Beautiful Marilyn Monroe Photographed by Richard Avedon, 1957

hi Drew,

Yes, Dali could paint, no doubt about it. His early still lifes are amazing. His name just happen to pop in to my head when reading the previous posts. Perhaps it was this [not only being extremely good at what he did] but also his promotion techniques that made him a household name. Otherwise, he walked the talk and talked the walk.

the migrant mother portrait was posed too
was the photographer who took that also a hack
and self promoter ?

sure you dont like avedon, we get it, but as i mentioned before he
has done innovative things that others had not done before him
which are commonplace today ,, and while you may think his american west portraits are corny or even cliche'd
and sure disfarmer did a whole towns worth of deadpan portraits .. is
he a selfpromoter hack as well .. he probably advertised...

it is easy to claim someone is basically a hack who takes cheesy photographs...

yurisrey said:

hi Drew,

Yes, Dali could paint, no doubt about it. His early still lifes are amazing. His name just happen to pop in to my head when reading the previous posts. Perhaps it was this [not only being extremely good at what he did] but also his promotion techniques that made him a household name. Otherwise, he walked the talk and talked the walk.

Click to expand...

hi yurisrey

i know what you mean ...
but im thinking more like pablo picasso seeing jonathan richman immortalized him in song as well

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc2iLAubras

[FWIW language is kind of coarse ]

====

Cliveh - back to the Cameron detour - I can't find any pictures of the current museum, so can't determine if it was part of the main house or the guest cottage. Some docent there would know. They bought two full lots with moderately large houses on them, then actually connected the two into one huge house via something even bigger they called the "tower". One extreme end was remodeled with large windows for a guest conservatory above and her studio below. I don't know if this lower floor equates to what was either affectionately or contemptuously referred to as the "chicken coop", or if that was something previous, once actually used for poultry. Don't have the time to research that right now. But it is perfectly obvious from many of her pictures themselves that they had a full live-in staff of maids, servants, gardeners, a driver, etc, plus facilities for numerous guests in the main house itself - in other words, a fairly opulent lifestyle. And she had neither the interest or need to "market" her work. She was essentially an amateur. What amazes me is just how corny her idea of art was.
You should read her poetry - about a gooey as it gets. But once she got behind the camera, her intuitive vision just seemed to transcend all
her own stereotypes - and oh, then the magic happened.

jnanian said:

hi yurisrey

i know what you mean ...
but im thinking more like pablo picasso seeing jonathan richman immortalized him in song as well

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc2iLAubras

[FWIW language is kind of coarse ]

====

Click to expand...

great video. I agree, Dali was no Picasso in this respect. (And probably Buñuel would agree.)

also about Cameron, isn't there some sort of Virginia Woolf connection? I remember reading in Techniques of the World's Great Photographers that there was some sort of familial tie between the two?

Yeah...The did Virginia W's portrait, and all kinds of other famous connections, esp Alice Liddel, the little girl behind Alice in Wonderland, whom she frequently photographed. Her father, the author of "Alice" apparently despised Queen Victoria, whom he lampooned in that story, along with her stiff court. So another thing I love about Cameron is how even her domestics are now on a par with the rich and famous, simply because she took such stunning portraits of them.

Well, my whole point in this mismatched comparison is how both Cameron and Avedon were addicted to artificial theatric nonsense in their portrait work, and one somehow leapfrogged over it to produce deeply intuitive timeless work, while the other comes across as a self-conscious
marketer of very, very dated advertising images per se.

Marilyn Munroe was notoriously difficult to work with Billy Wilder said after he had directed 2 of her movies that every day he filmed with her when he got home he hated women so much he felt like beating up his wife !.

But the performance she gave in "Some Like It Hot" was worth all the trouble.

falotico said:

But the performance she gave in "Some Like It Hot" was worth all the trouble.

Click to expand...

Wilder also said " after making two movies with her I don't want an Oscar , I want a purple heart.

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