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Tag: magnum

TateShots Bruce Davidson’s Subway

“I wanted to transform the subway from its dark, degrading, and impersonal reality into images that open up our experience again to the colour, sensuality, and vitality of the individual souls that ride it each day.”

Photographer Bruce Davidson talked to TateShots about Subway, the groundbreaking series of portraits he began taking in the New York subway system in the spring of 1980:

The series was collected into a book published by Aperture in 1986, and the 25th anniversary edition of Subway was published last year. The New York Review of Books ran excerpt of the introduction to that new edition here.

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Something for the Weekend

Fabulous Fury — Evie Nagy reviews Tarpé Mills & Miss Fury: Sensational Sundays 1944–1949 for The LA Review of Books:

Though Mills ostensibly hid her gender and wrote a high-adventure comic rife with guy stuff like smuggling, espionage, mad science, and gruesome murders, Miss Fury has much in it that seems designed to appeal to women as well. For one thing, the outfits are fabulous. As Robbins suggests, Mills clearly took great pleasure in dressing Marla, scheming villainess Erica Von Kampf, and other characters in elaborate gowns, lingerie, and smart but finely detailed sportswear. Modern superhero comics tend to focus on the intricacies of high-tech costumes at the expense of civilian clothes; Miss Fury, by contrast, is midcentury clothes porn.

Fucking Great — British film director Beeban Kidron remembers Magnum photographer Eve Arnold who died recently aged 99:

She was an early adopter of colour – favouring a thick negative with rich hues and simple compositions – and she ruthlessly edited her own work with a wicked sense of humour. “It’s not that we’re so great, it’s that the others are so fucking mediocre.”

See also:

A slide show of Eve Arnold’s work at The Guardian.

Eve Arnold remembered in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Financial Times, The New York Times and The Economist.

The best Typefaces of 2011 from FontShop and the most popular fonts of the year from MyFonts.

Forward! — Stephen Page, chief executive of Faber & Faber, writing for The Guardian on the way ahead in publishing:

[T]he men and women engaged in publishing need to be bold and exuberant. This is an extraordinary age for writing and reading, and it seems to me that this endeavour will go better if it’s done with a sense of purpose and pleasure, rather than defensively. It won’t turn out well for everyone currently in the business, but so what? If publishing is useful and creates value then it will be of value, whoever is doing it.

And finally…

A lovely profile of  Peter Hardwicke, one of the last traditional signwriters in London’s East End, in Spitalfields Life:

I am an old school signwriter that likes to talk directly to the client to select the fonts and the colours. I’ve found it a rewarding way to work, dealing with independent shopkeepers. I like to look at the built environment and choose fonts that are sympathetic to the architecture and the surrounding cityscape. I look at the other shops and I do research…I think people are bored with computer generated artwork…even my younger clients, they’d rather have it  done professionally than use stick on letters – it shows they’ve got taste.

You can find an earlier profile of Peter here and see an archive of his work on Flickr. (Thx Monique)

 

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