Marilyn Monroes first professional sitting

Anita Ekberg, Vintage 1956

Norma Jeane – Pin-Up

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I’m going to give myself a break for a while and do some simple posts and let the pictures speak for themselves. I’m assuming that everyone subscribed to this blog is here in some way or another for the pictures…

Today I’ve got photographer Ellen von Unwerth for you.

Ellen von Unwerth (born 1954 in Germany) is a photographer and director, specializing in erotic femininity. She worked as a fashion model for ten years herself before moving behind the camera, and now makes fashion, editorial, and advertising photographs.

Some of her work reminds me a lot of the Vee Speers Bordello series.

What do you think? Feel free to post your comments.

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A little about Les

In 1971, a young boy was kidnapped in Memphis, Tennessee. The ransom requested for the boy’s return was the removal of Les Krims’s photographs then on exhibition in Memphis. Krims’ pictures were removed and the boy was released unharmed. A few years later, Light Gallery, in New York City, published an original print portfolio containing the Krims photographs on view at that exhibition. Light Gallery titled the portfolio, “The Only Photographs in the World to Ever Cause a Kidnapping.” Krims had nothing to do with the kidnapping.

Les Krims has published numerous offset works. Two of these, “Fictcryptokrimsographs,” and “Making Chicken Soup,” were published by Humpy Press, which he founded and incorporated in the mid-1970s, and has since been dissolved. Krims has also published original print portfolios such as, “Idiosyncratic Pictures,” and “Porsch Rainbows.” Most recently (November 2005), a Photo Poche monograph, “Les Krims,” edited by Robert Delpire, with an introduction by Bernard Noel, was published by Actes Sud, in France.

I see glimpses of his work in artists of today like David La Chapelle and he’s definitely inspired some of the projects that I’m currently working on so a big thanks to the twisted Maestro of Jackassery, Les Krims.

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View all the images here.

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I came across and now subscribe to a blog by Pete Brook called simply “Prison Photography”. The blog features photos from many different sources, obviously with a focus on the prison system.

With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of residents it incarcerates.

Prison reform has always been a hot button issue for me. Our current system locks people up for absurd amounts of time in some cases. We have absolutely NO focus on rehabilitation in most prison systems. A typical scenario may go like this:

1. A person is an addict and perpetrates a crime to support their addiction.
2. We lock them up for their crime and do not do anything in the way of helping them overcome their addiction.
3. We send them back to the same environment they came from in a worse state than when they arrived in prison.
4. They re-offend and we give them more time.

And we’re surprised by the phenomenon of repeat offenders? As a society we set ourselves up for convicts to fail. Part of this is just laziness and part of it is the culture in our country of seeing in absolutes, black and white, instead of shades of gray.

I’ve met good men who carried around the label of murderer. And I’ve seen preachers who routinely and legally steal money from the less fortunate in the name of God. Things aren’t “good vs. evil” like so many believe and until we realize that we are ALL part of the same whole… then we’ll continue to build more prisons and hold the title of having more of our citizens behind bars than any place in the world.

Now that I got that out… Check it out if this is a subject you’re interested in. Some pretty cool work on Pete’s blog for sure.

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If you can’t see the video below go to http://blip.tv/play/zEDd9XOK6hA

This recollection by his son is moving to me.

“I don’t think dad is a normal person. He has his own way of dealing with things. I’ve never met anyone like him.” — Winston Eggleston

Like any great artist, he sees something spectacular in the norm and brings it to reality for the rest of us.

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Occasionally I come across a photographer who blows me away. I get that feeling every time I go back and look at Phil Borges work.

Borges has been a humanitarian photographer since the 1970s with his notable works being photographs of Tibetans who fled to Nepal, including the Dalai Lama. He found inspiration from Ron Zak who encouraged central themes through ‘bodies of work’. This led to Phil Borges’s signature style of black and white portraits with the subject’s skin toned in. His largest influences were Irving Penn and Edward Curtis.

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I came across Clayton Patterson today. He’s been shooting on the Lower East Side of Manhattan since the early 80’s. A pretty amazing body of work of real people.

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