Working For A Living

Irving Penn: Small Trades will be opening next month at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Center, featuring 252 prints from a series Penn started while on assignment in Paris in 1950.

As a side project, Penn began photographing skilled tradespeople dressed in their customary work attire and equipped with the tools of their trade, with the same style of natural lighting, neutral backdrop and meticulous attention characterizing much of his model and celebrity work. Then during the next 20 years, he experimented with printing methods, including gelatin silver, platinum and palladium, and explored tonalities and effects.

In 2008, the Getty acquired 252 of the best prints from this series, and they will be on view from September 9, 2009 through January 10, 2010. (According to Slate, the museum purchased 125 and Penn donated the rest.) In conjunction with the exhibition, Getty Publications created Irving Penn: Small Trades. It includes all 252 images, with the majority as full-page reproductions.

In addition to the Slate coverage, the September issue of Vogue includes an article by Kennedy Fraser that summarizes Penn’s career and describes images in the Small Trades series, including the above photo of ballroom dance instructors: “The man wears his work clothes, a tuxedo and a clipped mustache like William Powell’s. He looks sleepy and vaguely absent as if after a couple of martinis. The woman dancer, by contrast, is as fierce as a matador...”

Ballroom Dancing Instructors, New York, 1952 | Vogue Magazine, September 2009

Irving Penn: Small Trades

The Getty Center | 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90049 | 310 440 7300

The View From My Street

Sitting Pretty

“When the sitting is over, I feel kind of embarrassed about what we’ve shared. It’s so intense. Snapshots that have been taken of me working show something I was not aware of at all, that over and over again I’m holding my own body or my own hands exactly like the person I’m photographing. I never knew I did that, and obviously what I’m doing is trying to feel, actually physically feel, the way he or she feels at the moment I’m photographing them in order to deepen the sense of connection.” — Richard Avedon, 1985

Dorian Leigh, Paris, 1949, by Richard Avedon

What Would Rachel Zoe Say?

Bananas!

Top Banana

Today is Banana Lover’s Day.

Above: a 1920s photo of Josephine Baker in her banana skirt costume, dressed to perform in Un Vent de Folie at the Folies Bergere.

Natural Woman

Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen is the screwball tale of a character named Honey Santana who goes off her meds and wreaks havoc in the lives of petty evil-doers, including a bad-mannered telemarketer, whom she kidnaps, and her former, smelly employer, whom she whacks with a stone-crab-claw-cracking mallet.

One of the many best lines: “Mr. Piejack was the owner of the fish market, and he’d been sniffing after Honey for months. He was married and had numerous other unsavory qualities.”

Which, of course, is why she had to hit him.

Today Could Have Been Worse

One of the Mount Vesuvius’ most memorably destructive explosions occurred on August 24, 79 A.D., burying the Roman cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae in four billion tons of lava, rock and ash, killing an estimated 3,360 people. So no matter what kind of day you’ve had, it could have been worse.

Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture Around the Bay of Naples will continue at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through October 4. The exhibition features approximately 120 works of sculpture, painting, mosaic and other arts.

To get more of a definitive flavor what it may have been like to live in Pompeii before the destruction, it may be time to revisit the Getty Villa, which was modeled after a first-century Roman house, the Villa dei Papiri, which was located in Herculaneum. Many of the garden’s details are based on elements from ancient towns, from the shape of lanterns, to the types of herbs and shrubs that occupy the landscape.

For a social and scientific look at the eruption, there’s the 2003 Discovery Channel program, Pompeii: The Last Day.

And for a lighter-hearted look into a volcanic inferno, there’s the 1990 Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan comedy or klunker, depending on your point of view, Joe Versus the Volcano.

LACMA | 5905 Wilshire Boulevard | Los Angeles, CA 90036 | 323 857 6000

The Getty Villa | 17985 Pacific Coast Highway | Los Angeles, CA 90265 | 310 440 7300

Above: a poster from the 1935 movie, The Last Days of Pompeii, which featured Basil Rathbone as Pontius Pilate; aside from his performance, it sounds hammy enough to be fun.

You Are My King Of The Fall

Dali and Umani. Sweet Lady Jane and Disney Hall. Camus and a liquor store.

Synchronicity is everywhere. Or maybe it’s just seems that way, when there are similarities between unrelated objects.

The shape of Umami Burger’s logo, which resembles a hamburger bun, also brings to mind (well, my mind, anyway) Hercule Poirot’s mustache, Dali’s iconic Mae West lips sofa or Lee Miller’s lips in the Man Ray’s Heure de l’Obervatoire.

Of course Frank Gehry didn’t model Disney Hall after a delicious Sweet Lady Jane chocolate taco. (But wouldn’t it be great if he had?)

I love the sign for You Are My King Liquor, at the confusing triangular intersection of Fairfax, Olympic and San Vicente. The Fall by Camus has a serif treatment, You Are My King does not. Even so, both the book cover and store signage tell a story of ascension and decline through typography.

Umami Burger | 850 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90036 | 323 391 3000

Sweet Lady Jane | 8360 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90069 | 323 653 7145

You Are My King Liquor | at Fairfax, San Vicente and Olympic, Los Angeles

Dress For Dinner; Use A Napkin

Oh, don’t dress up on my account. You look fine. Besides, it’s just me, you and the fried chicken microwave dinner. You look great. Really -- really great.

Will the Real Mad Man Please Stand Up?

Tonight is the Season Three Mad Men premiere. (With limited commercial interruptions!)

In honor of the new season, here’s a link to a Chicago Magazine article about Draper Daniels, the legendary advertising creative whose real-life experiences shape the Don Draper character on Mad Men.

The Chicago article was written by Myra Junco Daniels, who first met Draper Daniels when their respective ad agencies merged; she later succumbed to his persistent wooing and married him unexpectedly, to the surprise of their families and agency staff.

Mad Men Season Three Premiere | AMC | 10 p.m.

When Life Gives You Lemons...

... make lemon meringue pie. (Today, August 15, is National Lemon Meringue Pie Day!)