{photography} – Page 86 – { feuilleton }

Cum In Your Eye by Scott La Force

American artist/photographer Scott La Force sent the above details of a show of his work at the suitably named Cock Gallery in Portland, OR which will be running throughout this month. There’s more work like the examples below on his website, while the gallery itself has a Facebook page apparently, but I can’t access it since I’m not a member of that particular walled garden. I like the photos from La Force’s Minutia series which place printed enlargements of pop-up windows from gay dating sites in everyday settings.

Minutia.

Pornshop.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Albert Robida’s Vieux Paris

After several posts about Albert Robida it seems more-or-less mandatory to write something about his spectacular creation for the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. “Vieux Paris” was an elaborate theme park-style attraction that sought to recreate some of the lost buildings of medieval Paris on the right bank of the Seine, a short distance from the Trocadero. (The international pavilions were situated on the opposite bank.) Robida is remembered today for his science fiction but he was given this job as a result of books such as Paris de siècle en siècle; le coeur de Paris, splendeurs et souvenirs (1896) which explored life in the historic city. Vieux Paris was planned by the artist, with the buildings being created by a team of architects under the direction of Léon Benouville. As with modern theme parks, teams of actors and other staff were costumed in order to convey the requisite period flavour. The birds-eye drawing is the best view I’ve seen of the construction, the pages being from Albert Quantin’s L’Exposition du siècle.

From the Brooklyn Museum’s Flickr set.

Photo by Michel Berthaud at Luna Commons.

Terminus by John Schlesinger

Before John Schlesinger made his debut feature, A Kind of Loving (1962), he directed a number of short documentary films. Terminus (1961), a day in the life of the Waterloo railway station in London, is the most notable of these, an award-winning snapshot of a period when Britain’s railways were still nationalised and steam trains were about to vanish from regular service. The film has that crisp, black-and-white photography so typical of the early 1960s, a look which renders close-ups with uncanny fidelity and makes the outmoded fashions—the bowler-hatted men and gloved women—seem all the more curious. A year later Orson Welles was deploying a similar style when photographing the dishevelled splendour of the Gare d’Orsay in Paris for his film of The Trial.

For a different take on London’s railway stations there’s Terminus by analogue electronic outfit Node, a track inspired by concerts they played live at Paddington station in 1995.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Screening Kafka

Zeppelinology

Robe dans le style Zeppelin, Berlin, vers 1930.

So after you’ve donned your very best Zeppelin dress (and grabbed a pair of binoculars)…

…you can head on over to the Zep Diner for lunch.

Try some of the Zeppelin Bread: it’s light as air!

Afterwards (if it’s not too early) you can relax with a martini prepared in a Hindenburg shaker…

…whilst listening to Billy Murray singing a song about his (male) sweetheart, Come Take A Trip In My Airship, and browsing colour photographs of the Hindenberg interior.

(Thanks to Thom for starting the ball rolling with his new Paris/Berlin tumblr!)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Vickers Airship Catalogue
• The Air Ship
• Dirigibles
• The Airship Destroyer
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls

William Mortensen’s Salomés

Joyzelle Joyner as Salomé.

Two undated photographs by William Mortensen (1897–1965) which use the Salomé theme as a possible disguise for motives that have little to do with Biblical storytelling; looking at this collection of Mortensen’s work he evidently had a thing for arty erotica. Joyzelle Joyner was an American actress who appeared in minor roles in a number of silent films. Her lascivious scene in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932) was deemed scandalous enough to later be cut from the film by censors. Watch it here. (Tip via Beautiful Century.)

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive