Hip Walk

We Are Moving

2010-08-23T09:00:00.003+01:00

Like many couples my age, my blogs Art Of The City and Hip Walk have been deathly quiet for a few months and can now be found shacked up together at a new address. From here on in, they will forever be known by a singular name - www.hipwalk.tumblr.com - but, provided the removal men don't drop anything en route, at least you should be seeing a fair bit more from them over the coming months.

Ricoh's Adventure

2009-10-21T21:10:00.001+01:00

Please check out my latest fledgling project at Ricoh's Adventure.

Ideas and input would be really appreciated...

Ed Ruscha: Gas Guzzling

2009-10-14T17:36:00.000+01:00

"I secretly appreciated the architecture of these gas stations. I like that concept of a little building that has a great overhang, a respite from the sun where you could pull your car up underneath and then go inside your place. I dreamed of living in a gas station at one time."

- Ed Ruscha, 2009

Mark Rothko: Loosening Your Grip

2009-10-12T15:22:00.003+01:00

Mark Rothko, Black on Maroon, Mural, Section 3, 1959

Tate Liverpool have collected together Mark Rothko's Seagram Murals again, 21 years after they helped open the gallery. I spent years wanting to like Rothko more than I actually did and it took seeing some of these colossal works at Tate Modern to truly understand his appeal. When a large Rothko fills your field of vision, all sense of perspective is lost. Appreciating his work requires you to let go momentarily, to loosen your grip. Most of my photographs focus on life's little details and I love that there is something so overwhelming out there to counterbalance that.

And with Anish Kapoor's retrospective and Miroslaw Balka's How It Is both opening recently and featuring similar attempts to immerse the viewer in three-dimensional colour fields (Kapoor with an indented canary-yellow cone; Balka with a room filled with darkness), you can't help but think that the notoriously depressive artist might just have cracked a smile from his great studio in the sky.

Left: Alexander Liberman, Rothko in his Studio, New York, 1964. © J. Paul Getty Trust

Image of the Day: Davide Monteleone

2009-10-07T17:24:00.004+01:00

Davide Monteleone, from Dusha, Russian Soul, 2007

Image of the Day: Arnold Newman

2009-10-06T15:25:00.003+01:00

Arnold Newman, Jackson Pollock, Long Island, 1949

Image of the Day: Jeff Wall

2009-10-05T17:18:00.002+01:00

Jeff Wall, After 'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue, 1999–2000

Transparency in lightbox, 174 x 250.5cm. © The Artist

Image of the Day: Saul Leiter

2009-10-04T00:01:00.000+01:00

Saul Leiter, Taxi, New York, 1957

Classic Album Covers #2 - Ornette Coleman

2009-10-03T10:51:00.000+01:00

This next cover isn't even one of Coleman's greatest records but both sides of the sleeve combine to sublime effect and the whole style marked a tipping point in jazz album design.

This sleeve was put together by Forlenza Venosa Associates - an ads, promo and music publishing company formed in 1966, when the former Columbia Records editor and art director Bob Venosa joined the fledgling Forlenza Associates.

For the past decade, the style of the Blue Note label had been dictated by designer Reid Miles, who had interpreted a string of landmark titles literally with smart modernist designs and Francis Wolff's noir-ish, two-tone photography.

With Venosa on board, however, they began to introduce increasingly wild, Afro-psychedelic art to the label's album sleeves, no doubt encouraged by his time spent hanging out with Carlos Santana and Jimi Hendrix.

However, for a year or two in the late 1960s, they turned out a string of covers that bridged the gap between the monochrome mod classicism of the early Reid Miles sleeves and the crazier excesses of the post-1970 designs.

Venosa worked on a number of classics, including Donald Byrd's Slow Drag, Lonnie Smith's Think!, Hank Mobley's Reach Out and Bobby Hutcherson's Total Eclipse, but for sheer atmosphere and timeless style, this wins it for me.

Image of the Day: Fred Herzog

2009-10-03T00:01:00.000+01:00

Fred Herzog, Crossing Powell, 1984

Image of the Day: Philip Lorca Dicorcia

2009-10-02T00:01:00.000+01:00

Philip Lorca DiCorcia, New York, 1993

Image of the Day: Robert Rauschenberg

2009-10-01T00:01:00.001+01:00

Robert Rauschenberg, Sky Rite, 1969

(From the Stoned Moon Series)

Lithograph, 86 x 66cm

Image of the Day: Paul Rand

2009-09-30T00:01:00.000+01:00

Paul Rand, Poster for Aspen Design Conference, 1966

Robert Mapplethorpe: Testing Memory

2009-09-29T22:13:00.001+01:00

I was in desperate need for distraction a few weeks ago and decided to catch Robert Mapplethorpe's Polaroids exhibition at Modern Art Oxford in its last week. Like most people, I came to Mapplethorpe via his close association Patti Smith, but I enjoyed the show for a whole host of unexpected reasons.

Think Mapplethorpe and think punk rock, polaroids and sado-masochism - all instantly gratifying hits. And while there was plenty of that among the 96 shots in the show, I was surprised how many lonely still lifes there were - single subject shots of dusty sideboards and worn mattresses from friend's apartments in early 1970s New York.

These images dealt with unexpected emotions; of nostalgia, contemplation and grief. Arranged as respite to his more aggressively sexual snapshots, they felt charged with a negative force, as if you could sense the absence of each object's owner(s).

Maybe I was looking for this. Having spent 36 hours by my Mum's bedside before she passed away in the early hours of the previous Saturday, I had found myself with plenty of time to dwell on similar small details and inanimate objects: the folds of her bed sheets, the patterns of the hospital curtains, the arrangement of belongings on her dresser. Regardless of the prompting, I felt like Mapplethorpe was looking at his immediate surroundings through a similar filter.

I was lucky enough to interview Patti Smith a few years ago and she told me how she had taken to visiting the houses and graveyards of the writers and artists that she admired to photograph the tools of their creativity - the writing implements of William Blake and such like. I wonder now if that was a fascination that dated back to her time together with Mapplethorpe, or whether she was belatedly picking up on the methods of her former lover?

Soon after that exhibition, the ever-generous Bill Guy recommended I take a look at the work of Uta Barth, a beautiful and rather understated photographer working in Los Angeles. As her website puts it, "her interiors and landscapes engage the viewer in an almost subliminal way, testing memory, intellect and habitual response." That seemed to crystallise what I had felt towards Mapplethorpe's still lifes but also left me sad that the Oxford exhibition and accompanying book had all been promoted in a rather one-dimensional way - even looking for a polaroid to accompany this post, I found plenty of his S&M shots and portraits but none of the more modest, contemplative pieces. Sure, people like to be titillated and provoked but where is the harm in presenting a fuller picture of an artist with more to offer? To me it was clear that sex sells but memories last.

Image of the Day: André Kertész

2009-09-29T00:01:00.000+01:00

André Kertész, Martinique, 1 January, 1972

Gelatin silver print, 19.1x24.8cm

Image of the Day: Bill Jacklin

2009-09-28T00:01:00.003+01:00

Bill Jacklin, Black Umbrella V, 2007

Oil on canvas. © Bill Jacklin

Image of the Day: Walter Hanlon

2009-09-27T00:01:00.000+01:00

Walter Hanlon, Humphrey Richard Adeane Lyttelton, 1954

Resin print, 37.7 x 27.5cm

Image of the Day: Ernst Haas

2009-09-26T00:01:00.000+01:00

Ernst Haas, Locksmith's Sign, NYC, 1952

Image of the Day: Andy Warhol

2009-09-25T15:08:00.001+01:00

Andy Warhol, Dennis Hopper, 1971

Silkscreen print with paint and ink on canvas, 101.6x101.6cm

Dennis Hopper Collection, Los Angeles

Hip Detours #3 - Jörg Sasse

2009-09-25T09:48:00.006+01:00

Jörg Sasse

The Jive Talk
“In the context of art photography, Sasse rightly begins by breaking the replicative link between camera and subject. Taking this altered concept of photography as a basic premise, he sees pictures not as illustrations of something else, or as records of the past, but first and foremost as two-dimensional formations, during the viewing of which the present occurs.”

- Stefan Gronert, The Düsseldorf School of Photography, 2009

The Hip Walk
Atmospheric, lo-fi shots of otherwise insignificant architectural details that feel loaded with nostalgia and intrigue.

www.c42.de

Robert Frank: Blurred Demons

2009-09-17T16:34:00.002+01:00

I just read this great story about "that little ole lonely elevator girl" from Robert Frank's photo, above. More than 50 years on, she came forward after seeing her 15-year old self in a review of Frank's The Americans at SFMOMA. I particularly like Kerouac's description of the "blurred demons" in the photo too - it's something I've attempted in a few pictures with mixed success.

Anyway, thanks to the Exposure Project blog for tipping me off to this (via the NPR site). I found their blog while I was searching for Christopher Doyle images online yesterday and it is the sort of site worth setting aside a long, wet afternoon to properly dig through.

Christopher Doyle: In The Mood...

2009-09-16T09:21:00.000+01:00

Another plea for recommendations here. After posting about the work of Rut Blees Luxemburg a few weeks ago, I've rewatched a bunch of bootleg Wong Kar Wai DVDs I picked up in Hong Kong last year. The director has worked with cinematographer Christopher Doyle on most of his features so far and between them they've established a very distinctive style, taking their cue from vintage noir and retro-futurism, with plenty of slo-mo camera work and unusual viewpoints.

It is the over-saturated colours and heavy contrasts that I'm particularly interested in, especially on 2046 and In The Mood For Love. I've seen it called "Vanguard colour grading" but can't find a good explanation of this on the 'net. I'm guessing it's an expensive post-production filter of some sort but I'm sure there must be an easy way of getting similar effects in Photoshop - a few things I've tried look far too processed or heavy. If anybody can advise on a neat way to replicate this or maybe point me to an online tutorial somewhere, that'd be much appreciated. Here is the kind of thing I mean...

2046, (Dir.) Wong Kar Wai and (Cine.) Christopher Doyle

Chungking Express, (Dir.) Wong Kar Wai and (Cine.) Christopher Doyle

In The Mood For Love, (Dir.) Wong Kar Wai and (Cine.) Christopher Doyle

Tom Waits: Control Freak

2009-09-15T16:24:00.007+01:00

Dutch photographer-turned-director Anton Corbijn has spent the best part of three decades taking portraits of Tom Waits and the pair have now collaborated on a book of iconic shots and lyrics. Waits/Corbijn was due out today according to Amazon but it looks like we might have to wait until the end of the year to see it, judging by the website of publishers Schirmer-Mosel.

Waits must be a dream to photograph as I can't think of another singer-songwriter of his stature who has maintained such a strong aesthetic over a 30-plus year career. His lyrics have always been a grab bag of vivid visual references and twisted narratives; of Potter's Field graveyards, windshield diamonds and jockeys full of bourbon; of buildings "lit like dominoes" and hookers so good they'd "make a dead man come."

And for a funny looking fella, he seems to really enjoy the theatre of the photo shoot, with each scene serving to accentuate his various character traits in neat little ways. When he barks into a megaphone or bangs a drum, it encapsulates that unpredictable menace within his music - that same uncomfortable feeling you get when a nutjob sits down beside you on the bus. Similarly, when he is shown elsewhere in silhouette clambering up a tree, it is impossible not to fixate on his simian-like features more closely next time around or chuckle at the Jungle Book-era Louis Prima bounce to his gravelly scats. Corbijn's photographs draw many of these traits out beautifully and the pair's collaboration should be a rare treat. Whenever it comes out.

Photos © Anton Corbijn

Quotes: Jane Wilson

2009-09-01T13:57:00.004+01:00

"I'd describe it as the experience of solitude. Growing up on a farm you accept solitude and live with it. Solitude is Midwestern. It's not loneliness. It's solitude, and it's valuable."

- Jane Wilson on the emotional component of her landscapes, 2001

Classic Album Covers #1 - Terry Callier

2009-08-28T10:22:00.002+01:00

As this blog has slowly transformed into a collection of the many influences I'm absorbing into the photography on Art Of The City, I thought I should finally start acknowledging by other biggest source of visual inspiration: album covers. I remember Paul Weller once saying something to the effect that he didn't have a favourite author and that when he was growing up that Lennon and McCartney were his favourite authors. In that same spirit, when I was growing up in a non-descript Midlands satellite town, photography and art galleries didn't really register but album and single sleeves proved a constant source of inspiration. I would identify with a great cover, trust a songwriter more for their artistic eye and often chance my luck on buying an album on the strength of the appearance alone. The covers mattered and they still do.

This occasional series will dig through the photos and designs that I've loved for years or just recently discovered, from the strange oddities to the stylish classics. First up is this cover from Terry Callier's 1973 lost gem What Color Is Love. The music is a dream; a hazy, lovelorn mix of folk, jazz and soul. When the sax flies on the epic opener Dancing Girl, it cuts cleanly through the bluesy atmosphere like a finger through dust on a shelf. As one Amazon.com reviewer has put it so sweetly, "everything you think about the cover is revealed in song." Listen to the full album here...

Hip Detours #2 - David A Ljungberg

2009-08-28T09:26:00.002+01:00

David A Ljungberg

The Hip Walk

Imaginative manipulations, ethereal street photography and fantastical illustrations from the Swedish creative. Thanks to the excellent F Blog for the tip...

www.davidljungberg.se

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Double Or Quits

2009-08-25T10:28:00.000+01:00

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sifnos, Greece, 1961

I've been in Paris for work over the weekend but managed to see the two Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibitions that are currently on show in the city - Henri Cartier-Bresson à Vue d'œil at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) and Henri Cartier-Bresson: L’Imaginaire d’Après Nature at the Museum of Modern Art.

There is plenty of overlap in the two displays, explained away by the former being a selection from their 300-strong collection and the latter being a set curated by Cartier-Bresson himself in 1975. The Museum has the benefit of a few larger prints and extra space, while the MEP has some less well-known images to tempt you in (not to mention the added bonus of some Saul Leiter images in the "recent acquisitions" display in the basement...). Regardless of the relative merits, what really struck me is the way in which HCB really drew the best from black and white - the shot above is almost no longer a scene from a Greek village but a beautifully arranged collection of bold abstract shapes. It is not only a moment caught but also a scene filtered down to it's very essence.

Quotes: William Burroughs

2009-08-18T09:56:00.004+01:00

"You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing? My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live."

- William Burroughs quoted in Paris Review, Fall 1965

Todd Antony: Outside In

2009-08-17T12:16:00.004+01:00

Todd Antony, Sicilian Room, 2009

Just a quicky today. Here's another great long exposure night photograph from Todd Antony. I especially like the fact that you get a sense of the city through the curtains and condensation, without ever seeing it directly. It is taken in a very traditional interior but the bustle of the city is deliciously close at hand, just outside the window. You can view more of Todd's stylish landscape work on his own flashy website here or better captioned on his flickr site here.

Hip Detours #1 - Antonio Santin

2009-08-14T16:13:00.003+01:00

I come across plenty of great young(ish) artists and photographers online that I want to share and so I've come up with a quick format for this going forward. In a bid to turn a few more people on to their work, I'm going to offer you condensed tasters of their latest output, with a link to finding out more. Here's the first, I hope I end up uncovering something new that you like...

Antonio Santin

The Jive Talk
“Santin’s images are imbued with a provocative edge, a painterly violation of photographic intentions - whilst simultaneously suggesting a celebration of the freedom of paint, enlivening an image from the flatness and fixed, controlled nature of the photographic image.”

- Rollo Contemporary Art press release

The Hip Walk
Spookily photorealistic portraits of women drowning in milk

www.antoniosantin.com

Floriane de Lassée: Another Night Shift

2009-08-13T15:31:00.007+01:00

Continuing my recent fascination with long exposure shots of cities by night, I came across the "Night Series" by young Parisian photographer Floriane de Lassée. It is obviously something of an obsession for him too, as he has produced shots in a variety of locations over a number of years now, starting in New York and taking in Moscow, Paris and the Far East.

There's a real sense of inquiry and improvement across each subsequent series too, culminating in the stunning Beijing shots below, which are the first set of nocturnal photos I have seen that manage to capture interesting interiors and exteriors in a single image.

Floriane de Lassée, Image 213, Beijing 2008

from the "Night Views" series

Floriane de Lassée, Image 225, Beijing 2008

from the "Night Views" series

Poster Art: Out Of The Past

2009-08-12T14:11:00.000+01:00

William Rose, Out Of The Past
Original US poster print, 104x69cm, 1947

Poster Art Wednesday is back with the bang of a vintage Enfield revolver, as I opted to dig up this vintage Mitchum film noir.

William Rose was one of the most prolific illustrators of the 1940s, preparing RKO cinema posters for everything from "the greatest film of all time" Citizen Kane to the cult B-movie Cat People (tagline: "She was marked with the curse of those who slink and court and kill by night!"). The artist also reportedly produced a painting a week for romance novels and society magazines, like Cosmopolitan and American Weekly.

The real interesting twist here is in the divided loyalties between these two sources of commissions. By all accounts, Citizen Kane was loosely based on the story of USnewspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who just happened to own American Weekly. Hearst had taken objection to the Orson Welles' film and done his damnedest to prevent its theatrical release in 1941. Given that there was a Rose original advertising Citizen Kane in foyers across the country, I can only presume he must have been a hell of a sweet talker to keep up the commissions from the notoriously no-nonsense Hearst.

Rut Blees Luxemburg: In Need Of Exposure

2009-08-03T16:36:00.005+01:00

The fantastic thing about blogging is that you can start a new blog entirely unsure as to the exact purpose of why you are doing it, only to then land on an answer maybe 30, 50 or several hundred posts in. I began Hip Walk as an outlet for my enthusiasm for mid-20th century art and photography, before it gradually mutated into a place to post up imagery from any period that has inspired my own photographs, over at Art Of The City.

While this much is true, and I'll still post things that I've discovered, however late or after the fact I am, I've also really realised that more than anything I want to find some like-minded people who can say: "You like this? Try this then..." It happened when Owen from Magic Lantern Show turned me on to the Vancouver photographer Fred Herzog. It also reaffirms subconscious steals or influences too, like when Bill Guy mentioned the obscure Jim Jarmusch film Stranger Than Paradise on this photo - for the record, I've had the poster of that film on my wall for about 5 years now, so Bill is either a) psychic, b) stalking me, or c) even more astute and visually perceptive than I first thought.

I've slowly discovered that such mutual tips and nods are the real reason I'm doing this second blog - it's obvious really, even if I've maybe not encouraged it the same. So for the few of you who check in here regularly, I really want to pick your brains as I go. If I post on a theme or a style that reminds you of something else, please leave me a comment and hopefully we can all turn each other on to something new, something enlightening or just something that looks pretty damn cool.

Anyways, today I've posted up the work of Rut Blees Luxemburg, a Berlin-born, LCC graduate who has taken some wonderful long exposure shots of East London over the past few years. Her work is suitably atmospheric and edgy enough for it to have graced the covers of two major UK albums - The Streets' Original Pirate Material and Bloc Party's A Weekend In The City - but I've returned to it purely for the skill of the rendering. I've been trying some long exposure night shots myself recently (I'll post them on AOTC when I finally take a good one) and have begun to appreciate how good these really are. In Luxemburg's photography there are no lens flares or other glossy Photoshop cliches, just grit, texture and glowing sodium colours.

So with my new spirit and purpose, can anyone recommend any other good long-exposure night photographers in a similar vein?!

Poster Art: Moon

2009-07-29T14:44:00.001+01:00

Poster Wednesday time again and for this one I've opted for a new release, albeit one with its flag planted firmly in mid-20th century art and design. This poster for Duncan Jones' Moon has been all over the tube network in London recently and it can do seriously odd things to your eyes. Those concentric circles trigger that great throbbing Op Art effect, like a Bridget Riley masterpiece or Paul Newman's buzzing face on this Cool Hand Luke classic.

In fact it's a real return to - or rather update of - those vintage Hollywood posters, when all you needed was a person, a title and a clever geometric design. Sure, those circles represent the moon itself, but they also evoke the disorienting experience endured by Sam Rockwell across the course of the film and the echoing emptiness of his surroundings. It's design motif as message. I love it.

If anyone knows anything of the artist or has a favourite vintage film poster in a similar style that they'd like to share, it'd be good to hear your comments...

Alex Kanevsky: Alla Prima

2009-07-23T09:38:00.001+01:00

Alex Kanevsky, Anunciation, 2007

This guy came up via a great little art book called Alla Prima. It's a new American title from Watson Guptill that details the finer points of painting wet-on-wet, but also delves into the history of the medium, tracing its usage from El Greco and Velazquez, via Edward Hopper and right up to contemporary talents like Alex Kanevsky.

The finish of this painting reminds me of Adrian Ghenie's earlier work, thanks to those vast fields of colour and the glitchy vertical splashes, but much of Kanevsky's other work tackles distorted nudes in a similarly inventive way. He uses plenty of clinical, bleached-out passages of bluish whites, yet the contrast with the darker foreground here really draws your eye back in - it's those contrasts again, like modern film noir shadows. Check out his full portfolio here.

Poster Art: The Taking Of The Pelham 123

2009-07-22T21:39:00.000+01:00

I need to get this one out of the way sharp-ish, before they sully the memory of one of the 1970s greatest movies with the pitiful-looking Tony Scott remake that is due out in the UK next week. This poster does a sweet job of summing up the dynamics of the original, with the orderly geometry of the subway map disrupted by the great sweeping graphic of the train.

Really though, it's the film that is the inspiration for several of the Art Of The City posts, from the subject matter (rattling trains, city streets and commuters) to the overall aesthetic (strip lights, shadows, all those vintage beiges and browns). And with such sharp dialogue, it's saying something that I'd even watch the film with the sound off...

Julius Shulman: Respect Is Due

2009-07-18T11:38:00.000+01:00

Respect is due to the photographer Julius Shulman who died on Wednesday, aged 98. A photographer best known for capturing the golden age of Californian modernist architecture, he spent the post-war years shooting public and private projects by the likes of Mies Van Der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. They may have designed the homes but it was Shulman that brought them to life, letting shadows dance across their interiors or capturing them in the context of a glittering city skyline.

Amazingly, Shulman continued to work until very recently, bequeathing more than 250,000 prints to the Getty Research Institute in 2005 and giving an interview to Metropolis magazine two years ago for the publication of his three-volume Taschen retrospective. I'd known some of his best known images for years but only put a name to them with the Birth Of The Cool exhibition and catalogue. Anyway, as a mini Hip Walk tribute, here are three of my Shulman favourites:

Chuey House, Los Angeles, California, 1958

Case Study House #20, Altadena, California, 1958

Case Study House #22, Los Angeles, 1960

Andre Kertesz: Reading Rituals

2009-07-17T21:30:00.006+01:00

Andre Kertesz's On Reading opened at London's Photographer's Gallery today and amazingly this is the first time that the Hungarian photographer's collection of bookish snapshots have been exhibited in the UK.

It's a clever little collection, full of unwitting members of the public caught in private moments; sprawled out on balconies with a novel, inspecting the bargain bins of Fourth Avenue book stalls or ignoring passersby like the man in Pont Des Arts, 1963, pictured left.

The exhibition - like Elliott Erwitt's Handbook - underlines why a cute concept and a sense of humour are a million times more important than staged gimmicks or superior finishes. However, revisiting the collection more than 90 years after Kertesz began taking the first images included here also lends the display a nostalgic edge, and one which got me thinking later on.

Subconsciously, I had left the book-themed exhibition and headed to Borders, around the corner from the gallery on Oxford Street. The flagship store was closing down, with all stock being sold off at a 50% discount. While this is no doubt due in part to the effects of online retailers and supermarkets undercutting them through bulk purchasing, I can't help feeling that it also could be as a result of people increasingly turning to digital means for their information fix. And wouldn't On Reading have been a far less interesting collection if all it showed was people huddled over laptops, iPhones and other assorted gadgets?

Now of course, I am an avid blogger, but I also love cracking the spine of a fresh paperback or grabbing the paper on my bleary-eyed sprint to work each morning. Maybe it's the relaxing ritual of it all, like making a cup of tea? Or maybe it's because you can never truly get lost in a story when you are reading it on a machine that is hooked up to millions of other people? Who knows. If you only one other thing on this rain-sodden evening, make sure it's grabbing yourself a good book - for Kertesz, if not for me.

Poster Art: The Beatles

2009-07-15T10:21:00.000+01:00

Buzzed by posting the large reproduction of North By Northwest last month, I want to start hipwalking classic and stylish modern posters every week. For the first of this series, I've turned to Richard Hamilton's Beatles photo collage that accompanied the original copies of the Scousers' "White Album".

Now, I'm no Beatles nut but their 1968 double album not only contained their best songs (Dear Prudence, Helter Skelter, Happiness Is A Warm Gun) but also one of the finest pieces of music-related Pop Art ever made. Hamilton suggested the poster as a means of contrasting with the austere, individually-numbered conceptualism of the album's cover. "I began to feel a bit guilty at putting their double album under plain wrappers," he recalls in Barry Miles' The Beatles Diary. "I suggested it could be jazzed up with a large edition print, an insert that would be even more glamorous than a normal sleeve."

A huge fan of the then 46-year old artist, Paul McCartney spent the best part of a week driving to Hamilton's house in North London to assist with the collage. Contemporary photographs by John Kelly and Linda Eastman were neatly arranged alongside childhood snaps, before Hamilton pasted in white paper to give the composition room to "breathe" and tie it in with the off-white album sleeve. McCartney was taken aback at the simplicity of the gesture: "It was beautiful and I remember being very impressed with the way he put this negative space on - it was the first time that I'd ever seen that idea."

*Complejo: Mysterious Hipster

2009-07-14T15:47:00.005+01:00

He's a fan of Diane Arbus and David Lynch, he lives in Barcelona and he goes by the name of *Complejo. Other than that, I can't tell you anything much more about this hipster's work, but everybody needs a little mystery in their lives once in a while, no?

Adorote, 2006

City And Colour VI, 2009

Wait, 2009

Ian Giles: After Cravan

2009-07-07T17:13:00.004+01:00

Last year, Chelsea graduate Ian Giles recreated the death of the Dadaist artist Arthur Cravan - alone, at sea, off the coast of Mexico in 1918. As Giles notes:

"It’s an imaginary finale because Cravan’s death is mysterious, never confirmed by a witness standing on the shore, not documented photographically, only mentioned fleetingly in texts."

Giles recreated it for the benefit of a video installation, off the coast of South Wales. On a day when I've had some sad family news, I've got really mixed reactions to this defiant, rather poetic act of self sabotage, but it is an undeniably striking image nonetheless.

Olaf Heine: Lonely Men

2009-07-01T12:39:00.007+01:00

I just got hold of the new Hatje Cantz book catalogue at work and came across the photography of Olaf Heine for the first time.

There's a real freshness to them - even if the three I've picked out all mine that lonely, misunderstood male vibe...

Barfly, Cuba, 2006

Bret Easton Ellis, Chelsea Hotel, New York, 2005

This Is The Day Life Leaves Me Again, Los Angeles, 2008

Paul Schütze: Drowned Moon

2009-06-30T22:12:00.000+01:00

This is class. Melbourne-born Paul Schütze has been making sound installations and ambient electronic albums for years, but I'm a sucker for his noir-ish photography, plain and simple. View his latest shots online here.

Jack Delano: A Lonely Hunter

2009-06-24T14:03:00.001+01:00

Having often named my Art Of The City posts after song lyrics or book titles, I'm always fascinated by the way in which references can cross genres and I recently landed upon Jack Delano's photography in this roundabout way.

I've loved the Thievery Corporation and David Byrne tune The Heart's A Lonely Hunter for a few years now, so when I realised that they named it after a 1940 Carson McCullers novel, I snapped that up. The latest Penguin Classics edition of the book carries a stylish crop of a photograph by Jack Delano. I didn't think much about it until I stumbled into Carter's Steam Fair in Victoria Park this weekend and the whole style of the fair reminded me of the book's cover. A quick Google and it turns out the photograph was from a series he did at the 1941 state fair in Rutland, Vermont, on assignment for the Farm Security Administration. You can see plenty more Delano images on the fantastic vintage photoblog Shorpy here, while my own fair photography begins on Art Of The City here.

Richard Long: Quiet Things

2009-06-22T22:29:00.001+01:00

In the winter of 1964, Richard Long pushed a snowball across the Downs in Bristol and recorded the results. Forty five years later and he's still making impermanent interventions in the landscape, photographing worn-down paths and summing up week-long hill walks via sublime little note poems. His latest retrospective at Tate Britain is inspiring stuff.

I think it's the tone of Long's delivery that I like the most. He touches on huge concepts like time, space or nature, yet he remains uncomplicated and modest. "I do think I'm a product of my time," he says. "I do like very simple, pure things. Quiet things."

North By Northwest

2009-06-19T11:00:00.000+01:00

The Hitchcock classic North By Northwest is being re-released in UK cinemas today, 50 years after it first premiered. The entire film is stylishly designed, from the graphic credit sequence onwards, but really for me the anniversary is just a cheap excuse to look at the film poster...

Edward Hopper: The Difference A Painter Makes

2009-06-18T23:21:00.006+01:00

The new issue of Aperture magazine has a great feature about Edward Hopper and modern photography. Jeffrey Fraenkel picks up on Geoff Dyer's lovely quote that Hopper "could claim to be the most influential American photographer of the twentieth century - even though he didn't take any photographs." You can order the magazine here or see a couple of the pics below...

Edward Hopper, Intermission, 1963

Lee Friedlander, New York City, 1962

Robert Boynes: A Brand New Start

2009-06-16T22:24:00.006+01:00

Right, things are going to change around here. I've subtly reworded the title panel of Hip Walk, so now this site will be devoted to the visual inspirations that are feeding my other photoblog Art of the City.

Between my day job (writing) and freelance work (more writing), I've been finding that I keep unearthing great artists, designers and photographers, but often find myself wordless in my spare time. So in the spirit of sharing and keeping things ticking over much more frequently, I'm going to put images up as I come across them. Also, the "mid-20th century" label has gone. Hip Walk will no doubt still be centred on - and influenced by - that period because that's what I love but hopefully this allows me room for more diversions.

Anyway, to kick things off, here is a work by Robert Boynes, a 60-something artist from Australia that I've only just discovered...

Robert Boynes, Exit, 2007

William Eggleston: Lost Details

2009-06-14T22:46:00.004+01:00

"I want an absence of too much prettiness...
Not a complete absence of it,
but just like coffee, pictures get too sweet."
- William Eggleston, 2009

William Eggleston claims that his new and ongoing Paris project could be his "crowning achievement", comparing it to Atget's own French portfolio a century earlier. Having seen a selection of them at the Fondation Cartier in Paris last week, I can't help thinking that he might be losing his critical faculties.

The best pictures, like the one above, feel a little contrived, while others seem lazy, snatched or simply repeats of other compositions from earlier in his career. It got me to thinking that maybe I only love his older photographs because they now serve as a time capsule that preserve lost stylistic details from the 1960s and 1970s, whereas these latest photographs are all too easily obtainable in the streets surrounding the gallery. Perhaps in thirty years, they might emerge as a more definitive and evocative portrait of modern Paris but in the mean time, I'm happier to return to classics like this...

Saul Leiter: Sheer Beauty

2009-05-27T16:45:00.001+01:00

Saul Leiter, Phone Call, 1957

I've been holding on to these photographs by Saul Leiter for a while now, waiting for a flash of inspiration. The truth is that I know very little about him, apart from that his experiments with his Leica on the streets of New York in the 1940s and 1950s are textured, abstract and instinctive works of sheer beauty.

Trained as a rabbi, he would later turn to fashion magazine shoots to earn a living, but in between times he showed that street photography needn't solely be a place for sweaty socio-realism. Others have done that before and since but perhaps what is most exciting about Leiter's work is that he didn't strain to find his best images. There are no forced narratives in his portfolio, no romantic cliches or staged shots. His subjects are cafe tables, steamed-up windows and half-painted signs - stylish vintage ones, sure, but nothing that we couldn't find at least a variation of today, in any street, in any town. Leiter simply knew how best to frame the odd reflections and distorted shapes that he found, elevating them to something much more mysterious and enduring.

Collections on his work had been notoriously difficult to get hold of - at one stage, a first edition of Early Color book was going for $600 on eBay - but the small, feverish demand for his work has finally been acknowledged. A second printing of Early Color is out now, London's Faggionato Fine Art ran a small show of prints last year and if Amazon is to be believed, a reprint of Early Black And White is due soon. Fingers crossed. In the meantime, you can see a selection of the photographer's best images here.

Shop America: Cut Price Design

2009-05-05T14:18:00.007+01:00

Taschen have got a small sale on and while I wouldn't normally mention it, they have one cheap title purely worth checking out. Shop America - Midcentury Storefront Design 1938-1950 is a throwback to a time when pharmacies, tailors and "dairy bars" weren't conceived as mere earth-bound commercial outlets but more a place for some sort of religious epiphany.

Art deco curves, dramatic perspectives and candybar colours all contribute to the retro-futurist tone but it is the shiny gloss of post-war optimism that really galvanises the whole book. Editor Jim Heimann has done a stunning job writing, researching and collating the book, making it a must for designers or period fanatics.

You can read an extract of the book here or buy it for just £9.99 (RRP £29.99) from the publisher's own website here. And no, I'm not on commission...

Robert Frank: Sad Poems For Sick People

2009-05-03T23:03:00.013+01:00

In 2009, fifty years after The Americans was first published in the US, everybody loves Robert Frank. Beat Generation fanatics think he's hip, documentary photographers praise his unflinching honesty and cultural historians regularly cite him as one of the most influential artists of the mid-20th century. In the book, Frank summed up a country on the cusp of change, laying bare some shared truths in his grainy monochrome pictures. Or did he? Another book I've been re-reading this week reminded me quite how selective hindsight can be.

Published in 1986, Robert Frank - New York to Nova Scotia contains letters to and from Frank, essays by Kerouac and Walker Evans, and various ephemera from the mid-1950s. There are a few of photographs too; some rare, some classics, like 1956's Political Rally, Chicago, pictured right.

However, one of the most fascinating parts of the book is the various contemporary reactions to The Americans. A spread titled "An Off-Beat View Of The U.S.A" reprints an article from the May 1960 issue of Popular Photography magazine, in which their many editors offer their opinions on Frank's new book. Here are a few of my favourites...

Les Barry: "...Frank's book actually explores a very limited aspect of life in the United States, and it is the least attractive aspect, at that. It's doubtful that he really thinks all Americans are simple beer-drinking, jukebox-playing, pompous, selfish, intolerant, money-worshipping, flag-waving, sacrilegious, insensitive folks."

Bruce Downes: "Frank is sensitive, but apparently he is without love. There is no pity in his images. They are images of hate and hopelessness, of desolation and pre-occupation with death. They are images of an America seen by a joyless man who hates the country of his adoption. ... The book seems to me a mean use to put a camera to."

John Durniak: "It is obvious that Mr. Frank had 1934 eyes and blinders on when shooting. The publishers have left a word out of the title. It should read: Some Americans. That is exactly what Frank has done, photographed some Americans. But has he photographed what these people are really like? His pictures are unconvincing. ... Frank possibly has done 5 percent of the job, if that."

James M. Zanutto: "Robert Frank's book is described in the introduction by Jack Kerouac as a "sad poem." A sad poem for sick people might be more accurate. ... Yet all photographers are encouraged to make personal statements with their pictures. In the case of Robert Frank, one wonders if his pictures contribute to our knowledge of anything other than the personality of Robert Frank."

The Americans remains a stunning body of work, but it is interesting to hear how sceptical some of these comments were. Affronted by the arrogance of the Swiss outsider and unaware of the wholesale changes that the 1960s would bring, the pivotal nature of the times and the defining qualities of Frank's book weren't immediately apparent. I wonder what those same critics might have thought of The Americans by, say, 1970 or 1980?

I should point out that the harshness of some of the comments from Popular Photography were tempered in their wider context and other editors were entirely positive, praising the tongue-in-cheek subtlety of Frank's title and his "lovely and evocative" images. Nevertheless, it's a fresh perspective in this anniversary year, something that the contrary and controversial photographer would surely welcome.

Parade - Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955

Joe Tilson: Political Prints

2009-04-30T10:23:00.004+01:00

While some Pop artists have ploughed the same furrow since the late 1950s, others have restlessly dug up new ground in pursuit of more personal visions. Joe Tilson is one such artist.

Initially lauded as founding figure of Pop, he grew tired of its relentless consumerism. At one point, he drew up a list of things you shouldn't do in print making and ticked them off, one by one. By the mid-1970s he was spending more and more time in Italy, turning his hand to reliefs inspired by Greek and Roman mythology.

The Printed Works 1963-2009 shows how throughout all these artistic upheavals, he has cultivated a formidable reputation as a subversive printmaker, one who has remained engaged and fascinated by the modern world, no matter which part of it he was living in.

Chiming with the protesting spirit of the 1960s, revolutionary politics looms large in his earlier work. Is This Che Guevara? (pictured right) features the much-reproduced face of the Cuban leader while Jan Palach commemorates the student who set himself on fire in protest at the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. Above all, it is his ability to take these events and turn them into striking, accessible and thoughtful images that makes this exhibition well worth a visit.

Joe Tilson: The Printed Works 1963-2009 is at Alan Cristea, London, until May 30.

Richard Hamilton: Spring Can Be A Festive Season

2009-04-24T15:52:00.004+01:00

The London Original Print Fair is on this weekend at the Royal Academy, offering the chance to pick up some original art bargains in this credit-crunched climate.

This was one of my particular favourites - a little out of Hip Walk's usual 1940s-'60s remit perhaps, but Richard Hamilton is a Pop Art legend and it looks like it's based on a vintage Bing Crosby still, so it's still worth catching it before it sells out.

Richard Hamilton, I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas, 1971

Courtesy of the artist and Sims Reed Gallery

Into The Sunset: The Definitive Article

2009-04-21T23:18:00.000+01:00

Garry Winogrand, New Mexico, 1957

While I was on holiday in New York last week I saw the MoMA's new photography show, Into The Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West. The exhibition has been criticised for being downbeat, delusional or distorted, but that all smacks of a point missed.

The title is clever in that it never professes to show the real American West, simply what subsequent generations have made of it through the artificial eye of their viewfinder. The scope is broad, covering the last 150 years, though it really comes alive around the 1940s and '50s. Not only do we see the West evolving before our eyes during this period, but also we can witness the rapid development of photography as a unique artistic authority. While the art world busied itself with the luminous ambiguities of Abstract Expressionism and the commercial frivolities of Pop, photography offered a very definitive take on the real world.

Like the new sheriff in town determined to clean up the joint, you may not have agreed with the views of these photographers perhaps, but there was no escaping the clarity and intensity of their delivery. Into the Sunset features the best of the period, with classic images from Garry Winogrand, Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander, alongside more experimental images like William A. Garnett's 1950 series of housing developments shot from the air. It tends towards the male perspective but this isn't a humourless or boorish show. End on the glum persistence of Elliott Erwitt's slot machine playing grandma and you'll be grinning until the cow(boy)s come home.

Georgia O'Keeffe: Skyscraping

2009-04-02T23:52:00.001+01:00

I'm going to stay in New York for the Easter holidays and while I was looking at a guide book I was reminded of Georgia O'Keeffe's stylish 1920s cityscapes. She was perhaps best known for her flower paintings or her erotic relationship with the photographer Alfred Stieglitz that played out across two decades worth of their collective art, but this series of sorts captured the skyscraping promise of a city on the rise.

Paris: The Jazz Century

2009-03-21T12:34:00.001Z

I'm currently researching a piece about jazz in Paris for a travel magazine and in doing so I came across a great new exhibition.

Le Siècle du Jazz, or The Jazz Century, opened this week and features a host of 20th century art, design and memorabilia. They've got Matisse paintings, bebop-inspired illustrations and all manner of photographs from the era, not to mention sound recordings, a programme of concerts and beautiful vintage album covers. I'll give a more comprehensive update once I make it over to see it, but in the meantime the promise of more than 1,000 works, you can't go far wrong. Le Siècle du Jazz runs at the Musée du Quai Branly until 28 June.

Pablo Picasso: A Little Mad

2009-03-10T16:04:00.001Z

London appears to have gone a little mad for old Picasso these last few weeks. First came the National Gallery's new show, Challenging the Past. Curated thematically and packed with his riffs on the Old Masters, it's an impressive collection, albeit let down by the dim-lit surrounds of the Sainsbury Wing basement. However it does offer the chance to see his sprawling take on Velazquez's Las Meninas up close, as well as a number of unusual early self portraits.

If you do get chance to visit, don't miss out on the print collection that they are showing in Room 1 of the main building either. It's free and offers fifteen extra variations on existing works, taking on Degas, Rembrandt and Cranach with a more voyeuristic outlook.

Albemarle Street dealer's Connaught Brown are also getting in on the printing act with a collection of minor linocuts and etchings; all blood red femmes, deep cut lines and one thing on his mind.

Perhaps most excitingly is The Allure of Language, a new Yale Uni publication that I got my hands on this week. It picks up on how fiction, poetry and philosophy fed into Pablo's early Cubist experiments and blossomed into a life-long fascination with the power of words and images combined. Below are two pages he illustrated for Pierre Reverdy's 1948 book of poems, Le Chant des Morts, or "The Song of the Dead", which are reproduced in the new book.

Ray Johnson: Unpopular Pop

2009-03-02T13:36:00.008Z

New York artist Ray Johnson (1927-1995) might have relied upon popular culture imagery, yet on this side of the Atlantic at least, his work remains largely unknown. However, a retrospective of his work, Please Add To & Return, opened on Saturday at new East London gallery Raven Row and should hopefully introduce him to a new audience.

Johnson graduated from Carolina's liberal Black Mountain College in 1948, where his contemporaries included Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly and Robert De Niro Sr - the actor's father and a noted abstract expressionist artist in his own right. On moving to New York the same year, he started producing Pop-style portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley (see the striking Elvis #2, 1956-57, pictured right) almost a decade before Warhol and co. got in on the act.

During this period, Johnson worked in a bookstore on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where he developed his interest in Zen philosophy and the art of chance. This fed into his art practice, as he took up where Marcel Duchamp left off and began to mail unfinished compositions to his friends, with instructions for them to participate in the creative process and send them on. These instructions would often become part of the works themselves.

Unfortunately he didn't remain so sociable. On the same day in 1968 that Andy Warhol was shot, Johnson too was mugged and attacked near his home in a separate incident. By all accounts, the experience shook the artist, as he withdrew from city life and became increasingly reclusive, even declining offers to show his work by the early 1990s. It is only now, following his suicide by drowning in 1995 that his work is finally beginning to take its rightful place among the 20th century's most challenging and influential names. A personal archive of unseen works were found at his home after his death, adding to his fascinating legacy.

Ray Johnson. Please Add To & Return runs until 10 May at Raven Row, 56 Artillery Lane, London E1. Image courtesy of the Estate of Ray Johnson at Richard L. Feigen & Co.

America Conquers The Brits

2009-02-26T13:44:00.005Z

Edward Hopper, Night on the El Train, 1918

ALVA's annual statistics were released today, confirming the British Museum as the UK's top visitor attraction, with nearly 6 million visitors in the past year. Perhaps the most surprising contribution to those numbers comes from the 355,000 who visited their temporary show, The American Scene: Prints From Hopper To Pollock. In fact, the Museum has even dubbed it "one of the most popular fine art exhibitions ever held in London."

It is a stunning primer of early 20th Century American art, from the grim realism of the Ashcan school, via Edward Hopper's romanticised nocturnal scenes, right up to the expressive early works of Jackson Pollock. Countless social, political and artistic influences penetrate the collection, from the Great Depression and the rise of Fascism, to film noir, jazz and underground boxing matches, making it unequivocally a product of the era.

A new discovery among the number was Martin Lewis, whose Little Penthouse and Spring Night, Greenwich Village (below) offer cute visions of life on the streets of 1930s New York, lit by the incidental light from nearby buildings. Thankfully, the exhibition isn't done yet either. The American Scene is currently on tour, taking in Nottingham, Brighton and Manchester over the coming year.

Martin Lewis, Spring Night, Greenwich Village, 1931

Le Corbusier: Cubist Art and No Buildings

2009-02-20T20:40:00.003Z

With exhibitions about architecture, you always get the sense that there is an elephant in the room that no one will mention. Or rather, there should be several massive elephants in the room but they couldn't be moved from their natural habitat and they wouldn't have fit in the gallery anyway. In other words, where are the finished buildings?

Sure, there are many practical reasons why this is a no brainer but there is no other arts discipline in which you would see the workings out but not the final answer. Could you a fashion house holding a retrospective without a single dress on display? Or a sculpture exhibition based on nothing but sketches and maquettes? You can't help feeling that architecture is at a serious disadvantage in gallery terms.

The Barbican's new Le Corbusier exhibition, The Art Of Architecture, steps around the elephant by filling their two floors with the Swiss architect's many other artistic pursuits: pre-Ikea leather-and-steel-tube furniture, back issues of his Modernist mag L'Esprit Nouveau, the odd tapestry and a wealth of Cubist-style sculpture and paintings. Of course, this does mean that your enjoyment of the show hinges on whether you can get excited by some deft Picasso-esque murals but it makes for a varied and often unexpected collection.

And maybe that is the point of exhibitions about architecture - that they can and should only ever be a colourful appendix to the buildings themselves. Having already been lucky enough to explore both Corbusier's Villa Savoye near Paris and the Maison Blanche in his home town of Le Chaux de Fonds, these art works simply helped to signpost his inspirations that bit more vividly.

Femme et coquillage, 1948

Wim Wenders: Lounge Paintings

2009-02-06T22:01:00.011Z

Wim Wenders, Lounge Painting # 1, Gila Bend, Arizona

from "Pictures from the Surface of the Earth"

"It took me hours to find somebody

who could open up the lobby

of the old "Stout's" hotel on Main Street in Gila Bend.

It had been closed for years already.

That painting over the Coke machine haunts me ever since.

It's the dream version

of the perfect beginning

of a road movie."

As if Wim Wenders' movies weren't achingly beautiful enough, it turns out he takes great photographs too. The German director carries a panoramic camera around with him as he scouts for film locations and selected prints have been collected together in Pictures from the Surface of the Earth.

There's everything from Buddhist temples to Havana cadillacs, but he really comes to life in the US. If you've seen Paris, Texas, you'll know Wenders has a keen eye for recreating a sort of lost, mythic Americana. The photographs he took across the Southern states zoom in on individual aspects of this, picking out vintage drinks machines and deserted shop fronts like some 35mm Edward Hopper. Ok, it's not strictly mid-20th century, but it sure as hell looks like it.

Turns out the week I picked up this book, he opens a photography exhibition at Derby Museum and Art Gallery. Once - Still Images of Moving Pictures opens tomorrow and runs until 13 April, featuring his film location shots from around the globe.

Wim Wenders, Used Book Store In Butte, Montana

Rene Burri: The Third Eye

2009-01-27T21:03:00.016Z

Rene Burri’s crisp 1960 shot of four men on a Sao Paolo rooftop was such a perfect fit for the title panel of this blog that the Swiss photographer’s enviable portfolio seemed the natural place to start.

As a student at the School of Applied Arts in Zurich, Burri had tried his hand at documentary making whilst also developing a taste for the visual arts. Photography helped him combine those interests and by 1959 he was invited to join the Magnum agency. He has spent the subsequent half-century criss-crossing the globe in search of fresh subject matter, capturing portraits of the likes of Picasso, Giacometti, Le Corbusier and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.

Burri’s image of the Cuban leader may not be the one immortalised on thousands of t-shirts but that meeting is nevertheless instructive. Che’s brooding confidence is there for all to see but his almost absent-minded glance to the left is indication of a comfort he felt around few other photographers.

I was lucky enough to interview Burri a few years ago and he explained how his humble Leica had acted as a passport to people and locations that would otherwise have been off limits. “The camera was a magic little tool, the third eye [that] just permitted me to poke my nose into things that normally you don't have free access to."
Take Picasso. With PR companies and superstar egos complicating interviews with much lesser talents, it is heartwarming to discover that Burri had simply walked up to the artist’s door and knocked on. This thirst for first-hand experience characterises his best images.

Burri wasn’t just able to capture intimate compositions either. Two of his finest images were shot from distance: that rooftop capture and another from the same year, shot from high, in which reflections and shadows slalom across the floor of Rio’s Ministry of Health. Like many classic Magnum photographs, they favour form and content over technical refinement, with their geometry and contrast making full use of the black-and-white format.

When I spoke to Burri, a college graduate had recently written a thesis on his work, which suggested he was the “antithesis” of a war photographer. When I pressed him on this, he was obviously flattered by her interest but clearly felt that she was doubting his conviction or commitment. "I wasn't afraid [of war] but I sort of backed off," he explained. "I was interested in situations before and after. Despite all of this, I haven't become a cynic and I'm an incurable believer, not in humanity and such a great thing, but in people. They are still the greatest and the worst.”

All images (c) Rene Burri/Magnum Photos