Wegman World

Mufle

For our French readers...WW on the cover of Eric Neuhoff's Mufle! 

 

Amateur Thursdays - New York Review of Books

WW joins authors Susan Orlean, Lisa Birnbach and Stefan Merrill Block in a candid discussion about  J.R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip. Watch the video below, or visit NYRB's website here.

 

 

WW featured in Abe Frajindlich's "Penelope's Hungry Eyes"

William Wegman, NYC, 2005 © Abe Frajndlich

Called "one of the most important photography books of 2011" by La Lettre, Abe Frajindlich's book, Penelope's Hungry Eyes, features the above portrait he shot of WW. To learn more about the book, and Frajindlich's thoughts on shooting this image of WW, read La Lettre's article here.

Seeing Stars, by Simon Armitage

Earlier this year Alfred A. Knopf published Simon Armitage's  "Seeing Stars" , a new book of poetry. We were very pleased when asked if one of WW's works could illustrate the cover. Below is the cover, and one of our favorite poems from the book. 

My Difference
by Simon Armitage, from "Seeing Stars" 

I’ve been writing a lot of poems recently about my
difference but my tutor isn’t impressed. He hasn’t said as
much, yet it’s clear that as far as he’s concerned my
difference doesn’t cut much ice. He wants me to dress my
difference with tinsel and bells and flashing lights, or sit it
on a float and drive it through town at the head of the May
Day Parade. “Tell me one interesting fact about your
difference,” he says, so I tell him about the time I lost my
difference down the plughole in a Bournemouth guesthouse
and had to fish it back with a paperclip on a length of
dental floss. He says, “Er, that’s not really what I had in
mind, Henry.” Basically he needs my difference to die in a
crash, or be ritually amputated in a civil war. Then he
shows me a prize-winning poem (one of his own in fact)
about a set of twins whose difference were swapped at
birth by a childless midwife, and who grew up with the
wrong differences, one in the bosom of the Saudi Royal
Family and the other beneath the “jackboot of poverty,” and
who met in later life only to discover that their differences
were exactly the same. He wants me to lock my difference
in a coal cellar until it comes of age then take it outside and
reverse over with a ride-on mower, thus making my
difference very different indeed, or auction my difference in
the global marketplace, or film it getting a “happy slapping”
in a busy street, or scream the details of my difference into
the rabbit hole of the cosmos hoping to bend the ear of
creation itself. I tell him I once swallowed my difference
without water on an empty stomach, but he isn’t listening
any more. He’s quoting some chap who went at his
difference with a pair of pinking shear. He’s talking about
such and such a poet who threw his difference in front of
the royal train, or had it beaten from him by plain-clothed
officers and rendered down into potting compost or
wallpaper paste, or set fire to his different on primetime
national TV. And when I plead with him that no matter
how small and pitiful my difference might seem to him, to
me it makes all the different in the world, he looks at me
with an expression of complete and undisguised and
irreversible indifference.

William Wegman, Twins with Differences, 1970

 

On the Abrams blog...

Recently, Andy Weiner of Abrams visited the studio. Last week, he posted on the publisher's blog about the trip:

--

When you’ve been in publishing and sales as long as I have it’s easy to get jaded. Dinner with Ivan Doig, Don Delillo, Barry Moser, Jon Scieszka, Reynolds Price? Sure, I’ve had the pleasure. Playing piano for Garrison Keillor? I might have been nervous but I did it. Chatting over lunch with Michael Eisner or meeting Bill Bradley or Robert Macneil? Yes, when I was a mere publishing pup.

Which brings me to a more recent thrill, and maybe my biggest ever. Ever since the early days of Saturday Night Live, when I saw a funny, quiet video about dogs playing baseball I’ve been a fan of William Wegman. 

 

Read the complete post.

The Hardy Boys

I grew up reading The Hardy Boys stories from the early 50's. Never as good as the covers, the books with numbingly memorable heroes and villains were a staple of every adolescent boy's reading in that era.

My favorite cover, and because of that, my favorite book, was The Missing Chums. I related to The Hardy Boys because of the danger the boys found themselves in -- which was not much, but enough to be fun. Reading the series as a kid, I never imagined that I might one day create my own version of The Hardy Boys.

In 1994, with my cast of four weimaraner stars, I set my mind to work on stories set in Rangeley Maine. The Hardy Boys become The Hardly Boys in my film Hardly Gold, starring sisters Batty and Crooky. Hardly boys, they are girls and dogs. Sequels in print and film were planned but not completed...yet.

 

 

- WW

Borges and Others

Jorge Luis Borges's writing had a big impact on my video works in the late sixties and early seventies. I was influenced in particular by the collection of stories called "Labyrinths". After reading that, I came up with ideas about narrative and circular time. Since my video was linear, narrative and circular, which was different than what other artists were doing. I found great solace in the Borgesian approach to time...circular linear, narrative .

More recently I have found inspiration in Adolfo Bouy Casares, another 20th century Argentine writer. "The Invention  of Morel" is of particular interest, as is "Asleep in the Sun". "Asleep in the Sun" was lying around the house, so I picked it up, read it and enjoyed it. When I finished, I realized one of my photographs was on the cover. 

I like very much Wallace Stevens and Wordsworth. "A violet by a mossy stone, half hidden from the eye" etc etc.

 

Happy Poetry Month...

-- WW

Retrospective Retrospection

                     William Wegman, Artist, 1971

       Funney/Strange, a retrospective of William Wegman's work, opened five years ago at its first location, The Brooklyn Museum. The New York Times did a video interview about the exhibition, which can be viewed here: A Conversation with William Wegman

    The exhibition catalog is available here: Wegman Store