If you happen across a piece of brutalist, modernist jewellery by Rafael Alfandary, you’d be forgiven for believing that the designer was Scandinavian. In fact, Rafael Alfandary (d. 2005) was from Canada via Israel and born in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia.
Alfandary initially trained as a mechanical engineer, finding his way into jewellery-making accidentally after creating a piece for his ESL teacher.
His creations were usually formed of copper, brass and sterling silver set with coloured cabochon Murano glass. They wouldn’t look out of place on Cleopatra or Nefertiti.
Clients included Prince, Margaret Trudeau, Liberace, Muhammad Ali, Paul Anka and Redd Foxx.
Find vintage examples of his work to buy on eBay and Etsy.
Original Toronto Star caption: Rafael Alfandary, mechanical engineer who moved to Toronto from Tel Aviv seven months ago and started designing jewelry, puts one of his copper necklaces on his wife, Esther. She wears bracelet with two rings he designed.
It dawned on me this week that I rarely feature photography on our Designer Desire series… so I’m remedying that this week by highlighting my favourite photographer, Annie Leibovitz.
Annie Leibovitz is a famous (and infamous) American photographer best known for her portraits of celebrities in politics, sports, the arts, fashion and Hollywood.
It was in 1968, as a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, that Leibovitz purchased her first camera.
I have always thought of my work as art… I really thought I could take pictures in this landscape of magazines.
Leibovitz has created some of the most iconic images of the 20th century; Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA album cover, a naked and heavily pregnant Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg in a bathful of milk and the portrait of John Lennon & Yoko Ono – a photograph that was taken a mere 5 hours before he was shot and killed outside his home in New York.
She also photo-documented many great historical events including the Apollo 17 mission, many of the Rolling Stones tours, the 1972 US presidential campaign alongside the journalists Hunter S. Thompson and Timothy Crouse and Richard Nixon’s resignation following the Watergate scandal.
Leibovitz has had an enduring and successful relationship with Rolling Stone (from 1973) and Vanity Fair (from 1983) magazines. While still a student, in 1970, she approached Rolling Stone magazine – just three years after its inception – with some of her photographs. A few of them were published, thus beginning her long career as a photojournalist and embarking on what would become a symbiotic relationship between the young photographer and a magazine famous for reflecting the American zeitgeist. Leibovitz’s first major assignment, in 1971, was for a cover story on John Lennon.
In March 2007, Leibovitz became the first American to create an official portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. They were commissioned by the Royal Household to celebrate the monarch’s official state visit to the USA.
When asked who and what inspires her, she responded:
Vintage Children’s books, particularly those published in the 60s and 70s. I like the work of Brian Wildsmith and Roger Duvoisin, Alice and Martin Provensen an American couple who illustrated more than 40 children’s books together. Mostly between the late 1940s and the 1960s.
Based in Broadstairs, Kent, Clare is also the author of many craft books. Buy her cards, prints, jigsaws and original collages from her online shop.
Ed Gray is a London artist whose paintings observe and explore human social interaction in vivid technicolour. He’s like the photographer, Martin Parr with his captures – but whose chosen medium is often acrylic paint, chalk and charcoal on canvas.
His works are snapshots of everyday city life; city from around the globe – New York, Tokyo, Mexico City and Cape Town. However, it’s the London scenes that I love the most; a packed carriage on the Tube, Smithfield Market stallholders, pubs, bookies and ‘the match’.
He attended Wimbledon Art College and then on to Cardiff University where he graduated with a BA Hons degree in Fine Art. He went on complete his PGCE teacher training after which he taught art and design at secondary level in Peckham, South East London.
He now spends his professional time painting, running workshops and undertaking private commissions.
I go out drawing in the streets to find characters to paint. These are real people, real moments in time, depicting the ebb and flow of city life. I aim to celebrate and commemorate these people; to leave a trace of these lives lived with my pen, my charcoal and my paintbrush
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