Guy Bourdin

Garance just wrote about going to see an exhibition of Guy Bourdin‘s videos. Guy is one of my favourite photographers, so I thought I’d take the opportunity of being reminded of him to put up one of my favourites of his photos. It always surprises me how fresh his photographs look. This one seems to be telling a story that’s half Thelma and Louise, half Max Headroom. I love the retro-futuristic vibe of the sunglasses.

This was shot for Vogue, but I sadly don’t know any more information about when where who why how. It was a surprisingly hard picture to track down. His pictures are splayed all over web, but they tend to be the more shock-to-the-gut nekkid-lady style photos he is more known for. It’s also really really hard to google. Result is, alas, no information. I’m guessing Vogue Paris, late  1980s? Regardless, a really awesome picture. I want to hang out with these girls. Hand over the sunglasses, and we’ll see what trouble we can get ourselves into.

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O Dia do Maracatu

 

Brazilian photographer Carlos Cajueiro took these pictures of the preparations for the maracatu rural performance in the village of Nazare da Mata in Pernambuco, in the Northeast of Brazil. He says that its his first year taking close portraits of the people involved in the festival. Previously, he would just take pictures of the preparations and dancing for further away. I think the results are just wonderful. The colours of the costumes and the expressions on their faces are really gorgeous.

I first heard about maracatu in Portuguese class, and I’ve been dying to see it ever since. It’s a performance form originating in Congo, and from what I can glean, contains costumes and elements designed to represent the history of royalty and slavery. Fascinating.

 

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Anouk Aimee

I love Daul Kim, and am oddly loving her even more as a blonde, despite my habitual knee-jerk loathing of brunettes hitting the bottle. I’m also really into this editorial she did for Russh Magazine #31. Her looks throw a kink into the dirty-motel, middle-America where she’s portrayed, to wonderful effect. The photographs bring out a sense of nostalgia for road trips not taken and seedy underbellies not explored.

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and Daul’s wonderful blog can be found here.

Dressed Down

I feel like this portrait of Daria by Hedi Slimane is pretty close to the Platonic ideal of casual beauty that all things like Gap ads and so on shoot for. I never really noticed before quite how beautiful her face is. Obviously I was aware that she is beautiful, but it had not really struck me until now.The contrast against the sloppy clothing really brings it out. Hedi is usually able to bring out new details from his subjects, though, so this revelation ought to come as no suprise. I’m really quite fond of this photograph.

Daria Werbowy by Hedi Slimane for Paris Vogue August 2007.

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Minutes to Midnight

There’s something about Trent Parke‘s photography that reminds me of David Lynch’s movies, particularly Inland Empire. I think it’s his use of unusual lighting. It gives his photos that sense of normalcy gone terribly, terribly twisted that I see throughout Lynch’s work. Parke’s pictures are wonderfully thought-provoking. I love how he manages to evoke this sense of motion and dreaminess, just through his use of lighting, until the subject becomes almost abstracted.

I’m not going to quote this directly, as I can’t find the source, but I could swear that I saw an interview with Parke where he talked about his inspiration for photographing his work, Minutes to Midnight, coming from a quote about the Australian lack of innocence, and wanting to document the process through which it happened. In order to do this, he took a roadtrip around Australia with his wife (photographer Narelle Autio) for two years, and just took pictures of everything he saw. The results are stunning.

The pictures I’ve put up come from his series “Minutes to Midnight”, “Dream/Life” and “The Seventh Wave”. He started shooting in colour, but I found I preferred the moodiness of his black-and-white photos.

Find more of his work here and here.

Mornin’

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Yeti v. Sasquatch

Nate Wragg is a pretty darn amazing artist. He works as an animator for Pixar, and also spends his time making these wonderful retro-tinged paintings of fun topics. My favourites are the Sex and Science series, and the Yeti vs. Sasquatch series.

(As a side note, the picture above is called “Talk Science to Me”, which is a sentiment I can always get down with. I totally have a thing for sciencey types, which probably started with reading about sexy, square-jawed, brilliant scientists/renaissance men in the trashy scifi books of my youth. My fella is a PhD student in electrical engineering at MIT who is saddened by the fact that he never became a mathematician, and I’m just like, mmm. Numbers. Chips. Things I know nothing about. Tell me more. (Plus he’s a hottie who does capoeira, kitesurfs and plays classical guitar. Yup. He’s a catch and a half.) )

Ok, daydreams about lab coats aside, check out these pictures. The Sex and Science ones are delightfully cheesecakey, and the Yeti vs. Sasquatch are just plain awesome. Yetis! A Sasquatch! Battling! Amazing!

Love the thought of horn-doggery in space.

And finally, Yetis in love! Cutest thing ever!

I kind of am tempted to try to track this one down as a card to use for Christmas this year. But I never get around to sending out cards, so I’ll just stick to looking at it. But look! He’s carving out the tree for her! How cute!

Whine and Cheese

It’s three am, I’m wracked with insomnia, I’m reading a book that’s boring enough to depress me, but not boring enough to put me to sleep. My freshly-washed hair is doing some coarse cave-woman thing that I can’t really get behind. My room is messy, I need to take out the kitchen trash, and pick up my laundry from the basement. My new sewing machine is sitting on my table mouldering because I’m back to the crazy 16-hour work days, and I have school applications I really need to get cracking on. Also, I need to find a job in a sector I actually envision myself working in, as I’m beginning to suspect the Insta-Millionaire fairy won’t be paying a visit my way anytime soon, and I recently had a nightmare about being an 80 year old paralegal. Horror! There are all these cute knitting patterns I want to play with, but I am working on the Enormous and Beautiful Crochet Blanket of Doom. I hurt my butt by sitting on it funny this weekend. My email refuses to answer itself. My boyfriend lives in Boston, which is really very selfish of him on nights like these. And all my dearest friends live in other cities.  I played with a beautiful chestnut Lab today, and now I really miss my pets.

All totally dealable, but the point is that I want to be somewhere else right now. Namely, Paris. With the added bonus of the fact that one of my best friends moved there. I’m just going to focus on this photo and will it to lull me to sleep so I can stop being so gosh-durn whiny.

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Silver and Red

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