Blog is back in business again, and it's M-Day!

Oh, Madonna. Lady Madonna. Happy birthday! Sixty today, and still able to cause a stir, make some serious noise and fill the dancefloor. Unapologetic, controversial and fearlessly fashionable, from the day she was born I imagine, and such an inspiration for my generation. 

From the moment I first laid eyes on her, sometime around Like a Virgin (an album I purchased immediately on it's DK release in 1884), I was smitten. And I still am.

The photo above, is taken by Richard Corman in 1983, just six weeks before her first album was released, and her almost immediate stardom was a fact. And no wonder, huh? It just shows.

Read about his work with a 24 year old, yet quite unknown Madonna, right here.

Here are a couple more of his great, great shots!

I loved that early phase of ruthless accessorizing, and her first, bouncy Jellybean ('Holiday' is, and will always be, one of my favourite Madonna tunes) and Nile Rogers produced hits. 

But she has remained a personal star and inspiration, because no matter what crazy, surprising turns her musical and personal style have taken, she has practically always felt just right and like exactly the thing you needed! How does she do it? And I say practically, because some of her work has been more marginal - but that has never been a problem for an artist who has the guts to experiment and develop. 

But there is consistency, oh yes! Because of course that gypsy/punk princess of the Richard Corman photos could be a film noir fetish godess. Or a geisha. Or a cowgirl.

The circa 1990 Blonde Ambition phase, the razor sharp looking Gaultier / Dolce & Gabbana clad superstar, was another highlight for me. If you haven't seen In Bed with Madonna, you should!

Vogue will make me dance anytime, anywhere (and I will still try to do voguey arm gestures, and be crappy at it), and the video is breathtakingly cool. I literally get goosebumps, every time I hear that opening chord. Just did, again. 

I could go on. But I won't.

Listen to your own Madonna Playlist today, celebrate a feisty woman who continues to grow and go new places, and is wonderfully age defying, when it comes to dress, style and propriety. 

I will end with a couple of some of my later favourite looks - connecting to my favourite Madonna title track: Ray of Light and my perhaps favourite-as-a-whole album: Music. Meet the healthy yogi with a suntan (!) from 1998 (photo by Mario Testino), and the folksy rhinestone cowgirl from 2000 (photo by Jean Baptiste Mondino)....

Ray of Light - a song that caused one of my worst running accidents, because I just can't keep my energy under control when I listen to that track. I simply flew along to it on an icy park road, onto which I fell, as long as I was - with smashed eyewear and much facial bloodiness as a result.

"Quicker than a ray of light I'm flying..." - and on my face and ass I landed.

From the brilliant Music: Listen to: Don't Tell Me or Amazing

Yes, it's that time of year

It's friday and I'm packing for the annual skiing trip to Sweden, a topic I have covered in great length before - but I hope you'll forgive me. It's simply that I am always so delirious with joy that we are going, and can hardly wait. I get like a five year old, when I look at the images from the other years, to me it's better than Christmas (well, almost) and New Years put together, and the best thing we do all winter.

It also gives me an excuse to post silly or nostalgic skiing outfit pictures, so today I am presenting to you (above) the lovely Lady Clementine Churchill, in two piece wool, Hermès scarf and St. Bernard dog. 1937 in St. Moritz, of course, where apparently most truly stylish skiing takes place. She gets to go first, because I just watched the very see worthy 'The Crown' on Netflix, where she is portrayed in a very sweet manner. 

I adore these ladies as well....

However, I could not see myself doing much skiing in heavy wool trousers, fur and stiff leather boots. Skiing I find complicated enough as it is, and modern, functional sportswear are one of the reasons it is doable. 

Except this polka dot number from a sixties editorial in Italian Vogue. Now, that I could go for. 

(images are from Getty Archives and Condé Nast Traveller)

Suits January perfectly: Brutgroup on Instagram

My favourite Instagram flow at the moment is this one: @BRUTgroup - a curated selection of images submitted from all over the world, with one theme: Brutalist architecture. Now, this is an architectural style most people have lots of opinion about, and no wonder, as it often has a kind of totalitarian-regime-vibe, and seems to be more about elaborate, over-the-top visions, rather than constructive ideas. 

But if you follow this account, and see the generous flow of images from all corners of the world, you get a much more nuanced idea, and sometimes simply a bit of a laugh - some of the projects are really absurd (and beware: a few of them are created in Photoshop!).

But there is something really beautiful here, I think. At least it's sculptural and eerie, and just perfect as a kind of architecture of the soul for this January, with its usual lack of sunshine and eternal howling wind. 

All images are from BRUTgroup on Instagram. From top, buildings from Morocco, UK, Brazil, Japan and Vietnam. Some are old, some more recent. Go check this cool account yourself!

Holiday spirits-ish

Even though I am technically only semi-employed and freelance working at the moment, it feels great to be able to say: Finally Christmas vacation and a bit of peace and rest! Or not quite yet, that is. Today we are having a party at our house, tomorrow it's office Christmas parties, Saturday it's going to be all about (I suspect) slightly panicky shopping - and then there's the big to do on the 24th.

But then, perhaps? All I wanna do is take a long, long walk, some place beautiful and quiet, without shopping bags or places to be at a certain time.

I love this photo, I found it on Flickr a long time ago. It's by Manuel Raposo, and appears to be taken in Salzburg. I want to be in that photo.

Lydia Kasumi Shirreff: Paper engineer

London based paper artist Lydia Kasumi Shirreff calls herself a 'paper engineer', and the complex geometrics of her work, makes that title quite appropriate. And when art and engineering meet, interesting things often happen! 

She does all kinds of abstract, fun and surreal backdrops or mini set designs for commercial photo shoots or editorial illustrations for a long list of very prestigious magazines and clients. In an interview from last year - read it right here - she tells us, when asked why she works in paper, that she just started out as a young designer/sculptor needing a cheap, available and flexible material. And then I suppose she must have stuck with the paper, and has become an absolute virtuoso.

See the magic she works - more links and info after the images.

These cubist, abstract works are just stunning! 

Some of her work is more explosively colorful - and these are just a few examples, visit her website (which I linked to in the beginning of the text), and explore. What I find fun personally, being so fond of paperwork myself, is trying to figure out some of her processes. Not so easy, and very, very impressive, no matter how she has done it.

She has done a lot of figurative set ups for various fashion and lifestyle clients, sometimes so neatly done, that they fool the eye at first (a bit in the style of the amazing German artist Thomas Demand)  but more often like these, where the feel of the paper makes it all pop-arty and candy like. 

On her website she does this great thing - she has a couple of 'behind the scenes' photos, showing her equally impressive work in the photo studio. When you see the shot I will show here, below, it looks almost like a surreal construction made in some 3D rendering program.....

But then check out the next image - and note how the roll of duct tape indicates the size of the small, hanging paper sculptures.

Nice work, indeed, and I love how she shares some of the meticulous preparations for such a single shot. How she works, can also be seen in this little video I found, where she explains a project she made for the eye wear brand Cubitts.

Click here to see the video on Vimeo

All images: copyright Lydia Kasumi Shireff

So strange, so beautiful

Wonderful, dreamy and peculiar they are, jellyfish - and you never really get to look at them properly. They are quite abundant in Danish waters, but hard to study in detail. Imagine my delight, when we visited the fantastic Monterey Bay Aquarium*, where an entire section is dedicated to them. These are common types in the Pacific area near Monterey, not odd or exotic varieties. I didn't write down the names, but just stood there, hypnotized, in front of the giant, backlit tanks, in the dark rooms, that made them gleam like jewels, and every tentacle, detail and colour stand out. Stunning!

 

*Check their Live Jelly Cam! 

 

Summer is coming to an end, and I am slowly starting to digest all the impressions from our long trip in July and August (we travelled on the US West coast), not to mention roughly organizing hundreds and hundreds of photographs, something I am always very keen to get done, but sadly do in short bursts of wild energy and determination (and then I don't get much done) and at very odd intervals.

I have thousands of unsorted photos in folders and folders, and they are both my treasure and a constant source of feeling behind. I think this is a very common problem, and sometimes I consider making dogma rules for myself, such as being only allowed to take ten photos per day, or doing a daily delete-session. Because sorting images for me is a big job: it actually means getting rid of all the redundant ones, only keeping the one or two of a certain scene I actually like, and it also means doing the big or small photoshop corrections on each image that may need them. And only then do I consider a folder of images sorted and done. And I do actually enjoy looking at my old photos, I frequently spend hours getting lost in them - I'd think rather have that than Netflix, any day. 

But what a job. Sigh. 

In honour of persistent, unapologetic women everywhere

There are so many wonderful and awe-inspiring stories to share on March 8th, thank god, and so many platforms that does that so much better than this one. But I have long wanted to post these absolutely stunning, powerful and remarkable portraits of Tina Turner, and she will be my inspirational, aspirational sisterhood poster woman today. 

Anna Mae Bullock aka Tina Turner: always an idol of mine, definitely a nasty woman, a fighter and such a real human. These photos are from 1969, and are by Jack Robinson (read more after the pictures). 

Jack Robinson, the photographer who shot this series in New York in 1969, had a really interesting story, it turns out. I Googled him, because I wanted to credit these images correctly, and came across  his unusual life story. 

In the 1960s, he was a superstar fashion, celebrity and journalistic photographer in his native New Orleans and in New York, but in the mid 1970s, his career started to decline for a number of reasons, addiction being one of them.

He left New York to care for his elderly parents in the South, gave up photography for good, became sober - and started out on a second career, one in which he seems to have excelled almost as much as in the first: he started working in a company that made stained glass windows, and became amazingly good at that!

He lived in Memphis, Tennessee and made stained glass windows (winning awards and all kinds of praise for that as well) the last two decades of his life, and when he died in 1997, only few people knew about his early career as a photographer. But boxes and boxes of neatly preserved and catalogued negatives and contact sheets were found in his flat, and he was discovered all over, resulting in book publications, exhibitions and so on.

Here is a bio, and here is an article about the re-discovery of his work, after his death.

La Maison de la Photographie in Marrakech

I was in Marrakech in November, and will probably get back to that visit in a few blog posts, since it's a spectacularly interesting and visually overwhelming city. I only had my old iPhone with me to take pictures this time, but had a wonderful trip and fell as much in love with the pink labyrinth-like inner city, as I did on my first visit, some years ago. 

This time, my two friends and I, made sure to visit La Maison de la Photographie, a small photo museum I will most warmly recommend. It's hidden away in a narrow medina alley, in a very pretty old house, that houses a large collection of old photographs of everyday life in Morocco, from the late 1800s up to around 1960, roughly. They only have parts of the huge collection on display, but change the exhibition regularly.

Marrakech is a place where the past seem very present, and this wonderful little, tranquil house full of fantastic photographs, makes you realize how much - and how little - the place and the people have changed.

Here are a few impressions.....
(all old black/white images below are courtesy of maison de la Photographie)

The house is, as I mentioned, very pretty, and when you reach the roof, you will find a small café and a gorgeous view! They also have a shop that sell high quality prints, if you fall in love with a special image. Most of them are available as prints.

Link to the Maison de la Photographie website, with all the practical info

There is one image you see again and again, in reference to this museum - and one you will remember, because this is a most remarkable face. It is a portrait of a young man, a slave called Hamidou, taken in 1885, and his sad eyes, and strong, beautiful face are impossible to forget.

When we visited, on a rainy quiet day, there was a gnawa street musician sitting outside the open door, and his singing and the sound of his sintir - a kind of slappy guitar bass - was following me all the time, while I was studying all these pictures. It was quite magical, like a perfect soundtrack.

He was really great, and I stepped outside and made a little film - you can see it here (very un-edited), and get an idea of how beautifully the old images and the old music just blended together.....

See (but mainly listen to) my little gnawa video on flickr