Tagged — Jamie Lyons

Alexey Brodovitch

3 entries

The Man Who Made Looking Dangerous

Alexey Brodovitch didn't give a damn about your comfort zone. This Russian émigré who'd fled the Bolsheviks only to land in Paris designing ballet sets understood something fundamental that most art directors of his era were too chickenshit to admit: the white space between images contains more voltage than the images themselves. He hit Harper's Bazaar in 1934 like a brick through stained glass. While everyone else was still arranging photographs like Victorian taxidermy (neat, dead, predictable) Brodovitch was cropping models mid-gesture, bleeding pictures off the edge, letting type crash into imagery like it was looking for a fight. The magazine didn't whisper elegance; it screamed it, which is the only way elegance ever really works. His "Design Laboratory" workshop became legendary not because he taught technique (fuck technique) but because he taught seeing. "Astonish me," he'd demand, chain-smoking through the sessions, his accent thick as borscht, his expectations impossible. The guy had survived revolution, exile, poverty, and he expected his students to match that intensity on the page. Richard Avedon walked out of those classes understanding that fashion photography could be as raw and immediate as jazz, as unforgiving as the street. What Alexey Brodovitch knew (what he felt in his bones) was that design isn't decoration. It's architecture for the eyeball, a controlled demolition of expectation. Every spread was a small violence against the ordinary, a refusal to let the reader coast. He made visual rhythm into something almost narcotic, spreads that moved like Stravinsky, angular and dangerous and absolutely necessary. The magazine page before Brodovitch: a museum. After: a crime scene, in the best possible way.
Backstage LINES Ballet Handel

Speculation 2018

Backstage LINES Ballet Handel

Standing in the wings at YBCA, Leica in hand, watching Alonzo King’s dancers move through Handel like light through water. When you’re backstage you’re seeing the machinery of transcendence. The sweat. The breath. The moments before and after the magic happens. Brodovitch knew this. Those ballet photographs of his weren’t about perfection, they were about […]

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FalseArt 2015

Taxidermist or The Last Ones There Get to Say What It Meant

What the Fuck Are We Even Doing Here? Performance photography and critical writing: we’re both chasing the same fucking unicorn. Trying to tell you what went down in that room when the air got thick, when something cracked open and spilled out onto the floor, when you could feel it in your teeth. Except we’re […]

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Taxidermist or The Last Ones There Get to Say What It Meant
repetition, live perforamnce, video perforamnce, live art

Speculation 2013

repetition or what happens when theorists never step into a rehearsal room

Look, I have nothing against scholars. Hell, I am one, PhD and all, even if that fact makes me want to punch myself in the face sometimes. But there’s a particular kind of fuckery that happens when really smart people theorize about performance in ways that completely erase how it’s actually made. When they’re basically […]

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