The New York Times published a video gallery in which 14 famous actors who defined cinema in 2010 capture classic screen types. The performers including Natalie Portman, Matt Damon, Robert Duvall, Noomi Rapace, Jennifer Lawrence and Anthony Mackie act out a number of fascinating, almost surreal and very interesting scenes. The videos where directed by Solve Sundsbo, set to a score by Canadian composer Owen Pallett of “Final Fantasy” and “The Arcade Fire”.
Solve Sundsbo’s clients as a fashion photographer have included Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent and Dolce & Gabbana. The videos accompany the black-and-white portrait series which Solve Sundsbo shot for “The Scene Makers: Actors Who Defined Cinema in 2010,” in the Hollywood Issue of The New York Times Magazine. These short clips portray not only the art, but also the joy and power of performance.
Currently the Foam Fotografiemuseum ( Photography museum) is presenting an exhibition of the stunning work by the photographic duo of Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. The exhibition is titled: Pretty Much Everything. It shows approximately 300 photographs spanning 25 years of the duo’s career. Art, fashion and portrait works all exist next to each other. By disregarding any chronological order the combinations of images are based on personal, formal, social, political and intuitive associations that show the way the artists have lived with the images for 25 years.
Inez van Lamsweerde en Vinoodh Matadin launched their international career with the publication of ten pages in the British magazine The Face in 1994. It was here that for the first time in a fashion series the models and the backgrounds were photographed separately and subsequently combined into a single image by use of a computer. The series typified van Lamsweerde and Matadin’s hyper-realistic style and was made to celebrate and subvert fashion within the context of a magazine.
Dubiousness is at the base of practically every image they make. Their work is ambiguous in every sense of the word and balances deliberately on the thin rope between fashion and art, perverting both worlds, mirroring the strangeness of everyday life through an extreme enlargement of a singular part.
Since each photograph demands its own dimensions, and some have been shown over the years and have their own existing size and frame style, the exhibition will have a dynamic flow and will read like a huge stream of images – forming one flowing, pulsating sentence rather than divisions that are grouped by size or subject. This showing will draw the viewer into Inez and Vinoodh’s world of constant dualism, duality and ambiguity, as well as their obsession with giving meaning to the surface, while oscillating between horror and beauty, the grotesque and the quiet, and the spiritual and the banal.
Pretty Much Everything is on view from the 25th of June untill September 2010 in Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam.
Photos Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin | M/M (Paris) | source: Foam Fotografiemuseum
Nick Knight is among the worlds most influential and visionary photographers. As a fashion photographer, he has consistently challenged conventional notions of beauty and is fêted for his groundbreaking creative collaborations with leading designers as well as editorial for W, British Vogue, Paris Vogue, Dazed & Confused, Another, Another Man and i-D magazines have consistently kept Knight at the vanguard of progressive image-making for the past three decades. His first book of photographs, Skinheads, was published in 1982. He has since produced Nicknight, a twelve year retrospective, and Flora, a series of flower pictures, both published by Schirmer Mosel. Knight’s work has been exhibited at international institutions such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, Saatchi Gallery, The Photographers Gallery and Hayward Gallery. He has also produced a permanent installation, Plant Power, for the Natural History Museum in London and was the first of Channel 4′s ‘Big 4′ 50-foot installations outside its London HQ in 2007.
The below Flower video by Nick Knight is featuring a remix of Special Cases by Massive Attack.
Photo and video: Nick Knight featuring Massive Attack | Youtube
