Olivier Mathieu is coming up with a new book that has sprung from his talented pen.
Our atelier will receive some of the fresh printed books soon!
And here is the official announcement:
Olivier Mathieu’s next book, “Another Sip of Sun,” 76 pages, should be available in about two or three weeks. It will contain 16 illustrations by various photographers, including three by the author and three by Max Stolzenberg. As for the cover, there is a photograph of the handprint of poor Gabriel, a tiny child who died on 11 December 2019 of brain cancer. The book “Another Sip of Sunshine” is intended as a testament to a civilization, at a time of dramatic planetary situation and ever-increasing restrictions on freedoms that, until yesterday, were still considered fundamental freedoms of the human person. The book also contains some dense and deep pages devoted to the great British photographer David Hamilton, as well as the American actress Dawn Dunlap.
What we already can say ist that the story of Dawn and David has been very well researched and the book comes up with a lot of information that can’t be found anywhere else. We are also proud that three of Max pictures are featured.
The following excerpt translated into English will give you a short insight into the book.
Be aware that the book is written in French.
From the credits of the film Laura the Shadows of Summer, it is specified: after a story written by David Hamilton. What does this film tell us? The devouring passion born between a sculptor and a teenage girl, daughter of one of his former mistresses (Maud Adams, in the film).
Malcolm Thomson, one of the producers of Laura the Shadows of summer, wrote to me proudly that he was the one who met Dawn Dunlap in 1977. In his e-mail of January 10, 2017, Malcolm Thomson told me that “Dawn Dunlap’s name first appeared in (her) diary on February 10, 1977.” I had answered him by playing false naivety: hadn’t David Hamilton and Dawn Dunlap done pictures together before? Answer by Malcolm Thomson, February 20, 2017: I would have known if Dawn had been photographed by David in 1976. And I do not think she lived inParis for three years with her parents. My recall is that the first shots were made a year before the Laura filming.
Malcolm Thomson was clearly unaware that his friend David Hamilton had revealed that he was photographing Dawn Dunlap as early as 1976. It is established, which is amply confirmed by the countless images that were published from these 1976 photo shoots, which David took Dawn to the Bahamas when she was twelve years old.
David Hamilton had wanted to film, alone, the sex scene of Laura the Shadows of summer. There had been only the three of them. He’s the filmmaker. His great friend James Mitchell, a member of Nina Ricci’s family. And, of course, Dawn Dunlap. It is in Laura’s sex scene that David Hamilton’s fate has arguably reached its highest artistic and human peak. The result is an absolutely prodigious abyss. Never, I say never, cinema and reality had ever been so brilliantly mixed. What a game of mirrors! What an art of recursiveness!
In 2017 I published, on the cover of my book The Portrait of Dawn Dunlap, two strictly unpublished photographs of the young American actress. Parisian images, at the end of 1979, in the apartment where she lived in the twelfth arrondissement of Paris, Boulevard de la Bastille. Its windows overlooked the marina of the Arsenal harbour.
For the emotions that his photographs had spread abounding on me in my youth, I had a debt to David Hamilton. I am proud to have done so. David Hamilton and I loved the same girl.
David Hamilton was an immense poet of exquisite sensitivity. At the same time, in a fundamental and famous interview with Photo magazine in 1974, he called his fellow photographers whore and sent the fuckers he called “the forty-year-old grandmothers with mid-thigh skirts”. He spoke clearly. Sensitive, lucid and cursed. That was David Hamilton. Only the superior knows how and why the meeting of appearances translates, exposes and disguises, steals and embodies the essence of things. David Hamilton’s photographs had an ontological consistency. He was photographing his own life. He was telling his memories. David Hamilton: a permanent F*K* YOU to the world. He was also a tenderness-hungry man who systematically chose the worst women and the most dubious of friends. What’s the reason? Because, out of arrogance, he always wanted to be more than he already was: immense. But this, his humility forbade him to understand it.
He had never been able to accept that girls were getting older. I never put up with it either.
Max was a young boy when he first met the grandmaster of light and colors in the eighties, a couple of years after the cinematographic appearance of Dawn. It was just before Max won his first major photographic competition at the age of 10 and the stile of 70’s and 80’s photography is reflected in his pictures until today. Max remembers this times as exceptionally beautiful and full of freedom. Times that seem to be far away today in a world of growing totalitarianism and restrictions where free speech has long been supplanted by political correctness.
The book will be available from us (just write to Bilitis to order your copy) and can also be ordered directly from Olivier Mathieu.
We strongly recommend reading this publication!
Dear Max, I would like to point out to you and your readers this article by the Swiss writer Roland Jaccard (author of “The Inner Exile”, a best seller of 1975) about my little book “Another Sip of Sunshine”. The article appeared today on his blog: https://leblogderolandjaccard.com/2021/02/28/a-onze-kilometres-de-gourville/
Your post, dear Max, is of great beauty. I say thank you. I completely share your opinion about the happy times of freedom in the past. The freedom of the “David-Hamiltonian” times, the freedom also of the photographs of your young girls in the fields, in the sun. I think one word is enough to sum it all up. SUN. This sun and summer that David Hamilton loved so much, as he demonstrated through his photographs and films. “Another sip of sunshine” is also “Another sip of freedom”, while the night risks falling on the world and smothering the sun of all freedom. That is why I wanted to write these brief literary texts, yes, as the testament of an era and a civilization. Ah! How one would like David Hamilton’s young daughters, and yours, dear Max Stolzenberg, to step out of the frames of the photographs and come back to enchant the world, as long as it is time, for poetry, beauty and freedom! As one would like to receive letters from them, undertake correspondence, discover affinities, and preserve the flame of the torch! Do you know what I would say to the girls who might read this post and this comment? Girls! Don’t you realize the times we live in, with the planetary irruption of coronavirus and its phobia? Don’t you realize how bleak the future looks? Do you not want to seize the opportunity, perhaps the last, to regain the meaning of death and love? Eros and Thanatos, the characters of Greek mythology, death in person, Eros the god of love. Two entities, two symbols diametrically opposed but one, since Friedrich Nietzsche thought them, wrote them, described them… And yet, who will not come back to them first, Eros and Thanatos, what will be his future?