Photography – Saturday Soul with Sandy Hibbard

Exploring the Mundane and Magical Symbols in Irving Penn's Work

Sandy Hibbard — Wed, 26 Apr 2017 05:44:50 +0000

I have always been a fan and totally in wonder of Irving Penn’s work. In my High School years, his work that appeared in Vogue and Bazaar inspired me toward fashion and beauty, and influenced the way I look at light and structure in photo and design work and the importance of objects and still life in art. His work, on exhibition here in NYC this summer, includes more than fashion though. Take a look for yourselves and if you are in NYC this summer be sure to plan a trip to the Met to partake in this rare delicacy of art. I am excited to be going this week and can’t wait to see his work up close and personal.
Cheers!
Sandy

To commemorate the life and work of Penn—who is still the envy of everyone 100 years after his birth—the Metropolitan Museum of Art will host Irving Penn: Centennial from April 25 until the end of July, when it will begin traveling.

I love this image – sumptuous, sensual, full of life and abstraction, his lighting and composition creates an illusion of a malleable clay sculpture. I just want to squeeze it!

The macro detail of these cigarette butts, the lighting and slight graininess of the film, transforms trash into an exquisite work of art.
From the article: I-D online magazine:
Cigarettes
In 1972, Penn produced a series of platinum prints of smoked-down cigarette butts. He shot the discarded cigarettes in much the same way that he shot high-end products — each cigarette, and its ashes, was perfectly composed against a white background. “The elegance of these pictures is similar to that which we find in his pictures for Chanel’s cologne for men, for Clinique’s lipstick or in brightly colored still lifes of flowers,” Michiko Kasahara wrote in an essay in Irving Penn Photographs (1997). “Whether the subject be cigarette butts or high fashion, they find equivalence through the elegance of Penn’s technique.” Although the beauty of these images is incontestable, Penn himself was strongly against smoking, and these images contain that sentiment. In 1975, Cigarettes was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. “That single exhibition,” Francis Hodgson wrote in the Financial Times in 2012, “overcame the strong prejudice against ‘commercial’ photographers being welcomed in the museum.”

“To call Irving Penn a fashion photographer is to misjudge one of the most complex and intriguing artists of the latter half of this century,” art critic and historian Andy Grundberg wrote in The New York Times in 1991.

One of my personal favorite photographic genres is still life, In fact I wrote a poem recently that expresses how the energy of an object or a still life vignette “RECollects” my life, you can read it here. I love the freedom you can take in shooting a still life, as exampled here in Penn’s work, the artist has total control in dismantling or creating life the way he alone sees it. That is what I love.
From the article: I-D online magazine:
Still Lifes
Penn’s personal work was often a direct reaction to his fashion photography. Liberman once told him that the editors at Vogue didn’t like his photographs because they “burn on the page.” “I began to understand what they wanted of me,” Penn said, “was a nice, sweet, clean-looking image of a lovely young woman.” From 1979 to 1980, Penn photographed still lifes of found materials—pieces of glass and metal arranged with bones or even a human skull. “When the prints were shown,” Penn said, “I admit I was surprised at the hostility they provoked.” Of course, he went on to produce many unusual and artistic still lifes for Vogue and they became among his most iconic published photographs. In 1990, critic Richard Woodward wrote, “The steely unity of Irving Penn’s career, the severity and constructed rigour of his work can best be appreciated when he seems to break away from the dictates of fashion for magazines,” he wrote. “Only then is it clear how everything he photographs—or, at least, prints —is the product of a remarkably undivided conscience. There are no breaks; only different subjects.”
Iconic fashion images, riveting portraiture, studies in still life, objects, and everyday people, ala Irving Penn that shaped our current culture and had a huge impact on my personal sense of style and exploration of art beyond the traditional bounds that had been set for me. A true genius. Thank you Mr. Penn for sharing your art with generations!

The Amazing and Magical Blood Moon Eclipse

Sandy Hibbard — Tue, 15 Apr 2014 19:40:21 +0000

Nothing feeds my soul like the moon, perhaps because I am a cancer in the zodiac and we are governed by the moon. I stayed up last night until 4 this morning with my Chiminea flaming, hot coffee and my trusty camera catching the different phases of the lunar eclipse. It was magical. Here are two of the photos of last night’s blood red moon, to see the entire lunar eclipse timeline of photos, go to my profile on Facebook.com/ – or you can watch the video of the time-line photos I have put together here:

I hope you will enjoy them as much as I enjoyed taking them!

Photos are a great way of reflecting

Sandy Hibbard — Fri, 10 Jan 2014 18:09:36 +0000

Photos are a great way of reflecting.

(slideshow at the end of the post)
If there is one thing I am learning in my life, it is accepting who I am now and not being stuck in who I used to be or who I think I used to be. Growing up, and aging with attitude, is about being honest and gracefully accepting the person I see in the mirror. Looking at photos helps me to place myself in a historic perspective, accepting who I have been, what I have gone through, my loves, my mistakes (including choice of eyewear!), happy and sad moments, and then moving forward to accept who I am today. It is pure honesty. Certainly, this applies to aging as well. As we get older, it is easy to be stuck in the memory of our self as 25 or 30 or whatever your age is in the memory picture of your mind, and photos help to bring us back to the reality and acceptance of who and where we are now. We’ve come a long way, baby! It also helps us to see where we have slacked up or need improvement, that’s the honesty part. Like accepting the fact that those 10 extra pounds we gained was because we stopped exercising and started eating too much, or realizing the decorator really screwed up the paint color we thought looked good!

In today’s post, I want to share some of my photographic images with you that are from my infamous 10-photo challenge “game” (this is a preview of some of my favorites, you can see the entire collection at the link). Sometimes I invite others to play the game with me publicly and to share their images online along with mine, sometimes I just play the game alone simply because I enjoy observing things and taking pictures. In fact, I love to take photos of everything, it’s like documenting life and time for me. In looking back over images of the past I feel delighted, surprised, saddened, joyful, recapturing the emotions from what those photos meant to me at the time I took them and what they mean to me now. It is interesting how our emotions change over time. It is even more interesting to me at how random photos can evoke thought and introspection on our lives as I mentioned above.

I believe photography is one of the most beautiful art forms we have today and a wonderful outlet that we all have available to us with the explosion of smart phone and new camera technology. We are able to capture moments on the spot, in real time. I hope you will enjoy these images; I would love to have your feedback. Please stay tuned because the first 2014 10-photo challenge of 2014 is coming soon, more on that in an upcoming post.
Love and peace, Sandy
Enjoy the slideshow!

Fair Day!

Sandy Hibbard — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 05:33:18 +0000

A few of my favorite Texas State Fair pics…