Favorite Photo Library!

The "Favorite Photo Library" is now officially on the side bar! Feel free to email me photos or let me know what you want in the library and I'll try and make it happen! 

Thank you for all of your wonderful photos and I may bring back video blogging again! 

Favorite Photos Video Blog Attempt

Hope you like the video! Let me know what you think and send in those photos! :)

TRANSCRIPT OF VIDEO BLOG (Hopefully this will help internationally!):

Hey everybody! Um...I am trying out a little bit of a video blog to try and change things up a little bit. My idea is that we can all post our favorite Ingrid pictures um and I'm about to show you two of mine. Gordon Parks did a photo shoot when Ingrid went to Stromboli to film with Roberto Rossellini in 1949 and there's a very haunting picture that appeared in Life Magazine and it's my all time favorite Ingrid Bergman picture; photograph. So--here it is. 

Cue Picture: Music "Ingrid Bergman" 

And my second favorite is a picture of her drinking champaign and she just looks like she's having a complete, fantastic, amazing time hanging out with people and just, I feel like it really shows who she might have really been. Um..I don't know her so I can't say. I'm sure we all wish we really had. So I'd like you to post your favorite Ingrid Bergman pictures and um.. either link them to the comments or put them on, like, twitpic or flickr. or anywhere!  And just link them to the comments page. I will post them and maybe put together some sort of collage or just a post that we can all agree on or disagree on. It should be interesting and feel free to be creative! If you want to send in fan art, or um... paintings and photos that you've done or um... or just a favorite video, that's fine too! Just send in, basically, you're favorite Ingrid Bergman thing. A dress that she wore, a favorite movie. Just make it a photograph so we can all see it. And you know, feel free, if you don't like this idea, if you don't like me video blogging, let me know and I'll stop or let me know that you like it and I'll keep going and maybe we could even have some sort of discussion. 

END

Pensive and Beautiful

I just found this photo on flickr and I thought it was absolutely Ingrid. 

Hope you agree. :)

Robert Capa Film Found!

The NYTimes reported today that the Mexican suitcase that arrived at the International Center of Photography, more than a year ago, contains 4,300 lost photographs taken by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour during the Spanish Civil War. The photographs that they show on the Time's website are amazing. They're reporting that the photos, though decayed, are still in great condition after 70 years of sitting in the suitcase, hidden from the public. The pictures link a lot of choppy history during the men's photojournalism years during the Spanish Civil War.

Here are links to the Article and the Slide show-- There wasn't any embeded option :( 

Article 

Slideshow

I am writing about this find, here, on the Ingrid Bergman Life and Films blog because Bergman and Capa were hot and heavy after WWII. Ingrid and Capawere very in love and found a release being with one another. He was addicted to danger which is evident through many of his photographs, most famously, his photos of the D-Day invasion on the beaches at Normandy. She was addicted to acting and her career. They found their relationship a Month after VE-Day at the Ritz hotel in Paris.

(Ingrid in a bathtub in post-war Paris, photo taken by Capa)

Ingrid was in town working with the U.S.O. (after a successful tour in Alaska) and had recently finished work on The Bells of St. Mary's while Capa was there as well working on shots of Paris after the war. They had both had affairs, but this one topped the cake. Ingrid convinced Capa (that's all she EVER called him) to come to Hollywood to work on the stills for Notorious, but after a while the romance dwindled. Capa had one run in with Petter Lindstrom, Ingrid's husband, on a skiing vacation, who flipped out when Ingrid admitted to the affair, asked for a divorce, which Ingrid denied (it was her turn to do so, lol, read a bio of her and this makes more sense...lol), and this set things up in smoke for a bit. When they were in New York City, 2 years after meeting, they decided to part ways amicably and remained friends until Capa died suddenly after stepping on a land mine in Indochina, in 1954. Ingrid was very saddened by his death for she had a true fondness for the man who refused to marry her as not to be caged by the threat of leaving a wife and potential children behind to mourn him (and most likely, restrain him.). 

If you'd like to read more about this affair and Ingrid's life, I suggest Donald Spoto's Notorious: The Life of Ingrid Bergman.

Ingrid Video by Catalina

This video is on flickr.com on Catalina's photostream. Catalina always has new and fantastic pictures and photos of Ingrid Bergman and Isabella Rossellini!
This video is a great addition to the photostream!

Oh Hay Ingrid!

Since creating the Ingrid Bergman blog, I have gone through a great number of photographs and pictures of Ingrid, moreso than when I was simply just looking at our hero. I have also read many books about Ingrid, her work, and life. The reading and visuals have provided me with topics for conversation, questions about who she really was and have given me a gateway to an intricate web of tales of fact, fiction and opinion. 

I would like to address a type of photo that really stands out in my view of Ingrid Bergman's life. There are many pictures of Ingrid holding hay, sitting on or next to farm equipment, and acting like a "Swedish milk-maid" or "the girl next door." Based on things I've read about her early career as well as interviews held with Ingrid, it makes sense that they marketed her this way. She didn't want to do the same nip/tuck thing all the other stars were doing, so they decided to promote her as "natural" and "innocent." Due to the events following her early career, the "Rossellini period," if you will, these pictures stand out. 

I feel like the studios, photographs and films from Ingrid's early years in America, set her up as an idealistic figure that no one, including Ingrid, could ever fully achieve. Though not all of her characters were so innocent, they were often victims, as most female characters of the time are, if they are not a femme fatale (which we all know what happens to them...whawh-whawh.). Ingrid's timing of her career and "scandal" were historically a bombshell. The times were all about ideals, conformity, patriotism, Christian based morality, communism, international relations and maintaining neutrality, as well as remaining in one's set gender roles: especially if one were in the limelight as well as a wife and mother. 

Ingrid always did what she wanted; I like that.

Her "saint-like" appeal to Americans and their devotion to her really backfired when she went on a new artistic and romantic endeavour. It was not her firest liaison with an extramarital affair but because Americans saw her as Sister Bendidict, it did not go over well.

I think the pictures of Ingrid with hay are beautiful and of course they wanted to promote her as much as possible, but with her story, they set her up for unavoidable disaster.

Here are the now almost literal bomb shell pictures:

Colorized Photos

Colorization and hand coloring* are names for the process of coloring film and pictures by hand and by frame. There are oils, watercolors and dyes used for this techniques applied to black and white film and photos.
This entry is to honor the work of early Hollywood to attempt to make color movies and pictures happen.


This picture has been colorized--it is from Ingrid's very first part in a film as "girl in line."

This is a colorized photo from the 1944 black and white film, Gaslight.

Colorized photo of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman from Notorious. I wonder if Robert Capa took this photo?! Wouldn't that be sexy?



There was a movement in the 1980s to colorize films that were originially done in B&W...I'm not a fan, but I thought in the 1920s and 30s it was a perfectly legit way to try and improve film. They also tried to do this to It's a Wonderful Life, I didn't like that colorized either. Lol.

*wikipedia information is subject to change and is not a reliable source. I just used it to emphasize my point, I'd suggest further reading if you're really interested in the history of colorization (also--different forms of colorization have happened throughout the history of film and photographs, so it's completely more complex than the wiki-answer).