Austin Kleon

You are here: Blog / Archives for photography

Drawing with light


The story goes that when photographer Gjon Mili visited Picasso’s studio in 1949, he showed the artist these photos he’d taken in 1945 of Carol Lynne skating with flashlights embedded in her boots:

Mili suggested Picasso draw with a flashlight in a darkened room. What happened next, as detailed in LIFE, Jan 30, 1950:

Picasso gave Mili 15 minutes to try one experiment. He was so fascinated by the result… that he posed for five sessions, projecting 30 drawings of centaurs, bulls, Greek profiles and his signature…. Mili took his photographs in a darkened room, using two cameras, one for side view, another for front view…. By leaving the shutters open, he caught the light streaks swirling through space. By setting off a 1/10,000-second strobe light, he caught Picasso’s intense, agile figure as it flailed away at the drawings.

You can see their further experiments, many in color, with Picasso playing with drawing in 3-D, here.

Mili did the light trick with many other kinds of artists:

Henri Matisse, sculptor Henry Moore, and violinist Jascha Heifetz

There are lots of his curiosities in the Mili LIFE archives. Here’s an image of a housewife ironing from a Sept. 9, 1946 article on “Easier Housekeeping”:

Here’s a picture of Mili from the table of contents:

Going through the LIFE archives is a total trip. I feel like somebody could write a whole book based solely on the juxtaposition of these two images and their captions. (“Squatting in the darkness, Picasso draws a distorted spatial centaur.” “Pattern of light streaks shows how an efficient housewife makes a bed.”)

More on Mili: “Hands in Motion,” and his books: Photographs and Recollections, Picasso’s 3rd Dimension, and The Magic of the Opera

Hands in motion

Gjon Mili, photo of the juggler Stan Cavenaugh, 1941

Looking at Gjon Mili’s remarkable photographs of humans in motion, I was reminded of all the drawings in Jason Polan’s Every Person in New York with more than two hands or arms:

“I only draw the person while I can see them,” Jason said. “The majority of the drawings are done (mostly) while I’m looking at the person, not at the paper.”

If they move or get up from a pose, I cannot cheat at all by filling in a leg that had been folded or an arm pointing. This is why some of the people in the drawings might have an extra arm or leg — it had moved while I was drawing them. I think, hope, this makes the drawings better.

It does.

The art of mending

It was interesting to come across Dorothea Lange’s 1934 photo of a woman’s mended stockings after reading about the Japanese art of Sashiko, which seems to be having a moment online:

Miho Takeuchi, a traditional sashiko instructor and designer born in Japan and based in the United States, tells me via email that sashiko, which developed in poor communities in Japan’s Edo period, “was born from the necessity of mending and patching garments, beddings and household items. In ancient days, clothing and bedding were made from homespun fabrics woven from native fibrous plants such as wisteria and hemp and necessity demanded that this clothing be recycled for as long as possible.” It was only later, she tells me, that the technique evolved to include the elaborate surface-level designs and intricate patterns popular with visible menders today.

“Whereas mending was once the province of those who could not afford new clothes,” the article notes, “today’s visible mending is the province, primarily, of those who can afford the time and attention it takes to make one’s clothes into a statement.” (See: “The poor can’t afford not to wear nice clothes.”)

Here is another photo by Lange, which seems to be of the same legs, stockings, and shoes, but look closely at both images, and you’ll see different contexts. In the first image, which is cropped closely on the legs coming out of shadows, the shoes are resting on worn wooden planks, and the mends almost look like scars. In the second image, where you can see the rest of her outfit and the smooth floor, the mending on the stockings looks more subtle and elegant.

I did a bunch of digging in Lange’s archives at the Library of Congress, but couldn’t find any more images of these feet. (Lange did a whole series of worn stockings and shoes. It’s interesting to note how much Lange liked photographing legs and feet — her own foot was misshapen by childhood polio and she walked with a limp.) Would love to know more about these images, or if there are any others in the series, if anybody knows.

See also: The story of Lange’s most famous image and Kintsugi and the art of making repair visible

Four (or more) seasons

From Kottke.org:

Nestled amongst hundreds of stunning shots of the aurora borealis taken by Finnish photographer Jani Ylinampa is a series of four photos of Kotisaari, showing the island from a drone’s point of view for each of the four seasons (clockwise from upper left): spring, summer, autumn, and winter.

I came across this image last week and I keep thinking about it. There’s something so magical about seeing the same view in each season. (This is what Thoreau was recording so diligently in his journals.) The Kotisaari photos remind me of Paul Octavious’s Same Hill Different Day:

Of course, this kind of project requires that you live somewhere with actual seasons. Here’s Paul on living in Chicago:

I live near Lake Michigan… it’s like living by an ocean. Also, having all four seasons is inspirational because I can do a photo project and see it evolve throughout the year. Going outside to a hill, or a tree, or taking one subject and revisiting it multiple times inspires me to see how I can photograph it differently each time.

Now I’m reminded of Kurt Vonnegut claiming in Palm Sunday that there are actually six seasons in the Northeast: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Locking, Winter, and Unlocking.

Regardless of how many seasons there are wherever you live, one should heed Thoreau: “Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.”

Harry and his monster hat

 “One cannot open a newspaper without being disgusted by new records of shame…. the house and land we occupy, have lost their best value, and a man looks gloomily at his children, and thinks, ‘What have I done that you should begin life in dishonor?’”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1851

A devastating image by photographer Brook Mitchell in the NYTimes. Nails the stakes of climate change: It is our children who will have to sift through the wreckage.

I was particularly affected by the photo, as I have a towheaded almost-six-year-old who looks a lot like Harry. (“Where have you been my blue-eyed son?” Dylan sings in “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall,” a song that now destroys me.)

A little googling led me to the original Guardian piece about Australian farm families battling the draught. You can see more photos of Harry and his family there, including this one, of him wearing what he calls his “monster hat”:

That one brings the slightest smile: Children are resilient, and no matter how bad it gets, there will still be moments of humor. Even if it’s gallows humor.

On the other side of the camera

wearing a crown

I needed new some new photos, so I asked one of my favorite artists, Clayton Cubitt, if he’d take them. We spent a couple of really pleasant hours last month in his studio in Williamsburg, just chatting about art and life and taking pictures.

Clayton likes to take a polaroid of studio visitors wearing a prop crown — he says he thinks everybody deserves to be royalty for at least a few minutes. (Iggy Pop: “Every stinking bum should wear a crown.”)

Here’s a photo I took of him in action — the tattoo on his right arm, “this too shall pass,” was explained by Abraham Lincoln (a quote I used in the last chapter of Keep Going):

“It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words, “And this too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!”

“Sometimes I worry it’s weird for my subjects to see a giant ‘this too shall pass’ tattoo on my trigger arm,” he says, “But it’s true and it’s why I photograph.”

Roberto Benigni in Down By Law

He gets a new hatchmark on his left arm for each year he makes it around the sun.

You can read more about his life and work in this interview.

Here’s my favorite photo that he took of me:

The season of lies

Back home after two weeks on the road with the kids. No new epiphanies, only fortified beliefs:

1. Traveling with young children is not a “vacation” it is a “trip.”

The sooner you understand and accept this the sooner you can lower your expectations accordingly. My kids are, I think, wonderful travelers, and even so, traveling with them is beyond exhausting.

2. Photos can say whatever we want them to say.

Instagram lies. If you follow me on Instagram, it probably looked like I was having the time of my life. Nope! There was a lot of eye candy to be had, but a large majority of the trip was pretty miserable.

I found myself thinking a lot about Errol Morris’s book, Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, and how he summarized it in these handy 8 points:

  1. All photographs are posed.
  2. The intentions of the photographer are not recorded in a photographic image. (You can imagine what they are, but it’s pure speculation.)
  3. Photographs are neither true nor false. (They have no truth-value.)
  4. False beliefs adhere to photographs like flies to flypaper.
  5. There is a causal connection between a photograph and what it is a photograph of. (Even photoshopped images.)
  6. Uncovering the relationship between a photograph and reality is no easy matter.
  7. Most people don’t care about this and prefer to speculate about what they beleive about a photograph.
  8. The more famous a photograph is, the more likely it is that people will claim it has been posed or faked.

If you’re sitting around this summer scrolling Instagram seething with jealousy over vacation photos, remember what Mary Karr says: “Don’t make the mistake of comparing your twisted-up insides to people’s blow-dried outsides.” You have no idea what kind of time anybody’s having. Images are nothing without context.

If you love summer and summer vacation, I’m happy for you. For me, it’s the season of lies. Best to pour some iced tea, crack a book, and wait for it to pass.

(Happy to be back, BTW. Will write a more upbeat post tomorrow!)

Reading right to left

After I wrote about looking at things upside down, a reader relayed what his daughter was learning in army cadet training: “In the field, troops are told to scan from right to left. As we generally read left to right, doing the opposite aids in detecting anomalies in the landscape and potential threats to safety.”

Here’s photographer Dale Wilson (emphasis mine):

One of the first tricks I learned many years ago had nothing to do with photography, but was drilled into me by an army sergeant. It only took a few smacks up the back of my head to learn how to look from right-to-left when scanning a landscape in an effort to see the hidden “enemy” in our mock battles. This process of reverse reading forced me to slow down and read each tree as if it were a syllable I was seeing for the first time. Even today, about thirty years after I called that sergeant every adjective not found in a descent dictionary, I still find myself scanning a landscape from right-to-left.

More on reading right-to-left here.

Recent posts

Follow me elsewhere

This site participates in the Amazon Affiliates program, the proceeds of which keep it free for anyone to read.