The Bad Art Cafe

Black & White Magazine for Collectors of Fine Photography

From time to time I pick up art magazines just for sheer fun of paying $7.00 - $15.00.  Still, it is like buying a fine art book you can catalog with all your other art findings.  If you do not mind the art ads all over the place (like even this site has been prone to lately, only not artsy, not art gallery artsy, yet)

April, 2008 issue profiles Photographers in St. Petersburg,  all shot in black & white - this writer's favorite form of art photographer.  From the introduction: " . . . the city's history has been etched in dark and tragic tones."

Black Coffee

"Black Coffee" Man & Mirror, c.1974,black & white, photographer unknown There is a man looking up from the coffee and cigarette; he clutches the coffee up on his knee, fingers wrapped around it. Another cup of coffee in front of the mirror mimics the one in his hand.. The picture might be set in a flat, or temperary living quarters. The man appears somewhat care worn, at age 27, but still has his inner shine and sex appeal. He's mustached, layered hair, defined cheek bones, and if you could see his eyes better, you'd see the most beautiful eyes on a man possible: slanted, sexually suggestive, artistic, shining with wit, but filled with the being of an old soul. The mirror that occupies the space to the right of the photograph is on the same level as the man. In folktales, mirrors stand for souls being suckout of a persona. They stand for 'mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" They stand for 7 years bad luck if broken. The man oblivious to his surroundings, and the fact he's being photographed, He's looking upward, towards the heavens, which he will one day occupy. "His eyes were watching God". The man is Steve Marriott, (1947 - 1991) white blues singer, guitar player, an a man of minor & major magic. ">

may queen

a fuzzy, soft focus victorian beauty in a pictorialist photograph, with hair flowing wild down her 19th century white gown of silk mouseline, or cotton lawn, rows of tiny pin tucks, delicate ruffled edges accented by a large picture hat to protect fine white english skin in india. dreamy-eyed, and ethereal expression of a pretty lady caught up in a mysterious studio background, holding a garland of white flowers to symbolize the queen of may, or the may day queen - these were the pictures Julia Margaret Cameron was famous for.

she started to photograph at the age of 48 when her six children were grown, and used her maids as dark room assistants & models, also all her beautiful relatives, the neighbors children, and sometimes men of state.

a rose is a rose is a rose

she was known for being a political revolutionary, another famous art photographer's girlfriend on the side, and silent movie actress from italy, but what she really was, and what she really goes down in history for, is her art photography.

roses, mexico by tina modotti is one of her most famous photographs, and one of her earliest efforts.  she moved with edward weston to mexico & operated his photo studio, but what she really did was start taking photographs, even as she worked as his model.  roses, mexico (in phaidon's the photo book) is a portrait of roses looked at for their sculptural quality.  the many lines on the photograph are difficult to follow, and according to the text, it's a "typical purist picture of the 1920's".  meaning, I suppose, she was an artist who looked for purity in all she did, although the roses appear to be a little over grown, into the next stage of wilting after they bloomed.  they look pretty, but a little decadent, lush, but not fresh, and some critics goes as far as to say they represent the modotti/weston relationship at it's prime.

I'd like to think that the viewer is finding out about roses in the same way gertrude stein said a rose is a rose is a rose, that's a purist line from the 1920's too . . . .

Letter to JF on RM’s birthday

11/04/04

JF,

Happy birthday to the misunderstood little boy who sat on santa’s lap as a 5 year old, and asked for a set of beads for xmas because he felt magic in his hands, as you know, he grew up to be an art photographer god. If RM was alive today he’d be 58 years old, which is very weird to think about.

Your book about RM is one of my favorites, Assault with a Deadly Camera, because you painted this other side of RM by showing the same little boy who became so famous, and in the glare of fame, he developed this other persona, which you so aptly named ‘Lord Mapplethorpe’ to the extent, if you had one of his pictures on the wall (like the one on his bio RM: a biography, by P. Morrisroe, Self Portrait, 1984), it would be the picture on the wall of his mansion with eyes that follow a person around. But he really was just a little boy at one time, who was his mother’s favorite, but she had so many children she didn’t know what to do . . . . and so he found an art mommy in Patti, whom you call the widow mapplethorpe in your book, but she’s a widow 2 times over since she lost her husband on RM’s birthday soon after Robert’s untimely death at 42 (to be continued)

I Want the Angel

I Want the Angel
the early life and art career of Robert Mapplethorpe

“They are not fun flowers.” Robert Mapplethorpe

“Roger didn’t even turn his head to us as he spoke, informing us in a tone which neither of us had ever heard him employ before that he was staying, that he found it fascinating, that we should leave straight off if we ‘couldn’t find any value in it.’

“Jenny was upset. She tried imploring him with a whimpering sound that was a language Roger alone understood. . .Roger acknowledged the sound with a look of hostility, that sinister quality in his eyes breaking out to the forefront from its usual recesses. Jenny grabbed my arm in half-anger, half-panic, squeezing her long, thin fingers with a power she had never before revealed, even in orgasm. It was terror.”

This short scene was reproduced in Jim Carroll’s diary from 1971, showing an outing through Times Square with his two closest friends at the time, his girl friend, Patty Smith, and her former boyfriend and still a roommate, Robert Mapplethorpe. Carroll was the youngest of the three, but seem to provide the cohesion to Patty and Robert’s on going relationship that the two lacked without him. It was a summer night, during dusk, and the three of them took a walk through Times Square, where they were led to an “exhibition” in an upstairs gallery of dummies, half manikin like models that showed in graphic plastic representations, cancerous tumors in various stages of growth.

The two poets became wary and sick almost immediately, but the future arts photographer, Robert (Roger) wanted to stay and find out more. In fact, the diary entry begins when Patty (Jenny) is complaining to her diarist boyfriend Jim, that “he was at that place again,” making it something like 5 nights in a row he went to visit the “Cancer Hall of Fame”, as it was dubbed by the two poets.
When Robert and Jim met again, Jim presented him with a short couplet:

“There is a rumor that this boy loves tumors
Enough to treat his friends with such bad humor

“He even tossed it on the floor . . . an original manuscript . . . in my own hand, no less. ‘Well, the meter is flawed,’ I teased, ‘but, it does scan.’ He bugged out the door, slamming it, leaving a bunch of his reptilian necklaces bouncing nervously on a rack. I was sick of the whole situation, and told Jenny so. I mean, Roger is as susceptible and entitled to ‘the strange’ as she or I. It’s simply a matter of taste. The fact that his taste overlaps the truly tragic bizarro is really none of our concern.”

Eighteen years later, shortly after the artist died from AIDS, in 1989, a curator with the Washington Corcoran Gallery of Art would make the artist’s bizarro taste the concern of the museum going public. Christina Orr-Cahall canceled The Perfect Moment exhibit because of its possible interference with National Endowment for the Arts appropriations in Congress. Two weeks later, a crowd of seven hundred people gathered in protest outside the Corcoran and projected photographs from the Perfect Moment on the building’s façade, and shouted, “Shame, shame, shame” at the Corcoran.

Trees, Vertical Lines, and Outdoor Urinals

Chateau de l’Ambigu, a black and white photograph, c. 1875, (Albumen print), by Charles Marville, a Parisian artist and photographer, is a portrait of an outdoor six-sided urinal.

The Bishop's Charisma, text & black & white photos by Diane Arbus, unpublished, 1964

Biship Ethel Predonzan of the Cathedral of the Creator stands with her arms open, in full length white damask robes, a crown, a sheer white silk scarf with beatific smile signally her heavenly visions. She holds a Styrofoam cross, with smaller jewel crosses inside of it.

A photograph is literally an image “written in light”

If the eye and the camera saw the world in the same way, then the world would look the way it does in a photograph.

Photographers intervene in every step of the process of picture taking:
pose sitters
select time of day
lighting source
pick the camera
pick the film
exposure time
position the camera at a certain height or distance from the subject
focus on a plane or area
develop the film to bring out certain features
choose printing paper
manipulate the print during enlargement and development

from A Short Guide to Writing About Art by Sylvan Barnett

2 Quotes from Dublin

From the Robert Mapplethorpe Retrospective in Dublin, Ireland 11/96 - 1/97:

“I don’t feel uplifted after seeing this display. Confused, maybe. A little startled, I guess. Maybe it’s just too American or something. Just not very cultured, unless you consider the flowers but there weren’t many of them, were there?”
11/31/96, Dublin, Ireland

“I thought the guy was old-fashioned because he relied n studio equipment for his work. So much of this stuff is controlled, brilliantly controlled. I personally like less contrived set-ups where the photographer has little say concerning what is going to happen”
12/6/96, Dublin, Ireland