Annemarie goes to Penn

It’ll be 10 years in October that I made a 10 day trip to Buenos Aires to spend time with my aunt, photographer Annemarie Heinrich. Every afternoon we passed the hours blithely inspecting her photo albums. Meticulously organized in chronological order, identified with names and dates, and often including technical notes, each page produced a story that Annemarie could recall like she’d shot it last week. A prolific shooter, she gave her Rollies and Leicas quite a workout. There were about 20 albums, each one a photography treasure chest of family, friends, travels, experiments, and work images. She was 84 at the time of that visit, and though debilitated from the illness that would end her life in October of 2005, she never tired of looking at photographs and talking about them with me, every page a precious reminder of a life fabulously well lived.

From August 26th to October 15th the Arthur Ross Gallery http://www.upenn.edu/ARG/, University of Pennsylvania will exhibit “Annemarie Heinrich, Grande Dame of Argentine Photography”. Among her subjects were internationally known dancers, choreographers, writers, poets, painters, film stars, all transformed to Annemarie’s B&W idealized vision of humankind. Her style? Think Hurrel, Horst, and Hoyningen-Huene (all my favorites begin with the letter “H”). Do an “images” Google of Annemarie Heinrich for a quick look at a full page of samples (the color one is of Annemarie). For a short crudely translated bio http://www.zonezero.com/magazine/obituaries/annmarie/index.html. The opening is the evening of Thursday September 14, 5:00 to 8:00. See you there.

BTW, that image on the top left was done on one sheet of film.

If you’re looking for a great restaurant while in Philly, check out POD near the Penn campus, http://www.podrestaurant.com/ very cool website.