Timeless Beauty at C/O Berlin
It’s a good pr event when the museum curator leads dozens of curious bloggers into the institution’s cavernous attic and warns everyone to be careful because the floor seems to be unstable—and then leaves it at that. After a few nervous laughs and timid steps, the warning got tossed aside and we headed into the space above the dome for a secret peek at this seldom-seen space.
We were on a private tour of the Timeless Beauty exhibition, a 100-year survey of fashion photography from Many Ray to Mario Testino that is happening now through October 28. The photographs are displayed with the magazines that presented them, a choice that highlights the shifts in the visual language of fashion over the decades.
The building that houses C/O Berlin was once the Royal Post Office and it is as interesting as the exhibitions on display. The interior is a charming, banged-up mix of architectural details that only Berlin could pull off; ornate nineteenth-century floor tiles give way to curling sheets of 1970s DDR linoleum, the stairway walls are exposed layers of chipped paint…and you guessed it—the building’s future is uncertain, so visit while you still can.
Timeless Beauty
100 years of fashion photography from Man Ray to Mario Testino
August 18 to October 28, 2012
C/O Berlin im Postfuhramt
Oranienburger Straße 35/36
>> See map
Mary Jo Hoffman / Still Blog
A search for images of Lake Superior led to this beautiful and ongoing project by Mary Jo Hoffman that documents things gathered during daily excursions. I love it that she lists the original location of each item—the harbor in Grand Marais, the side of a highway, the beach in the Bretagne, trails in Saint Paul, MN.
The Getty
There is so much we didn’t do during our time here. I tried to console myself during the return tram ride from the Getty yesterday that we did a lot and that three weeks just isn’t enough time to do it all. But still I feel bad.
The trip to the Getty was a small triumph of time management. The Pacific Standard Time exhibition and the experimental photographs of Lyonel Feininger were both super exciting to me and just what I needed to see right now. It isn’t often that I go to look and get this worked up about so many things. Also, I had my mind blown by Peter Alexander who was on pretty serious cloud patrol for his resin cube sculpture, Cloud Box.
This is called leaving on a high note. Good-bye LA!
Pia Fries at the Berlinische Gallerie
Today over to the Berlinische Gallerie. It’s a little oddly placed, so it requires a short walk through an odd urban landscape.
There were two shows I wanted to see: As Time Goes By, which included work by 38 artists that has to do with time, and the work of Pia Fries, who won the 2009 Fred Thieler Prize for painting.
Upstairs I found a little group of photos from the late 19th century of Charlottenburg. I was really surprised to see these because they show rural farmland. These kinds of photos are common in the United States but I have never seen any of European cities and I guess it makes sense why.
Picturing America at the Deutsche Guggenheim
A late Sunday afternoon visit to the Deutsche Guggenheim to see Picturing America: Photorealism in the 1970′s. Afterwards we wandered about in the drizzle, first to Friedriechstraße and then to Hackesher Markt. The light was beautiful despite the rain and there were a lot of photos to be had, but unfortunately I had the wrong camera with me.
My favorite moment was the photo on the bridge. Just to my right sat a man in a chair playing the accordion. The darkness so complete that his face was completely obscured by it. It was his body moving with the instrument rather than the sight of him that made his presence noticeable. We stayed only moments, then left him behind and continued home.
