Vanity Fair Portraits
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发布于: 11年前
Vanity Fair Portraits
MARCOS: Hello, welcome back, I'm Marcos, and you are listening to the Tickets ---the BBC's Art and Entertainment Program. Now can't interest you in a news photo of actress Scarlett Johansson? No? Well I've been over by Einstein, Charley Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway and Louise Armstrong with their clothes on, who former US President Ronald Reagan dancing. Yet some of the greatest portrait photographs of the last hundred years or so are just going on show in London, actors, musicians, athletes, dancing presidents and politicians. All the images on show would rather have taken full or published in the US magazine Vanity Fair since it first began back in 1913. And it is highday the magazine captured the era, the jazz age, the birth of modernism, the avant-garde. Its pages are full of images by legendary early photographers like Cecil Beaton, Man Ray, Baron De Meyer and Edward Steichen. You find their works as well as that by contemporary Vanity Fair photographers at London's National Portrait Gallery, pictures of some of the jazz greats. How could I resist?
PRESIDENT: Well here we are, London's National Portrait Gallery around the back of the Trafalgar Square of stone strove from Nelson's Column, seemly got a good omen. In here I am reliably told the portraits of two man music icons trumpeters, Louise Armstrong and Miles Davids. They are just two with more than 150 photographs, not to mention, rather large crowd of glitter. Look at them. I am joined by the Armstrong caster Christopher Cook. Christopher, I think, it's incredible collection, isn't it?
CHRISTOPHER COOK: It's quite remarkable. When you see these pictures together, they can't just kind of record of our ideas about fame, celebrity and glamour.
PRESIDENT: And what are trial portrait to begin? We just walk a little away to, well, the first three portraits here in the collection. Right, by the main door you come through, the composer, Irving Berlin, the Russian dancer Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova?
CHRISTOPHER COOK: What really interested us in this picture is not so much the quality that we never found. But the fact, here are two great classical dancers. Both of whom were dances with the Diaghilev, the Russian impresario. And also the great popular chance with the early American period Irving Berlin. What of course reminds us is that Vanity Fair was always about both popular and highly serious. There is Nijinsky dress among these wonderful, Ballets Russes scrupulous costumes. But there is Irving Berlin sitting behind Tim Panally, looking on the knowingly with the camera and with the sheet of paper writing. We know Irving Berlin could actually write a music. Yeah, it is a famous photo. It does look like that.
PRESIDENT: Why Vanity Fair magazine, I mean this picture dated back to the beginning of the magazine since section 1913, 1914, why this magazine, what did they do with it so special?
CHRISTOPHER COOK: Well, I think, its well man's visionary. It's Frank Crowninshield to the editor of Vanity Fair who understood perhaps before most anybody the importance of what we now call photo journalist. We understood it wasn't its words, but the images, too. And they understood the importance of the equality and the words. So they fixed together. You take the pictures of somehow fixed together appropriately in the right style with the test. Is that, I think, from the surface floats, the great 20th century tradition of photo journalist, whether is news, whether it is quality leisure magazine or whatever.
PRESIDENT: It took photography very seriously as well, didn't it? I mean it did want to make everything accessible, but it almost put it on a part without their art forms.
CHRISTOPHER COOK: I think the early period what you're getting is the photograph version that the great portraiture of the 19th century. This is photography that seems to do exactly what the portray paint does review the character, the kind of one-to-one relationship that you're framing and organizing situates the reviews of it.
PRESIDENT: Come with me and look at the extraordinary picture, on the great iconic pictures now I've covered.
CHRISTOPHER COOK: This is quite frankly one of the greatest pictures, I think, of Vanity Fair ever published. I think it's one of the greatest pictures here in the exhibitions. Now come in the great popular entertainer, the writer plays like private lives musical complicated shouting New York. What's extraordinary about is that you can scarcely see his face. It's almost Italian tribune led from the left. He's got the cigarette when he standing in the shadow over open grand Pierma making him wonderful kind of shell bowl shape behind a over for light on a pillar there is an Egyptian cat. What's of course all this is the perfect presentation of our decade, that great New York stars like Sheer Smart Star with the Rockefeller Center and the Chrysler Building. And here is covered somehow with the explosions. And just look at the way he stands. His hand's in his pocket, one links slightly a kind of motionless, a kind of easy-grace about it. This is the essence of the 1920s, 1930s's time.
PRESIDENT: And if we move around here, that was only 32, and the whole wall of the photographs here are from the 1930s. And you begin to see that sort of experimentation with shadows.
CHRISTOPHER COOK: I think that what you get from here of course is the realization that what influences the photographers isn't simply the tradition we talked about before, the idea of portraiture. What's happening here is that new sort of photograph or photo journalist is beginning to cast. Here social realism is beginning to cripple to its photographs.
PRESIDENT: I have just spoken that Louie Armstrong portrayed that I was only about and that seems typified to me that iconic jazz became so vital to the 1940s and 1950s. You know clubs, all with instruments, dark, sweating until weary with the huge. And of course the extraordinary shadow that leads off the back of the photograph.
CHRISTOPHER COOK: In the sense it is. What we think as a kind of smoky jazzy one, but everything is foregone in the end of about Louie, the artist. Well, it has to actually to say that the text or the style for how it expect jazz exhibition to look. When we get to 1980s, we moved away from the concept of glamour that, for example on cover or Louie Armstrong. The idea of presenting these people as a kind of figure extraordinary rather remote glamour and we can just somehow participate there were and we move actually to celebrity. We move to the idea of people being famous simply for the second to be famous and the key element within the celebrity presentation. It's of course they should also look rather like us, so should be a sense of ordinariness about the world in which we are photographed where we are and of course the shift beginning here. The photographer is slowly beginning to intervene himself. And when we get photograph by Annie Leibovitz; for example, one of the great contemporary photographers, there are all about her as much social photographs.
PRESIDENT: Because a lot of politicians say behind these we've gotten president Bushes, Cabinet Ohio face misses and rather terrified, the biggest pictures in the exhibition, Margret Thatcher staring straight out.
CHRISTOPHER COOK: By Helmut Newton, too, I'd like to say that she is a pretty woman in the 90s. You should take in 1991. It's after she left the office. I mean she has the sense of regret, just look at the eyes. They are not quite chilling as you think. The mouth slightly open, and the pearl slightly hidden down. I think the sense of this woman's time has passed. But you're right. Seeing quickly it's the past tense. It's not some you don't time with.
PRESIDENT: You mentioned Annie Leibovitz. She's taken this president Bush and his very secretary state, gather-together in the offices of panel in the White House.
CHRISTOPHER COOK: The land he comes to mind obviously on this photographs is the pose that I look on my work with my tears despair. You know there we have the kind of key figures, who is responsible for taking the United States. I am not supposed that Britain to be any other allies into the war in Iraq. There signs in the middle, the president himself wave the peace with the kind of cowboy built, hands in the pockets. There is the Vice President sitting on the low as his hands on his knees, Colin Powell on the left looking on the diffident and the way with there Mr. Rumsfeld to the end, a command, perhaps the most powerful armies the world has ever filled. Yes, indeed. This is the real smell of power and that there is one woman there and by large there are all men.
MARCOS: Christopher Cook with the president of the Vanity Fair portrait exhibition and the exhibition continues at London's National Portrait Gallery until 26th, May.
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