{photography} – Page 127

Equus and the Executionist

I wrote about Peter Shaffer’s fascinating play, Equus, in September last year, and in passing touched on the horse and Mari Lwyd-inspired paintings of Clive Hicks-Jenkins which seemed to complement the play’s themes of sexuality and passionate obsession. Callum James had been having similar thoughts about Clive’s art and urged his friends at The Old Stile Press to bring play and artist together. Clive was in touch last week to let me know that his illustrated edition of the play is now in print. The Old Stile Press produce limited collectors’ editions of books to the highest standard. Consequently these are expensive works but then they’re as much art pieces as books, as you can see from the care which has been lavished on this particular volume. Nice to see one of my favourite typefaces, Bodoni, used for the text.

Also in touch last week was photographer Gray Scott with news of this striking picture entitled Executionist which also happens to be a limited edition print. This is another expensive piece—as limited prints tend to be—but there’s no law that says the best things have to be cheap, is there?

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dark horses
• Gray Scott

Emil Cadoo

Untitled (1963).

One of a small number of pictures from a recent exhibition of work by American photographer Emil Cadoo (1926–2002) whose nude studies and often homoerotic themes were controversial in America of the Fifties and Sixties but welcomed in France, as was often the case at that time.

In April 1964, all 21,000 copies of the April/May issue no.32 of the American magazine Evergreen Review – containing (among others) texts by Norman Mailer, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Bryon Gysin, Michael McClure, Karl Shapiro (a who’s who of the day’s practitioners of perceived outrage), and an erotic photo-essay by Cadoo – was seized by the police whilst it was still being bound. The edition had been deemed ‘obscene’ by the county’s district Attorney, whose particular disapproval was leveled at Cadoo. It took the special intermission of Edward Steichen, who compared the images to the work of Auguste Rodin “the greatest living sculptor of our time”, to obtain the condemnation of three judges of this action as ‘unconstitutional’, and to return the magazine to the public domain. (More.)

Cadoo favoured the double-exposure to achieve painterly or (for want of a better word) “poetic” effects, and some of these photos were used on book jackets by Grove Press (also the publishers of Evergreen Review), among them this Genet title which I posted a couple of years ago. More of Cadoo’s work can be found on various gallery sites but there’s no dedicated site unfortunately.

Photo by Emil Cadoo; design by Roy Kuhlman (1963).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Penguin Labyrinths and the Thief’s Journal
• Un Chant d’Amour by Jean Genet

The recurrent pose 29

Taner photographed by Hedi Slimane.

No, I don’t go looking for these deliberately, they just keep turning up. This latest manifestation of the Flandrin pose is from a photo shoot by Hedi Slimane. I was going to write a bit more on this subject but haven’t had the opportunity today since the webhost has been having problems and the site was down for a few hours. Something for later. Meanwhile, a commenter recently pointed out this similar example by John Jude Palencar, a Flandrinesque painting for a book cover.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive

Uranian inspirations

left: Sicilian boy by Wilhelm von Gloeden (no date); right: Jugend cover by Hans Christiansen (1896).

My current reading is The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (2003), a long and fascinating study by Neil McKenna which attempts to disentangle the true nature of Wilde’s sex life from the myths and evasions of his biography and biographers. Among the pictures in the book, McKenna shows a couple of the “Uranian” photographs by Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856–1931) which Wilde owned. Von Gloeden’s views of naked Sicilian boys were described as “Classical” in a barely-believable subterfuge familiar during the 19th century, and it’s understandable why Wilde, who’d been praising the attractions of Mediterranean youth for most of his adult life, would have found these pictures worthy of purchase. Wikimedia Commons has a substantial set of the photos, although it should be noted that provenance is often uncertain; there were other photographers active in Taormina at the time who catered to a similar market. One photo in particular stood out recently when I recognised it as the possible source for the figure on a Hans Christiansen cover for Jugend magazine of 1896. The cover above has appeared here before but this is the first time I made the photographic connection.

left: Jeune homme assis au bord de la mer by Jean Hippolyte Flandrin (1836); right: Cain by Wilhelm von Gloeden (c. 1902).

Gloeden, of course, was one of the first people to use the Flandrin pose, as I noted in the original post on that theme. I wonder if he knew he’d been copied in turn? That Jugend cover and its inspiration reminds me a little of Flandrin’s other depiction of Classical youth, his portrait of Polites, a painting which Oscar would no doubt have enjoyed.

Polites, Son of Priam, Observes the Movements of the Greeks by Jean Hippolyte Flandrin (1834).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive
• The Oscar Wilde archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Forbidden Colours
• Jugend Magazine
• Evolution of an icon

The coming of the dust

Impossible to avoid thoughts of either JG Ballard or various apocalyptic horror and science fiction scenarios when looking at these photos of Sydney, Australia, taken a few hours ago. A cloud of red dust passed over the city in the early morning and the depopulated views only add to the eerie atmosphere. These are from a Red Dust Flickr gallery. The Other Andrew writes about the inundation on his blog. I’m looking forward now to the reaction of another Sydney Melbourne resident, Simon Sellars, who runs Ballardian.

Update: The Red Sydney Project—Dust Storm Days

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Apocalypse now