Tag: photography

Franz Betz: Music History

Photographer Unknown, “Franz Betz in His Role as Wotan”, 1876

Born in March of 1835 at the Rhine River city of Mainz, Germany, Franz Betz was a bass-baritone opera singer known for his performances in operas by Richard Wagner. He received his training in the city of Karlsruhe, home of the Baden State Theatre opera house. Betz made his debut, at the age of twenty-one, in 1856 at the Court Theater of Hanover in Wagner’s “Lohengrin”, part of the “Knight of the Swan”legend, but most recognizable for the”Bridal Chorus”, still played at weddings today.

Framz Betz’s successful performance in 1859 at the Berlin State Opera, singing the role of Don Carlo in Giuseppe Verdi’s “Emani”, resulted in a permanent contract with the company and his becoming one of Wagner’s most trusted singers. He sang the role of Hans Sachs in the world premier of Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nümberg” at Munich in 1868, eventually singing the role over one hundred times.

Im May of 1872, Betz was one of the four soloists in the performance of “Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony” to mark the laying of the foundation stone for the Bayreuth Festival Theater, built by Richard Wagner for the sole use of his works. At the Beyreuth Theater in 1876, Betz sang the role of Wotan in the operas “Das Rheingold” and “Die Ring des Nibelungen”.

Franz Betz continued to sing lyric and lyric-dramatic roles well into his career as a singer of Wagner’s operas. For instance, he sang, in the same season of 1863, both the role of Telramund, a heavy dramatic part, and the lyric part of Valentin in “Faust”. Betz’s voice deepened as he grew older; and in consequence, Wagner added to his operas the role of König Marke, a lyrical bass role without a low tessitura and, in the same year, the role of Wotan. Betz’s enormous repertoire ranged from the roles of Don Giovanni and Wolfram, through Pizarro and Posa, to the roles of Holländer, Amonasro, Sachs and Wotan, expanding finally to Falstaff in 1894. 

During the period from 1882 to 1890, Betz held the position of president of the German trade union for stage artists, technicians and administrative staff, the Genossenschaft Deutscher Bühren-Angelhöger. Although singing in a few London concerts in 1882 and 1889, he never sang elsewhere outside of Germany. Franz Betz died in Berlin on the 11th of August in 1900 and is buried at the Protestant Wilhelm Memorial Cemetery in the Westend district of Berlin.

Note: The photographs show Franz Betz as Wotan, bearded and with shield,  in Richard Wagner’s opera “Die Ring des Nibelungen” performed in Bayreuth. The photo card is entitled Costume Portraits of the Bayreuther Festival Thater, and was published by Joseph Albert, Munich, in 1876. 

Top Insert Image: Loescher & Petsch, “Franz Betz”, circa 1870, Cardstock Photo, 8.6 x 5.5 cm, Kunstbibliothek, Berlin

Bottom Insert Image: Verlog von J. Albert, “Franz Betz as Wotan”, Costüm Portraits, 1876, Card Stock Photo, Berlin

Julien Duval

Julien Duval, “Port  and City of Rovinj, Croatia”, Date Unknown

Julien Duval, a professional photographer specializing in travel photography, interior design, and music photography, is based in Zagreb, the capital city of Croatia. Born in Normandy in western France, he lived most of his life in Besançon, located in eastern France close to the border with Switzerland. Duval majored in geography, obtaining a Masters degree in geography and started a PhD at the University of Franche-Comte in France. 

Julien Duval, upon changing his field of study to photography, spent three years of  study in Paris. Photographers that he admires include Finish portrait photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen, American photo-journalist Steve McCurry, landscape photographer Max Rive from the Netherlands, and Croatian photographer Tošo Dabac, best known for his social photography of the1930s. 

Combining his photography and geography skills with his desire to travel, Duval  travels, preferably to remote places, to capture the beauty and simplicity of nature with his camera. Recent travels have taken him to the Plitvice Lakes National Park on the Croatian coast, the rural areas of Iceland, the streets of New York City, and the still less-visited national park of Durmitor in northern Croatia. His clients include tourist boards and agencies, hotels, corporate work, and global music festivals.

The artist’s site is located at: https://www.julienduvalphoto.com

Frederick Evans, “Aubrey Beardsley”

Frederick Evans, “Aubrey Beardsley (With Hands)”, 1893, Platinum Print and Photogravure, Wilson Center for Photography, London

Born in London in June of 1853, Frederick H. Evans was a British photographer known fo his images of architectural subjects. Before becoming a full-time photographer in 1898, he was a bookseller. While working as a clerk in London’s breweries, Aubrey Beardsley spent his lunch breaks browsing in Evan’s second-hand bookshop, developing his artistic and literary tastes from the wide variety of books.

As a result of his visits, Aubrey Beardsley became close friends with Frederick Evans, who was developing his photographic technique of monochrome printing involving a platinum process. Using his new process, Evans shot this portrait of Beardsley in 1893.

This portrait of Aubrey Beardsley was used in the editions of his early published works and has become the defining image of the artist. It became known as the ‘gargoyle portrait’, for Beardsley’s pose resembles the famous carved figure on the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. 

Born in August of 1872, Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was an English author and illustrator. His black ink drawings were influenced by Japanese woodcuts, and emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler. Beardsley’s contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau and poster styles was significant despite his early death from tuberculosis in March of 1898, at the age of twenty-five.

Image reblogged with many thanks to a great photographic history site: https://artblart.com

Be Creative

Photographer Unknown, (Be Creative)

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”

—-Jim Jarmusch, MovieMaker Magazine #53-Winter, January 22, 2004

Image reblogged with many thanks to: https://theskywaspunk.tumblr.com

Sergio Larrain

Sergio Larrain: The Valparaiso Series

Born in Santiago, Chile, Sergio Larrain was an experimental photographer, considered to be the most important of the Chilean photographers. His depictions of his homeland in the 1950s and1960s were taken with a documentarian’s instinct, the scenes creatively presented with vertical frames, deep shadows and low angles. Most notable were Larrain’s intense images of the children of Santiago living on the banks of the Mapocho River and his series of images which captured the mood of late 1950s London.

After studying music and forestry in the United States, Sergio Larrain, with the assistance of a British Council scholarship, traveled to Europe and the Middle East, working for various European magazines, joining the staff of the Brazilian magazine “O Cruzeiro” in 1956. The images he shot in London during his travels caught the attention of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who, a founding member of Magnum Photos, invited Larrain to join the international photographic collective. 

Sergio Larrain joined Magnum Photos in 1959 as an associate, becoming a full member in 1961. After that, Larrain worked in photography professionally for only ten years until 1972. A follower of the Bolivian philosopher Oscar Ichazo, he  retreated from public and professional life to live in the remote mountain village of Tulahuén, where he took up meditation and the art of calligraphy. Sergio Larrain died in Tulahuén on February 7th of 2012.

Of the four photographic books published in Larrain’s lifetime, “Valparaiso”, published in 1991, made the greatest impression on the public and fellow photographers. Sergio Larrain began photographing the famous Chilean port of Valparaiso throughout the 1950s. In 1963, he returned, accompanied by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, to spend more time in the city, exploring and photographing the bohemian lifestyle of the port-side neighborhoods.

Sergio Larrain’s “Valparaiso” was republished in 1993 as an extended edition of the work, which included photographs from the series he had taken in the 1950s. In 2016, a new edition of the work was released by Xavier Barral Editions of Paris which included eighty unpublished images and Larrain’s handwritten and typed notes, letters, and drawings. Through these texts, Sergio Larrain expressed his emotions and his faith in the importance of yoga meditation, revealing the sensitivity extended throughout his work.

Note: Upon being developed, a set of Sergio Larrain’s photographs shot in the 1950s outside Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris revealed that a couple, unnoticed at the time of the shoot, was in the frame. This discovery provided the inspiration for Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar’s 1959 short story “The Devil’s Drool”, which in turn inspired Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 classic mystery thriller “Blow-Up”.

Top Insert Image: Sergio Larrain, “School Boys, Santiago, Chile”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Magnum Photos

Middle Insert Image: Rene Burri, “Sergio Larrain, Paris”, 1967, Gelatin Silver Print, Magnum Photos

Bottom Insert Image: Sergio Larrain, “El 45, Bar in Balparaíso. Chile”, 1963, Gelatin Silver Print

Brenton Parry

Photography by Brenton Parry

Brenton Parry is a graphic designer with over twenty years of experience ranging from logos and stationary to posters and catalogues. Photography, a passion instilled by his father, has over the last fifteen years developed into a major part of his life. Parry’s male figure photography has resulted in two solo gallery exhibitions, work in two group exhibitions, a series of soft-cover male photography books published by Blurb Books, and a continuing series of downloadable male photography booklets.

Residing in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, Brenton Parry works in Australia and worldwide. In 2014, he photographed the Sydney Stingers, the city’s LGBTI-inclusive water polo team to promote their annual trivia fundraising night in the Star Observer online magazine. Parry has also done product work for ASICS Sportswear and Footwear, Shimano Fishing Australia, and other companies.

More information, prints for purchase, and downloadable booklets can be found at the artist’s site located at: https://www.brentonparry.com

Elys Berroteràn, “Nicolas Quevedo”

Elys Berroteràn, “Nicolas Quevedo”, Photo Shoot for “Kaltblut.” Magazine, September, 2020

Born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1991, Elys Berroteràn is a photographer, fashion designer, model and actor. He started his career in fashion modeling and television commercial appearances. Deciding to make the fashion industry his career, Berroteràn formed Caracas Fashion in 2009, which, under his direction, is now one of the largest fashion showcases in Venezuela. One of his latest photography projects is “Moda Caracas Moda”, running the current fashion campaign “Born to be Wild”. 

Nicolas Quevedo is a model signed with the fashion and talent company Grupo 4 Colombia. 

Images reblogged with many thanks to the fashion magazine“Kaltblut.”, located online at https://www.kaltblut-magazine.com

Many thanks for inspiring this post to https://doctordee.tumblr.com

Sid Avery

 

Sid Avery, “Rock Hudson at Home in North Hollywood”, Date Unknown, 1950-1979, Silver Gelatin Print

Sid Avery, a Hollywood photographer, was known for capturing the private moments of stars like Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean and Audrey Hepburn. His work in the 1950’s and 60’s was a departure from the glamorized, soft-focus portraits of an earlier Hollywood era when images of the stars were tightly controlled by the major studios. He showed celebrities on the movie set between takes and away from the job, relaxing with the family or engaged in household chores. Among his candid photographs are ones of Marlon Brando taking out the garbage, Rock Hudson emerging from the shower to take a phone call, and Audrey Hepburn riding her bike at Paramount Studios with a shaggy Yorkshire terrier in the basket.

The established stars, used to the old system, were not easily convinced to let a photographer document them in their unvarnished private lives, but Avery succeeded where others failed—he managed to get in where no one else could—and he soon became the man magazine editors and art directors called on for their candid photo layouts. Avery’s most effective tool was not his technical skill as a photographer, but his personality. His friendly, unassuming style put his subjects at ease and made them open up.

Among Avery’s first odd jobs as a young man was that of taking glamour shots of the chorus girls at Earl Carroll’s Vanities and the Florentine Gardens. When drafted into the Army, Avery was assigned to the Signal Corps and selected to receive six months of training at LIFE in New York before being sent overseas. Stationed in London, he was placed in charge of the Army Pictorial Service Laboratory, where all the still and combat footage coming out of the European theater passed through his hands. When Avery returned to Hollywood after the war, he was ready for the photo journalism boom. Avery eventually became one of the top advertising photographers in Los Angeles, moving from still photography into directing television commercials and receiving numerous awards.

In the eighties, Avery redirected his energies toward preserving the history of Hollywood as depicted in still photography, founding the non-profit Hollywood Photographers Archive which was donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts. Avery then rebuilt the collection which still thrives today, the Motion Picture and Television Photo Archive (mptv Images), representing over fifty of Hollywood’s best-known photographers. Avery’s photographs have been exhibited all over the world, from Australia to Japan to England and throughout Europe.

My thanks to Becker-Minty for the information on Sid Avery: https://www.beckerminty.com/art/

 

Fabio Dolce

Photographer Unknown, Fabio Dolce: Underwater Dance

Born in Palermo, Sicily, Fabio Dolce started dancing at eleven years of age with ballroom dances. At sixteen, he began his ballet training and contemporary dance at the “Teatro Massimo di Palermo, later participating in several years of competitive Latin ballroom dancing. Dolce completed his studies of ballet at the National Academy of Rome. joining upon graduation the Cannes Jeune Ballet where he danced works by choreographers Jean-Christophe Maillot, George Balachine, Marc Ribaud, and Edward Cook. 

Joining the CCN Ballet de Lorraine at age twenty-one, Dolce performed for nine years, dancing a varied repertoire of works by Emanuel Gat, Merce Cunningham, and Vronislava Nijinska, among others. At thirty years old, he joined DeNada Dance Theater in 2017 for the company’s second national tour of  choreographer Carlos Pons Guerra’s seductive and provocative “Ham and Passion”, where Dolce  danced the roles of Anna in “Passionaria” and the role of Maria in “O Maria”. 

After working internationally for many years, Fabio Dolce is now a freelance dance artist, choreographer, and teacher, working in England and France. In France, he is a collaborative director with the dance company Antonino Ceresia, seeking funding for the new work “La Commedia Divino”. Dolce is also involved with the EU funded project “Lifelong Dancing”, a series of learning pathways about dance for adult educators.

Fabio Dolce’s website is located at: http://fabiodolce.com

Gian Paolo Barbieri

 

Gian Paolo Barbieri: Tahiti Photogrpahs, Silver Gelatin Prints

Born in Milan, Italy, in 1938, Gian Paolo Barbieri is a self-taught fashion photographer, whose professional career started with a short  apprenticeship to Harper’s Bazaar photographer Tom Kublin. In 1963, Barbieri had some images published in the Italian fashion magazine Novità, which later became Vogue Italia in 1965. 

As fashion photography had not been fully created in the 1960s, Barbieri had the unique opportunity to create a new style, with its makeup, hairstyles, and jewelry. After opening his own Milan studio in 1964, working both in Milan and Paris, he began to develop creative  relationships with fashion designer Walter Albini and Valentino Garavani, who with Barbieri was responsible for innovating modern fashion advertising campaigns. In 1965, Barbieri shot his first cover for Italian Vogue. 

An analog photographer who does not retouch his images, Gian Barbieri became a travel photographer in the 1990s. When Vogue magazine sent him to Tahiti for a photographic reportage, he found  more than just an exotic island. Like other children who sailed the South Seas through film and books by Melville and James Cook, he saw a dream-like unknown world. Barbieri’s photographs of the Polynesia culture, focusing on their tattoos, became a record of the unspoken language left on the skin of the Tahitian people. These images were collected and published in the photographic hard-cover art book “Tahiti Tattoos”, by Taschen Press in 1998. 

Gina Paolo Barbieri was awarded in 1968 the Biancmano Prize as Best Italian Photographer. He was named one of the fourteen best international fashion photographers by the German magazine Stern in 1978.

Gerardo Vizmanos

Gerardo Vizmanos, “Matthew Gillmore”, Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, Colorado, Date Unknown

Born in a small town in Spain, Gerardo Vizmanos is a photographer based in London and New York. He first studied law and worked, upon graduation, for law firms and companies in Europe and the United States. His interest in photography led him to study in 2010 for his Master’s in the Photography program at Centro Univesitario de Artes TAI in Madrid. Conflicts arose between photography and work, leading to his major decision to pursue photography as a career. Upon winning the International Talent Support contest in Trieste, Italy, he took his awarded scholarship in 2012 to study at New York’s School of Visual Arts. 

An openly gay artist, Vizmanos’s work revolves around the denial of set social constructions, including those of gender, that have become part of our societal existence, and the focusing on the essence of a human being. Born into a world where gay men are typically accepted only when they hide behind socially constructed roles, Vizamonos exposes his own experiences as a gay man through his work, while also presenting an inherent study of gay sexuality through his male subjects. 

Vizamos’s first work after the School of Visual Arts was entitled “No One”, which presented the idea of living without being someone. His first solo exhibition, the “Hidden Subject” series, presented as an installation with large-format images in dialogue with each other, concentrated on the idea of latent sexuality.The “Unidentified” series, shot during a period of personal struggles, dealt with the idea that grieving can be defeated only by going through the pain. He also shot a series called “Subject Matter(s)” which also dealt with body movement, nudity and sexuality, showing that clothes are just an addition to the natural condition of the human body.

Charles Robert Gatewood

Photographs by Charles Gatewood

Born in November of 1942 in Elgin, Illinois, Charles Robert Gatewood attended the University of Missouri, earning a degree in anthropology. It was during his first year of graduate work at the university that he began his photographic work. Studying sociology at the University of Stockholm, Gatewood apprenticed with a group of documentary photographers, worked as a darkroom technician, and began shooting photos of jazz artists on tour.

After returning to the United States in 1966, Gatewood settled in New York City, where he worked at the Jaffe-Smith photography studio in Greenwich Village. He was hired in 1969 as a staff photographer for the weekly The Manhattan Tribune, covering the upper West Side. It was at this time that he started freelancing assignments for Time magazine, The New York Times, and Rolling Stone magazine. Gatewood’s first major celebrity photograph “Dylan with Sunglasses and Cigarette” was taken at a 1966 Swedish news conference and syndicated to publications worldwide.

Gatewood continued to work as a freelancer for Rolling Stone, producing,, among other works, a series of portraits of the writer William S. Burroughs in the early 1970s, and covering political demonstrations, Gay Pride celebrations, and Manhattan’s downtown music and arts scene. He gravitated toward photographing extreme behavior, extreme people and extreme situations, with particular interest in the annual New Orleans’ Mardi Gras.

The gritty, often sexually explicit, photographs taken by Gatewood were rejected my many publishers  before the small New York publishing house Strawberry Hill agreed to publish his “Sidetripping” in 1975. The book’s photos are a first-hand account of the 1960s and 70s counter-couture with an introduction and narrative by William Burroughs. It was in the mid 1970s that the majority of his famous celebrity portraits were taken including Andy Warhol, Sly Stone, Etta James, Carlos Santana, and Bernado Berolucci. 

From 1978 to 1987, Gatewood lived near Woodstock, New York, working in Manhattan and elsewhere. His photos from this period include social protests, outlaw bikers, nature photos, and portraits, including Quentin Crisp and dark comedy writer Michael O’Donoghue. Gatewood was awarded a grant in 1984 by the New York State Arts Council to publish his book “Wall Street”, which was recieved  the Lieca Medal of Excellence for Outstanding Humanistic Photojournalism. In 1987, Gatewood relocated to San Francisco, spending the years from 1998 to 2010 as photographer for the tattoo magazine “Skin and Ink”.

Gatewood’s many photo collections include the 1977 “People in Focus”, “Primitives” in 1992, and the 1999 “Badlands”. He was the subject of two film documentaries: Mark and Dan Jury’s “Dances Sacred and Profane” in 1985, and Bill MacDonald’s “Forbidden Photographs: The Life and Work of Charles Gatewood” in 2003. Charles Gatewood died in San Francisco on April 28, 2016, at the age of seventy-three, after sustaining injuries in a fall from his balcony three weeks earlier. An apparent suicide, Gatewood left three notes behind.

Konstantin Sorokin

Konstantin Sorokin, “Aboulfeit Djibrine Musa”, Photo Shoot

Konstantin Sorokin is a Moscow based photographer specializing on fashion and portraits. Besides his creative activities, he is actively sharing the experience of photography by teaching students and organizing seminars and lectures in different cities worldwide. 

Images reblogged with thanks to: https://celebswhogetslepton.tumblr.com

Cormac McCarthy: “The Sky to the North Had Darkened”

Photographer Unknown, (Imminent Storm)

“By early evening all the sky to the north had darkened and the spare terrain they trod had turned a neuter gray as far as the eye could see. They grouped in the road at the top of a rise and looked back. The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place n the iron dark of the world.” 

—Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses