Well, guess what…
Broadway & 6th
February 24th, 2018
Category: Chrono
Solitude
And a certain sense of belonging.
Broadway, Midtown Manhattan
February 24th, 2018
Soggy bottoms, foggy tops
February 24th, 2018
(but it could as well have been yesterday; it was a foggy and soggy day, miserable like only a proper Monday can be; also, a helicopter crash-landed on a high rise roof, sending shivers down the spine of the entire City)
Midtown Manhattan
Slide right, then continue straight
Walk as far as you can; relish the rare luxury of having a street of New York all to your self.
Broadway, Midtown Manhattan
February 24th, 2018
Cityscapes || Old town vibes
@ NoMad
1170 Broadway
February 24th, 2018
To mariekondo or not to mariekondo…?
That is the (weekend) question.
On the other hand, a little chaos never hurt anyone. Also, I would never be able to fold my tees so perfectly. Sorry Marie, I’m just not that talented. Or patient.
Photo by Konstantinos Implikian
February 22nd, 2018
A concrete plan
for mapping Manhattan.
Urban Cartographers @ Midtown Manhattan
February 20th, 2018
*NSFW* || The Incomplete Araki
*But if you are at work and looking, I promise not to judge you…!
New York’s Museum of Sex is nowhere near the top of my ”places-to-see” list; it didn’t even make it to my ”tourist-traps-but-should-go-at-least-once” list. That was until ”The Incomplete Araki” a major retrospective about the erotic, provocative, sensual, eclectic and deeply, deeply personal work by one of the most notorious photographers of our times came up, back in 2018; it was time to make an exception.
Lady Gaga
Nobuyoshi Araki, 2011
Gelatin silver print
This print originally comes from a 2009 photoshoot with Lady Gaga for Voguy Hommes Japan, and is distinctive because it combined for the first time Gaga’s particular brand of global superstardom and Araki’s signature use of bondage.
Self-portrait with Yōko (Colourscapes)
Nobuyoshi Araki, 1991
C-print
In all the ways that Araki chooses to represent himself in his photography – whether it be via self-portrait, metaphor, brushstroke or through documentary practice – perhaps none are so charged as the ones where he seeks to express how his marriage to his wife Yōko resulted in the most complex and private component of his identity.
Colourscapes
Nobuyoshi Araki, 1991
C-print
Winter Journey
Nobuyoshi Araki, 1989-90/2005
Gelatin silver print
Sentimental Journey
Nobuyoshi Araki, 1971/2017
Gelatin sliver print
”There is a picture of Yōko sleeping on a boat on the Yanagawa River,” Araki has said, about on of his favourite images from Sentimental Journey. ”It was our honeymoon, so she was exhausted from all the sex. In Japan we say that you cross the Sanzu River when you depart to the ‘other world’. I had no intention of taking a picture like that, so I feel like maybe God or someone made me take that picture. Her posture is like that of a fetus.”
Araki and Yōko met while they were both employed at the Japanese advertising firm Dentsu, in the late 1960s. They were married in 1971 and for the next 19 years, their relationship – everyday life, sex, their cat Chiro, Yōko’s sudden diagnosis of ovarian cancer, her illness, her death, her funeral – would be the basis for photographic work infused with intimacy, unabashed directness and a kind of evolving understanding that even the ferocious love Araki felt for Yōko would end, like all journeys do.
Complement:
Start your day with a good breakfast together, 2009
From the series Experimental Relationship
Chromogenic prints
&
Soft-heeled Shoes, 2013
3D printed Polyjet photopolymers, suede shoes, metal
by Pixy Liao
India in Woodstock, 2013
From the series Pheromone Hotbox
&
Céline, 2016
From the series Vénéneuse
by Amanda Charchian
Museum of Sex, Manhattan
February 18th, 2018
Quicksilver Brilliance || Adolf de Meyer Photographs
An exhibition of works by the great pictorialist. 
Adolf and Olga de Meyer at the Acropolis, 1900-1910
Gelatin silver print
Unknown artist
Olga de Meyer, Japan, 1900
Platinum print
De Meyer made this affectionate photograph of his new wife while on their honeymoon to Japan.
Lady Ottoline Morrell, ca. 1912
Platinum print
Rita de Acosta Lydig, ca. 1917
Platinum print
De Meyer’s portrait of the socialite, art patron, ”shoe queen”, and suffragette Rita de Acosta Lydig is striking in its simplicity of tone and contour. The image, which appeared in Vogue in 1917, resonates with the classical elegance epitomized in the paintings of society portraitists John Singer Sargent and Giovanni Boldini, who also depicted this “alabaster lady”.
Count Etienne de Beaumont, ca. 1923
Gelatin silver print
An aristocrat and patron of the avant-garde, Count Etienne de Beaumont cuts a dashing figure here, posed in one of the grand salons of his hôtel in Paris’ rue Masseran. The count hosted a series of legendary masquerade balls at this residence during the interwar period, attended by avant-garde artists such as Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and Man Ray. De Meyer described these parties, which he and Olga often attended, as ”fêtes of unsurpassed magnificence” in a 1923 article for Harper’s Bazaar.
Josephine Baker, 1925-26
Direct carbon print
The New Hat Called Violette Worn by The Honorable Mrs. Reginald Fellowes, 1928
Gelatin silver print
Mannequin in Suzanne Talbot Hat, 1929
Trichrome carbro print
Plates from Le prélude á l’après-midi d’un faune, 1914
Collotypes
These six collotypes belong to de Meyer’s 1914 volume Le prélude á l’après-midi d’un faune. As with all bound works, the album is constructed from a variety of materials, each subject to the effects of time. In this case, the embrittlement of the adhesive used in the original mounting resulted in the separation of these six prints from their support leaves. Following the exhibition, each one was returned to its original location in the album, completing the conservation treatment of this rare book, one of only seven known copies, documenting Nijinsky’s scandalous 1912 ballet L’Après-midi d’un faune.
A rare exhibition of some 40 works by this master photographer, portraitist of celebrities, the first official photographer of the American Vogue and leading photographer of Vaslav Nijinsky and the Ballets Russes, was on view at the Met, between December 2017 & April 2018.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
February 17th, 2018
David Hockney
What I was saying yesterday, about popular exhibitions? Well, David Hockney’s major retrospective held at the Met between November 2017 & February 2018, was one of them. Impossible to enjoy – oftentimes not being able to see anything at all, multiple rows of heads obscuring the art. So crowded were the galleries, we soon gave up. But not before catching at least a few striking images on camera, the most ”presentable” of which I’m glad to share today with you.
Art:
1/ & 2/
My Parents, 1977
Oil on canvas
3/
Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 1968
Acrylic on canvas
4/
The Cha-Cha That Was Danced in the Early Hours of 24th March, 1961
Oil on canvas
5/
Self-portrait, 1983
Charcoal on paper
David Hockney @The Metropolitan Museum of Art
February 17th, 2018
The Humble Fabulist 