Ballerina boy, Paris 2003.
Youssef Nabil colours his photographs so they look like antique hand-tinted prints. Plenty of striking examples on his site, including portraits of one of my favourite singers, Natacha Atlas.
A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Photography
Ballerina boy, Paris 2003.
Youssef Nabil colours his photographs so they look like antique hand-tinted prints. Plenty of striking examples on his site, including portraits of one of my favourite singers, Natacha Atlas.
Solitude (?) by Hans Thoma (no date).
A couple more examples of the Flandrin pose. There are other versions around but most are poor copies of the original. Hans Thoma (1839–1924) was a very conventional German artist whose work occasionally skirts the homoerotic, perhaps unintentionally. I may post some of his prints later. He produced another variation on the Flandrin pose entitled The Prodigal Son with the figure reversed.
An uncredited and undated photograph from a collection of vintage male nudes on Flickr. That looks like a Union flag so we can guess that photographer and model were British.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive
Anyone who’s seen a Soviet film from 1947 onwards will recognise the logo of the Mosfilm studio which featured a model of Vera Mukhina’s Worker and Kolkhoz Woman monument. This 24-metre tall steel-plate statue proved surplus to requirements after the collapse of the old order, like so many monuments of that period. English Russia has a series of moody photographs of the structure lying in pieces whilst being dismantled.
Poor Vera, who died in 1953, must have thought her work would last a very long time; these pictures are a poignant reminder of the ephemeral nature, not only of art, but of whole ideologies. They’re also reminiscent of the deliberately degraded sculptures made by Igor Mitoraj (below) which trade for their effect on exactly this disjunction between delusions of permanence and the ravages of history.
And on these Flickr pages you can see one of Mitoraj’s influences from a ravaged past, the fragments of the Colossal Statue of Constantine in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Stalker meme
• The art of Igor Mitoraj
• Enormous structures II: Tatlin’s Tower
• Solaris
Another instance of the Flandrin pose, this time by
way of Donald Miller‘s photography and artwork.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive
Today at 17:21. This kind of view always reminds me of the opening
line from The Hill of Dreams (1907) by Arthur Machen:
“There was a glow in the sky as if great furnace doors were opened.”