I’ve been following Olivia Bee’s work since the days of Flickr. Her photography has an earthy grainy 70’s quality I love. She was ridiculously talented even as a teen and her first book, Kids in Love, was an instant classic. The book channels the feeling of being a teenager somewhere out in America in a time before everyone was glued to their phones. It reminds me that we were once obsessed only with each other and how that world felt intensly lived. 

Now a decade or so later she and her husband run a farm in Oregon. She continues to make evocative editorial and personal work, and still seems intensely connected to her people and the land around her. 

I don’t know why, but I recently remembered ASCIIquarium. It still exists! (You can also find it in an easy-to-install hombrew package) Thank me later.  

The original art was by Joan Stark and was grabbed from Geocities. 

Sam Bourne a Nottingham bank clerk with with a passion for phtography photographed the Indian Himalayas in the 1860s. Tony Davis of antiquephoto writes about his work here and Heritage Lab, dives into the untold stories of local labor and knowledge used to make them. 

More of his work from around India can be found on these sites: National Gallery of Scotland, the V&A, and DAG. 

I love studying movies through scene by scene screencaps. Breaking down films to frames both exposes the artificiality and the art of moviemaking. 

These are a few sites I frequent for these:

deep fried movies - no fuss, but limited selection.

caps a holic - gets into the nitty gritty of the source material, often housing screencaps from multiple sources.

scene still - focuses on high resolution images. 

film grab - large library, includes ads but is not too obnoxious about them.

Like intimate art experiences and a bit of artworld intrigue? The Soloviev Foundation occassionally holds guided tours of small portions of its banger art collection. Go to the menu on the foundation’s home page to book a guided tour. I’ve been to a few of these. They’re usually lightly attended, and each time I’ve seen very different portions of the collection. Very cool.

Soloviev is an unusual billionaire/philanthropist if only for his tattoos and 22 children.

Cy Twombly is a favorite of those of us with art history degrees for a reason. His body of work is simultaneously thinky and emotional. It draws you in, but the more you investigate, the more you start to see connections to other art and literature of the period. Twombly once famously said that he would sit thinking for a few hours before making a painting in 15 minutes. 

He didn’t talk much about his work (the word “enigmatic” is often used to describe him), but people in his circle clearly adored him and always mentioned his intellect. If you’ve ever done deep dives on Twombly, you might have noticed that stories about him often featured unusually good photography. 

What I didn’t know at the time was that the person making those photos was often his wife, an Italian Baroness named Tatiana Franchetti, an heiress from a family famous for its art patronage. In addition to being his benefactor, she was an accomplished photographer and artist in her own right. 

The NY Times featured her photography and posted a cache of her photos. You should check them out. Each is excellent. 

More Franchetti’s work. Bastian Gallery , Rosebery’s , 

More on Twombly and Franchetti: Paris Review , On their relationship