Lisa Kereszi

It shouldn’t really come as a surprise that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas collect the paintings of Norman Rockwell, but who knew? A current show at the Smithsonian highlights their holdings. (For the record, Spielberg is winning, with 50 pieces to Lucas’ mere 30.) The painting reproduced with this post was commissioned in 1923 as an Underwood Typewriter ad. It was Spielberg's very first Rockwell purchase. He said in the NY Times, “I hung the painting over my desk... It was my deblocker. Whenever I hit a wall or couldn’t figure out where a story was going, I just looked up at that painting.” It all makes sense – the three of them and their love for drama and Americana and story-telling. Spielberg was quoted as saying, “He was always on my mind because I had a great deal of respect for how he could tell stories in a single frozen image.

A familiar image popped up via Huffington Post today. It was a link to a LIFE Magazine page about the famous photograph of a dying, Christ-like AIDS patient and activist,  David Kirby, in his last moments, being desperately comforted by family and friends. It ran famously in a Benetton ad, and was instrumental in spreading the word about the crisis. The picture was made by a then-grad journalism student, Therese Frare, who said, "I asked David if he minded me taking pictures, and he said, 'That's fine, as long as it's not for personal profit.' To this day I don't take any money for the picture. But David was an activist, and he wanted to get the word out there about how devastating AIDS was to families and communities. Honestly, I think he was a lot more in tune with how important the photos might become." Frare pauses, and laughs.

Benjamin Donaldson is one of the artists in a previously-posted show, HOUSED. His picture in the exhibition, of a trailer loaded up with wood stoves, randomly parked on a Hampton, New Hampshire lawn, fits in with his general oddball take on the world we inhabit. It is from a series entitled Terrain, sort of a catalog of the left, lost and discarded in urban and suburban locales. He has work from other projects online, though, that not only show that sense of humor, but also betray a darker sensibility, dealing with themes like death and loss, faith and reason, shock and awe, and daydreaming versus reality.

Former forensic photographer and current artist and gallery preparator, Luke Turner, (who I have had the good fortune to work with) is giving a lecture on July 13th, and will present images from the history of forensic photography, slides from cases that he has photographed, and documentation of modern and contemporary art works that engage the viewer in the reconstruction process. Some relevant concepts explored by artists are crime scene reconstruction in Pierre Huyghe’s “Third Memory”, entropy in the work of Robert Smithson, accumulation in Barry LeVa’s pieces, the logic of sensation in the painting of Francis Bacon, something about that guy that had himself shot in a gallery, and many more. He will also discuss the curatorial work of Ralph Rugoff, and Luc Sante who have both made important connections between art and the forensic image.