Showing posts with label 30's. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 30's. Show all posts

8/19/10

two things that I'll never forget


light play: black white and grey, by Laszlo Moholy Nagy



...Moholy-Nagy's fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda commissioned him to design special effects for the science fiction film Things to Come. He was asked to make a film about the sex life of the lobster, at a time when David Attenborough was still a boy. A quizzical Moholy-Nagy spent several weeks on the Sussex coast getting to know the fishermen, grappling with their dialect, recording their families and close community. At the other end of the social spectrum, he took photographs for Bernard Fergusson's book Portrait of Eton and John Betjeman's Oxford University Chest. Where Sybil responded to 1930s England with an often explosive impatience at its snobbery, Moholy-Nagy remained unemotional, professional. The English class structure was the object of his fascinated observation.

But Moholy-Nagy was not totally cold-shouldered. He designed the publicity for Jack Pritchard's English modernist Isokon Furniture Company. One leaflet included a typically dreamlike small drawing of a figure floating in a bath, suggesting that a Breuer Long Chair gave a similar sensation. Imperial Airways commissioned him to design a mobile exhibition to tour the British empire in a railroad car, promoting the still-novel idea of air travel. He became display consultant for the menswear store Simpsons of Piccadilly, bemusing passersby with his abstract compositions of striped shirts and bowler hats. But these activities were desultory in relation to Moholy-Nagy's far-reaching design philosophy.


Is there anything this man didn't do? I really wonder how a conversation between hedi slimane and moholy nagy would play out.

12/2/09

fading canvas

'closed lids' erwin blumenfeld



'the style of michelle obama', by brian rae











... when minusing is more important than adding.


12/31/08

explain to me why

i like pictures and things that speak of their time, but when they completely transcend their era, i like them a little bit more.


1 - Gene Tierney, March 11, 1946
2 - Lea Seydoux, December 2008
3-Un Voyage en Italie, 1938

12/24/08

being natural is simply a pose

"There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love. There are simply different ways of doing it." man ray, 1948
...wonder, 'should surprise us again and again, appear to us as new, very different from what we knew...

12/2/08

the story is simply this

Two Prostitutes in Crib Windows 1934


mexico 1964


spain, barcelona barrio chino 1933


Henri Cartier-Bresson 1908-2004
"Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever."
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