Bill Cunningham, street styler

J’ai decouvert hier en lisant un article sur Bill Cunningham, cet homme de 84 ans qui arpente les rues de new York à vélo depuis 50 ans, avec son appareil photo, m’a interpellé.

Je voulais vous faire partager son histoire.

Ce génie, touchant que l’on définit comme un street styler, photographie non pas les gens, mais les vêtements, passionné par ce que les gens portent. Il est l’histoire de l’évolution des changements et des retours de la mode.

Son minuscule studio situé au dessus du Carnegie Hall est ainsi rempli de tonnes de négatifs.

L’histoire à commencé il y a un peu plus de 40 ans pour Bill Cunningham, trouvant les photos qu’il avait pris d’un manteau de vison fantastique, il s’est resolu a pousser la porte du New York Times, pour les proposer.

Emballement du New York Times, pas pour le manteau de vison, mais pour celle qui le portait : Greta Garbo, c'était le début.

Pour que l’histoire soit compléte, il faut préciser que Bill Cunningham qui ne mange que des hot dogs à 3 dollars, n’avait pas et n’a d’ailleurs toujours pas de télévision.

A few summers ago, on upper Fifth Avenue, Bill Cunningham spied a remarkable creature: a woman, in her seventies, with a corona of blue hair—not the muzzy pastel hue associated with bad dye jobs but the irradiant one of Slurpees and laundry detergent. The woman gave Cunningham an idea. Every day for a month, whenever he saw something cerulean (a batik shawl) or aqua (a Hawaiian-print sarong) or azure (a Japanese parasol) coming down the sidewalk, he snapped a picture of it. One morning, he spotted a worker balancing, on his shoulder, a stuffed blue marlin. “I thought, That’s it, kid!” he recently recalled. The following Sunday, “On the Street,” the street-fashion column that Cunningham has maintained in the Times for more than a decade, was populated entirely with New Yorkers dressed in various shades of the color—a parade of human paint chips. “Mediterranean shades of blue are not yet the new pink, but they are a favorite this summer,” he wrote.

“The cooling watery tones, worn as an accent with white and browns, appear in turquoise-color jewelry and blue hair, but it is rare to see a man crossing the Avenue of the Americas with a trophy sailfish.”

Cunningham’s job is not so different from a fisherman’s: it requires a keen knowledge, honed over years, of the local ecosystem and infinite patience in all manner of weather conditions. His first big catch was an accident. It was 1978, and a woman wearing a nutria coat had caught his eye. “I thought: ‘Look at the cut of that shoulder. It’s so beautiful,’ ” he later wrote. “And it was a plain coat, too. You’d look at it and think: ‘Oh, are you crazy? It’s nothing.’ ” Cunningham shot frame after frame of the coat, eventually noticing that other people on the sidewalk were paying attention to its wearer.

It was Greta Garbo. Cunningham showed the pictures, along with some shots of Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney (whom he recognized), Farrah Fawcett (whom he didn’t, not owning a television), and the King and Queen of Spain, carrying plastic bags from Gristedes, to an editor at the Times. “The editor said, ‘Why don’t you wait and see who you get next week?’ ” Cunningham recalled. “And I said, ‘My God, I’m not expecting Jesus Christ.’ ” Soon after, his column became a recurring feature.

“On the Street”—along with Cunningham’s society column, “Evening Hours”—is New York’s high-school yearbook, an exuberant, sometimes retroactively embarrassing chronicle of the way we looked. Class of 1992: velvet neck ribbons, leopard prints, black jeans, catsuits, knotted shirts, tote bags, berets (will they ever come back, after Monica?). Class of 2000: clamdiggers, beaded fringe, postcard prints, jean jackets, fish-net stockings, flower brooches (this was the height of “Sex and the City”). The column, in its way, is as much a portrait of New York at a given moment in time as any sociological tract or census—a snapshot of the city.

On September 16, 2001, Cunningham ran a collage of signs (“our finest hour,” “we are stronger now”) and flags (on bandannas, on buildings, on bikes) that makes one as sad and proud, looking at it now, as it did when it was published. So far this year, he has identified vogues for picture-frame collars, microminis, peg-legged pants, and the color gray (“often with a dash of sapphire or violet,” in the manner of the Edwardians). His columns are frequently playful—he once featured a woman, near the Plaza, walking three standard poodles, “an unmatched set in pink, turquoise, and white”—but they also convey an elegiac respect for the anonymous promenade of life in a big city, and a dead-serious desire to get it all down.


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/16/090316fa_fact_collins#ixzz1Qjn0o300

Schwarzenbach, l'écrivain maudite de la Suisse

Morphinomane et lesbienne : c'est ce que l'on retient hâtivement de l'écrivain photographe, poétesse et journaliste suisse Annemarie Schwarzenbach. A condition déjà de la connaître, ce qui est rare à moins d'habiter les environs de Zurich où elle est aujourd'hui une icône. Annemarie Schwarzenbach est un écrivain fulgurant à découvrir.

Née en 1908 dans une famille suisse bourgeoise pronazie, elle s'est, en réaction, rangée à gauche et tournée vers le monde. Ses reportages en Espagne, en Perse, en Russie, aux Etats-Unis, en Afghanistan et au Congo belge, dessinent le monde des années 1930, au seuil de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Son œuvre romanesque et poétique est celle d'une femme sensible et seule à l'extrême, une lectrice du poète Hölderlin, désespérée par la condition humaine, tel que l'illustre La Vallée heureuse en 1935. Elle meurt en 1942 des suites d'un accident de vélo. Elle a 34 ans.

Les années de guerre l'engloutissent jusqu'à ce que Dominique Laure Miermont découvre l'œuvre lumineuse de cette étrange androgyne dans les années 1980. Avec sa coauteur Nicole Le Bris, elle lui consacre un livre, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, la quête du réel (coll. « Voyager Avec », éd. La Quinzaine littéraire-Louis Vuitton) qui rassemble reportages et photos inédites prises par cet iconoclaste écrivain des années 1930, marquée, comme elle le disait, par la malédiction de la fuite

http://www.20minutes.fr/article/746265/schwarzenbach-ecrivain-maudit-suisse

Annie Leibovitz - Life Through A Lens

Born in 1949 in Waterbury, Connecticut, Annie Leibovitz enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute intent on studying painting. It was not until she traveled to Japan with her mother the summer after her sophomore year that she discovered her interest in taking photographs. When she returned to San Francisco that fall, she began taking night classes in photography. Time spent on a kibbutz in Israel allowed her to hone her skills further.

In 1970 Leibovitz approached Jann Wenner, founding editor of Rolling Stone, which he’d recently launched and was operating out of San Francisco. Impressed with her portfolio, Wenner gave Leibovitz her first assignment: shoot John Lennon. Leibovitz’s black-and-white portrait of the shaggy-looking Beatle graced the cover of the January 21, 1971 issue. Two years later she was named Rolling Stone chief photographer.

When the magazine began printing in color in 1974, Leibovitz followed suit. “In school, I wasn’t taught anything about lighting, and I was only taught black-and-white,” she told ARTnews in 1992. “So I had to learn color myself.” Among her subjects from that period are Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, and Patti Smith. Leibovitz also served as the official photographer for the Rolling Stones’ 1975 world tour. While on the road with the band she produced her iconic black-and-white portraits of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, shirtless and gritty.

In 1980 Rolling Stone sent Leibovitz to photograph John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who had recently released their album “Double Fantasy.” For the portrait Leibovitz imagined that the two would pose together nude. Lennon disrobed, but Ono refused to take off her pants. Leibovitz “was kinda disappointed,” according to Rolling Stone, and so she told Ono to leave her clothes on. “We took one Polaroid,” said Leibovitz, “and the three of us knew it was profound right away.” The resulting portrait shows Lennon nude and curled around a fully clothed Ono. Several hours later, Lennon was shot dead in front of his apartment. The photograph ran on the cover of the Rolling Stone Lennon commemorative issue. In 2005 the American Society of Magazine Editors named it the best magazine cover from the past 40 years.

Annie Leibovitz: Photographs, the photographer’s first book, was published in 1983. The same year Leibovitz joined Vanity Fair and was made the magazine’s first contributing photographer. At Vanity Fair she became known for her wildly lit, staged, and provocative portraits of celebrities. Most famous among them are Whoopi Goldberg submerged in a bath of milk and Demi Moore naked and holding her pregnant belly. (The cover showing Moore — which then-editor Tina Brown initially balked at running — was named second best cover from the past 40 years.) Since then Leibovitz has photographed celebrities ranging from Brad Pitt to Mikhail Baryshnikov. She’s shot Ellen DeGeneres, the George W. Bush cabinet, Michael Moore, Madeleine Albright, and Bill Clinton. She’s shot Scarlett Johannson and Keira Knightley nude, with Tom Ford in a suit; Nicole Kidman in ball gown and spotlights; and, recently, the world’s long-awaited first glimpse of Suri Cruise, along with parents Tom and Katie. Her portraits have appeared in Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, and in ad campaigns for American Express, the Gap, and the Milk Board.

Among other honors, Leibovitz has been made a Commandeur des Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and has been designated a living legend by the Library of Congress. Her first museum show, Photographs: Annie Leibovitz 1970-1990, took place in 1991 at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. and toured internationally for six years. At the time she was only the second living portraitist — and the only woman — to be featured in an exhibition by the institution.

Leibovitz met Susan Sontag in 1989 while photographing the writer for her book AIDS and its Metaphors. “I remember going out to dinner with her and just sweating through my clothes because I thought I couldn’t talk to her,” Leibovitz said in an interview with The New York Times late last year. Sontag told her, “You’re good, but you could be better.” Though the two kept separate apartments, their relationship lasted until Sontag’s death in late 2004.

Sontag’s influence on Leibovitz was profound. In 1993 Leibovitz traveled to Sarajevo during the war in the Balkans, a trip that she admits she would not have taken without Sontag’s input. Among her work from that trip is Sarajevo, Fallen Bicycle of Teenage Boy Just Killed by a Sniper, a black-and-white photo of a bicycle collapsed on blood-smeared pavement. Sontag, who wrote the accompanying essay, also first conceived of Leibovitz’s book Women (1999). The book includes images of famous people along with those not well known. Celebrities like Susan Sarandon and Diane Sawyer share space with miners, soldiers in basic training, and Las Vegas showgirls in and out of costume.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/annie-leibovitz/life-through-a-lens/16/