STEVE SCHAPIRO: "“I don’t think I’ve yet taken my most important photograph"

 

Barbra Streisand, 1970. 'We shot this at her house in Malibu. She has extremely good taste and strong ideas about how pictures should be.'

Photo: Steve Schapiro

 Via The Telegraph


Steve Schapiro: access all areas


How did photographer Steve Schapiro go from documenting the lives of drug addicts and immigrants to spending months trailing Hollywood’s biggest stars? ‘I was quiet and polite,’ he tells Lucy Davies

Steve Schapiro learnt not to be intimidated by fame at an early age. As a teenager, long before he became a fixture of film sets and rock star mansions, Schapiro was determined to become “the world’s greatest novelist”. So he enrolled at Bard College in upstate New York, where he had tutorials with author Saul Bellow; they walked in the woods together, discussing Dostoevsky. But after a five-week sojourn in Paris and Spain working through the night on a novel, he realised there were “only four good pages in the whole thing. It was at that point I took up photography.”

Until then, it had been his hobby – something to do on holiday. He had a small, Bakelite camera called an Argoflex that he sometimes took outside on the streets near his home in the Bronx. “It seemed to me that the best thing you could do was work for Life magazine, so I began my own projects that were similar to the things they published – drug addicts in East Harlem, Haight Ashbury. I would keep going back to Life every few weeks to persuade them to hire me.”

In 1959, his story on migrant workers in Arkansas was picked up by a small magazine called Jubilee: “The New York Times saw it and asked if they could use one on their cover. It was really a terrific moment for someone just starting out.”

Life finally commissioned him – a portrait of Patrick Dennis, author of hit comic novel Auntie Mame. “I’d heard that Life photographers liked to photograph people in a bathtub – I don’t think it was necessarily true – but I brought along some bubble bath and persuaded him to do it. It ran full page.” The rest of the pack followed suit: Look, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone.

“Even though I was in my twenties, I looked about 16, and I was quiet and polite. Everyone liked me. I travelled with Bobby Kennedy, I photographed the Selma March with Martin Luther King. I did Andy Warhol in The Factory and Muhammad Ali. I never knew where I would be in two days because I was always on the plane.”

Alongside the political stories he was making his name on the entertainment pages. His photograph of Dustin Hoffman for Look became the logo for Midnight Cowboy, then Otto Preminger hired him to take the onset photographs for The Cardinal, which was nominated for six Academy Awards.

While working on the lots he heard that Marlon Brando was going to be in Paramount’s forthcoming production of The Godfather. “At the time Brando was the top actor, so I went to Life and I got them to guarantee a cover, which they never do – they wouldn’t even do it for Frank Sinatra. I went back to Paramount and, of course, they agreed. I ended up working on the entire film.” Schapiro’s shots of Brando, Pacino et al are now classics of still photography. Everybody saw them, and everybody wanted Schapiro to photograph them. At the time it wasn’t unusual for him to spend four days, even six months, with a personality, one-to-one. “It often seemed we were the best of friends,” he says.

The only person he found difficult was Charles Bronson: “very brash”. Generally, though, his shoots were amiable collaborations. “For me there’s no difference between photographing a celebrity and a migrant worker. You’re always looking for a picture with emotion, design and information. I leave a lot of room for self-expression. I want my subjects to be themselves, and then I quietly pounce.”

Now 78, Schapiro lives in Chicago with his wife and youngest son. He continues to photograph and recently worked with his son on a photo story about the ageing hippie generation. “I don’t think I’ve yet taken my most important photograph,” he says. “I’m happy with many of the images. But I always look to the future.”

‘Steve Schapiro: Then and Now’ (Hatje Cantz, RRP £55) is available to order from Telegraph Books at £50 plus £1.35 p&p. Call 0844 871 1516 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk

This article also appeared in SEVEN magazine, free with the Sunday Telegraph. Follow us on Twitter @TelegraphSeven

George McGovern, the Quiet Warrior: Photos By Bill Eppridge From His ’72 Campaign

Slideshow here.

 

Via LIFE

 

 

Former U.S. Senator and 1972 presidential candidate George S. McGovern (b. 1922) has died after being admitted to a Sioux Falls hospice six days ago. He was 90 years old and had been in failing health “with a combination of medical conditions, due to age, that have worsened over recent months,” according to a statement from his family. From the mid-1960s through the early ’80s, he was one of the most prominent Democratic politicians in the United States — a proud liberal, decorated World War II veteran and tireless advocate for the poor and disenfranchised in America and around the world.

Here, LIFE.com remembers the native South Dakotan with a series of photos by LIFE’s Bill Eppridge, made on the campaign trail during the 1972 race for the presidency. Over the course of a few, heady months of that pivotal year, Americans were able to take the measure of the man to an extent that they never had before — and never would again. In November, he would lose to Richard Nixon in an historic landslide for the Republican incumbent; but during his time in the national spotlight, George McGovern articulated the progressive ideals he held dear as forcefully and as consistently as any candidate in the history of American presidential politics.

[Read Howard Chua-Eoan's McGovern obituary on TIME.com.]

Bill Eppridge recently told LIFE.com that, 40 years after that ’72 campaign, he recalled McGovern, the man, much more clearly than McGovern, the candidate. And he liked what he remembered.

“He was the sort of person,” Eppridge said, “that you’d want to have as a next-door neighbor. Friendly. Solid. He struck me as a genuine, down-to-earth person, and that’s not a quality you associate with many politicians. Not today, and not so much back then, either.”

Eppridge had documented Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign for the presidency and, famously, chronicled the violence-scarred final moments of RFK’s life as he lay dying in a bus boy’s arms on the floor of a Los Angeles hotel kitchen. Eppridge told LIFE.com that Bobby Kennedy’s death made it impossible for him to care, for years, about politics or politicians. He had grown into a Kennedy supporter and believer while covering the candidate in public and in private, and RFK’s murder in June 1968 left him bereft. He had to get away from the rough-and-tumble, and the unending stress, of high-stakes politics.

“But four years later,” he continues, “I was back covering a presidential race. McGovern’s campaign had a positive, unhurried feel to it. It ran smoothly, and McGovern himself was an easy guy to be around. The campaign had energy, of course, but it never felt frantic … or mean.”

[See more of Bill Eppridge's work at the Monroe Gallery of Photography.]

Below is an admittedly incomplete, at-a-glance biography of George McGovern — a man who led an exemplary American life, filled with accolades and victories as well as profound disappointments and searing personal loss. He will be missed.

George McGovern married his wife, Eleanor, in 1943, during the Second World War. They remained married for 64 years, until hear death in 2007. (She was also a native South Dakotan, and as a pilot during WWII McGovern named his B-24 bomber the “Dakota Queen” after her.)


Father of five children, including his late daughter, Teresa, who died in 1994 at the age of 45 after a long battle with alcoholism. McGovern later wrote a book, Terry: My Daughter’s Life-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism, chronicling her struggle and the devastating effect her illness had on his family. In 2012, his son Steven died — after years of fighting alcoholism, as well.


Military Service: Pilot, B-24 Liberator, European Theater, WWII. Flew 35 missions, earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and three Air Medals


Ph.D., Northwestern University


Congressman (D-SD), 1958-1960; United States Senator, 1963 – 1981


Publicly opposed American involvement in Vietnam as early as 1963


Democratic candidate for president, 1972; lost to Richard Nixon in a landslide, winning only the state of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. After the Watergate scandal destroyed Nixon’s presidency, cars were seen bearing bumper stickers that read, “Don’t blame me, I’m from Massachusetts.”


First-ever director of the United States’ Food for Peace program in 1961


Served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture (1998–2001); named World Food Prize co‑laureate in 2008


Gandhi Peace Award Laureate (1991)


Presidential Medal of Freedom (2000)

For 180-years, people have been asking the question: is photography art?

Andreas Gursky's Rhein II fetched £2.7m last year, setting a record for any photograph sold at auction. Photograph: Andreas Gursky/AP Photo/Christie's

 

 

Via The Guardian

 Michael Prodger

 

Photography: is it art?

 

From the earliest days of photography, practitioners took their inspiration from paintings. But as a new exhibition at London's National Gallery shows, the link went both ways

 

 

For 180-years, people have been asking the question: is photography art? At an early meeting of the Photographic Society of London, established in 1853, one of the members complained that the new technique was "too literal to compete with works of art" because it was unable to "elevate the imagination". This conception of photography as a mechanical recording medium never fully died away. Even by the 1960s and 70s, art photography – the idea that photographs could capture more than just surface appearances – was, in the words of the photographer Jeff Wall, a "photo ghetto" of niche galleries, aficionados and publications.

But over the past few decades the question has been heard with ever decreasing frequency. When Andreas Gursky's photograph of a grey river Rhine under an equally colourless sky sold for a world record price of £2.7 million last year, the debate was effectively over. As if to give its own patrician signal of approval, the National Gallery is now holding its first major exhibition of photography, Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present.

The show is not a survey but rather examines how photography's earliest practitioners looked to paintings when they were first exploring their technology's potential, and how their modern descendants are looking both to those photographic old masters and in turn to the old master paintings.

What paintings offered was a catalogue of transferable subjects, from portraits to nudes, still lifes to landscapes, that photographers could mimic and adapt. Because of the lengthy exposures necessary for early cameras, moving subjects were impossible to capture. The earliest known photograph of a person was taken inadvertently by Louis Daguerre – with Henry Fox Talbot one of photography's two great pioneers – when he set up his camera high above the Boulevard de Temple in Paris in 1838. His 10-minute exposure time meant that passing traffic and pedestrians moved too fast to register on the plate, but a boulevardier stood still long enough for both him and the bootblack who buffed his shoes to be captured for ever.

When Daguerre turned his camera on people rather than places the results were revelatory. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was so struck by Daguerreotypes that she rhapsodised over "the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever". The fidelity of features captured meant that she "would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest Artist's work ever produced" not "in respect (or disrespect) of Art, but for Love's sake". If, however, her photographer followed the advice of Eugène Disdéri, who wrote in 1863 that: "It is in the works of the great masters that we must study the simple, yet grand, method of composing a portrait," she could satisfy love with both physiognomy and art.

My Grandchild by Julia Margaret Cameron. Photograph: Hulton/Getty

What some pioneering photographers recognised straight away was that photographs, like paintings, are artificially constructed portrayals: they too had to be carefully composed, lit and produced. Julia Margaret Cameron made this explicit in her re-envisagings of renaissance pictures. Her Light and Love of 1865, for example, shows a woman in a Marian headcovering bending over her infant who is sleeping on a bed of straw. It is part of a line of nativity scenes that is as long as Christian art, and was hailed by one critic as the photographic equivalent of "the method of drawing employed by the great Italian masters". I Wait, 1872, shows a child with angel's wings resting its chin on folded arms and wearing the bored expression that brings to mind the underwhelmed cherubs in Raphael's Sistine Madonna. Such photographs were not direct quotations from paintings, but they raised in the viewer's mind a string of associations that gave photography a historical hinterland.

If Cameron and contemporaries such as Oscar Rejlander and Roger Fenton (who took numerous photographs of still-life compositions of fruit and flowers as well as his better known pictures of the Crimean war) were keen that their photographs should reflect their own knowledge of art, the links went both ways. In 1873, Leonida Caldesi published a book of her photographs of 320 paintings in the National Gallery, and her intended audience was not just the public but artists themselves, for whom the photographs were both more accurate and more affordable than engraved reproductions. By 1856, thanks to Fenton's photographs, artists could study classical statues in their own studios.

Richard Learoyd's Man with Octopus Tattoo II (2011) by Richard Learoyd. Photograph: Courtesy of McKee Gallery, New York

It was perhaps in depicting the nude – such as Fenton's bestselling photograph of the discus thrower Discobolus – that photography could repay its debt to art. Hiring a life model was expensive, and engravings were a poor substitute. Delacroix was one artist who "experienced a feeling of revulsion, almost disgust, for their incorrectness, their mannerisms, and their lack of naturalness". He praised instead the painterly aid provided by académies (books of nude photographs) since they showed him reality: "these photographs of the nude men – this human body, this admirable poem, from which I am learning to read". He even helped the photographer Eugène Durieu pose and light his models. And in 19th-century Britain and France, when pornography was illegal, photographs of the nude were in demand from customers who had no artistic interests.

When it came to landscape photography the new medium appeared just as the impressionists were beginning to work in the open air. Some commentators saw photography's real challenge to painting as lying in its ability to capture what the photographer and journalist William Stillman called in 1872 "the affidavits of nature to the facts on which art is based" – the random "natural combinations of scenery, exquisite gradation, and effects of sun and shade". Another practitioner, Lyndon Smith, went further, declaring landscape photography the answer to the "effete and exploded 'High Art', and 'Classic' systems of Sir Joshua Reynolds" and "the cold, heartless, infidel works of pagan Greece and Rome".

Being new was a laborious business, however. Eadweard Muybridge, the British-born photographer who first captured animals in motion and as a result ended the old painterly convention of showing horses running with all four legs off the ground, was primarily a landscape photographer. His pictures of the Yosemite wilderness, for example, involved carrying weighty cameras, boxes of glass negatives, as well as tents and chemicals for a makeshift darkroom, up mountains and through forests. Monet's painting expeditions by contrast required only paint and canvas.

Richard Billingham's Hedgerow (New Forest), 2003. Photograph: Courtesy of the Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London

If early photographers had no option but to negotiate their own engagement with painting their modern descendants can call on nearly two centuries of photographic history. It is a point the exhibition makes by combining old and new. So when a contemporary photographer such as Richard Billingham photographs an empty expanse of sea and sky in Rothko washes of slate blues and greys (Storm at Sea) he is referring to a heritage that encompasses both the monochrome tonality of Gustave Le Gray's atmospheric photographic seascapes of the 1850s and a painting such as Steamer on Lake Geneva, Evening Effect, 1863, by the Swiss artist François Bocion.

An image of a couple in their suburban home, from Martin Parr's album Signs of the Times, England, 1991 Photograph: Martin Parr/Magnum

The point is made across the different media. A brittle portrait of a suburban couple from Martin Parr's 1991 album Signs of the Times, for example, is contrasted with Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Andrews of 1750. Both are images of possession and entitlement, the latter displaying landowners at ease amid their fields and woods, comfortable with both themselves and their station, the former a couple posing stiffly in their sitting room.

Ori Gersht's Blow-Up- Untitled 5, (2007) Photograph: Bigbang Ii/Courtesy of the Artist and Mummery + Schnelle, London

Meanwhile a 19th-century flower painting by Henri Fantin-Latour is the starting point for Ori Gersht's fragmented blooms, Blow Up. Gersht froze his flowers with liquid nitrogen before exploding them with a small charge and photographing the petals turned to flying shards. Among the nudes, Richard Learoyd's Man with Octopus Tattoo, 2011, is placed next to the gallery's 1819-39 painting of Angelica Saved by Ruggiero by that connoisseur of bodily curves, Ingres. The appeal of flesh and its sinuosity is timeless.

The curators of the National Gallery exhibition have avoided using many of contemporary photography's biggest names (there is no Andreas Gursky and no Cindy Sherman for example), and nor do they include photorealist painters such as Gerhard Richter or Andy Warhol. Their choices are largely less celebrated figures as if to show how deep is the seam of photographers still working with the long visual past. When in 1844-6 Fox Talbot published his thoughts about photography he gave the book (the first publication to contain photographic illustrations) the title The Pencil of Nature. This exhibition lays out what photography's founding father could never know: how the camera has also always been the pencil of art.


Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present
National Gallery, London
WC2N 5DN
Starts 31 October 2012
Until 20 January 2013
Venue details

"The Art of Collectiing Photography" Talk in Conneticut

Via Voices the Newspaper

WASHINGTON — Kathy McCarver Root will present The Art of Collecting Photography in a powerpoint presentation at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, October 25, in the Wykeham Room of the Gunn Memorial Library, 5 Wykeham Rd.

Ms. McCarver Root’s career as a photo editor and collector makes her uniquely suited in this particular field.

She says, “Photography is an extremely versatile medium and therefore can be woven into a variety of types of collections-paintings, drawings, ceramics, as well as a variety of décor styles — modern, traditional, urban and country.”

Ms. McCarver Root began her photography career upon moving to New York City, where she landed an internship with Esquire Magazine. An avid collector, she gained her experience throughout two decades while working as a photography editor.

She is now a photography dealer and consultant, working with individual and corporate clients to purchase and install fine art photography.

This program is free and open to the public. Registration is recommended.

Those seeking additional information or wishing to register may call 860-868-7586 or visit www.gunnlibrary.org

 

 

Related:  Photography dealer Kathy McCarver Root will open the latest show of fine art photography, Diane Arbus: Guggenheim Grants, 1963-1967, from Friday, October 26, through Saturday, December 29, at KMR Arts, 2 Titus Rd.

THE Magazine Review: Stephen Wilkes: Day to Night

Installation Photograph by Stephen Wilkes

The Magazine
Critcal Reflections
June, 2012

Iris McLister



Are you a city person? Do you like hailing a taxi or looking upward to see the tippy top of a skyscraper?


Maybe you’re more of a country mouse like me, and being among millions of people with places to go and people to see leaves you cold. My only, very brief, visit to New York City, several years ago, left my feathers substantially ruffled. The rush, the anonymity, the impossible task of trying to be nonchalant about riding the subway; the everywhere presence of interesting-looking people I’d never know or even meet.

No, not all of us are city people. Contemporary photographer Stephen Wilkes chose New York City as his subject for his series Day to Night, capturing moments of astonishing urban beauty in luscious, vivid color. His unique digitally manipulated, time-lapse photography allows the course of an entire day to be viewed in one image, thereby exposing the city’s constant energy while suggesting its ultimate stability.

We’ve all seen pictures of the Empire State Building or the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk; these aren’t those. The first thing you notice about the photos in Day to Night is the uncanny quality of light they capture; they look lit up from within. Wilkes has been a commercial photographer for many years, working for major publications like Sports Illustrated, Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, and Time. As a fine-art photographer, his work reaches similarly wide audiences and often has political undertones. A series shot on Ellis Island depicts eerie scenes of dilapidated buildings and neglected grounds—it garnered so much attention that it helped prompt Congress to grant the area millions of preservation dollars and designate it as a “living ruin.” In a 2008 body of photographs taken in China, Wilkes conveyed in equal measure the sterile coldness of sprawling factories and the humanity of their workers.

For this more neutral, but visually dazzling, body of work, the artist began by choosing an iconic New York City location like Central Park or Washington Square. Perched fifty feet above ground level in a rented boom lift, the artist spent ten to fifteen hours taking hundreds of pictures of the same scene throughout the course of a day, painstakingly ensuring that every shot came from the same, fixed perspective.

Wilkes then blended together dozens or so carefully chosen shots with digital photo software to forge utterly seamless portrayals of a day’s shift into night. Painstakingly detailed and full of nuance, a single image can take months to create. Photographs take on time-travel qualities in their ability to relate distinct times of day in just one frame. In Gramercy Park, this city landmark becomes a dense forest, composed so that the vermillion shock of tall trees in the foreground gives way, somewhat ominously, to darkened evening skies. Apartment building windows are so warmly and clearly lit you can almost make out figures, and the bizarre lighting, which Wilkes sometimes manipulates into veritable fluorescence, suggests the contrivance of a movie set or a starkly illuminated dollhouse. In Park Avenue, rows of golden yellow cabs stream down traffic lanes in a scene of ecstatic motion. Thrillingly bright light beams downwards onto the avenue, and an inky-dark, cloudy sky makes a perplexing and delightful backdrop. This is a remarkably beautiful rendering of an urban scene—and it feels consummately new in its depiction. Coney Island is more literal in its representation of a day’s transition from morning to night; the evening portion on the left side of the picture gradually turns to brilliant daylight on the right. The neon blur of the Ferris wheel against the night sky gives way to the sunbathers and sailboats creating areas of startling, but somehow organic, contrast. Of these photographs, which Wilkes calls “quintessential city portraits,” the artist says: “You realize that the pedestrians are communicating, the cabs [are communicating], all these elements are coming together and creating a complex life form… that’s how the city works.”

In this eye-catching exhibition, Stephen Wilkes manages to inject scenes of urban New York with a dynamism that conjures universally relatable themes of renewal and change. This work encourages us to celebrate and share in the ineffably triumphant quality of New York City—and it’s got this country girl yearning for a visit to the Big Apple.

The exhibition has been extended through June 24, 2012.

Photo Courtesy Hance Partners

AP’s Legendary Photographer’s Hong Kong Exhibition & London Memorial Oct. 18

Vietnam 1967 — AP photographer Horst Faas, with his
Leica cameras around his neck, accompanies U.S. troops in
War Zone C. (AP Photo)

Via Photo This & That

Earlier this year, May 10th, saw the sad passing of one of our time’s greatest photojournalists and picture editors; the legendary Horst Faas. Best known for his amazing images from Vietnam, Horst was a double Pulitzer Prize winner. As AP chief photographer for Southeast Asia and picture editor, he was also instrumental in getting Nick Ut’s powerful ‘Napalm Girl’ on the AP wire, along with another definitive image from that war, Eddie Adams’ Vietcong prisoner execution.

A boy carries a toy rifle as he walks with his mother past French
soldiers in battle gear at the Bastille Palace in Oran, Algeria,
May 4, 1962. Algeria’s eight-year battle for independence had
reached a tense cease-fire pending a July referendum.
 (AP Photo/Horst Faas)

The sun breaks through dense jungle foliage in early January 1965,
around the embattled town of Binh Gia, 64 km east of Saigon, as South
Vietnamese troops, joined by U.S. personnel, rest after a cold, damp
night of waiting in an ambush position for a Viet Cong attack that
didn’t come. One hour later, as the possibility of an overnight attack
faded, the troops moved out for another hot day hunting the elusive
communist guerrillas. (AP Photo/Horst Faas)

 

Exhibition

The Foreign Correspondent’s Club, Hong Kong will be have a reception and exhibition on Horst’s work on September 4th. For further details, visit the FCC website. The exhibition of images will remain on display for the foreseeable future.

Memorial

In London, on October 18th at 11.30am, we will be having a memorial service for Horst. The service will be at St Brides Church, Fleet Street.

South Vietnamese civilians, among the few survivors of two days of
heavy fighting, huddle together in the aftermath of an attack by
government troops to retake the post at Dong Xoai, June 1965.
Just a few of the several hundred civilians who sought refuge at the
post survived the two day barrage of mortars and bombardment.
After the government recaptured Dong Xoai, the bodies of 150
civilians and some 300 South Vietnamese soldiers were discovered.
(AP Photo/Horst Faas)

Save The Date: Paris Photo, November 15 - 18

 

PARIS PHOTO 2012
Dates: 15th -18th November 2012

Location:
Grand Palais
Avenue Winston Churchill
75008 Paris

Dates & times : Thursday 15 Nov. - Sunday 18 Nov. From noon till 8pm.
Opening: 14 Nov. 2012 (by invitation only)

Rates :
Full price : 28 € TTC
Reduced fare (student) : 14 € TTC
Catalog 2012 : 25€ TTC
"Mutations" Book : 25€ TTC
Package entry + catalogue : 45 € TTC

Free for kids under 12 years old and for Personal Care Attendant (upon presentation of proof).

 

lens culture has an an extensive (but by no means exhaustive) sneak peek preview of 276 photographic works of art that will be exhibited at the fair in 2012 - click here.

Hank Walker: JFK and RFK, 1960

John and Robert Kennedy, Los Angeles by Hank Walker

© 1960 Time Inc

La Journal de la Photographie has been running a series of excerpts of interviews with several Great Life Photographers. This photograph is a particular favorite of ours.

"At the 1960 Democratic Convention, where everybody was shooting pictures like crazy, I was doing a story on Bobby Kennedy. The morning after Jack was nominated, we went up to his room. The brothers talked very quietly, and Jack told Bobby he wasn’t going to choose Walter Reuther for Vice President. I only made one picture in there, and then I waited outside for Bobby to come out. When he did, he was furious. We were walking back down the stairs, and Bobby was hitting his hand like this, saying “Shit, shit, shit.” You know, he really hated Johnson. "

(Interviewed September 29, 1994. Excerpted from: John Loengard, LIFE Photographers: What They Saw, Boston, A Bullfinch Press Book, 1998)

Barbra Streisand Returns to Brooklyn

© Bill Eppridge: Barbara Streisand in her kitchen, Brooklyn, NY, 1964

Barbra Streisand is back. She opens her new Back to Brooklyn concert tour at the new Barclays Center arena on Thursday and Saturday, has a new album titled Release Me coming out Tuesday, will be back in movie theaters this fall with a film titled The Guilt Trip, and is the subject of a dishy new William J. Mann biography, Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand.

Bill Eppridge covered Barbra Streisand for a LIFE magazine cover story  as she was reaching international stardom in 1966. See it here.



Related: Remembering a Film About Brooklynites Who Were All About Streisand

©Bill Eppridge: Barbara Streisand with Paparazzi, Paris, 1966

NY Photography Auctions: Results

Via La Journal de la Photographie


Christie’s sales of Photographs and Richard Avedon on 4-5 October achieved a combined total of $7,793,000/ £4,831,660/ €6,000,610, selling 73% by lot and 80% by value.

Sotheby’s October 3rd Photographs auction in New York featured a range of material from the 19th to 21st centuries.

Phillips de Pury & Company’s Photographs auction totaled $4,704,450, selling 81% by value and 76% by lot

Swann sold a complete set of Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian for $1,440,000--the highest priced item ever sold at New York's premiere auction house for works on paper.