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Photography

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Nobuyoshi Araki LOVE ON THE LEFT EYE

The insatiable Japanese photographer turns the loss of sight in one eye into a creative rebirth. In October of last year the uncompromising erotic photographer Nobuyoshi Araki lost the vision in his right eye from a retinal artery obstruction. As a result, the 74-year-old provocateur’s salacious new juxtapositions of naked girls and floral arrangements are half obscured, bringing his personal experience as close to the medium as possible. “I say to myself that I believe I should be able to see things differently,” says the controversial figure of the images curated from his latest show, Love On the Left Eye. The exhibition is the latest example of the man who has tied up Lady Gaga and published over 450 book’s voracious appetite for shooting the female form. “It feels something like looking through their body, as if I can see through women’s skin,” he says of his affinity with his subject. “I can look through her tits and see their back is curved.”   For Araki, who documented his honeymoon and the premature death of his wife in his 1991 series, Sentimental Journey/Winter Journey, his diaristic approach to photography is shot through with sex, grief and now, encroaching blindness. “When you lose something, you gain something else,” he says. “Something for the future, maybe.” Love On The Left Eye runs through June 21 at the Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo.

www.takaishiigallery.com

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Painting

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Bicleta Sem Freio FERA

Opening this coming weekend, March 5th through the 8th, 2015, at REXROMAE in London is the collective Bicleta Sem Freio’s first ever solo show, “FERA.”  Curated by JUSTKIDS’s Charlotte Dutoit the show will feature brand new work from the world acclaimed Brazilians Douglas de Castro and Renato Perreira.  The show’s title, “Fera,” means savage and perfectly portrays Bicicleta’s wild assault of color and beauty on the eyes, leaving one dazed not with pain or regret but ecstasy and respect. 

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Photography

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Emile Rafael GHOST TOWN

Excalibur is a 187 single-storey estate in Catford, South London. Completed in 1946 it is one of the very last remaining post-war era estates of its type, but it is soon to be gone for ever.  

Many of the Exaclibur Estate residents have been relocated and their dwellings boarded up. It remains an eerie and evocative place, full of ghosts and signs of a once thriving community, many of whom spent much of their lives here and were not wanting to leave.

The estate provided a location for Emile's Stubborn Heart film. 

http://cargocollective.com/helloemile

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Photography

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Brian Pescador KINGS OF THE CANYON

Palm Springs-based photographer Brian Pescador is leading a double life. By day he makes his living chopping locks and trimming beards as a travelling barber, and by night (also quite often during the day, but presumably when he’s not cutting hair) he’s an incredibly talented photographer. Naturally as a resident of the Coachella Valley, he’s got a wealth of stunning scenery to go out and shoot whenever he sees fit, but the best of his photography marries the people and places of his homeland into an idyllic portrait of youthful hedonism.

www.brianphilippescador.com

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Cinema . . .

Paul Thomas Anderson INHERENT VICE

Joaquin Phoenix Josh Brolin Katherine Waterston Reese Witherspoon Benicio Del Toro Jena Malone Maya Rudolph Martin Short

Written & Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Cinematography by Robert Elswit

Editing by Leslie Jones


Original Music by Jonny Greenwood

Conversation with Paul Thomas Anderson about his life & career here

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Cinema

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David Fincher

SE7EN

Morgan Freeman Brad Pitt Kevin Spacey Gwyneth Paltrow

Directed by David Fincher

Written by Andrew Kevin Walker Cinematography by Darius Khondji Editing by Richard Francis-Bruce Original Music by Howard Shore

Watch Fincher discuss the film in a recent conversation

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Photography

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Thomas Billhardt ITALY + DDR + USSR

Thomas Billhardt, born in 1937 in Chemnitz, is a German photographer and publicist. He became especially well known in the GDR because of his photographs from Vietnam and Palestine. From 1959 to 1963 he took on a degree at the »Hochschule für Graphik und Buchkunst (HGB)« in Leipzic which he completed as a qualified photographic artist. In 1962 he joined the »Verband deutscher Journalisten« (German journalists’ assosiaction) and worked as a freelance photographer from 1963 to 1971. He became a member of the Socialist Union Party of Germany in 1968. From 1972 to 1981 Billhardt was manager of a work group with the »Deutsche Werbeagentur« (DEWAG) in Berlin and manager of Billhardt studios with the publisher for agitation and illustrative material from 1982 to 1989. Since 1990 Billhardt is a member of the »Deutscher Journalistenverband« and from 1990 up until 2001 he was also a member of the »Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie« (German society for photography). From 1990 he joined the » Bund Freischaffender Foto-Designer e.V.«. In 1969 Billhardt received the Award of Arts of the GDR, in 1987 the national award of the GDR. He staged countless international photograph exhibitions, including the UNICEF exhibition »Children of the World« in New York in 1989. Billhardt envisions himself as an artistic rather than a political photographer.

Thomas Billhardt resides in Italy and in Berlin.

thomasbillhardt.de

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Painting

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Andy Warhol ARTWORKS

“I’d asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally one lady friend asked the right question, ‘Well, what do you love most?’ That’s how I started painting money." Andy Warhol

Documentary Part One / Part Two

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Photography

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Gummo COSTUMES TEST POLAROIDS

Chloë Sevigny, who co-starred in the polarizing 1997 film Gummo (written and directed by Spring Breakers' Harmony Korine) was also the film's Costume Designer.

Here are some Polaroids Sevigny used for notes regarding the costumes.

trailer

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Photography

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Andy Warhol POLAROIDS

“The best thing about a picture is that it never changes. Even when the people in it do.” Andy Warhol

warhol.org

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Photography

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Melissa Catanese DIVE DARK DREAM SLOW

Photographer and bookseller Melissa Catanese has been editing the vast photography collection of Peter J. Cohen, a celebrated trove of more than 20,000 vernacular and found anonymous photographs from the early to mid-twentieth century. Gathered from flea markets, dealers and Ebay, these prints have been acquired, exhibited and included in a range of major museum publications. In organizing the archive into a series of thematic catalogues, she has pursued an alternate reading of the collection, drifting away from simple typology into something more personal, intuitive and openly poetic. Her magical new artist’s book, Dive Dark Dream Slow, is rooted in the mystery and delight of the “found” image and the “snapshot” aesthetic, but pushes beyond the nostalgic surface of these pictures and reimagines them as luminous transmissions of anxious sensuality. Through a series of abandoned visual clues, from the sepia-infused shadow of a little girl running along a beach to silhouettes of a group of distant figures pausing upon a steep and snowy hill, a dreamlike journey is evoked. Like an album of pop songs about a girl (or a civilization) hovering on the verge of transformation, the book cycles through overlapping themes and counter-themes--moon and ocean; violence and tenderness; innocence and experience; masks and nakedness--that sparkle with deep psychic longing and apocalyptic comedy.

melissacatanese.com

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Photography

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Bronia Stewart BABESTATION

Photographer Bronia Stewart recently spent nine months documenting the offscreen activities of the men and women who work at Babestation, an adult television and phone sex line based in Central London since 2002. The project was chosen by the Photographers’ Gallery to be part of FreshFaced + WildEyed, an annual competition for emerging photographers out of BA and MA programmes. Having completed her MA at the London College of Communications, the Babestation series is the first step for Stewart in a wider investigation into the themes of hyper-sexualisation, and how the media’s portrayal of women has influenced the nature of aspiration. Here, she speaks about her experience behind-the-scenes, and how she was able to capture such candid photos.

How did you end up shooting at Babestation? For some time I’ve been interested in themes of aspiration, why some people succeed, why some don’t; what drives people to certain jobs and careers. I started out looking at the adult entertainment industry, and from this I ended up doing a series of portraits, which was my entry point.

Then I met a guy at the Erotica trade show in Kensington Olympia who works for the Adult Industry Trades Association, and through him I was introduced to Babestation’s PR woman. The Babestation studios are on Great Portland Street, opposite Radio 1. I didn’t really know what I was getting into but I was taking every opportunity, and I ended up shooting there for nine months, sometimes going three or four times a week.

What exactly is Babestation? It’s a dedicated channel on Sky and you can also watch it on the internet. You can phone in and speak to the girl that’s on the screen, though you’ll probably have to wait in a queue, paying all the while. While you’re waiting you’ll be able to see her talking to someone else –there’s normally some mad set design like pink velvet or something – but you can’t hear the girl until your call is live. It gets really busy after the pubs shut.

How difficult was it to forge relationships there? It was quite hard at the beginning to get the sort of access I was hoping for. The girls took a while to understand what I was trying to do. I like to get engrossed in subject matters so it was a good experience in learning how to build relationships.

Were you surprised by anything at Babestation? Initially I thought it was going to be all about fame for the girls, but what I found out was that it was more about a working life. So while some of them had 20,000 followers on Twitter, it was about being able to provide for their family and earn good money. Also, I want to differentiate between people working in the sex industry, and people working in adult entertainment. What prostitution and what these girls are doing has no crossover

How do you feel personally about what they’re doing? There’s an element of trust with these people that I have known for nine months and who I care about. I’m not going to be disingenuous and become judgmental in how I portray them, because that goes against everything I want to achieve. But I do want to make work that I hope provokes some debate about why things are the way they are. What I started to realise is that the drive to do something like this is symptomatic of how the media has pushed the complete sexualisation of women. This is how you can get ahead; this is how you can make money. It’s easy; it doesn’t require education or qualifications. A lot of these girls have changed their bodies to become the perceived ideal woman. Massive lips, massive boobs, skinny, long hair extensions. From the photos, Babestation seems like an upbeat place. What’s it like to work there? Babestation is a proper business and it’s run as such. Also, it’s a nice environment. It’s a fun environment. Very secure, safe, comfortable. They’re treated well. All the men who work there are producers. In the photos I thought it was important to show the girls’ interaction with them because it’s very positive. You chose to shoot on film. Why? I enjoy everything about it. I enjoy the feel and the process of taking pictures. Also there’s a financial implication with film, so you become much more considered. A project like this really benefits from film because there’s no back camera, so your subjects will never see a bad picture of themselves. I think when you’re trying to gain trust this can really help. What’s next? I want to look at the industry of kiss and tell girls; particularly girls who sleep with footballers and sell their stories. Also, I’m looking at publications such as Heat magazine and the themes that come out of that: money, drama, body obsession, attractiveness. It’s a much bigger project – I’m excited.

broniastewart.com

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Feature Film

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Jonathan Glazer UNDER THE SKIN

Scarlett Johanson Paul Brannigan

Cinematography : Daniel Landin Music by : Mica Levi

trailer here

In early 2001, Jonathan Glazer began planning his next film. The director was then 35, a wildly sought-after maker of music videos and adverts who had just released his first film, the singular gangster movie Sexy Beast. His next was to be an adaptation of Michel Faber's cult novel Under the Skin. The project ended up on ice. Work didn't start until 2004. Ten years later, Under the Skin is finished, and Glazer is in a publicists' office in Soho, a well-preserved Londoner with a thicket of dark hair, tall enough to verge on the looming. Having spent almost all his 40s getting the film made, he must feel like a different man from the one who began it? "Well. Hmm. I … God. That's a teaser." He stalls. "I want to be honest. It's just hard to articulate. I need to scratch my chin about that one. Can we pick it up later?" He clearly finds interviews akin to visiting the dentist. "But I want to stand behind the film," he says. The thing is, Under the Skin does invite you to ponder its creator. It concerns an alien in Glasgow, preying – obliquely but chillingly – on single men. They co-operate because the alien is played by Scarlett Johansson, who is still Johansson even in a mangy fur coat and wig. There is footage from cameras hidden in the van in which she tirelessly cruises; elsewhere, visions of her black, amniotic alien realm. Many will loathe it – the premiere at the Venice film festival was met with boos. It will also blow minds, its punk experimentalism and raw sensuality making pretty much everything else seem hopelessly quaint. Masterpiece is the word. Interview phobia aside, Glazer is affable and open. He has the fractionally dazed air of a rescued castaway. "I'm a bit bereft without the film. It's like falling in love. You think, what do I love? I love this." He puffs on an electronic cigarette. The boos don't matter: "Some people love it, some are repulsed. Fair enough." We talk about literary adaptations. "I don't think I'm the right man to adapt a book," he says. To recap: at the dawn of the noughties, he was cinema's coming man, adored for his witty, ingenious ads for Nike, Guinness and more. Sexy Beast, with Ray Winstone playing a saveloy-tanned safecracker retired to the Costa Brava, was hailed as a surreal-ish modern classic. With Under the Skin shelved, he swept on instead to his 2004 film Birth, an uneasily gorgeous tale of a young boy who might be the reincarnated husband of a New York widow (Nicole Kidman). It was also booed at the Venice film festival. It was also a masterpiece. Fans claimed him as the new Kubrick. The world wondered what was next. For a decade, he vanished behind a door marked Under the Skin, where events fell into three acts. The first involved a faithful adaptation of the novel that producer Jim Wilson sent Glazer while the pair worked on Sexy Beast. Glazer liked this early script, with its rendering of Faber's carnivorous aliens. He just had no interest in making it. "I knew then that I absolutely didn't want to film the book. But I still wanted to make the book a film." Puzzled, he sought to find out why. The longest phase in the process saw endless versions of a story assembled and dismantled. "It was the job. It wasn't a hobby." Days and nights slipped by. Weeks became months. Memories of normal life dimmed. Three years in, one co-writer Milo Addica made way for another, Walter Campbell. Eventually, the script revolved around a pair of aliens masquerading as a Scottish farmer and his wife. Brad Pitt signed to play the husband. There was still never a workable budget. Anyway, Glazer wasn't ready. "I said I was giving up many times. I don't think I ever meant it." Others around him suggested he should. Wilson says he grew "convinced this just wasn't going to happen". Then came the Eureka moment. What Glazer wanted, he realised, was to make a film representing, as purely as possible, an alien view of our world. Everything clicked. "We took years to get there, and suddenly it was obvious." Pitt moved on. Work focused on the female character alone. Glazer and Campbell took their 100-page script and deleted the 60 in which she played no part. Elaborate special effects sequences were tossed. "It was like a big, extravagant rock band turning into  PJ Harvey," Wilson says. Glazer obsessed over how the world might really look to new eyes. "I liked having it in my head. Finding the logic, the images. It's like learning an alphabet, then a language, then writing in it, then trying to write poetry in it." His face falls. "This is why I don't like interviews. I sound batty." The desire to capture an alien perspective became, he says, his "North star". Why did it mean so much? "I suppose I must have that alien thing in me to start with. Yeah. Probably. I do feel outside. Not entirely, but I do. I've had that about me since quite a young age I think." He looks perturbed. I tell him that though I love his films, I know almost nothing about him. Where does he live in London? Near Camden. Married with three kids. And he grew up in – "A place called Hadley Wood. Near Barnet. Yep. Knocked around with mates on my street, messed about on the railways, in the woods. Motorbikes, skateboards, CB radio. All that." He pauses. "Arsenal fan." Another pause. "I'm Jewish. Went to a Jewish school." Do you feel Jewish? "Yeah. I mean, I'm not fanatical. But I do." His father was a film buff, with whom he watched David Lean movies. As a teenager, his circle included the comic actor Paul Kaye; the two ended up going to university in Nottingham together, Glazer studying theatre design. Back in London, he found himself unhappily editing trailers for multiplex movies. He started making shorts, music videos, breaking into commercials. But while the corporate world fell for his grand designs, his inspirations were spiky – such as the incendiary 1968 satire If … "I saw it on TV when I was 12, 13, and it shocked me. Scared me. It probably fucked me up a bit. To see something with the questions left in, it's powerful when you're young. You think: 'Oh, I didn't know you were allowed to do that.' It stays with you." Glazer still needed a movie star – and one who was very, very game. If Under the Skin belongs to him, it also belongs to Johansson. Her beestung femininity gives the film a lushness among the cold surfaces. Besides learning to drive a van and mastering an English accent, she also had to cope with his second epiphany. For life to feel real, he decided, they needed real life. Extras shouldn't just be non-professional actors, but people who didn't even know they were being filmed, caught on hidden cameras when she pulled up at the roadsides of Glasgow. (Glazer and crew were concealed in the back.) She was hardly ever rumbled; who expects to be accosted by Johansson on their way to the Asda in Govan? She was, Glazer says, "devoted. Unflinching." And as she chose where to drive next, Glazer – as with most directors, used to being in control – gladly gave up his film to the random. "There were times I said to Jim, Let's just dump the last two-thirds of the script and stay in the van. Because I loved the idea of leaving the door open to reality. The surprises. The treasure." There is more to Under the Skin than the van. Besides the abstract social realism is a skeletal story, heartbreak, horror, extraordinary sweetness. But if the goal was to make the humdrum lurchingly strange, it worked. As Johansson totters through a Glasgow shopping centre, passing between Clinton Cards and H Samuel, the human environment looks so unshakably weird, it became one of the most disturbing moments I've had in a cinema. Glazer looks pleased when I tell him this. He himself, he says, had a similar experience in Debenhams. Wilson pleaded with him to book conventional extras, have a scripted Plan B. Wilson explains: "I was saying: 'What if Scarlett drives all day and nothing happens? What if there are no happy accidents?' But Jon was insistent. And he was right." Glazer's iron will is nothing new. Even before Sexy Beast, he walked away from his planned debut – the film Gangster No 1, later made elsewhere – after disagreements over casting. His relationship with advertising is strained these days. In 2010, he shot a commercial for Cadbury Flake, in which the French actor Denis Lavant cavorted as a crimson, Byronic chocolate demon. The ad never ran; when it surfaced online, Cadbury's lawyers demanded its removal. Glazer says that in commercials now, "fear abounds". He knows it is time to let go of Under the Skin. "I won't know if it's good until I see it on TV one night and can't remember what comes next." That, of course, might take 10 years. He smiles. "Another 10." I mention Faber, whose novel Glazer once called "great but trashy". He winces. "I did say that. Well, one day I hope to meet Michel, and I hope he sees the film, and I'd be very interested in talking to him about what he wrote and what I made. I think there's a rhyme there." It is a curious thing, Glazer's relationship with words. He wonders aloud if somehow film peaked with Charlie Chaplin's City Lights. "I'm still obsessed by images. Not intellectually. Practically. How they sing, how they sync. And I wonder what cinema could have been had it not gone down the word road. But we always want to know what's going on. We hate to not know." Wilson remembers conversations with Glazer in Scotland when the director was chasing pure realism. Filming, Wilson argued, itself made things unreal. "And these talks we'd have became very philosophical. I found them fascinating. But I think they only interested Jon up to a point." Later, I listen to the tape of the interview. One of his own answers, Glazer says, is "nonsense." Another is "baffling". I realise I never returned to my first question. Apologetic, I email: "Are you a different Jonathan Glazer to the one who started making Under the Skin?" Next morning, he replies: "Yes."

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Photography

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Frank Horvat NEW YORK UP AND DOWN

The street photography series “New York Up & Down” is a fascinating glimpse of New York City in the 1980s by photographer Frank Horvat. Horvat began photographing 70 years ago and his career has spanned photojournalism, fashion, and advertising. He talks about “New York Up & Down” in this L’Oeil de la Photographie article. "But if they were measured by their emotional intensity, the years in New York would count twice as much… This is what I tried to convey by the words ‘up and down’. The highs and lows of New York are not just the transitions from Uptown to Downtown, from the darkness of the subway to the view from the top floors of the skyscrapers, from the temperatures in January to those in July. But also the shifts, between one day and the next and sometimes between one minute and the other, from exhilaration to disappointment, from triumph to failure, from fullfilment to defeat".

horvatland.com

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Art

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Cityscapes JEREMY MANN

Jeremy Mann was born in 1979. He holds a Cum Laude BFA from Ohio University and an MFA with valedictorian honor from Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

In his creative practice, Mann aims to imbue his city, San Francisco, with drama, mood, and personality. He paints his immediate surroundings with intimate, dynamic expression. A number of his compositions are inspired by wet pavement that reflects street lamps and neon signs and glitters in the rain.

Painting on medium-to-large scale wood panels, Mann utilizes a number of techniques: staining the surface, wiping away paint with solvents, and applying broad, gritty marks with an ink brayer. He paints with confidence and flair, addressing complex compositions with colors both vivid and atmospheric.

Since his graduation, Mann has received attention from critics and collectors alike. His work recently graced the cover of American Art Collector magazine and has been extensively exhibited in Ohio and California.

http://redrabbit7.com

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Art

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Installation / Encirclement BEILI LIU

Thistle is a fierce plant well armored with sharp prickles all over itself, from the stem to leaves to flower buds—much protection for its soft purple flowers. After blooming, the plant sends out feathery white thistledown into wind.

Encirclement is created with hundreds of thistle plants, stemming perpendicularly from the wall, outlining two silhouettes of a standing and a bending figure. The performer then positions herself inside the thistle field, disguised/ camouflaged with thistledown. The beautiful plants surround the body as if protecting her, while she is in fact being embraced by the countless thorns of the plants.

www.beililiu.com

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Art

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The photorealistic art of KIM SUNG JIN

An artist working out of South Korea, Kim Sung Jin graduated from the Hongik University for Fine Art. He works primarily in oils on canvas, and as you can see is a photorealist painter, with a very sensual style. I’ve always enjoyed artists that painted in a photorealistic style, but often the content was not as impressive as the skill level the artist had. This new crop of artists, such as those shown at Thinkspace Galleries “New Realism“, are creating work that is not only technically impressive, but draws you in further with the content. Kim Sung Jin’s art falls perfectly into that description. Every new painting you see while going through the artists gallery bring back that awe of how someone could create an image that looks so real, and he even paints macro-like closeups of the lips and face of the models. After looking at these previews, make sure to check out the artists homepage for a lot more.

click here for Kim Sung Jin website

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