I photographed these young Russian sailors some years back in San Francisco’s Chinatown while they perused every touristy junk display up and down the street. They looked not a day over 14, if that, and were ready to flirt with anything in a skirt. Their portrait ended up in a montage called Water rats for a series named (S)Elective Affinities which combined portraits and places that were distant in real life but had psychological commonalities. I placed them into a photograph of a poster of the Sutro Baths near the Cliff House in S.F., an old bathing facility that is now in ruins after a fire in 1966.

Below is a painting of a sailor by Bohumil Kubista one of the founders of modern Czech painting. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohumil_Kubišta) The color palette and geometric construction somehow reminded me of the montage above. Kubista was an interesting artist and critic, who was greatly influenced by a number of painters, van Gogh, Munch, Cézanne among them. He held contact to the German expressionist group Die Brücke, but developed an original style. Other than yours truly who just jumped into montage work without any formal schooling, he took studies seriously, worked on color theory, mathematics and geometry and analyzed the old masters. His life was short, born in 1884 he perished in the 1918 flu epidemic after spending his last years of life in the army.