Tag: volcanic sand

Source unknown – Nicole Vaunt (2017)

Few places I have ever visited have gotten so thoroughly under my skin as Iceland. If my Seasonal Affective Disorder wasn’t already off-the-charts, I would have moved there by now.

What’s so great about it? If I told you it’s because it’s magical, there would be two distinct  responses: those who will grin stupidly/nod knowingly & those will look askance/skeptical–the former have visited, the latter have not.

I could talk about the light. But the light in-and-of-itself is not entirely exceptional. If you’ve watched any of Bergman’s films–you’ll understand why he and Sven Nyquist strove to work with natural light whenever possible. (Arctic light in the summer is pretty much ripped out of a Romantic Period oil painting.)

The landscape might as well be off-world–the stunning vibrancy of color contrasted against the harsh landscape is something that stops you in your tracks at least a half dozen times each day.

It’s not all rainbows and kittens: most folks view Iceland as a sort of Viking inhabited glacier. (I started having dreams about the place during my middle teens and it was all snowbound and empty. I found out after about a decade of having the dreams that Iceland is green and Greenland is ice–in fact, viking languages were apparently uber literal because the capital of Reykjavik means nothing more or less than ‘smoky bay’ and Iceland in the native languague is really Island; it’s westerners that make it seem like a stronghold of winter.) The weather is hardly perfect. I’ve seen it rain sideways while it’s still blindingly sunny. (But as the saying goes: if you don’t like the weather, wait 15 minutes–as is that ever the fucking truth.)

What appeals to me about this image is the degree to which it–by decontextualizing both the relationship of the landscape to light and color, it demonstrates the degree to which the landscape has texture. (I think that’s something I’ve always felt on an instinctive level but it would’ve taken me several more trips to come to that realization on my own. And as far as I’m concerned that’s really the single credo you need when asking whether or not a photo or image is good: does it show me how to see something that I might otherwise have never discovered? If the answer is yes, then that’s already more than halfway there.)

Herb Ritts – [↖] Female Nude with Black Sand, Hawaii (1989); [↗] Female Nude with Black Sand, Hawaii (1989); [↓] Untitled (1989)

If you’re anything like me you’ll ask yourself: Herb who? You already know him–I promise.

This photo of David Bowie? This photo of Michael Jackson? This one of Britney Spears? All three were made by Herb Ritts.

There’s a good bit of common ground between Ritts and Avedon, actually. Both have the same tendency of thwarting expectations. Working in a studio was less something either did as a means of de-emphasizing location as it was an effort to give personality free range to manifest. Also, both make photos that focus on the subject in the same way–Ritts merely trained his lens on larger than life uber celebrities, house name entertainers and supermodels. (Leveraging recognizability and depicting celebrity personality as its own ultra exclusive destination which you could only access as he allowed was a brilliant maneuver.)

Perusing his catalog is a strange undertaking–where you see the person both as they wanted to be seen at the time the photo was made. At the same time, ex post facto, it’s possible to look at the work and guess what the various PR teams had in mind but there’s also a way in which the work also presents a subtle wink to some of the less pristine aspects of many of his subjects lives–about which we have begun to learn.

I don’t care for Picasso at all but it’s sort of like the critic who took issue with his painting of Gertrude Stein by saying it doesn’t look anything like her and Pablo responding shortly: but it will.

Also, there’s no way to fault Ritts for borrowing so readily from others–as the adage goes it’s not theft if you take something and improve upon it.  It’s difficult to say if stealing Avedon’s formula and applying it to the super rich and famous was an act of genius or not–it just works too well to judge that after the fact.

However, in the case of these photos, it’s easier to see that here he was riffing on Iwase Yoshiyuki. (Although again, he did at least pick something of Yoshiyuki’s that was truly and exquisitely exceptional…)