Dear Shaded Viewers,
A Shaded team was invited for brunch at the villa were Graham Tabor and his friends and family are staying, it’s about 30 minutes from Hyeres.
Miguel Villalobos diving and The Shaded team by the pool at Graham Tabor’s villa, Yoann Lemoine and Antoine Asseraf
Trying to be David Hockney with Miguel Villalobos, diver
Lunch and Miguel Villalobos
Akiko Hamaoka and Miguel Villalobos and Melvin Sokolsky
A visit to Melvin’s site is a must.
Melvin Sokolsky is a man of images. His series “Bubbles” and “Flying,” both shot for Harper’s Bazaar respectively in 1963 and 1965, figure among the classics of fashion photography. In the former, a woman floats along the Seine in a bubble. In the latter, another woman flies over Montmartre. These images are emblematic of Sokolsky’s work in photography: a light and playful world of enchantment. Beyond such remarkable achievements in fashion, the photographer’s entire body of work is astonishing.
Melvin Sokolsky is 21 years old when he starts working in fashion in 1959 at the invitation of Henry Wolf, the visionary art director of Bazaar. Wolf had just left Esquire, and he was looking for new photographic talent to modernize Bazaar; Sokolsky was among the chosen.
Less interested in apparel, Sokolsky is especially fascinated by his models as they pose in front of the camera. He portrays this fascination on several occasions, notably by creating images-within-images inspired by “Las Meninas.” Month after month he invents stories through which he explores the female form, its posture and attitudes.
Within the walls of his studio, Melvin Sokolsky releases an insatiable creative appetite. He plays with scale and perspective, increases the number of models, and constantly experiments. A woman walks on the ceiling; two others interact on top of a giant table and chair; another climbs a stairway that has no beginning or end. Sokolsky is knowledgeable about the history of images; sources of influence like the surrealist movement or metaphysical painting are sometimes quite apparent. There is a wealth of ideas, always fresh, yet there is also the process, the precision of the images, and the saturation of colors.
Alongside his sustained collaboration with Bazaar, the photographer also works for Show, McCall, Esquire, Newsweek, and New York Times Magazine. After more than a decade of professional photography, Sokolsky begins to work with motion pictures and decides to move to Los Angeles in 1975, where he engages in a parallel career as a filmmaker, mostly in advertising. At the turn of the century, Sokolsky takes up again his collaboration with Bazaar, and works for Vogue, Vibe or The New York Times. His visual poignancy remains intact; his photography, an experience both sensory and conceptual, is as luminous as ever.
The 1960s are rightfully considered to be the Golden Age of fashion photography, as well as its age of emancipation. Sokolsky, with his blazing creativity, is among the vanguard of the genre’s revolutionary movement. “I acted on instinct, and all I had to offer at first was irreverence.”
The ambition of this retrospective is to emphasize Melvin Sokolsky’s essential contribution to the revival of photography in the 1960s, and reveal to 21st century eyes just how strikingly contemporary this photographer is.
Melvin Sokolsky lives and works in Los Angeles. He is represented in L.A. by the Fahey/Klein Gallery and in New York by the Staley+Wise Gallery and by Marek & Associates.
Kristin Barron and Sadek Bazaraa and Olivier Borde
And now for the news that you have been waiting for…..
It was dead birds and flowers for the photography prizes. First prize went to Audrey Corregan for her series of the back view of dead birds that faceless assumed the postures of humans.
Audrey Corregan
Audrey Corregan (1982) is French and is based in Amsterdam. She began her studies in photography at the Vevey School before finishing at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. For this year
