Mark Elson's wet-plate photos of Civil War reenactors ... Backstories: the painting at Langer's and the Venice Beach piano player ... changing the thinking on football head injuries
Civil War photos: Re-enactor uses old camera to re-create 'period' images (slideshow)
" Wet plate collodion photography ... on metal and glass plates ... was the way photographs were made during the Civil War. To obtain the look, feel, and authenticity for my book, I learned the process, had equipment built, and found period lenses. I fell in love with this demanding and beautiful process, with its rich tones, great detail and timeless look." -- Mark Elson on Battlefields of Honor
Many Civil War reenactors take on the persona of their relative who fought in the war. One woman, an HR worker in real life, helps people on the battlefield as a first aid worker; another woman portrays one of the hundred or so who hid their sex and fought alongside the men. A surprising (to Americans) number of Europeans put on their own reenactments.
(Mark Elson and his Civil War-era wet plate photography rig. Credit: Britain Nelms.)
And when Mark Elson, a photographer by trade, reenacts, he dresses in period costume and often shoots with the equipment of the time: big clunky wooden cameras that used 5x7 glass negatives and might take half an hour to make a single exposure.
The results are in a new book Battlefields of Honor: American Civil War Reenactors. The book features 50 wet plate images, plus about 200 35mm shots of battles, behind the scenes looks, and some great before/after photos of the reenactors. Elson's reporter wife Jeannine Stein provides the text for the book.
Stein told me reenacting "really is a way for them to get away from the 21st Century. Get away from cell phones, get away from their jobs. And they truly immerse themselves to the point where it's kind of a rude awakening when they do have to go back home; they really do miss it."
Llyn Foulkes: Rediscovered (again) at the Hammer Museum
(LISTEN to John Rabe's interviews conducted at the Hammer Museum opening for Llyn Foulkes Saturday, February 2, 2012, including Hammer director Ann Philbin, art fan Andy Schwartz, and artist Llyn Foulkes.)
Talking with art fan Andy Schwartz at the Hammer Museum Saturday night, I said I'd never seen anything quite like Llyn Foulkes' work. "No, you haven't," Andy agreed. "That's why he's always been the outsider in the art world. Nobody's ever figured quite where he fits."
Llyn Foulkes is 78, and lives and works in LA. He went to Chouinard Art Institute and started showing his work at the famed Ferus Gallery in 1959. He exhibited at the late-great Pasadena Art Museum, and LACMA bought one of his pieces in 1964. He was in Paul Shimmel's groundbreaking exhibit Helter Skelter at MOCA in 1992. His works are often unsettling, either in an overt way (bloodied, mutilated heads) or in a way that you can't put your finger on: Schwartz says Foulkes' huge paintings of rocks are "leathery, visceral, alive. " He attacks corporations, and pays tribute to veterans. But he's never achieved the worldwide fame his supporters believe he deserves.
Hammer director Ann Philbin told Off-Ramp Foulkes says he's "been discovered about a dozen times, but this time we're gong to make it stick" with a 150-work career Foulkes retrospective, titled simply "Llyn Foulkes," at the Hammer through May 19. Then, the exhibit travels to New York and Germany.
The exhibit includes early drawings, cartoons, and notebooks; paintings in which Foulkes covers heads with paint and often mutilates them; the huge paintings of huge rocks from the 60s and 70s; the attacks on corporate America; and will even feature Foulkes' one-man-band.
What does Foulkes think of the Hammer show? "I'm very happy now, once I saw it all toether. There's stuff in there I haven't seen for 50 years. When I started looking at it all together, I thought, 'Oh, I've got some pretty good stuff!'"
Langer's Delicatessen home to pastrami, fine art: the story behind Marinus Welman's deli paintings
Langer's Delicatessen has been around for over 65 years now. The MacArthur Park-adjacent institution's serves matzo ball soup, lox on bagel and the famous Number 19 sandwich. Past the hordes of pastrami-loving diners that line the booths you'll find three paintings: they show a Langer's Deli 45 years into the past.
Off-Ramp Kevin Ferguson found out the paintings are the work of a Dutch born painter named Marinus Welman who is still painting today. He went to Langers to investigate. Norm Langer, the deli's owner says despite pleas to sell them, the paintings are a treasured part of his "public collection."
Welman hasn't gone far. He's living in Southern California still and keeps a studio in an industrial part of Orange. He says he was asked by the deli's founders—Al and Jean Langer—to produce three paintings for the restaurant. In exchange Welman said Langer's gave him about $1000 and a year's supply of the deli's Number 6: chopped chicken liver and pastrami.
Welman—a lifelong artist—was 20 when he moved to the states. He grew up in Amsterdam during World War II. His first paintings showed scenes of war wrecked buildings and food, which was scarce then.
He made a career here as a graphic artist in the states but never losing his love for fine art. And touring his studio you'll find all genres: beautiful coastal landscapes, portraits of American Indians, enormous skyscapes. He says that recently though, he's confronting a topic that for a long time was hard to approach: the Holocaust.
Welman's Holocaust work was recently on display at Santa Ana's Q Art Salon. Along with a series of foreboding portraits of anonymous Nazi generals, Welman also depicts scenes of everyday life. One painting shows a group of women happily singing as a uniformed Nazi soldier plays the accordion. The blood red background and the grotesque depiction of the characters tells the viewer something isn't right here. The scene, Welman says, is based off a photograph taken at Auschwitz.
Welman says it's these kinds of images that both inspire and enrage him. "Sometimes when I come across these people having so much fun and making their music, rollicking it up in a death camp—that it just sparks me to do something nasty," says Welman.
Vox Pop: One true love?
Off-Ramp intern Bridget Read asked passers-by one of the eternal questions: "Is there one, and only one, true love per person?"
(For Mary and Nick Roman, KPCC's Senior News Editor, it's been 25 years! Photo by Patricia Nazario.)
California Nature Conservancy: Love is a brutal thing in the animal kingdom
In the animal kingdom, love can be a grim matter. Each year, for example, salmon swim upstream to the site of their freshwater birth to spawn and die not long after, never to see the open water again.
For Valentine's day this year, the Nature Conservancy of California is celebrating those animals that are willing to die--or kill--for love. Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson talked with Larry Serpa, an ecologist with the Nature Conservancy.
For Valentine's Day
Marc Haefele tells us that the Romans didn't think Cupid was so cute.