Salon.com > Joe Gioia

The $126 million man

Sat, 12 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Kevin Garnett has an old face. Not that at 23 he looks 30, but old, like Egyptian old. It's the kind of face you'd see in a Pharaoh's tomb; head shaved smooth, high cheek bones, prominent nose and wide-set almandine eyes -- vivid as lamps against his dark brown skin. When he smiles and those lamps light up, you get a sense of the big fun involved in being the young darling of professional sports: the fine body, the great moves, the clothes, the cars, the casual abundance of diamonds.

But when he is not smiling (and this can last for days) -- when he is tired after a game (dead tired after losing), tired of answering questions, tired, just a bit, of the continuous multi-tasking that is just being Kevin Garnett -- then his eyes go soft, his mouth seems to vanish altogether and his nearly 7-foot frame finally allows him the distance he needs from the world. Then it's his turn to watch and question. And if that old Pharaoh's face tells you one thing, Dog, it's that his standards are very, very high.

They have to be. In 1995, one month after turning 19, Garnett agreed to play pro basketball without having gone to college. He was the first player in 20 years to do so. At 22, he signed (with his team, the Minnesota Timberwolves) the biggest sports contract in history: six years for $126 million.

Elliott Erwitt

Mon, 29 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

"Museum Watching," Elliott Erwitt's latest picture book, is a pronounced departure from the whimsical fare many have come to expect from the famous photographer. Though still attuned to the odd moments and peculiar social spaces that grace all of Erwitt's personal work, the book has a larger, elegiac feel.

Erwitt, who is possibly more famous now for his amusing and widely reproduced photos of dogs than for the handsome balance of work he's done during his almost 50 years with the Magnum photo agency, haunts museums of all types around the world "at idle moments." His main goal is to observe the people he finds in them. "For a photographer," he writes in the book, "rather than fly casting, it's like shooting fish in a barrel." Most of those he photographs are immersed in a cultivated absorption of the past, and there is not one cute canine in sight.

Like his contemporary, Robert Frank, Erwitt brought an essentially European sensibility to the American scene. (He was born in Paris to Russian parents and escaped the Nazis as a teenager, settling in Los Angeles.) Whereas Frank's work mirrors his dislocation, exposing a morbid groundlessness in American social spaces, Erwitt looks to make a bemused peace with strange lands. "Everyone's got to be somewhere," he observes in "Museum Watching." The theme of most of Erwitt's published work seems to be the sometimes silly ways people -- and dogs -- make themselves feel at home in the world.

The real America gone mad

Wed, 13 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Suddenly, photographer David LaChapelle is everywhere. In a breathlessly short period of time, his gaga colors and anything-goes aesthetic have recharged slick magazines (Interview, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and Details), amped up moribund video visuals ("Dandy Warhols"), and added his brand of kink to print campaigns (Pepsi, Levi's, Diesel jeans, Jean Paul Gaultier perfume, Camel and Bass Ale.) Photography first must be a treat for the eye, and LaChapelle's photos are that, earning the admiration of Richard Avedon, for one, who likens the 36-year-old New Yorker to the surrealist painter Reni Magritte.

His work -- packed with enough humor to soften his often mordant observations -- celebrates the sickest side of pop culture. Even the titles of his books, 1996's "LaChapelle Land" and this season's "Hotel LaChapelle," hint at what's up in a typical LaChapelle picture -- an alternate universe of polymorphous perversity, all bright colors, buff dudes and bodacious ta-tas.