Showing posts with label The big picture. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

The big picture / Michel Vanden Eeckhoudt’s languorous horse

The big picture: Michel Vanden Eeckhoudt’s languorous horse

The Belgian photographer’s 2012 image exemplifies his gift for connecting with animals on camera

Tom Adams

Sundsy 19 January 2025

Recent research into animal behaviour indicates that, contrary to the belief that horses only respond to stimuli in the moment, they have the ability to think ahead and plan their actions. The horse in this picture by Michel Vanden Eeckhoudt seems to have no urgent need for such strategic thinking. The mane of flaxen tresses, the loose ringlets of the tail, the languorous attitude, meadow flowers as far as the eye can see – Vanden Eeckhoudt’s horse seems to exist in a kind of pony club elysium, idly dreaming an afternoon

The big picture / William Klein captures geometric elegance in Rome

Simone Daillencourt and Nina Devos model for Italian designer Roberto Capucci in Rome’s
Piazza di Spagna in 1960. Photograph: William Klein

The big picture: William Klein captures geometric elegance in Rome

The photographer, who died last week, balances monochrome cool and traffic chaos in this striking image of two Vogue models

Tim Adams
Sunday 18 September 2022

y 1960, when he took this picture for French Vogue, William Klein had established himself as one of those artists who might help to define the look of the decade to come. Klein was born two days before the Queen in 1926 and died last week two days after her. He first made a name for himself in the 1950s with street pictures of the outer boroughs of New York, full of stylish visual irony and hard-won pathos.

The big picture / Girl in the dust, Somerset

Somerset, April 2020. Photograph: David Watts

The big picture: girl in the dust, Somerset

For photographer Dave Watts, it’s as if family life has gone back in time a little since the pandemic hit…

Tim Adams
Sunday 28 June 2020

uring lockdown, family life has sometimes established a different time and space. Dave Watts took this photograph of his daughter Minna, five, on the daily walk he and his wife, Frances, a landscape artist, have taken with their three young children. Watts and his family live on the edge of a town in Somerset, where he works as a commercial photographer, but when jobs dried up in April and the kids were home from school the days took on a less predictable, sometimes magical shape, one he has tried to capture.

“There is a network of footpaths and we fell into doing the same route every day,” he says. “Probably about a mile and a half, always quite a leisurely pace. The children got into the habit of stopping in the same places to play. Because it was at the end of such a long dry spell, this place was dusty and Minna loved that; she throws herself into being busy and messy.”

In some ways, shrinking horizons have perhaps taken children across the country back in time a little – with not much traffic on the roads, and long days to fill.

Watts started his career as a travel photographer based in London, before moving back to Somerset, near his childhood home, when his eldest child was born. The weeks of relative confinement have been a bittersweet time, he suggests – the fears and liberation of an empty schedule. The family has been sustained in part by Frances selling some work through the Artist Support Pledge. “To start with there was a lot of anxiety, with the pandemic and the lack of income, but then there were also these lovely sunny days outside with the kids,” Watts says. His pictures capture some of that contrast – the poignancy of living in the moment, and trying not to wonder what comes next.

THE GUARDIAN

Sunday, May 9, 2010

The big picture / Brigitte Bardot visits Pablo Picasso in Cannes, 1956

The artist in his studio with Brigitte Bardot during the 1956 International Cannes film festival.
Photograph: Jerome Brierre

The big picture: Brigitte Bardot visits Pablo Picasso in Cannes, 1956

The 21-year-old 'sex kitten' holds her own against the old predator, Picasso, during a visit to his studio at Vallauris, near Cannes, during the film festival in 1956

Peter Conrad
Sun 9 May 2010

hen the first Daguerreotype photograph was taken in the 1830s, a French artist sonorously prophesied: "From this day, painting is dead." It took Picasso to prove him wrong, by demonstrating the limits of photographic vision. The camera is restricted to surfaces; painting, if it is as aggressive and inquisitorial as Picasso's, can torment and transform the world of appearances, violently metamorphosing matter. "Reality must be torn apart," Picasso told his lover, Françoise Gilot. People, especially women, had to undergo the same painful fate.

The big picture / Yves St Laurent unveils his autumn/winter couture collection

Yves Saint Laurent takes a bow at the finale of his couture catwalk show. Photograph: Neville Marriner/Daily Mail/Rex Features.

The big picture: Yves St Laurent unveils his autumn/winter couture collection

The influential designer, whose lasting legacy was the trouser suit, is in his element here as one of the last kings of couture

Peter Conrad
Sunday 4 April 2010

oday a few unfashionable people may be celebrating the rebirth of a god. Early Christianity legitimised itself by latching onto the pagan rites of spring, so the resurrected redeemer annually takes responsibility for the new life that stirs in the mortified earth. It's a shrewd strategy for any cult that wants to establish itself as a religion, and it has been adopted by the fashion industry, which observes holy weeks of its own throughout the year. In midwinter, designers anticipate spring at florid catwalk shows in which models mimic flowers on legs; what we see here is a midsummer show where the models are already dressed for winter – except for the one beside Yves Saint Laurent, who has an overblown rose where her head to ought to be. Fashion lives in the future: if winter comes, can spring be far behind?

On this occasion the audience outdazzles the models, and the young man in the yellow shirt could be impersonating a newly opened daffodil. Why all the sunglasses? Fashion belongs in a conservatory where exotic growths can be pampered. Hence this gilded hothouse, with spotlights creating a solar blaze indoors.

Roland Barthes suggested: "Fashion, for the modern woman, is a bit like what the great Dionysian festivals were for the ancient Greeks." Well, just a bit: these guests clap politely rather than running amok like the wine-maddened worshippers of Dionysus, who adorned themselves with flowers as a tribute to the blossoming god. Yet Saint Laurent understands the purpose of the performance: he has walked down a runway that resembles the nave of a cathedral to attend his own consecration. He has dressed for it, however, in a suit. For others, fashion may be an art or a religion, but for him it's a business. Gods only need to delude their infatuated followers; they don't have to believe in themselves.

THE GUARDIAN

Sunday, March 21, 2010

The big picture / Christine Keeler in Cannes, 1963

Christine Keeler on the beach in Cannes, May 1963. Photograph: Popperfoto

The big picture: Christine Keeler in Cannes, 1963

It's high nooon on the beach at Cannes for the woman who made a Tory government totter with a film about her notorious affair

Peter Conrad
Sunday 21 March 2010

On the beach is where you wait for the world to end, or watch a continent crumbling into powder that washes away with every wave that thuds on the shore. It's a laboratory for studying erosion: the hill beyond the Cannes waterfront may have been covered with Italianate villas made of stone quarried from local mountains, but down here in the foreground there are only granules of dirt, churned up by the child in the sun hat. The beach is where earth sifts away like sand trickling through an hour glass.

The woman with the hooded eyes, long nose and unkempt hair is walking across the beach towards oblivion; in the shorter term, she is on her way to jail. Christine Keeler had supposedly endangered national security by sleeping with both Harold Macmillan's secretary of state for war and a Russian naval attaché. At home she was notorious but in this paradise of cooking flesh she looks quaintly prim: the former topless showgirl from a Soho cabaret has chosen to wear a prudish one-piece bathing suit. The few men whose gazes stray towards her were probably wondering why anyone would bother to take her photograph. If the palms along the corniche are too exotic for Cannes, she's not exotic enough.

Her walk was a stunt to publicise a tacky film about her affair with Profumo, made in Denmark and never licensed in the UK. Keeler recited the credit titles at the end, beginning with her admission that "I was played by Yvonne Buckingham": she wasn't even allowed to be the heroine of her own life story. The film disappeared like a footprint in dry sand, leaving behind only an image from another publicity campaign – Lewis Morley's nude portrait of Keeler astride a curvy biomorphic copy of a chair designed by Arne Jacobsen. Morley photographed her in a studio, with her white limbs and the blond wood of the chair eerily radiant in the darkness. Outdoors, in the unsparing sunlight, she looks ordinary, despoiled of aura. Was this the face that made a Tory government totter?

What gives the image interest is two passages of abstract form that have nothing to do with its documentary content. One is the pattern on Keeler's bathing suit, as much a relic of Sixties design as a Jacobsen chair: zoom in on those stripes and you'll find yourself inside a piece of op art by Bridget Riley. The other is her shadow etched on the sand, foreshortened because the sun is so high overhead at noon: it looks like a frisky dog, leashed to her ankle. This spirit animal was only there for a fortuitous instant, and vanished before Keeler did. Photographs, like beaches, are lessons in ephemerality.

THE GUARDIAN

DRAGON
How Christine Keeler provided inspiration for Giacometti
Christine Keeler, former model at heart of Profumo affair, dies at 75
Christine Keeler's nude photograph / Still sexy and subversive, 50 years on
The big picture / Christine Keeler in Cannes, 1963
'I am part of English history' / Christine Keeler interview - archive, 1983
Profumo affair model Christine Keeler / A life in pictures

Sunday, March 7, 2010

The big picture / The Oscars, 1967

Steve McQueen and his wife Neile Adams at the 1967 Academy Awards. Photograph: Bettmann

The big picture: the Oscars, 1967

Stars will make sure the cameras catch them at their best at the Oscars tonight, but 43 years ago Steve McQueen was caught off guard, and goofy, on the red carpet with his wife Neile Adams

Peter Conrad
Sunday 7 March 2010

Steve McQueen in the film Bullitt drove a green Ford Mustang in a chase through San Francisco not "a cop car" and in The Great Escape vaulted a motorbike over the fence at the Swiss border not a "concentration camp".

The sky over Hollywood is inky, except for the glare of the klieg lights. If it weren't for the blue eyes of Steve McQueen and the lilac dress of his first wife, Neile Adams, the scene would be grimly and unglamorously monochrome. The whitest thing in this particular spectrum has to be the portcullis of porcelain teeth displayed by Mrs McQueen. The blackest thing is also white: the cigarette that dangles from the mouth of the man behind McQueen's left shoulder, who would be arrested as a menace to public health if he lit up at this year's Oscars. You can find a "memento mori" in every photograph, and here is a premonitory hint of the cancer that killed McQueen in 1980.

Because of the occasion, this is a photograph about photography, and it contains a veritable museum of gadgets that look neolithically clunky in our digital age. One man wields the kind of flash bulb used by paparazzi to stun their prey; another holds up a movie camera that looks as if it might have had to be cranked by hand; others wear an additional eye on their chests, and peer at the viewfinder as if into upside-down periscopes.

It's also a photograph about the fickleness of the camera's roving gaze, since no one but whoever took this snap has any interest in McQueen. In 1966 he was nominated for an Oscar for his role in as a sailor The Sand Pebbles, and in 1968 he made Bullitt, unforgettably bouncing a cop car down the steeply terraced streets of San Francisco, but in 1967 his wattage had temporarily dimmed. The scrum of photographers ignores him to concentrate on some unseen A-lister who parades past just outside the frame.

Disarmingly, he can't have known that he was being photographed. Otherwise he would surely have closed that goofily gaping mouth, or at least treated us to an orthodontic display like his wife's. What made McQueen a pin-up was his sullen moodiness. He glowered as he stood beside the motorcycle on which he vaulted over the concentration camp fence in The Great Escape, scowled as he showed off Bullitt's shoulder holster, and unrepentantly stared back at the police photographer in a mug shot after his arrest in Alaska for drunken driving in 1973. Here he looks almost gormless, wondering at some mid-air spectacle we can't see – an absence as intriguing as that of the brighter star who monopolises the attentions of the photographers behind him.

Even his wife – to whose pretty head McQueen later held a gun, to punish her for a one-night stand with Maximilian Schell – looks genuinely enraptured. They might be watching the mother ship that opens its doors to admit a few fortunate earthlings at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Maybe there actually is a heaven; meanwhile we have to make do with Hollywood.

THE GUARDIAN

Sunday, February 28, 2010

The big picture / Chaplin on set

prepares for his role as Calvero in Limelight. Photograph: W. Eugene Smith

The big picture: Chaplin on set

BIOGRAPHY

Charlie Chaplin checks his make-up while filming Limelight: The star returned to his music-hall roots in his final Hollywood film before he was exiled in Europe for his 'un-American' liberalism. Photograph by W. Eugene Smith

Peter Conrad

Sunday 28 February 2010

haplin, whose Little Tramp was an exemplary modern man, soon became a compulsory subject for modern art. Fernand Léger made a cubist Charlie from panels of painted wood, and Erwin Blumenfeld drew him as Christ limply dangling from a crucifix – a dejected saviour, shedding comic grace on an unworthy world. Edward Steichen photographed him as a capering faun, whose walking stick might be a magician's wand; Lee Miller, catching him in middle age, arranged his prematurely grey hair into radiant waves and made the imp – whose sexual escapades often got him into trouble with the law – look handsomely rakish. W Eugene Smith spent weeks on the set of Limelight, watching him mug and preen in front of the camera and issue orders behind it. Chaplin was 63 and soon to be exiled. When he left California for the film's London premiere in 1952, his permit to re-enter the US was revoked to punish him for his "un-American" liberalism.

Limelight took Chaplin back to his early years as a music-hall comedian. In Smith's photograph, the jaunty tramp is replaced by a tragic clown, whose mouth manages to smirk while turning down at the corners. He is ashen, even spectral: mimes paint their faces white because they want to join the company of the dead. His character's name is Calvero, which recalls the martyrdom in Blumenfeld's drawing; he dies onstage, of course.

The portrait at the mirror is also a self-portrait for the unseen photographer. W Eugene Smith was a tragic character, whose images, as Cartier-Bresson said, were "taken beneath the shirt and the skin", in the vulnerable vicinity of the heart. He photographed burials at sea during the Pacific war, spied on a Ku Klux Klan conclave, documented the ravings of psychiatric patients in Haiti, and wrecked his own health recording the misery of Japanese villagers poisoned by pollution.

The complicity between Smith's beatnik depressiveness and Chaplin's stoical despair enables the photographer to look behind the actor's pretence. The clown's persona crumbles when we see the jars that helped the actor assemble it and the tissues that will scrub the artifice off. Photography is about light and its battle with dark, and blackness seems about to engulf that white, bloodless face. Limelight, which illuminates Calvero's routines, gets its lunar glare from quicklime, which is also sprinkled on bodies to speed up their decay; the bulbs beside the mirror offer their own augury – are they not turned on, or have they burned out?

Chaplin here sadly prepares for a frolic that may be his final curtain, and Smith takes courage from his determination to challenge the encroaching night. The connection was momentary, as all photographs are. Ten years later Smith phoned Chaplin's home in Switzerland from his squalid Manhattan loft. The number rang for an age and the operator finally reported that no one was at home. Smith taped this pointless exchange, then filed the reel after labelling it "Last attempt to call Chaplin".

THE GUARDIAN