Daily Archives: February 20, 2015



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Meet Florence Henri, The Under-Acknowledged Queen Of Surrealist Photography

Meet Florence Henri, The Under-Acknowledged Queen Of Surrealist Photography
Think about surrealism and a few names inevitable spring to mind — André Breton, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Hans Arp and Yves Tanguy. Yet an upcoming exhibition at Jeu de Paume is honoring a pioneering surrealist photographer whose influence, like her work itself, remains cast in shadows.

Florence Henri was born in New York in 1893 but spent most of her artistic career in Paris, moving there 1925 following the death of both her parents. First interested in painting, Henri immersed herself in the visual languages of geometric abstraction and cubism, both of which would factor into her photographic approach. After around two years, Henri grew tired of paint, and, on the suggestion of her friends and avid photographers László Moholy-Nagy and his wife Lucia Moholy, taught herself the ways of the camera. Henri picked up the basic technical and visual principles of photography. And, following the economic crash of 1929, she opened up a commercial photo studio in Paris to get by.

spool
Composition 1928 Florence Henri Gelatin silver print period, 27 x 37.1 cm. Museum Folkwang, Essen. Florence Henri © Galleria Martini & Ronchetti

Henri’s prop of choice was the mirror — using the common object as a surrealist tool to disrupt perception, disorient the viewer and multiply her subject matter into infinity ambiguity. Her photographs, which included self portraits, compositional still lifes, artist portraits, nudes, photomontages, photo collages, were often reminiscent of Cubist paintings, with disjointed reflections complicating the space so even straight forward depictions become uncanny meditations.

Somewhat associated with her fascination with mirrors, Henri also toyed with her own identity, revamping her persona with through costumes, makeup and pose with every shot. “It’s obvious that self-portraits have something to do with a search for identity but Henri’s are particularly tilted that way,” William Wilson, the erstwhile Los Angeles Times art critic, wrote in 1992. “In one she saw herself as a bohemian tomboy, in the next she’s an earth-mother peasant in a babushka. It was fairly easy to lose track of oneself in the floating world of the international avant-garde, especially if you were a woman and an artist.”

selfie
Self-portrait, 1928, Gelatin silver print period, 39.3 x 25.5 cm.
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek. Florence Henri © Galleria Martini & Ronchetti

Her most well-known work is a self-portrait, in which Henri sits before a mirror, dolled up almost as if in drag. Two silver balls lay reflected up against the mirror, equivocal symbols of both testicles and breasts. Henri, influential in both her artistic style and personal styles, toyed with gender binaries, using her personal appearance to emphasize the performative nature of gender. The artist was married to a Swiss house servant, but went on to have other relationships with both men and women, including a longtime affair with artist and model Margarete Schall.

Henri established herself as a formidable photographer, and remained consistent in her work up until World War II. Then her work declined considerably, both due to lack of materials and the prohibitions imposed under the Nazi occupation. Henri briefly returned to painting, but her central period of output remained in the 1920s and 1930s. Her compositions, simultaneously warm, playful, clever and inquisitive, set the stage for future explorations into the limits of photography, or lack thereof.

Florence Henri’s work will be on view from February 24 until May 17, 2015, at Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris.

www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/20/florence-henri_n_6723024.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

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Study Suggests Attractive Men Are More Selfish

Study Suggests Attractive Men Are More Selfish

Zoolander Models

We’ve all been there: we were introduced to that really good looking guy at a party or at the club or some other social setting, and even though he was hotter than a rooster in socks the more he talked the more turned off you got as it became clear that he was kind of a self-focused ass. According to a study at Brunel University London this isn’t just happenstance. Rather, attractive men as a whole tend to be more selfish.

The study, titled “Bodily Attractiveness and Egalitarianism are Negatively Related in Males” and published in Evolutionary Psychology, took 125 male and female participants, scored them on generalized attractiveness measures, and then took part in an economics experiment where they were asked to share money with someone else. The results found that men who were ranked as more attractive tended to have a bias towards selfishness. The research also found that attractiveness was at least as important as wealth when it came to attitudes of altruism and egalitarianism. Interestingly, the same was not true for women.

Lead researcher Dr. Michael Price warned against taking the findings as gospel, however, saying:

The correlation between attractiveness and selfishness was nowhere close to being perfect, and many very attractive men will also be very altruistic and egalitarian.

Additionally, these attitudes tended to be subconscious, and being made aware of their biases helped men act against them and engage in more generosity.


Christian Walters

www.towleroad.com/2015/02/study-suggests-attractive-men-are-more-selfish.html

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Ryan Phillippe Is Glad You'll Finally Get To See His '54' Gay Kiss Scene

Ryan Phillippe Is Glad You'll Finally Get To See His '54' Gay Kiss Scene
Ryan Phillippe says he’s looking forward to a planned digital release of the director’s cut of “54” because it will restore, among other things, a steamy kiss between him and co-star Breckin Meyer that was left on the editing room floor.

“There was a part of us that was a little sad nobody ever got to see it,” Phillippe told New York Magazine’s Vulture of the same-sex kiss which, in case you’ve forgotten, would have been included in a 1998 film years before “Brokeback Mountain,” “Milk” and other Hollywood blockbusters that feature gay love scenes ever hit cinemas.

That fact is not lost on the 40-year-old actor, who played Studio 54 “It Boy” Shane O’Shea in the movie.

“We did something that was relatively bold for two young male actors, and we took pride in the places that the original story went,” he added. “So, it’s nice that people finally get to see Breckin and me kiss.”

Low-quality footage of the kiss made its way online in 2013, five years after writer-director Mark Christopher’s original cut of “54” played to a sold-out crowd at New York’s Outfest. For the screening, about 45 minutes of footage (including the aforementioned smooch between Phillippe and Meyer) were added back into the movie, which bombed at the box office in its initial release in 1998 and currently has a 13 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

That version, Philippe added, “captures the freedom” of the late 1970s and early ’80s, the time period in which the movie is set, but also “the impending sobriety that would come with AIDS. It resonates.”

Phillippe had previously expressed his regrets over the final version of the film in a 2010 interview with The Advocate’s Brandon Voss, noting that he had been “against the changes that were made because I feel like there was a better movie there to begin with.”

“We thought we were making something like ‘Boogie Nights‘ because it was about a time of complete sexual abandon, but the studio watered it down,” he said at the time, calling the original cut “more edgy and honest.”

www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/20/ryan-phillippe-54-gay-kiss_n_6722882.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

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