10+ Leila Courey

Inspiration from photo-related people. On Fridays.

I’ve been sharing a pod with Leila Courey for awhile now. She’s been the Art Buyer at Leo Burnett in Toronto for 4 years and has been ever so generous with her CA’s, her Bookmarks and her Creative Department. Leila’s hilarious and also a bit of an overachiever. Brace yourself, she’s provided lots of pretty pictures here:

1. Eamon Mac Mahon
There is no particular order to my top 10, but Eamon Mac Mahon will always be on the top of my list. His photographs are places I want to see, people I want to know – the landscapes of dreams. He has travelled great distances and produced a broad body of work, but each of his images embodies the same quiet, precious spirit. He has an innate ability to respond to people and environments. Shadows and light fall into place for him, allowing him capture more and more moments for the universe to enjoy.

2. Philip-Lorca Di Corcia
I fell in love with photography when I saw Philip-Lorca Di Corcia’s pictures. His deliberate, often covert placement of light sources within each frame is genius. In his “Head” series, he creates voyeuristic street scenes while his subjects remain coolly oblivious.

3. Billy & Hells
German photographers Anke Linz and Andreas Oetinger formed the collective Billy & Hells in 1996. I found their work in Hasseblad’s Victor magazine, and was instantly drawn to one cowboy’s face – he looked like someone I’d known in a past life. Then, as I discovered the rest of Billy & Hells’ “Wilder Western” and “Sisters of Mercy” series, I was arrested by the intensity of their portraiture, served up with the precision and detail of image-making masters.

4. Barbara Crane or here
Barbara Crane has been an artist and a teacher for the past 50 years. Her still lifes, architectural photos and portraits of people in her urban Chicago landscape are linked by a uniquely abstract nature.

For her “Human Form” series, Crane paid her own children 35 cents an hour to pose for her camera, with the understanding that they would not be identifiable in her pictures. So she experimented with void and light, and created shadowed, linear images of them.

These photos effect me in the same way as Picasso’s Femme and Simon Chaput’s nudes (though in his case, the light is inverted).

5. Julia Fullerton-Batten
Fullerton-Batten is a consistent heavy hitter. Her photographs are pleasantly uncomfortable, like stills from imaginary, fairy-tale films similar to Alice in Wonderland. I love these images. I love getting lost in them.

6. Mike Slack
Mike captures environmental, graphic details within a Polaroid frame. His aesthetic is beautiful, distinct and pure. All natural. No fuss.

7. Tin Eye Reverse Image Search
Toronto’s Idée Inc. is developing a brilliant online tool, Tin Eye, which allows you to upload or link to a JPG, then searches the web for additional sites where the same image appears. It’s a great resource for finding the original sources of nebulous images that float through cyberspace. Tin Eye is still in beta development, but it’s constantly improving. Idée is also responsible for Multicolr Search Lab, a Flickr add-on that finds photos according to a user-generated colour palette.

8. Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine
I saw this film in the late ’90s. Its visuals have stayed with me since. La Haine takes place in a French banlieue (suburban ghetto) where a young, diverse immigrant population suffers a racist, oppressive police presence. The story follows three friends – Vinz, a Jew, Saïd, an Arab, and Hubert, an African boxer – over a 24-hour period. A cop has shot one of their friends; the city is on the brink of rebellion. Here are clips from two of my favourite scenes:

The opening credits feature a montage of real footage from Parisian riots, excerpted from French news coverage. Bob Marley’s Burnin’ and Lootin’ plays the soundtrack.

DJ Cut Killer on the decks, blasting NTM’s Nique la Police (a remix of N.W.A.’s F*** tha Police) into the courtyard of a low-rise tenement development. Kassovitz takes us on a kite’s-eye flight across the treetops.

Since we’re talking film, I’m sneaking in an extra item. Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train is shot in long, sweeping pans. Its moving pictures have the same qualities that I love in still photos. This scene is hilarious:

9. Graham Roumieu
Graham’s world is full of dark humour and visual delights. His work is strange and wonderful, peppered with perfect imperfections. A Graham Roumieu drawing is playful and wise, together at once.

10. Nina Simone, If You Knew

It’s the lyrics and the melody. It’s the long stream of sweat, caught in the dull stage lights, that rolls down her neck. At 2:14, it’s the expression she wears when she looks up and acknowledges her audience for the first time. She is with strangers, not her lover. She is Nina Simone.