"Blue Prints," Zeva Oelbaum (2002) and the pop world of Bae Yong Joon

Zeva Oelbaum's cyanotype botanicals (blue photographic prints), a few examples of which are reproduced here from her beautiful book Blue Prints (Rizzoli, 2002), create an unexpected, otherworldly effect. Zeva's own words, further below, capture the scientific, photographic properties of cyanotype, but there is a romantic mood created by the simplicity of color and shape of these contemporary images from this antique and nearly-forgotten 19th-century process.

Oelbaum's work inspires others in unexpected ways. In the blog "Zoom on Bae Yong Joon," Blue Prints photographs complement the imagery of a Korean pop star. The effect is incongruous, yet the blogger known as Jaime has created a universe of romantic longing and beauty -- however silly it seems -- from joining the ridiculous and the sublime: an earnest, visual definition of kitsch. Yet the effect is unusually haunting.

In the world of pop culture blogs it can always be argued that, as in art, far less has been done with far more. In the world of pop idols, however, the unexpected (and the appropriated) has its place, even if the serious artist is blissfully unaware of how the work is used. Here are Jaime's own words, reminding all readers that romantic swoons can be a path toward understanding, as well as a labor of story-book love:

Still-life photographer Zeva Oelbaum discovered a Victorian herbarium (botanical journal) in a tiny seaside antiques shop along the coast of New England. The only trace of its origin is an inscription ‘May 18, 1896, Randolph, VT’ in graceful penmanship. This century old treasure has yellowed rippled parchment paper tied with fraying white satin ribbon. Through the delicate hands of a young woman over a century ago, the fragile botanicals were diligently arranged with strings of linen in an artful and whimsical composition. Time has worked wonders too, the pressed botanical has created a shadow impression of itself reflecting on the adjoining page.

The journal was a means of creative fulfillment, letting this young lady escape into the beauty of flowers in her peaceful surroundings. Maybe it’s that light touch of nostalgia lingering in the air, that mystical sensation from a bygone era or the mere thought of an artist’s creativity narrowly forgotten and rediscovered.

About her own work with blue print photography, Oelbaum writes:

I became fascinated by the cyanotype process when I learned that it holds an important, if unrecognized, place in the history of photography. In 1843, British botanist Anna Atkins (1799-1871) published a landmark volume of over four hundred cyanotypes entitled British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. This book was the first to be illustrated entirely with photographs. To make the prints, Atkins placed the algae specimens on paper coated with iron salts, then exposed it to sunlight. When she washed the print in water, the outcome was a white specimen outlined on a prussian blue background. Images created in this manner came to be known as blue prints. In this way she created photograms, or "shadowgraphs" as she called them, of each original plant.

The chemical formula for cyanotypes was developed the year before by British astronomer Sir John Herschel (1792-1871) as a reliable and efficient way to copy his calculations. Before his discovery, draughtsmen were typically employed to duplicate notes and charts. Herschel also coined the terms "photography," "negative," and "positive."

I found working with the blue print process liberating. Released from any obligation to reproduce details, I started to explore the interactions of shapes both formal and organic. As the objects became less precise, I became freer to interpret them.

It was rewarding to work in this nineteenth-century medium to create a contemporary body of work that both expanded upon this form that Atkins had mastered and my own photographic vocabulary.

Zeva Oelbaum's website can be found at http://www.zevaphoto.com. All images from the book Blue Prints created by Zeva Oelbaum and published by Rizzoli Books, New York.

Edmund White's fevered "Dream"

"I cannot help vanishing, disappearing and dissolving. It is my foremost trait."
Stephen Crane, 1896



More than one hundred years since his death at 28 from tuberculosis, Stephen Crane himself has nearly vanished from American literature. Although he merits two volumes from the Library of America (the first, containing "The Red Badge of Courage" and other stories, was issued in 1990; a second volume containing his singular poetry came out in 1997), his brief life and career mark him as a writer of unfulfilled promise and ultimately a curiosity in American letters. Yet during his short life he enjoyed a reputation in Europe that included friendships with Henry James and Joseph Conrad, and was celebrated there as a premier American stylist of a new, bolder and unvarnished prose far removed from European forms.

Edmund White's new novel, Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel (2007) is written in a style that Crane would admire. Its quick-paced 220 pages are an historical fiction wrapped around the final months of Crane's life as he and Cora Taylor (whom he never married, although she called herself Mrs. Stephen Crane after his death) travel from England to Germany in hopes of a cure for Crane's deteriorating health. White's "what if" scenario -- a last, lost manuscript, tantalizingly incomplete, of a New York banker and his young male lover -- is a fantasia prompted by a real-life encounter between Crane and a "painted boy" in lower Manhattan.

Whether or not the reader accepts this hot-house premise (White supports it with some suspect papers he calls "uncertain" and "challenging material for a novelist"), it allows White free rein to imagine the story as Crane dictates it to his devoted Cora. Realizing this fabrication could collapse at any time, White tells the story quickly. He never lingers on the improbabilities of explicitly homosexual descriptions from the dying writer to Cora, or that the story of "the painted boy" itself becomes an un-Crane-like fantasy at the end. White does supply a neat twist which would explain the mystery of the "lost" manuscript, and his research into the gay culture of 1890s New York is extensive in detail. He obviously views the gay culture of Hotel de Dream as another historical aspect to his own autobiographical work.

A woman believed to be Cora Taylor with Stephen Crane, 1899

The little we know of Crane's original intentions is from the letter of a friend. In 1894 he and Crane met a boy, heavily made-up, soliciting in the street. They bought the boy a meal and after Crane overcame his initial shock at the boy's story, he was inspired to write at least part of a novel, calling it Flowers of Asphalt. Crane eventually destroyed this manuscript (at the request of his horrified audience of one, the writer Hamlin Garland).

The poet John Berryman, in his biography Stephen Crane, supplies few more details about the book being written in May, 1895, from the same letter by James Huneker:

His book started in a railway station, with a country boy running off to New York -- a scene that in Huneker's view Crane never surpassed. It was going to be called Flowers of Asphalt and "longer than anything he had done." But Hamlin Garland, when Crane read him some of it, was horrified and begged him to stop. Whether he ever finished it Huneker didn't know. The manuscript has not been traced.

Berryman writes that "this is not the best attested account in the world," yet it fits with Crane's passion for helping outcasts and for rescuing "fallen" persons. Themes of innocence lost he had addressed before in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and George's Mother. Berryman refers to this idea, rescuing the fallen, as one of the dominant passions of Crane's life.

On this sketchy information, White spins out the story of Crane's final days in the spring of 1900 based on documented history. Crane had met Cora Taylor a few years earlier in Jacksonville, Florida running a brothel called the Hotel de Dream. To escape Cora's shady past (and dubious present) the Cranes move to England, where they become friends with a whole neighborhood of writers -- James, Conrad, H.G. Wells, Ford Madox Ford -- who view him as the quintessential American, full of dash and vigor. Eventually they watch him waste away, while he dictates his remembered story -- "The Painted Boy" -- and Cora chides him: "This really isn't in your vein." Knowing it can never be published, Crane continues to dictate the story "for one man only, and that man is myself."

Because he was a journalist and war correspondent, Crane's writing has a graphic clarity that must have appealed to White. His reputed encounter with the painted boy triggered White's curiosity about homosexual life in the 1890s, including its colorful, coded language. Crane's death from tuberculosis may have reminded White of friends and lovers dying of AIDS. The connection between the dashing American writer and the author of A Boy's Own Story (1982) was made when White discovered the tale of the missing manuscript.

Enlisting an artist like Crane to tell this story, White can show how hints from chance encounters are translated into fiction and how a heterosexual writer might view a gay subculture (or at least one man's infatuation). He turns Crane into a kindred spirit, entertaining with style, hobnobbing with other famous writers, yet still curious about humble--and disguised--lives, and not in the least judgmental. In deftly telling the twin stories of the Hotel de Dream White pulls off a neat vanishing trick of his own, assuming the character of one of America's least understood writers and "unearthing" one final, unconventional, and spectacular tale.