Amazing B&W portraiture

patrickh · Expire: 2011-11-18

Orio
Herbert von Karajan recovered his career by recanting - although I for one remain unconvinced about his conducting/interpretative skills. As far as I am aware Leni Riefenstahl did not feel she had any apologies to make. Politics will always outrank art - as indeed "Excretum tauri vincit cerebellum". Let us appreciate what she left, learn from it and her mistakes and move on. Cruel but sane.

patrickh

Orio · Expire: 2012-12-04

I still am unable to understand why it seems so difficult to judge a photographer from his/her photographs only.

I keep wondering what would happen if, for instance, tomorrow newspapers reported evidences that Pablo Picasso was a child abuser.
Would his artworks be forbidden? Would the books of history of art be rewritten because of that? Would all the following painters that he influenced, be not described as influenced by him, because it would be shameful?

I can not help feeling that this mentality is an aberration.

But I also feel like we will never agree on this point, so I agree it's time to leave this topic and move on.

F16SUNSHINE · Expire: 2011-11-18

What will we be saying about the American Conservative media in 10,15, 30 years or more. The way that this war is so blindly covered in the US is blatant and very uncomfortable. The fact that people take sides during time of war and conflict is admissible. To knowingly support an oppressive regime and it's manifesto is another story. It is a real conflict for those who appreciate artistic vision (fox news and the like is not art in any form). What motivates an artist and the mechanism to support there work is often in conflict. We can not always know why people make there choices. But to not appreciate the artistic vision that someone has is unrealistic. We are all human. That means we are all capable of very brilliant and very despicable decisions in our lives. Sometimes it is important to appreciate the good things that come from those who also make very bad decisions. It is a reminder to have compassion and I think a very healthy exercise. Everyone in there life will have to make a choice that is difficult to live with. For some it is an easy burden, others the thing that becomes their undoing. Still I believe it is best in life to look for the good in people. Even those who have chosen wrongly in there lives. This artist had something to offer us all. To not see that positive is a waste. It is obvious her work came from a place of beauty not hate. So WE should enjoy her vision and learn to avoid the mistakes that where made. Those who simply profit from conflict and oppressive thinking do not deserve this kind of understanding. They are the only ones who deserve harsh judgement.

Andy

BobDodds · Joined: 13 Nov 2007 Posts: 87

R-Biotar, roentgen biotar, what did Leni use to bend the bottom line spectral response of film? Foveon is weird, too. Foveon and R-Biotar is nice weird.

"She kept ill-advised company". So did Jesus.

Charlie Chaplin made a great antiwar movie, but profitable tomb whitewashers flooded the Ruhr mines and cultivated Hitler from the 1920's(Sam and Prescott Bush) and prevented Konrad Adenhauer from blocking their patsy for war profits.

I watched LR's olympics movie, and a documentary showing her in Kenya after the war. She might have been exiled from working in film. She made film and still photos. More Jesse Owen, she gave fair play to a non-aryan folk culture.

Paavo Nurmi took steroids.

My grandmother's father got his MD at Leipzig. Then his son went to fight his father's friends' sons in WWI. He said in a letter to his dad that the soldiers on both sides were the same, and he drew pictures of them. One was black, one wore a turban, one had a muslim crescent insignia. The problem is that the war profiteers are the same on both sides, too. al-CIA-duh is terrorbombing north Iran and the Indian embassy in Afghanistan, so if Obama invades Pakistan, al-CIA-duh will be fighting US while fighting Iran for the US while the US bombs Iran, or Palin dreams of Israel bombing Iran(she said as much quite literally).

The reason I read this thread is that apparently I have the only internet-documented R-Biotar made to mount on still cam, and I wondered what Riefenstahl used for bending the light spectrum by using a bent filter. X-ray lens, "Roentgen" biotar, would that help? I noticed that Sigma SD14 Foveon sensor, combined with imperfect ir filter, is picking up on colors not visible to human eye. I photographed a gray wasp nest, and a rainbow of colors marking internal tunnels came through.

Before Jesus had a name with the war memorial whitewashers, he knew how to light his name up through their spy eyes. "Tell your masters that the good news is preached to the poor". In the history of economics, that is called,"unregulated sympathy", "race treason", "sin against Darwin", don't feed the Irish or give him a job...unless you want to light your name up real quick through the low-f echelon all the way to the bright whitewashers of tax-free sweat-shopping.

lulalake · Expire: 2011-11-18

BobDodds · Joined: 13 Nov 2007 Posts: 87

Orio remarked on Leni's use of "space", "supernatural", "light seeming to emanate" from objects and people.

The way she evokes a supernatural level either through light or design can also be a photographer's game of "here it is", a photographer allowing emergence of the preternatural symbolic http://forum.mflenses.com/mining-waste-heap-during-blue-hour-t2934,highlight,riefenstahl.html Strategic thematic level "here it is", and create new design by arranging given design elements.

I am searching on her name to research R-Biotar. I think the darkness of her work might have originated with the Zeiss lenses like the biotars need full exposure to saturate. At the same time I think we may like the uneven transmission of color by imperfect lense design and coatings. That helps the notion of supernatural. A little bit weird color, saying not common, and then a little dark, again saying not just the same dimension you could see with your eyes, and then very 3D sharp saying "real", real preternatural then, or very fuzzy and ghosted saying special. Light paintings of emerging symbol apparently emanating light.