And since he doesn’t tamper with his face, it is not separate from but is completed by his body – which is judged attractive by the impression it gives of virility and energy.”
― Susan Sontag