52 Polaroids: 10 of 52
So I was knocking around the library in search of early 20th century art history textbooks when I stumbled upon a book of Aubrey Beardsley illustrations. I was floored … the drawings were familiar, but I’d never investigated further.
The image at right is Portrait of Miss Winifred Emery from 1895 and provide but a hint of Beardsley’s prolific talent.I’m spending a little time investigating Beardsley and his life, and it sounds like a pretty odd tale. He died at age 25 of either tuberculosis or suicide, was a rumored homosexual who hung out with Oscar Wilde and his crowd, and made incredibly vulgar art nouveau illustrations for ribald classics like Lysistrata.
With Chris Ware’s New Yorker covers still fresh in my mind, I began to think of the challenges of illustration – specifically the development of a unique style. I’m no illustrator; my visions are primarily lens-based and the pen/hand combo has always been somewhat of a foreign idea. But looking at these two (Beardsley and Ware) and their immediately recognizable style, I was reminded of John Szarkowski’s quote:
“Photography is a system of visual editing… Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from the given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.”
The key for me is that idea of visual editing: when an illustrator sits down to the blank sheet, there is nothing to edit. All must come from within. It’s that element that fascinates me the most. From nothing comes everything; while, with photographs, something comes from everything. And – hopefully – that something (the photograph) helps illuminate everything in a new way.
Large Archive of Beardsley Images
Aristophanes Lysistrata illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley (NSFW) (Ha!)
