{photography} – Page 144

Aubrey by John Selwyn Gilbert

Aubrey Beardsley photographed by Frederick Evans (1894).

I’ve been going through the Coulthart VHS library recently, transferring to DVD recordings which can’t be purchased or found online. Among these is a drama from the BBC’s Playhouse strand, Aubrey by John Selwyn Gilbert, which was broadcast in 1982. This drama follows the life of artist Aubrey Beardsley from the time of Oscar Wilde’s arrest in April 1895—which event resulted in Beardsley losing his position at The Yellow Book—through the foundation of The Savoy magazine, to his tubercular death in March 1898.

John Dicks as Aubrey.

Playhouse was a BBC 2 equivalent of Play for Today (which usually ran on BBC 1) and Aubrey, like many other dramas of the period, was shot on video in the studio. This was done for convenience as well as being cheaper than shooting on film, since scenes could be filmed using several cameras simultaneously. The drawback is that the image looks very harsh, and historical works such as this often seem unreal and artificial as a result. If you can forgive this deficiency, Aubrey was an excellent production with some great performances, especially Ronald Lacey as Leonard Smithers and Rula Lenska as Aubrey’s sister, Mabel. The details of Beardsley’s life are very accurate, down to his beloved Mantegna prints on the walls, and many of the scenes are arranged to correspond with his drawings, the production design being largely monochrome.

Continue reading “Aubrey by John Selwyn Gilbert”

Albert Kahn’s Autochromes

“Lying on a raised dais, this woman may have been the concubine of an affluent opium smoker.” (1915)

In 1909 the millionaire French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn embarked on an ambitious project to create a colour photographic record of, and for, the peoples of the world. As an idealist and an internationalist, Kahn believed that he could use the new Autochrome process, the world’s first user-friendly, true-colour photographic system, to promote cross-cultural peace and understanding. More.

More Albert Kahn Autochromes and similar early views in colour at this Flickr pool.

Update: And there’s The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn, site and book.

The Palais du Trocadéro from the Eiffel Tower (1912).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Palais du Trocadéro
• The Dawn of the Autochrome
• German opium smokers, 1900

Old lighthouses

From a collection of old postcards depicting British lighthouses. My own fascination with these structures can be traced directly to these two particular examples. The Lower Light or Beach Lighthouse is positioned a couple of streets away from the nursing home where I was born. Although we never lived in Fleetwood, I grew up a few miles down the coast and we often made trips to this unusual port which 19th century entrepreneurs built from nothing in the 1830s.

The lighthouses were built in the 1840s, intended to function together as a guide to ships approaching the docks through sandbanks. To me they helped augment the town’s curious edge-of-the-world quality. Fleetwood is positioned at the end of a peninsular, surrounded by the Irish Sea on two sides with the estuary of the River Wyre on the third. The trams which travel the length of the coast have to make a loop around a block of buildings when they reach the Pharos lighthouse and head south again. A lighthouse built in the middle of a residential street seemed completely bizarre when I was a child; it still looks strange now, as though it was dropped there then forgotten. Once you’ve reached it there’s nowhere left to go. (Well, unless you take the ferry over the river….) Its modest companion is more naturally situated on the promenade nearby. This Flickr photo shows how it looks today.