Long before the tumultuous marriage to Diego Rivera and the mortifications of the flesh occasioned by a horrific bus accident, and longer still before the avalanche of Frida-centric kitsch and tchotchkes and the Julie Taymor biopic starring Salma Hayek, there was a cherubic little girl named Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón.
Witness these photos of young Magdalena Carmen Frieda, taken by her Hungarian Jewish father, Guillermo, over a period of twenty years.
The 2‑year-old Frida is merry, chubby, and barely recognizable.
The piercing gaze starts coming into focus around age 5. Kid looks like an artist already!
The famous eyebrows have filled in by 12, when she faces the camera in a sailor suit and giant hair bow.
The 18-year-old pre-med student adopting an unsmiling pose in 1926—the year of the accident—is unapologetic, intense, and unmistakably Frida Kahlo.
Visit Vintage Everyday for more of Guillermo Kahlo’s images of his second-to-last daughter.
Reference photo for Norman Rockwell’s portrait of Robert F. Kennedy, c. 1968. Courtesy of the Norman Rockwell Museum Collections.
Whatever you think of Norman Rockwell’s paintings and illustrations, you can’t deny them the status of enduring Americana. For my money, Rockwell’s images certainly make for more interesting representations of the culture than those of, say, Thomas Kinkade. But even if you have little interest in the America Rockwell created on paper and canvas, you’ll surely find compelling the America he captured in photographs. We now have unprecedented access to these thanks to a $150,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services that has enabled the Norman Rockwell Museum to digitize what they call the Norman Rockwell Photographic Print Collection: approximately 50,000 images that, according to archivist Venus Van Ness, “provide a unique window into Mr. Rockwell’s working process, his personal life, and the times in which he lived.”
Reference photo for “Portrait of a Geisha Girl,” Pan American- Japan (1956)
These images include “reference photos Rockwell used to compose his paintings, photos of work in progress, and candid shots of him working and interacting with John Wayne, Ann-Margret, Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, and many other twentieth-century icons who posed for the artist in his Stockbridge studio, on location at a movie set, at the White House, or — as in the case of Kennedy — at his Hyannis Port home on Cape Cod.”
You can browse them on this page, which displays the search results for the word “photograph” in the Norman Rockwell Museum’s archives. And if you want to dig up those photos of Wayne, Ann-Margret, Kennedy, or other icons of what they call the American century, you can also add particular terms to search for specific subjects. Or you can even search for specific places, for instance Rockwell’s many reference photos for the ads he did for flights to Japan by Pan Am — naturally, the iconically American airline.
Reference photo of Norman Rockwell’s Portrait of Ann-Margret, c. 1965.
“To anyone who saw the exhibition Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, which was organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum and opened at the Brooklyn Museum in November 2010,” writes Hyperallergic’s Benjamin Sutton, “the importance of photography to Rockwell’s practice is not news. That show juxtaposed some of Rockwell’s best known paintings like ‘New Kids in the Neighborhood’ (1967) and ‘Boy in a Dining Car’ (1946) with the many, many studio and documentary photos the artist took and spliced together before putting pencil to paper or paintbrush to canvas.” But now “the public and art historians can get a better sense of the laborious preliminary photography work that went into each of Rockwell’s images, and the exceptional level of access he was given to his subjects.” And though the process of browsing them may remain tricky for the time being, rest assured that, according to the official site, “the Museum’s new digital experiences project is getting underway with support from yet another IMLS matching grant awarded in September.” And so American innovation continues, on a level Rockwell could never have imagined.
Historians have debated for centuries how Napoleon Bonaparte managed to turn the same men who once overthrew a king in the name of liberté, égalité and fraternité into a formidable fighting force devoted to an emperor. But that’s precisely what he did. As he swept through Italy, Spain and Egypt, his army grew rapidly and not just with French troops. Polish, German, Dutch and Italian soldiers took up arms under Napoleon’s banner. In 1805, in a French village facing the English Channel, Napoleon christened his massive multinational army the Grande Armée.
Originally, the diminutive despot from Corsica planned to use the force to invade Britain but that ultimately never happened. Instead, he directed his force to take out some of his continental rivals. The Grande Armée destroyed the Holy Roman Empire at Austerlitz. After it forced the Austrians into submission following the Battle of Wagram in 1809, the Grande Armée set out for Napoleon’s disastrous campaign in Russia. As it marched towards Moscow in 1812, its ranks swelled to over a half million troops. As it retreated, it was reduced to less than 120,000.
Napoleon and the Grande Armée were finally defeated in 1815 during the Battle of Waterloo. And though Napoleon was ignominiously exiled to Elba, he, and his army, continued to be revered by the French. On the anniversary of his death, May 5th, veterans of the Napoleonic wars would pay homage to the Emperor by marching in full uniform through Paris’ Place Vendôme.
In 1858, someone took portraits of the veterans using that newfangled technology called photography. The men were well into old age when the pictures were taken, and some were clearly struggling to stay still for the length of the camera’s exposure. But they all look impressive in their uniforms complete with epaulettes, medals, sashes and plumes. You can see some of the images above. Click on each to enlarge them.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
David Lynch’s break out movie, Eraserhead, is the sort of movie that will seep into your unconscious and stay with you for days or weeks – like a particularly unnerving nightmare. Shot in inky black and white, the film achieves its uncanny power in part because of its setting — a rotting industrial moonscape bereft of nature. Much of the film’s soundtrack is filled with the clanking of distant machines and the hissing of steam escaping pipes.
Lynch’s obsession with the remnants of the industrial revolution have punctuated much of his work since — from the grimy, claustrophobic Victorian streets in TheElephant Man to the opening titles of Twin Peaks to his 1990 avant-garde multimedia extravaganza Industrial Symphony No. 1.
“Well…if you said to me, ‘Okay, we’re either going down to Disneyland or we’re going to see this abandoned factory,’ there would be no choice,” said Lynch once in an interview. “I’d be down there at the factory. I don’t really know why. It just seems like such a great place to set a story.”
Earlier this year, Lynch exhibited at a London gallery a series of photographs he shot of, yes, rotting factories around New York, England and particularly Poland. The subjects of the photos are pretty mundane – a door, a window, a wall – but he imbues them with this odd tone of foreboding and menace. In other words, Lynch makes them seem Lynchian.
“It’s an incredible mood,” Lynch told Dazed Magazine. “I feel like I’m in a place that’s just magical, where nature is reclaiming these derelict factories. It’s very dreamy. Every place you turn, there’s something so sensational and surprising – it’s the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. All the cities are looking more and more the same. The real treasures are going away; the mood they create is going away.”
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
When Stanley Kubrick was a mere high school student in April 1945, just after FDR died, he snapped a picture of a news vendor framed on either side by posters announcing the president’s death. He was so excited by the picture that he skipped school to develop it and then marched right into the office of Look magazine. Photo editor Helen O’Brian offered to buy the photo for $25. Displaying his trademark cockiness, Kubrick told her that he wanted to see what price he could get from The New York DailyNews. They only offered $10, so Kubrick went with Look. Within a few months, at the age of 17, Kubrick became a staff photographer for the publication.
Below you can see some photographs that Kubrick took in 1949 while on assignment in Chicago. Using the same noirish high-contrast, low-light look that marked his first three movies, he documented all different strata of society from floor traders, to lingerie models, to meat packers to impoverished African-American families. Click on the images to view them in a larger format. Find a more extensive gallery of images here. To take a closer look at Kubrick’s photography, see the 2018 Taschen book Stanley Kubrick Photographs: Through a Different Lens and also Stanley Kubrick: Drama & Shadows.
Men working the floor at the Chicago Board of Trade
Lingerie model, wearing a girdle and strapless bra, smoking in an office; in the background a woman sits at a desk
Butcher holding slab of beef in a meat locker
African American mother and her four children in their tenement apartment
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
Hiroshima Mon Amour, Alain Resnais’s landmark 1960 meditation on war and memory, was Emmanuelle Riva’s first starring role. She plays a married actress (catch a scene here) who, while making a movie in Japan, has an affair with a Japanese architect played by Eiji Okada. Screenwriter Marguerite Duras chisels away at the actress’s Gallic reserve over the course of the film as memories of the war, not to mention guilt over the affair, overwhelm her. Resnais lingers on Riva’s face as she comes apart. Her performance is as brave as it is exact. French film critic Jean Domarchi once stated, “Hiroshima is a documentary on Emmanuelle Riva.”
As it turns out, Riva was documenting Hiroshima too. While filming on location, she took a series of photographs of everyday life of a city still recovering from the war. They are a fascinating slice of life from a Japan that has long disappeared. The Hiroshima Riva captured was still dominated by dirt roads and wooden buildings. People still regularly wore traditional geta wooden shoes.
Children seemed to be a favorite subject for Riva. She photographs a flock of elementary school students walking to school; a pair of boys fishing before the genbaku dome – ground zero for the bomb; and a gaggle of kids staring agog into the lens, no doubt curious at the sight of a stylish French woman with an expensive camera.
Years later, Riva’s pictures were collected into a book called Hiroshima 1958, which, sadly, seems to be available only in Japan. Riva, of course, went on to a celebrated acting career, including an Oscar-nominated turn in Michael Haneke’s harrowing love story Amour.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. Most of us know this — or at least if we don’t know the exact date, we know it happened in 1914, 100 years ago. We also know that the spark of the killing ignited the international geopolitical tinderbox just waiting to flame into the First World War. Yet as military historians often remind us, no one event can really start a conflict of that unprecedented scale any more than one event can stop it. The second half of the year 1914 saw a series of interrelated crises, responses, counter-crises, and counter responses that, these hundred years on, few of us could cite off the top of our heads.
We can compensate for the century between us and the Great War by reading up on it, of course. Of the countless volumes available, I personally recommend Geoff Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme. But nothing brings home the detailed reality of this ever-more-distant “huge murderous public folly,” in the words of J.B. Priestly, like looking at color photos from the front.
That color photography exists of anything in mid-1910s Europe, much less as momentous and disastrous a period as World War I, still surprises some people. We owe these shots to the efforts of German photographer Hans Hildebrand, as well as to his country’s already-established appreciation for the art and adeptness in engineering its tools. “In 1914, Germany was the world technical leader in photography and had the best grasp of its propaganda value,” writes R.G. Grant in World War I: The Definitive Visual History. “Some 50 photographers were embedded with its forces, compared with 35 for the French. The British military authorities lagged behind. It was not until 1916 that a British photographer was allowed on the Western Front.” But among his countrymen, only Hildebrand took pictures in color.
“The overwhelming majority of photos taken during World War I were black and white,” writes Spiegel Online, where you can browse a gallery of eighteen of his photos, “lending the conflict a stark aesthetic which dominates our visual memory of the war.” Hildebrand’s images thus stand out with their almost unreal-looking vividness, a result achieved not simply by his use of color film, but by his relatively long experience with a still fairly new medium. He’d already founded a color film society in his native Stuttgart three years before the Archduke’s assassination, and had tried his hand at autochrome printing as early as 1909.
Though not himself a dyed-in-the-wool propagandist, he did need to pose the soldiers for these photos, due to the lack of a film sensitive enough to capture actual action. Still, they give us a clearer idea of the situation than do most contemporary images. Hardly a glorification, Hildebrand’s work seems to speak to what those of us now, one hundred years in the future, would come to see in World War I: its misery, its oppressive sense of futility, and the haunting destruction it left behind.
In 1960, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir ventured to Cuba during, as he wrote, the “honeymoon of the revolution.” Military strongman Fulgencio Batista’s regime had fallen to Fidel Castro’s guerilla army and the whole country was alight with revolutionary zeal. As Beauvoir wrote, “after Paris, the gaiety of the place exploded like a miracle under the blue sky.”
At the time, Sartre and de Beauvoir were internationally renown, the intellectual power couple of the 20th century. Beauvoir’s book, The Second Sex (1949), laid the groundwork for the feminism movement, and her book The Mandarins won France’s highest literary award in 1954. Sartre’s name had become a household word. The philosophy he championed – Existentialism – was being read and debated around the world. And his political activism — loudly condemning France’s war in Algeria, for instance — had given him real moral authority. When Sartre was arrested in 1968 for civil disobedience, Charles de Gaulle pardoned him, noting, “You don’t arrest Voltaire.” As Deirdre Bair notes in her biography of Beauvoir, “Sartre became the one intellectual whose presence and commentary emerging governments clamored for, as if he alone could validate their revolutions.” So it’s not terribly surprising that Fidel Castro wined and dined the two during their month in Cuba.
Cuban photographer Alberto Korda captured the couple as they met with Castro, Che Guevara and other leaders of the revolution. One picture (above) is of Guevara in his combat boots and trademark beret, lighting a cigar for the French philosopher. Sartre looks small and unhealthy compared to the strapping, magnetic revolutionary. Sartre was apparently impressed by the time he spent with the guerilla leader. When Che died in Bolivia seven years later, Sartre famously wrote that Guevara was “not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age.”
Later, Korda caught them as they were guided through the streets of Havana. And as you can see (below), that iconic image of Guevara, later plastered on T‑shirts and Rage Against the Machine album covers, is on that same role of film.
When the couple returned to Paris, Sartre wrote article after article extolling the revolution. Beauvoir, who was equally impressed, wrote, “For the first time in our lives, we were witnessing happiness that had been attained by violence.”
Yet their enthusiasm for the regime cooled when they returned to Cuba a year later. The streets of Havana had little of the joy as the previous year. When they talked to factory workers, they heard little but parroting of the official party line. Beauvoir and Sartre ultimately denounced Castro (along with a bunch of other intellectual luminaries like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Octavio Paz) in an open letter that criticized him for the arrest of Cuban poet Herberto Padillo.
You can read more about the life and photography of Alberto Korda in the 2006 book, Cuba: by Korda.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new drawing of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily. The Veeptopus store is here.
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