Photo-ops consists of photographs taken quite casually over a considerable number of years of sundry notables in the arts and culture. Among them: Barbara Steele, Tilda Swinton, George Clooney, Claudia Cardinale, Martin Scorsese, Terri Garr, Jacqueline Bissett. Michelangelo Antonioni, Gdal and Wong Kar Wai. None of these subjects were posed. Each image captured a random yet precise moment in space and time. To quote Susan Sontag: “Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.” She also notes “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed”

It all began rather inauspiciously back in 1989 when I was planning “The Scorsese Picture: The Art and Life of Martin Scorsese” and realized that as it was going to be heavily illustrated it would be a good idea to take some pictures of my own. So I bought a Minolta and used it to take shots of Marty and Thelma at work on “Cape Fear.” It grew from there to take in whatever or whoever passed before me.

Bill Reed is editing an annotation providing context for these images.

Here are Two Photographs not taken by me:

Roland Barthes

And Lewis Powell about whom Barthes said — “He is dead and he is going to die”. Photograph of Lincoln assassin Lewis Powell taken by Alexander Gardner in 1865

“The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: this will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose, the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence.”

Powell was obviosly Roland’s “type”

“The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence … The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest (o)shared(i) hallucination (on the one hand ‘it is not there,’ on the other ‘but it has indeed been’): a mad image, chafed by reality.”

“Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not — achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the (i)noeme(i) of Photography.”

Buy ‘Photo Ops’

 

Both starred in the film Doubt (2008). Ehrenstein was free-lancing press coverage. He recalls that on the set Hoffman told him that when a take was over, his Method technique was still deep in his character, but Streep began hanging out with the crew, cracking jokes, etc. This was passed along by Hoffman with total respect and admiration for his co-star. Died of a drug overdose in 2014.

 

CLAUDIA CARDINALE

Star and Muse for Federico Fellini (81/2), Visconti (The Leopard), and Sergio Leone (Upon a Time in the West), this Photo Op was taken on the occasion of a tribute to Leone in Hollywood in 1998.

 

 

 

“The most offbeat star in the history of cinema,” avers Ehrenstein. Amply demonstrated by his lead in Robert Altman’s film version of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye (1973).

 

(Johnny Marvin “If I Had a Talking Picture of You”)

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. Today the blog transfigures itself into a red carpet of sorts so Mr. David Ehrenstein can walk his and Bill Reed’s new kindle/book of pix selected from David’s decades of snapping the famous and great into the theater that we call the world, and this post reveals an initial tiny array of its goodies. Please be attentive and, ideally, salivate or some equivalent. Thanks, and thank you, David. ** h (now j), Saint John is super singular and a plus for anyone’s memories, I think. I do of course remember your poetry scholarliness. I hope the rain held good things. I will be ready to kill for some starting tomorrow if our forecasters are correct. Best of luck with your deadlines! ** _Black_Acrylic, Oh, right! I totally spaced on the Kier interview! I would have housed it here in a heartbeat if I hadn’t. Damn. Everyone, the great artist Kier Cooke Sandvik submitted to an interview with the legendary and partly _Black_Acrylic-edited zine Yuck ‘n’ Yum on the topic of yesterday’s blog superstar Shaye Saint John a few years, and you can and really, really should read it for, like, a billion reasons. Here. Whoo-hoo on the Premier League qualification! ** David Ehrenstein, Enjoy today, I hope. Everyone, Mr. E has done a new thing on his FaBlog and, if you’re a USA person who even remotely follows the news, its title — “It Is What It Is” — will surely tell you exactly what it’s about. Here. ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff. I didn’t know that about Lincoln Center thing either. Do, obviously, take that opportunity. Oh, Daniel Schmid Day is finally popping up here tomorrow. Fingers strangled on the screenplay, and fist pump on the Georgia retreat score! I love XTC and Andy Partridge in general. I was lucky to get to see XTC a few times before Partridge freaked out. To me, ‘Mummer’ and ‘The Big Express’ is where they start losing their adventurousness and their greatness begins to taper off, but I think there are some really great tracks on both of them. My favorites are kind of the obvious albums: ‘Drums and Wires’ and ‘Black Sea’. Also, if you can manage to get them, there’s this fantastic pair of LPs from 1982 that collect their singles and B-sides respectively: ‘Waxworks’ and ‘Beeswax’. XTC’s B-sides were often as great as — and more experimental than — their album tracks. No, the meta-intervention into the Walser piece turned out to be unnecessary. The piece needs to live or die on the Walser text. Zac and I did a pretty heavy edit on the overly verbose play while we were in Rennes, and I think that has hopefully solved a lot of the problems. Bon day, man. ** JoeM, I’m forced by being over here and my impatience to acquire books that I want to read to stick to mostly pdfs and eBooks. Less pleasurable but less cluttering, I guess. ** cal, Yes, I think that was Saint John’s intention. ‘Glamour that doesn’t really go anywhere’: I like that. That’s a lure. Enjoy family life. Nice that that’s nice. Nice family, I mean. I seem to be good. Dreading an imminent brutal heatwave, but good, working, the usual. Happy Wednesday! ** chris dankland, Hi, Chris! Oh, shit, I’ll go find it. Hold on. Okay, gotcha. I’m glad you’re already enjoying the teaching after only one day, and, obviously, I’m glad your school is one of the wise ones. What was I like in 5th grade? Hm. Quite nerdy. Not popular. Overly tall. (I grew too fast.) I was kind of best known at school for this handmade zine I made and sold to my schoolmates called ‘Flunker’. I’d handmake/ write/ draw, like, 7 or 8 identical copies of each issue and charge kids at school 50 cents or something to buy it. It was kind of notorious. It was very influenced by Mad Magazine because I was completely obsessed with Mad Magazine at that age. Sadly not a single copy exists anymore. Oh, and I can’t remember if I was in 5th or 6th grade when I got hit on the head with the axe ‘cos recovering from that occupied a lot of time. But I think it was 6th grade. I was 11, whatever year of school you’re in when you’re 11. What about you in 5th grade? Pony up, man. I’ve had some awesome dark coffee, and I intend to have a lot more before the day is through. xo ** Bill, Hi. The person Saint John reminds me most of is a kind of brain damaged Ryan Trecartin. But, yeah, I get the Johanna Went thing too. I, of course, say give the difficult route all you’ve got before you go simple, but then go simple without a care or trace of guilt if you do. ** Damien Ark, Hey. Oh, yeah, I do miss the comments that show up while I’m doing the p.s., and it’s only once in a blue moon that I remember to check back to see if I missed anything. Uh, figure out a way to de-shittify things around you ASAP. There’s always a way. You’re pretty resourceful, man. And enjoy the good stuff. The good stuff is all life has to give. xo. ** Okay. Please help make the birth of David’s book a pleasant one, whatever that entails. See you tomorrow.

‘Shaye Saint John videos are the internet’s answer to outsider art, and they’ve been flippantly relegated to just another thing in ” that weird part of YouTube.” There’s no big artist reveal, no studio-backed film adaptation, no corporate sponsorship. She posted videos on YouTube, and then one day, she stopped. Her website looks like it was plucked from 2001, because it was. The “Meet Shaye” page, peppered with GIFs and an autoplaying MIDI, declares: “LONG STORY SHORT…I AM AN ENTERTAINER, I AM A MODEL, I AM A SINGER, I AM A MAGICIAN, I AM AN ACTOR. I AM SO MANY THINGS! I AM ALSO THE WORLDS RECORD HOLDER FOR HAVING THE MOST PROBLEMS!”

‘Words are repeated and flashed across the screen, dolls are destroyed, mannequin legs tap and drag across the concrete. And there’s so much of it! But a few themes repeat in the videos: obsession with beauty/perfection, obsession with celebrity, obsession with connecting with others (but an inability to ever really do it). Shaye is a woman of excess. She’s on the internet 24/7, interacting with her fans and sharing autographs, she’s seeking miracle cures, she’s seeking riches. When you see her masked face in front of the palm trees and twinkling Hollywood horizon, and her strange figure slouching in front of the pink stucco houses, she simultaneously fits the scene and repulses the viewer. She’s a manifestation of celebrity excess and obsession—she’s an Indiana punk in LA exorcising her creator’s demons.

‘That creator was Eric Fournier, an LA-based artist who passed away on February 25, 2010, from complications related to his alcohol abuse. He was 42 years old. In this story, there are two Shaye Saint Johns. First, in myth, supermodel Shaye Saint John is disfigured in a freak accident and subjected to a series of horrific mind-control experiments by the CIA. Eric Fournier, shy and genius artist, takes her under his wing and helps her create art for a wider audience. Second, in reality, Shaye Saint John is a rubber mask and deflated costume draped over a wheelchair when not worn by Eric Fournier, shy and genius artist. Battling alcoholism and overflowing with ideas, he uses the Shaye character to create art while deflecting the spotlight away from himself.

‘Fournier grew up in Bloomington, Indiana, and in the mid 1980s he nourished the growing punk scene in bands like Blood Farmers and Skelegore. Before the interconnectivity of the online world, Fournier’s friends in Bloomington relied on him to import the new punk trends from LA. “I distinctly remember the great feeling of anticipation whenever Eric returned from LA. What new gem would he have dug up?” recalls a friend on a memorial message board posted after his death. “And he rarely failed to deliver.”

‘But despite his role as importer of hardcore culture, Fournier shied away from the spotlight. “I never had the impression he was at all comfortable being a singer in a band. It was not about ego or desire for attention,” another friend recalls. “He’d sort of keep his back to the audience, pull faces or whatever—keep a bit of ironic distance from the whole ‘singer in a band’ thing.” These posts were made five years ago on a message board started by Jim Faust, Fournier’s partner in the 14 months before his death. Faust was seeking insight into Fournier’s past.

‘Fournier arranged a showing of the Shaye Saint John short Turkey Day, which, according to Shaye’s website, premiered at the Nuart Theater in Los Angeles on Feb 1, 2002. “A lot of people were down there, a lot of lights and stuff, regular people just don’t know what to think,” Crew recalls. Lenora Claire was also in attendance: “It freaked everybody out, and it got banned from the Nuart. I was like, ‘What is this weird puppet robot woman lady?'”

‘And that’s the thing—she’s clearly not a puppet, clearly not a robot. She’s some sort of woman, who can form sentences and move about. There’s a person manipulating the costume, but the videos never reveal the creator within. “Shaye’s like a hot dog,” Claire says. “It’s awesome, but don’t ask what’s inside.”

‘Fournier’s work has inspired a few disciples, such as filmmaker Larry Wessel, currently working on the documentary ERIC AND SHAYE. His goal in creating the documentary is bringing Fournier’s Shaye Saint John work to a wider audience, with the goal of helping Fournier get recognition as a groundbreaking filmmaker. Wessel describes Fournier’s work as “maximalist” art, or, “the diametric opposite of the extreme simplicity and ultra boredom inducing pretentiousness and elitism of minimalism.” To Wessel, Fournier’s films represent a complete freedom from convention.

‘As a figure of this maximalist movement, Shaye exists outside of Fournier himself, and her role in the mythos is tantamount to the art itself.’ — Kate Davis Jones

Sink Stink

What’s Wrong With Shaye’s Legs?

Twenty4Seven Music Video

Tissue

Starchild Project: Funfetti Cake

Hand Thing

Balloon Goon

Halloween Trash

OMG OO-LALA

Playing With Matches

Washroom 2

Western Town

Shaye Saint John Youtube Channel
The Bizarre and Tragic Story Behind One of the Internet’s Original Outsider Artists
Trigger Happy: The Hallucinogenic Horror of Shaye Saint John
Behold the Hilarious, Magical Horror That is Shaye Saint John
“Cracked Actress: The Enigma of Shaye Saint John”
ON SHAYE SAINT JOHN, SUPERMODEL OF MANNEQUINS
Shaye Saint John @ Twitter

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Golnoosh, Hi, Golnoosh! I’m so happy you like his poetry. My favorite of his books is an early one that unfortunately is extremely out of print: ‘Spring In This World of Poor Mutts’. I think almost all of his books are o.o.p., so probably the ‘Collected’ is the only easy way to go. I hope everything is wonderful with you! ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Yeah, he’s fantastic, and, yeah, lacks the name recognition of many of his peers for unknown reasons. ** Misanthrope, Good. That you liked his poems. Right, I just saw its back to hurricane level again. Have fun with it. It could be fun (if you like that sort of thing) by the time it gets to you. An illusion: color me not surprised, like you no doubt. Any new bites? Poor spider. He meant well. RIP. Ouch. Both you and your car. What a weekend, dude. ** JoeM, Hi. Infinity Land is great, and they’re sweeties, and their books are as beautiful, object-wise, as books get. So he’s got a very good champion in them. I don’t know if I’ve ever even read a single Booker winning novel. Maybe by the law of averages, but it’s the same with the American lit prizes. I tend to sort of rebelliously knee-jerk view those awards from on high as a bad sign. James M. seems rather confusing. He just brought some huge stake in the Art Basel enterprise and seems to be easing out of the Fox empire. Very hard to trust that lot, though. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey, B. Ah, too bad about the doc, but I guess no real surprise. There’s def. a great doc possible with that guy. I am among those who think Zidane is basically a god, yes. That was a very nice clip, thanks. Big up to your charged dude and his/your team. They’re still knocking it out of the park, to horribly mix sports metaphors? ** cal, Hi, cal. Like I think I said yesterday, the two shorts just before ‘Pomegranates’ and the feature just after are amazing. And ‘Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors’ is very worth seeing too. Joan Crawford? Hm, you know I think I don’t have any thoughts about her acting and so on. I have seen her in stuff. Big presence, maybe a bit too hammy? I mostly know her from the notorious scuttlebutt — ‘Mommie Dearest’ and all of that. I will watch that vid of her reading her autobiography in just a bit. That seems a good way into her. Thanks, bud. Everything good re: you and yours? ** Steve Erickson, Thanks for straining your eye(s) for a moment. I’m very glad to hear it went well. Take care of it for as long as it needs, yeah? And make the most of the storm. ** h (now j), Hi! I’m pleased you like his poems. He’s kind of a poet’s poet, as they say, much admired by his peers and younger poets, but not known much at all to the poetry reading audience at large. Why, … who knows, I guess? I originally found his poetry in the great, super great anthology ‘Anthology of New York Poets’ edited by Ron Padgett and David Shapiro. That book was basically my Bible in the early 70s. It’s where I first discovered so, so many of my favorite poets from Ashbery and Schuyler to Berrigan and Brainard and beyond. I carried that book everywhere. I hope your storm is intense only in the dreamy, atmospheric way. We have another day or maybe two of loveliness here before the temperatures skyrocket into hell again for a few days. ** Okay. Do you know the insane videos of the late internet based artist/genius/weirdo Shaye Saint John? If not, you’ve got a real mindblower ahead of you today, should you so choose. See you tomorrow.