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I got to meet John Dominis last Saturday. I had lunch with my friend Art Elkon, who then took me around to the VP Gallery on East Buffalo Street in the Third Ward. VP specializes in the work of LIFE magazine photographers; gallery owner Bill Appleby told me his is one of eight galleries worldwide that does. I think it was eight—maybe it was four. (Numbers mean little to me. I have trouble remembering my own phone number.) The gallery's reception for for the artist was in progress.
I asked John, who was a longtime staffer for LIFE (you can see a picture of him here, taken by Marc Riboud) if his picture of the Black Panther salute by runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the Olympic Summer Games in Mexico City in 1968 was his most famous picture. He was quiet, then allowed as how that one "wasn't much, as a photograph." He named his (also well known) Donner Pass picture as one of his own favorites.
John Dominis, Southern Pacific Steam Engine, Donner Pass, California, 1949
There were fifteen or eighteen pictures of John's on view, and he said he could have put up just as strong a show with fifteen or eighteen entirely different ones. I made some sort of assenting noise, and he added that that couldn't go on forever—he said he probably didn't have more than a hundred or so pictures of the same quality, from a whole career.
Most of his pictures, for those who are interested in such things, were taken with a Leica and a 35mm lens. (The Donner pass picture looked like medium format to me, although I didn't ask.)
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My own favorite of John's was one of the few pictures in the gallery that was new to me, of Mickey Mantle descending into the dugout and flinging his batting helmet aside in disgust after striking out. And not just because I like seeing Yankees frustrated (although there's that). A great classic 35mm shot.
John Dominis, Mickey Mantle Having a Bad Day at Yankee Stadium, New York, 1965
Another picture in the gallery that I'd never seen before—with photo geek interest, even—was a great shot by Bob Gomel of Malcolm X taking a picture of Muhammed Ali (then Cassius Clay) in a club after Clay's victory over Sonny Liston. You can see that one here. There was also a gorgeous large print of Margaret Bourke-White's famous DC-4 shot on sale for a cool $42,000. TOP isn't quite that successful just yet, so I had to leave that one on the wall, but it was nice to see. Bill explained to me that the print takes many hours to spot, because there are lines running through the middle of it, owing to the fact that the negative was once stored folded in half!
After the VP gallery, Art and I went around to Debra Brehmer's Portrait Society Gallery, where Art himself had some pictures up. Debra had asked him to take some general establishing shots for an exhibit of Ringo White's collage assemblies, which are made entirely of detritus Ringo finds on beaches. Art's lakescapes were taken with his trusty Canon G9, and looked great printed big.
Art Elkon with his trusty G9 at the Portrait Society Gallery, Milwaukee, Fall 2009
As a final note about all this, Bill Appleby thinks that the weighty tome The Great LIFE Photographers
(Also, just FYI, the book will be coming out in paperback soon.)
A nice "day off." It's always a good day for me whenever I get to look at real prints.
Mike
Featured Comment by Jim Hart: "I'm of an age where there's not much I look at and say 'If I had the money, I'd have that.' Mostly it's better to want something than to actually have it, I've found."Usually it's some type of automobile (which explains the C5 Corvette that was in the garage for awhile; I didn't have money, but it turns out I did have the credit line).
"But Ms. Bourke-White is my all time favorite photographer and if I had the money that print would be on the wall, along with a number of her other works.
"I have no idea why her work hits me where I live, and it's probably better that I don't know—but man, she just rocked.
"Just my 2 cents.
"Which leaves me $41,999.98 short."
Opal as a very young bird. Wish I had a photo of him "slinky-diving."
By Ctein
I was amused by a comment to one of my previous parrot columns that opined that parrots weren't so smart, 'cause they'd never invented anything.
'Cause, y'see, I had this tool-making budgie (a.k.a. budgerigar, a.k.a. parakeet).
I am not making this up.
It's hard for me to know if Opal was weird by budgie standards; I've never had a budgie that wasn't weird. I think weird is the budgie norm—they're little bundles of organic chaos. I raised Opal from a chick, hand feeding and weaning him (above). Growing up safe and secure made him fearless, not exactly a useful survival trait in a small prey animal, but whaddayagonnado?
Opal had a plastic slinky, both ends taped down in an upside-down U, on his play platform. He'd pluck at the loops; they'd go twang. Budgies do like making a racket. Opal started seeing how far he could yank them against the springiness; he'd stand on one side of the U and use the beak-over-claw hauling motion to pull loop after loop to one side of the U. The higher the tension, the bigger the twang when he let go.
One day he pulled as many loops as he could over, the tension nearly matching his body weight, hanging onto the topmost loop with his beak. Then he stepped onto the loops. Wham! The slinky sprung back over, whipping Opal over the top and flinging him onto his back on the other side. Opal flailed, flapped, and emitted that shrieky chitter that's the budgie's "I'm in danger" panic cry.
Then he jumped up, ran around to the other end of the slinky and did it all again. Pull, pull, step, twang, fling, SHRIEK. Over and over. He liked scaring himself.
But that's not the point of this column.
Parrots have trouble scratching around their eyes and their earholes with their claws, so they like using sharp protuberances as scratching posts. They're also Nature's own wood-chippers. Shredding stuff is a major time-sink for them. We regularly replenished Opal's supply of chew sticks; a block of wood would rarely last more than a week or two before it was sawdust.
We had a hamster chew-dowel (square cross-section stick about 6 centimeters long and half a centimeter cross) stuck into a block of cactus wood that was bolted to the top cage play area so the stick stuck out at beak level, for more chewing pleasure. Opal had gotten it down to a pointy stump maybe 1.5 cm long, well on its way to total demolition. I hypothesize that an itch struck, and he started rubbing his ear against the stump. I didn't see. Apparently a little grain-of-wheat lightbulb went off over that lentil-sized brain. Opal stopped demolishing the stump. He started trimming it. He evened up the sides, smoothed off corners and turned it into a nearly symmetric pencil-point of wood. This became his regular scratching stick and for the rest of his life (several more years), he never chewed away at that stick, save that he'd periodically slightly resharpen and reshape the tip when wear made it deviate from the desired form. He was still a mighty little sawdust machine when it came to other woody accessories. This one was special.
That's still not the point of the column. This is:
After a few months of observing this, Paula and I, being scientists by nature instead of normal people (to understand this difference see here), wondered if this might be subject to experiment. I decided to see if it was replicable. I stuck a fresh hamster dowel in the other end of the cactus wood. The feathered chain saw sprang into action, demolishing it with vigor. In a matter of days, all but a centimeter or so of that dowel was gone. The destruction stopped and finishing immediately began, much more promptly than before. With no hesitation at all Opal smoothed the sides, rounded off edges, and finished the point. When the second stick nearly matched the first, he stopped reworking it. He'd use one stick for scratching his left ear, the one facing the other way for scratching his right. That way he could always face towards the room when scratching an itch (that's just survival instinct—you don't turn your back on the world if you're a budgie).
Opal's tools. Once may be happenstance, but twice is definitely not coincidence.
Much else was reduced to sawdust over Opal's life, but the scratching sticks endured and were carefully maintained. When Opal died, I saved them and the cactus wood they were stuck in—it's pictured here as Opal left it.
Any animal behaviorists reading this? This one puzzles the hell out of me. It appears to meet the criteria for purposeful toolmaking, which has been observed in corvids and large psittacines. I've never read of it in something with a brain this small.
I won't go so far as to label it "invention," because I don't know how common it is for budgies to whittle points. Maybe that's a normal instinctive behavior. But maintaining and conserving a particular artifact and replicating it? That's just weird.
*Animal intelligence
If you're a beginner: I can recommend Peter Stepan's 50 Photographers You Should Know
This would also make a useful gift for any young person you know who's just getting interested in photography.
If you're more advanced: If, on the other hand, you've been involved in photography for a while and already know a thing or three about it, and you feel you're pretty well up on a lot of the basics, then I recommend Lewis Blackwell's excellent new tome Photowisdom: Master Photographers and Their Art
It's the same sort of thing as 50 Photographers You Should Know—a sampler—but it's on a whole 'nuther level.
The text bits have no real consistency (although many of them are interesting), because they were each written by the photographers themselves. The good side of that coin is that the photographs were chosen by the photographers too. There were a large number of pictures in this book that I've never seen before, which is pretty unusual for me these days, especially with this sort of book.
Two more things you should know about the book: first, the photographers chosen are a really good mix. (And if you think it's easy to come up with a good list like this, you should try it some time.) Too many books of this sort confine themselves to certain "ghettos" of photographic practice; Photowisdom makes a good effort to span some of the gaps, and it really does provide a wide variety of current practitioners (perhaps a little weak on landscapists, but that's understandable given that they're so well covered elsewhere). Books of gallery art photography especially tend to cluster around a group of "usual suspects" and snootily ignore working photographers, documentary photographers, and journalists. Any book of this type can't possibly include everybody, and it can't do justice to every kind of photography; but this book feels right, presenting a well-chosen matrix that feels free, wide-ranging, and inclusive. (The editor, Lewis Blackwell, is the former Group Creative Director of Getty Images.)
And the second thing: it's a beautifully made book, with a clean design and well-above-average reproduction quality that serves the content well. And that's important. Whereas you're likely to see many of the images in Peter Stepan's book elsewhere, the images in Photowisdom might be the only reproductions you'll see of the chosen pictures, so it's more important that they make a good account of themselves.
The combination of great picture editing and great reproduction quality make the book a visual feast. If the previous book is one you should give someone else, this one should be a gift for you—put it on your Christmas list. Or shoot the link to your S.O.!
Andrew Wyeth by Andrew Zuckerman
If you look for this one in the bookstore, be a little careful, because there's another current photobook of roughly the same size and shape with the word wisdom featured prominently in the title
Especially if you don't feel like you're quite up with the hot photographers o' the moment, this one might be good for your continuing education. It was for mine.
Mike
Question from Miserere: "Mike, Any chance you could provide a list of the 50 photographers included in 50 Photographers You Should Know? If you have better things to do than type out 50 names for us (and who wouldn't!), I would at least like to know if there is a good mix of nationalities or if the list leans heavily towards U.S. photographers. While my knowledge of photographers is by no means large, it is sadly biased to those on this side of the pond (I'm writing from Boston)."
Mike replies: I believe Peter Stepan is German and the book was originally written in German; it was originally published by Prestel Verlag in Munich. So there wouldn't be any overt reason for it to be overly USA-centric. If you'll forgive a rough accounting—a few of these numbers might be one off either way—I counted 2 Hungarians, 10 French, 19 Americans, 8 Germans, 2 from the U.K., 1 Italian, 1 Russian, 1 Japanese, 2 Czechs, 1 Turk, and 2 photographers from Mali (formerly French Sudan). That doesn't quite add up, does it? Forgive me...I don't own the book and I counted a bit too hastily. So if anything it could be faulted for being light on Japanese and non-German European photographers—as well as being a bit preferential to Mali!—but otherwise I think the balance is okay. Tough to be fair to every country with just fifty picks overall.
Alfred Cheney Johnston [see the first Featured Comment below for details]
By Ava Land
Alfred Cheney Johnston was discovered by Flo Ziegfeld of the famed Ziegfeld Follies. Flo was a master of publicity and when he saw what "Cheney" was capable of creating with a large studio camera and glass plate negatives, Ziegfeld hired the young photographer on the spot. Cheney was shrewd beyond his years thanks to being mentored by family friend and famous illustrator Charles Dana Gibson who became famous for the Gibson Girl drawings. Gibson advised Cheney to make sure every photograph of his had the name, Alfred Cheney Johnston, clearly stamped on it. Thanks to that bit of advice Cheney would become world reknown [sic] for his amazingly beautiful photographs of the gorgeous stars of the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway...
READ ON at articlesbase.com
[articlesbase.com bio] Ava Land is a freelance magazine and web writer. For more information on the stunning photographic images of Alfred Cheney Johnston go to: http://alfredcheneyjohnston.com.
Mike
(Thanks to Eolake)
Ed. Note: A wistful, semitragic story, I thought, of a photographer done in by another depression. Eolake and I aren't sure if the photograph here is by A.C.J. or not, although it sure looks like one of his to me. Does anybody have the book? Also, A.C.J. is no relation to me, at least as far as I know—although if you go back far enough, to the 1500s and earlier, we're doubtless both distant scions of the same eponymous Scottish border clan. Inset: Gibson Girl 32-cent postage stamp. —MJ
Featured Comment by Eric: "Page 111 of Jazz Age Beauties: "Helen Henderson, ca. 1922–25. Henderson appeared in the Follies of 1923 and 1925 and played the part of 'Other Hostess' in Night Hostess in 1928."
Mike replies: Thanks Eric!
