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july 23, 2011 sat am

lady gaga was on 'the view" not too long ago.  she needed two guys to help her walk out with these shoes....or are they called shoes? i shot them next to the joy's shoes.... a definite conversation piece. doesn't gaga...aka  Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta thrive on this reaction?       ABSOLUTELY!  I watched a lot of gaga's video. I  love most of them.  She is amusing and outlandish! 

i had to take a photo off the tv screen with my cell phone.  lady gaga is a new york performance artist/singer/dancer supreme.  i loved her from day one, a paesane from new york!  the funniest part of this interview is when the camera panned to her modest mother in the audience.  OMG, what can her italian american mother  make of all this outrageousness? rebel against italian catholic family!  :)
yes, her child was "unique" from the jump start....smile...gaga teaches acceptance of yourself....love your inner"freak". lady gaga has madonna's outlandishness....i loved madonna too, particularly what she did in the video "like a prayer", flames
and all!
another partly italian girl....what is it with these italian girlz and boys on stage?
gwen stefani, bruce springsteen, steven tyler, bon jovi, and that new jersey
blue eyed swagger, frank sinatra!  must be all that emotionality deep inside
their souls.

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 July 13,2011
I  went to 49 Geary, SF, with a new artist friend who is a painter and textile artist. I am a photographer, and sometimes I do un-glamorized portraits in a natural setting. I also like architecture and I shoot a great deal of it whenever I feel inspired. So today we took BART over to SF and went to see the great Irving Penn exhibit at Frankel Gallery 49 Geary St. Sf  http://www.frankelgallery.com.  The show is called "Radical Beauty 1946-2007".

Irving Penn was a fabulous  studio photographer.....he like Francesco Scavullo, Annie Leibovitz, Diane Arbus, Bert Stern, and Richard Avedon photographed people of character, with interesting faces, wardrobes, and bodies. These photographers worked for Vogue, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone Magazines. They also had accounts with make up companies, perfumes,and shot celebrities, models, musicians, authors, etc.  They have all earned a great deal of money from photography, have books, and huge retrospectives
at various museums and galleries around the world. 
 
Penn's work is interesting and very stylized technically, a master of studio lighting, and design. One photograph was selling for $425,000.!  In my humble opinion, it wasn't a photo that I thought
was his best work.  Curiously, I asked someone in another photo gallery how do they come up with these prices??? It is what is trendy at the time, what the market will bear, how famous a photographer is, if its cutting edge, different from their other work. What type of print is it, B &W silver gelatin, Platinum, is it printed on aluminum, watercolor paper, is it a dye
transfer? How many prints from the negative were made?  Did the photgrapher print it herself? You can bet it's an archival print, matted archivally etc to last for at least a century or longer.

There was one photo that I particularly liked.  It  was of a model wrapped in fabric, face hidden.Because I like fabric and texture, don't sew (tho my ancestors earned their living in sewing factories in NY),
Being Italian American I have a good eye for fine threads.
I liked the way Penn lit this piece, showing the folds, the shadow, this reminded me of my class with Mark
at BCC.  Attempting to paint in watercolor the folds of cloth, I loved that best. The other shot I liked was a a african women with tribal scarring all over her torso.  Question... was it a hot brand of this design?  I like photos that cause you to think. On the other walls were photographs by Diane Arbus.  The lady nudist with sunglasses, swimming cap  of sorts,
and slippers.  She was tall, had a shapely body.Penn like Arbus had some interesting characters.  He also had a sketch book of his plans for photos,
planned out like a story board for a movie.
I also like the shot of a nude Mama Cass Eliot, with her overly abundant body.  Mama Cass was the lead singer of the Mamas and Papas and I believe she passed on from choking on a chicken bone. R.I.P, Cass you
were a great singer in your day.  That is courageous to be a celebrity, to have less than a perfect body and yet pose nude for a great fashion photographer and then have it in the public eye. Now that is gutsy!  Did she sign a model release?  Probably so!

In the other gallery there were two large scale Richard Misrach photos of sun bathers.  I love Misrach's work. Large scale landscapes that cause you to think.  The bigger prints the better for landscape photography.
This way you can almost feel the grandeur of the landscape.  I say almost because how many times have I've been in magical spaces and photographed them only not to capture the essence of it photographically,
the camera not capturing the subtle nuance of light and energy...
How can it really?....on rare occasions it does and then I am very pleased with the outcome.
Like standing underneath a tree in a forest in Napa, listening to the rain, the rustle of trees, the whispers of the ferns, the stillness in all things living...raindrops on leaves, the smell earth and wood,
cool mist in my hair....dew on my eyeglasses...I stand in silence, with my camera around my neck, trying to capture what I am feeling and experiencing. It is a time, not to be preserved really, just to imprint these moments in my cells, my brain, my body. In these moments I believe that this is what we call GOD.  I have been given the grace of touching the DIVINE.
Yes, for others who know what I am talking about, it is called BLISS of the DIVINE.  The embrace of
serenity, the kiss of unconditional love.
Not many people know my thoughts on my photography.  Only when I am at my exhibits and talking to my guests,
or to my photo students or to other artists do I get to express my feelings and thoughts. Photography like writing and other arts is a solitary activity.
It is always fun to go on field trips with my students and be in the same place and come out with very different images....of course, we all have different view points, I encourage their unique visions...
try something different, think out of the box.  They are often too new to photography, struggling with angles
and other technical aspects of their cameras.

Fan Ho- A Hong Kong Memoir B & W Photographer at Modernbook Gallery, 49 Geary St. SF 4th floor
www.modernbook.com
These photographs are fabulous!  Light fog, dark moody images of people, the sea, sail boats, the mountains,
printed darkly creating more moody photos.
This reminded me of Henri Cartier Bresson, W. Eugene Smith's work. Lewis Hines.... Emotionally stirring..
I LOVED THEM!  By far the best show I've seen in a long while and I've seen many!

Danny who works at the gallery told me a little bit about photographer Fan Ho, actor, a well known director
in China.  I know that Asia creates beautiful dramatic films like Italians from studying Asian filmmaking
and watercolor painting ,caligraphy, and haiku....so Fan Ho captures these in his photographs, a man in his boat, a wisp of the outline of mountains in the fog in the background. People in between buildings, reminds me of the closeness of the alley ways in Venice.
Just exquisitely executed, each photo more than a document of Chinese life. 
We Westerners need to see these things.  I  have visited Chinatown in American cities, shooting colorful architecture and the daily activities of the bustling commerce.
Yes, Fan Ho is a master of bringing life in Hong Kong to others.  I am glad to have experienced a bit of  arm chair travel. The gallery has  65 vintage b & w photos priced from 950.00 to 15 K. 



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July 20, Wednesday.
We are finally getting some nice summer days.I had to go to the beach this morning at low tide. It was really a perfect day. I brought lots of Italian
and French bread with me and walked out quite far to feed the sea gulls and other shore birds. On my way, I picked up some garbage and put it in a bag.
I really want to preserve the land and waterways. Besides which, its disgusting, hurts the birds, and is disrespectful for people to use the beach and not care for it.

It was SPLENDID!!! QUIET and SERENE!
I'm glad because I need some healing energy.
I took my shoes off and took my bag of bread out to the  birds.
The water was luke warm and it felt great.There was many little jelly fish blobs,dead crabs and mounds of swirling sand piles.  The sand was really soft, almost like quick sand.

I found a oar out there.  I dug some holes to see what was in the sand.  That was fun.  I spend 21 years on  NY beaches......Rockaway Beach, Brighton Beach, Coney Island, Jones Beach, Bayville  and Oyster Bay in Long Island.  So I love the beach!  My family had a little motor boat and my Dad loved to fish.  It was my fondest memories of my childhood with my parents! Dad was a avid beachcomber and he taught me a lot about the water and pretty shells.I also learned how to fish from him but I don't like killing fish.
So some time at the beach, easily becomes nostalgic for me.
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First Post! 07/21/2011
 
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