ART NEWS: When Arthur Fellig, the New York street photographer known as Weegee, moved to Los Angeles in 1947 to become a technical adviser on The Naked City, the film-noir classic named after his 1945 book of photos, he had big Hollywood dreams. Like many aspiring stars before and after, he didn’t quite find the magical landscape of the movies, and he declared that Hollywood was Newark, New Jersey, with palm trees. Weegee was famous in New York for grisly crime-scene photos. He earned his nickname from his job as a darkroom assistant, or “squeegee boy,” for the New York […]
ARTSY: From Russia With Love
OLEG DOU: I was born in the artistic family and faced the art when I was a little child. Once I was looking at the book with Proto-renaissance artists which became my favourite for many years. I found a lot of awesome portraits with strange weird emotions in that book. Some people was ill, some angry, some crazy and some had empty indifferent eyes. It was not used to show the people that “perversion” way nowadays and that was real discovery for me. Since that time I had a passion for a human face and tried to find that kind […]
THERE BE MONSTERS: The Dark Side Of Sendak
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Where The Wild Things Are creator Maurice Sendak is, in many ways, the dark side Doppelganger of Dr. Seuss and taken together they represent the twin titans of 20th Century children’s literature. If Dr. Seuss’ work vibes like a drug-free acid trip for children aged 8 to 80, then Sendak’s oeuvre is, to extend the metaphor, like Vicodin for the soul, numbing tender-aged psyches from the pain of growing up in a desultory world of de-saturated colors and unrelieved melancholia where adults do monstrous things to each other, and sometimes to children, too. There were two formative […]
ARTSY: Subterranean Homesick Blues
The Woodmere Art Museum is now exhibiting A Force Of Nature which documents a Philadelphia born-and-raised movement in contemporary visual art. The extensive retrospective focuses on Elaine Kurtz (1928-2003), who first debuted at Philadelphia Art Alliance, Gross McCleaf Gallery and Locks Gallery in the 1970s. The museum smartly deconstructs Kurtz into her elements. Visitors first pass through an anteroom where her geometric and color studies demonstrate a highly analytical mindset. Some of these works are reminiscent of Gestalt images in that they trick the viewer. For instance, diametrically opposed spectrums of color create blind spots along their center, where entire […]
ARTSY: Mayhem Is My Business; Business Is Good
BY MIKE WALSH If you enjoy Weegee’s famous crime and disaster scene photos from the 1930s and 1940s (as who doesn’t?), get yourself to the International Center of Photography (ICP) in Manhattan where Murder is My Business, an exhibition of Weegee’s most famous photos recently opened. Weegee’s photos are fun, trashy, insensitive, and full of suffering and blood. What’s not to like? The great thing about this exhibition is that it includes wall plaques of information about the specific car crashes, tenement fires, suicide, and gangland murders depicted in the photos. It does not leave you speculating about why the […]
ARTSY: The Great Beyond
You might not know it from the recent media focus, but there are photographers living and working in South Philadelphia not named Zoe Strauss. One of them is Ted Adams, who just unveiled an overview of his work stretching back to the 80s at the Robin Rice Gallery in the West Village. The small exhibit is an overview of Adam’s photography, some pieces dating back to the 90s. These’s nothing digital in this exhibit. Adams shoots with a vintage Leica and Kodak Tri-X film. He also processes his own film and prints in the darkroom at his house. In fact, […]
ARTSY: The Afterlife Of Vivian Maier
BY MIKE WALSH In 1951, at age 25, a young woman named Vivian Maier moved from France to New York City, where she worked for some time in a sweat shop. Maier also had a camera, and she spent much of her free time walking around NYC working class neighborhoods taking photos of people, places, and buildings. She used a Rolleiflex camera, the type you look down into a two-inch lens to aim and focus. It used 120 mm film, a large format that, in the hands of someone like Maier, can capture incredible richness, detail, and depth of field. […]
EARLY WORD: Wowie Zoe
South Philly photographer Zoe Strauss has come a long way since she received a camera as a gift in 2000–so far, in fact, that an exhibition of 150 of Strauss’s photos (titled Zoe Strauss Ten Years) opens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art this Saturday night. Despite the amazing achievement of a museum show for Strauss, she also convinced the museum and Clear Channel to finance the placement of 54 of her photos around Philly on billboards, substituting the unreal optics of advertising with the real thing. PMA managed to bring her inside, but in the process, Zoe managed to […]
ARTSY: Zooey Deschanel As Lizzie Borden
“Does This Make My Eyes Look Bluer?” by Kevin P. Ruin, the first in his “Slaughterhouse Starlets” series, via Etsy. And you thought Etsy had no edge!
ARTSY: A Picture Worth Thousands Of Words
[“Mattress Flip” by ZOE STRAUSS] PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY: On the day that Boo was shot, a group of older male family members went to Dorney Park in Allentown. Boo [pictured above, right] stayed behind. Richards remembers that morning and her son’s last words to her. “My mom was cooking for Father’s Day. He came in and said, ‘Mom, I’m getting ready to be a dad.’” “I said, ‘You better leave something behind!’” Boo loved kids. He babysat family members often. His cousin Robyn, 25, was pregnant at the time. “He wanted to be the godfather,” says Robyn. “Every time he’d see […]
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A MIDDLE-AGED MAN: A Q&A With Cartoonist Dan Clowes
EDITOR’S NOTE: To mark the occasion of yet another swell New Yorker cover by Mr. Clowes, we are re-running our interview with him from last spring. Enjoy. BY JONATHAN VALANIA Daniel Clowes’ 30-plus-year career as a cartoonist/graphic novelist/screenwriter has seen some remarkable reversals of fortune. Back in the mid-80s, when Clowes was fresh out of Pratt and looking to take the graphic design/illustration world by storm, he couldn’t get art directors to return his phone calls. These days, post-Ghost World, the New Yorker and The New York Times plead with him to return their calls. When not busy cranking out […]
ARTSY: Let There Be Light
RELATED: REMAIN IN THE LIGHT: A Q&A With Post-Punk Stained Glass Sorceress Judith Schaechter
LIFE LESSONS: A Pep Talk For OccupyPhilly
AP TICKER: I’m getting lots of letters about why I haven’t shown my face at any of the Occupy Philly protests. I wholeheartedly, endorse and support their endeavors and while I talk a good game about revolution and overthrow of this plutocracy, the sad truth of the matter is……..I’m a very very lazy man. As I have said many times before, my favorite hobbies are as follows, lying on my couch and being very very quiet. I and my couch bound brethren, represent a subset of The Greatest Generation that I have coined “The Lazy Generation” This true silent majority […]
