An Armenian woman in national costume poses for Prokudin-Gorskii on a hillside near Artvin (in present day Turkey), circa 1910.
This series of exquisitely beautiful images from southern and central Russia is already all over the web via the Boston Globe, but Coilhouse has to post a heads up in case anybody missed them. Absolutely stunning. Boston.com editor-in-chief, Alan Taylor, says:
“With images from southern and central Russia in the news lately due to extensive wildfires, I thought it would be interesting to look back in time with this extraordinary collection of color photographs taken between 1909 and 1912. In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images.”
A man and woman pose in Dagestan, ca. 1910.
“The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time – when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun. Collected here are a few of the hundreds of color images made available by the Library of Congress, which purchased the original glass plates back in 1948.”
The full gallery is viewable here, high res. Previously on Coilhouse:
Isfandiyar Jurji Bahadur, Khan of the Russian protectorate of Khorezm (Khiva, now a part of modern Uzbekistan), full-length portrait, seated outdoors, ca. 1910.
In a new series titled Machine Punk, artist Laurie Lipton (previously on Coilhouse, with a cameo appearance by Caryn Drexl) skillfully renders a series of cumbersome, beautifully sprawling machines whose tangled wires and polluted textures conspire to create a sense of unease. Lipton states that the series was inspired by steampunk, but notes that the machines in her images run on “madness and electricity” rather than steam. “I was vacuuming one day, and noticed the amount of plugs and cables on the floor… a veritable wasp’s nest of wires and sockets connecting a hoard of gadgets and doo-dads intertwining around the house and my life. I was trapped like a fly in an electrical web. What had happened? Were these things making my life easier or more complex?” The resulting series features contraptions ranging from rickety flying machines to torturous exercise equipment, and critiques – among other things – CCTV surveillance, a broken recycling system, and the empty thought-calories of spending too much time online. Most of the images in this series are best enjoyed at a larger size, so click here to see them all.
Machine Punk will be on display at La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles from November 5 – 28th in Gallery 1, side-by-side with artist and Coilhouse collaborator Jessica Joslin in Gallery 2. Also, if you’re a fan of Laurie Lipton’s ghostly older work, it’s worth mentioning that she recently collaborated with clothing company AllSaints to produce a line of t-shirts featuring the wraiths and skeletons of her previous work, and that some of these shirts are now on sale. [Many thanks to the awesome Coilhouse reader who sent this in - I received your submission a while ago, but can't find it now to credit you! Was it via Twitter?]
Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Born on this baleful day back in 1890. Portrait by Bruce Timm
“There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.”
Below is an unforgettable and somewhat controversial piece of U.S. history. Commissioned in 1951 by the US government, Duck and Cover was distributed as a children’s safety education film that taught atom bomb preparedness.
This film is chock-full of alarming statements like, “There are two kinds of attack: with warning and with no warning” and “Tony knows that the bomb can explode any time of the year, day or night, and he’s ready for it!”, over striking footage of schoolchildren dropping to the ground in the middle of play, “enemy planes” dimming the skies, and the U.S. military at the ready. Made during the height of the red scare, Duck and Cover feels more like a Pinko-paranoia-induction tactic than a safety film, especially when we consider that all of the methods shown would be absolutely useless at ground zero. From the film’s Wikipedia page:
For those not at ground zero, there would be a delay between the flash (indicating the need to duck and cover) and the arrival of the blast wave, which could shatter windows and cause other blast or impact injuries (although electromagnetic radiation, such as infra-red and gamma rays, would arrive at the observer’s position at the same time as the light flash, leaving the observer no time to find cover from these particular aspects of a nuclear detonation). A newspaper would, at least in theory, block alpha radiation although skin does this anyway, provide some shielding from the heat (IR, visible and UV) radiation and small debris, though it would have no effect on the beta and gamma radiation or on the shockwave that would accompany an atomic detonation.
Watch Duck and Cover below and pay close attention. After all, you never know when the bright flash may come.
There is a weirdly compelling sort of attraction to the exaggerated melodrama present in Josef Fenneker’s work. Inky backgrounds of blackest shadows and murky, moody gloom provide stark contrast to bloodless facial expressions, vivid with violent emotion – whether delirious passion, or murderous lunacy – and it is not difficult to imagine oneself mesmerized, whipped into a maelstrom of sympathetic mania when confronted with such imagery.
Toten Tanz, Marmorhaus
Fenneker, a German artist in 1920s Berlin, “became the eye of the cultural and political hurricane that was Weimar Germany”. A painter, graphic designer, and stage designer, he worked in a “mixed style, strongly tinged with expressionist characteristics”, and there is the foreboding of gathering storms and imminent, though decadent, doom in almost all his work.
Born in 1895, the son of a grocer, little of Josef Fenneker’s early life in Bocholt is known. Perhaps inspired by his uncle Anton Marx, a church painter and architect, Fenneker studied at the Arts and Crafts schools in Munster, Dusseldorf and Munich, and became one of Emil Orlik’s master-class students at the school of the Berlin Arts and Crafts Museum.
First employed by Berlin theaters – most notably the Marmorhaus, the “paramount movie palace of Germany” – Fenneker designed numerous film posters, between 1919 and 1924. A “ combination of Radio City Music Hall and Graumans Chinese Theater”, any film premiering there gained “instant prestige”. Thus, Fenneker was not just another movie poster designer, but THE movie posterist of his day, in whose hands the “art of the film poster arguably reached its zenith,” and in the postwar years he became “one of the most sought after designers of film posters. “ Fenneker went on to create stage designs for theater and illustrations for such magazines as Simplicissimus and Jugend.
Josef Fenneker died in Frankfurt in January1956 of heart failure. In the obituaries of the regional and national press, he was noted as one of the most important and most original German set designers of the 1920s and 1930s. More than 300 works have been preserved from his vast oeuvre by the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, several more of which can be seen below the cut.
So… any Mad Men fans in the ‘haus? No spoilers in the comments, please, because I’m not sure if Mer and Zo have had a chance to catch last Sunday’s Season 4 premiere. But without giving away any plot points, I just want to ask: what was up with Don Draper pulling a Dov Charney with his horrible Jantzen pitch? Our colleague Copyranter eats this kind of American Apparel shit for breakfast. The Portland-based swimwear company was portrayed as a stodgy, conservative business to whom Draper declares angrily, “you’re too scared of the skin your two-piece was designed to show off.” I guess he (and/or the show’s writers) never saw Jantzen’s Vargas-inspired campaign, which ran in LIFE in 1947 (below). Dear readers, I proudly tag this post “Stroke Material” and present you with my stash of vintage Jantzen advertisements from the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. Sun-kissed beauties with Bettie Page smiles and space-age swimsuits – as well as a few clever parodies – after the jump.
Happy Summer Solstice! Y’know, unless, like Sergeant Howie here, you’re not into that sort of thing…
SPOILER ALERT. Don’t watch if you haven’t seen The Wicker Man before! Rent the full film.
Summer is Icumen in,
Loudly sing, cuckoo!
Grows the seed and blows the mead,
And springs the wood anew;
Sing, cuckoo!
Ewe bleats harshly after lamb,
Cows after calves make moo;
Bullock stamps and deer champs,
Now shrilly sing, cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo
Wild bird are you;
Be never still, cuckoo!
“Sumer Is Icumen In“, a traditional English round, is one of the oldest known pieces of polyphonic music in existence, dating back to the early 13th century. It’s actually a song celebrating the advent of spring (or Christ’s crucfixion, depending on what translation you favor), not summer. Yet it always seems ends up in my stereo on June 21st.
“Versailles, 1685. France has industrialized centuries before her neighbors but focuses on creating exquisitely ornate robotic shells for the aristocracy called, DOLLIES. Towering, lavishly expensive, [they] run on electricity provided by damming the Seine. Only the court elite wears DOLLIES, but their upkeep is beginning to bankrupt France. During the king’s birthday party, his Dolly explodes but is found to be empty…”
Artist Molly Crabapple (look for her illustrations in #05!) and author John Leavitt have been creating lots of buzz in recent weeks with The Puppet Makers, their gorgeous “rococo steampunk murder mystery” set in Versailles, 1685. DC Comics’ online imprint, Zuda, has been publishing it in page-by-page increments each Wednesday. A stunning new page went up this morning.
Molly –generous and supportive friend to Coilhouse that she is– would like to give away a signed, limited edition print of one of The Puppet Makers’ pages to the Coilhouse reader with the “best guess as to where the king is”. Read up, then leave your deduction in comments for a chance to win!
Model: Maggie of Lucent Dossier. Collar by Dream Rockwell.
LA-based Allan Barnes’ love of “Jurassic” image-making technologies – ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, instant film, and the like – lends itself well to his portraits of artists, models and performers from the LA scene. Recently, his work has displayed a greater degree of sartorial opulence thanks to contributions from the likes of Lucent Dossier’s Dream Rockwell (who created the collar above), Billy and Mellie (formerly) of Antiseptic, and one Miss Laila (responsible for the masks/headpieces below, though there’s no known URL for her work), among others. Sadly, many of the most stunning images are marred by what I consider to be a gruesome watermark, but that doesn’t dissuade me from sharing them after the jump. Barnes is also a teacher, so LA residents interested in learning old-timey processes are encouraged to follow him on Flickr for updates on workshops in the area.
Just a wee bit o’ vintage muppet-on-muppet violence to kick start your morning. The backstory, via Wikia:
In 1957, Jim Henson was approached by a Washington, D.C. coffee company to produce commercials for Wilkins Coffee. The local stations only had ten seconds for station identification, so the Muppet commercials had to be lightning-fast — essentially, eight seconds for the commercial pitch and a two-second shot of the product.
From 1957 to 1961, Henson made 179 commercials for Wilkins Coffee and other Wilkins products, including Community Coffee and Wilkins Tea. The ads were so successful and well-liked that they sparked a series of remakes for companies in other local markets throughout the 1960s.
The ads starred the cheerful Wilkins, who liked Wilkins Coffee, and the grumpy Wontkins, who hated it. Wilkins would often do serious harm to Wontkins in the ads — blowing him up, stabbing him with a knife, and smashing him with a club, among many other violent acts.
