The making of 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love”
"I'm Not in Love" is a song by English group 10cc, written by band members Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman and released in the UK in May 1975. Eric Stewart came up with the idea for the song after his wife, to whom he had been married for eight years at that point,...
Henry Fox Talbot
"I do not claim to have perfected an art but to have commenced one, the limits of which it is not possible at present exactly to ascertain." William Henry Fox Talbot, by John Moffat of Edinburgh, May 1864. William Henry Fox Talbot (11 February 1800 – 17...
Charles Nègre
Charles Nègre (9 May 1820 – 16 January 1880) was a pioneering photographer, born in Grasse, France. He studied under the painters Paul Delaroche, Ingres and Drolling before establishing his own studio at 21 Quai Bourbon on the Île Saint-Louis, Paris. Delaroche...
Knocker-uppers / Before the alarm clocks
A Knocker-upper, was a profession in Britain and Ireland that started during and lasted well into the Industrial Revolution, when alarm clocks were neither cheap nor reliable, and to as late as the beginning of the 1920s. A knocker-up's job was to rouse sleeping...
Once upon a time with Charles Perrault
Charles Perrault (12 January 1628 – 16 May 1703) was a French author and member of the Académie Française and he laid the foundations for a new literary genre, the fairy tale. Portrait (detail)of Charles Perrault by Philippe Lallemand, 1672 In 1695, when he was 67,...
In a white lace universe
In a white lace universe, three inventors create machine which are both pretty and useful. Unfortunately people do not understand them... “ Les Trois Inventeurs" (“The Three Inventors”) is a beautiful 1980 papercut animation film about a family of inventors that build...
Dorothea Lange ,the story behind her photograph “Migrant Mother”
Working for the Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration, Lange's images brought the plight of the poor and forgotten—particularly sharecroppers, displaced farm families, and migrant workers—to public attention. Distributed free to newspapers...
Willy Ronis, the story behind his photograph, Nu provençal (Provençal nude)
Ronis' wife, the Communist militant painter Marie-Anne Lansiaux (1910–91), was the subject of his well-known 1949 photograph, Nu provençal (Provençal nude). The photograph, taken in a house that Marie-Anne and he had just bought in Gordes , showed Marie-Anne washing...
The other side of Vladimir Nabokov
Nabokov's butterflies In 1967, Nabokov commented: "The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru. It is not improbable that...
Jack Kerouac
No one reads Kerouac better than Kerouac.. “ The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like...
Self-Portraits / Rembrandt van Rijn
"I can't paint the way they want me to paint and they know that too.Of course you will say that I ought to be practical and ought to try and paint the way they want me to paint. Well, I will tell you a secret. I have tried and I have tried very hard, but I can't do...
Library / Magic mountain – Thomas Mann
Der Zauberberg, first German edition, 1924 The Magic Mountain begins with a short but important introduction. Thomas Mann tells us this will have to be a very long book, since he wants to tell the story of a person, and a person is built up very slowly by important...
Craigie Horsfield
Craigie Horsfield (born 1949 in Cambridge) is an English photographer. In 1996 he was nominated for the annual Turner Prize. Horsfield described his work (photographs of the environments and people around him) as, "intimate in scale but its ambition is,...
“One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich”
- Chris Marker shooting his documentary on Andrei Tarkovsky "One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich", released in 1999.- The film combines clips from Tarkovsky's films with footage of Tarkovsky on the set of his last film The Sacrifice and on his deathbed, during...
Let’s talk about you – Sascha Windolph
Sascha welcome to my "home", thank you very much for agreeing to take part in this new column of my blog. Through this i want to get to know the artists that i appreciate most and i would like that they share with me their thoughts, worries, as well as an overview of...
Let’s talk about you – Winding Numbers
Hello Larry, I met you on the Tumblr platform where you manage two blogs. To start,tell me a few things about yourself. Just the things you feel like sharing, of course. I’m retired after spending a few years in the military and then many years as an educator. I have...
The world of interior / Henri Matisse
"The environment creates the object. I spent my entire life working in front of the same objects that gave me a sense of reality, turning my mind to all that these objects had been through for me and with me ." Henri Matisse Matisse liked to be surrounded in everyday...