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Aug. 23: Week in Photography
Your lens to the internet's most powerful photographs. 📸 MOST POWERFUL PHOTO OF THE WEEK 📸 David Becker / Reuters Death Valley set a possible record for the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth this week, a weather metric that feels fitting in light of the raging wildfires in California, the devastating derecho in Iowa last week, and ongoing flooding in parts of China.
📸For Your 👀 Only: HOW ARTISTS BECAME MYTHS We're still in the summer of books! This week, we look at a new book by Magnum, Great Photographers Meet Great Artists, which offers up a series of portraits by Magnum photographers of famous artists throughout history. With an intimate vibe, the portraits offer insight into the art world that was rare before the age of Instagram. We spoke with Simon Bainbridge about his curation process, and some of the stories behind the images.
WERE YOU INVOLVED IN CHOOSING WHAT WAS INCLUDED IN THE BOOK? I was brought on to curate the images and go through the archive, and I spent six months, nine months doing that. What I was really interested in, with Magnum photographers photographing these great artists, was how they came to the shoots as equals, kind of confident and sure of themselves. These were people who were often covering wars or very serious subjects, and they came to these portrait shoots with the same level of seriousness, with this intensity of observation. What I was often looking for were moments that were informal and capture some of the daily life of the artists, that would bring some context and insight into the production of the art they were making instead of the normal history of art, which is presented in white-walled museums and very clean spaces. Alec Soth / Magnum WERE THERE ANY GEMS THAT SURPRISED YOU? Some of the surprises were more the stories behind the actual shoots. That was the other thing we were looking for — did the shoot happen at a really important time in the artist's career or was it a story in the making? One of the nicest ones was an Alec Soth photo of William Eggleston. Most of the photographs in the book, the photographer is almost an equal with the artist, and not intimidated, but here we have the opposite — we have a very young Alec Soth out on the road hoping to meet his hero William Eggleston only to find him unconscious in his front garden passed out because he had been drinking, and Eggleston waking up and demanding that Soth drive him to buy cigarettes. They eventually return to the house to do a shoot, when Eggleston's partner throws Soth out and he ends up having to take a sneaky shot through the back window of Eggleston in his music room.
Some of them have been written about by the artists themselves. In some cases I interviewed the photographers and got some stories, but a lot of them it is a mystery. I would have loved to have found out more about Wayne Miller’s picture of Robert Frank.What was wonderful about that picture was that it was made while Frank was still on the road shooting the Americans, while most of the other pictures of him are made while he was in his place in Manhattan. Wayne F. Miller / Magnum HOW DID YOU FIND THE BACKSTORIES? Some of them have been written about by the artists themselves. In some cases I interviewed the photographers and got some stories, but a lot of them it is a mystery. I would have loved to have found out more about Wayne Miller’s picture of Robert Frank.What was wonderful about that picture was that it was made while Frank was still on the road shooting the Americans, while most of the other pictures of him are made while he was in his place in Manhattan.
Yes, absolutely you can. In any case, in the early days, some of the Magnum photographers were a part of that artist scene, so that mythologizing was happening in these photographs. In the image of Jeff Koons by Thomas Hoepker, this to me is the ultimate image of art-making in the 1980s, very showy and moneyed and arrogant and posturing, and it really sums up that decade.
Thomas Hoepker / Magnum The space of their production really gives some clues about their art-making and their obsessions. It was a very different context of the neutral space of the gallery. I am sure that curators came to meet Picasso in these places but they felt more like spaces where hard work was done, and the studios of contemporary artists, hard work is done but there's an army of assistants.
IS THIS BOOK INTENDED TO BE A TIME CAPSULE OF THE ART WORLD? It certainly wasn’t the intention starting out, but it’s what unveiled itself to be. There was this sense of Paris being the great art center of the world and that shifting to New York for a long period, and I think now it's become much more global. This book could have easily been all dead white men, but we made a point to find the diversity within the archive. That is something that is obviously happening within the museum spaces themselves. Some of the women artists were being given big retrospectives on their work as we were making this book. Of course it’s nowhere near representative of art-making today, that is something that we see as part of an opening, a new story emerging, less Europe-focused.
Werner Bischof / Magnum 📸THE WEEK'S PHOTO STORIES FROM BUZZFEED NEWS 📸 This week, we're getting ready for the conventions and taking a look back to summers past. Check out these stories from our archive.
Find more of the week's best photo stories here.
THE OLDEST PARK IN CALIFORNIA HAS BEEN DESTROYED BY FIRE Randy Vazquez/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News via Getty Images SEE THE FULL STORY
PEOPLE REALLY TURN OUT FOR THEIR PARTY AT POLITICAL CONVENTIONS Paul Morris / Bloomberg via Getty Images SEE THE FULL STORY
📸SOME HOPE 📸 Armend Nimani /AFP via Getty Images "That's it from us this time — see you next week!" —Kate “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”— Susan Sontag Want More? Go To JPG Homepage
📝 This letter was edited and brought to you by the News Photo team. Gabriel Sanchez is the photo essay editor based in New York and loves cats. Kate Bubacz is the photo director based in New York and loves dogs. You can always reach us here.
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