Aug 23
Quote of Note | Diana Vreeland
Posted in: Uncategorized
“I have astigmatism, like El Greco. I’m not comparing myself with El Greco for a minute, except that we both have the same physical disability. Partly because of his disability he saw things that most people don’t see. I see all sorts of things that you don’t see. I see girls and I see the way their feet fall off the sidewalk when they’re getting ready to cross the street but they’re waiting for the light, with their marvelous hair blowing in the wind and their fatigued eyes….”
–Diana Vreeland, quoted in Amanda Mackenzie Stuart‘s Empress of Fashion: A Life of Diana Vreeland (Harper)
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
“In my project Miracles et Cie (2002) I settle my scores with the supernatural. My images are an ironic homage to the touching facet of the history of photography, which has been used to fake the presence of ghosts and spirits: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many crooks used photography’s powers of persuasion to ‘demonstrate’ their paranormal powers. But this work’s critical objective consists of an outrageous reflection on how the current whirlpool of beliefs, cults, rituals, and superstitions has set us adrift. Here, by using conjuring effects, photography becomes the document of the illusion.”
“Everybody has yellow inside. For us it’s a very spiritual color. It’s something that happens very naturally when we work in the studio, when we are drawing. Everyday we go to work in the room and it’s yellow because of the lights that come in the window. Sometimes in the house of my mother, we take one room and use it as our studio. All our drawings from this time are orange, yellow, red, hot. The night is too cold outside. All the colors you see are how we feel. When you feel the night knocking on your window, you need to be yellow, keep yellow. All the colors you see are improvised, everything we do is improvised. We never know which color we going to put on the clothes or character, it just happens.”
“The most interesting stuff [in product, packaging, and communications] is coming out of the interactive world, because you can tell a much longer story. There is nothing wrong with print, but it’s going to be two-dimensional.
“I was sixteen when I traveled with my family for the first time to bella Italia. As I recall, immediately upon arriving in Milan, in the haze of jet lag and the oppressive July heat, I was struck by a billboard featuring an art nouveau rendering of a couple in a passionate embrace against an inky night sky, with just the words Baci and Perugina. I knew that baci meant kisses, though I didn’t even know what product this advertised. It didn’t matter. The woman was clearly in a swoon, and so was I. This was the pivotal moment when I fell in love all at once with Italy, type, and food. Whenever I see the iconic Baci package (though it has been ruthlessly updated over the years), it still makes me smile.”
“The previous covers that we’ve published of LeBron have tended to be more serious and introspective—so I knew this cover had to be lighter, both in tone and mood. This photo of LeBron that Jeffery Salter took shows that genuine moment of relief and enjoyment. Throughout the playoffs, you could see the intensity and the ‘weight of the world’ on LeBron’s face. This cover needed to be the opposite.
“Ansel Adams is probably the one who got me into photography. We have a button in 