tagged w/ Manhattan
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Our blazing, red-hot summer is finally on the wane, and the clock is ticking down on some big summer events, including one last chance to catch the old Coney Island before the lazy, hazy days of summer are over. One by one, the venerable institutions of old Coney Island are vanishing: Ruby’s, the last of the boardwalk-facing bars, has served its final drink; Shoot the Freak, one of the most popular game booths, won’t reopen in the spring. And this week, demolition began on the old Shore Hotel. It’s all part of a development plan to replace the area’s old (and historic) buildings with retail stores and entertainment facilities. In addition to the Shore Hotel, destruction is imminent for a number of other structures, as local preservationists have run out of options in court.
Sitting on the outskirts of New York’s five boroughs, Coney Island’s world famous pleasure beach has been the summer destination for New Yorkers since its early heyday in the 1890s. Towards the end of the 1960s, one year after he first picked up a camera, Bruce Gilden began taking the subway train through Brooklyn to capture the sunbathers, the weekenders, the sideshow booths and the Cyclone roller-coaster. Coney Island’s reputation has steadily slipped since Gilden started to photograph there, and it’s now known as a place where the poor who cannot escape the summer city heat go for thrills. Regardless of this reputation, Gilden’s ability to capture Coney Island’s characters and eccentricities give the beach and its surrounding neighborhood a humorous view of daily life from the sixties through the late 1980s.
You won’t see any of the usual iconic images of Coney Island in Gilden’s collection of photographs: no parachute jumps, Cyclone roller coaster thrills, or mermaids on parade. What you will see is a view of Coney Island that is up close and personal. Very close-in-your-face personal, and mostly confined to the beach. Gilden’s black and white images of Coney Island cover a period of about 16 years. Most of them are of beach people, New York locals who are just out for a day in the sun. Old guys, some flabby middle-aged women, the kind of characters you’d like to photograph if you only had the nerve. There are a number of must-see photographs in this collection that provide a pleasant way to end our scorching-hot summer.
This piece includes a number of black-and-white photographs, a photo-gallery and a documentary short film.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/08/07/one-last-chance-to-catch-old-coney-islands-eccentric-characters/Our blazing, red-hot summer is finally on the wane, and the clock is ticking down on... more
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In the photo-series “Texters,” street photographer Joseph Holmes captures amazing, wondrous images of texters in NYC, encouraging you to have a little peek. Have you ever texted on the street, in the park, at the beach or in a coffee shop? This collection of photographs shows people who look mesmerized as they pull out their phones and text, tweet and connect to something other than the world all around them. The pictures show a number of individuals who seem to be shockingly focused on whatever they’re texting: a young woman texting while walking in the rain, a businessman in a park and a women looking frozen in time as she gazes into her phone.
This piece includes a number of wonderful high-resolution color photographs, a photo-gallery and a very funny animated short film.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/07/12/a-photo-series-the-busily-diligent-texters/In the photo-series “Texters,” street photographer Joseph Holmes captures... more
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“Interlacing” is the first major exhibition of collected works by China’s renowned dissident artist Ai Weiwei, currently on display at Zurich’s Fotomuseum Winterthur. The collection consists of an extensive selection of photographs, videos and explanatory essays that present the interweaving artist as a network, company, activist, political voice, social container and agent provocateur.
Ai Weiwei is a generalist, conceptual, socially critical artist dedicated to creating friction with/and forming reality. As an architect, conceptual artist, sculptor, photographer, blogger, Twitterer, interview artist, and cultural critic, he is a sensitive observer of current topics and social problems: a great communicator and networker who brings life into art and art into life. Ai Weiwei deliberately confronts social conditions in China and in the world in ways that have captured an international audience.
In 2003, Ai Weiwei played a major role, together with the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, in the construction of the Olympic stadium, the so-called “Bird’s Nest.” Subsequently, he publicly repudiated the project and the whole Olympic buildup as a preposterous fraud to put on a “good face” for the international community. In 2007, 1001 Chinese visitors traveled, at his instigation, to “Documenta 12” (Fairytale) in Kassel, Germany. In 2010, the world marveled at his large, yet formally minimal carpet of millions of hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds at the Tate Modern.
Chinese officials announced in May, 2011, that the authorities were investigating Ai Weiwei on suspicion of tax evasion, after police officers had taken him from the main Beijing airport on April 3rd as he prepared to board a flight to Hong Kong. A global outcry went out, blasting the Chinese government for what was deemed a politically motivated move, claiming that the tax inquiry was a pretext to silence one of the most vocal critics of the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese legal authorities finally released Ai Weiwei on June 22nd, after a three-month detention, apparently ending a prosecution that had become a focal point of criticism of China’s eroding human rights record. Nevertheless, the terms of his release may silence him for months or even years.
This piece includes a number of photographs, a photo-gallery and three documentary short films.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/ai-weiweis-interlacing-a-chinese-activists-photographs-and-videos/“Interlacing” is the first major exhibition of collected works by... more
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Cy Twombly (1928-2011), whose spare, delicate scratching and scribbling, odd marks, raw smudges, and gorgeous visceral color with intimations of myth, narrative and poetic engagement with antiquity left him often ignored by the movements of postwar American art, even as he eventually became one of the era’s most significant painters, died on Tuesday in Rome. He was 83.
His artistic career roguishly subverted Abstract Expressionism, dipped briefly into Minimalism, barely acknowledged Pop art, but anticipated some of the concerns of Conceptualism, Mr. Twombly was a polarizing figure in the art world almost from the beginning. His work has been described by one important art curator as “influential among artists, discomfiting to many critics and truculently difficult not just for a broad public, but for sophisticated initiates of postwar art as well.”
Twombly left New York City and moved permanently to southern Italy in 1957 and paid little heed to his many critics, who constantly questioned whether his work really deserved a place at the forefront of 20th century abstraction. The low point for Twombly probably came after a widely panned 1964 exhibition in New York, which one critic described as a blatant fiasco. However, he lived long enough to see his work receive new-found attention and a degree of critical favor he had never enjoyed before. By the 1990s, he had become highly sought after not only by European museums and collectors, who had appreciated his work early on, but also by those back in the United States who had not known what to make of him two decades before.
During the final decade of his life, Twombly surpassed his earlier body of work, making tremendous late abstract works telling tales of ancient armies, otherworldly invasions of burning suns and radiating chrysanthemums. His works from this later period invoked twelfth-century dynasties, exoduses, love, loss and longing. He had launched upon a creative journey to some artistic place where the deepest of feelings, experiences, expectations, dreams, and love become one.
This piece includes a number of colorful pictures, a gallery and two documentary short films.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/07/07/cy-twombly-scratching-and-scribbling-to-the-heights-of-abstract-expressionism/Cy Twombly (1928-2011), whose spare, delicate scratching and scribbling, odd marks,... more
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The 42nd Annual Chicago Gay Pride Parade kicks off from the northside Lakeview neighborhood at noon on Sunday, led by Chicago’s new mayor, Rahm Emanuel. It will be the first time in a long time that a sitting mayor has appeared in the parade, a salute to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.
Emanuel is a regular at the parade, having appeared at the festivities almost every year while he served in Congress. He has been a relentless advocate of gay causes, including HIV/AIDS funding, civil unions and gay marriage. Joining him in the parade will be Governor Pat Quinn, recently who signed the Illinois civil union legislation, as Illinois became the sixth state to allow civil unions or their equivalent, giving same-sex couples the same state-level rights that come with marriage.
The parade usually draws around a half-million celebrants, but coming right on the heels of winning the long-sought right for same-sex couples to enter into civil unions and the historic passage of the New York bill allowing same sex marriage Friday night, this parade is expected to swell far beyond a half-million rainbow-clad spectators.
This piece includes a number of color photographs and two parade videos.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/06/26/mayor-rahm-emanuel-leads-chicagos-42nd-annual-gay-pride-parade/The 42nd Annual Chicago Gay Pride Parade kicks off from the northside Lakeview... more
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The New York Senate voted on Friday to legalize gay marriage, a breakthrough victory for the gay-rights movement in the state where it got its start. New York became the sixth state where gay couples can wed, and by far the biggest. Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who campaigned on the issue last year, has promised to sign it. Gay weddings could begin 30 days after that.
Although New York is a relative latecomer in allowing gay marriage, it is considered an important prize for advocates, given the state’s size and New York City’s international stature and its role as the birthplace of the gay-rights movement, which is said to have started with the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village in 1969.
Gay-rights advocates are hoping the vote will galvanize the movement around the country and help it regain momentum after an almost identical bill was defeated in New York in 2009 and similar measures failed in 2010 in New Jersey and this year in Maryland and Rhode Island.
This piece includes photographs and two documentary short films.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/06/24/new-york-senate-votes-36-26-to-approve-gay-marriage/The New York Senate voted on Friday to legalize gay marriage, a breakthrough victory... more
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“Brothers of Arcadia” is an amazingly erotic four-minute short fashion film directed by Branislav Jankic. The film features a number of mostly-naked men with stunning physiques to grab your attention. It starts off slowly with a dramatic, black and white beachside romp set to classical music, with the leading men wearing nothing but briefs and some bling. However, the mood quickly changes when vibrant colors emerge, as well as a bumping techno jam by Jessica 6. Viewers are transported into a steamy underground photo-shoot that seems to have a Greek gods and soldiers theme, which is appropriate because these dudes are, like, chiseled from marble.
This piece includes a number of high-resolution black-and-white photographs, as well as the very sexy short film.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/06/23/the-very-sexy-brothers-of-arcadia/“Brothers of Arcadia” is an amazingly erotic four-minute short fashion... more
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Shanghai-born photographer Shen Wei has developed an international reputation, with numerous awards and exhibitions to his credit. Shen says he was bought up “strictly and conservatively,” in Mainland China, but since relocating to New York City, his desire for self- expression has grown. His earlier collection of photographs, “Almost Naked,” was a series of portraits and occasional still-life images that explored how others have dealt with the emotionally complex issue of identity.
America primarily knows China as a far-away giant, a distant country of industrialism and gigantic cities. Shen Wei’s new series of photographs, “Chinese Sentiment,” provides us with new views and brings China closer, with more mystery and less smog. Shen commented on this collection, saying “The scale of the ultra-modern China is obviously quite pictorial and stunning. But China is much more than just skyscrapers and the Yangtze River. I am interested in seeking a poetic, intimate, and romantic China. Since 2008, I’ve traveled to numerous cities and villages all over China, with a goal of finding my authentic China.”
This piece includes a number of high-resolution color photographs, a photo-gallery and the documentary short film, “Almost Naked.”
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/chinese-sentiment-a-poetic-and-intimate-view-of-china/Shanghai-born photographer Shen Wei has developed an international reputation, with... more
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The 2011 Mermaid Parade took place on Saturday, June 18th in New York City’s Coney Island. The annual event first took place in 1983 and has been a very popular area attraction ever since. The Mermaid Parade draws a huge crowd of celebrators who don wild and outrageous costumes, with the parade’s naughty marchers wearing sea-themed outfits that often leave little to the imagination.
This piece includes a number of beautiful high-resolution color photographs, a photo-gallery and a documentary short film.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/those-crazy-coney-island-dayze-the-mermaid-parade/The 2011 Mermaid Parade took place on Saturday, June 18th in New York City’s... more
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Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart,” which originally was performed at New York City’s Public Theater in 1985, won the 2011 Tony Award for revival of a play. The play is considered to be a literary landmark, contending with the AIDS crisis when few would speak of the disease afflicting gay men, including gays themselves. It remains the longest-running play ever staged at the Public Theater.
In addition, Ellen Barkin and John Benjamin Hickey both won Tony Awards for their performances in “The Normal Heart.” Producer Daryl Roth accepted the award, but it was the playwright Larry Kramer, an outspoken gay activist for many years, who received the biggest welcome from the audience. The writer exhorted the gay community to “carry on the fight,” adding that “our day will come.”
The stunning, pulse-pounding ensemble drama tells the groundbreaking story of love, rage and pride as it follows a group of New Yorkers confronting the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s. The story of a city in denial, “The Normal Heart” unfolds like a real-life political thriller, as a tight-knit group of friends refuses to let doctors, politicians and the press bury the truth of an unspoken epidemic behind a wall of silence. A quarter-century after it was written, this unflinching, and totally unforgettable look at the sexual politics of New York City during the AIDS crisis remains one of the theater’s most powerful evenings ever.
This piece includes a number of color photographs, as well as three documentary short films.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/broadway-revival-of-larry-kramers-the-normal-heart-wins-three-2011-tony-awards/Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart,” which originally was performed at... more
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“A Brooklyn Summer, 1974” is a beautiful collection of vintage photos of Brooklyn taken in the summer of 1974 by photographer Danny Lyon, and the vintage tone of these summertime photographs makes everything look so much hotter. Lyon spent two months snapping pictures of the daily life in the borough, exploring Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Fort Green, Park Slope and other neighborhoods. Lyon captured the photographs of inner-city life while on assignment for Documerica, a project of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that hired freelance photographers to capture images relating to environmental problems, EPA activities, and everyday life in the 1970s.
Born in 1942 in Brooklyn, Danny Lyon received a BA from the University of Chicago in 1973. In the 1960s and 1970s, Lyon made a name for himself covering life in Chicago’s impoverished Uptown Appalachian-migrant neighborhood and the Southern Civil Rights movement. Lyon went on to give the world three incredible works: “The Bikeriders,” in which he chronicled his travels as a member of the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club, “The Destruction of Lower Manhattan,” documenting the large-scale demolition of our country’s greatest city back in 1967, and “Conversations with the Dead,” in which he photographed and wrote about Texas inmates in 6 different prisons.
Lyon’s work has been frequently exhibited and collected; he is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts grants in both film and photography.
This piece include a number of vintage color photographs, a photo-gallery and a documentary short film.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/06/11/the-americans-a-brooklyn-summer-1974/“A Brooklyn Summer, 1974” is a beautiful collection of vintage photos of... more
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“Pizza Verdi” is a seven-minute suspense-thriller short film by New York filmmaker Gary Nadeau, whose film “Red” won the 1994 Student Academy Award. In “Pizza Verdi,” a seemingly routine pizza delivery to a luxurious Manhattan apartment rapidly escalates into a tense operatic game of cat-and-mouse, and we soon realize that perhaps there’s more to this story than first meets the eye. Giuseppe Verdi provides the soundtrack for this quintessential New York tale, a spellbinding film that will leave you sitting on the edge of your seat right up to its astoundingly shocking conclusion.
This piece includes a number of black-and-white photographs, as well as the suspenseful short film.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/06/09/pizza-verdi-an-astoundingly-shocking-suspense-thriller/“Pizza Verdi” is a seven-minute suspense-thriller short film by New York... more
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“Self: Photographic Portraits and Sartorial Anarchy” is a collection of photographs by Iké Udé, an exhibition that presents a number of portraits with a simmering intensity. The photographs feature subjects ranging from himself, to fashion designer Manolo Blahnik, to financial executive Reggie Van Lee. The portraits show a highly stylized world of color, attitude, and object, making their domain as much anarchic as desirable. According to Iké, sartorial anarchy is an expression of dandyism that is enhanced by the indeterminate delicacy of pose, gestures, tilt, determinate lines, or a thrust here-and-there, all harmonized by an agreeable countenance.
Artist Iké Udé was born in Lagos, Nigeria, moved to the States in the 1980s and presently works in New York City. His artwork is in the permanent collections of New York’s Guggenheim Museum and the Smithsonian National Museum, Washington DC. Udé is the founder and publisher of “aRUDE Magazine,” a quarterly devoted to art, culture, style and fashion. He is the author of Style File: The World’s Most Elegantly Dressed and was selected as one of “Vanity Fair’s” 2009 International Best Dressed Originals.
This piece includes a number of high-resolution color photographs, as well as a photo-gallery.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/06/09/ike-ude-photographic-portraits-and-sartorial-anarchy/“Self: Photographic Portraits and Sartorial Anarchy” is a collection of... more
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“Case History” is a study of the homeless, a collection of photographs of homeless people in the Ukraine by Mikhailov, one of the leading photographers from the former Soviet Union. Mr. Mikhailov began making photographs in the 1960s, but he was arrested and interrogated twice by the K.G.B. In 1996, five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he began making portraits of people who had been disenfranchised and left homeless by the rise of a new capitalist oligarchy in his hometown of Kharkov, Ukraine. He published 400 of them in his book “Case History,” from which the photographs here were selected.
Mikhailov’s raw images of the homeless are sometimes intensely painful and not for the squeamish; they are hard to look at, but also hard to look away from and hard to forget. The photographs from “Case History” are currently on exhibition at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, the first in-depth presentation of Mikhailov’s seminal series (1997-98) at an American museum. The photographs portray people who are far from conventionally attractive in grungy rooms or in wintry outdoor sites, naked or pulling aside their clothes to expose parts of their bodies ordinarily hidden from view.
What does it mean to present images like these as art in a museum? In one respect, they carry on the tradition of picturing the downtrodden exemplified in photographs by countless artists from Walker Evans to Andres Serrano. Works like those tell us that, whatever their outward appearances and circumstances, the poor have souls that are worthy of respect. However, Mr. Mikhailov’s photographs are not so ennobling. They render their subjects as exotic and even demonic. Like specimens in a freak show, they elicit sympathy, revulsion or amazement, but not admiration or empathy.
In “Case History,” the subjects are, above all, actors who function mainly as allegorical symbols. They stand as expressions for the underbelly of society, and their challenging revelations of their own usually hidden body parts is a metaphor for the whole project of exposing what polite society would prefer to keep under wraps. To the extent that they appear everywhere around the world, including in New York City, they are universal signs of capitalism’s failure to care for the less fortunate.
This piece includes a number of color photographs, a photo-gallery and a documentary short film.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/06/05/case-history-behold-the-anonymous-homeless-downtrodden-insulted-and-injured/“Case History” is a study of the homeless, a collection of photographs of... more
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“Plan of the City” is an amazing new short film, a 13-minute animated collage combining animation with live action, conceived and directed by the brilliant young filmmaker and animator Joshua Frankel. The film is about the architecture of New York City, in which New York’s buildings blast off rocket-like into outer space and resettle on Mars. “Plan of the City” was created in collaboration with composer Judd Greenstein and the NOW Ensemble, an acclaimed “indie classical” chamber ensemble. Members of the ensemble, including Greenstein, feature prominently in the film as live actors set within the animated framework.
NOW Ensemble is a composer/performer collective that has quickly established itself as one of the most prominent and promising sounds in 21st century chamber music. NOW’s “alt-classical” performance of Greenstein’s new composition “Change” genuinely conveys the mood of new classical music with its indie-rock sensibility, combined with amplification and a synthesizer or guitar. The film proves to be one of the best matches of visuals to music that you’re likely to experience. Just as old buildings are transformed into new homes in Frankel’s film, this project seems to forge new ground in the old and well-loved territory of music video production.
This piece includes a number of color photographs, as well as the remarkable short film/music video.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/06/03/plan-of-the-city-destroying-old-foundations-and-breaking-new-ground/“Plan of the City” is an amazing new short film, a 13-minute animated... more
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“Women are Beautiful” is a collection of photographs by Garry Winogrand (1928-1984), which is currently on exhibition in Barcelona at the Foundation Foto Colectania. Winogrand is considered to be one of the greatest innovators of twentieth-century American photography. Winogrand’s pictures are focused on the reflection of reality, with no retouching or other ideas added. Garry Winogrand represented a new American style in photography, which broke new ground in the emerging era of street photography.
Described as an undisciplined mixture of energy, ego, curiosity, ignorance, and street-smart naiveté, throughout the 1950s, the Bronx native photographed incessantly, mostly on the streets, working as a freelance photographer for a picture agency and eventually publishing journalistic images in numerous magazines. Around 1960, after being shown a copy of Walker Evans’s book “American Photographs,” Winogrand began to take a more artistic approach in his work.
Winogrand eventually published four books of photographs, including “Women Are Beautiful” in 1975, which was composed mostly of candid shots of anonymous women on the street. He knew like no other photographer of his time how to capture the social transformation of females in the 1960s and 1970s through his portraits of women, which stand as an allegory of women’s emancipation and of their new roles in society.
This piece includes a number of stunning high-resolution black-and-white photographs, a remarkable photo-gallery and a documentary short film.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/garry-winogrand-women-are-beautiful/“Women are Beautiful” is a collection of photographs by Garry Winogrand... more
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During the course of his artistic career, David LaChapelle was hired by Andy Warhol, fired by Madonna, photographed Pamela Anderson, Lady Gaga, and Hillary Clinton, and made a star of the transgender personality Amanda Lepore. He earned millions and spent much of that on his self-financed movie about an urban dance form created in the rough neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles. When the film, “Rize,” failed to attract a large audience, the weary LaChapelle packed up his career and disappeared.
Now, many years later, LaChapelle is back in New York briefly, overseeing his one-man show at a Madison Avenue art gallery and a separate commissioned installation that is opening in the lobby of the Lever House on Park Avenue. With their erotic gloss, their sizzling aesthetics and their slick production values, the photographs at Michelman Fine Art are recognizably the work of a man who in his editorial work for “Vanity Fair,” “Interview,” “Rolling Stone” and others photographed David Duchovny dressed in Lycra bondage trousers, Kanye West as Black Jesus, a turbaned Elizabeth Taylor looking like a $5 fortune teller, Eminem naked but for a well-placed prop and other stars like Tupac Shakur (wearing soap bubbles), Angelina Jolie and Lady Gaga baring their souls for the camera, along with a good deal more.
At the Lever House, however, the artist has returned to techniques he employed when, at the very beginning of his career, long before he became the go-to video director for pop music divas, he used naïve, childlike forms like linked paper chains to make his work. In the space that in the past has presented exhibitions of works by artists such as Barbara Kruger and Damien Hirst, Mr. LaChapelle has hung the chains from walls and ceiling in looping festoons. At first glance, the stapled links only look like colorful decorations for a children’s party, but when viewed more closely they reveal images of naked bodies, as an allegory for human connection.
This piece includes a number of high-resolution color photographs, a photo-gallery and two music-videos with artwork by LaChapelle.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/david-lachapelle-the-fellini-of-photography-returns-to-fine-art/During the course of his artistic career, David LaChapelle was hired by Andy Warhol,... more
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OMG...This is just plain terrible! Outrageous! Tiny babes have been found hanging from beneath city buses, beheaded on fancy supper plates, kidnapped and abandoned under city bushes and made filthy by burly, brutish city workers. And it's all documented here, yes indeed...right here in these very funny high-resolution color photographs. And to provide a little brevity, this piece is accompanied by the Pixar animated short film, “One Man Band.”
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/photos-of-the-day-tiny-tots-in-serious-peril/OMG...This is just plain terrible! Outrageous! Tiny babes have been found hanging from... more
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OMG...This is just plain terrible! Outrageous! Tiny babes have been found hanging from beneath city buses, beheaded on fancy supper plates, kidnapped and abandoned under city bushes and made filthy by burly, brutish city workers. And it's all documented here, yes indeed...right here in these very funny high-resolution color photographs. And to provide a little brevity, this piece is accompanied by the Pixar animated short film, “One Man Band.”
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/photos-of-the-day-tiny-tots-in-serious-peril/OMG...This is just plain terrible! Outrageous! Tiny babes have been found hanging from... more
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