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it’s always amazing to see what nature is up to when we aren’t there
up there in the wildest places, the farthest places from our small lives, that’s where you’ll see what can happen without us. it is always original, never trivial, never trending.
Even when these farthest places change because of the accumulated effects of our daily lives. the result is all nature’s own–spectacularly un-human, beautifully bereft of our precious cliches.
We can’t help but drop our jaws and shed some tears of admiration before we go back to our day job. But some have chosen to find work, put down roots and raise families right up against the raw originality (and harshness) of remote places.
This is upper Peru. Life unplugged from everything except life. It isn’t easy of course, but the miracle is that it exists at all. Found here
And this village is on Greenland in the upper middle of nowhere looking bright, cheerful, remarkably at ease. Part of a collection here
The only rival to the remoteness of the highest and coldest places on earth are the oceans where, we are told, you might sail for weeks without seeing any land at all
The only mark on this part of the Pacific is an air pocket…
The remotest places have many lessons to teach us, if we will only listen and look, lessons about beauty, humility, responsibility…
Just look .
Image by hiroshi sugimoto (seascape-north-atlantic-cape-breton)
Originally posted May 2016
Painters, photographers, and law enforcement officers have shown a lot of interest in capturing just one side of us, a side of us we don’t usually see.
Italian artists working 500 years ago and more gave us some of the most arresting one-sided portraits we will ever see. Up top, that’s Federico da Montefeltro giving his wife Battista Sforza the eye, courtesy of Piero della Francesca. And that beautiful face in the round frame belongs to an unnamed Florentina painted by Paolo Uccello (1397-1475). More here
Here’s a lady caught at the window by Fra Filippo Lippi (c 1406–1469). Her eyes don’t quite meet his, and maybe that’s the story here. From this nicely gathered collection of side portraits.
Moving up the road to France and a bit closer to our time, we found this lovely drawing by Jean-Joseph Bernard, 1785, at Vanderbilt University. Just pen and ink with watercolor on paper.
Staying in France for a moment, here is a carved profile of an homme who from this angle seems both aristocratic and capable of beating somebody up. Image found here
This group called Portraits of Lawgivers lives in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol Building. Each of the men depicted is a person who, some say, contributed to the laws that now underlie the US justice system. We think that’s Hammurabi up there.
Madame X, as she came to be called, was an American in Paris in the 1880’s who did well in marriage, generated much gossip, and attracted the attention of painter John Singer Sargent who asked if he could paint her. She said yes and the resulting portrait of her, with her gaze averted stage left, was judged just s bit too, you know. Despite the averted gaze and the “X” everyone recognized the woman in black as “that woman”. See her here now, at your leisure.
Jumping ahead to modern scandalous celebrity, getting your “mug” shot shortly after an arrest, profile on one side and full face on the other, is almost a rite of passage for film stars and musicians of the last 70 years or so. Mr Hendrix got out of the Toronto jail soon after and went on to play another day.
20th century artists like Man Ray rediscovered the power of the sidelong view even when no crime had preceded the shot. This is Lee Miller in his Paris studio. Some of course thought it a crime that a woman this beautiful could also be a talented, brave, and prolific photographer.
Isn’t she lovely, actress Billie Dove. We don’t care what she’s done.
Audrey Hepburn photographed by Yousaf Karsh and, bless her, she turned just a little toward us. From Boston.com
The silhouette was not just a fad, it was an obsession at a certain point. If you hadn’t been caught from the side on black paper with scissors well you just hadn’t arrived. This nice example from England found here
Many got the whole damned family scissored and pasted. This is the Sturge Family, ca. 1820 presented in the collection of the Library of the Society of Friends (The Quakers)
Some silhouettists snipped black images of everyone they met, apparently. Here’s a book of hundreds of them at the Smithsonian Institute
Back to where we started, in Italy, this must be counted among the most beautiful portraits ever produced, and it is amazing how much it conveys while only showing us one side of this woman’s story. Her name is Giovanna Tornabuoni, and she died in childbirth. Painted posthumously by Domenico Ghirlandaio about 1490. She now lives in a museum in Madrid and was recently the star of an exhibition there reported here.
Much as we love the profile portaits we found, we are very very glad that Jan Vermeer (go here) coaxed this lady to turn toward his canvas and to us. Perhaps the gift of her gaze is all the more powerful because we have been deprived of it. Maybe that’s the power of the profile–to increase the appetite for more of her face.
originally posted June 2014
Sometimes the best discoveries don’t require meticulous planning, a long journey, or special shoes. Sometimes you just have to see what’s in front of you.
This is some of what Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert has been seeing and recording for the rest of us over the last 40 years.
He is credited with helping to prove the point that European photographs could be in colour and still be taken seriously. Not that there is anything wrong with black and white.
Mr Gruyaert claims that he doesn’t think much about all this, and he avoids talking about it if at all possible.
The British Journal of Photography did manage to get a few words out of him, which can be read here
All images © 2015 Harry Gruyaert / Magnum Photos
The world is (still) full of wild things, plenty of them pretty weird in appearance and habits. Yet we humans have never been satisfied with nature’s menagerie. Since way back when, we have imagined things even more wild and more weird. Like this unnerving critter photographed by Nhung Dang (spotted here).
No surprise the Japanese have been heavily into conjuring up unusual creatures from the imagination. There was a whole show of them in London.
The USA can claim many producers of eye-poppng imaginary animalia, sometimes under the banner of Folk Art, sometimes Outsider Art, sometime…Art. This wild dog was here.
And in the USA, there is no shortage of well produced, well attended shows featuring objects and drawings of creatures who have never actually roamed the earth, but which are very much alive in the minds of some artist.
And then there is England, which might hold the all time record for the number of its citizens who have turned their imagination and their natural skills to the rendition of new life forms. The above drawing is a collaboration of two sisters born in the 1840’s with time on their hands and wonderful, playful minds. Here’s the story.
Kate Bradbury, a current artist from England, emerged late, blossomed quickly, makes things no one else could never dream of. This is her Angel. More
Let’s give the last word and image to the Asians. Eunmi Chun is Korean, and she makes animal figures out of dried intestinal skin and human hair (sometimes gold-leafed), beautiful forms sewn together, see here.
Wild. Thing. You make my heart sing.
Nature is the crucible, churning out an infinite variety of living things. And still, some of us turn our heads and minds to the invention of things that, so far, never were.
Wild.
Living by the sea can be a swell thing. Where we live, the breezes are mostly mild and scented with salt, sea shells, and mermaids.
People, lots of people, choose to live in coastal cities, and they always have. And those who don’t or can’t, come for holidays. Many of the benefits are obvious. Lovely pic of a coastal guy on his lunch break from here. Experts from all over (e.g.) say that just breathing sea air allows us to sleep better, and that can have real benefits to how happy and healthy we are.
But of course we can’t be blind to the other side of living with the sea as your neighbour. Our salty benefactor that serves up so much pleasure and good health can also serve up destruction and death. The truth is, sometimes, the bountiful sea doesn’t stay put. Sometimes, it comes calling.
Venice is the most famous and photogenic example. And though Venetians are justly famous for just carrying on and wading about their business, the government is spending a fortune (even by Venetian standards) to try and keep the Mediterranean out of the piazzas and palazzos. One story here
New Yorkers got a taste of life with the Atlantic ocean too close for comfort during and after Hurricane Sandy Oct 2012. Since then, the city has been re-thinking the way Manhattan works in order to prevent similar damage from future, inevitable storms. Here is one of many reports on the plans.
It is not just New York’s problem. This is something all great and small coastal cities should have on their agenda. Because there is more water in all the seas than there once was, and the only place it has to go is up, where we are, by the sea. Why?
The ice at the top and bottom of our planet is melting fast enough to cause measurable changes in sea level around the world. Whether you think the reason is man-made climate change (we do), natural cycles, socialists, or alien misbehavior, the melting of arctic and antarctic ice is real. It is not a theory or a political platform. It happens daily, sometimes in dramatic fashion.
This berg is about to shed a wedge of ice the size of warehouse. Beautifully photographed in Alaska by Betty Sederquist. More here.
At the other end of the earth, this is a giant iceberg in Antarctica about to leave the mother ship. It was deemed separated in April of 2014 and weighed in at “the size of Chicago” or “as big as Singapore”, depending on your source. Lots of video coverage via this site
What this event means for those of us who live by the sea now is not much, in terms of our day at the beach. Even if it drifts into warm waters and melts completely, even when Chicago melts, you’d need more than an eagle eye to spot the rise in sea level. But there are lots more city size ice cubes breaking away and melting. This is a recent summary report from the NY Times
This beautiful object (wonderful photo by Camille Seaman) may not be much of a threat to modern ships or tomorrow’s day at the beach, but it and its kin are slowly raising the tideline around the world. Choice property will be lost–some quickly in murderous storms, some slowly over generations.
We can’t stop it, but we can do what we do when we are at our best: we can start thinking differently about how we respond to this force of nature. We in coastal cities can start planning–as New York is doing–for dealing with higher water when it comes, taking preventative action, reducing the destruction. Instead of pure admiration or pure fear of the ocean, we need to get more realistic and show more respect for the ocean we love. As sailors always have.
It’s time to move the carousel. Pic from Brooklyn Oct 2012.
the republic of less 
