Jonathan Singer: Botanica Magnifica

I’m impressed! Thanks to Vanity Fair, I learned of this amazing photographer, Jonathan Singer, a podiatrist who loves qualities of light and how they are captured. His website, Botanica Magnifica, offers a preview of his upcoming show at the Washington Museum of Natural History. Can’t wait until that show is in NY!

Although I have only found out about Singer’s work, I will admit that some of the still-life images I’ve been directing for The Caelum Archive look similar to his style. I guarantee you: it’s pure coincidence.

George Lois, Carl Fischer at the MOMA

George Lois is a marketing power house. Perceptive and visionary. His two books $ellebrity and Iconic America explore American fascination with its own pop-culture and the visual teams who define culture in pictures. My interest in Lois’s work is specifically in the pictures: how he solved visual riddles and how photography was employed to either assert or inform the cultural lexicon of his day(s). He is most famous for his Esquire covers, and now you can see these covers at the Museum of Modern Art, starting on April 25th. It will be interesting to the photographs by Carl Fischer in large scale.

Here is an interview with George Lois by Kurt Anderson for NPR’s Studio 360.

Since George Lois is famous for his work on Esquire magazine, a related note:

“There’s not one path anymore,” David Hirshey, executive editor of HarperCollins and former longtime deputy editor of Esquire magazine, said the other day. “Thirty years ago, you worked at a newspaper, you moved to a magazine, and then you wrote books or screenplays. Today you can be a blogger who writes books or you can be a stripper who wins an Academy Award for Best Screenplay.”

Ha! Excerpted from this month’s Magazine Issue of the NYO.