Subterms
Peter Fisher for The New York Times2023 in Retrospect: 59 Photographs That Defined the Year in ArtsDeadheads, ballerinas and Mick Jagger: As 2023 winds down, revisit a memorable handful of the thousands of images commissioned by our photo editors that capture the year in culture.Marysa Greenawalt More
Fans of Winona Ryder lined up outside Dover Street Market in Manhattan on a recent chilly evening to attend a launch party for “Winona,” a book of Polaroids and cellphone shots of the Gen X cultural idol.“She’s so famously private that any peek into her interior life is delicious,” Daniela Tijerina, a writer and editorial assistant for Vanity Fair, said. “I’ve molded so much about my own style after a woman I know so little about, and that makes her as cool as a person can possibly be.”The shots in the book were taken by Robert Rich, who started photographing Ms. Ryder soon after becoming friends with her more than 20 years ago. His images capture her in unguarded moments: eating pizza during a sleepover at his Hell’s Kitchen apartment; and smoking a cigarette in a bathroom, while the model Daria Werbowy quoted lines from “Reality Bites” to her.Robert Rich, whose candid shots fill “Winona.”Ye Fan for The New York TimesPortraits of the Gen X star from the book “Winona.”Robert RichAt the party, Mr. Rich, 57, signed copies of his book, as guests mobbed a merch table selling T-shirts, caps and tote bags, all of which read: “Winona.”“What we love about Winona is that you know nothing about her,” Mr. Rich said. “We love that she’s a mysterious woman. I used to never recognize her when I’d meet her. She’d always be wearing a visor or a pageboy cap. I’d walk through the city with her, and no one even knew who I was with.”He befriended Ms. Ryder when he was a manager of the Marc Jacobs store on Mercer Street in SoHo in 1999. The shop was a hangout for Selma Blair, Sofia Coppola, Parker Posey and Kate Moss, and Mr. Rich often took Polaroids of celebrity clients in his basement office.He got to know Ms. Ryder during fittings at the store and later helped dress her in Marc Jacobs pieces for parties, premieres and magazine photo shoots. After Ms. Ryder’s shoplifting trial in 2002, he became a confidante during a period when she retreated from public view.Joe Jonas, left, looks through “Winona.”Ye Fan for The New York TimesA shot from the new book.Robert RichA year ago, Mr. Rich found himself thinking about all the Polaroids he had amassed in several shoeboxes in his closet, and he texted Ms. Ryder about the idea of collecting them in a book. After she said yes, the London-based book dealer and publisher, Idea, took on the project. Marc Jacobs wrote the foreword.As the party guests sipped champagne and flipped through the book, Mr. Jacobs made an appearance.“She was our young Garbo,” he said. “A Winona sighting was always a big deal back then. She came to one of my shows at the time, and I still remember she was a little like a deer in the headlights. She’s not snobbish. She’s not the red carpet girl. And that has always added to her cachet and cool.”Francesca Sorrenti, who designed and edited the book, reflected on Ms. Ryder’s enduring appeal.“To understand Winona, you have to understand the youth movement of the 1990s,” she said. “There are only a few personalities quite like hers out there at any given time, and in her era, it was Kate Moss and Winona. You’d just see them and you’d want to know, Who is that?”Another of Mr. Rich’s shots from “Winona.”Robert RichAt the party, Marc Jacobs likened Ms. Ryder to the reclusive Greta Garbo.Robert RichMs. Sorrenti said that Ms. Ryder’s shyness added to her mystique.Robert Rich“I’ve hung out with Winona,” Ms. Sorrenti added. “And yes, she’s shy, and that shyness also projected itself into what her fans consider her mystique.”Hanging out by a rack of Comme des Garçons jackets was Inna Blavatnik, a creative director. “I’m of the Generation X era that Winona represented,” she said. “It was all about having a moody cool and not giving a you-know-what, and she became my role model as a teenager.”As the night progressed, the fashion designer Zac Posen and the musician Joe Jonas stopped by — and a question loomed: Would Ms. Ryder show?“I texted her about the party,” Mr. Rich said, “but I haven’t heard anything back yet.”The filmmaker Zoe Cassavetes offered: “I’ve known Winona for a long time, and when you get to know her, she’s extremely present and generous, but she’s also good at disappearing into the ether.” She concluded: “If she were coming, she wouldn’t tell anyone she was.”The filmmaker Zoe Cassavetes said Ms. Ryder was “good at disappearing into the ether.”Robert RichGuests at the “Winona” party.Ye Fan for The New York TimesMs. Ryder ultimately never materialized, but Jayna Maleri, a fashion editorial director, said she preferred it that way. “I almost never want to see Winona Ryder in person,” she said. “Not because I think she’d disappoint me, but because she occupies a place in my brain so rooted in my nostalgia that it would be jarring.”“She’s an icon of my youth, the eternal cool girl who embodied the authenticity of the ’90s,” she continued. “And I want to hold onto my illusions of her.”A Robert Rich collage.Robert Rich More
In one of his famed self-portraits, Omar Victor Diop, a Senegalese photographer and artist, wears a three-piece suit and an extravagant paisley bow tie, preparing to blow a yellow, plastic whistle. The elaborately staged photograph evokes the memory of Frederick Douglass, the one-time fugitive slave who in the 19th century rose to become a leading […] More
It’s not a painting. It’s a picture of a Victorian artisan taken in the English countryside in 1892.On Nov. 8, 1971, Led Zeppelin released its iconic fourth studio album, which was untitled but is widely known as “Led Zeppelin IV.” It features the band’s major hit “Stairway to Heaven,” and the wordless cover shows the image of a bearded, older man with a large bundle of sticks on his back against the backdrop of a decaying wall.Now, 52 years later to the day, a minor mystery about that cover has been solved.Sometimes thought to be a painting, the image, it turns out, was a Victorian-era photograph of a man who made thatched roofs for cottages in Wiltshire, a rural county in southwestern England. His name was Lot Long and he was 69 at the time, according to Brian Edwards, a researcher who found the photo.Mr. Edwards, a visiting research fellow at the University of the West of England, stumbled upon the picture in March while scouring the internet for new releases at auction houses that might be interesting for his research, which includes the area’s well-known landmark Stonehenge.As he was looking through a Victorian photo album full of landscapes and houses, Mr. Edwards noticed a photo he had seemingly seen before.“There was something familiar about it straight away,” he said in a phone interview. (Mr. Edwards was the proud owner of a “Led Zeppelin IV” LP from the year the album was released, he said, and he listens to it to this day, albeit on a CD.)After a quick call to his wife for a “sanity check,” he concluded: This was indeed the image on the cover of one of the most epic musical releases of his teenage years. He then called the Wiltshire Museum, where he curated an exhibit in 2021.The museum bought the photo album for 420 pounds (about $515), according to the auctioneer’s website.The photo album’s first page states, “Reminiscences of a visit to Shaftesbury,” and is made out as “a present to Auntie from Ernest.”Based on that information, Mr. Edwards researched the origins of the photo album and was able to conclude that the photographer was a man by the name of Ernest Howard Farmer.“It sounds like good detective work, but in truth there was a lot of luck involved,” Mr. Edwards said. “I caught a few good breaks.”As for how that photo ended up on the album cover: Legend has it that Robert Plant, Led Zeppelin’s vocalist, and his bandmate Jimmy Page were in an antique shop in Pangbourne, a village about 50 miles west of London along the River Thames, where they spotted a colorized version of the photograph that will be on view in the Wiltshire Museum.Because the photographer, Mr. Farmer, was also a teacher, Mr. Edwards said, one plausible theory is that he used the picture to teach colorizing to his students. One of those versions may have ended up in a frame in an antique shop. That colorized version of the picture seems to have been lost.The photo album included about 100 photos showing architectural views and street scenes together with a few portraits of rural workers, according to the Wiltshire Museum, where the photos will be on display.“We will show how Farmer captured the spirit of people, villages and landscapes of Wiltshire and Dorset, an adjoining county, that were so much of a contrast to his life in London,” the museum said in an announcement about the exhibit.“Even if this Led Zeppelin photograph wasn’t in there, this would be a very interesting exhibition about the quality of Victorian photographs,” Mr. Edwards said. More
A London production adapted from Eliza Clark’s debut novel refuses to justify its unreliable narrator’s violence, but lacks narrative depth and complexity.How far can you go in the name of art? For Irina, nothing is off-limits. She’s a photographer who takes pictures of young men, with a particular preference for guys that are unprepossessing, shy and biddable. Irina’s “thing” is capturing male vulnerability, so she photographs her subjects in compromising poses; she takes liberties with consent, and violates their dignity in increasingly troubling and violent ways.Irina is the antiheroine of “Boy Parts,” adapted from Eliza Clark’s 2020 debut novel of the same name, and running at the Soho Theater, in London, through Nov. 25. It’s an engrossing and darkly funny one-woman show, but doesn’t quite make the best of its provocative premise.Aimée Kelly plays the role with a winning blend of caustic humor and narcissistic self-pity: She’s highly strung, manipulative and insecure. By modulating her voice and posture, Kelly also plays various other characters, including Flo — Irina’s best friend, whose almost canine devotion is rewarded with casual contempt — and a succession of hapless young men, portrayed a sympathetic, slouchy charm. Irina’s motivations are both aesthetic and political: She idolizes the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini — the director of the infamously graphic feature “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” — and wants to subvert the traditional power dynamics of objectification in the visual arts, by putting men on the receiving end of a violating gaze.Gillian Greer’s adaptation successfully transposes the unsettlingly blithe, almost jaunty narrative style that won over so many of the novel’s readers. (Despite garnering only modest coverage in the mainstream press, it became a viral hit on TikTok.) But some of the finer subtleties are lost. In the novel, Irina’s friends, while predominantly in her thrall, have occasional moments of clarity, in which they see her for what she was. Onstage, Irina metes out her sadism with relatively little pushback, but those telling little flashes of interpersonal tension would have lent themselves to stage adaptation, and Greer could have teased them out more.The set, by Peter Butler, is bare except for a single stool; a screen at the back of the stage shows a photograph of the garage Irina uses as her studio, switching images to denote different settings. But otherwise, and ironically — given that this is a tale about photography — the visual medium is almost entirely eschewed: We see no actual artworks, and events are relayed mostly through anecdote rather than action. The opening strains of Goldfrapp’s 2000 single “Lovely Head” provide an intermittent soundtrack, with doleful whistling and harpsichord creating a suitably gloomy atmosphere.The one-woman show format is apt, in a way, since the story revolves around an unreliable narrator. By standing in for all the other characters, Kelly as Irina has complete control over the narrative, and the absence of any other physical presence gives a literal expression to Irina’s self-absorption.But the format has its limitations. Toward the end of the show, there is a climactic scene in a gallery where Irina exhibits the photographs we’ve been watching her create. It’s an event that can make or break her career, and the place is meant to be teeming with people, but Kelly’s aloneness on the stage feels too palpable. Moreover, the production is poorly paced, and the gallery scene feels rushed, which exacerbates a sense of anticlimax. After all that leisurely buildup, the play’s momentum fizzles out in a matter of minutes.There is, of course, a tradition of thrillers in which a woman engages in the sort of creepy antics more typically associated with men, dating back to movies like “Fatal Attraction” (1987) and “Single White Female” (1992). The tendency, in recent years, has been to dignify the tawdry sensationalism of such stories by offering up pathological explanations for problematic behavior — a theme that has become drearily familiar in contemporary fiction — or, as in Emerald Fennell’s “Promising Young Woman” (2020), framing criminal exploits as morally legitimate revenge missions. In “Boy Parts,” Irina issues a pointed rejection of the trauma plot: “Maybe I just like to hurt people,” she says. She is bad, simply because she is bad.It’s refreshing, but it’s also something of a narrative dead end. There are no subplots here, no moral ambiguities, no ifs or buts. There just isn’t enough else going on to provide satisfying complexity or depth as Irina hurtles from one misdeed to the next in a steeplechase of cruelty and self-sabotage.The audience may project tongue-in-cheek irony onto it, if they so please. The trouble, in the end, is that a winking pastiche of schlock doesn’t look and feel all that different from schlock itself.Boy PartsThrough Nov. 25 at the Soho Theater, in London; sohotheatre.com. More
His feature-length film, “Pressure,” mapped the struggles of Black Britons in an era of unyielding racism. He was knighted in 2022.Horace Ové, a prolific and groundbreaking Trinidad-born filmmaker and photographer whose 1975 film, “Pressure,” explored the fraught experience of Black Britons and is considered the first feature film by a Black British director, died on Sept. 16 in London. He was 86.The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, said his son, Zak.“Pressure” was made on a shoestring, shot in West London with neighborhood characters and Mr. Ové’s friends from film school volunteering their expertise. It was written with Samuel Selvon, a novelist from Trinidad, and it tells the story of Tony, a first-generation Briton and top student who has just graduated from school shouldering the expectations of his traditional West Indian parents and his own ambition, and navigating a community on the boil.As he looks for a job to match his talents, he slowly realizes his is a fool’s errand in racist London. Tony’s older brother is a Black militant — born in the West Indies, he has no illusions about the limitations of the society he has landed in — and he exhorts Tony to join his activist struggle.“Pressure” won awards and critical accolades when it was shown in film festivals in 1975, but it would take three more years to be widely released, as the British Film Institute, which had partly funded the movie, felt its depictions of police racism were incendiary. But Mr. Ové was documenting the climate of the times, and his own experience.“The English ‘Deep South’ has always been the West Indies and Africa,” he told The San Francisco Examiner in 1971. “Until recently, they managed to keep it out of the country. The problem is more complicated in England than in America. In America it’s a visible thing. In England, it’s more of a mental violence.”When “Pressure” was finally released in 1978, critics celebrated Mr. Ové as a significant Black filmmaker — “a talent with which we should reckon,” wrote The Sunday Telegraph — and roundly upbraided the British Film Institute.“It seems palpably absurd to be welcoming Horace Ové’s ‘Pressure’ when the film, one of the most important and relevant the British Film Institute’s Production Board has ever made, was actually shot in 1974 and completed in 1975,” Derek Malcolm wrote in The Guardian. “The BFI should hang its head in corporate shame.”In “Pressure,” Herbert Norville played the lead role of Tony, a recent graduate shouldering the expectations of his traditional West Indian parents and his own ambition.BFI National Archive & The Film FoundationMr. Ové had came of age as an artist in West London in the 1960s. It was a dynamic neighborhood, the heart of the British counterculture and also the Black Power Movement, of which Mr. Ové was an ardent participant.He was a skilled photographer who captured the movement’s leaders and events, as well as his artist peers and Carnival, the ebullient multicultural Caribbean festival that had been exported to Notting Hill in the late 1960s by community activists as a way to celebrate their heritage and ease cultural tensions.He met his second wife, Mary Irvine, at a socialist worker’s meeting; she was the fiercely political owner of a hip women’s clothing boutique called Dudu’s. (It sold no polyester or high-heeled shoes because she felt they were bad for women.)They were a formidable duo. Their West Hampstead apartment became a hub for artists and radicals of all stripes. Michael X, the civil rights activist born Michael de Freitas in Trinidad, lived upstairs. Mealtimes began with the family raising their fists and declaring “Power to the people,” Zak Ové recalled.James Baldwin was a family friend, and when he lectured at a West Indian student center with Dick Gregory, the comedian and activist, Mr. Ové made a compelling short documentary about it.A 1967 photograph by Mr. Ové of Michael X, a civil rights activist, and the Black Power boys in Paddington Station.Horace Ové, via the Estate of Horace OvéMr. Ové was a documentarian at heart — his aesthetic was naturalistic — and he made a number of films for the BBC. “Reggae” (1971) was live footage and interviews that some critics described as that culture’s “Woodstock” movie. “King Carnival” (1973) was a critically acclaimed history of the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival. Skateboard Kings” (1978) chronicled the star skateboarders — the Dogtown crew — of Southern California.“You can imagine Horace showing up in Venice Beach in a massive caftan swathed in African jewelry,” said Zak Ové. “Those kids looked at him and just fell in love.”And then there’s “Black Safari” (1972). It’s a Pythonesque mockumentary about a group of African explorers searching “darkest Lancashire” for the heart of England along the Leeds and Liverpool canal, a good-humored spoof of the traditional colonial narratives.Their boat is called the Queen of Spades, and Mr. Ové is its captain, a character named Horace Ové. Along the way, he and his crew mates have all sorts of adventures, like getting stuck in a lock, coming down with the flu and losing their tempers, witnessing the mysteries of clog dancing and suffering the noise of an oompah band.Mr. Ové in 1979 on the set of “The Latch Key Children,” a television series he directed. via the Estate of Horace Ové“For me, a director is a director no matter what color he is,” Mr. Ové told an interviewer in 2020. “Here in England there is a danger, if you are Black, that all you are allowed to make is films about Black people and their problems. White filmmakers, on the other hand, have a right to make films about whatever they like. People miss out by not asking us or allowing us to do this. We know you, we have to study you in order to survive.”Horace Courtenay Jones was born on Dec. 3, 1936, in Belmont, a suburb in Port of Spain, Trinidad. His parents, Lawrence and Lorna (Rocke) Jones, ran a cafe and hardware store that sold basically everything, including goods for Carnival makers.Horace changed his name to Horace Shango Ové when he emigrated to Britain in 1960. Like many who were involved in the Black Power movement, he wanted to shed his so-called slave name for one that reflected his African heritage. Shango is the Yoruba god of thunder, lightning and justice. But the meaning of “Ové” is still a mystery, Zak Ové said. “It’s a bit like Rosebud,” he said. “I never got a proper answer.”Mr. Ové in the early 1940s in Belmont, Trinidad, with his grandmother, Imelda. The Estate of Horace OveHorace Ové was 24 when he left for England to pursue a career as an artist or an interior designer. He lived in Brixton and West Hampstead, communities populated by West Indian immigrants who had been lured to Britain in the post World War II years by the promise of good jobs, only to be met by offers of menial work and abject racism; Mr. Ové recalled the “No Blacks” signs in the windows of boardinghouses there.He worked as a porter in a hotel, on a fishing boat in the North Sea and as a film extra. When he was cast as a slave in the 1963 film “Cleopatra,” starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the production moved to Rome. He stayed three years, working as a painter and a photographer, and he returned to London determined to make movies, having been deeply influenced by the Italian naturalist approach to filmmaking.Back in London in 1965, Mr. Ové studied at the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School).Over his long career he worked extensively in film and television. His documentary about the Bhopal gas leak in India that killed at least 2,000 people, “Who Shall We Tell,” aired in 1985.A feature film, “Playing Away” (1987), is an amiable comedy of cultures gently clashing when a West Indian cricket team from London is invited to a match in a quaint and insular fictional Suffolk village. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it a “movie about the comic pretensions of social and political organisms — the kind of community-comedy at which British moviemakers have excelled.”In addition to his son Zak, from his second marriage, Mr. Ové is survived by his daughter Genieve Sweeney, from his first marriage, to Jean Balosingh; a daughter, Indra, from his second marriage; and a daughter, Ezana, and a son, Kaz, from his third marriage, to Annabelle Alcazar, a producer of “Pressure” and many of Mr. Ové’s films. All three marriages ended in divorce.Mr. Ové, left, with the writer James Baldwin in 1984 at the opening of the exhibition “Breaking Loose,” a retrospective of Mr. Ové’s photographic work. via the Estate of Horace OvéIn 2022, Mr. Ové was knighted for his “services to media.” In 2007, he was made a commander of the British Empire; while he was in a taxi on the way to the palace for the ceremony, Mr. Ové pulled out a CD of James Brown’s funk anthem “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud,” and asked the African cabby to play it at full volume, which he was delighted to do.“I’m always interested in characters,” Mr. Ové told the Black Film Bulletin in 1996. “I’m interested in people that are trapped, Black, white, whatever race: That is what attracts me to the dramatic film, the trap that we are all in and how we try to get out of it, how we survive and the effects of that trap.” More
This documentary attempts to give a unique look at Queen Elizabeth II by speaking to photographers who took portraits of her.Endless is the stream of programs that have, over the last 70 years, documented the life of Queen Elizabeth II. Yet “Portrait of the Queen” takes on a unique angle, examining the creation of the queen’s public image by, in its most effective moments, speaking to a handful of photographers who have taken her portrait throughout her reign.It’s a relatively interesting perspective to use in considering a monarch who remained obstinately inscrutable from her coronation in 1953 to her death in 2022, at 96. Indeed, the documentary’s most illuminating beats come from the photographers’ recollections of private moments with the queen, when they observe her guarded persona punctuated by flickers of vulnerability.Unfortunately, these scenes are few and far between in a film bogged down by superfluous sequences and formal inconsistencies: an overused, tonally confused score; two narrators (one of whom is a too-moodily-shot Charles Dance); and talking-head interviews that flit between ordinary citizens and seemingly random celebrities, including Susan Sarandon and Isabella Rossellini. (Fabrizio Ferri, the film’s director and a fashion photographer, clearly called in a favor or two.)Elements that could have made for a somewhat intriguing documentary get lost in what amounts to a tedious piece of agitprop that ultimately regurgitates the dutifully respectful picture of Elizabeth we’ve seen time and time again.Portrait of the QueenNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More
The Future of Rap Is Female As their male counterparts turn depressive and paranoid, it’s the women who are having all the fun. Aug. 9, 2023 Like American men in general, our top male rappers appear to be in crisis: overwhelmed, confused, struggling to embody so many contradictory ideals. As a result, the art is […] More
