The trailer for Channel 4’s ‘Born Risky: Grayson Perry’, a four-part short-form series with artist Grayson Perry discussing gender expression and gender identity.
Eudorah M. Moore on Craft
I don’t think that there is any question but that there is an ongoing art/craft controversy. My point of view about this is the fact that the entire creative act is one. My feeling is that the term ‘art’ actually is an accolade. It doesn’t have anything to do with intent, really. This person is an artist. And, to me, that person can be a craftsperson, maybe a potter, for instance. But some of the people who practice in those different categories are artists. And then, many people who paint and make paintings are not really artists at all. So, my feeling is that the word ‘artist’ is an accolade that is given by others. And the word ‘craftsman’ is a noble word from my point of view because it bears back to tradition and to the formation of all objects of use with which we surrounded ourselves.
Lost in the Memory Palace: Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller
William Klein: In Pictures
‘Almost everything is coincidence and luck and chance.’ William Klein is one of the twentieth century’s most important photographers and film-makers and in this interview for Tate Media, he discusses his experience photographing on the streets of New York, the challenges in publishing his first New York book and how he worked with filmmaker Federico Fellini.
Daido Moriyama: In Pictures
Daido Moriyama uses an ordinary compact camera and never stops shooting. The artist is the most celebrated photographer to emerge from the Japanese Provoke movement of the 1960s.
From Lens To Photo: Sally Mann Captures Her Love
Photos by Sally Mann; Produced by Bilal Qureshi and Claire O’Neill
From NPR’s All Things Considered, an interview by Melissa Block with Sally Mann about her work and series ‘Proud Flesh’
It’s almost dreamlike the way we move; each one of us knew what we had to do and we weren’t talking. But there was something very quiet, very loving about the whole process — his willingness to go through it and also his encouragement of me.
– Sally Mann
Photos © Sally Mann
An excerpt NPR’s All Things Considered:
Down in her photography studio close by the house, there are lots of windows and a pungent chemical smell. — ether.
Sally says it smells like her art.
It’s here that she took some of her latest photographs of Larry, moody black and white nude studies of his form.
“It’s almost oneiric, it’s almost dreamlike the way we move; each one of us knew what we had to do and we weren’t talking,” Sally says. “But there was something very quiet, very loving about the whole process — his willingness to go through it and also his encouragement of me.”
Sally photographed Larry using a cumbersome process that goes back to the 1850s: collodion wet plate, creating a large-format negative image on glass, not film.
She shoots with antique view cameras from the early 1900s, the kind where you duck under a cloth to take the picture. They have hulking wooden frames, accordion-like bellows and long brass lenses held together with tape, with mold growing inside. She says she loves that. It softens the light, makes the pictures timeless.
“I’m just the opposite of a lot of photographers who want everything to be really, really sharp and they’re always stopping it down to F64 and they like detail and they look with their magnifying glass to make sure everything’s really sharp,” she says. “I don’t want any of that. I want it to be mysterious.”
And the mystery comes through in the images — an intimate series called “Proud Flesh” — with milky light and shadow playing across her husband’s body.
Sally photographed Larry using a cumbersome process that goes back to the 1850s — collodion wet plate, which creates a large-format negative image on glass, not film. These are some of the chemicals used in the process.
Sally says a good picture often comes at the expense of the sitter. That exploitation is at the root of it, even when it’s your husband.
“And he was willing to make himself so vulnerable,” she says. “Cause the series wasn’t so much about his illness and the degradation of his body and muscle as it was just a paean, just a love story. But you couldn’t avoid looking at the waste of his right leg and his left arm. And he was completely willing to show that, which is extraordinary.”
Sally says they didn’t talk about the process very much.
“I’ll be interested to hear what he says about, as a matter of fact, isn’t that funny?” she says. “No, we didn’t talk about it — we just started taking the pictures. He would say, ‘Let’s take some pictures this week.’ He would always encourage it. He’s really brave.”