Word: couchs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...What is it about scarlet and its ilk that would simultaneously produce two completely unrelated books of photography devoted to pictorial variations on the same red object? Kenn Duncan's Red Shoes comprises 42 photos of the famous in fuchsia footgear, Kevin Clarke and Horst Wackerbarth's The Red Couch is the record of the amazing overland odyssey of twin crimson chaises through the heart of America...
...cinematic commonplace, they started right off with a metaphor in search of a meaning. Least Heat Moon's informative but overly journalistic commentary describes the origin of the sofa project in an unused college swimming pool, revealing in a reverent tone that the photographers initially envisioned suing the Red Couch "to disturb the commonplace into something new, and then photograph the results." The presence of the sofa in every picture imposes self-consciousness on the photos, becoming a big red photographic sic; even the most naturalistic portraits of Americans on the couch seem deliberately contrived artistic statements. The sofa, whether...
Where Duncan indulges his subjects. Wackerbath and Duncan challenge theirs, putting them on the couch for photographic psychoanalysis, squeezing sides out of their subjects that they often would rather not provide. Wackerbarth had to surrender the negatives for his portrait of Larry Hagman that looks far cheaper and sinister than J.R. could ever be. The injury behind the photo of the Illinois Nazis is almost as interesting as the picture itself: a deep woodpancled room with the Nazi's arranged defensively in the rear, conspicuously ignoring or suspiciously eyeing the camera...
...photographers included about twelve too many sittings of average Americans in their native environment: farms, construction sights, gravel pits. The photos that work are the most incongruous: a beach arcade owner plomped smugly against his daily haul: Steven Jobs riding the Couch down the Macintosh assembly line; meat magnate Wally Mander sitting cross-legged in his slaughterhouse, and my favorite, part-time "model" Tina L Hotsky reclining on a New York streetcorner under the watchful eye of the NYPD...
...shots, each separated from the next by a few seconds of blackness, and three funny bits. Artfully done, with offhand references to directors ranging from Byron Haskin to Yasujiro Ozu, Stranger Than Paradise has the odd odor of something left too long behind Aunt Bela's chintz couch. Yet it has been extravagantly praised and is a box-office success in its Manhattan debut. Rarely has a movie so fetid been so feted...