Analogue Chic

Posts Tagged ‘photography’

Local fashion-related events, in no particular order.

19th Century women's shoes from the collection of the Mattatuck Museum

The documentary biography of renowned street-style photographer Bill Cunningham is playing at Bethel Cinema again this week. HIGHLY recommended if you are interested in fashion, photography, NY life, or just stories of interesting people.

The Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury has an exhibit through September illustrating themes in interior decor and objects of daily life, including costumes and textiles.

The Danbury Museum will be opening a major exhibit of women's hats spanning 3 centuries, on Saturday, June 4. Look for my interview with the guest curator, this week at The Mercurial.

Not a Jeopardy answer. An occasional, very sporadic feature in which I gush about stylish relics of the analogue era, or modern analogue design.

I’m an analogue girl in a digital world… – Erykah Badu

Still from Desk Set, starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, and some fantastic outfits. Via aatombomb.

A range of young artists who use "obsolete" technologies to create their work. (click if you love innovation and craftsmanship.)

An incredible hobby-turned-business-turned-archive of major historical significance. (click if you love vinyl.)

The death rattle of typewriter manufacturing, fact and fiction. (click if you love clacking keys and dinging bells.)

Part 2 of this series, where I point out some common photo foibles, and give you advice on how to look better in snapshots.

This week we have,

The Picture Worth $1000

That is what your online profile photo is worth, folks.  What are you gonna do with a thousand words? I'll take $1K, thank you. 

Think about it.  It could be the deal maker (or breaker) for a full time job, a freelance gig, or a wealthy spouse.

I will now attempt to explain how to take your profile photo from "floating head" or "mug shot" to a money-making headshot, with my lovely assistant, professional photographer, Kristina V.

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Photo: Leon Levinstein, via Metropolitan Museum.

I’ve added a couple of US and international fashion-related exhibits to my post from last week. Take a look:

For centuries, it was easy to identify an upper-class woman by the amount of fabric she was wearing– yards and yards of it.  This has implications from art history to the hijab debate in Islam.  Nowadays, the opposite may be true ("It’s better to be cold and stylish, than to be warm and frumpy.").  But there is still a class of women, even in our modern democratic society, whose role it is to be fertile and look attractive for their husbands.  I’m talking about you, Fairfield County.

Here are two artists who deal with women (and men) and fabric. (Also see Shadi Ghadirian.)

Elene Usdin, Femmes d’Interieur series

In this series of pictures on “Femmes d’intérieur”, I want to play with the codes, to re-arrange them, giving a cushion or a chair or a pair of shoes the same attention as the subject. It’s my way of depersonalizing the woman, of turning her into (perhaps what she always was): the object, the woman-object. Upending things in effect poses the question: what is the social status of a woman? The reference to “great classics” of painting is a good way to illustrate how a woman is corseted by her rank and the social position of her husband or her own family.

To speak of just one of these photographs : the portrait of “Georges”, is the one of (Georges) Sand, the writer, who in her own era deconstructed the codes corseting women. I have chosen to repaint the famous portrait of her by Charpentier which shows Sand with an amused smile.
In my vision, she is inviting the viewer to sit down on her, she is the woman-chair. But attention: on the armrest there lurks an aggressive barracuda which reverses the notion of the submissive woman. A kick in the nose to what society once expected of women. And today, is their independence so much more meaningful?

Quotes via Elene Usdin.

Andre Wagner, Black Holes series

I was unable to find any artist statement or curator’s description of this series.  Many different intended meanings could be read into the series title… Optimistically, my interpretation is that this series is a commentary on the tendency of people in the West to view people of other, non-Western cultures, even people of non-European descent living in the West, as one simplified image, identified by their foreign clothing, rather than as individuals.

It appears he has digitally erased the flesh of his subjects as well as the background, leaving disembodied clothing, although you can still see wisps of hair peeking from the pallu of the girl on the left in the first photo.

All images copyright to their respective creators.

Via PSFK.

Got a tip* today on an lovely new blog, A Collection a Day, by artist Lisa Congdon, an illustrator and collector.

Images copyright Lisa Congdon.

This is my attempt to document my collections, both the real and the imagined. Some of my collections are so large that I will need to photograph them separately over several days. I will likely not attempt to photograph collections in which the individual pieces are large in size or awkward in shape (i.e. my art collection or vintage enamel dishware collection). The only rule is that I must photograph or draw a whole or part of a collection each day for 365 days and post the result here on this blog.

*Thanks, Cyanatrendland.

Photographers documenting street fashion have been getting a lot of press lately: The Sartorialist, Garance Dore and others are the newer kids on the block; New York Magazine has The Look Book; Bill Cunningham has been at the game for much longer at the New York Times.  (Video interview here. I was introduced to Mr. Cunningham’s work by this great New Yorker article.) 

And there’s a "democratization" process taking place, I think, in fashion in general, to the point where designers are actually using the street as their venue of choice for shows.

Given my dormant aspirations to be a photographer, and my current fashion projects, I’ve come up with the scheme of putting a similar street-fashion feature here on the blog. 

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