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Philippe Noiret In Pose - 1970s

1970s

Philippe Noiret - Vintage Photo is a vintage black and white photograph realized in the 1970s Good conditions.

Philippe Noiret - Vintage Photo is a vintage black and white photograph realized in the 1980s. Good conditions.

Philippe Noiret is a vintage black and white photograph realized in the 1980s. Good conditions.

Philippe Noiret and Enrica Bonaccorti - Vintage Photo is a vintage black and white photograph realized in the 1980s Good conditions.

Original photography of Christian Dotremont by unknown photographer, circa 1970. In original good conditions. Christian Dotremont (1922-1979...

HARRY BOWERS T E N P H O T O G R A P H S I DON'T LOOK FOR PHOTOGRAPHS I INVENT THEM I recall my first meeting with Harry Bowers in California a few years ago. As he produced his large-scale prints, I was at first flabbergasted, not only by their size, but by their seamless perfection. Technique appeared to be everything but then technique as technique simply vanished. After the first moment, tech­nique was no longer an issue, but rather a passageway to the imagery. Suffice it to say about Harry Bowers' working style that he is an obsessive man. Trained as an engineer, he has turned that discipline to art. His lenses, equipment and darkroom, much of it exactingly manu­factured by himself to answer certain needs, serve the desire of the artist to take photographic tech­nique to its ultimate perfection in invisibility and transparency. I respect obsession in art, and particularly in photography, because obsession in photography passes beyond the easy, middle ground of image making to a more demanding, more difficult, yet more rewarding end. Bowers' obsession is to eliminate "photography as technique." No grain, no decisive moments, no journalism, or, seemingly, direct auto­biographical endeavors appear in his work. Bowers is an artist of synthesis who controls his environment if only in the studio exactly to his liking. The images he creates are formal structures, saucy stories on occasion, which may offer hints of a darker, more frightening sexuality, but what you see is the end product of an experiment in which nothing save the original insight perhaps is left to chance. We seem fascinated with the idea of replication of reality in art. Popular painting frequently reproduces a scene "with the accuracy of a photograph," and photographs may "make you feel as though you were right there." The very invisibility of the photographic medium is important to Bowers, in that it allows him to maneuver his subject matter without concern for rendering it in an obvious art medium which would interfere with the nature of the materials he uses. The formal subtleties of Bowers' recent work are as delicious and ambiguous in their interrelationships as the best Cubist collages, yet while those col­lages always suggest their parts through edge and texture, these photographs present a structure through a surface purity. Bowers' earlier works, for example, the Skirts I Have Known series, were formed of bits of clothing belong­ing to Bowers and his wife or found at local thrift shops. These works fused an elegance of pattern and texture, reminiscent of Miriam Shapiro...

Lower East Side, New York 1958, vintage gelatin silver photograph, signed Frank Paulin and dated on verso.

Lotte Jacobi Chaim Weizmann Photograph Year: 1948 Size: 13.9x10.8in Signed in the print Lotte Jacobi Copyright Annotation lower left, recto Ref.: 924802-1355 Lotte Jacobi (August 17, 1896 – May 6, 1990) was a leading American portrait photographer and photojournalist, known for her high-contrast black-and-white portrait photography, characterized by intimate, sometimes dramatic, sometimes idiosyncratic and often definitive humanist depictions of both ordinary people in the United States and Europe and some of the most important artists, thinkers and activists of the 20th century. Jacobi's photographic style stressed informality, and sought to delve deeper into the traits of her subjects than traditional portraiture. She made a point of photographing subjects in their own environments, and talking to them while she worked. She explained the reasoning behind her approach this way: "I just try and get people to talk, to relax, to be themselves. I don't like a passive, bored subject. I do portraits because I like people, and I want to bring out their personalities. Many photographers today, I think, are bringing out the worst part of people. I try and bring out the best." Jacobi is perhaps best known for her "portrait of Albert Einstein (Princeton, 1938), whom she photographed candidly, seated at his desk, dishevelled and dressed in a leather jacket, a work that was refused by Life magazine for its simplicity." Other personality-driven portraits include "Eleanor Roosevelt sitting back, gesturing, and obviously speaking in midsentence; Marc Chagall depicted as a jovial family man; Thomas Mann appearing as thoughtful as his work; and more candid, gentle portraits of Einstein." Other celebrated subjects included poets W. H. Auden, Robert Frost, and May Sarton; philosopher Martin Buber; writer J.D. Salinger; writer and activist W. E. B. Du Bois; scientist Max Planck; artist Käthe Kollwitz; the actress and singer Lotte Lenya; the singer and activist Paul Robeson...