Happy birthday Sir Michael Gambon
This 2019 portrait by Richard Learoyd @NPGLondon is special: it was made using a camera obscura & the Ilfochrome dye destruction positive-to-positive photographic process. A unique photo of a unique actor.
In Richard Learoyd's camera obscura photographs, light falling on the subject is directly focused onto the photographic paper without an interposing film negative.
Big Sur I, 2018
Richard Learoyd’s portable camera obscura at Big Sur.
📷 Miles Mattison, 2018
But back to birthday boy Michael Gambon:
He's one of the great actors in this recreation of Leonardo's Last Supper by photographers Dean Mitchell, Alistair Morrison & Andy Teare. How many can you name?
Answers here - click on "Identify" by each name: npg.org.uk/collections/se…
I wondered why Robert Powell got to be Jesus in this recreation of the Last Supper, & then the penny dropped. He played the role before, without glasses, in Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth, 1977
The Last Supper photo was taken in 2011. Alas, Tim Pigott-Smith, who plays Simon Peter, with his hands outstretched, is no longer with us; he died in 2017. I believe, though, that the others are all still alive.
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Remembering Charles Ives on his birthday 🎂
📷 Eugene Smith, 1945
"His music ineluctably anticipates the future because it originates from a perspective that sees time as laid out, simultaneously not successively, in space."
- Jonathan Cott
"No one else seems to hear it the same way. Are my ears on wrong?"
- Charles Ives
US Postal Service, 1997
Lou Harrison tells a sad story about Charles Ives, who composed in an 'aerie', on the top floor of his brownstone. One day he came down the stairs with tears in his eyes & said, "It doesn't work anymore, I can't do it anymore."
"And that was the end."
📷 Clara Sipprell, c. 1947
Remembering Arthur Rimbaud on his birthday 🎂
His portrait at 17, by Etienne Carjat, 1871
Musée Arthur Rimbaud
"One might say that contemporary French poetry owes everything to Rimbaud. Thus far, however, none have gone beyond him - in daring or invention."
- Henry Miller
A portrait of Arthur Rimbaud by Paul Verlaine, 1872
This is the revolver with which Paul Verlaine shot & injured his lover Arthur Rimbaud. It was auctioned by Christie's in 2016
📷 Thomas Samson
Remembering Jean-Pierre Melville on his birthday 🎂
📷 A. Abbas
"In Melville country, all slopes are slippery, some of them fatally so."
- Anthony Lane
Jean-Pierre Melville by Sam Lévin
"Transposition is more or less a reflex with me: I move from realism to fantasy without the spectator ever noticing."
Jean-Pierre Melville gives us a wave from his 1956 Plymouth Belvedere
📷 Gaston Paris, 1956
Remembering Vinicius de Moraes on his birthday 🎂
With Tom Jobim at the Bar Veloso
📷 Paulo Scheuenstuhl, 1960
With their great song "Garota de Ipanema"
Vinicius de Moraes & Tom Jobim by Pedro de Moraes, 1958
Another song the two collaborated on: "Insensatez". @TedGioia points out in The Jazz Standards that the song resembles Chopin's Prelude in E minor.
Tom & Vinicius in Brasilia
📷 Jader Neves, 1960
Antonio Carlos Jobim & Vinicius de Moraes are standing near where the Museu do Catetinho, Brasília's first presidential residence, will be built.
Remembering John Le Carré on his birthday 🎂
📷 Dudley Reed
"One of the fascinations of the intelligence world is that it’s such a reflection of the society it serves. If you really want to examine the national psychology, it’s locked in the secret world."
John Le Carré by Lord Snowdon, 1989 @NPGLondon
"The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. Spying is like the wiring in this building - it’s just a question of who takes it over and switches on the lights. It will go on and on and on."
John Le Carré by Terry O'Neill, 1975
"Le Carré’s true subject is not spying. It is the endlessly deceptive maze of human relations: the betrayal that is a kind of love, the lie that is a sort of truth, good men serving bad causes and bad men serving good."
- Timothy Garton
Gina Lollobrigida by Raymond Voinquel, 1956
This was taken on the set of Carol Reed's Trapeze @MAPatrimoine
Raymond Voinquel also took a series of photos of Gina Lollobrigida on the set of Jean Delannoy's Notre Dame de Paris, also from 1956.
The goat is trying hard to upstage Gina Lollobrigida in this shot by Raymond Voinquel. She was playing Esmeralda in Jean Delannoy's Notre Dame de Paris, 1956.