I DON’T BELIEVE IN ANY KNOWLEDGE, ACQUIRED WITHOUT JOY

I DON’T BELIEVE IN ANY ROAD, HIT WITHOUT GOAL

I DON’T BELIEVE IN ANY HEIGHT, CLIMBED WITHOUT EFFORT

I JUST BELIEVE IN “ACTION”, ACTED WITH PASSION.

BUT IT AIN’T WHAT YOU ACT, IT’S THE WAY YOU ACT IT ! 

J.K.

Revered as the baroque master of lifelike portraits and light and shadow, the 16th-century painter Caravaggio is now being touted as the first master of photographic technique, two centuries before the formal invention of the camera.

The Italian artist has long been suspected of turning his studio into a giant camera obscura, punching a hole in the ceiling to help project images on to his canvas. But new research claims that Caravaggio also used chemicals to turn his canvases into primitive photographic film, “burning” images he then sketched on to for works such as St Matthew and the Angel.

“We were already sure Caravaggio projected images of his sitters, but we have now found mercury salt in his canvases, which is light-sensitive and used in film,” said Roberta Lapucci, conservation chief at Florence’s SACI institute.

Lapucci said she investigated the use of chemicals after building a camera obscura with artist David Hockney. The technique of using lens and mirrors to project an image was written about by Leonardo da Vinci, and Caravaggio was reputedly inspired to use one by the philosopher Giovanni Battista della Porta.

“You get the image by turning the whole studio into the camera obscura, but you need darkness, and the problem is you cannot paint in darkness,” she said. “X-ray fluorescence shows the presence of the mercury salt in his canvases. That is not uncommon because it was used in glue, but we are awaiting proof he was using it on the surface, in his primer.”

The image burned into the primer would last about 30 minutes and only be visible in the gloom. “Therefore he used a white lead paint to sketch, mixed with barium sulphate which was luminous, and which we have found traces of. That way he could see where he was sketching.”

life:

Well, hello Steve McQueen.

“We’re sitting around the swimming pool. and Steve goes away and he comes back without any clothes on! He just enjoyed being out in the desert, looking at the sun… . He was just so natural about everything. There was no time to feel embarrassed, so I shot all the pictures that I needed to shoot. I shot some pictures specially of his backside so we could use them in the magazine, because in most of them he was just [full-on] nude. He wasn’t hiding anything.”

Read more here.

No document gives greater insight into how a photographer shoots and edits than a contact sheet—the direct print, from a roll or negatives, where a film photographer often first sees her work, grease pencil in hand, and marks her best frames. A new book from Thames & Hudson collects a hundred and thirty-nine notable contact sheets made by Magnum photographers, from the nineteen-thirties to the present, some of which are currently on view at the International Center of Photography. “One rarely expresses in words all the random thoughts that run through one’s head except maybe a psychoanalysts couch, and yet the contact sheet spares neither the viewer nor the photographer,” Martine Franck writes in the book. “By publishing that which is most intimate, I am taking the very real risk of breaking the spell, of destroying a certain mystery.” Sometimes, though, the mystery only deepens. Here’s a selection of contact sheets (which can be clicked for a larger view) and final prints.

by photo booth - The New Yorker