The current exhibition at Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta features the fashion photography of Lillian Bassman, Frank Horvat, and William Klein. It's appropriately titled for these sweltering Southern summer days: Heat + High Fashion.

From the press release from Jackson Fine Art owner and curator Anna Walker Skillman:

The works of Lillian Bassman, Frank Horvat and William Klein helped define and revolutionize Fashion Photography of the 20th century. Their images of some of the foremost models of the day, immortalized the style of a bygone era. Their Individual styles set them apart but their experimental approach to their crafts unifies them. Working for magazines such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Glamour, with some of the top art directors Alexey Brodovich and Alexander Liberman throughout the 40s, 50s and 60s, these three photographers broke conventional rules and set the ground work for the fashion images we see today.

Lillian Bassman's photos are particularly striking.

Frank Horvat is no slouch either.

This work is so visually stunning. It's beyond fashion, especially considering when they were made.

I just came across a collection of wonderful photographs of New York City's Lower East Side in the late '70s and early '80s by Michael Sean Edwards. The photos are vivid and gritty, both in subject matter and the look of the film.

Really wonderful stuff. Believe it or not, looking at these photos makes me wish I had been old enough to experience this New York. I'll admit I'm romanticizing it quite a bit but there's no denying the artistic and cultural energy of the time. Gone.

Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds chimes in with some commentary on a few of the photos. Definitely worth the quick read.

Check out the whole NYC 1978-1985 set and all of Edwards' work. Lots of great stuff to look at.

Blah Blog Blah has a post up about Allen Ginsberg's old apartment in New York City. The photos in the post aren't much to look at but the words that accompany them are those of a former neighbor and intimate observer.

We didn't bother with each other much, but he'd take photos of my shirtless carpenter boyfriend when he'd use the fire escape for an impromptu workshop. You never knew who'd be gathered around his kitchen table: a PBS film crew, a minion of men with black garb and payis chanting Sabbath prayers, etc.

Get a little more about Ginsberg's old homes here and here.

Blah Blog Blah's post got me to thinking about the recent exhibition at the National Gallery of Art featuring Ginsberg's photographs from the Beat era.

Ginsberg's photographs are far more than historical documents. The same qualities that governed his poetry -- intense observation of the world, deep appreciation for the beauty of the vernacular, and faith in intuitive expression -- also permeate his photographs. Drawing on the most common form of photography, the snapshot, he created spontaneous, uninhibited pictures of ordinary events to celebrate and preserve what he called "the sacredness of the moment."

I love the captions that Ginsberg added to the photographs.

Myself seen by William Burroughs, Kodak Retina new-bought 2'd hand from Bowery hock-shop, our apartment roof Lower East Side between Avenues B & C, Tompkins Park trees under new antennae.

Hey Jack Kerouac...

Jack Kerouac wandering along East 7th Street after visiting Burroughs at our pad, passing statue of Congressman Samuel "Sunset" Cox, "The Letter-Carrier's Friend" in Tompkins Square toward corner of Avenue A, Lower East Side; he's making a Dostoyevsky mad-face or Russian basso be-bop Om, first walking around the neighborhood, then involved with The Subterraneans, pencils & notebook in wool shirt-pockets, Fall 1953, Manhattan.

This one ties in just right with the old apartment story.

I sat for decades at morning breakfast tea looking out my kitchen window, one day recognized my own world the familiar background, a giant wet brick-walled undersea Atlantis garden, waving ailanthus ("stinkweed") "Trees of Heaven," with chimney pots along Avenue A topped by Stuyvesant Town apartments' upper floors two blocks distant on 14th Street, I focus'd on the raindrops along the clothesline. "Things are symbols of themselves," said Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. New York City August 18, 1984

My mind is wild with the thoughts of the energy that filled the room while Ginsberg had his morning tea. Or even the energy the view from his apartment gave back.

Several years ago I was making photos for a company that made school pictures. This company's specialty was making photos of preschool age children. As a result, I was in preschools all over Charlotte every morning chasing 3 and 4 year olds with my camera. The upshot: it was great exercise.

One of those fine mornings I was in the lobby of a church preschool in downtown Charlotte, done with the shoot and wrapping up from the chase. I looked up and saw this woman walking past me, sliding her feet forward more than walking, dressed in her Sunday best even though it was a Tuesday, and an unlit cigarette dangling from her lips.

How could I pass up this serendipitous photo opportunity?

I pulled my camera out, walked up to her, and asked if I could make a quick portrait of her. She stopped shuffling, didn't say a word, and just slightly nodded her head up and down. It was just the two of us for 20 or 30 seconds; woman, camera, man.

After I snapped the shutter I smiled and thanked her. She made no gestures, just turned away and continued to shuffle forward.

Where was she going? What was her story? I don't know and I didn't ask. I had my own story of her in a portrait.

It wasn't until later that day, while looking at the image on the computer, that the true magnificence of this image appeared to me. The hat, the blouse, the "I love Jesus" strap, the look on her face, the miles on her skin, the unlit cigarette -- wow.

A collection of photographs outside the studio of a portrait photographer on calle Río Lerma in Mexico City. I wanted to walk in at some point and have him make a photo of me, but the place was always closed. This photo is my souvenir.

Ben Ratliff has a sobering review of the latest reissue of Exile on Main Street, the classic Rolling Stones album from 1972, over at The New York Times.

One of the selling points for the reissue is its 64-page booklet, which features tons of photographs by French photographer Dominique Tarlé. Tarlé had incredible access to the private world of the Stones during that very crazy, very hedonistic, very creative time in their career.

Crazy? Hedonistic? Creative?

Yep. Ratliff writes:

[Exile on Main Street] is often called one of the best rock records ever made, and framed as an after-the-fact concept album: a wise horror show, an audio diary of rock stars finally facing the rigors of marriage, children and addiction. (“‘Exile’ is about casualties, and partying in the face of them,” the critic Lester Bangs wrote in 1972. “The party is obvious. The casualties are inevitable.”)

Tarlé shows us a little of what Ratliff and Bangs write about and a whole lot more.

See more of Tarlé's photographs and go back and listen to Exile on Main Street. Neither are perfect, but they each capture a very important time in rock and roll history.

PHOTOGRAPHER (to subject): Bend forward, let your hair fall in front of you covering your face, kick your heels out. Now hold that. Perfect.

My daughter is that kid.

You know the one: the kid who likes to jump into the frame and make a goofy face when a photo is being made. Especially when it's not one of her.

However, when I deliberately try to make a photograph of her she's as fickle as a four year old can be. Sometimes she plays along, other times no way. Bribes are common when faced with the latter. As are my desperate pleas of "just one."

Then there are the other other times. For those there are no words.

A couple of months ago -- after having read Patti Smith's Just Kids, her book about her relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe -- I was approached by a friend on Twitter about producing an homage to the highly influential Robert Mapplethorpe. Always up for an excuse to make beautiful photographs, I said yes.

While I don't really shoot in the style that Mapplethorpe is most renowned for, his imagery has had an influence over me for as long as I can remember. It's iconic and poignant. There's no escaping his influence if you're photographing the human body. It was an honor to let his work inspire me.

I'll spare you the details of the actual production and post-production that went into these shots. One thing I do want to mention is that all of the people in these images agreed to do it via Twitter. That's a pretty damn cool use of social media.

Personally, these images fill me with intense awe and infinite sadness. A lot like Mapplethorpe's images do. These are some of the most beautiful images I have ever made. They also stirred up lots of personal crap. Either way, I'm extremely proud of the photographs and am very happy to be on this side of them now, personally and creatively.

Here's the gallery. Not safe for work (NSFW), natch.

PROJECT: MAPPLETHORPE HOMAGE

Another great quote from Roberto Bolaño's novel Amulet:

For a moment, with a sinking heart, I thought he was going to tell me about an ex-lover. We all have an old love affair to talk about when there's nothing left to say and day is breaking.

Have you ever been so awestruck by a fellow artist's work that you felt intimidated or inferior?

Writer Maud Newton has. She confesses:

A couple weeks ago, I was reading Rupert Thomson’s gorgeously evocative, meticulously pared-down This Party’s Got to Stop.

About a third of the way through, I had to take a break. The essay I’m writing had stalled. My verbs seemed unconscionably obvious next to his, my sentences clumsy, my narrative voice about as natural as a conversation heard through a tin horn.

You're not alone, Maud. It happens to me all the time. For me it comes from looking at the work of photographers I greatly admire. For instance:

Robert Maxwell  ↓

Chris Buck  ↓

Jake Chessum  ↓

Danny Clinch  ↓

So what do you do when you suffer, as even Joan Didion too suffered, from "awe-inspired paralysis"?

Maud has her own trick.

For occasions like this, for the past couple years, I’ve kept on hand a well-reviewed novel that I don’t like or respect. It’s sitting on my desk right now, in fact. I don’t re-read it in any detail, because I don’t want it to contaminate my thinking, but flicking through the book makes me feel better about my own work, however imperfect it may be.

That's a good one if you're a writer.

As a photographer, I just take what inspires me about the work or style -- the pose, light, composition, film grain, whatever -- and file it away in my head. I may even go so far as to create an image or more in a favorite photographer's style just to get it out of my system.

The upshot here is that in the process I've (hopefully) learned something new about my craft by doing and not just looking. Even if I am only filing away the image for future reference the influence of my heroes is part of my work. Sometimes you see it in a final image, sometimes you don't.

I find great joy in the work of my favorite photographers (as Maud does in her favorite writers). It's almost as if each and every one of them is right there with me each and every time I make a photograph. Yeah, it's intimidating, but we make a damn good team.

Patti Smith, from the book Just Kids, after having visited the Museum of Art in Philadelphia for the first time at the age of 12:

I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

Just Kids is the story of Patti Smith, one of the greatest performers in music, and Robert Mapplethorpe, one of the most significant and controversial photographers of our time.

This book, however, chronicles their lives before the fame and recognition. Patti and Robert are two fledgling kids living in New York City and full of a longing to live a creative life full of unconditional love and support.

   I was particularly moved by the drawing he had done on Memorial Day. I had never seen anything like it. What also struck me was the date: Joan of Arc's feast day. The same day I had promised to make something of myself before her statue.
   I told him this, and he responded that the drawing was symbolic of his own commitment to art, made on the same day. He gave it to me with out hesitation and I understood in this small space of time we had mutually surrended our loneliness and replaced it with trust.

This is an iconic image: a photograph of Patti Smith created by Robert Mapplethorpe for the cover of her debut album Horses. It and the album are classics.

I'm finishing up Patti's book, Just Kids. In it she writes about the creation of this image. It's too good to not share.

There was never any question that Robert would take the portrait for the cover of Horses, my aural sword sheathed with Robert's image. I had no sense of how it would look, just that it should be true.

We never talked about what we would do, or what it would look like. He would shoot it. I would be shot.
   I had my look in mind. He had his light in mind. That is all.

   The clouds kept moving back and forth. Something happened with his light meter and he became slightly agitated. He took a few shots. He abandoned the light meter. A cloud went by and the triangle disappeared. He said, "You know, I really like the whiteness of the shirt. Can you take the jacket off?"
   I flung my jacket over my shoulder, Frank Sinatra style. I was full of references. He was full of light and shadow.
   "It's back," he said.
   He took a few more shots.
   "I got it."
   "How do you know?"
   "I just know."
   He took twelve pictures that day.
   Within a few days he showed me the contact sheet. "This one has the magic," he said.
   When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us.