April 29, 2003
Photo Noir.
Swiped from Metafilter is an excellent exhibit of tabloid photographs from the Los Angeles Herald Express, curated by Diane Keaton. But aside from the lurid nature of the photographs -- it looks like a James Ellroy gallery come to life -- the high aesthetic quality of the images cannot be denied either. (This has already been explored in, for instance, Luc Sante's Evidence, the Police Pictures exhibit at SFMOMA a few years back, and Sean Tejaratchi / Katherine Dunn's Death Scenes, not to mention Weegee's place in the photographic canon.)
The caption reads:
Mrs. Shirleen KuninWhat's striking about the photograph is not just the Diane Arbus-like quality of the image, but the way the light falls on her unreadable (rapturous?) face and how her gaze similarly follows the light. It's almost reminiscent of a shot in La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc!
March 27, 1948 Saturday
“Dennie got so many Christmas presents! But the dreadful accident happened 10 days before Christmas.
Compare this, for instance, with Carol Jo Pivar's portrait, which looks like a Cindy Sherman "film still" -- she looks like she just stepped out of some noir film.
Posted by the wily filipino at April 29, 2003 11:08 AM
The following comment is full of crap:
"Compare this, for instance, with child murderer Carol Jo Pivar's portrait, which looks like a Cindy Sherman "film still" -- she looks like she just stepped out of some noir film."
My mother, Carol Jo Pivar, the woman in the "portrait" was not and is NOT a "child murderer"!!
As a woman married to a man suffering what was then known as "shell shock" [now called "post-traumatic stress syndrome"], and that marriage basically decaying rapidly, she lashed out and struck my sister Laurie, a baby at the time causing problems for Laurie that have been sustained to this day. However, Laurie is alive and well. My mother is not, having died at the ripe old age of 38 years in 1972 from the big "C". Fortunately the whole episode was passed on, in detail to my oldest sister and she passed it on to me some years back. I was very shocked to see the posting on your site with the offensive term as you printed it. I will however admit that this was probably lifted from newspapers of the time, as the whole "incident" got a lot of publicity. The photo was probably taken as Mom was being taken to jail or Sybil Brand (where she roomed with the 1st woman in California to be executed!!). The situation aside, it does reflect the feel of a noir photo shoot.
...just wanted to set things straight!
Bruce W. Pivar