The photo that started it all. The Beatles Pillow Fight, Georges V. Hotel, Paris, 1964.

He first arrived with the Beatles in 1964, he’s photographed every U.S. president from Eisenhower to Obama, was steps away from Bobby Kennedy the night he was assassinated, in the room with Nixon the day he resigned and invited into Michael Jackson’s bedroom to snap some baby pics. He’s the man who just happens to materialize - with a camera - wherever history’s being made.

“Too many photographers dance around the edges of a story,” Harry Benson likes to say. 

Not Harry. He goes for the heart - the subjects of his new book New York New York prove it. Through hundreds of iconic photographs of the city’s immortal characters - from Truman Capote, Jackie Kennedy and Andy Warhol to Paloma Picasso, Malcolm Forbes and Spike Lee, Benson captures that raw energy, that action over thought, that chaotic beauty that is New York. 

5:14 pm  •  3 September 2011

First. Make up your mind to be happy. Happiness is largely a matter of self-hypnotism. You can think yourself happy or you can think yourself miserable. It is up to you. Learn to find pleasure in simple things. If you can’t go to the opera, you can turn on the radio. Nail on your face the smile that won’t come off, and after a bit you will find that it comes naturally.

Second. Make the best of your lot. Of course, you’re not everything you want and things are not just right. Nobody is that lucky. Even the most fortunate have a lot of crumpled rose leaves under their forty mattresses of ease. There isn’t a single human being who hasn’t plenty to cry over, and the trick is to make the laughs outweigh the tears.

Third. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Don’t think that everything that happens to you is of world-shaking importance and that somehow you should have been protected from the misfortunes that befall other people. When death robs you of one you love, or you lose your job, don’t demand to know of high heaven why this should happen to you and grow rebellious and morbid over your sorrow. We are never happy until we learn to laugh at ourselves.

Fourth. Don’t take other people too seriously. They are not so much, anyway. Don’t let their criticisms worry you. You can’t please everybody, so please yourself. Don’t let your neighbors set your standards for you. Don’t run into debt trying to keep up with the Joneses, or bore yourself to death trying to be as intelligent as the Highbrows. Be yourself and do the things you enjoy doing if you want to be comfortable and happy.

Fifth. Don’t borrow trouble. You have to pay compound interest on that and it will bankrupt you in the end. It is a queer thing, but imaginary troubles are harder to bear than actual ones. There are none of us who have not lain awake at night petrified with dread of some calamity that we feared might befall us and that we felt would shatter our lives if it should occur. Generally it never happened, but if it did, it was not so bad after all and we survived it without serious injury. Enjoy today and let tomorrow take care of itself. There is no sounder adage than that which bids us not to trouble trouble until trouble troubles us. The only good that worrying ever did anyone was make him thin. It is grand for the figure but hard on the disposition.

Sixth. Don’t cherish enmities and grudges. Don’t keep up old quarrels. Don’t remember all the mean things people have done to you. Forget them. Hate is a dreadful chemical that we distill in our own hearts, that poisons our own souls. It takes all the joy out of life and hurts us far worse than it does anyone else. There is nothing so depressing as having a grudge against someone. Nothing makes a home so miserable as for the family not to be on good terms. Meeting someone you don’t speak to will spoil any party. So if you have an enemy, forgive him and kiss on both cheeks, not for his sake but simply because it is to making you unhappy and uncomfortable to be stirred up in wrath against him.

Seventh. Keep in circulation. Go around and meet people. Belong to clubs. Travel as much as you can. Have as many interests as possible. Have hosts of friends. That is the way to keep yourself cheerful and jolly and thinking that this is the best of all possible worlds.

Eighth. Don’t hold post-mortems. Don’t spend your life brooding over the mistakes you have made or the sorrows that have befallen on you. What is done is done and cannot be changed, but you can have your whole future life in which to make good. Not all the tears can bring back those we have lost, but we can make life miserable for ourselves and those about us by our unavailing weeping. Quit beating upon your breast because you haven’t as much money as you used to have. Don’t be one of those who never get over things. Have the courage to take misfortune on the chin and come up smiling.

Ninth. Do something for somebody less fortunate than yourself. Minister to other people’s trouble and you will forget your own. Happiness is a coin that we keep only when we give it away.

Tenth. Keep busy. That is the sovereign remedy for unhappiness. Hard work is a panacea for trouble. You never saw a very busy person who was unhappy.

4:36 pm  •  31 March 2011

“A photographer looks at everything, which is why he must look from beginning to end. Face the subject head-on, stare fixedly, turn the entire body into an eye and face the world.” 
Shomei Tomatsu

Up through Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory, The AIPAD Photography Show offers a pretty impressive range of works, blending old with new, new media with photojournalism - oh, and lots of Japanese.  Amongst the sorely topical works: a 1961 post-Hiroshima shot by Shomei Tomatsu featuring a morphed bottle, melted by the atomic blast.

10:56 am  •  18 March 2011

Vassar Place, Houston, circa 1992

1:35 pm  •  11 February 2011

Versailles for the masses.

Hooray slackers! Now you no longer have to waste your time traveling the world in order to delve into our cultural heritage. New Google Art Project conveniently walks you through art museums and institutions street-view style.

For the more critically inclined, ponder this and consider how Google Art Project is changing the mode of aesthetic experience:

Painting simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience, as it was possible for architecture at all times, for the epic poem in the past, and for the movie today. Although this circumstance in itself should not lead one to conclusions about the social role of painting, it does constitute a serious threat as soon as painting, under special conditions and, as it were, against its nature, is confronted directly by the masses.

- Walter Benjamin, 1936 (!)

2:55 pm  •  1 February 2011

Don’t get me wrong, I know a lot of people who find LinkedIn useful. Smart people. And it’s not that it isn’t useful and probably a great tool if used right, it’s just that LinkedIn epitomizes the way we view our own capacities. Always in terms of categories. And I believe this obstinate categorization, norm in both education and business, is limiting us to think inside pre-assigned boxes. Our times promote specialization. Which is great! As long as people are actually sharing and tapping into each other’s expertise. 

Enter genius. In a recent blog post debating the loss of ingenuity, Jonah Lehrer proposes that the complexity of our 21st century problems have replaced yesterday’s lone genius with that of the collective mind.

Personally, I’m most convinced by an alternative explanation, which is that our modern problems have gotten so hard – so damn intractable, complicated and multi-disciplinary – that we can no longer solve them by ourselves. 

I agree. But are these increasingly complex problems really being solved on a multi-disciplinary level? Maybe this is where the ingenuity is getting lost. The specialization is there, the liquid networks are there, but are we doing what we can to make the necessary connections?

The problem obviously doesn’t lie in information accessibility. Lone geniuses like Darwin or Einstein didn’t have the abundance or connectivity of the web. I think the difference has to do with the combination of three things in particular: limitless curiosity, fuzzy academic and practical boundaries, and the permission to fail. Legendary innovators have always dabbled in different modes of intellectual activity, creating a cognitive environment where even the smallest scraps of ideas can collide and create new, bigger ones. These can then be confirmed or refuted, adopted or rejected, preserved or destroyed. But at least they were given the time of day.

I don’t believe that the dearth of lone thinkers has to do with our living in a trivial age, or with information overload and the internet making us stupid. It’s the lack of cognitive overlap that’s making us less likely to tap into areas other than the ones we’re already familiar with. That, and academic and professional environments that promote a treadmill-like existence.

I’m not saying that LinkedIn is the White Witch, keeping us all in a hundred-year innovational freeze, but I do believe that it represents a paradigmatic way of thinking about our capabilities and skills. In the words of Steven Johnson: it’s not so much a question of thinking outside the box as it is allowing the mind to move through multiple boxes. 

3:49 pm  •  28 January 2011  •  1 note

Map Shower

For Marcia

I want your hair
to cover me with maps
of new places,
so everywhere I go
will be as beautiful
as your hair.

— Richard Brautigan

5:18 pm  •  7 December 2010

“The ‘laptop generation’ thinks there is no painting before Pollack and no film before Tarantino.” - Peter Greenaway

Here is the artist/film director’s vision and means of educating them, opening today at the Armory. 

11:26 am  •  3 December 2010

French photographer Sacha Goldberger’s fantastic pictures of his feisty 91-year-old grandmother Frederika, a.k.a. Mamika.

Photographs on view at Galerie Wanted in Paris until November 30th.

12:17 pm  •  19 November 2010

“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.”

Chuck Close on Charlie Rose, October 28, 2010: Creative Brain, a discussion about creativity with artists Richard Serra and Chuck Close, neurologist Oliver Sacks, Ann Temkin, chief curator of painting and sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art and Eric Kandel of Columbia University.

5:46 pm  •  4 November 2010