All tagged photography
Episode #60: True Crime/Fine Art: Man Ray and the Black Dahlia Connection (Season 6, Episode 7)
This season we’re learning that true crime and art history are two genres that have smashed together with some fascinating results. Today’s show: it’s our season finale, and this is the story we have been DYING (sorry) to tell you. Did Man Ray inspire the infamous (and infamously unsolved) Black Dahlia murder?
Episode #59: True Crime/Fine Art: Eadweard Muybridge, Photo Pioneer and Jealous Husband (Season 6, Episode 6)
This season we’re learning that true crime and art history are two genres that have smashed together with some fascinating results. Today’s show: a photo pioneer goes off the jealousy deep end. It’s Eadweard Muybridge time!
CURIOUS CALLBACK: Episode #5: Death and Disaster, Warhol and Weegee
Death has always been a part of art history. That's one of the beautiful things about art-- it can detail and document and celebrate every facet of our existence. And so much of the great art that we know and love today works in the capacity to stave off one of the terrible side effects death-- being forgotten. Portraits, stone monuments, ancient coins-- they all aim to ensure that the subjects depicted will be remembered and revered for all eternity.
But Andy Warhol’s take on mortality wasn't about memorializing. He instead focused on the direct causes of death, or the aftermath of a terrible accident. His series, Death and Disaster, is one of the most well-known and polarizing of his career. But Warhol wasn't the first artist to focus on the everyday tragedy of death as a subject to quite this revealing and exploitative extent. No, that honor might very well belong to someone else-- an immigrant photographer working in Manhattan in the 1930s and 1940s.
In this episode, we discover the subject matter and motivations behind Andy Warhol's Death and Disaster series, and relate them to the work of the greatest crime scene photographer in history, Weegee.
Episode #12: Diego and Frida, Part 1
There’s something a little strange about the pairing of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Certainly it’s the surprise of a pairing of seeming opposites, at least from a physical standpoint-- she the small, seductive, and somewhat frail painter whose subject matter referred to the most intimate sides of her own life; he, the large and somewhat brutish muralist whose large-scale works touched upon revolution and justice and larger issues of Mexican history. There’s almost a Beauty and the Beast quality there, and for many of us, the relationship between these two artists is just as intriguing as their creative output. And especially when it comes to Frida’s art, it’s very hard to separate their love from their artistic legacy. But how did it begin? And what is it about these two that makes them so fascinating, even 60 years later?