Photograph of the day

[CaledoniaMan]

I thought this board could do with a post so here is an image to share with you.

http://clair.me/portfolio/philippe-halsman/

A bit about the photographer and the photograph. It is of course a picture Marilyn Monroe. Maybe not so well known is the photographer Philippe Halsman who is the other person in the image.

Halsman was born at the beginning of the 20th century in Latvia and after leaving school chose to become a photographer. He moved to Paris where he would shoot portraits of artists and writers. He fled Paris when the Nazis arrived and used his friendship with Albert Einstein to get a visa and ticket to travel to the US.

The image is one of many he took of people jumping. At the end of a shoot he would ask his subjects to jump for him. It was his way of capturing his subjects with their guard down. The list of famous people that jumped for him is long and includes the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Richard Nixon, Groucho Marx. Liberace, Brigitte Bardot. He even started to characterise his subjects by the way they jumped. Women who jumped with bent knees were still little girls at heart. Jumpers who didn't move their arms did not like to communicate, professionals dancers would always be overly theatrical in their jumps.

He worked a lot with his friend Salvador Dali and produced quite a famous surreal image of the artist jumping with cats and water in mid flight arund him https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/ ... 0004012622

More of his work can be seen on the Phillip Halsman website http://philippehalsman.com/images/

Feel free to use this thread to post a link to a favourite image you would like to share.

[Clitheroekid]

I'm a huge fan of the photography of Ansel Adams, and this is one of my favourites - on the face of it just a simple landscape shot, but the balance is perfect - http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mLJnChLAhPo/T ... %2B04.jpeg

[Lootman]

I'm a huge fan of the photography of Ansel Adams, and this is one of my favourites - on the face of it just a simple landscape shot, but the balance is perfect - http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mLJnChLAhPo/T ... %2B04.jpeg

Yes, me too. There are usually exhibits of his images at SFMOMA and the Visitors Centre at Yosemite. Although of course, at the latter, you can see the real thing. Yosemite is probably my favourite place to be of anywhere and I've been seven or eight times. I'm as cynical a Randian capitalist as they come but I cannot visit Yosemite without crying at some point. (Zion NP, Utah too, but I digress).

Adams was a genius, and spare a thought also for John Muir, the Scotsman who persuaded Theodore Roosevelt to preserve Yosemite.

[redsturgeon]

He worked a lot with his friend Salvador Dali and produced quite a famous surreal image of the artist jumping with cats and water in mid flight arund him https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/ ... 0004012622

That is one of my favourites, I remember reading an account of how many takes that shot took!

I have followed his technique a few times with varying degrees of success. Some people are natural jumpers, others, not so much!

One my my most successful "jump" shots was of my four kids on a beach in California, it captured their joyful mood completely. It hangs on my wall now.

With my shots using models I have had some spectacular jumps from trained dancers but even supposedly static poses can look a lot better if the model moves into the pose rather than try to "freeze".

John

[redsturgeon]

I'm a huge fan of the photography of Ansel Adams, and this is one of my favourites - on the face of it just a simple landscape shot, but the balance is perfect - http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mLJnChLAhPo/T ... %2B04.jpeg

That shot does indeed have a beautiful rhythm to it. I cannot recall seeing that particular image before.

John

[CaledoniaMan]

Another classic photograph by American photographer Eugene Smith. It's titled "A Walk to the Paradise Garden" and apart from being an evocative image, the story behind it IMO adds to its poignancy. Here is a link to the image and the events leading up to its making.

https://shrineodreams.wordpress.com/tag ... se-garden/

[mart44]

Can this board be used for posting photographs taken by members with [img]-[/img] tags so that they show as photos rather than links?

[Slarti]

Can this board be used for posting photographs taken by members with [img]-[/img] tags so that they show as photos rather than links?

Yes. See viewtopic.php?f=29&t=4836&start=40

Slarti

[mart44]

Thank you Slarti - I'll add one or two in that thread.

[CaledoniaMan]

This is an unusual photograph for this thread and maybe its more suitable for "The meaning of life" board. It's not your normal Ansel Adams, Norman Parkinson type photo it is a photo taken from space by the Voyager 1 spacecraft back in 1990 when after much deliberation the decision was taken to turn the spacecraft around temporarily to face where it had come from and take a photograph. The result is this image

http://static3.uk.businessinsider.com/image/56c03acedd08950d408b4595-1041-781/540616main_pia00452-43_full.jpg

The photograph became known as "Pale Blue Dot". The image itself is similar to many astronomy type pictures of stars, planets and constellations and whilst the technology required to get the picture is pretty mind blowing, the real magic of this photo in my opinion are the words that the astronomer and instigator of the photo Carl Sagan attached to the image. In a lecture about the photo at Cornell University he said:

"We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there – on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

[...] To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
— Carl Sagan, speech at Cornell University, October 13, 1994

More information on the photo can be found on the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot

[redsturgeon]

I'm loving these photographs,

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesig ... n-pictures

a bit like a cross between Greg Crewdson

http://time.com/4166380/discover-gregor ... otographs/

and Cindy Sherman

https://www.thebroad.org/art/cindy-sherman

I really like the idea of a whole narrative created in a single frame.

John

[CaledoniaMan]

As the commentary mentions there is definitely a Guy Bourdin influence in there.

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/gal ... n-pictures

The painter Edward Hopper's work also comes to mind https://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/exhi ... opper.html

They all have a story telling narrative quality about them.