RF | Binder

For nearly sixty years a growing number of us in the world of communications have wondered how people who strive to be creative in their personal and professional lives can be guided by meaningful values. It is easy to profess concern about widely accepted values, and we can gain a measure of satisfaction when we do so. But is is much harder to search honestly within ourselves to see what actual relevance these values have for the way we live and work.

To stimulate our minds into thinking seriously about this more difficult task, we have established a tradition of selecting thoughtful observations about human behavior and motivation and combining them with photographs of sculpture. Our hope has been that by looking at these Thoughts & Images for a period of time we can sharpen our sensitivies to values that mean the most to us and help us to live satisfying and useful lives.

In the late1950s we published two of our initial Thoughts & Images as full-page advertisements in Fortune. In the early 1960s, a selection of our Thoughts & Images was exhibited at the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and traveled to major cities in the United States as well as to London, Paris, and Milan. In the 1970s, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. published a large portfolio of our Thoughts & Images. In the 1980s, they regularly appeared as full-page features in two publications of the American Management Association. Sharf and Silverman published a second portfolio in the late 1980s. In 1998, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the founding of Ruder & Finn, Millwood Publishing published a selection of fifty Thoughts & Images.

The photographs in the Thoughts and Images on this website were selected from the book, Chillida, published by Konemann in 1999 with a text by the art historian and curator Giovanni Carandente and with my own photographs. The idea of taking photographs for a book on the work of Eduardo Chillida was first suggested to me by Tom Messer, then director of the Guggenheim Museum. Tom had long known about my passion for photographing sculpture and the many books I had published on subjects ranging from ancient Egyptian masterpieces, to the cloister of Moissac, and a sculpture park in the mountains of Japan. Tom said at the time that in his opinion Chillida was the greatest living sculptor, and I understood why when we went together to an exhibition of his work at the Sidney Janis Gallery. Through my photographers eye, I sensed something magical in Chillidas work. I was sure that if I could point my camera at details of his sculpture I would find an amazing array of forms that would make fascinating photographic compositions. He seemed to have invented a way of creating curves and squares and spaces and lines in a variety of materials, especially solid steel, that were dazzling to behold. It was not organic form like Moores, or intimate and personal like Giacomettis, nor freewheeling like Picassos it was structured, self-contained, solid, immensely strong, and it evoked powerful visual images that were unique.

-- David Finn, Chairman

Sample Thoughts & Images:  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |  6  |  7