Back in London...
Back in London after more than three months… a good opportunity to catch up on the latest exhibitions, movies and theatre plays… First I went to the Lee Miller retrospective at the Victoria and Albert museum… Lee Miller had a somewhat unique career: she was a model and a photographer, a successful fashion photographer (mainly for Vogue) and a serious photojournalist, particularly during World War II and the immediate aftermath. One of her most iconic images is showing her taking a bath in Hitler’s bathtub in his private apartment in Munich… she took this image to show the apparent banality of this monster’s daily life…
Photograph by Lee Miller.
Lee Miller was also close to (and often also a muse for) some of the most renowned photographers, painters, and writers at that time such as Man Ray, Edward Steichen, Picasso, Dali, André Breton among others… She died after an extraordinary life aged 70 almost exactly 30 years ago…
Turning to more contemporary photography: the Photographers’ Gallery is currently showing the project “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” by Taryn Simon where she photographed with a large format camera (5 x 4) over a period of four years odd places and things that usually are inaccessible or unknown to the general public. Among them an avian quarantine facility, the Playboy as a braille edition, a facility for inbreeding of white tigers, a research marijuana facility, the CIA headquarters, a nuclear waste encapsulation and storage facility, and a cryopreservation unit. While the images are at first apparently trivial or puzzling, the large format images really grow on you when you study them for a little longer and when you start to understand the context… A seemingly innocuous flask becomes eerily moving when you learn that it contains the HI virus… Unfortunately the talk with her this evening at the gallery was fully booked, I would have loved to listen to her speaking about her work… but in any case a very impressive body of work.
Photograph by Taryn Simon.
Photograph by Lee Miller.
Lee Miller was also close to (and often also a muse for) some of the most renowned photographers, painters, and writers at that time such as Man Ray, Edward Steichen, Picasso, Dali, André Breton among others… She died after an extraordinary life aged 70 almost exactly 30 years ago…
Turning to more contemporary photography: the Photographers’ Gallery is currently showing the project “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” by Taryn Simon where she photographed with a large format camera (5 x 4) over a period of four years odd places and things that usually are inaccessible or unknown to the general public. Among them an avian quarantine facility, the Playboy as a braille edition, a facility for inbreeding of white tigers, a research marijuana facility, the CIA headquarters, a nuclear waste encapsulation and storage facility, and a cryopreservation unit. While the images are at first apparently trivial or puzzling, the large format images really grow on you when you study them for a little longer and when you start to understand the context… A seemingly innocuous flask becomes eerily moving when you learn that it contains the HI virus… Unfortunately the talk with her this evening at the gallery was fully booked, I would have loved to listen to her speaking about her work… but in any case a very impressive body of work.
Photograph by Taryn Simon.
posted by rupert beagle at 11:03 pm
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