The dance floor was crowded with sad-looking people in tinsel hats. Clouds of balloons floated down from the ceiling, and the diners who were left behind at their tables solemnly amused themselves by blowing out paper tubes with feathers on the end and making shrill blasts with wooden whistles. The English, in their way, were having a Gala Night.
Macdonald Hastings, Mr Cork’s secret (and Greta Garbo in The Temptress, c.1926 offering a good deal more fun.)
A fashion shoot with Gorkey Patwal for Archana Jaju.
In honour of a friend and Garbo look alike’s birthday, I present Ms Garbo photographed by Ruth Harriet Louise, the first female photographer in Hollywood and head of MGM’s portrait studio from 1925 to 1930. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a woman took such good (and non stereotypical) photos of other female stars.
Photographed by James van der Zee in Harlem, 1915. A perfect pairing for Nella Larsen’s ”passing” (which is set in Harlem about 10 years later) and which we’ve just read in book club.
Aka Lillian Fischer, star of the Ziegfeld Follies and then Paris model. A perfect period match for the Cartier yesterday.
Bettina is a model currently based in St Petersburg, photographed here by Alexandra Bochkovera.
A tiny exhibition, but an excellent one, is on at the reopened Courtauld Gallery and included in the general entry ticket. This is of Anthony Kersting’s 1946 and 1948 photos in Kurdistan, which mainly focused on the Yazidi population.
This was interesting as Kersting was an architectural photographer and this was the only time he seems to have taken portraits.
There are still a number of architectural photos that Kersting took – interesting in part because ISIL has since destroyed the palaces and tombs of earlier civilisations and in part because the stepped, conical towers of local mausoleums reminded me of Zoroastrian structures that I’d recently read about – but it’s the portraits that are really interesting.
Loving these 1900s garden photos
Photo by @jjamesmckenzie
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