Curio Cabinet / Photo Curio

It's Flashback Friday! Celebrate fall with this autumnal favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Photographer Ja Soo Kim is really making us reconsider our centerpieces for this upcoming Thanksgiving dinner. Fall Forage, pictured above, and other images of Kim's colorful collages were recently spotlighted by the World Photography Organization. Kim has lived and traveled all over the world, collecting bits of leaves, flowers, and grasses on her walks through locations like Honolulu, Paris, and her current home city, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Offering a somewhat decontextualized view through the use of a simple black background, Kim arranges her found objects to highlight the incredible variance of colors, shapes, and patterns in nature. Fall Forage shows off the rich oranges and reds that come with the loss of chlorophyll in the winter, and in the top left corner, the blues and greens of spruce and pine needles, which keep their color in the colder months. Kim has said the process of creating her photos is like a soothing "meditation" for her: a way to fondly remember her father's amateur studio setup from when she was younger. We're starting to see the leaves piling up in our yards in a new light!

 

Below: more of Ja Soon Kim's collages: the tropical Tahiti Jungle, and Dried Citrus.
 

Image credit & copyright: Ja Soon Kim
 

Jack-o-lantern be nimble! If this image seems like it could be straight out of a late-night horror film, then photographers Francisco Diaz and Deb Young have achieved their goal. The two manipulated dozens of pictures to arrive at the above scene of children amid a background of dense fog and ominous birds. To create this photomontage, called Jumping Over Pumpkins (from The Playground Series), Diaz and Young collaborated across 8,000 miles and two countries: the U.S. and New Zealand, respectively. Gray surroundings or not, the kids are deeply engaged in their play: they leap and swing with carefree abandon, in what Diaz and Young describe as the schoolyard version of "fast and hard [lessons] in how social structure works." Because it's all fun and games taking turns hopping and skipping over pumpkins—until one of them reaches out and grabs you!

 

Below: more images from The Playground Series: Follow the Leader, Hoops, and The Light.
 

Image credit & copyright: Francisco Diaz and Deb Young
 

Ooh, that might bruise. Born this week in 1878, photographer Percy Byron captured these unusual images showing women learning self defense around the turn of the 20th century. Held in New York, the self-help classes were revolutionary; at a time when physical exertion was still frowned upon, few women had access to ways to protect themselves while traversing the city's crowded streets. These images were taken at classes held by one Doctor William Latson, but he wasn't the only one encouraging women to take up arms... ahem, umbrellas. Coinciding with other feminist movements like suffrage, the women's self-defense movement spread to other cities, some classes even featuring boxing and jiu jitsu lessons. In the early 1900s, women still wore their heavy dresses while learning fight moves, but later images show them in looser, more comfortable clothing. Either way, it looks like these ladies weren't afraid to roll up their sleeves and get dirty!
 

Below: more of Percy Byron's images of a self-defense class; a woman performs jiu jitsu on a man in Berlin in 1924.
 

Image credit & copyright: Percy C. Byron / Museum of the City of New York and German Federal Archive
 

Online gossip really takes the long way around these days! Photographer Maggie Meiners has been thinking about what the iconic American painter Norman Rockwell's images would look like if they were created today, giving her the inspiration for a series called Revisiting Rockwell. In the above composite photo entitled It Went Viral, Meiners' pairs stare at their cell phones for the latest buzz, rather than at their companions—in contrast to the Rockwell original Gossip painting, which shows people animatedly playing a game of "telephone" by word of mouth and landline phones. When Meiners discovered that the artist painted from photos of his subjects, she decided to pay homage to pieces like Gossip by shining choice lighting on subjects and photographing them in side profiles. For Meiners, Rockwell's candor and idealism still lend themselves to contemporary discussions about what it means to live as an American in the early 21st century. "I have always had a fascination with the past and end up having a better understanding of the world if I look at the old in the context of the new," Meiners said. Now that's a quote that deserves 1,000 likes, if we've ever heard one!

 

Below: Rockwell's original Gossip painting, and more from Meiners, including Freedom from Want, Skin Deep, and Dream Act.
 

Image credit & copyright: Maggie Meiners, Norman Rockwell Museum
 

Si, se puede, or Yes, we can is the motto of the United Farm Workers Union; it was also the conviction that animated La Raza, a publication that covered the Latino and Chicano rights movements in Southern California from 1967 through 1977. La Raza was a spirited bilingual newspaper-turned-magazine that sent its reporters and photographers to the fields and streets to cover what was called "El Movimiento": strikes, demonstrations, and other actions in support of the United Farm Workers Movement, labor rights, and anti-discrimination efforts. In La Marcha por la Justica, Belvedere Park, Jan. 21, 1971 above, for example, photographer Luis Garza captured a group of students and young people demanding justice. But La Raza wasn't just about political activism; in candid portraits of families, neighborhoods, and street life, it chronicled the day-to-day experiences of communities that were not being covered by the mainstream media at that time. Garza and other La Raza photographers helped not only make that community visible, they gave it a voice.  

An exhibit of photos from the publication, La Raza, is on view at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles through February 10, 2019.  

Below: young families join La Marcha de la Reconquista along a dusty highway through the farmland of Southern California, 1971; Little Chicanita protesting unfair labor practices at Mejian Chevrolet Car Dealership, East Los Angeles, circa 1972.
 

Image credit & copyright: top: Luis C. Garza; center: Danial Zapata; bottom: La Raza Staff Photographers, courtesy UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this tasty favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Even a head of cauliflower deserves a five-star photo shoot! Though Irving Penn usually photographed fashion models or noted artists like Pablo Picasso or Georgia O'Keeffe for Vogue, he took this food assignment as seriously as his glamorous gigs. Penn carefully arranged the contents of this sparse kitchen, hanging a long slab of meat and fowl on pegs on one wall. He covered a table with rustic cloth and positioned a jug and some cauliflower as if a real cook had just left them there. A closer look also reveals some furry and feathery friends Penn added to boost the farmhouse feel: a mouse nibbles on fruit that's fallen from an overflowing basket while a crow nestles against one table leg. Penn, born a century ago this year, is best known for his fashion photography and advertising work for brands like Clinique and Chanel. During his 66 years of working with Vogue, he also shot many works like this one (called Still Life with Mouse). Maybe fish and tomatoes weren't as important as models, but at least they didn't spend hours in make-up!
 

Below: Penn's image of a mozzarella ball, a tomato, and an olive, which he called Italian Still Life. Further below, the still life Fish Made of Fish.
 

Image credit & copyright: The Irving Penn Foundation
 

The most unlikely of scenarios got Marcel Marceau started on miming: while smuggling Jewish children across the France-Switzerland border during World War II, Marceau would keep them enrapt (and quiet) with his silent performances. After the war and his time in the French Resistance, Marceau built a successful miming career with his character "Bip the Clown." Bip's white face and smushy hat (often with a flower poking out of it) soon became a familiar presence on televisions around the world, eventually earning Marceau an Emmy. Marceau's hand movements, sensitive facial expressions, and control of surrounding space earned him a place in the pantheon of movement artists; Marceau's physicality inspired a range of artists including Michael Jackson. Yet the trials of Marceau's formative years stayed with him. (Though he escaped genocide, his father died in Auschwitz). "The people who came back from the [concentration] camps were never able to talk about it," he said at a speech in 2001. "My name is [Marcel] Mangel," he said, referring to the birth name he had changed for protection during World War II. "I am Jewish. Perhaps that, unconsciously, contributed towards my choice of silence." He became famous for his simple humor, but his motivations were anything but.
 

Below: more images of Marcel Marceau taken by the photographer Jan Dalman.
 

Image credit & copyright: Jan Dalman
 

Fashion designer Ralph Lauren once said, "I don’t design clothes. I design dreams." The same could be said for fashion photographers like Richard Avedon, who create glossy images of style and beauty that transport us far from our humdrum daily lives. In Renée, The New Look of Dior, Place de la Concorde, Paris, August 1947, a woman turns heads as she steps out, skirts swinging, on a Parisian boulevard. But fashion photography’s commercial orientation has kept it from receiving much respect from the art world; as Avedon himself once said: "Fashion is the f-word, the dirtiest word in the eyes of the art world." The photographer had a foot in both circles: he was a revered photographer for the New Yorker, creating stunning portraits of everyone from Toni Morrison to Hillary Clinton. He also took fashion photos for Vogue and advertising shots for Revlon, Christian Dior, and other industry giants. Now his stunning fashion photos, along with those of 88 other photographers, are on display at the Getty Museum in the exhibit, Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography, 1911-2011—and it’s hard to argue that this isn’t art.  

Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography, 1911-2011, is showing at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles through October 21st.  

Below: more images including Black Evening Gown in Flight by Hiro, and Untitled by Guy Bordin, for Charles Jourdon, Spring 1977.
 

Image credit & copyright: top: The Richard Avedon Foundation; center: Hiro; bottom: The Guy Bourdin Estate 2017, Courtesy of Louise Alexander Gallery
 

Judy Dater calls herself an "obsessive people-watcher," and from her earliest days as a photographer her subjects have been humans—including herself. In My Hands, Death Valley, Death Valley, California, above, her hands make a powerful foreground; they appear to be pulling back a slide to reveal the desert plain and mist-shrouded mountains behind. Dater studied her craft in San Francisco in the 1960s, when Ansel Adams and Edward Weston dominated the photography world, and everyone wanted to take pictures of natural objects and landscapes. Not Dater. On photography field trips, while everyone else shot rocks and cliffs, she took photos of her fellow students. "Seeing a person in relation to the environment was always more visually interesting to me," she reflected recently. An exhibit of the photographer's work, Judy Dater: Only Human, on view at San Francisco's de Young Museum through September 16th, reflects both Dater's evolution as an artist during her five decade career—and her deep and abiding interest in her fellow human beings. At 76, Dater and has no plans to stop taking photos. She has a lot more people watching to do.  

Below: Twinka and Tree, San Anselmo, California, and author Maxine Hong Kingston, both by Judy Dater.
 

Image credit & copyright: Judy Dater
 

Whatever this couple does, they need to avoid taking showers in the Bates Motel. Released this week in 1960, the film Psycho turned modern cinema on its head. The director was, of course, none other than Alfred Hitchcock's—shown above, from the waist down in the director's chair, wearing his trademark black suit pants and dress shoes. The subject matter of Robert Bloch's novel of the same name was considered too controversial for Hitchcock's studio, Paramount; determined, the director financed the film himself and chose to shoot it in black and white, to save costs and get the bloody shower scene past censors. The above behind-the-scenes image shows a cinematic taboo of the time, with a couple sharing a single bed instead of a less-sexualized pair of doubles (per standards of the Motion Picture Production Code). In this plotline, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) steals a real estate deposit of $40,000 from work and offers the money to her paramour Sam Loomis (John Gavin) before stopping into the Bates Motel for the night—the last place she's ever seen. At the time of its release, Psycho received mixed reviews from critics, but like any other horror film worth its mettle, it was the audiences who kept coming back for the plot twists and exhilarating frights.
 

Below: lighter moments behind the scenes with Hitchcock and Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, and a clapperboard.
 

Image credit & copyright: Paramount
 

It's Flashback Friday and Wear Teal Day! Enjoy this blue-themed favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

The alien invaders are coming! Despite looking like something out of Stephen King's The Mist, this glowing turquoise cloud is a naturally-occurring phenomenon known as a supercell. Supercells are the rarest of the four classifications of thunderstorms and contain deep and persistently rotating updraft winds. They can produce severe weather conditions, including damaging hail and violent tornadoes. Photographer Anthony Quintano caught the surreal moment two years ago this week during the early stages of a supercell in Electra, Texas. Central U.S. states are primed for these storms, which occur most frequently during May and June in areas with mild climates and flat, open land. As for that vibrant color, it's caused by light scattering; tiny moisture particles within the storm clouds absorb red light and scatter them into a transparent blue hue. We can't help but feel mesmerized by the tropical palette… until we remember a violent tornado could form at any second. Better run for cover!

 
Image credit: Anthony Quintano
 

Those claws won't be remaining tiny for long. The Galapagos iguana—the world's only marine iguana—develops into a powerful creature with strong limbs and long claws that help it clutch the edges of rocks. Pictured here is a young iguana photographed by Mattias Klum for National Geographic earlier this year. The patterns and coloration on each creature differ; this particular one shows some lighter, copper-colored spots on his head and nose. The iguana's nose is designed so that it can easily graze on seaweed when it's underwater; other useful body parts include a flat tail that comes in handy when swimming. (Some tails are over two-and-half feet long!) These unusual features caught the eye of Charles Darwin, who was taken aback by their strange look, calling them "imps of darkness." But it was a good thing he noticed them on his trip to the Galapagos Islands in the 1830s; key differences between the marine iguanas and their land-faring relatives helped Darwin propose the idea that both types of iguanas may once have come from the same ancestor, but evolved to fit into their different habitats—in what would later become part of his argument for the theory of evolution. These creatures may be a tad creepy looking, but they're doing their part contributing to science!
 

Below: an adult Galapagos iguana suns itself on a rock.
 

Image credit & copyright: Mattias Klum / National Geographic
 

Odd choice of decor, but hey—no judgment here. American photographer Kenneth Josephson might be a garish exterior decorator, but his conceptual photography was decades ahead of its time. Though we're well-versed in the unreliable nature of photographs, be they doctored or biased, "the camera never lies" was a common expression during Josephson's youth. Privy to his art form's quirks, he deconstructed this widely-accepted belief by creating pieces like Postcard Visit, Buffalo, 1970. Differing collaged photographs, each of a postmodern home, poke at the temporal and visual qualities of photography. The final image falls victim to clever editing—like a defaced portrait or a poem subject to censorship. The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is currently honoring Josephson's decades of experimentation with a fittingly named exhibit: Picture Fiction. His pioneering style showed, before the age of Photoshop, that capturing an instance of absolute certainty is almost certainly impossible.
 

Below: more photography by Josephson, including: Chicago, 1972; Postcard visit, Chicago, USA , 1969; and Postcard Visit, Chicago, 1969.
 

Image credit & copyright: Kenneth Josephson
 

This day in 1957 was a charged one for nine students. The Little Rock Nine, as they've come to be called since then, were the first black students to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas, when the school year began after Brown v. Board of Education declared segregation unconstitutional. As Elizabeth Eckford, pictured here, walked towards the school's front steps, she faced the wrath of the crowd that had gathered to protest desegregation. One person was especially vocal; Hazel Bryan is the woman in the background whose face is contorted in hate. "They moved closer and closer…. Somebody started yelling… I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the crowd—someone who maybe could help," Eckford said of that fateful day. It was up to Army troops called in by President Dwight Eisenhower to make sure the students got inside the school safely. Years later, Bryan began to realize the extremity of her response; she reached out to Eckford to offer an apology. The two attempted a reconciliation of sorts, and even went to schools together to give educational talks about the incident. They ultimately did not remain friends, the legacy of racism perhaps being too difficult to overcome over tea or a simple meal.
 

Image credit & copyright: Will Counts / Associated Press
 

I'm telling Mom! In Dave Heath's photo, Vengeful Sister, Chicago, taken in 1956, a small boy curls on the pavement, weeping, while his sister storms away in a righteous rage. The photo captures sibling conflict in a single, concise image, and the small, forsaken figure on the ground could easily be a stand-in for the photographer himself. Heath was abandoned by his parents at the age of four and grew up in an orphanage and foster homes. He began taking pictures as a teenager after seeing a Life magazine photo essay on foster care, and the hobby quickly became an obsession—and a reason for being. "I don't know why some people become artists and others don't," he would later say, "but there was some deeper sense within myself of survival, of having to define and declare myself on my own terms and not in other people's terms." Heath married once, briefly, and was extremely shy. Still, throughout his career and in his highly respected book of photographs, A Dialogue With Solitude, published in 1965, he managed to channel his loneliness and sense of abandonment into powerful images that deftly illuminate the perils and poignancy of human connections.  

An exhibition of Heath's work titled "Multitude, Solitude" is at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art through September 16.
 

Below: more images including Kansas City, Missouri, and Washington Square, NYC.
 

Image credit & copyright: Dave Heath, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, Gift of the Hall Family Foundation; Howard Greenberg Gallery
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this park-themed favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Hot springs never had such a cool look. This photo of Yellowstone National Park's Grand Prismatic Spring was taken by Michael Nichols, a National Geographic photographer known for going the distance to get the perfect shot. Case in point: in 2014, he and his wife lived in Yellowstone National Park for 18 months in order to capture the park's vast ecosystems. This overhead shot from that period shows off the multi-colored layers of the Grand Prismatic Spring thawing out of snow. The brown and yellow outer rings are colored by bacteria, with the inner green layer formed from thermophiles, or microbes that live in hot water. The inner hot spring runs 121 feet deep, and is the source of the clear blue center of the Grand Prismatic. Nichols' photos were recently featured in a National Geographic issue dedicated to Yellowstone. The magazine is running a yearlong series on America's National Parks, where the intersection of big and small worlds like those in the Grand Prismatic's will be on view.

 
Image credit & copyright: Mike Nichols
 

One of the planners for the March on Washington 55 years ago this week was also a silent leader for the Civil Rights movement. Seen here holding a map of the D.C. area around the Lincoln Memorial, Bayard Rustin was a chief organizer of the event that drew over 200,000 attendees. In the '40s, Rustin along with A. Philip Randolph originally intended to have a March on Washington to protest employment discrimination against black workers, though President Roosevelt's establishment of the Fair Employment Practice Committee in 1941 curtailed those plans. Rustin instead turned his gift for social organizing to Freedom Rides and the 1957 Southern Christian Leadership Conference. When Randolph and Rustin joined forces again—with MLK in tow—in 1962 to re-plan a March on Washington, Rustin coordinated with six of the biggest civil rights organizations of the time, and created an organizing manual that outlined the procedures and demands for the Civil Rights marchers. For all of his efforts, Rustin remained far from the spotlight, as his ex-communist political affiliation and open homosexuality were considered liabilities to the cause. But his value to the Civil Rights movement can't be overstated these days.

 

Image credit & copyright: Associated Press
 

That's one way to ketchup to the competition in Buñol, Spain. This red fellow was part of La Tomatina last year, or the tomato-throwing festival that takes place on the last Wednesday in August. About 160 tons of tomatoes are thrown in the hour-long fight—though per the safety rules laid out by the Buñol​ city council, the veggie has to be squashed before throwing to avoid hurting others. For the next few hours, the town square is swimming in tomato sauce, with happy participants dredged in red pulp as well. What is said to have begun in 1945 as teenage mischief at the Giants and Big-Heads figures parade has turned into a ticketed event to keep worldwide participation to a manageable 20,000 attendees. While La Tomatina has come under fire (not from thrown produce) in discussions about world hunger issues, the official word is that the tomatoes used in the festival are overripe or rotten, and not fit for human consumption. Hey, when life gives us rotten tomatoes, make might as well make some tomato-ade, right?
 

Below: a festival goer climbs the palo jabón pole, a truck once loaded with tomatoes to disperse makes its way through the crowd, a shop owner cleans the debris firefighters missed—the citric acid in tomato pulp is said to clean and shine the facades of local buildings.

 

Image credit & copyright; Biel Alino, Corbis / National Geographic Creative; Pablo Blazquez Dominguez; Jaime Reina / AFP / Getty
 

This August marks 98 years since the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote in elections. The fight to get the vote wasn't an easy one, though; for example, in January of 1917, the National Woman's Party began picketing the White House in a six-month-long effort to rally for a woman's right to vote. Holding purple, white, and gold banners, women from various social backgrounds gathered to call out President Woodrow Wilson, who effectively broke through the picket line without acknowledging the protesters during his March 4th inauguration. The demonstrations were seen as an embarrassment to the nation during World War I, when principles of freedom and democracy were being fought for abroad, but repressed at home. Photos taken at this time are described by the Library of Congress as images from the first White House picket line, and are evidence of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's powerful words: that "the history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality."
 

Below: Another view of the suffragettes picket line outside the White House.
 

Image credit & copyright: Library of Congress
 

Surrealist artist Man Ray's goal—to "violate every rule in photography"— worked out quite well in his series of Rayographs. The above image is an example of his cameraless photogram technique, which came about after Man Ray accidentally developed an unused sheet of photosensitive paper in the dark room. As a struggling artist he was reluctant to waste materials, so he threw photo lab items onto the sheets, and developed a method of "working directly with light itself." Some Rayograph prints display household items in still life arrangements; others lend a frenetic or alien appearance to familiar objects. The above image, taken in 1922, conveys a surreal sense of intimacy: through multiple exposures to light treatments, features including darkroom trays, hands, and kissing heads give a whole new meaning to the word "transparency." Hey, for Man Ray's birthday today, it's not too late to start thinking about a trend of Rayograph wedding photos!

 

Below: more Rayographs.
 

Image credit & copyright: Museum of Modern Art