This framed image of pop superstar Lady Gaga pictured below is one of many such celebrity portraits by the accomplished photographer Martin Schoeller currently on view at the Hasted Kraeutler gallery in New York. (To the left of Gaga is portrait of artist Jeff Koons and on her right is one of actor-comedian Zach Galifinakis.)
We’re loving Acid, a fresh and artsy surf magazine based in Europe. In issue Number 2, pictured here, there’s beautiful photography and photo essays and fascinating personal essays about surf adventures in unlikely places like the southeast of England where waves are extremely rare and the Eisbach River in Munich, Germany, hundreds of miles from the sea and many more from an oceanic surf break.
This past Friday we went out to Rough Trade New York in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for a performance by Swedish indie-electronic duo I Break Horses. The band were joined by a live drummer and in spite of some old-school analog-synth equipment needing reboot during the show, they sounded great in Rough Trade’s perfect cavernous performance space.
Epic new mural by the street-art superstar artist RETNA next to the On Stellar Rays Gallery on Rivington Street in New York’s Lower East Side.
This stenciled “Smoke Trees” wheat-pasted street art poster in the Lower East Side of New York City has a graphical, lo-fi propaganda feel. The bear iconography and message harkens to Smoky the Bear and public service ad campaigns to create awareness about forest fire prevention. The message here is subversive and explicit, though unclear. The colors are beautiful and and make for a striking visual on the side of the general clutter of the graffiti- and street art-bombed Jay Maisel Building at the corner of Spring Street and the Bowery.
We love this book of photographs by the renowned Swiss artist duo of Peter Fischli and David Weiss. “800 Views of Airports” is precisely that: A collection photos taken by Fischli and Weiss at airports visited on travels around the world throughout their decades-long career. The volume is the definition of coffee-table book. “800 Views” is textless. There are no captions, no labels, nothing to indicate where and when the photos was taken. This curatorial, editorial concision gives the hefty tome some mystique and only adds to its beauty. For the well-traveled, many of the airports may be easily identifiable — Tokyo Narita, JFK, London Heathrow, Schipol, Paris Charles de Gaulle, Malpensa — though there are a bunch of photos taken at an airfield that few would recognize, a place where de-commissioned commercial aircraft are put out to pasture.
The 33rd photo in our What’s Outside the Window? photo project series is this view looking out the door window of the J train on the Williamsburg Bridge as it approaches the Marcy Avenue subway station in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The view looks north up Bedford Avenue with a tenement building covered in graffiti in the center and a painted billboard for the Landmark Vintage Bicycle shop and steelwork of the bridge in the foreground.
In our ongoing photo series What’s Outside the Window? is this image of a couple hugging on Orchard Street, as seen through the plate glass front wall of the Dressing Room Bar, in New York’s Lower East Side. The girl looks sleepy and affectionate, while the guy is checking his cellphone and seems to be texting.
Reid van Renesse’s art photography of skaters, surfers and life in New York City’s Rockaway Beach captures the playful, urban beach subculture of this gritty, singular Queen’s neighborhood. The artwork shown here was recently exhibited and for sale as part of a local fundraising event at Rockaway Beach Surf Club to raise money for rebuilding a skate park destroyed by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
We’ve personally never been into tattoos. We don’t have any of our own. But we appreciate seeing a beautiful tattoo. And combined with a certain style, as in the case with the women pictured here snapping cellphone photos at a recent protest in New York City’s Washington Square Park, we find a tattoo very alluring.
OjodePez is a rather serious but excellent art and journalistic photography magazine from Spain. Pictured here is edition 29 of magazine.
In the latest installment of our ongoing photo project series What’s Outside the Window?, here’s an image of the view from our Delta airlines window seat of the control tower at John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) in New York. An El Al airlines’ Boeing 747 jumbo jet is parked at Terminal 4 in the foreground.
We’re intrigued by this new wheat-pasted street art piece that just went up on the Mulbeery Street-side of the famous Puck Building in New York’s SoHo. The artwork is a composite of a black-and-white photo of a sexy, topless bleached-blonde woman cropped and displayed within a two-dimensional shape of a gun. There’s a mash-up of mystery, danger and sexuality implied by the image. – CL
Israeli artist Yossi Wallner’s viral street art project “Ctrl Alt Del” is one of the coolest projects and cleverer ideas we’ve seen in a while. Wallner has taken the common keys used in laptops and computer keyboards and installed these as buttons on walls, columns, and public infrastructure in his home city of Tel Aviv, in Israel. See photos below.
The re-contextualization of these familiar keyboard components, with their abbreviated function labels (Del, Esc, Wake, Power, etc.), imbue these objects with multiple meanings when in the public space, whether on a telephone pole, next to a security camera, in a leafy park or on a busy street.
What’s more, in these settings the buttons suggest some new kind of functionality whereby we can shape parts of the real world outside by pressing the same keys we use to change the words in an email or re-touch an image in Photoshop. Wallner poses the questions “What if the keyboards that we are buried in blindly all day could change your reality? If you could escape something by a push of an “Esc” button? Delete anything by a flick of a finger?”
The Tel Aviv installations are the first for this project, and Wallner is planning to create a website and a community of collaborators to put up keyboard buttons in cities around the world and submit photos of their installations to his site. We’d love nothing more that to walk down a street in Tokyo or New York a year from now and find one of his “Esc” keys on a wall.
The indie art-lifestyle magazine 032c recently published a photo essay of old images of and by acclaimed auteur German film director Werner Herzog, who directed “Fitzcarraldo,” one of our favorite movies of all time
The view out the window from the seventh floor Sky Room of the New Museum in New York City. This photo was taken on a recent snowy day and shows the Lower Manhattan skyline in the distance and the rooftops and tenements of the Lower East Side and Nolita in the foreground. The tallest building is the nearly completed 1 World Trade Center building, or “Freedom Tower,” built at the site of the Twin Towers that were destroyed on 9/11.
