Hiroshi Sugimoto, Photographer

http://www.sugimotohiroshi.com

Hiroshi Sugimoto, born on February 23rd, 1948 is a Japanese photographer currently dividing his time between Tokyo and New York. His catalog is made up of a number of series, each having a distinct theme and similar attributes. His use of an 8×10 large format camera and extremely long exposures have garnered Sugimoto a reputation as a photographer of the highest technical ability. He is equally acclaimed for the conceptual and philosophical aspects of his work. Sugimoto began his work with "Dioramas" in 1976, a series in which he photographed displays in natural history museums. The cultural assumption that cameras always show us reality tricks many viewers into assuming the animals in the photos are real until they examine the pictures carefully. His series "Portraits", begun in 1999, is based on a similar idea. In that series, Sugimoto photographs wax figures of Henry VIII and his wives. These wax figures are based on portraits from the 1500s and when taking the picture Sugimoto attempts to recreate the lighting that would have been used by the painter. Begun in 1978, Sugimoto's Theatres series involved photographing old American movie palaces and drive-ins, exposing the film for the duration of the entire film, the film projector providing the sole lightning. The luminescent screen in the centre of the composition, the architectural details and the seats of the theatre are the only subjects in the photographs, and the unique lighting gives the works a surreal look, as a part of Sugimoto's attempt to reveal time in photography.

Sandro, Photographer

http://www.sandrofilm.com



Internationally known photographer Sandro D. Miller has been photographing people from around the world for over 25 years. Born in 1958 in the Chicago suburb of Elgin, Sandro was raised in an Italian/American family. Illinois. He became interested in photography at the age of 16 upon seeing the works of Irving Penn, and since then has devoted his time and passion to making expressive images. Sandro’s work has been featured in The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Forbes, Details, stern, and ESPN Magazine. He has exhibited in Munich, Germany; Daytona Beach, Florida; and at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Illinois.

Alan Cohen, Photographer

http://www.alan-cohen.com



Alan Cohen grew up in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. After earning a degree in nuclear engineering at North Carolina State University and beginning a doctoral program in thermodynamics at Northwestern University, he began photographing and eventually left the sciences to study photography. As a graduate student at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design, he studied with Aaron Siskind, Arthur Siegel, Garry Winogrand, Charles Swedlund, Ken Josephson, and Joe Jachna. He was awarded a M.Sc. Photography degree in 1972. Married to Susan Walsh, Cohen lives in Chicago and is an Adjunct Professor in the Art History, Theory, Criticism Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a member of the visiting faculty at DePaul University's School for New Learning and at Columbia College Chicago's Department Of Photography.

"It's irrelevant whether you like most artists' work or not. It's how you use their work; it's whether it's instructive or not."

Robert Adams, Photographer

Robert Adams (born May 8th, 1937) is an American photographer who came to prominence as part of the photographic movement known as New Topographics. Adams was born in the industrial town of Orange, New Jersey relocating to Colorado as a teenager with his family. Adams became interested in documenting how the western landscapes of North America, once captured by the likes of Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson, had been shaped by human influence. As part of the New Topographics in the 1970s, Adams approach to photographing these landscapes was to take a stance of apparent neutrality, refraining from any obvious judgements of the subject matter.

"The goal is not making art, it's living a life."

William S. Burroughs, Author

William Seward Burroughs II (February 5th, 1914(1914-02-05) -- August 2nd, 1997) was an American novelist, philosopher, essayist, social critic, painter, and spoken word performer. Much of Burroughs' work is semi-autobiographical, drawn from his experiences as an opiate addict, a condition that marked the last fifty years of his life. A primary member of the Beat Generation, he was an avant-garde author who affected popular culture as well as literature.

Burroughs Soundbites: http://www.netherworld.com/~mgabrys/william/

A Short Film on William S. Burroughs, by Gus Van Sant:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7_MYrVzU-Y

e. e. cummings

Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14th, 1894 - September 3rd, 1962), populary known as e. e. cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, and playwright. His body of work encompasses more than 900 poems, several plays and essays, numerous drawings, sketches, and paintings, as well as two novels. He is remembered as a preeminent voice of 20th century poetry, as well as one of the most enduringly popular.

Since Feeling Is First

since feeling is first

who pays any attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool

while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,

and kisses are a far better fate 

than wisdom

lady i swear by all flowers. Don't dry

--the best gesture of my brain is less than

your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for eachother: then

laugh, leaning back in my arms

for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

If Strangers Meet

if strangers meet

life begins-

not poor not rich

(only aware)

kind neither

nor cruel

(only complete)

i not not you

not possible;

only truthful

-truthfully,once

if strangers(who

deep our most are

selves)touch:

forever

(and so to dark)

Somewhere I Have Never Travelled

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

any experience, your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and

my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly, 

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility: whose texture

compels me with the color of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens; only something in me understands 

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 - March 4, 19630) was an American poet closely associated with modernism and imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, a line of work that no doubt influenced the subjet matter of his poetry.

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

Alex Budovsky for The Real Tuesday Weld

Alex Budovsky, a Russian animator, made the video for the song "(Return I Will to Old) Brazil" sung by The Real Tuesday Weld. He also did the video for their song, "Bath Time in Clerkenwell."

Sylvain Chomet

Sylvain Chomet (born 1963) is a French animator and film director. Born in Maisons-Lafitte, near Paris, he studied art at high school until he graduated in 1982. In 1986 he published his first comic, Secrets of the Dragonfly. Chomet moved to London in 1988 to work as an animator at the Richard Purdum Studio. In September of that year, he established a freelance practice, workiong on commercials for clients such as Principality, Renault, Sinton, and Swiss Air. In 1991, Chomet started work on his first animated film La Vieille Dame et les Pigeons, with backgrounds designed by Nicolas de Crecy.... Skipping head, his first feature-length animated film, Les Triplettes de Belleville, was also nominated for two Oscars in 2003, and introduced Chomet's name to a much wider audience.

Nicolas de Crecy

Nicolas de Crecy (ne le 29 septembre 1966 a Lyon en France) est dessinateur et scenariste de bande dessinee et illustrateur. Apres un baccalaureat Arts Appliques en 1984 a Marseille, Nicolas de Crecy fait partie de la premiere promotion de la classe de bande dessinee des Beaux-Arts d'Angouleme, dont il sort diplome en 1987. Il travaille notamment comme dessinateur pour les studios Disney de Montreuil, mais choisit bientot de se consacrer a la bande dessinee et publie en 1991 son premier livre, Foligatto, immediatement salue par la critique.

Alfred Kubin

Alfred Leopold Isidor Kubin (April 10, 1877 - August 20, 1959) was an Austrian Expressionist, Illustrator and occasional writer. Kubin was of Czech ancestry, and was born in Bohemia in the town of Litomerice, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From 1898 to 1901, Kubin studied at the Art School Schmitt Reutte and at the Munich Academy. He produced a small number of oil paintings in the years between 1902 and 1910, but thereafter his output consisted of pen and ink drawings, watercolors, and lithographs.