#handcrafted thoughts

Cancelled

“Photography is not a sport. It has no rules.”

Movie posters by the Stenberg Brothers

Amazing works by Russian designers Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg. From Notebook:

Born in 1899 and 1900 to a Swedish father and a Russian mother, the brothers initially studied engineering and fine arts. Pioneers of Constructivism, they worked as sculptors, architects and designers of everything from railway carriages to theater sets to women’s shoes, always working in collaboration with each other. But it was as movie poster designers, in the glorious spring of Soviet Cinema, that they excelled. From their first poster for The Eyes of Lovein 1923 until Georgii’s untimely death ten years later in a motorcycle accident, they designed more than 300 posters. (Vladimir continued to design film posters, though with less distinction, and was appointed Chief Designer for Moscow’s Red Square. He died in 1982.)

What is extraordinary about the Stenbergs’ posters, beyond their amazingly expressive and dynamic use of color, composition and typography, which has rarely been equalled, is that, though they look like photomontage they are actually almost entirely illustration. The ever-inventive Stenbergs had constructed a prototype overhead-projector which would allow them to project filmstrips onto their posters and to copy and embellish faces and bodies (as well as to distort them if necessary), hence their photorealist look. This gave their posters a consistency and quality that would have not been possible to achieve, due to the limitations of the printing processes available at the time, by cutting and pasting photographs onto paper.

There’s a catalog of their work that’s out-of-print, but you can get used copies here.

Funny Black and White Street Photography by René Maltête

Polaroids taken by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1970s

Director Andrei Tarkovsky was a great admirer of photography. He created some kind of a “photo-diary”: he shot his family, everyday life, places he travelled to. 

Hong Kong Yesterday.

Fan Ho.