American Pictures

This picture has been on my mind.
This lady has been on my mind.

jacob_holdt

Jacob Holdt made this photo- one of approximately 15.000 pictures he took during 5 years of hitchhiking across America in the early 1970’s. During this time, he stayed in over 400 homes, ranging from the extremely poor to the very wealthy and intimately documented this stark contrast, the painful social injustice within American society. 
His parents had sent him the cheapest half-frame camera they could find, and every week Jacob sold his blood plasma in order to have a little money to pay for new film and post the photographs back to his family home in a small village in western Jutland, Denmark.

Jacob Holdt never considered himself a great photographer and has mentioned that for him, photography is just a way of fighting racism.
About the above photo, he has shared the following story:
“In Alabama, this poor old woman of 87 asked me to drive her to Phoenix, Arizona. She wanted to go there to die. I helped her board up the windows in her dilapidated shack outside Tuskegee, because although she knew very well she would never return, she still didn't want the local blacks moving into it. 
She sat the whole way out there with a pistol in her hand. She was scared stiff of me because of my long hair and beard, but she had no other way of getting to Arizona. She was so weak that I had to carry her whenever she had to leave the car, but in spite of this she continued to cling to her gun.
The car was so old that we could only drive at 30 miles an hour, so the trip took us 4 days. She had saved for years in order to have enough money for gas, but she had no money for food, so I had to get out several times and steal carrots and other edible things along the road. ”

Now- when I read these words and look at the old lady’s face, it saddens me.
It saddens me, that in the evening of her life, all this lady had to hold on to was hate and fear, tightly clutching it through the cold metal of her gun.
But somehow I hope, that somewhere, perhaps at the end of her last journey, she experienced a tiny sense of freedom. 

A feeling that Jacob Holdt himself described as following: 
“The greatest freedom I know is to be able to say yes; the freedom to throw yourself into the arms of every single person you meet. Especially as a vagabond you have the freedom, energy, and time to be fully human toward every individual you meet. The most fantastic lottery I can think of is hitch-hiking. There is a prize every time. Every single person can teach you something. [...] Every person is like a window through which the larger society can he glimpsed.”

American Pictures, Jacob Holdts’ document of the time he spent in the USA between 1970 and 1975 is devastatingly intimate, painfully confronting and shockingly relevant.
http://american-pictures.com/

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* all photographs copyright ©Jacob Holdt

Songs to start the day - 'Anenome' by The Brian Jonestown Masacre

Anthony Bourdain described the vibe of this song so well, when he said:
“Drenched in opiates and regret, I heard this song once and became besotted by it.
It sounds like lost love, past lives, unforgiven mistakes and transgressions.”

Anenome by the Brian Jonestown Massacre is the perfect song to start your day with, If you want to start your day
feeling dangerously sensual, that is.

Click to listen here:

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Where they worked - Jan, Marianne and Annabert Yoors

Jan Yoors- a childhood wanderer, that left his parents’ home in Antwerp at the early age of 12 to join a group (‘kumpania') of Roma, who he travelled on and off with for ten years, and was eventually adopted by.
A life, that he wrote several books about and documented with timeless and brilliant black and white photographs.
Jan Yoors- an active member of the World War II underground, managing to escape from Gestapo capture and torture.
Jan Yoors- a polyamorous New York based artist, that reinvented the world of tapestry and hung around with Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning.
Jan Yoors- who had a relatively short life but continued to live on, in the epic designs he left behind. Extraordinary tapestries that were being created until years after his passing...woven on giant looms, by the two wives that survived and revered him.

At this point it’s hard to tell exactly how much of the details of his incredible story are true.
Jan himself once spoke the following words:
“Tapestry is by definition a mural art and as such can, and must, be of epic scale and heroic dimensions.”
And perhaps, he really lived a life that measured up to the exact same criteria as his art.

What I do know for sure though, is that he left a stunning legacy of paintings, drawings, designs, sculptures, books, photographs and tapestries. And for this post, I’d like to show a little more of the latter and about how and where they were created.

Design Process
After being inspired by an exhibition about French tapestries, Jan built a loom and together with his wives Annabert and Marianne, through trial and error, discovered the techniques of weaving.

Then, after a decade of exploring vibrant figurative designs, often depicting biblical and mythical subjects, Yoors began designing abstract tapestries in the late 1950s. The abstract journey led him towards an increasing fascination with capturing the ephemeral and many of the tapestries from the late 1960s onward, recall geographic and natural forms, as well as more ephemeral concepts such as language.

“He would take a picture of a torn poster, a shadow or some graffiti—something that’ll be gone in a second—and then turn it into a design for tapestry, which would take ages to weave!”
- Kore Yoors about his father Jan.

This captivation with the ephemeral- and transforming its fleetingness through the permanence of an ancient art form as tapestry- is, where the timeless magic of Yoors’ designs springs from.
Surroundings became opportunities and inspiration became boundless- Jan, Marianne and Annabert all participated in this process and there was a constant dialogue and experimentation between them.

Through photography, the art form that already guided him on his journeys as a teenager and young adult, Jan could capture ephemeral elements such as patina and imperfections in urban landscape- like torn posters or dripping paint. 
He would then rotate, crop and enlarge parts of the abstract photographs, and turn them into vibrant gouache designs.
The gouache image was traced and gridded, to enable translation to a large scale that was transferable to their giant, hand built loom.
These full scale paintings were often hung behind the loom, for guidance while weaving and the warp threads themselves were painted on to mark changes in colour.

Process steps of designs based on photographs of landscape and of the residue of torn posters (click to enlarge):

Process steps of the tapestry “As Clouds to Moon”, based on Newspaper Cutouts:

Photographs of torn posters and Gouache designs:

Process steps of designs based on Shadow Studies:
Yoors designed The Tantra series from cropped contact prints that he made of leaves and their shadows.

Process steps of designs based on Texture and Pattern:

Weaving Process

If three to four people weave eight hours each day, a 2.5 by 3 metre tapestry, would usually take four or five months to complete.
When this sinks in, one can imagine that the lives of the Yoors family were inseparable from their work.

Annabert and Marianne wove together for fifty years, sometimes for days without a break.
Using an age-old method, they threaded their giant 4.5 metre loom and carefully transposed Jan’s original full-scale design onto the threads with a paintbrush.
They wove one colour at a time, beating each individual Persian thread down with a screwdriver. Marianne has said that they wove as one person, which is proven by the tapestries’ flawless surfaces.
The final product was hemmed and pressed, all by hand.

“When you spend six, eight, ten months weaving a tapestry,  you weave a foot or so and roll it up. 
You cannot make a mistake because it cannot be fixed.” 
- Marianne Yoors

From each design, only one single tapestry was woven.
”We make one single tapestry from each design, as opposed to the current trend of producing editions or series of reproductions.
In an age marked by either anonymous mass production or, in its very opposite, what I consider, excessive egocentrism and interpersonal distrust, the team work, demanded by the making of tapestries as we practice it, is one of the purest forms of romance and personal fulfilment.”
- Jan Yoors

The tapestries were always signed, “Jan Yoors.” 
In answer to the question why she and Annabert didn’t sign the weavings, Marianne has simply stated: “we signed with every stitch.”


96 Fifth Avenue
The Yoors’ moved to 96 Fifth Avenue in New York in 1950.
With tapestry not yet being recognised as a fine-arts form, plus it taking them six to nine months to weave one tapestry, they were completely broke.

“We had no money at all. We were living in a loft building we were not allowed to live. We had no kitchen, no bathroom... But all that mattered to Jan was having space to do his work.
The three of us worked every single day, even weekends, until midnight.” 
- Marianne Yoors

329 East 47th Street
Their dedication however persisted and commissions started coming in, which then allowed them to move to a larger (and amazing!) studio on 47th street.

108 Waverly Place
Finally, in 1967, the Yoors Family ended up in Greenwich Village.
Jan and Annabert already had two children together (Vanya and Lyuba) and after Marianne became pregnant with Kore, they decided to divorce.
This was a formality, which enabled Jan to now marry Marianne and become Kore’s official father.

“I didn’t care about this at all, but Jan insisted!
We didn’t even have a celebration. We just went to City Hall, and that was it. I can’t even remember the date!” 
- Marianne Yoors.

Apartment Kore and Marianne
Jan passed away in 1977, he was 55 years old and suffered a heart attack at home.

Annabert and Marianne continued weaving his remaining unwoven designs for many years, until the landlord decided to sell their studio.
In 1998, after 35 years, they had to leave Waverly Place for a much smaller apartment, where it became almost impossible to continue the weaving.
When asked the question by the New York Times if moving would be like disassembling a shrine, Marianne answered:
''That is the wrong word. A shrine is to something that is no longer alive.''

In the same interview, the ladies spoke about each other:
''She talks so beautiful,'' said Annabert of Marianne,
''She goes everywhere, she is afraid of nothing'' Marianne said of Annabert.

Annabert passed away in 2010.

Marianne and Kore still live in the smaller but beautiful apartment.
The space is unique and full of love and art, in the living room a coffee table made out of their first loom, throughout the house Mariannes wonderful ceramics an Jan’s timeless photography, life sized sculpture and vibrant designs.

Work
Jan, Annabert and Marianne Yoors created dozens  of handwoven tapestries between 1945 and 1977, the year that Jan died.
The actual number is now closer to 200,  seven of which have a length over 6 metres. The designs and colours are as brilliant and unique today as when they were first dyed and created.

But instead of speaking further about his art, let’s finish up with Jan’s own words:

“If I am reticent to speak about the sources, the drive to make, or the meaning of my tapestries, it is because I strongly feel that were I able to do so, articulately and coherently, I would be a writer on art rather than an artist.”

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*Photographs sourced from various locations, but mainly through the Yoors Family Partnership, please click pictures to enlarge.
Kore and Marianne’s apartment photographed by Leslie Williamson.

Treasure Hunting

Photographer Peter Byrne found a true treasure at a car boot sale in York...
A box full of slides, taken by a couple living in New York during the 1950’s. 
Only one of the slide boxes had a name on it: “Frank J Dominick”.
But each picture tells an entire story. 
The boys and their turtle is my absolute favourite.
More from the amazing find below (click to see full size) and on Peters Blog: https://peterbyrne.co.uk/category/found/


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Amazon skin

Javier Silva Meinel’s series “Piel del Amazonas” was developed in the course of several years in the Peruvian jungle.
Javier imagines wildly.
Gazes gently.
And collaborates with his subjects intimately.
The fabric background he incorporates in most of his images, seems to add a veil of separation from the normal surroundings- creating a new and safe space of rite.

 

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* all photographs copyright ©Javier Silva Meinel, click to enlarge. 

Gösta Peterson

“I didn’t want to work with these damn people who scribbled on my drawings. I liked to have control,” is what Gösta Peterson later said about quitting his job as an illustrator in the 1950's.
So he grabbed his Rolleiflex and taught himself photography.
A few years later, he was the one that captured the first ever American portrait of Twiggy and he was the one that shot Naomi Sims for the New York Times in 1967 (the first time an African-American model finally appeared on the cover of a national magazine).
He chose character over beauty and declined working for Vogue, because they wouldn’t let him choose his own models.
A bit of a badass, definitely original, independent.
An artist in fashion.
Tack ska du ha, Gösta!

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* all photographs copyright ©Gösta Peterson, click to enlarge. 

Anja Niedringhaus

Anja Niedringhaus took this stunning picture of Palestinian schoolgirls enjoying a ride at an amusement park outside Gaza City in March 2006.
She was an Associated Press photographer for over 25 years, documenting from conflict zones in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia and beyond.
Amidst death and danger, she maintained a clear eye and warm heart for humanity and the lives of the ordinary people that she cared about deeply.

In April 2014, Anja was shot and killed by a police officer in Afghanistan, leaving behind a body of work that won awards and broke hearts.

On the AP website, I read the words “Anja Niedringhaus faced down some of the world's greatest dangers and had one of the world's loudest and most infectious laughs.”
I like that.

Thank you, Anja- may you rest in peace and loud laughter. 

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* all photographs copyright ©Anja Niedringhaus, click to see full size photographs and background information.

Where they worked - Georgia O'Keeffe

Her incredible art, her battle against gender bias, her vivid and inspiring correspondence, her fierce and sensual beauty and her impeccable, understated taste in wardrobe...there's a lot that one could talk about when it comes to Georgia O'Keeffe.

Well, she was a lover and a loner and New Mexico stole her heart.
And it was there, in the North of New Mexico that she spent the last forty years of her life, in quiet but creative isolation and in two incredibly beautiful houses, of which I’m sharing a few images of today.


Rancho de los Burros at Ghost Ranch
“To me it is the best place in the world,” O’Keeffe said of Ghost Ranch, of which she first purchased a very small piece of land in 1940.
“It has always been secluded and solitary. When I first went there, it was only one house with one room—which had a ghost living in it.
As soon as I saw it, I knew I must have it”

But Rancho de los Burros was barren and a place for summer, so in 1945 Georgia bought a second piece of land in the village of Abiquiú.
Three acres, including a crumbling adobe home and the possibility of planting a garden.
She spent three years remodelling and rebuilding the house and after her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, passed away, O’Keeffe left New York to make Abiquiú her permanent home.


Abiquiú house- Outside

"When I got to New Mexico, that was mine. As soon as I saw it, that was my country.
I’d never seen anything like it before, but it fitted to me exactly.
It’s something that’s in the air, it’s just different.
The sky is different, the stars are different, the wind is different. 
I feel at home here – I feel quiet – my skin feels close to the earth when I walk out into the red hills …"


Abiquiú house- Patio and Atelier

Abiquiú house- Studio

After fully moving here, Georgia would sign her letters to the people she loved with “from the faraway nearby”, a beautiful oxymoron, enveloping physical distance as well as emotional closeness.
One can be inspired by the absolute beauty of the distance and yet remain close to the ones we love, in our hearts and minds.

Abiquiú house- Living Room

Abiquiú house- Dining Room

Abiquiú house- Kitchen and Pantry

Abiquiú house- Bedroom
O'Keeffe did not bring antiques to Santa Fe, she worked with what she had and mixed modern and adobe with found objects.
The patent-leather blackout curtains in her bedroom however, are a flash of her New York days.

I love the detail of the Buddha hand in Abhaya mudrā pose ( right hand held upright, with the palm  facing outwards) a gesture of fearlessness.
It reminds me of one of my favourite quotes by Georgia O’Keeffe:
“I’ve always been absolutely terrified every single moment of my life and I’ve never let it stop me from doing a single thing I wanted to do”

In her paintings, Georgia O’Keeffe immortalised the dramatic landscape surrounding her homes, in all its shifting colours and moods
In her houses, she managed to create an extraordinary calm.
And in her words, she left us with wise thoughts to delve into:
"I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.”
“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant—there is no such thing.
Making your unknown known is the important thing—and keeping the unknown always beyond you…”

May we all have the courage to explore our personal and unique unknown, while also having a safe haven from which we can admire our surroundings.
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*Photographs by Tony Vaccaro, Yousuf Karsh, Balthazar Korab, Herbert Lotz, Todd Webb, John Loengard, Brittany Ambridge, Arnold Newman and Laura Gilpin.
Sourced from various locations, please click to enlarge.

Footprints of devotion

Hua Chi, a Buddhist monk and doctor of traditional medicine, has been praying in the same spot for decades.
Over the years, he has knelt in daily prayer so many times, that the soles of his feet have become deeply embedded in the wooden floor of the temple he lives in.
These beautifully ingrained footprints show his devotion and inspire others to work towards leaving their own mark.

Photo's by Reinhard Krause
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Slim Aarons

"I used natural lighting. If it was good enough for Rembrandt, it was good enough for me."
S.A.

Slim Aarons became an army photographer at 18, during WW II.
After the war, he decided he wanted to turn his camera away from misery and be photographing “attractive people, who were doing attractive things in attractive places”.
So he started capturing the dolce vita of the jet setting High Society of the 1960's and 70's.

These stories, the vibrance, the optimism…all the 'bull' (as Slim called it himself) are still like taking a refreshing dip into the pool of a fantasy world.

Thanks for showing us a wonderful time, Slim.

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* all photographs copyright ©Slim Aarons, click to enlarge.

Reality

He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil.
Psychosis: out of touch with reality.
Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it.
- Jeanette Winterson

Picture by Alva Bernadine

Picture by Alva Bernadine

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Claude Nori

French photographer Claude Nori has an ongoing love affair with Italy.
And so do I.
Mister Nori decided to make a lovely book about it, a book about the sweetest “dolce far niente” on the Italian coast. 
The photographs, taken in the 80s and 90s almost make you taste the salt, feel the sun, hear the Vespa’s.
Purrrrrr.

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* all photographs copyright ©Claude Nori, click to enlarge.
Follow Claude Nori on Instagram @noriclaude and visit his website at http://www.claudenori.com/ to see and read more.

Dream Away

“She pinched my butt, and that was that”- words that photographer Michael Northrup spoke about meeting his former wife and muse Pam, in 1976.
Michaels book ‘Dream Away’ is a document of their relationship- in all of its curious, sexy, beautiful, intimate, gentle and dramatic glory.
The marriage has long ended.
But the memory remains, in the tender and colourful melancholy of this wonderful tribute to a Love lost.

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* all photographs copyright ©Michael Northrup, click to enlarge.
Follow Michael on Instagram @michaelenorthrup and visit his website at http://www.michaelnorthrup.com/ to see more of his brilliant work.

Monochrome Melancholy

Autumn Colours

Things To Do

When asked for his definition of paradise, Johnny Cash replied:
“This morning, with her, having coffee.”

The following to-do list by Johnny, sold at an auction in 20110 for $6,250.
Remarkable, as to me it seems invaluable.
❤️ 

IMG_3130.JPEG

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Joan Colom

Joan Colom worked as an accountant during the week and shot the Raval neighborhood of Barcelona on the weekends. Without aiming, he trusted his instincts and shot from the hip- collecting some amazing and touching moments.

* all photographs copyright ©Joan Colom, click to enlarge.