Category Archives: Photography

Gorgeous Lady of the Week — Adriana Lima

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All right, so choosing the mega-gorgeous supermodel Adriana Lima for GLOW is a bit, how shall I put it, on the nose. But you have to give the devil her due: the Brazilian bombshell has been part of the big time fashion and pop culture scenes for over 14 years now, ever since she was anointed a Victoria’s Secret “Angel” back in 2000. That’s the modern day equivalent to Pin-Up superstardom and it instantly catapulted the Elite model, who had won Ford’s “Supermodel of Brazil” contest at the age of 15, into the stratosphere.

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Following that breakthrough, she was quickly signed to be the face of Maybelline in 2003 and also worked for Armani, Louis Vuitton, Versace, GUESS? and BCBG among many others. Of course, Ms. Lima’s lovely visage has also graced the covers of top magazines such as Harper’s, Vogue and Elle, as well as best-selling issues of GQ and Esquire.

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She’s also flirted with the art world, famously being photographed by artist Richard Phillips for cult fashion magazine Visionaire. Continue reading

Motorsport Books — The Cruel Sport by Robert Daley

The companion piece to Robert Daley’s seminal Cars at Speed, The Cruel Sport is ostensibly more of a coffee table picture book. With its oversized dimensions featuring beautiful black and white photos of Formula 1′s golden era taken while Daley was a correspondent for the New York Times in the late 1950s and into the 1960s, The Cruel Sport captures the romance and danger of Grand Prix motor racing during its mythic past. Shots of the greatest drivers of the era — Phil Hill, Jack Brabham, Graham Hill, Jim Clark, Dan Gurney, Jackie Stewart, et al — doing what they do best make up the bulk of this great tome with the text secondary and spare.

Scene from 1964 GP of Holland (Photo by Robert Daly)

Scene from 1964 GP of Holland (Photo by Robert Daley)

The fantastic record of the state-of-the-art cars of this era — thin, gasoline-filled aluminum monocoques surrounding the driver like a casket with a giant engine newly moved to behind his back — pay tribute to the beauty of the Ferraris, Lotuses, BRMs and all the other land rockets of the pre-safety, pre-downforce era. Interspersed throughout are brief profiles of the drivers and circuits written in Daley’s inimitable wry, Hemingway-esque prose. Showing through, as in all his writing on motorsport, is the paradoxical ambivalence of at once being highly attracted to the derring-do of the men’s wondrous achievements as pilots and revulsion at the wonton waste of life inherent during this era of Formula 1, when the death of drivers and spectators was nearly guaranteed several times a season.

Death of Lorenzo Bandini, Monaco, 1967 (Photo by Robert Daley)

In fact, the footnotes to the photos in the closing “Photo Identification” section are practically another book unto themselves, with detailed ruminations about the deaths of Graham Hill by plane accident in the 1970s and Jim Clark at Hockenheim in a Formula 2 race in 1968, among many other anecdotes. And Daley’s quietly devastating recounting of the death of Lorenzo Bandini in a Ferrari at the 1967 Monaco Grand Prix and his journalistic need to photograph it (the horrifying shot of Bandini trapped beneath his burning Ferrari is the fitting endpaper of the book) makes for essential reading in and of itself as a shattering piece of self-reflective journalism, motorsports notwithstanding. In short, along with Cars at Speed, The Cruel Sport is a must have volume for any serious racing fan and anyone who cherishes the bittersweet history of Formula 1 and the men who lived & died it in its most glorious years, as told by its finest, most clear-eyed chronicler.

Check out more of Robert Daley’s life and work at his website, robertdaleyauthor.com.

Classic Photography — Eliot Elisofon

Above: Photographer Eliot Elisofon in the Congo, 1951 (Joan Elisofon/National Museum of African Art)

Time’s passage can elevate and it can also erase. Once great men can see their fame grow as the years pass while others who were prominent in their day are practically forgotten. The latter circumstance is the unfortunate case with Eliot Elisofon, arguably a lost titan of 20th century photography. If the name does not ring a bell, you’re not alone. While Elisofon was a staff photographer for LIFE magazine during WWII and after, part of a team of luminaries like Alfred Eisenstadt and Margaret Bourke-White among others, his name is not very well known today. And that is a pity because Elisofon had an important and multifaceted career from the 1930s until his death in 1973.

American soldiers in North Africa during the Allied Tunisia Campaign, 1943 (Eliot Elisofon—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

American soldiers in North Africa during the Allied Tunisia Campaign, 1943 (Eliot Elisofon—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Jessica Tandy & Marlon Brando in A Streetcar named Desire, 1947 (Eliot Elisofon—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Jessica Tandy & Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, 1947 (Eliot Elisofon—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Born on the Lower East Side of New York City in 1911, Elisofon graduated from Fordham University and promptly became a member of the socially conscious Photo League in 1936. Continue reading