Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Waits/Corbijn '77-'11 - Schirmer/Mosel

We have, today, taken delivery of a cardboard box containing the most expensive book I have ever purchased. It is the result of a long term collaboration between my favourite photographer and my favourite singer/songwriter/musician.  I am afraid to open the box.

Here though is a wonderful article in Interview magazine by Alexandria Symonds:

http://goo.gl/zTGNC

Tom says of Corbijn: 

"We are very different men. He's, like, 6'5", Dutch, quiet, studious, controlled—almost like a doctor—and I'm jerky, impatient, corny, curious, spraying in all directions. But we are both trying to discover something we have not seen before. Anton pulls hats out of rabbits. He will draw all the color from your face, put you against a gray sky, and presto: you look like a gravedigger. We are no longer in Miami. We are in Siberia."

ON THE MOOD OF THE PHOTOGRAPHS: When I'm out making pictures with Anton, we look for places that look mythic, filmic, tragic, operatic, and places that, if you frame out that new car dealership, could feel like a place from an old-fashioned book or a battlefield, a dying town . . . or an alley that could be hiding the Boston Strangler. Or we look for long shadows and dead trees, so you feel like you are in Odd Man Out or The Ox-Bow Incident.

ON OIL STAINS: The thing about oil stains is that if you go back in the next few days and try to find them, they will be gone. So the photos, for me, are profound because they have such short lives. They are more like fingerprints, dead leaves, rain puddles, or the corpses of flies.


I will open the box but not just yet.

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