Jacques Henri Lartigue’s Parisian Women/Curves/Mae West & Edith Piaf
“Curves: The loveliest distance between two points.”
Mae West
Jacques Henri Lartigue (June 13, 1894 – September 12, 986) was a French photographer and painter.
Born in Courbevoie (a city outside of Paris) to a wealthy family, he is most famous for his stunning photos of automobile races, planes and fashionable Parisian women from the turn of the century.
Although Lartigue occasionally sold his pictures to the press and exhibited at the Galerie d’Orsay alongside Brassaï, Man Ray and Doisneau, his reputation as a photographer was not truly established until he was 69, with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the publication of a portfolio in Life. He now added his father’s first name to his own surname, becoming Jacques Henri Lartigue. Worldwide fame came three years later with his first book, The Family Album, followed in 1970, by Diary of a Century, conceived by Richard Avedon. In 1975 he had his first French retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. For the rest of his life, Lartigue was busy answering commissions from fashion and decoration magazines.
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Click on Link to Download Soundtrack: The Voice of the Sparrow – Edith Piaf
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James Nachtwey War Photography/The Existence of the Human Soul/There are plenty of good reasons for fighting
“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.”
Kurt Vonnegut
James Nachtwey (born March 14, 1948) is an American photojournalist and war photographer. He has been awarded the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Gold Medal five times. In 2003, he was injured by a grenade in an attack on his convoy while serving as aTime contributing correspondent in Baghdad, from which he has made a full recovery.
hard to pick the featured images/as every shot is pure fire/like capa on crack/capturing every aspect of living with violence/squeezing the human condition down to a pin-point of light/the human struggle/sentient bags of translucent tubes, blood, gristle/torn open and spilling like garbage bags/but more importantly/showing such emotion
that
the
human soul
is
an
undeniable
reality
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Ancient Mexican Culture/Tres Leches/Where’s Your Gat Gringo?
“You ain’t a killer, you still learnin how to walk/From New York to Cali all the real niggaz carry chalk/Mark you for death, won’t even talk that East and West crap/From Watts to Lefrak, it ain’t where you’re from it’s where’s your gat.”
Big Punisher
excerpt and images from the new york times
Ruben E Reyes is Mexican. He was raised in Mexico City. But some of the indigenous Tarahumara people of northern Mexico had a word for him when he first traveled among them in 2002. The word was “gringo.”
“I was never called that before,” Mr. Reyes, 31, recalled recently.
Though his father’s family had come from an area about 50 miles away, Mr. Reyes was an outsider in the Copper Canyon, among the mountains of the Sierra Madre Occidental. He found the Tarahumara, who are known for their running prowess, living lives not wholly unlike their ancestors centuries ago, who fled to these elevations from the Spanish.
“They still had their own culture,” Mr. Reyes said. “It wasn’t Mexicanized.”
However, by the time he returned for several months in 2009 to photograph, Mr. Reyes saw signs of a cultural shift among the Tarahumara (also known as the Rarámuri). Men who had previously worn loincloths now wore jeans. Children, most of them now in school, were speaking Spanish, while their grandparents spoke only Tarahumara. People were leaving the canyon to seek work in the cities. Yet, at the same time, Mr. Reyes found many traditional religious practices still being maintained, alongside Catholic observances.
His black-and-white, medium-format photographs have a timelessness of their own, as if they had been taken a century ago. But this wasn’t the result of some conscious aesthetic strategy. “This is just the way I photograph,” Mr. Reyes said.
He currently works as a freelance photographer in Cincinnati, where he lives with his wife, Jamie, and their newborn daughter. That’s a long way from Copper Canyon.
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Soundtrack: Capital Punishment – Big Pun
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Piano Necktie 