Simon Griffee
Design consulting, art direction, photography.
May 2019
Bruce Gilden Lost And Found, New York City, 2019
A pleasure to work with master photographer Bruce Gilden together with Sophie Darmaillacq on these wonderful images, to be printed by master printers at Éditions Xavier Barral. The book will be available on 19 November, 2019.
After recently moving house, Bruce Gilden discovered hundreds of contact prints and negatives in his personal archives, from work undertaken in New York, his native city, between 1978 and 1984. From these thousands of images, most of which are new even to their author, Gilden has selected around a hundred. Extending from the desire to revisit the work of his youth, this historic archive constitutes an inestimable treasure. ¶ An extraordinary New York is portrayed here, revealing an unknown facet of Gilden’s oeuvre. With all the energy of a young man in his thirties, and with no flash (before Gilden became famous for its almost systematic use), Gilden launched an assault on New York in a visibly tense atmosphere. In this extraordinary gallery of portraits, the compositions — mostly horizontal — simmer with energy, bursting with the most diverse characters, as though Gilden intended to include within the frame everything that caught his eye. ¶ In this book, we see the guiding tropes of the work that was to make Gilden famous: sustained movement and tension, unrivalled spirit, and an instinctive and irreverent affection for his subjects, perfectly in cahoots with his city.
Remembering Leonardo da Vinci 500 Years After His Death
Taking a moment from current life flux to note that Leonardo da Vinci, a great human being, died 500 years ago on 1519 May 2nd.
His extraordinary powers of observation, his boundless curiosity, and his kindness, live on in our species’ memory.
Go get a copy of Walter Isaacson’s biography for a refreshing look at a life that taught and inspired, and continues to teach and inspire, so many, and take a moment today, and every day, to observe a tree or a leaf or a flower, a grain of sand or flowing water, a bird or a piece of paper in flight, the sun and clouds, moons and stars, the expression of a person sitting in front of you, or passing by, in light and shadow and time.