Telephone lines and ocean liners
Comments: 4
I’d never seen Tina Modotti’s 1925 photograph of telephone lines before and I was struck by the resemblance to A. M. Cassandre’s Normandie (this is the nicest-looking page but this is the larger reproduction) which it predates by a decade.
The soaring upward heft of perspective — power, literally in Modotti’s case and figuratively in Cassandre’s — off horizon lines that are in both cases pictorially and functionally absolute vies with a denser, clustering perspective at the bottom of each image: a group of birds glides on the updraft coming off the hull of the Normandie, telephone poles seemingly bare of wires create an off-kilter symmetry.
Somewhat ominously Cassandre’s birds are thirteen — the same number of lower-perspective poles in Modotti’s photograph.
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Posted to General Rants • 2004.08.05 (Thu) • 23:14
Comments
Posted by Matthew Aaron 2004.08.06, 01:55
Not to nitpick, but I believe there are 16 birds in Normandie (they are difficult to see against the background, but they’re there).
Posted by jh 2004.08.06, 11:30
Damn! There goes that theory. I’ve only got tiny little web scans to look at.
A wonderful little French restaurant in Ebisu where I used to go for lunch had a print on the wall, but that was years ago. When I went back recently to see if I could enjoy, just one more time, that paté he used to make and perhaps have the lamb and then the girl’s coffee with a ramekin of crème brûlée, I discovered the place had moved I know not where or closed!
Will try to consult better repros before going off half-brûlée’d.
Posted by dr Dave 2004.08.06, 15:37
Damn, it took me until yesterday to figure out where I had seen that guy on the left-hand corner… knew I had seen him somewhere, just couldn’t place him…
That wouldn’t be so bad, save for the fact I had been spending most of last week playing that very movie in every possible directions and speed in order to sample the hell out of it…
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