Kinshasa & Couture

South African photographer Guy Tillim composed a set of documentary images in the Congo city of Kinshasa during a 2006 election. An earlier appearance by this photographer – panoramic studies of colonial architecture in decay – occurred some years ago here.

In 1883 Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt II imported the "Electric Light" ball gown from Paris. It was conceived and executed by the foremost dressmaker of the day, Jean-Philippe Worth (1856-1926).  Today this densely embroidered artifact of Victorian futurism is displayed at the Museum of the City of New York.  

Mrs. Vanderbilt wearing the Electric Light ballgown (with Mr. Vanderbilt)

Honor

On Tuesday in the midst of quickly looking something up in the New York Times, I discovered that Nadine Gordimer had died at age 90. The black and white portrait above was made 25 years ago by a photographer named Chester Higgins Jr. around the time of Gordimer's Nobel Prize.

I read her South African novels, one by one, as they came out in America. I would often recommend her books when people asked me what to read. Like Christa Wolf in East Germany, Nadine Gordimer invented ways to write and publish political fiction of high quality under conditions of heavy government censorship.

Not Random

1. View in Venice / George Cattermole, 1852
2. Bavarian Castle in Snow - 19th century
3. Trafalgar / Frederick Stanfield Clarkson, 1833
4. Ce & Ce / Grenville Davey, 1989
5. Nude Study / Melina Daviau, 1913
6. Scrap-Metal Assemblage / El Anatsui, 2004
7. Sicilian Garden / Wilhelm von Gloeden, 1898
8. Tomorrow's Apples / Eva Hesse, 1965
9. Three Ladies / William Hogarth, 1736
10. Shop Window with Ingres Odalisque - Israel
11. Keilrahmen / Imi Knoebel, 1968-69
12. Study for Prometheus / Jacques Lipchitz, 1936
13. Abstract / Pádraig Timoney, 2007
14. Kitchen Window / Spencer Alley, 2014

More pictures that have waited too long in the limbo of the short-term picture file without finding companionship, and must move along now, in whatever way they can.

Infra

"Infra, Richard Mosse’s first book, offers a radical rethinking of how to depict a conflict as complex and intractable as the ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mosse depicts the rich topography, inscribed with the traces of conflicting interests, as well as rebel groups of constantly shifting allegiances at war with the Congolese national army (itself a patchwork of recently integrated warlords and their militias). For centuries, the Congo has repeatedly compelled and defied the Western imagination. Mosse brings to this subject the use of a type of color infrared film called Kodak Aerochrome. Originally developed for military reconnaissance and now discontinued, it registers an invisible spectrum of infrared light, rendering the green landscape in vivid hues of lavender, crimson, and hot pink. The results offer a fevered inflation of traditional reportage, underlining the growing tension between art, fiction, and photojournalism" – Aperture Foundation 

Animal Print

Back in January I sent my daughter a copy of Simple Modern Sewing by Shufu To Seikatsu Sha. On her own blog my daughter wrote about it here, explaining the present fad that exists (and that she shares in) for these style-and-pattern books translated from Japanese.

We decided to try one of the designs, a kind of slouchy summer jacket. At Britex (that gorgeous & traditional downtown San Francisco fabric store) we found a contemporary Japanese print depicting big bunches of blossoms inhabited by miniature African animals (but only animals with a history of modeling for animal prints). Heavy cotton/linen blend. Echino Collection by Etsuko Furuya for Kokka Fabrics.

1/4 second, f/9

1/8 second, f/7.1

1/2 second, f/13

I finished it tonight, but daylight was disappearing and I only had time for a few hasty pictures (more long exposures, all at ISO 1000). Of which these are the only tolerable specimens. They show the overall shape of the back plus a few pictorial details.

It is set to be delivered tomorrow. And what a singular blessing that my daughter has the sort of career (editing art and design books for a successful independent publisher) that allows and even encourages her actually to wear our experiments for purposes of real everyday life out in the world.

I am sure Mabel Watson Payne will be quick to spot (and name) every animal.

Naipaul

In The Masque of Africa V.S. Naipaul sets out to describe present-day forms of animism and magic as he encountered them while traveling through Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Gabon and South Africa. The journey often sounds like a burden borne with reluctance by this elderly author. His physical discomfort tends to dominate the page. There are also quite a few clumsy and clearly unintended repetitions and redundancies in the text. (Literary editors at publishing houses don't stoop to line-editing anymore, it is said, and very likely Naipaul is too eminent to accept such editing anyway.)


"We talked after this of the wildlife of Ghana. There wasn't much of it left. The people of Ghana had eaten much of it out. From this talk of wildlife we turned to the cats and dogs that people were now eating with a will. In the north they ate and loved dog: they called it "red goat." In the south they ate cats and had almost eaten them out. Richmond knew someone who bred cats in order to eat them.

The trouble with cats was that they were tricky to kill. Cats knew when they were going to be killed and eaten; they fought for their lives and they could be dangerous for a few minutes. The best way of killing a cat, assuming you had invited someone to dinner and didn't want to create a scene, was to stretch the animal's neck, the way people in England kill a rabbit. But when you did that you could be badly scratched. The surest way – if you or your guests didn't mind the racket – was to put a cat in a sack and beat it with a stick until it was dead. Another good way was to drown it. You used a sardine as bait to attract the cat to a container of water, and then you poured and poured water. The cat swallowed a lot of water and the virtue of this method was that it was much easier afterwards to tear the bloated cat's skin off.

With this talk of local food – breaking off from time to time to look at unfinished concrete pieces in the bush – we beguiled many miles. And then, as if this talk of food had called them up, there appeared at the roadside local men holding up smoked animals, offering them for sale, the surrounding bush combed and combed for these survivors – the agouti, together with a big rat known here as the grass-cutter, baby armadillos, long-snouted baby ant-eaters, and a few other creatures that just weren't fast enough to get away from these idle fellows."

African Landscapes

"I was born into a landscape that became unfamiliar as I grew to know it. The mirror of my mind's eye transposed political play into flickering stage. The impulse to photograph this stage is less an attempt to anchor the scenery than to situate myself."






"These photographs are not collapsed histories of post-colonial African states or a meditation on aspects of late-modernist-era colonial structures, but a walk through avenues of dreams. Patrice Lumumba's dream, his nationalism, is discernible in the structures, if one reads certain clues, as is the death of his dream, in these de facto monuments. How strange that modernism, which eschewed monument and past for nature and future, should carry such memory so well."







"In the frailty of this strange and beautiful hybrid landscape struggling to contain the calamities of the past fifty years, there is an indisputably African identity. This is my embrace of it."

words and photographs from

AVENUE PATRICE LUMUMBA by Guy Tillim

Munich : Prestel, 2008