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Magnum Blog

on December 03, 2007

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Ilona Szwarc : American Girls

These "American Girls" images by Ilona Szwarc appeared in a post on the New Yorker site. Each young model poses with an American Girl doll that she presumably designed to mimic her own appearance, or else created by an adult else as a gift. The photographs are occasionally humorous for the juxtaposition between real and copy, also but painfully closed to meaning beyond that relationship. The more successful images have at some hint of ambiguity, as in the shot above, that get away from the basic conceit. In this image the open landscape (Southern California?) and pose place the girl and doll in an usual place. The girls seems small, unprotected yet still confident in a squat seen throughout Asia. She seems just capable enough to care for an actual child, gazing with just the right amount of self-awareness at the camera, despite being outside of a house/home context. The least successful images are those in which the control of photogr...

Paul Graham: Empty Heaven

"Paul Graham: Empty Heaven - Photographs from Japan 1989-1995" by Paul Graham Scalo Books, New York 96 pp., 54 full-page color illustrations, 9x12" 1995 Printed pink graces the cover and dust jacket interiors to Paul Graham's "Empty Heaven." It's pink like half-tone dots spreading and assembling into the color to represent Hello Kitty, princesses everywhere, and the antithesis of the horrors of life. Pink like perfect sunsets and the lips of the young Japanese woman on the cover, a woman who appears transfixed yet vacuous in her off-camera gaze. When I first heard of Paul Graham it was about ten years ago when my friend Christian Widmer left a message on my answering machine saying something to the affect of, "I have found God. I have found God. Call me." At the time it was a typically strange message from Christian, who at the time was completing his MFA thesis work at Arizona State University and would persistently call me Wlliam T. Sh...

Pekin Fine Arts

Continuing my investigation of Chinese photographers. View work by Zhang O at Beijing's Pekin Fine arts: http://pekinfinearts.com/artists/artists.php?id=19 View work by Weng Fen as well: http://pekinfinearts.com/artists/artists.php?id=4

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