Cultural

Billie Dove  c. 1920s Photo: Alfred Cheney Johnston Lillian Bohny (Billie Dove), actress: born New York 14 May 1903; married 1923 Irvin Willat (marriage dissolved 1929), 1933 Robert Kenaston (died 1973; one son, one adopted daughter), 1973 John Miller (marriage dissolved); died Woodland Hills, California 31 December 1997. Billie Dove was one of the greatest stars of the silent days of Hollywood. At the end of the 1920s she was voted, with Clara Bow, as America's most popular actress, and at the box office exceeded even the drawing power of Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson and Greta Garbo. The singer Billie Holliday named herself after her. Billie Dove was born Lillian Bohny in New York City in 1903. (Her brother, Charles, became a cameraman in Hollywood.) Her parents were Swiss immigrants. She visited Switzerland as a child, and spoke German before she spoke English. Her parents were Lutheran and their church organised sports events; the girls on the basketball team called her ...

Gaudenzio Marconi (1841-1885), Nudo maschile accademico (nude male model), 1865 ca.

Une négresse Une négresse par le démon secouée Veut goûter une enfant triste de fruits nouveaux Et criminels aussi sous leur robe trouée Cette goinfre s’apprête à de rusés travaux : À son ventre compare heureuse deux tétines Et, si haut que la main ne le saura saisir, Elle darde le choc obscur de ses bottines Ainsi que quelque langue inhabile au plaisir Contre la nudité peureuse de gazelle Qui tremble, sur le dos tel un fol éléphant Renversée elle attend et s’admire avec zèle, En riant de ses dents naïves à l’enfant ; Et, dans ses jambes où la victime se couche, Levant une peau noire ouverte sous le crin, Avance le palais de cette étrange bouche Pâle et rose comme un coquillage marin. A Negress Possessed by some demon now a negress Would taste a girl-child saddened by strange fruits Forbidden ones too under the ragged dress, This glutton’s ready to try a trick or two: To her belly she twins two fortunate tits And, so high that no hand knows how to seize...

This vintage real photo postcard features pretty Belgian stage and film actress, Jane Marnac (1892-1976). She appeared in dozens of parts on stage and sang in numerous operettas. She is well known for appearing in “Au temps des valses ” (1930), a play by Noel Coward that played at the Apollo Theater. She is also remembered for her role in “The Darling of Paris” (1931). Wikipedia provides a list of twenty of her play appearances (1912-1938) and notes that it is an incomplete list.  Wikipedia also lists six films (1911-1931) in which Marnac made appearances.  In regard to her personal life, she was born in Brussels, Belgium. She married an English officer in 1927. This postcard was published by K.F. (Kunzli Freres) of Paris, France and is part of a series (no. 2315). The company was one of the largest pioneer postcard publishing houses. The company was established in 1874. It had offices in Zurich and Paris. Beginning 1898, it became known for publishing postcard maps throug...

The Reutlingers were a French family of German descent. The family photographic business was founded in Paris in 1850 by Charles Reutlinger, and the studio became famous for its portraits of the actors, artists, musicians, composers, opera singers and ballet dancers of the period. In 1880, Charles handed over the studio to his brother, Emile Reutlinger. In 1883, Emile's son, Léopold-Emile Reutlinger, who had been born in Peru in 1863, arrived in Paris and began to work for his father, eventually taking over the Reutlinger studio in 1890. He produced the firm's first known erotic photographs. The family of the Reutlingers, originating from Karlsruhe in Germany, began with Charles Reutlinger to establish a photographic studio after moving to Paris in 1850. In the following decades, especially under the directorship of his nephew Léopold, the Studio Reutlinger, Paris, Boulevard Montmartre 21, developed to one of the leading photo studios for portrait-photography of french high s...

Vanora Bennett is a British author and award-winning journalist. Bennett Russian at Voronezh State University in the former Soviet Union and at Le Centre d'Études Russes du Potager du Dauphin, a centre established by White Russian emigres outside Paris, at Meudon.                       *** About two hundred thousand White Russians who escaped from Russia after the 1917 Revolution, spreading westward across Europe, eventually came to live in France. By the mid-Twenties, Paris was the cultural and political centre of the diaspora. Paris had Russian-language newspapers, a literary scene, a theatre, schools, night classes, orphanages, an old people’s home or two, a cathedral and many restaurants. They’d been declared stateless by the Bolsheviks, so their bureaucratic needs were not administered by the ambassador who took up residence in the embassy after France recognised the Soviet Union from 1924. But the last White ambassador, ...

Gertrude Käsebier was a leading member of the pioneering photographic movement known as Pictorialism, which emphasized a subjective, painterly approach to photography rather than a documentary one.  Though she had long been interested in art, Käsebier only began her formal training at the Pratt Institute after her children entered high school. She planned to be a painter, but eventually switched to photography. Following classes in Paris and apprenticeships with a German photographic chemist, and a Brooklyn portrait photographer, Käsebier opened her own portrait studio in 1897. She achieved immediate success: attracting wealthy clients, exhibiting her work, and receiving enthusiastic reviews. In addition to portraits, Käsebier produced photographic landscapes and figure studies. In 1902, Käsebier joined noted American photographer Alfred Stieglitz and others to found the Photo-Secession, an organization that promoted Pictorialism. Käsebier was an active member of Stieglitz’s ...

Alphonse de Lamartine, (born October 21, 1790, Mâcon, France—died February 28, 1869, Paris), French poet, historian, and statesman who achieved renown for his lyrics in Méditations poétiques (1820), which established him as one of the key figures in the Romantic movement in French literature. In 1847 his Histoire des Girondins became widely popular, and he rose to considerable political prominence in early 1848, when he led the Second Republic for a short time. Early Life And Méditations Poétiques His father, an aristocrat, was imprisoned during the culminating phase of the French Revolution known as the Reign of Terror but was fortunate enough to escape the guillotine. Lamartine was educated at the college at Belley, which was maintained by the Jesuits though they were suppressed in France at this time. Lamartine had wanted to enter the army or the diplomatic corps, but, because France was ruled by Napoleon, whom his faithful royalist parents regarded as the usurper, they would n...

"In the past few women may have attempted to express themselves in painting... But somehow all the attempts I had seen, until O'Keeffe, were weak because the elemental force and vision back of them were never overpowering enough to throw off the Male Shackles." Alfred Stieglitz A vital force in the development of modern art in America, Alfred Stieglitz's significance lies as much in his work as an art dealer, exhibition organizer, publisher, and editor as it does in his career as a photographer. He is credited with spearheading the rise of modern photography in America in the early years of the 20th century, publishing the periodical Camera Work (1903-17) and forming the exhibition society, the Photo-Secession. He also ran a series of influential galleries, starting with 291, which he used not only to exhibit photography, but also to introduce European modernist painters and sculptors to America and to foster America's own modernist figures - including his ...

Born in Coronel Dorrego near Buenos Aires in 1929, Roberto Juarroz worked as a  professor of Library Science in University of Buenos Aires. Intensely withdrawn as a person and a philosophical thinker , he was the proponent of what he himself called "explosive poetry",  seeking pastures that  goes beyond conventional limits of poetry and language. Ocatvio Paz called him  one of the most distinguished of all Latin American poets. Paz wrote:" Each poem of Roberto Juarroz is a surprising verbal crystallization: language reduced to a bead of light. A major poet of absolute moments."  This is very true about the subject and form of his poetry as his poems speak about a speaker's momentary confrontation with some quandary conveying the brevity of the immediate. Juarroz's goal in poetry is "the recuperation of the instant". Juarroz's vertical poetry is wise and luminous. As the great Argentinian novelist Julio Cortazar rightly said,  "It'...

Gerard Fieret was an anarchic photographer whose erotic portraits are collected by the best museums in the world.

The American model was a favourite, during the 1920s and 1930s, of numerous Vogue and Vanity Fair photographers such as Cecil Beaton, Baron George Hoyningen-Huene or Edward Steichen who described her as ‘the greatest fashion model I ever photographed.’ Tall, thin with brown eyes and a narrow face inherited from her native American ancestry, Marion Morehouse was often compared to a Modigliani painting. In 1932, she met the author and painter E.E Cummings whom she would be married to until his death, in 1962. When her modeling career ended, she took on photography herself fueled by her past experience and a modernist aesthetic just like her friend and colleague Lee Miller. Rob Couteau wrote in his book[1]: "In the late Twenties and early Thirties, before meeting Cummings in 1932, Marion was one of the most widely recognized fashion models of the day, appearing in both Vogue and Vanity Fair. The renowned photographer Edward Steichen called her “the greatest fashion model I ever sho...

Heidenröslein Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Sah ein Knab' ein Röslein stehn, Röslein auf der Heiden, War so jung und morgenschön, Lief er schnell es nah zu sehn, Sah's mit vielen Freuden. Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden. Knabe sprach: "Ich breche dich, Röslein auf der Heiden." Röslein sprach: "Ich steche dich, Daß du ewig denkst an mich, Und ich will's nicht leiden." Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden. Und der wilde Knabe brach 's Röslein auf der Heiden; Röslein wehrte sich und stach, Half ihm doch kein Weh und Ach, Mußt' es eben leiden. Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden. Heather Rose Johann Wolfgang von Goethe  Once a boy a Rosebud spied, Heathrose fair and tender, All array'd in youthful pride,-- Quickly to the spot he hied, Ravished by her splendour. Rosebud, rosebud, rosebud red, Heathrose fair and tender! Said the boy, "I'll now pi...

"L'amoureuse" was written by the French poet Paul Eluard.  Born in 1895 at Saint Denis, on the outskirts of Paris, Eluard is probably best known for his surrealist aphorism "Elephants are contagious."  He published his first book of poetry at eighteen, when confined to a Swiss sanatorium for tuberculosis. There he met Gala, a Russian woman he would marry in the midst of the war, four years later.  Capital of Pain, comprising many of the poems written between 1921 and 1926, is widely considered Eluard's finest surrealist achievement. The collection was acclaimed as the unified exponent of Surrealism's creative intentions.  Eluard died in 1952. L'amoureuse Elle est debout sur mes paupières Et ses cheveux sont dans les miens, Elle a la forme de mes mains, Elle a la couleur de mes yeux, Elle s'engloutit dans mon ombre Comme une pierre sur le ciel. Elle a toujours les yeux ouverts Et ne me laisse pas dormir. Ses rêves en pleine lumièr...

Lee Miller / Nusch, Paul Eluard, Roland Penrose, Man Ray, Ady Fidelin. 1937 In the summer of 1937, Lee Miller stays in Paris, she reconnects with the Parisian avant-garde. Meets the British painter Roland Penrose, who became her second husband.

Pique nique à Mougins, Nusch Eluard, Paul Eluard, Lee Miller, Man Ray, Adrienne Fidelin dite Ady

Gloria May Josephine Swanson (/ˈswɑːnsən/; March 27, 1899 – April 4, 1983) was an American actress and producer best known for her role as Norma Desmond, a reclusive silent film star, in the critically acclaimed 1950 film Sunset Boulevard. Swanson was also a star in the silent film era as both an actress and a fashion icon, especially under the direction of Cecil B. DeMille. Throughout the 1920s, Swanson was Hollywood's top box office magnet. Swanson starred in dozens of silent films and was nominated for the first Academy Award in the Best Actress category. She also produced her own films, including Sadie Thompson and The Love of Sunya. In 1929, Swanson transitioned to talkies with The Trespasser. Personal problems and changing tastes saw her popularity wane during the 1930s when she moved into theater, and later television.

On December 5th 1906, Lina Cavalieri gave tenor Enrico Caruso a passionate kiss in front of an astounded audience, caught completely by surprise by the opera singer’s intense gesture. After that, “the most beautiful woman in the world”, as fans called her, also became “the kissing primadonna”: that “coup de théâtre” on the stage of New York’s Metropolitan Opera House made Umberto Giordano’s “Fedora” simply unforgettable, and brought Cavalieri great luck in her career. Born in Viterbo in 1874, Lina Cavalieri had grown up in poverty; her voice was her only wealth, and she sang while busy at random jobs working as a florist or seamstress, or folding newspapers along the streets in Rome. Someone heard her and gave her singing lesson, and that beautiful and intelligent young lady was able to use that help wisely. Although her vocal range was not extraordinary, her presence on stage helped her stand out on the most important opera theaters in the world, from the San Carlo in Naples t...

Bride and groom, both fashion designers, photographed at their nude wedding in a Tokyo nightclub, November 1970

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This is Fuseli’s infamous masterwork The Nightmare. This has been an icon of horror ever since it was first exhibited to the public at the annual Royal Academy exhibition in London in 1782. The painting draws on folklore, science and classical art to create a new kind of sexually-charged image. Fuseli wanted the painting to shock and intrigue, as well as to make a name for himself. In this he succeeded triumphantly. The work has been copied and lampooned many times. Background One of the most innovative Romantic artists of his day, the Swiss-born Johann Heinrich Henry Fuseli - son of the portraitist Johann Caspar Fussli (1706-82) - developed an early talent for drawing before moving to London in 1764 at the age of 23. Here, encouraged by Joshua Reynolds (1723-92) who was shortly to be elected the first president of the newly formed Royal Academy of Arts, Fuseli took up painting. This led him to spend most of the 1770s in Italy, studying the figure painting of Michelangelo (1475-...

Erwin Blumenfeld (26 January 1897 – 4 July 1969) was an American photographer of German origin. He was born in Berlin, and in 1941 emigrated to the United States, where he soon became a successful and well-paid fashion photographer, working as a free-lancer for Harper's Bazaar, Life and American Vogue. His personal photographic work showed the influence of Dadaism and Surrealism; his two main areas of interest were death and women. He was expert in laboratory work, and experimented with photographic techniques such as distortion, multiple exposure, photo-montage and solarisation.

‘People say: “I do not trust my eyes.” Myself, I always trust them, my eyes. But there are days when they bring me slightly too much astonishment.’ Jacques-Henri Lartigue 1909–10 1 The son of an amateur photographer, Lartigue took his first photographs in 1901 at the age of six. He received a camera the same year and went on to become an inadvertent chronicler of the 20th century. He was an incessant diary keeper in which he kept drawings, notes and photographs of the day’s events. Lartigue photographed the modern age of cars and airplanes, registering the new century’s compulsion for speed, yet considered himself as foremost a painter rather than a photographer. His fascination with the camera, however, never waned and he recorded life’s events with flourish: ‘I open my eyes, then shut them, then open them wide and Whoosh! I catch the picture with everything in it: light, shadow, fullness and emptiness.’ 2 The enigmatic, expressionless face of ‘Neuilly-Solange’ is a finel...

Johnston was born into an affluent New York banking family, which subsequently moved to Mount Vernon, New York. Initially he studied painting and illustration at the National Academy of Design in New York, but after graduating in 1908 (and marrying fellow student Doris Gernon the next year), his subsequent efforts to earn a living as a portrait painter did not meet with success. Instead, reportedly at the suggestion of longtime family friend and famed illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, he started to employ the camera previously used to record his painting subjects as his basic creative medium. In approximately 1917, Johnston was hired by famed New York City live-theater showman and producer Florenz Ziegfeld as a contracted photographer, and was affiliated with the Ziegfeld Follies for the next fifteen years or so. He also maintained his own highly successful personal commercial photo studio at various locations around New York City as well, photographing everything from aspiring actres...

Born Marie Louise Fuller in the Chicago suburb of Fullersburg, now Hinsdale, Illinois, Fuller began her theatrical career as a professional child actress and later choreographed and performed dances in burlesque (as a skirt dancer), vaudeville, and circus shows. An early free dance practitioner, Fuller developed her own natural movement and improvisation techniques. In multiple shows she experimented with a long skirt, choreographing its movements and playing with the ways it could reflect light. By 1891, Fuller combined her choreography with silk costumes illuminated by multi-coloured lighting of her own design, and created the Serpentine Dance.[1] After much difficulty finding someone willing to produce her work when she was primarily known as an actress, she was finally hired to perform her piece between acts of a comedy entitled Uncle Celestine, and received rave reviews. Fuller costumed for her Serpentine Dance and holding a typical "skirt dance" pose. Almost immedia...

http://www.luminous-lint.com/app/photographer/Walery/A/

"The story of men is the story of their mistakes, not their truth. The truth is probably like happiness, it's simple and has no history. " Albert Camus The Crisis of Man - Text of the lecture given in 1946 at Columbia University unpublished in French, translated from English by Jean-Marie Laclavetine In Nouvelle Revue Française. Andrey Chezhin - from Touching the City St. Petersburg, 1991

Deborah Turbeville has been one of the world's most important and recognized fashion photographers since the mid-1970's when her first photographs. Her New England upbringing gives her an appreciation of weather and storied environments, which is still reflected in her work today. She moved to New York City before she was 20 and worked for designer Claire McCardell, a major influence on her career. After working as an editor at Harper's Bazaar and then Miss, Turbeville became a photographer, originating a highly distinctive style known for its soft-focus use of mise-en-scene and grainy, pointillist printing technique. Her influential, cinematic work appears regularly in American, British, French, Italian and Russian Vogue, and The Uomo Vogue and W magazine, among others, and her work has been exhibited internationally. In 2006, a retrospective Deborah Turbeville: The Narrative Works 1974-1996 was presented at The Wapping Project (London). She has been awarded the recipi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Rogers https://twitter.com/EllenJRogers http://ellenjanerogers.com/

Sanne Sannes was a tripped-out fashion art photographer who lived his short life hard and fast. After almost four decades of obscurity, a unique collection from the oeuvre of the Dutch photographer Sanne Sannes (1937-1967) comes to light again. Sannes, during his brief photographic career in the sixties, became renown for his taste for the erotic, his fascination with women and seduction. His imagery recalls the atmosphere of the sixties, which acted as an impulse both for his models and for his own talent in photography. After his untimely death at the age of 30 in a car accident, with only an eight year photographic career of innovating art, Sannes oeuvre is still on par with internationally acclaimed Dutch photographers such as Gerard Fieret and Ed van der Elsken, who in the sixties defined Dutch black-and-white photography. What’s great to discover with these vintage prints is the amount of fun that Sannes had during the shooting, and even more so afterwards in the darkroom. ...

Carry Me Away, By Henri Michaux                          Translation by Eli Siegel  Carry me away into a Portuguese boat of once, Into an old and gentle Portuguese boat of once, Into the stem of the boat, or if you wish, into the foam, And lose me, in the distance, in the distance. Into the yoking of another time. Into the deceiving velvet of snow. Into the breath of some dogs brought together again. Into the weary gathering of dead leaves. Carry me, without breaking me, into kisses, Into breasts that raise themselves and breathe, On palms covering them and their smile, Into the corridors of long bones, and of articulations. Carry me away, or rather dig me deep. Carry Me Away, By Henri Michaux.   1968.  The desire of a person to be anywhere else, as long as it is else, is strongly in this poem of Henri Michaux. The details chosen by Michaux...

Air du feu, tu n’as pas su jouer. Tu as jeté sur ma maison une toile noire. Qu’est-ce que cet opaque partout ? C’est l’opaque qui a bouché mon ciel.Qu’est-ce que ce silence partout ? C’est le silence qui a fait taire mon chant. L’espoir, il m’eût suffi d’un ruisselet. Mais tu as tout pris. Le son qui vibre m’a été retiré. Tu n’as pas su jouer. Tu as attrapé les cordes. Mais tu n’as pas su jouer. Tu as tout bousillé tout de suite. Tu as cassé le violon. Tu as jeté une flamme sur la peau de soie. Pour faire un affreux marais de sang. Son bonheur riait dans son âme. Mais c’était tout tromperie. Ca n’a pas fait long rire. Elle était dans un train roulant vers la mer. Elle était dans une fusée filant sur le roc. Elle s’élançait quoiqu’immobile vers le serpent de feu qui allait la consumer. Et fut là tout à coup, saisissant la confiante, tandis qu’elle peignait sa chevelure, contemplant sa félicité dans la glace. Et lorsqu’elle vit monter cette flamme sur elle, oh… Dans l’instant ...