Louis Seaman and his friend, Joseph Polacek, Perth Amboy, NJ.

Louis Seaman and his friend, Joseph Polacek, Perth Amboy, NJ.
I took this photo of my uncle Joe and his friend Louie with a Holga.

Monday, July 12, 2010

The Cracked Mirror of Miles Ladin's Photographs

Miles Ladin's photographs of the rich and the beautiful are fascinating because they simultaneously show why celebrities attract some people and repulse others. I fall into the second category and for me Miles's images confirm the reaction I've had since I was a teenager. These days when I'm subjected to celeb images it is almost always against my will. I've stopped watching television altogether; likewise Hollywood movies. I avoid places like malls and big retail stores (for other reasons besides this). But I still have to deal with them in supermarket checkout lines, when driving in my car (highway billboards), visiting NY City (everywhere, especially subway stations) and at my Mom's house (television, though she usually turns it off).

I admire the edginess of Miles's photographs. It's interesting that he regularly publishes in magazines and newspapers with little or no backlash. Recently, his work was also featured in the book, Celebrity & Performance: The World's Top Photographers. The images presented here are more ambiguous, but I'm hoping you will take a closer look at Miles's work to see what I'm talking about. I'm going to contact him about running additional images here, because I'd like to write something about them. In the meantime, this is an introduction and you can go to his website,
Miles Ladin Photography.

Miles and I became friends about twenty years ago when we both studied photography with Larry Fink. While he is not a hardcore traditionalist and occasionally shoots digitally, Miles continues to produce most of his work using Nikon 35mm cameras, making both traditional gelatin silver prints and large scale ink jet prints from scanned negatives.