YOU'RE THE STAR OF MY MOVIE

I just finished Claire Messud’s The Emporer’s Children.” She is a compelling storyteller and draws vivid, complex, and believable characters. There is some “what would this look like photographed?” language, but it rarely gets overly descriptive. The writing is mostly in service of the storytelling and you can read the whole thing in a couple [...]

I’m now reading: Freddie Young & Paul Petzold’s “The Work of the Motion Picture Cameraman.” It inspired me to post an exceprt from Dviga Vertov’s “Man With a Movie Camera.” Make some popcorn because it’s a stone cold classic. I must have watched it 20+ times in school. (This is the popper we use and [...]

Director of Photography extraordinaire Harris Savides shot the new Sofia Coppola movie Somewhere with Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning. Here’s the trailer… (and here’s a great interview with him)

I came across the 4×5 work of Dannielle Nelson Mourning recently and I am particularly captivated by the open-ended quality of this picture. There is much to read into the filmic nature of the gesture (she is casual, yet determined and I have to wonder what happens next). The look on her face (deep in [...]

I hung out with Lucy Punch last week and she was both funny and a delight to be around. You can see her in Dinner for Schmucks which opens today. She is getting raves from critics saying she stole the show. The picture is for the Castor & Pollux blog Loving.

I went to opening night of Christopher Nolan’s Inception last night at BAM. Kudos to Warner Brothers. It was a 160 million very well spent dollars on their part. Opening night raked in $21 million in the US alone. This is what mass entertainment should be. It looks good. There’s enough intrigue to happily spend [...]

I saw a Jason Bell picture in the new Vanity Fair. His site led me to Derringer Cycles which led me to a state called desire. WANT THIS SO BAD (board track racing motorcycle by Adrian Van Anz):

I’m pretty excited that Alessandra Sanguinetti‘s “The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of their Dreams” is finally coming out. I’ve been hoping to find an inexpensive copy of Light Work’s Contact Sheet 120 for a while. This body of work was first published there as far as I know. There is [...]

I got this book of painter Maurice Denis‘ photographs at the Musée d’Orsay a couple of years ago in Paris. They are very Summer Friday. His paintings express his interest in the flatness of the picture plane, line and pure color shapes and his photographs from 1901 (left) and 1911 (right) show a similar concern [...]

“I like to think of myself —as an artist— as being in a nondescript swamp, alone, up to my knees in mire, painting the vital beauty I see there, in my own way, not caring a damn about tradition, or anyone’s opinion.” — Charles Burchfield Gardenville, February 8th, 1938 I was at a party last [...]