{photography} – Page 125

Tite Street then and now

This LIFE magazine photo of Oscar Wilde’s home at 34 Tite Street, Chelsea, is fascinating for Wilde aficionados in being a far more detailed view of the “House Beautiful” exterior than one ever finds in books about the writer. No information as to when it was taken but from the look of the print it was probably some time just before or after 1900.

Google Earth lets us examine Tite Street as it is today, with Oscar’s house looking relatively unchanged aside from the blue plaque which informs people that he once lived there. What you can’t see in this picture is the opposite side of the street which now contains a particularly dreary housing development from the 1960s. Oscar and his contemporaries in the area—many of whom were artists—wouldn’t have been impressed at all.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Oscar Wilde archive

Prague panoramas

Now that we’re into the dismal weather, sombre views of Old Prague’s splendour seem appropriate. The pages at 360 Cities have a lot of Prague panoramas—76 in all—including many more of the Viriconium-esque Giant Mantis performance I linked to a few years ago. A shame they don’t do this every year.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Eno’s Luminous Opera House panorama
• Callanish Standing Stone panoramas
• Jaipur Observatory panoramas
• Infinite reflections
• Large Hadron Collider panoramas
• Passage des Panoramas
• Bruges panoramas
• Paris panoramas
• Venice panoramas
• St Pancras in Spheroview
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague
• Giant mantis invades Prague
• Whirling Istanbul

Inondations 1910

Rue Saint André des Arts sous l’eau Inondations.

The Great Flood of Paris, January 1910, as seen via picture postcards. There’s more here and at Flickr.

75008 Bld Haussmann Effondrement Egout Inondations.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Old lighthouses
• Adolph Sutro’s Gingerbread Palace
• Atget’s Paris

Edmund Teske

Kenneth Anger, Topanga Canyon, California, Composite (1954).

This portrait of a dashing Kenneth Anger juxtaposes the filmmaker with an engraving by Gustave Doré for Paradise Lost. Like his contemporary Emil Cadoo, photographer Edmund Teske (1911–1996) often concealed the homoerotic nature of his pictures by rendering them “artistic” through double-exposure. Teske was friends with rock group The Doors, and a number of his studies of Jim Morrison and co. are very familiar from histories of the band.

Via Bajo el Signo de Libra.

Nude, Davenport, Iowa, Composite with Leaves (1941/46).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Emil Cadoo
• The art of Robert Flynt

Luke Smalley memorial exhibition

Megaphone from Gymnasium.

I wasn’t aware that photographer Luke Smalley had died prematurely this year until a brief post I’d made about his work started getting hits from an obituary piece at the NYT. Bill O’Connor of Wessel + O’Connor emailed this weekend with news of a showing of Smalley’s final photo series, Sunday Drive, at Clampart, NYC. As with earlier series such as Gymnasium (2000), there’s also a monograph available from Twin Palms Publishers.

Luke Smalley: Sunday Drive—A Memorial Exhibition runs until December 19, 2009.

Medicine Ball from Gymnasium.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Luke Smalley