Undercover: Louis Stettner, Enrique G de la G

Louis Stettner, Tuilleries (1997)

Enrique G de la G, Beso (2009)

Intervention

Ella9

NY

Louis Stettner: Seagull, Twin Towers (1979)  |  First plane before crash 11/9 (2001)

Grimaldi sur l'amour

Mon ancien professeur Nicolas Grimaldi et l'ancien amant de Carla Bruni parlent de l'amour  ... 

Cela me rappelle que je ne peux pas retarder plus la lecture des livres de Grimaldi sur Proust (sur l'amour et sur la jalousie), hélas!

Madelaine and gelato al limon

For those nostalgic days, nothing better than Proust's madelaine.

Is such a madelaine a real impossibility? Is nostalgia produced because you do flirt with a chimera, of what could had been if...? Flirting is such a bittersweet feeling, similar to nostalgia: some nervous -- or painful -- happiness.

If you feel nostalgic, there is always música ranchera or Jacques Brel to worsen it. There is even a gelato al limon. Ah, the great Paolo Conte... He managed to transform a happy, green ice into a sad stuff. Like nostalgia: it turns completely over happy memories and smiling feelings.

(If it weren't for the microphone, you would think that this clip was recorded yesterday, but it is more than 30 years old, which makes me peruse the nostalgia caused by my own age: what if my past had been different...? Right, it would not be me now. What easy it is to utter it.)

Ah, the wildly musical Hebrew language... (Is it again a chimera or plain hope?)

Behlín: Fashion vs Naked

There is that great hit by "Pulp" called Underwear, with witty lyrics:

If fashion is your trade,

then when you are naked

I guess you must be unemployed, yeah...

 Today, Behlín is becoming "world capital" of fashion: Fashion Week (aka Fashion Weak) and Bread & Butter, and who knows what else is going on in this crazy city.

Just if Zoe Duchesne comes, I will attend...

Foto: Sports Illustrated

Vivian Maier: Sleep

If you haven't heard about Vivian Maier, you definitely have to check out her story, although there is no much information available.

She was a French girl who came to Chicago in the early 1930's, seems that she had not a family or they had no strong bounds. It seems that she had no formal education, could barely write (in French). She worked most of her life as a nanny, among other little jobs. But her passion has the photography. She took around 100,000 pictures, which she left on her unpaid flat when she got old and sick. The boxes containing the films were sold in an auction, a young guy called John Maloof found them and started checking them. And it is one of the most vast and incredible treasures of street photography, covering many decades. At some point, Maloof -- who had no idea about photography -- got very curious about this woman, googled her and found out that she had died a few days before. (For more details, see this video.)

I made a selection of the 'Sleeping Beauties' she found in Chicago, California and elsewhere. And am afraid that she is getting on my personal ranking as high as her countryman Cartier-Bresson. I just love her work!

Ganas de vivir

"No se podía estar quieto. Había hecho el intento de dormir un rato para apaciguarse, pero el sueño se le había ido. También se le había ido el hambre. No tenía ganas de nada. Sólo de vivir".

Juan Rulfo, ¡Diles que no me maten!

 Fotos: Elliot Erwitt, St. Tropez (1959)

Pushcarts: Francis Alÿs, Alain Delorme

Francis Alÿs is a Belgian artist who has been working in Mexico City for the last twenty years or so. I first bumped into him when I discovered his series of pushcarts. The pics are cruelly urban.

 

Now, French photographer Alain Delorme is doing something similar in China, but with more poetic, harmonic colors.

"Nuit blanche"

Two years ago, I was daydreaming about being with my girl at the Café de Flore. Today, it's about the Café de Fiore.

Alexa Meade

Alexa Meade is an artist exploring new perspectives using body-painting made of acrylic. She paints people and things who stop looking like people and things, in order to reveal themselves as (im/expressionist) paintings. In doing so, she reduces three-dimensional objects to two-dimensional objects.

For my birthday I want a portrait by Alexa!

Three postcards from Hamburg

The Sartorialist recently said in a short, stimulating documentary film:

"I feel very lucky to get part of my day leading a visual life. (...) to go on just be in the world you are in, see it, keep your eyes open, and really relate to what you're seeing, react to what you're seeing".

I feel touched by his words, since I have became more and more conscious about the importance of visual life the last three or four years.

Obviously he refers to real world, but since I just wake up minutes ago and have seen just this flat where I am staying these days in Hamburg and, of course, the internet, I want to post three powerful images, two of the XIX century, one of yesterday.

When I saw this, I first thought it was a photograph. And I thought it was perfect in its composition. It is known that Maximilian brought the first photographers to Mexico, he was object of the first photographs in that country, and it is also known that the first photographers had a strong artistic education, mostly based on painting. So, it could be possible, that this dramatic composition had been captured by a master photographer. The black/white image did the trick.

But looking carefully it is just impossible to have such a drama in a picture, I thought. Indeed, it is rather a painting by French artist Jean-Paul Laurens called Les derniers moments de Maximilian (1882), which hangs in the Hermitage. It rather looks like this:

 

Then, while checking out the website of Hamburg's Kunsthalle to prepare my visit, I found this beautiful, minimal, super modern painting by Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810) called Hund, den Mond anbellend. In fact, you can barely see the moon, which is being mostly covered by a bank of clouds (cirrus and nimbus "wrongly" sorted).

Runge, Hund, den Mond anbellend (undated)

Later, in 1926, Miró painted the same motive in a very different way, also modern, but without that breaking spirit of Runge. Rufino Tamayo did the same in different occasions, but Runge's is still my favorite.

 Joan Miró, Perro ladrando a la luna (1926)

 Rufino Tamayo, Perro ladrando a la luna (?)

And finally, an image by The Sartorialist, a fashion-blogger, who took last week this picture of a boyish girl in Florence. Red shoes are definitely my favorite, and in this case the match with her lips, hair lace and wrist band is just perfect. Her most feminine and shy attitude contrasts completely with her masculine outfit and selbstbewusst elegance. A great shot!

The Sartorialist, Black, White, Red, Florence -- Cristina  (2011)

Waiting in Houston

I am waiting in Houston for my flight. I observe the people running with their shoes on their hands to catch their flight, security personal attending an alarm ("17, are we clear?"), a 35-year old silicon Barbie in pink, not a single book besides my "On Chesil Beach", but tons of huge foam cups with soft drinks, a Serbian woman speaking on her cell phone holding a DHL package under her arm (now I understand less and less).

I was checking the beauty of the outside world thanks to the services of Google Street View and 9-eyes, while listening to my fav new band, The National. I am a big fan of flying birds on first plane (sometimes it's about butterflies), and creepy horses in the cities, or running children...

 

On books

The new purse trend

Paris on the footsteps of Madonna

Marilyn reading her husband's work

Life: A bubble on the road

Jennifer Khoshbin, Life Bubble 

Photo Credit: Peter Stackpole

I felt Stefan Zweig was describing me and my life when I read this:

"Vielleicht ist unser wahrer Weg dies, dass wir immer am Wege sind, wehmütig zurückblickend und sehnsüchtig voraus immer nach Ruhe begehrend und immer noch ruhelos; denn immer ist nur dies ein heiliger Weg, dessen Ziel man nicht kennt und den man beharrlich doch schreitet, so wie wir hier ins Dunkle und Gefährliche schreiten diese Nacht und nicht kennen ihren Ausgang".

Der begrabene Leuchter. Eine Legende (1937)

Life: plans and dreams

"And they had so many plans, giddy plans, heaped up before them in the misty future, as richly tangled as the summer flora of the Dorset coast, and as beautiful. Where and how they would live, who their close friends would be, his job with their father's firm, her musical career and what to do with the money her father had given her, and how they would not be like other people, at least, not inwardly" (Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach).

Life is made of plans and dreams. A misunderstanding, a crime, a mistake, an accident, a disease, and they are gone or your life changes for ever.

I think of A, who always had "fiebre de horizontes". I think of M, who knew how to clear out the dust of such fevers. And of S, who fulfilled his own in a two-year-enterprise: he traveled by bike from Ushuaia to Bering Sea, and knows how to teach and defend the value of dreams.

Life is also made of phases. And transition is hard. C'est la vie.

Photo: Richard Avedon, "Suzy Parker and Robin Tattersall, robe de Dior", Place de la Concorde, Paris (1956).