Alas, Poor Yorick

My friend Suzzane went to Italy last month and brought back this hat for me. She said that looking at it made her feel Shakespearean.

Apocalypse Now and Then

Elevator Girl

NPR recently aired a short segment about a photo by Robert Frank that appeared in his book, The Americans. In the introduction, Frank’s friend Jack Kerouac fixed upon a certain image and wrote: “That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what’s her name & address?”

The elevator girl had no idea that she was the subject of a well-known image by a famous photographer. That discovery came years later -- approximately 10 years ago -- when she saw the photo at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. After staring at the image for several minutes, she recognized herself -- Sharon Goldstein, at age 15, working a summer job in a Miami Beach hotel.

Elevator girl is now Sharon Collins, and to learn more about her unusual story, please click here.

The Americans, by Robert Frank

Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans” -- the 50th anniversary companion book to an exhibition commemorating “The Americans” at the National Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art

National Public Radio

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!