We’ve taken you inside Marilyn Monroe’s personal library, which included “no shortage of great literary works – everything from Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, to Ulyssesby James Joyce, to Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky and The Plays Of Anton Chekhov.” And speaking of Ulysses, we’ve also revisited a 1955 photoshoot where the pioneering photojournalist Eve Arnold captured Monroe reading a worn copy of James Joyce’s modernist classic in a playground. By the looks of things, Monroe was making her way through the final chapter, sometimes known as “Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy.”
Today, we have Monroe reading Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. In his biography The Return of Marilyn Monroe, Sam Staggs notes that “Walt Whitman was [Monroe’s] favorite poet, even more than Carl Sandburg. She loved him from the moment a New York friend gave her [Leaves of Grass] years earlier.” Staggs continues, “She often read Whitman for relaxation. The rhythm of his long free lines of verse lulled and stimulated her at the same time.” The photo above was seemingly taken by John Florea at the Beverly Carlton Hotel circa 1952. You can find a whole Pinterest board dedicated to Marilyn Monroe reading here.
Feel free to download free copies of Leaves of Grass and Ulysses from our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections.
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My wife jokes that I’m pretentious for my love of what she calls “tiny awards” on the covers of movies—little laurel leaf-bound seals of freshness from the art film festival circuit. It’s true, I nearly always bite when unknown films come to me preapproved. Were I to encounter the cover of the 2008 Patti Smith documentary Dream of Life I should be forced to watch it even if were I totally ignorant of Patti Smith. It won several tiny awards—including a Sundance Prize for best cinematography, a well-deserved honor that shows director Steven Sebring’s high regard for his subject. Any worthwhile film about Smith—singer, writer, poet, artist—must privilege the visual as well as the musical and literary. Smith’s world has always been one of high contrast and dangerous prescience, like the work of her childhood friend, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, with whom she moved to the Chelsea Hotel in 1969 and who took the iconic photo on the cover of her first album, Horses. Her and Mapplethorpe’s storied partnership helped both take New York City by storm. As a young Smith says above, “New York is the thing that seduced me; New York is the thing that formed me; New York is the thing that deformed me.”
Born in Chicago—“mainline of America” she calls it—Smith’s family moved across the Midwest to rural New Jersey. Her work also bespeaks of an experience of Eastern Migration, with nostalgic traces of longing for open spaces. The film opens with a galloping herd of horses, nodding to Smith’s 1975 debut, a blast of punk poetry that still sounds menacing and raw. But the documentary’s title comes from a 1988 record that marked a sort of cesura for Smith, as one period of her life ended and another waited to begin. Produced by her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith (formerly of the MC5), whom she met in 1976, it’s an album of “polished love songs, lullabies, and political statements” and it’s a very grown-up record, the sometimes adult contemporary sound saved from blandness by Smith’s compelling lyricism and beautiful voice.
Fred “Sonic” Smith fell ill not long after the album, and Patti retired, more or less, from music. She returned to performing and recording after her husband’s death in 1994, after the loss also of her brother and Mapplethorpe. Always an intensely emotional writer and performer, her later period is marked by memorials and meditations on loss—not unusual for an older poet and longtime survivor of rock and roll, as well as the literary and art worlds. All of Smith’s many changes occur before us above as she remembers and reflects in her poet’s voice over that Sundance-winning cinematography. It’s hard to imagine another document—save her National Book Award-winning memoir Just Kids—doing more justice to Smith’s vision than Dream of Life.
For several decades of its history, the Polaroid was called a “Land Camera” after the company’s founder Edwin Land, and the product line included not only consumer devices but also high-end machines like the SX-70, a folding SLR camera introduced in 1972. The SX-70 boasted a host of impressive features that allowed photographers to achieve the effects of non-instant SLRs such as “changes in depth of field, double exposure, fixed-point focusing, and closeup photography.” The SX-70 made a considerable impression on famed husband and wife design team Charles and Ray Eames, so much so that they produced the 11-minute advertisement above describing in detail the SX-70’s highly complex operations. In his introduction, Charles Eames tells us that no less an authority than Alfred Stieglitz “favored any means that might free the photographer’s whole energies so that they could be channeled in the direction of the decision, the picture itself.” Thus, Edwin Land’s inventions are given the imprimatur of the father of fine art photography himself, and in 1972, the SX-70 was Land’s highest achievement to date.
The Polaroid instant camera seems to have come full circle from consumer toy to utilitarian snapshot-maker to artists’ experimental tool to instrument of retro-hipsterism to consumer toy again. But the physical, real-world Polaroid aesthetic almost met its end in 2008 when the company discontinued production of its instant film, prompting the creators of the Impossible Project to “[save] analog instant photography from extinction by releasing various, brand new and unique instant films.” VP Dave Bias demonstrates the project’s device, which allows smartphone photogs to print images on Polaroid-style film. Responding to the massive demands of 21st century détourned nostalgia, Polaroid has introduced new lines of instant cameras, and Fuji is also bridging the Instagram/Polaroid divide with a portable printer this spring. But what the Impossible Project highlights—as the Eames did in ‘72—is just how much the Polaroid became a means of making fine art as well as kitsch, a too often unremarked upon application of the famous instant camera and the visual aesthetics it bequeathed the digital age.
Take Laurence Olivier. Who else could have made the phrase “Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera” sound like Shakespeare? Seriously. He could’ve tacked the string of superlatives he unleashes against a black background above onto the end of Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech and I would have been none the wiser.
(And gentlemen in England now a‑bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day -
Pocket sized, folding, electronically controlled, motor driven…)
Sir Larry was followed in 1979 by actress Liv Ullmann, solemnly praising the SX70 Sonar OneStep’s moment-capturing abilities. Is there a Polaroid somewhere in the Ingmar Bergman Archive of his and Ullmann’s 12-year-old daughter Linn, standing at the sink, washing dishes? Or has YouTube become the sole reliquary for these precious moments?
Christopher Plummer’s 1980 spot seems downright loose by contrast, as he kicks back on a beach, aiming his SX70 Sonar OneStep at a Golden Retriever and a canoe’s worth of kids. (Sir Larry’s subject was a rather fussy porcelain clock.)
In December of 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 became the first people to leave our home planet and travel to another body in space. But as crew members Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders all later recalled, the most important thing they discovered was Earth.
Using photo mosaics and elevation data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), this video commemorates the 45th anniversary of Apollo 8’s historic flight by recreating the moment when the crew first saw and photographed the Earth rising from behind the Moon. [See the original photo here.] Narrator Andrew Chaikin, author of A Man on the Moon, sets the scene for a three-minute visualization of the view from both inside and outside the spacecraft accompanied by the onboard audio of the astronauts. The visualization draws on numerous historical sources, including the actual cloud pattern on Earth from the ESSA‑7 satellite and dozens of photographs taken by Apollo 8, and it reveals new, historically significant information about the Earthrise photographs. It has not been widely known, for example, that the spacecraft was rolling when the photos were taken, and that it was this roll that brought the Earth into view.
The visualization establishes the precise timing of the roll and, for the first time ever, identifies which window each photograph was taken from. The key to the new work is a set of vertical stereo photographs taken by a camera mounted in the Command Module’s rendezvous window and pointing straight down onto the lunar surface. It automatically photographed the surface every 20 seconds. By registering each photograph to a model of the terrain based on LRO data, the orientation of the spacecraft can be precisely determined.
This video above is public domain and can be downloaded here. In 1972, astronauts took another famous picture of the Earth, known as The Big Blue Marble. You can watch a film (“Overview”) that commemorates that photograph and explores the whole concept of seeing the Earth from afar. And, of course, you should always see the Carl Sagan-narrated film, The Pale Blue Dot, too.
Some of the prints, like the one below, certainly have a foreign quality to them. They feel far away in terms of time and place. But others (like the shot above) feel remarkably close, something we can all relate to today.
According to the PDR, the pictures came to reside in the Dutch National Archive as a result of the centuries-long commercial relationship between the Dutch and the Japanese. More vintage pix can be viewed here.
I believe it was Jacques Derrida, though I don’t recall exactly where, who said that some of the most revealing text of any work can be found in the footnotes. In documentarian Errol Morris’ recent photo-essay series on Lincoln for The New York Times, footnotes, chronologies, snippets of interview, and endlessly recursive references continuously intrude on the stories he tells. In this way, the series, called “The Interminable, Everlasting Lincolns,” enacts the tension Morris identifies as “the push-pull of history,” a contest between several ways of approaching the past: “Facts vs. beliefs. Our desire to know the origins of things vs. our desire to rework, to reconfigure the past to suit our own beliefs and predilections. Perhaps nothing better illustrates this than two radically different predispositions to objects—the storyteller vs. the collector.”
The way story after story inevitably nests within each historical artifact seems to be Morris’ overarching theme as he charts the history of Lincoln iconography by reference to a single image, a photo of Lincoln by Alexander Gardner that exists in only one known original print, called O‑118 after collector of Lincoln photography Lloyd Ostendorf (see the retouched version above, the original print below). This print, along with 13 others, was made either four or five days before Lincoln’s assassination.
Morris’ fascination with this photograph is as variously motivated as the number of different views he adopts in examining its provenance, its history, and its meaning. For one thing, O‑118 is supposedly the last photograph taken of Lincoln alive. In 1922, The New York Times published the original print (above) with text by James Young, who wrote:
Probably no other photograph of Lincoln conveys more clearly the abiding sadness of the face. The lines of time and care are deeply etched, and he has the look of a man bordering upon old age, though he was only 56. Proof that the camera was but a few feet away may be found by scrutiny of the picture…. The print has been untouched, and this picture is an exact likeness of the President as he looked in the week of his death.
The photo’s caption also included information that Morris makes a great deal of: “The Cracked Negative Caused it To Be Discarded. It Has Only Once Before Been Published, and Then in a Retouched Form.” For one thing, Morris seems to associate the photograph with what Walter Benjamin called “aura”; The print, it seems, was the only one Gardner was able to make before the cracked negative became useless and mass production from the source impossible. Un-retouched, the print shows a “fracture cutting through the top of Lincoln’s head.” For the storyteller, writes Morris, “the crack is the beginning of a legend—the legend of a death foretold. The crack seems to anticipate the bullet fired into the back of Lincoln’s head at Ford’s Theater on Good Friday, April 14, 1865.” Using the rhetorical term for “a figure of anticipation,” a narrative feature that foreshadows, foretells, or prophesies, Morris calls this “the proleptic crack.”
His winding narrative, replete with the antiquarian minutiae of collectors, moves from the day—February 5, 1865—that Lincoln and his son Tad walked to Gardner’s studio on 7th Street in Washington, DC for the photo session, through the use of photography as an aid to Lincoln painters and sculptors, to the meaning of Lincoln for such diverse people as Leo Tolstoy, Marilyn Monroe, and our current President. Morris’ series ranges far and wide, visiting with historians and collectors along the way, and telling many a story, some freely speculative, some wistful, some tragic, and all somehow circling back to O‑118. Like much of Morris’ documentary work, it’s an exercise in collage—of the methods of the scholar, the essayist, and the archivist—and like its subject, it’s a fractured, but everlastingly fascinating meditation. Follow Morris’ entire series below.
Spare yourself the grim realities of the state fair reunion tour circuit.
On the other hand, it’s deathly hard to control one’s image from beyond the grave. Especially when you’ve got an award-winning PR Agency and a photo manipulation company teaming up to imagine how you might look had you survived!
The twelve unlucky recipients of these posthumous makeovers remain household names (see the gallery here), even though it’s nearly twenty years since the last of their number drew breath. Like Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain was but 27 when he passed, though at the time of his birth, the other three were all old enough to be his mommy or daddy. Fitting, then, that he appears to be the baby of the golden group.
Music writer Elijah Wald and popular music scholar Reebee Garofalo offer insights below each portrait in the gallery about where the subjects might now find themselves in their careers. It’s all conjecture, but their experience ensures that their opinions can be taken as educated guesses, at least.
And who here thinks the 78-year-old Elvis would traipse around in the sort of short-sleeved poly-blend shirt my late grandfather wore to his weekly men’s prayer breakfast?
For pity’s sake, age does not automatically imply drabness!
(Who’s that I see over there? Could it be Yoko Ono, looking great at 80, in a top hat and tap pants? Even if she were looking less-than-fit, it would still be a bold choice! I doubt she wears that get-up to the grocery store, but the progression of time has not robbed her of the ability to make a deliberate visual impression.)
What is refreshing—though not necessarily believable—is how none of the resurrected icons in these portraits seem to have gone in for plastic surgery.
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