Remembering Kurt Vonnegut on his birthday 🎂
📷 Inge Morath, 1986
"He laughed a lot and was kind to everyone."
- Dan Wakefield
Jill Krementz took this picture of herself & her husband Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt and me at the end of the evening.
In Kurt’s words: ”When things are going sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment, and then say out loud, ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’”
Kurt Vonnegut
"I would just as soon have skipped it all", 2006 @smithsonian National Portrait Gallery
Kurt Vonnegut by Gil Friedberg for Life magazine, 1969
"I let the dog out, or I let him in, & we talk some. I let him know I like him, & he lets me know he likes me."
Kurt Vonnegut, hard at work in a typical Jill Krementz author shot. Vonnegut & Krementz were married from 1979 until his death in 2007. This was the photo the @NYTimes used in Vonnegut's obituary.
He called her "Jillio".
From Kurt Vonnegut's interview @ParisReview, 1977
INTERVIEWER
There were some bad reviews?
VONNEGUT
Only in The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, The New York Review of Books, The Village Voice & Rolling Stone. They loved me in Medicine Hat.
Kurt Vonnegut with the cast of his play Happy Birthday, Wanda June
📷 Jack Mitchell, 1970
"The bicycle was so full of magic & innocence, hiding there. It might have been a unicorn."
- Kurt Vonnegut
📷 Herbert List, Hamburg, 1930
Kurt Vonnegut by Ulf Andersen, 1988
"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer & cold in the winter. It’s round & wet & crowded. At the outside, you’ve got about 100 years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies - 'God damn it, you’ve got to be kind'."
Kurt Vonnegut by Santi Visalli, 1972
"For a book about surviving a massacre, Slaughterhouse-Five makes you laugh an unreasonable amount. Not least through the repetition of three short words that have inspired a thousand bad tattoos: 'So it goes'."
- @MBJack
Kurt Vonnegut by Douglas Elbinger, 1992
"Vonnegut managed to combine an exceptional humanity with a remarkably blasé pessimism, & presented his despair at human life in such engagingly simple terms that even Charlie Brown would have found it persuasive."
- Phil Baker
Kurt Vonnegut by David Levine, 1976 @smithsonian National Portrait Gallery
"His sheer amiability could light up all the cathedrals in America."
- J. G. Ballard
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Happy birthday to Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk 🎂
📷 Ara Güler
"His books are multi-layered, allegorical, sometimes fanciful, Proustian in their attention to detail and Borgesian in their dazzling complexity."
- Sarah Lyall
Orhan Pamuk by Sophie Bassouls, 1990
"Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow."
It's so great that other photographers have continued Philippe Halsman's #jump! tradition. Here's Orhan Pamuk by Alex Majoli.
This was taken at Cannes in 2007, when Pamuk was a member of the Festival Jury.
Celebrate the Richard Avedon Centennial 🎂💯
📷 Irving Penn, Vogue, August 23, 1993
"He was small, dark & electric with his own sort of vitality. Crackling. Sparks seem to fly out of him. He flashes his fingers like tiny rapid moths."
- Ginette Spanier
On Richard Avedon's Centennial, my favourite portraits
Carson McCullers & Tennessee Williams, April 25, 1950 #Avedon100
On Richard Avedon's Centennial, my favourite portraits
Buster Keaton, 1952 #Avedon100
I'm listening to Concerto Italiano play Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, in their 2005 recording under Rinaldo Alessandrini.
I've always loved the cover photo; it's by Julia Fullerton-Batten. I'll start a thread of some of my favourites of her photos here. 🧵
Julia Fullerton-Batten
The Lady of Shalott, 2018
... which is, of course, a reinterpretation of John Waterhouse's 1888 painting of Lord Tennyson's poem.
Happy birthday Sofia Coppola 🎂
📷 Kate Barry
"Coppola is a true auteur — a filmmaker with a distinct worldview and sensibility and a personal set of quasi-autobiographical interests."
- J. Hoberman
Sofia with her dad on the set of Godfather 2
📷 Steve Schapiro, 1974
The Coppola family by Ted Streshinsky, 1974
Eleanor & Francis Ford Coppola with their kids Sofia, Roman & Gian-Carlo
Celebrate the Red Garland Centennial 🎂💯
📷 Bill Spilka, c. 1957
"Garland's style was understated and harmonically sophisticated; he would delineate a melody, then shade it with distinctively voiced block chords and hints of counterpoint."
- Jon Pareles #RedGarland100
Esmond Edwards' great album cover for Red Garland's "Red in Bluesville", from 1959. Edwards took the photo, & designed the album as well.
Remembering Bea Arthur on her birthday 🎂
📷 Martin Mills, 1972
"Those of us working with her knew we were working with a golden comedic touch." - Norman Lear
Beatrice Arthur with Bill Callaway & Carl Ballantine in Bruce Jay Friedman & Richard Adler's musical A Mother's Kisses
📷 Jack Mitchell, 1968
Angela Lansbury & Beatrice Arthur in Mame
📷 Friedman-Abeles, 1966
Arthur won the Best Featured Actress in a Musical Tony for her performance. She was Beatrice on the stage & Bea on TV.