Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe photographed by Annie Leibovitz for US Vogue October 2011.
Abelardo Morell, View of Central Park Looking North—Fall, 2008
“Explaining the optical principle behind the device is probably the most complicated thing about it. A camera obscura receives images just like the human eye—through a small opening and upside down. Light from outside enters the hole at an angle, the rays reflected from tops of objects, like trees, coursing downward, and those from the lower plane, say flowers, traveling upward, the rays crossing inside the dark space and forming an inverted image. It seems like a miracle, or a hustler’s trick, but it’s high school physics. The brain automatically rights the eye’s image; in a regular camera a mirror flips the image.”
(via Camera Obscura - Photo Gallery - National Geographic Magazine)
Next was a video presentation. Bruni-Sarkozy crouched down to watch, balancing an elbow on one bent knee, like Rodin’s “The Thinker.” She was offered a chair. “No, no,” she said. “It’s more agreeable to me. I’m stretching my back.” She watched a video called “French Poodle” (a poodle in a military uniform saluting the viewer) and then went downstairs for a reception next to an art installation (a taxidermied deer with a human face staring into a pair of headlights). Bruni-Sarkozy was handed a glass of champagne, and she made a toast. “I loved being here,” she said. “I wish my days were longer.” She went out to her motorcade, in the rain. The students and the administrators watched.
“She’s beautiful,” Irina Makarova, a painter, said. “We were just gape-mouthed.”
“It was like we were trying to talk, but no words were coming out,” another student, Eric Zhang, said.
“I was a little bit of a deer in the headlights,” Nancy Barton, the N.Y.U. chair, said. “I kept calling her Carla.”
Jason Martin, the video artist, said that he’d meant to play a different video, not “French Poodle,” but his computer had crashed and he’d panicked.
Yann Toma, the Sorbonne dean, shrugged and said, “Art is like that.”
— Lizzie Widdicombe, “Carla Bruni takes a tour of N.Y.U.”, New Yorker
Marilyn Monroe reads Ulysses
What attracts us more: beauty or brutality?
NY Times critic A. O. Scott looks back at the 1951 classic A Streetcar Named Desire and the moment when movie acting changed.
(via cowgirlblues: clarelefebure)
