Thursday, May 17, 2012 Last Update: 4:43 am EDT

I am still googly eyed over this portrait of Tony Kushner by Christian Weber for New York Magazine. It’s all silvery and full of shine and special glasses reflections and is just beautiful.

I was so enamored that I trotted over to Mr. Weber’s site to see what else he’s been up to. Turns out, a lot. Have look-see.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

The Creators Project:
The Creators Project features a screening of Christian’s film “Somatic” in Beijing Saturday
September 18th. Somatic features Corona Radiata scored by Nine Inch Nails. The Creators Pro-
ject is a new network dedicated to the celebration of creativity and culture across media,
and around the world. Check it out!

7.

ouch.

Ooowee, I get so excited each time I see a new Abelardo Morell camera obscura image, so I squealed out loud when I opened New York Magazine this week.

Here are three new images– click to make them bigger, and read more about them in the piece by Miranda Siegel, here.

You ever see a picture in a magazine and think, “wow, now that’s a tricky assignment”. Me too. I had that x 100 when I saw Timothy Devine’s image for New York Magazine’s “Come Here Often?” column last week.

The wrangling for this thing alone would leave me in tears.

But Mr. Devine didn’t cry. I asked him how he stayed sane and got the shot. Here’s what he said:

“The people in the photo were all actual clubgoers at Lavo — the idea was to get real patrons interacting in a real scene. I showed up before the club opened on a busy Thursday night and spent the time setting up lights so that when the doors opened, I’d be ready to go. I hard lit the booths from the front with five or six grid spots and then used a couple of custom-built pencil lights to light the back alcove. We sectioned off a corner of the place where I set up my camera and equipment and tweaked the lighting using the waitstaff as stand-ins. With the help of the writer and a few interns from the magazine, we wrangled patrons of the club. I staged them and gave them direction within the scene.

The shoot was challenge after challenge. As soon as the doors opened, the club got packed. The management were really tolerant, but they wanted the shoot to happen quickly because they were having celebrities come in later in the evening who wouldn’t want cameras around. The music was deafening and made communicating really hard. My assistant was standing right next to me and couldn’t hear a word I was saying. So I kept having to run back and forth between my camera and the people in the shot to speak with them. It was pretty insane. Thank goodness for alcohol, it definitely helped to lubricate all the subjects.”

___

Thank goodness for alcohol, indeed. I hope you got a nightcap, Tim. Here’s the image with the copy the mag ran.

The Place: The latest Cristal-pouring, Vegas-channeling subterranean ultralounge from the guys behind Marquee and Avenue.
The Time: Thursday, 11:42 p.m.
The Mission: Chat up every reveler in sight.

1. TANYA CAMBURN
32, hairstylist
“I know one of the managers, so he invited me to host a table. Basically, they pay you to bring 30 or 40 people, and you’re just there to make the party look cute. I don’t usually go places like this—it’s a little mainstream, but it’s beautiful.”

2. BENEDICT PEREZ
45, banker
“Fifty-Eighth Street used to be a pretty hoppin’ place, then a grimier crowd came in, so this is good. Barnaby works across the street and said, ‘Let’s have one drink after work.’ But it’s never just one drink.”

3. BARNABY HALL
29, banker
“This is a very impromptu night, and pretty innocuous to begin with. I have a girlfriend, but she’s not here. No flirting—I’m just enjoying the company. I’ve had a couple martinis.”

4. JESSICA CATALANO
25, PR specialist
“There were a lot of people outside, but my friends are friends with some of the managers, who let us in. I’ve been going to Marquee and Avenue for a while, and I usually cut the line because they remember me.”

5. ALLIE MINTZ
22, fashion-sales rep
“I live on the Upper East Side, and instead of spending $20 on a cab home from downtown, you spend $6 from here. It’s pretty early, so I’ll assume the crowd will get better as the night goes on. Right now, it’s a little old for me.”

6. JENNA DRIGGERS
24, marketing manager
“I’m out with like ten of my girlfriends. We had dinner at a friend’s place at the Plaza and were dancing there, and then we kept on dancing here. It’s good exercise, especially in heels—a way to save money on the gym.”

7. ALONA KRUGLAK
“ageless,” entrepreneur
“I’m at the age where I don’t want to be surrounded by 20-year-olds, and this is an age-appropriate, older-money crowd. I’m currently single, and it’s like a candy store of good-looking, successful men.”

8. ANDRÉA EMRICK
38, real-estate project manager
“This crowd is very eclectic, which I like. If I feel like going after a young guy, there’s a young guy; if I feel like going after an older guy, there’s an older guy. It’s always a goal to find one of each.”

9. LEDA BELUCHE
30, talent manager
“Before this, we went to dinner at Tao, and we walked outside and saw all these fashionable people across the street. And we were like, ‘Those are the elite crowd, and we’re the elite crowd, so let’s go join them.’ ”

See the full piece at NYMag. See more of Timothy Devine’s work.

Art world darling Alex Prager is moving on to moving pictures with famous actresses. Here’s her first short film, Despair, which employs many of the visual cues we’re used to from Prager.

What do you think? Sink or Swim? Click on the image to see the video, and read the synopsis below, from The Nowness.

From The Nowness:

Photographer Alex Prager Turns Director With This 50s Chiller

The setting: 1960s Los Angeles. Inside a phone booth stands a beautiful woman wearing the portentous femme fatale uniform of red lipstick and high heels. Bright and eerie, it’s picture-perfection. In her first short film, LA-based photographer Alex Prager is going for pure, cinematic melodrama, hoping to catch just one emotion—despair—through her chilling juxtaposition of dreamy Americana aesthetics and back-story brimming with overstated tragedy. Set to a score by composer Ali Helnwein and starring model and actress Bryce Dallas Howard, the film takes its cues from the opening of Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1955), and the Hans Christian Andersen-inspired 1948 ballet The Red Shoes. According to Prager, Despair was conceived as a living, full-sensory version of her photographic work, which has previously been exhibited at M+B Gallery in Los Angeles, Yancey Richardson in New York and Michael Hoppen in London.

“I’d like to show the before, now and after of one of my images––that’s really the concept of the film,” she says. Accustomed to running a one-woman show on her shoots, where she usually plays photographer, stylist, set-designer and everything in between, Prager was ensnared by the collaborative nature of creating a film. “It’s like taking every art medium and melding it into one,” she says. “It’s incredible!” As for working with Howard, a fast-rising talent (and the daughter of director Ron Howard) best known for her performances in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village and Lady in the Water, Prager credits fate for bringing them together. She knew it could be no one but the fair-skinned beauty after deciding the role called for a redhead with serious acting chops. Howard’s graceful, porcelain-like look seems to embody one of Prager’s defining characteristics as an artist—her unabashed love for, and understanding of, color.

As for suspense: one of the stills from the four-minute film is headed to the prestiguous MoMA this September for the group show New Photography 2010, where Prager is exhibiting alongside Elad Lassry, Roe Ethridge and Amanda Ross-Ho. Film stills from Despair are currently being exhibited and sold exclusively by Michael Hoppen Contemporary in London.

ps:

Here a bonus behind the scenes chat with Prager I found on the internets. There are wigs.

THIS Visits: Alex Prager from Incase on Vimeo.

Tucked away in the feeds this week is an astounding piece by VII’s Tomas van Houtryve on North Korea.

Here’s the gist:

North and South Korea held their first military talks in two years this week and North Korea released a photograph of the heir apparent to Kim Jong-il, his son, Kim Jong-un. VII The magazine decided to take a look at the North Korea which has systematically isolated itself from the world and applied communist thinking to the utmost extreme. The Kim regime has vanquished any traces of capitalism, foreign imperialism, and the enemies–real and imagined–of the radical left. Even as communism collapsed elsewhere and over a million people died of starvation in the 1990s, the government did not waver from its course. The result is a paranoid militarized society, an astounding cult of personality, and the formal absence of any individualism.

Today, as ever, much of what is said about North Korea is based more on speculation than first hand reporting. Posing as an investor looking to open a chocolate factory, Tomas van Houtryve managed to slip into North Korea twice. He faced hours of interrogation, was threatened by appartchiks, and at one point was almost exposed as a journalist. The bold tactics gave him access to factories, hospitals and government offices, some of which had never before been seen by a Western photographer.

Click below to see the full slideshow, complete with music.

Here are some stills:

See more from Tomas van Houtryve.

See more from VII.

See the slideshow.

You should be reading SPREAD ArtCulture’s blog, if you aren’t already– it’s a rich archive. Today I found a two-part interview with Jeff Bark, whose work feels to me like a meeting of Gregory Crewdson and Bill Henson.

I’m especially drawn to these images from the series Woodpecker. Click on them to enlarge.

Jeff has a show up now at Hasted Hunt, check it out. And read more about him on SPREAD.

I’m at a desk job in Manhattan this week, and if it weren’t for the shiny 27″ monitor on this desk, I might be losing my mind. Luckily I have all sorts of nice images opened in Bridge to keep hope alive. I thought I’d share five with you. (You can click on them to see them in all their larger glory.)

1. Another gem from gem-producer Thomas Prior. His website announces that he’s joined DS Reps. Seems like a great partnership for them both, congrats!

2. Those Russia in color from 1909-1911 images I was obsessed with a few years back have appeared again on The Big Picture. So awesome. This shot is from 1911!

3. Flipped through Jonathan Smith’s imagery today. Some special things in there. Very Blade Runnery.

4. Did you know Brigitte Lacombe has done some work for Heifer International? Yup, and there are goats. Check it out.

5. iGavel has a new auction up, benefiting the George Eastman House. I would like this John Paul Caponigro print for my wall, please.

Ciao. Thursday is going to be awesome.

Naturally I was fantasizing about axes the other day on Best Made Company’s site, and I recognized my old buddy Finn O’Hara’s name on one of their sharp videos.

So I harassed him a little to get the lowdown on these sharp agents of death, and also on his work in motion. Here’s what he had to say.

Peter from Best Made Company and I went to the same canoe tripping summer camp when we were younger, and we got in touch recently through a mutual friend.

Working with the Phantom HD Gold has been a real thrill. It’s like shooting another dimension. The studio I’ve joined recently owns one, as well as a great collection of ARRI Master Primes. So with all the motion toys at my disposal, and the Best Made Axe, Peter & I came up with a visual study called CHOP.

I started working in motion last summer with the 5D, working on a big motion project for the Canadian Tourism Commission. I compiled the work into a motion piece that can be seen here.

I’ve also attached some production stills

Thanks for sharing, Finn and Best Made Company!

We’re pleased as punch to have fabulous and funny photo editor Robyn Lange on board with us today, with a fresh Q&A with filmmaker/photographer John Hicks.

Robyn Lange is a freelance photo editor who has worked with some of the finest publications on the newsstand. She lives in New York City and is obsessed with 19th century polar exploration.

Without further ado….
—

With iPads breaking down editorial boundaries and art directors scrambling to harness their potential, I’ve been seeing more and more instances of photographers grasping the reins of video and driving them into the new wild west. Whether you have a lifetime subscription to Wired or SX70 4EVR is tattooed on your forearm it can’t be denied that we are on the brink of a precipice that could dramatically alter the editorial landscape.

For example, I recently opened an email and was presented with a stunning short film by John Hicks. His work has always been graphic and vivid, so his film pursuits weren’t entirely surprising. But with all these visions of new technology dancing in my head I decided that I should take a closer look.

Hi John. Let’s talk about the motion section of your website. What was it that prompted you to start creating short films? Was it an outgrowth of the new technology that is available to photographers thanks to the leaps and bounds that digital cameras are making?

I’ve always been interested in film and I’d already made a couple of short films, but video was not a cinematic option and 16/35mm film was just so expensive and involved such a big team that I couldn’t dedicate myself to it as well as to stills. So now to have a professional level film option in the camera that you use for stills and to be able to employ the same lenses to create amazing quality HD footage has just exploded the possibilities and made filmmaking accessible to anyone with a camera and a computer.

I’d say technology has definitely helped me get back into film, but my photographic work already had a very cinematic style. I’ve always like to shoot on the horizontal (even though it drove magazine editors crazy!!!!) because that’s how my eye sees the world and I’m known for shooting motion capture on location so all this combined to make my move from stills to film that much smoother.

Regarding your latest film, The Hardest Fight, what came first: the stills or the motion? Can you walk us through the process of making this film?

The stills came first because I originally met Dave Payne as the technical advisor on a fashion shoot I did for FHM collections. Fitter, stronger and tougher than most men half his age, there was a certain vulnerability about Dave and I was really inspired to take some portraits. Although I was pleased with the shots somehow I wanted to tell his story better which is what led to the film.

First I set out to find a location because visually I wanted to avoid the cliché of the gym or the ring and to look beyond the brutality and violence associated with a sport like boxing.

I found the abandoned warehouse and one of the first things that struck me was the incredible light it gave – it was almost cathedral like. It seemed like a lonely place – a place where a man like Dave would go to train and instinctively I knew straight away that I would film the solitary figure skipping from that high observer vantage point as the intro to the film.

I made up a storyboard – which is something I always did as a stills photographer and that really helped with the edits. I knew I wanted to film certain sequences but it was the work I put into the storyboard that enabled me to piece it all together like a jigsaw otherwise it would just have been a jumble of moving images.

I’ll admit that at first I made the classic mistake of working like a stills photographer but I soon realised that to tell a story it’s not enough to simply record the action. You have to create drama and suspense by moving the camera, you have to involve the viewer emotionally as well as visually and you have to get as many interesting angles of the same shot as you can to sustain interest.

So primarily I worked the images because I’m visually minded, then the edit pretty much followed the storyboard and finally I worked on the narration and music. I knew from the outset that I wanted a voiceover but Dave was reluctant so I just got him to talk by asking him a series of questions and recorded his responses.

When I asked him about the hardest fight he ever had his spontaneous reply sent shivers down my spine and I knew I had my title and a killer quote. I collaborated on the music because I wanted something haunting, evocative and original and I didn’t want to ruin the final piece so I saw the whole thing through from start to finish.

How do you see yourself progressing with this medium? Will it coexist side by side with your still work or might you move fully into motion work?

I’ll always love taking stills – I love the spontaneity and the way you react purely on instinct to what happens in front of you but, ultimately, when I want to tell visual stories i can do this most effectively with film and motion. So I hope the two mediums will continue to co-exist in my work and each craft will inspire and challenge the other to make a better photographer and filmmaker of me.

Okay, how did you find that spectacular location? Did you have to get any tetanus jabs?

I actually started out in photo journalism and have always had an eye for interesting and unusual locations but in my commercial work I became known for simple backgrounds and blue skies so I really wanted to challenge this perception because I love urban decay and industrial backdrops. I have a house in Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands about 100 miles off the north west coast of Africa, and that’s how I found this abandoned warehouse.

I was inspired by the colors, the beauty in its decay, the natural light inside and I thought of it almost like a character in the film.

A building with a certain sadness, a soul and a story of its own to tell. I think one of my strongest points as a photographer is composition and here I had so many possibilities for filming that I wasn’t going to let a bit of rusted metal worry me and I’ve already had my fair share of tetanus jabs. Plus, to be honest, I’m more afraid of the injections than any danger or discomfort I put myself through getting the shots. When you’re in the creative zone doing what you do best it’s like nothing else matter – it’s hard to describe the feeling but it’s what makes film and photography so addictive and all consuming.

Who or what influences your work?

Location, light, inspiring and interesting characters and a love of film and photography. Photographers I admire include Bill Brandt, Don McCullin, Bruce Davidson, Diane Arbus, Josef Koudelka, Sebastião Salgado, Mary Ellen Mark, Annie Liebovitz, Richard Avedon, Guy Bourdin, Martin Parr, Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, Chris Killip, Joel Sternfeld, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, Charlie Crane…..the list is endless and in film its Andrei Tarkovsky, Frederico Fellini, The Coen Brothers, Nicholas Roeg, Martin Scorcese, Jim Jarmusch… I could go on forever!!!

What new skills have you acquired since shooting film that you now use in your photography?

I guess, for me, the most important has been to look for a lot more interesting angles for the same shot. High/low/eye perspective – don’t just settle for the obvious observer point of view in every shot.By moving more around the subject and the location its really opened my eyes to the many different ways we can all see the same thing.

Also because, in film, you’re not so dependent on one shot to tell the whole story, it really allows you to be more flexible and in turn more creative with your craft so that when you get back to shooting stills that lack of rigidity over ‘capturing the perfect image’ really helps free you to explore and develop your single images further.

For a closer look at John’s work please see his website www.johnhicks.co.uk.

And see more of Robyn Lange!

I think animals in slow-mo are the new black, and I count myself among the fans of this hairy trend. There’s a beautiful piece right now on Nowness shot by Matthew Donaldson of polo player Nacho Figueras. Look, look:

And some behind the scenes…

p.s. a zorse!