{photography} – Page 92 – { feuilleton }

Carel Struycken’s panoramas

The Bradbury Building by Carel Struycken.

An idle search for a panorama view of the interior of the Bradbury Building in Downtown Los Angeles fetched me up at my favourite panorama site 360Cities and this photo by Carel Struycken. Mr Struycken is better known as an actor whose great height has seen him cast as The Giant in the Twin Peaks TV series, and Lurch in the Addams Family films. 360Cities has a page of his panorama views most of which are taken in and around Los Angeles. The strangely ossified landscape around California’s Monolake is more familiar from this photo by Hipgnosis for Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album.

Urban Light by Carel Struycken.

Monolake in Winter by Carel Struycken.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The panoramas archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Through the darkness of future pasts
• The Bradbury Building: Looking Backward from the Future

Carleton Watkins in Yosemite

Yosemite Valley (c. 1865).

The Getty Museum recently published a large and expensive ($195) volume collecting all the surviving photographs by one of the pioneers of landscape photography, Carleton Watkins (1829–1916). The most important of Watkins’ many photos of California in the mid-19th century are those taken in the Yosemite Valley, a series of views which helped persuade Abraham Lincoln to preserve the area as a national park. The pictures here are from the Watkins collection at the Library of Congress where many of the images can be downloaded as huge (200mb) tiffs. The LoC also has a number of stereograph views. The quality of these pictures is quite stunning when you consider that the photographic medium was only about thirty years old. To capture many of these views Watkins had to cart a bulky glass-plate camera up and down mountain trails.

Carleton Watkins, The Complete Mammoth Photographs edited by Weston Naef & Christine Hult-Lewis can be ordered direct from the Getty Museum. There’s also an earlier study by Weston Naef, Carleton Watkins in Yosemite.

Half Dome, Yosemite Valley (c. 1865).

Cathedral Rock, Yosemite Valley (c. 1865).

Front view, Three Brothers, Yosemite (c. 1865).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dead Roads

Weekend links: 2012 edition

The Hand of Fate, Life magazine, October, 1912. Artist unknown.

• In Search of Barney Bubbles: the great graphic designer is profiled on BBC Radio 4, Monday, 2nd January. And speaking of album cover designers, Cool Hunting talked to Storm Thorgerson about his work.

• FACT mix 310 is a hugely eclectic two-parter from Moon Wiring Club. Grab it while it’s still available. And there’s also Solstmas 2011/2: The Final Countdown, a mix by El Minko Misterioso.

• One of the music events of the new year will be the release of Captain Beefheart’s Bat Chain Puller album. Pre-order it here.

In 1972, at the age of thirty-one, [Fred] Halsted released L.A. Plays Itself, a film which drew upon Kenneth Anger’s surrealist eroto-expressionism, and went way beyond Anger’s sublimated homoeroticism to explicitly portray gay male S/M sex. In 1969, when Halsted first decided to make a sexually explicit film, he decided to create a part for himself, and then be that part.

Halsted Plays Himself by William E. Jones reviewed at Lambda Literary

• Lunar Rover: An interview with Steve Moore and extract from Somnium.

• Battersea Power Station, a graveyard of architectural schemes.

Editors might admire a fine book, but are overridden by marketing and accounting departments who now have the final say. I know of a novel that wasn’t accepted by one publisher after the manuscript was first submitted to W.H. Smith, who said that it wouldn’t sell enough.

Jenny Diski on the state of fiction publishing in the UK

• EU copyright on James Joyce‘s works ended at midnight.

• Dressed to Kill: Dispelling the Myths of Men in Drag.

• The Geology of the Mountains of Madness

• Mandala of the Day

• Chomeography

• The Floppy Boot Stomp (1978 mix) by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band.

Let England Shake

Design by Michelle Henning, drawings by PJ Harvey.

An album that’s been a continual visitor to the Coulthart CD player over the past few months, Let England Shake was consciously composed like George Crumb’s Black Angels “in time of war”, referencing not only wars present but those long past. Coiled around the bellicose theme is a portrait of a nation whose patriotism is built on sand. England did shake this year, and the unavoidable correlation of PJ Harvey‘s words with the events of the summer makes her album stand in relation to 2011 the way The Specials’ Ghost Town did to 1981.

In addition to the CD, Let England Shake also comes as a DVD of a dozen short films by photographer Seamus Murphy, one film for each song. Harvey and Murphy have very generously put the full set on YouTube in HD. Follow the links below.

Let England Shake

The Last Living Rose

The Glorious Land

Continue reading “Let England Shake”

Colour photography, 1908

Portrait of Jessie M. King by J. Craig Annan (autochrome).

I don’t recall having seen a photo of artist Jessie M. King prior to this so it’s an additional surprise to find one in colour. All these examples are from Colour Photography: and other recent developments of the art of the camera (1908), one of the many books edited by Charles Holme from features in The Studio magazine. Needless to say, not all the entries are colour but a number of the monochrome plates have their own qualities, such as that painterly effect which so many early photographers were eager to cultivate. Anyone familiar with Gertrude Käsebier’s very painterly The Crystal Gazer, famous for its appearance on the cover of a Cocteau Twins sleeve, may like to know that two more portraits by Ms Käsebier are included in Holme’s selection. For a look at more recent attempts to match the effects of painting with the camera, see this piece by Rick Poynor about the remarkable work of Saul Leiter.

A Tangle After a Storm by Walter Bennington.

A Late Winter Sun by Dr. H. Bachmann (gum print).

Continue reading “Colour photography, 1908”