If you can find one, an original copy of Sam Haskins’s 1964 photo collection Cowboy Kate will cost you hundreds of dollars — in mint condition, thousands. Rizzoli’s new edition, including several new “stories” and the “director’s cut” of Cowboy Kate, is a delight: an amalgam of fashion photography, pin-up art, and photo essay.
The title tale (preceded by Desmond Skirrow’s prose outline), is an impressionistic Western with a young woman in the traditionally male role of the cowpoke who gets into a card game and then into trouble. “Impressionistic” doesn’t just refer to the scanty wardrobe — mere panties, gun belt, and hat in some shots — but to Haskins’s method. He directs the eye the way a filmmaker chooses shots. One character’s demise is denoted by a shot of daisies, as in “pushing up . . . ” This make-do technique adds to the wit. The soft, backlit black-and-white photograph lends an overall effect that’s both erotic and lyrical, as if a young man’s daydreams of sex and adventure had gotten all mixed together. The other stories here attest to Haskins’s love of women, particularly those who exhibit what you might call a fresh-scrubbed naughtiness. There are some parallels from the period: the glamour photos of Wingate Paine; Bert Stern’s more tongue-in-cheek work. But, utterly devoid of chilly chic or aestheticism, Haskins’s playfulness is all his own.
Related:
Gallery: SIGGRAPH 2006, Miss Nine, Dick for a day, More 
- Gallery: SIGGRAPH 2006
We sent our photographers to SIGGRAPH 2006, the annual five-day conference on digital art and computer graphics at the Boston Convention Center. Slideshow: selections from the SIGGRAPH 2006 exhibition. Photographs by Joel Veak. Slideshow: SIGGRAPH 2006 fashion show. Photographs by Kristin Osiecki.
- Miss Nine
Recording her debut DJ CD for the Dubfire imprint Yoshitoshi, Miss Nine — a fashion model from Germany who has developed a solid reputation as a DJ in London — puts together a 12-track mix distinctive for its easygoing intensity.
- Dick for a day
I don't consider myself very girlie.
- Ain’t that America
Photographer Henry Horenstein crossed paths with Jerry Lee Lewis at a Ramada Inn in Boston in 1975.
- Good vibrations
In honor of dancing dirty, as well as Patrick Swayze’s open-shirt-pelvic-thrusting summer camp fantasy, we offer this list of the dirtiest dancing music videos we could find.
- Glower power
It’s a mysterious career. To Whitehead’s credit, it’s not a career in the normal sense at all.
- Don't pass by
The coming midterm elections hang on the decisions of that growing group of citizens who struggle to survive on stagnating wages, and aspire to the credentials that are the key to jobs in the better paying sectors of the economy.
- Walk on the mild side
In 1970, William Wegman was making short videos — jumping around in his underwear with purses hanging all over him, that sort of thing.
- Digital language at the PRC
How important would you say Ansel Adams is to the modern trends of digital art? If your first inclination is to answer, "Not at all," you're probably right.
- Viva Modernism
Long before the threat of swine flu, Mexico was the scene of an outbreak of a very different kind: Modernism.
- Bill Frisell | Disfarmer
Guitarist Frisell is one of jazz's great impressionists, and here he has the perfect subject for one of his audio mini-movies: the eccentric Arkansas portrait photographer Michael Disfarmer.
- Less
Topics:
Books
, Culture and Lifestyle, Photography, Fashion and Style, More
, Culture and Lifestyle, Photography, Fashion and Style, Models and Modeling, Bert Stern, Less
