Doppelganger

Doppelganger, San Francisco, August 2007.

Mid-Century Modern

Eames Rocking Chair, 1946, April 2007.

Watching Mad Men made me recall the time I developed a fetish for mid-century chairs. Once, we couldn't get a fiberglass Eero Aarnio ball chair into my son's room so we had to cut a hole in the wall, reseal and reset the window pane. The chair is forever ensconced in the room, at least until we knock the walls down.

Like many chairs from the period, the ball chair is a relaxation machine, a cocoon for spacing out with the iPod and both feet over one's head. So are the rocker designed by Charles and Ray Eames from 1946 (main photo), made of molded fiberglass and maple runners, and the Barcelona daybed (right), designed in 1930 by German-American architect Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe.

My favorite designer from the period is French architect Jean Prouvé, whose simple wood and steel furniture reveal the grace of their lines only upon close contemplation. His economical and functional work outfitted hospitals, schools, government buildings, and prisons. Long out of production and coveted by collectors, a few of his chairs and tables were recently reproduced by Vitra, where I was able to get the Standard chairs (pictured on the left) which he developed in 1936.


Lighting fixtures from the period reflect the same sparseness and functionality. My all-time favorites are the works of Danish designer Poul Henningsen, whose glare-free PH-5 pendant (left) cuts such an enduringly modern form that it's almost impossible to date it by sight (it was designed in 1958). Henningsen's work continues to be produced by Louis Poulson, but vintage ones can still be obtained from Danish sellers.

The spirit of the Bauhaus Movement, whose 90th anniversary is currently being celebrated in Berlin, informed modernism and continues to inspire today. On the right is a table lamp whose lines are typical of the Bauhaus aesthetic; beside it, my daughter sita on a sofa that was originally designed by Le Corbusier.

My daughter's face

Zoe, San Francisco, April 2008.



I've been photographing my daughter, Zoe, since she was three or four. She has become accustomed to the intrusion of my camera when she awakes, walks, eats. She obliges me with her camera face and she has learned how to catch her light. In my company, she knows that a barren wall or a luminous shaft of light would mean having to stand against it, be blinded by the light, or appear silly to passers by; but she indulges me.

In the process of being model and muse, she has picked up the camera herself, learning to shoot with it manually before discovering that she didn't have to. She also learned about Iturbide and Balthus, Björk and Almodovar, the people we have made homages to; exposure, aperture priority, rule of thirds, diagonals. She likes her pictures dark and is a killer at Photoshop. When she photographs, as she did for her school yearbook, she is fearless and demanding.

I love my daughter's face. Her downward gaze telegraphs sadness unknowable for her age. Her grace and poise preceded her dance training: calm and stillness before the lens inhabit her naturally; hers is a face that changes its essence with the slightest movement of the eyes or the angle of the chin. She has maturity beyond her years that she projects for my benefit. As easily as she puts on "the look," she would remove it, like a mask, the moment I say "all done," and she is a child again.

She is fast approaching her teens, and as I contemplate the gift that she has given my work and the beauty she has lent to images that I shall treasure always, I give her my own: from William Butler Yeats' "A Prayer for My Daughter." I know she will read this and hope that she fathoms its meaning. It is my own wish for this beautiful child of mine.

"May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend."

All my children

Miguel and Zoe, Oakland, August 2009.

Taken Today: Dancing

After Ballet Class, Berkeley, July 2009.

My daughter is on her sixth or seventh year of taking ballet classes. She's getting stronger, more limber, and beginning to distinguish her Fosses from her Balanchines. But her real idols are the modern dance choreographers of her generation: Mia Michaels, Wade Robson, Sonya Tayeh, Shane Sparks, Tice DiOrio, Adam Shankman, Mandy Moore; in short, the choreographers of the inspiring reality TV show, So You Think You Can Dance. Better known to its fans as SYTYCD, the show has taken dance out of its elitist and airless space and into the living rooms of the public-at-large, alive, kicking, and a joy to behold. SYTYCD has shown everyone what dance enthusiasts have known all along -- that dance is hard work and, when done well, is an exuberant celebration of what the human body can do.

Here's a sample of the boundless ingenuity of its choreographers, a Latin-hiphop hybrid set in a Cuban bordello, danced to the music of Cuban-American rapper Pitbull, choreographed by Tabitha & Napoleon and Dmitry Chaplin. (For Jorge, who missed this number when it was first braodcast.)

So You Think You Can Dance - Calle Ocho

Viva Almodóvar

Dedicated to Alan and Isabela

After Volver, Oakland, California, November 2007.

Pedro Almodóvar is on a roll. Since 1999 he's been making one gem after another, starting with All About My Mother and continuing all the way to Volver (2006), which featured Penelope Cruz at her sauciest and his entire pantheon of great character actresses. Bookended by these two movies about women were two movies about men, Talk to Her (2002) and Bad Education (2004), rarities for Almodóvar and equally great. Almodóvar's movies before 1999 were all irresistible in their own ways: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown was so popular it may soon become a TV series for Fox, and at the core of Live Flesh was a great performance from Javier Bardem. But none of them could have prepared us for the complex depths of feeling and tragedy found in All About My Mother and the later films. He has a new movie coming out soon, Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces), and a new movie by Almodóvar is always a good thing.

There's one more reason to look forward to a new Almodóvar movie: a new musical score from Alberto Iglesias, the brilliant composer who scored Almodóvar's last seven films. (Listen to -- and be swept away by -- the title track from Talk to Her in the first video below.) Almodóvar reputedly likes to haunt karaoke bars and sing his heart out. It shows in his movies; the tragic ones are like operas and the day-glo comedies are Broadway musicals waiting to happen. His soundtracks mine the best of old and new music from Spain and some of the best heartbreakers ever recorded (listen to Caetano Veloso's Cucurrucucu Paloma or Maysa Matarazzo's version of Ne Me Quitte Pas). His new movie, Los Abrazos Rotos, which is about a filmmaker who has become blind, features the beautiful song "A Ciegas" (Blindly), scored by Iglesias and performed by Miguel Poveda (see video below).


All About My Mother


Talk to Her

Bad Education


Volver




Almodóvar Images (music by Alberto Iglesias, Talk to Her)


From Los Abrazos Rotos, Miguel Poveda sings "A Ciegas"


Penelope Cruz sings title song of Volver


Anatomy of a Movie Poster, Volver


Main Titles, Talk to Her

THX-1138, high key, and Harry Callahan

THX-1138, San Francisco BART, April 2007.

This high key picture of a passing train reminded me of THX-1138. Audiophiles will recognize THX (Tomilinson Holman's eXperiment) from the roaring locomotive credits found in some DVDs, the trademark of Lucasfilm's high fidelity quality assurance technology used for movie soundtracks. But for cinephiles, THX can only mean one thing: the 1971 film THX-1138, George Lucas' Orwellian nightmare of totalitarianism set in the 25th century.

THX-1138 is George Lucas' first feature film, which he made after apprenticing with Francis Ford Coppola, six years before the rampaging phenomenon called Star Wars. It was shot in color, but many of the scenes have the feel of black & white in high key. Characters, male and female, wear white, their heads are shaven clean, and they are shot against empty white spaces whose stark incandescence blinds the eyes; they appear imprisoned in eternity.

The high key images of THX-1138 recall the 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Theodor Dreyer's masterpiece of minimalism. The movie has been spectacularly restored on DVD by Criterion and features an alternate score, "Voices of Light," which was inspired by the film. The movie is a must see for the performance of Maria Falconetti, who plays Joan of Arc, and its unforgettable high key images.

High key photographs, like the portrait I shot on the right, are remarkable for their exaggerated brightness and shadowless contrasts, achieved through exposure, lighting or post-processing. The white-on-white quality of high key images gives them the delicacy of brush paintings; at their most pronounced, the brightness consumes the forms, leaving nothing but line.

Some of my favorite high key images were made by Chicago photographer Harry Callahan, whose nudes and portraits of his wife, Eleanor, are oftentimes so washed out by light that they become abstractions of the female form. Callahan's pictures have been described as "quiet," like the laconic photographer himself, the kind you would look at while listening to Mompou or Satie. It's the high key; white is the color of tranquility.

High key images from THX-1138

This graphic world

Zoe in the madding crowd, San Francisco, April 2007.

These are my favorite images from Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi masterpiece. The movie is set in Los Angeles in the year 2019, a mere 10 years from today. In Ridley Scott's vision of the future, Los Angeles has become a Babel-like city of foreign noises, more East Asian than American, a city on the verge of sensory overload. Talking electronic billboards loom like IMAX screens against the night sky, their advertising relentless like the rain and the darkness.

Eliminate the shuttle crafts from Blade Runner's hypergraphic world, and you're in present-day Times Square on a rainy night. Or Mumbai with its wall-to-wall Bollywood posters plastered all over the city. Or Causeway Bay, Hong Kong's maddening shopping district. Along Manila's highways, mammoth billboards of models in their underwear create havoc on the road by obstructing the views of drivers and distracting their libidos.

Cities have become canvases; and like a Jackson Pollock painting, every square inch of space is taken. High above skyscrapers, down on the street, further down subway stations, on walls, buses, and lampposts, cities inundate us with graphics and light, competing for our ADD-addled attention.

The images plead to us: to look, to read, to buy, to swoon, to vote, to enlist, to engage, to enrage, to copy, to care, to believe.

They belong to our reality but transport us out of it. A mad hour dash to the commuter train becomes a confrontation with armed men and a lost child in war-ravaged Darfur. A bus blocks the crosswalk, and six larger-than-life marines in parade dress appear and disappear. In that flashing moment, the martial image transports us into the realm of patriotic duty and an unpopular war. Without a doubt, the daily barrage of graphic images can be unsettling, but we can't escape from them. We see them everywhere, we step on them, they even invade our dreams.

Still it is not enough that we must plaster an entire city -- and everything that moves in it -- with graphics and messages. People themselves are compelled to put messages on their clothing. This, to me, is just silly behavior. Like satirist Fran Lebowitz said: "If people don’t want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?"