What does this mean for those of us coming up through the grapevines? (Those with the capability, but not yet the experience due to whatever cultural or social reasons.)

We live in an extremely controlled (governed) environment. It is not so much the literal and obvious government, but the societal rules which are mentally restrictive. We are socialized and domesticated because we couldn’t otherwise have order. The flip side is introduced as a cautionary tale in Orwell’s 1984 and in the popular movie The Matrix. You realize you’ve been sedated; you become aware that you haven’t been fully aware. Society relies on over-anesthesia to subdue dissent and function with order. It assumes those who will make it will find their way eventually.

However, to find your way, you still have to have the conceptual framework planted. I’d bet a good portion of the consumers in mainstream media who tout the catch-phrase “out of the box” are describing it from inside the box, so that out of the box is a farce of itself. You can’t know what you don’t know; you can’t understand something if no groundwork has been laid to build the conceptual framework laid groundwork for. You need a seed.

Keep an eye out for a correlation between the disappearance of art programs in schools, and an increase in obedience, conformity, and lack of tolerance among youths. Sadly, the elite are fine with removing the opportunity for the seeds of questioning from being planted. Money can buy it privately. That is an elitist concept in itself.

But back to art– why have some ‘radical’ and highly critical theories avoided censorship or the label of propaganda? Subversive messages survive because the architects of our society don’t actually want to lock the door and throw away the key. It is the idea of qualified patrons only, which can be buried in dark ages and rediscovered hundreds of years later. We wouldn’t give the unqualified or plainly dumb the keys to the control panel, but it can be noted that some of the dark ages have been brought on by just that… the intellectually irrational or uncompassionate.

I think this is an interesting but overlooked nuance of art.. taken for granted as a right of passage into fresh air with no turning back.
I became interested in the possibilities of conceptual photography after being introduced to the work of installation artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (American, born Cuba. 1957-1996). He chose ordinary household objects to present his ideas (social or political commentary), arguing that objects are neutral and for example, a clock cannot be criticized as having ‘a homosexual agenda’ (“Untitled, Perfect Lovers”).

Abstract art can better survive attacks than the explicit, and it may strike more clearly and simply at higher truths.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres. (American, born Cuba. 1957-1996). Untitled (Perfect Lovers). 1991. Clocks, paint on wall. overall 14 x 28 x 2 3/4″ (35.6 x 71.2 x 7 cm). Gift of the Dannheisser Foundation. © 2006 The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery.

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It takes about 2 hours to read and digest it all, but it’s as good as taking a course!

Start with reading the Model Release Primer: http://www.danheller.com/model-release-primer.html

Then read the full article on Model Releases: http://www.danheller.com/model-release.html

And finish with When Editorial Uses Require Model Releases: http://www.danheller.com/blog/posts/when-editorial-uses-of-photos-require.html

The main lessons I learned were:

• There are only disputes on HOW an image is published, not THAT it is taken. You can always take a photo, of a person or crowd or building etc. so long as you’re not illegally trespassing on property as a peeping tom. Deal with usage later.
• Model releases are for the publishers. Photographers are not responsible for how an image is published. We only get them because it improves saleability to certain clients. Photographers should just be clear if they have a model release for an image or not, it’s up to the publisher to use the image in the appropriate context given that information. However, the photographer probably shouldn’t give their opinion to the publisher on how an image could be used.. because then you start to assume some liability.
• Money/financial transactions do not require model releases. You can sell a photo to someone or any agency, or sell your work in a gallery without needing a release because the sale has nothing to do with a person’s likeness, it’s an objective transaction.
• Editorial content typically does not require a release. You can take a photo, sell it or give permission to a newspaper to run it, all without needing a release.
• Artwork is covered under freedom of speech and almost never needs a model release. You can openly display photos you’ve taken on your own site, in a gallery, and sell prints.

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I’ve had the above image of a massive visually endless pool with dividing walkways strongly imprinted in my mind from a dream I had a couple years ago. I’m not sure if I’d seen this imagery before, or if I was pulling from something collective– but interesting to come across this again.

In the 1930’s floating baths on barges popped up around Manhattan as a service for the tenement residents. It’d seem like such a crazy idea if it popped back up today. We have a variation though.. a floating swimming pool in brooklyn bridge park!

Birds Eye View of Astoria Pool Bathers with Hell Gate Bridge in Background

The Aquazanies perform at Astoria Pool in Queens, early 1940s.

Check out the videos on the pools (including mccarren park pool) and more images on the NYC Parks and Recreation’s site:
http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_about/parks_history/pools.html

I stumbled onto all these while looking at possible shoot locations. This seems like a nice website to learn about the types of architecture in this city: http://www.nyc-architecture.com/GRP/GRP034.htm

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7/27/2009

—

“Everyone wants a formula!”
3/27/09

—

“Capitalism, consumerism, materialism drive me mad!”

3/6/09

—

“Pop and drugs are cathartic alike.
A snobbery of one is hypocritical…”

—

“A lot of the wrong people have the money;
and in our society,
money equals power.”

1/24/09

—

“We even try to die
in a socially acceptable manner. “

1/8/09

—

“There was no other way to arrive at now…”
-11/2008
—

A blessing unless disguised:
your eyes immediately give you away.
-10/24/08

—

Where a person gets into trouble is
in attempting an application without understanding its theory.

—

The Free mind is enslaved.
The Enslaved mind is free.

—

We have put out honest intellectualism
in favor of diluted celebrity.

-12/7/08
—

Drone away!

—

Something is up,
but we are too busy looking down.
-9/26/08

—

Down (not up) is where the culture is.
-9/22/08

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2. LA will probably be the first to experiment with grid driving on an x-y-z axis.

3. Suburban sprawl has been and is united through its media airwaves.

4. Mass systems which get such a city to operate, also put it inside the system. (This explains a *lot* about the culture)

5. Mass systems lead to less individual accountability, especially in leading individuals to quantify territory as “my personal space” vs “outside my space”.

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Models, film stars and now Westminster’s movers and shakers… David Bailey’s lens has caught them all. He tells Roya Nikkhah about his life.

David Bailey directs a model during a photoshoot in 1967

David Bailey makes Gordon Ramsay sound like vicar giving his Sunday sermon. Such is his love of expletives, barely a sentence is delivered without three or four them blasted out in quick succession.

“I’m bloody dyslexic, so the short rude ones are the only ones I know how to spell,” he says, with a wheezy, deep chuckle. “Anyway, it’s a bloody good trick because you won’t be able to print any of this,” he says, dancing about the sofa in his studio, reluctant to sit down.

“Honestly, I’m not very good at this,” he says. “I’ve really got f*** all to say,” he insists, before barely drawing breath for the next hour.

Best known for his iconic images of the swinging Sixties and glamorous fashion shoots, Bailey has just produced his first ever “political portfolio” – a collection of pictures of the current crop of political movers and shakers for the men’s style bible, GQ magazine .

And politicians have never looked so good. There is Gordon Brown, beaming at the camera with the most winsome of smiles and David Cameron looking very much at home in a sharp suit. Turn the page and Foreign Secretary stares broodily into the lens like a Hollywood film star. Even William Hague looks quietly handsome.

“Politicians aren’t normally big on my agenda because it’s too easy to go for them – too easy to stitch them up and make them look bad,” he says. “But with this lot, I just did them how I found them.”

So, how did he find them? “I was pleasantly surprised actually, because modern politicians are usually so up their own arses,” he says in his strong Cockney accent, recalling an incident when “Hillary” (that’s Clinton) “invited me to tea with that Mo Mowlam. God, she was so bloody la di da – full of it she was – nightmare.”

I ask him if it’s true that he broke the ice with a nervy Prime Minister by asking him which one was his dodgy eye? “Yeah, I did, why not?” he laughs. “He was charming, actually. Bit of an introvert, but charming. When I got in the car afterwards, I said to my wife “I think I’ve just been screwed, this bloke has charmed the backside off me” because he really had. But I told him that I hate socialism because it’s just like using digital – it reduces everyone to the same.”

As someone who has photographed some of the most glamorous women in the world, Mrs Brown may be pleased to know that she passed the Bailey style test. “She was much better dressed than most women in politics,” he says. “Especially the lefty women – it’s like where do they get those suits from? And the more successful they get, the worse the suits become.”

Cameron, he says, was a “sincere, easy-going kind of guy”, but did Bailey, who has previously photographed Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher, think he had the makings of a Prime Minister? “Well, he has the makings as much as Blair ever did – he looks good – he just needs to be a better actor than Blair. You could always tell when he was lying.”

He was, however, somewhat puzzled by the Liberal Democrat leader, who gets the smallest show in the portfolio. “Telling everyone how many women he’s been with, what’s that all about?” he asks, referring to Nick Clegg’s recent admission that he had slept with “no more” than 30 women. “I mean, do I really want to know what an underachiever he is,” he says, nudging me in the ribs and roaring with laughter.

We meet on Friday morning, as votes for the mayoral election are being counted. Born and bred a Londoner – he works from his studio in Clerkenwell and lives in Kings Cross – he voted for Boris Johnson simply because, “I like someone to have a bit of a sense of humour.”

He has met Ken Livingstone several times and remains distinctly unimpressed. “I’ve taken some charming pictures of Ken but he certainly doesn’t ooze charm,” he says. “He’s just a bit of a dictator isn’t he? And I object to being lied to – all that talk about the Olympics only costing £4 billion pounds when he knew it would be loads more. Makes you wonder what else he has lied about.”

Now 70, though he doesn’t want reminding: “Christ, don’t rub it in, I don’t need viagra or surgery yet,” Bailey first started taking pictures when he was posted with the RAF to Malaysia and Singapore as a teenager doing his National Service. Demobbed at 20, he returned home to the East End determined to avoid the career paths of “gangster, car thief or boxer”, and found work as an assistant to the studio photographer, John French.

Nobody was more amazed than Bailey himself, when, aged 21 and relatively inexperienced in fashion photography, Vogue offered him a job. After all, those were the days when only the most clipped and polished accent would do in the corridors of Vogue.

“You’re probably too young to remember the class thing, but you cannot imagine what it was like,” he says. “If you had a Cockney accent, you were f*****. I don’t know how on earth I managed to slip through the net. The amount of stunning models I saw who just couldn’t get a job because of the way they spoke was unbelieveable.”

Bailey recalls early on his career, taking some pictures to Jocelyn Stevens, then editor of Town magazine, who mistook him for the messenger. “”Tell Mr Bailey we’ll call him” he said”. It’s all so much easier now – it’s not about birth any more, just money, although I’m not sure which is worse.”

Together with fellow snappers like Terence Donovan and Patrick Lichfield, Bailey captured, and in many ways helped create the dizzying glamour of sixties London, dominated by high fashion and celebrity chic, where photographers rubbed shoulders with actors, musicians and royalty.

In 1964, Bailey’s Box of Pin-Ups, a box of poster prints of 1960s celebrities and socialites including The Beatles, Mick Jagger, Terence Stamp and the notorious Kray twins, secured his as the Sixties icon-maker. Two years later, the film director Michael Antonioni immortalised Bailey in Blowup, a film about the work and sexual perks of a London fashion photographer played by David Hemmings and largely based on Bailey, who dated almost all of the great beauties of the day, including the models Jean Shrimpton and Penelope Tree.

Were the Sixties as much fun as they looked? “They were fabulous, God yeah, but only for about 500 people in London,” he says. “I don’t know how much fun they were for the coal miners in Yorkshire. And the good thing is I can remember them because I was never into drugs or anything. I drank a bit, but I reckon I only smoked about three joints the whole time.”

Back then, he says, celebrities were a different breed to the “vacuous hordes” he so often comes across today. “Well, most of them were famous for actually doing something – singing, painting, creating – whereas today everyone’s famous for being famous and they don’t have much going on up here,” he says, prodding his forehead. “Take her, for example,” he says, pointing at polaroid of Jordan, aka Katie Price, pinned on one of his walls.

“Nice girl and all, but it was literally like knock knock, anyone at home?” he says, rapping the table twice for emphasis. “And guess what? There was nobody in,” he laughs.

The big names of the Sixties, says Bailey, were also much more “normal” than the modern-day A-listers. “Now they bring their PRs and all that crap – actually it tends to be the second-raters who do that. The likes of Jack Nicholson and Johnny Depp still turn up on their own. But I have to deal with some characters, like that man in black fellow.”

Man in black fellow? “You know, Mark, who was that pain in the arse?” he says, quizzing his assistant who chuckles in agreement. “Tommy Lee Jones from Men In Black?” I ask. “Yeah, him. Real w***** he was. I turned up wearing something like this and he dismissed me as a squirt – thought I was the janitor or something,” he says, gesturing to his scruffy combat trousers, blue shirt worn over a t-shirt and desert boots. “He was bloody awful. And that Winehouse girl. She never bothers to show up.”

The only downside to the Sixties, says Bailey, was “that whole bloody feminism thing”. “I mean, what was all that about?” he asks. “I was brought up by two women – my mum and Aunt Dolly,” (Bailey’s father walked out on the family when he and his sister were young).

“Tough as an old gypsy, mum was, she scared the s*** out of me, but I was surrounded by strong women so it had never even occurred to me that women were anything other than equal to men. Then all those bloody feminists started attacking me, the silly uptight cows, having a go because I slept with more than one woman.”

Bailey has certainly had his fair share of women, with no less than four marriages under his belt. Former wives include Rosemary Bramble, Marie Helvin and Catherine Deneuve. The actress and model Catherine Dyer is wife number four to whom he has been happily married for 25 years.

“Yes, I’ve been a lucky boy,” he says, rubbing his hands together at the memory of so many beautiful conquests. “They were all great, but my wife now is just about the best thing that ever happened to me, aside from being born.” The couple have three children – Paloma, 22, Fenton, 20 and Sascha, 13. “Look at his,” he says, proudly showing me a nude photograph of his wife he took recently. “Not bad for 46, eh? Haven’t I done well?” he asks. Looking at the short, greying man in front of me whose considerable pot belly is pushing every button on his shirt to its limits, I agree that he has done very well indeed.

Despite his track record as a serial lothario, Bailey has managed to stay on remarkably good terms with all of his former flames. How does he do it, I ask? “Let me look at your hands, not married yet, right, let me tell you something,” he says knowingly.

“Marriage or no marriage, you need to keep a sense of humour – that and curiosity are the most important qualities in a woman as far as I’m concerned,” he says, citing the time Deneuve told him of their divorce.

“We barely ever saw each other, we were both so busy, and one day she called me in the studio and said, “Bailey, do you know we’re divorced?” Are we, I said. “Yes,” she said. “Now, we can be lovers”. See, even then she was making a joke.”

Even Marie Helvin, who in her recent autobiography painted a picture of Bailey as a bit of a bully – a husband who cheated on her, pointing out his conquests to her at parties and describe her 5ft9, size eight frame “mighty meaty” – says that they are still great friends.

These days, though, Bailey shoots fewer models than during his heyday, preferring classic portraiture to modern fashion photography, of which he is somewhat scathing. “The problem is bloody digital,” he laments. “It makes all the girls look the same. I mean, [Steven] Meisel is a great photographer, but I don’t want to go to bed with any of his women,” he says. “They all look like something from outer space – like they’ve been created on a computer. And guess what? They have been.”

He continues, however, to make an exception for Naomi Campbell, his favourite supermodel, with whom he has just shot “the most fabulous series of nudes”.

“She took me to breakfast with Nelson Mandela once, so I can forgive her almost anything,” he says. Not that he needs to, according to his assistant. “Bailey controls, he doesn’t take s*** from anyone, not even Naomi, so she knows her place with him,” says Mark.

While nude photographs of supermodels are not exactly incentive to hang up his camera, at 70, how much longer can he plan plough on for?

“What, you mean think about giving up? Why should I? No, never,” he says. “Well, not until that white feather lands on my pillow.”

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NOW YOU SEE THEM Sascha Kooienga, left, and Artem Emelianov represent the current silhouette on the men’s wear runway. More Photos >

By GUY TREBAY
Published: February 7, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/07/fashion/shows/07DIARY.html?adxnnl=1&8ur=&emc=ur&adxnnlx=1202486872-cOTMM05ORBaO0ELAz/a4pw

CREDIT Hedi Slimane or blame him. The type of men Mr. Slimane promoted when he first came aboard at Dior Homme some years back (he has since left) were thin to the point of resembling stick figures; the clothes he designed were correspondingly lean. The effects of his designs on the men’s wear industry were radical and surprisingly persuasive. Within a couple of seasons, the sleekness of Dior Homme suits made everyone else’s designs look boxy and passé, and so designers everywhere started reducing their silhouettes.

Then a funny thing happened. The models were also downsized. Where the masculine ideal of as recently as 2000 was a buff 6-footer with six-pack abs, the man of the moment is an urchin, a wraith or an underfed runt.

Nowhere was this more clear than at the recent men’s wear shows in Milan and Paris, where even those inured to the new look were flabbergasted at the sheer quantity of guys who looked chicken-chested, hollow-cheeked and undernourished. Not altogether surprisingly, the trend has followed the fashion pack back to New York

Wasn’t it just a short time ago that the industry was up in arms about skinny models? Little over a year ago, in Spain, designers were commanded to choose models based on a healthy body mass index; physicians were installed at Italian casting calls; Diane von Furstenberg, the president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, called a conference to ventilate the issue of unhealthy body imagery and eating disorders among models.

The models in question were women, and it’s safe to say that they remain as waiflike as ever. But something occurred while no one was looking. Somebody shrunk the men.

“Skinny, skinny, skinny,” said Dave Fothergill, a director of the agency of the moment, Red Model Management. “Everybody’s shrinking themselves.”

This was abundantly clear in the castings of models for New York shows by Duckie Brown, Thom Browne, Patrik Ervell, Robert Geller and Marc by Marc Jacobs, where models like Stas Svetlichnyy of Russia typified the new norm. Mr. Svetlichnyy’s top weight, he said last week, is about 145 pounds. He is 6 feet tall with a 28-inch waist.

“Designers like the skinny guy,” he said backstage last Friday at the Duckie Brown show. “It looks good in the clothes and that’s the main thing. That’s just the way it is now.”

Even in Milan last month at shows like Dolce & Gabbana and Dsquared, where the castings traditionally ran to beefcake types, the models were leaner and less muscled, more light-bodied. Just as tellingly, Dolce & Gabbana’s look-book for spring 2008 (a catalog of the complete collection) featured not the male models the label has traditionally favored — industry stars like Chad White and Tyson Ballou, who have movie star looks and porn star physiques — but men who look as if they have never seen the inside of a gym.

“The look is different from when I started in the business eight years ago,” Mr. Ballou said last week during a photo shoot at the Milk Studios in lower Manhattan. In many of the model castings, which tend to be dominated by a handful of people, the body style that now dominates is the one Charles Atlas made a career out of trying to improve.

“The first thing I did when I moved to New York was immediately start going to the gym,” the designer John Bartlett said. That was in the long-ago 1980s. But the idea of bulking up now seems retro when musicians and taste arbiters like Devendra Banhart boast of having starved themselves in order to look good in clothes.

“The eye has changed,” Mr. Bartlett said. “Clothes now are tighter and tighter. Guys are younger and younger. Everyone is influenced by what Europe shows.”

What Europe (which is to say influential designers like Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons at Jil Sander) shows are men as tall as Tom Brady but who wear a size 38 suit.

“There are designers that lead the way,” said James Scully, a seasoned casting agent best known for the numerous modeling discoveries he made when he worked at Gucci under Tom Ford. “Everyone looks to Miuccia Prada for the standard the way they used to look at Hedi Slimane. Once the Hedi Slimanization got started, all anyone wanted to cast was the scrawny kid who looked like he got sand kicked in his face. The big, great looking models just stopped going to Europe. They knew they’d never get cast.”

For starters, they knew that they would never fit into designers’ samples. “When I started out in the magazine business in 1994, the sample size was an Italian 50,” said Long Nguyen of Flaunt magazine, referring to a size equivalent to a snug 40-regular.

“That was an appropriate size for a normal 6-foot male,” Mr. Nguyen said. Yet just six years later — coincidentally at about the time Mr. Slimane left his job as the men’s wear designer at YSL for Dior Homme — the typical sample size had dwindled to 48. Now it is 46.

“At that point you might as well save money and just go over to the boy’s department,” Mr. Nguyen said from his seat in the front row of the Benjamin Cho show, which was jammed as usual with a selection of reedy boys in Buffalo plaid jackets and stovepipe jeans, the same types that fill Brooklyn clubs like Sugarland. “I’m not really sure if designers are making clothes smaller or if people are smaller now,” Mr Nguyen said.

According to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Americans are taller and much heavier today than 40 years ago. The report, released in 2002, showed that the average height of adult American men has increased to 5-9 ½ in 2002 from just over 5-8 in 1960. The average weight of the same adult man had risen dramatically, to 191 pounds from 166.3.

Nowadays a model that weighed in at 191 pounds, no matter how handsome, would be turned away from most agencies or else sent to a fat farm.

Far from inspiring a spate of industry breast-beating, as occurred after the international news media got hold of the deaths of two young female models who died from eating disorders, the trend favoring very skinny male models has been accepted as a matter or course.

“I personally think that it’s the consumer that’s doing this, and fashion is just responding,” said Kelly Cutrone, the founder of People’s Revolution, a fashion branding and production company. “No one wants a beautiful women or a beautiful man anymore.”

In terms of image, the current preference is for beauty that is not fully evolved. “People are afraid to look over 21 or make any statement of what it means to be adult,” Ms. Cutrone said.

George Brown, a booking agent at Red Model Management, said: “When I get that random phone call from a boy who says, ‘I’m 6-foot-1 and I’m calling from Kansas,’ I immediately ask, ‘What do you weigh?’ If they say 188 or 190, I know we can’t use him. Our guys are 155 pounds at that height.”

Their waists, like that of Mr. Svetlichnyy, measure 28 or 30 inches. They have, ideally, long necks, pencil thighs, narrow shoulders and chests no more than 35.5 inches in circumference, Mr. Brown said. “It’s client driven,” he added. “That’s just the size that blue-chip designers and high-end editorials want.”

For Patrik Ervell’s show on Saturday, the casting brief called for new faces and men whose bodies were suited to a scarecrow silhouette. “We had to measure their thighs,” Mr. Brown said.

For models like Demián Tkach, a 26-year-old Argentine who was recently discovered by the photographer Bruce Weber, the tightening tape measure may cut off a career.

Mr. Tkach said that when he came here from Mexico, where he had been working: “My agency asked me to lose some muscle. I lost a little bit to help them, because I understand the designers are not looking for a male image anymore. They’re looking for some kind of androgyne.”

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