Minor White: Hands

I came across the work of Minor White (what a name),  a photographer who worked mostly in the 1940s - 1960s. His work capturing the natural world are striking and worth a look, but I find these shots he took of hands beautiful and interesting.

But Beautiful: Geoff Dyer

I fell in love with Geoff Dyer's writing recently, reading his book about jazz But Beautiful, a series of fictionalized vignettes about some of jazz's tragic heroes. I've underlined a good majority of this book - it is so sensitively written and so very beautiful.

One of my favorite passages about Chet Baker:

Chet put nothing of himself into his music and that's what lent his playing its pathos. The music he played felt abandoned by him. He played the old ballads and standards with a long series of caresses that led nowhere and subsided into nothing. 

That was how he had always played and always would.  Every time he played a note he waved it goodbye. Sometimes he didn't even wave. These old songs, they were used to being loved and wanted by the people who played them; musicians hugged them and made them feel brand-new, fresh.  Chet left a song feeling bereft.  When he played it the song needed comforting: it wasn't his playing that was packed with feeing, it was the song itself, feeling hurt. You felt each note trying to stay with him a little longer, pleading with him. 

Skye, Scotland: Moving bus, Storm

Some images shot inside a moving bus of a glorious part of Scotland called the Isle of Skye. 

Skye reminded of the land where Heathcliff must have been born. There is a wildness there that is capable of swallowing you whole.  And the wind bangs against the windowpanes, your body. Wuthering.

Cornelia Parker: PsychoBarn

Can't wait to see the Cornelia Parker's Psychobarn, which is now on the roof of the Met.
Parker built the frame of a house that is: homage to the wholesome American icon of the red barn + nod to the twisted Bates house in Psycho / Hopper's House by the Railroad.


Cornelia Parker's Transitional Object (Psychobarn)


Hopper's House by the Railroad, 1925


Bates' House, Hitchcock's Psycho, 1960

Francis Alys: Fabiola

"Created by the internationally acclaimed artist Francis Alÿs, Fabiola is an installation of over 300 portraits of a fourth-century Christian saint collected by the artist from flea markets and antique shops throughout Europe and the Americas. These seemingly identical portraits, including paintings, embroideries and miniatures are all copies of a lost original of Fabiola by the French nineteenth-century painter, Jean-Jacques Henner." (from: The National Portrait Gallery)