{photography} – Page 74 – { feuilleton }

Callanish panoramas

A post for the Summer Solstice. I’ve linked to panoramas of the Callanish standing stones before but these are more recent photos at 360Cities where the full-screen views are more immersive, especially if you have a large monitor. The stones are situated on the Isle of Lewis in north-west Scotland, and still tend to be overshadowed by the reputation of their more visible relations in the south of England. Stonehenge and Avebury may be more famous but they’re ruined cathedrals next to the Callanish stones which have survived four thousand years of harsh Atlantic weather very much intact by virtue of being so remote. In that respect they retain some of their original aura: anyone planning a visit has to really want to see these things, you can’t simply drive past them on the way to somewhere else.

Photo by Alan McLean.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The panoramas archive

Atget’s corners

Un coin, rue de Seine (1924).

Photographer Eugène Atget had a thing for the architectural promontory, as do I for that matter, and this photo of a street corner in the rue de Seine, Paris, has always been a favourite. Atget liked the location enough to photograph it at least twice from different angles. The long exposures bleach the sky and turn passing figures into ghostly blurs.

Coin rue de Seine (1924).

Opening up Google Maps to see how the street looks today left me astonished when I realised I’d walked past this very corner without realising it was the location of Atget’s photos. The rue de Seine is one of two streets giving access to the rue des Beaux-Arts, the location of L’Hôtel where Oscar Wilde died. Matters weren’t helped by my walking in the opposite direction to this view so I didn’t notice the narrow corner. In any case the street looks very different today from Atget’s gloomy intersection.

Maison d’Andre Chenier en 1793–97, rue de Cléry (1907).

Equally as clean and unremarkable is another narrow building in the rue de Cléry which in 1907 was sporting some kind of wooden structure on its upper floor. Google’s cameras tend to diminish whatever space they photograph but the streets seem smaller today when cluttered with bollards, cars, bikes and the ubiquitous green bins of Paris.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Rue St. Augustin, then and now
• Brion Gysin’s walk, 1966
• L’Hôtel, Paris

The recurrent pose 51

Maren writes: “When I saw your recurrent gallery I couldn’t help but think of this photo my partner took of me one weekend here in San Francisco.” Many are the contemporary imitations of the Flandrin pose but this is one of the most accurate I’ve seen for its recapitulation of the details, from the ocean background to the fabric seat. My thanks to Maren for letting me post this!

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive

LightSpin

After a week or so of posts looking back over a century of dance, this brings everything into the present. Eric Paré’s LightSpin used stop-motion photography and twenty-four cameras to capture half a million photos which were then edited into a short video. All of the lighting, which floats around the dancers, is done by hand. Core77 goes into the technical detail, and also has some astonishing jpeg loops from the same sessions.

Tamara Karsavina’s Salomé

Salomé: portrait of Tamara Karsavina (1914) by George Barbier.

A slight return to the Russian ballet, and another Barbier portrait. Tamara Karsavina danced lead roles for the Ballets Russes, most notably with Nijinsky in the original performances of The Firebird. The pictures here are from La Tragedie de Salome, a ballet with music by Florent Schmitt, and costumes based on Beardsley’s illustrations by Sergei Sudeikin, another member of the Diaghilev circle.

Tamara Karsavina as Salomé in the Beecham Russian ballet season, 1913.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• George Barbier’s Nijinsky