Thelonious Monk, Minton's Playhouse, New York, Sep 1947

William Gottlieb, The Golden Age of Jazz

Reknowned Photographer Eve Arnold passed away earlier this year. She was famous for her photographs of Marilyn Monroe. I still remember the effect these images had on me when I first saw them. 

I have previously shared one before. But here's my favourite one, which I hunted all over in the Camden Market, and my blogpost on that day. 

~After all the hunting, have finally laid my hands on this precious photo of my two personal Gods: Marilyn reading Ulysses. A sublime symbol of what God and Man are best capable of.

Now, as the frame adorns my study wall, I contently sip my tea marvelling at its beauty, split between my admiration for Ulysses and adoration for Monroe, telling to myself, how it was all worth the time and quid.

To borrow Monsieur Balzac, Yes, there goes another novel….

Raymond Gehman, via Nat Geo

"A massive exercise in human misery"

-Margaret Bourke-White

Morgana

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

 
~ Susan Sontag

Alongside Marie Colvin died a promising French Photographer Rémi Ochlik . Reading about Remi, he comes across as one of those kids of the great lineage in Europe who know at a very young age what they want to do with their life, and go about doing it - living like they know not how to othewise and, dying, well, dying like only they can. 

Here is Rémi Ochlik's picture at work somewhere in Egypt during last year's uprising. 

You can visit his website here that has much of his work here and a msnbcphotoblog that I found whilst looking for Rémi's pictures.

Michael Cavén

Michael Melford via Nat Geo

His flickr stream has many wonderful offerings.

This lead photo in the NYMag piece on Joan Didion's Blue Nights is eerie in a prescient sort of way - eerie because Didion actually allowed such a photograph to be taken and prescient because it captures the essence of contemporary aging. It is also a perfect snapshot of Didion's present state of life.