The Online Photographer: Books

Image Atlas

UPDATE #2: Broken.

Since yesterday, when we published this post—the whole point of which is to link to imageatlas.com—that site has been working only intermittently. Not working, mostly. I haven't been able to get it to work since yesterday afternoon. Maybe they have very slim bandwidth and we're stomping on it?

It's possible it's related to the recent suicide of Aaron Swartz, the site's co-founder.

I guess I'll leave the post here, since it's gotten some comments, but...sorry for the...well, not "inconvenience," exactly; "pointlessness" might be a better word, under the circumstances. —Mike the Ed.

P.S. It's not Ken's fault...the site was working when he submitted the post.

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Posted by Kenneth Tanaka

I recently attended a lecture given by Taryn Simon, someone whose work I've been curious about for quite some time. Taryn is a very energetic, ultra-curious researcher who uses a camera and her brain to examine seemingly fringe subjects which ultimately seem to tie firmly back to mainstream Earth life. Strangely, her work is heavily promoted within an art or photography context. But it's not really art in any expressionist sense. It really falls under investigative journalism.

Anyway, at the end of the lecture she demonstrated a project that she and the late Aaron Swartz had completed last year shortly before Swartz's death. The project is a unique search engine called Image Atlas. In brief, unlike conventional grab-all search engines, Image Atlas returns only images. But unlike, say, Google, "Image Atlas investigates cultural differences and similarities by indexing top image results for given search terms across local engines throughout the world." (Source: the Image Atlas About page.)

Rather than blather on about Image Atlas, I invite you to just give it a try. Warning: Don't start investigating it if you have anything urgent to do.

[UPDATE #1: The Image Atlas site has been up and down, up and down today—first I took this post down, then put it up again when the site appeared to be working. Now it appears to be not working again. I think I'll leave the post alone and we'll see what happens to Image Atlas in the next 24 hours or so—if it's persistently down then I'll remove the post again; if it seems to be consistently working again I'll remove this Update. Very sorry for any frustration or inconvenience! I'll try to stay on top of it the situation. —Ed.]

[Ed. Note: Taryn Simon's most celebrated book, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, is on deck to be reprinted in April.]

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Thomas McInnis: "I can wholeheartedly recommend An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. It is a beautifully simple idea expressed so eloquently. Apart from the gorgeous plates (printing is really good in my copy), the binding is familiar to anyone who has submitted a Ph.D. or other post-graduate thesis, and I think it is the perfect choice. It is one of the only non-fashion photography books I have ever been moved to purchase, and one of my most loved. I feel it is the breadth of 'topics' or 'issues' photographed by Simon which makes her work appeal to the art community more than the journalism community. This contrasts her other work about death-row inmates, which feels more at home on the New York Times Lens blog than in a gallery. The only quibble some will have is that the photographs cannot be separated from their accompanying text without losing a lot of their meaning, but for me they worked so harmoniously that I stopped caring about that almost immediately."

latent_image: "I am no fan of Taryn Simon. She photographed my dying father without being honest either to him or my family about her intentions for publication. It really bummed me out to see her name mentioned on The Online Photographer. I'd managed to suppress memory of her during the past few years."

Posted on Friday, 15 February 2013 at 04:10 PM in Books, Photographers, current | Permalink | Comments (16)

Guest Post: Lasting Pictures?

Written by John Camp

The Norton-Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, is near a major intersection a few blocks from my Pasadena home, so I have the privilege of being able to stop by on a whim, and often do. And, often as not, I stick my nose into the bookstore to see if there's anything new since my last visit.

On a Friday last August, I came up with a curious photographic book called The Last Pictures, by Trevor Paglen, an accumulation of one hundred photographs that could be, sometime in the distant future, literally the last existing pictures of humankind.

The photographs, which the book says have been "etched into an ultra-archival silicon disk nestled inside a gold [plated] shell" will be attached to the Echostar XVI satellite. The satellite was scheduled to be launched into a stable geosynchronous orbit last November, according to the information I could find on the net. According to the book, the satellite could remain aloft for literally billions of years; or, for only a few seconds, depending on how well the rocket works—this last being my observation, not that of the book.

A lot could be written about the book, not all of it flattering.

Trevor Paglen, according to the blurb on the back flap, is "an internationally recognized artist, writer and scholar working across multiple disciplines in a variety of media."

The back cover, under the headline "Praise for Trevor Paglen," has three quotes: "Awe-inspiring…timely…Paglen's art matters," from Artforum; "Paglen’s own life experience and academic training reflect the blurred boundaries so widely celebrated as a new media hallmark of contemporary art," from the L.A. Times; and "Brilliant," from New York Magazine.

Further excavations on Wiki reveal that he has an M.A. in fine art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in geography from U.C. Berkeley. The Wiki does not say exactly what form of art he worked with at Chicago. His projects, published in three previous books, tend to deal with military-involved secrecy in the U.S., apparently with some geographic considerations in most of them. From the descriptions of those other books, they sound quite interesting. You can get all this other information, including titles of his books and so on, by checking his entry in the Wiki.

• • •

So, to The Last Pictures.

A book begins with a brief, interesting but somewhat rambling discussion of time, and how the human concept of time has changed over the centuries. In the first few tens of thousands of years of human experience, time was local and tended to be short and fractured. "Deep time" and "universal time" were discoveries and inventions that humans made only fairly recently. But given the concept of "deep time," the question arises, can we, humans of the early 21st century, send graphic images into the future, much as unknown ancient ancestors of ours did with the Cave at Lascaux?

The answer is, well, yes, we can do that, and, in fact, a number of highly technological efforts in that direction have already been made—efforts to build warning signs of nuclear waste dumps that would last thousands of years; images and even music sent off on deep space probes; and so on.

Paglen's effort, then, was to find a way to project an aesthetic impulse from our time, out over the centuries and millennia and eons. He hit upon attaching contemporary 20th and 21st century images, suitably engraved upon a resilient, space-worthy medium, to a satellite whose time in orbit may extend out billions of years, ending only when the sun becomes a red giant and sucks up everything attached to earth.

His route to this decision is covered in the books' lead essay, which will not be further reviewed here, other than to say that there are some rather curious plums in this pudding, such as an apparent hostility to the concept of pi; the belief that mathematics is basically anthropogenic and thus cannot be used to create a universal language; and the information that Nature magazine has withdrawn valid scientific papers because of industry pressure.

• • •

In any case, Paglen winds up choosing one hundred photographs to send into the future, assuming, of course, that the rocket doesn't do a face-plant.

To me, the interesting thing about these photos is that given the same project, I wouldn't have chosen a single one of them.

With some of them, I agree with the idea, but I feel the image is either poor or non-representative. Others, I think are nonsense, like the photo of the back of a painting by Paul Klee.

Understand, none of these photos are "famous." They were chosen to be a kind of slide show of our times…a rocket blasting off into orbit; a wave breaking over a pier during a typhoon; illegal immigrants seen through a camera on a Predator drone; some electron micrographs; Leon Trotsky’s brain, clutched in somebody’s hands, apparently taken during the autopsy; stills from not-very-good movies; a "study of perspective" in which the Chinese artist Ai WeiWei gives the finger to the Eiffel Tower; a snapshot of an Occupy demonstration; a number of photos involving atomic weapons; a Union Carbide advertisement entitled "Bringing Science to India," a reference I think might elude many people even now, much less in a billion years.

All the photos are in black-and-white, and many are not what you would call "good." The thing to keep in mind, however, is that this is an art project, not a conventional photographic book.

The questions that plague me are, "Does this achieve any kind of goal?" followed by, "Is it necessary that a goal be achieved?" And, "Is there an aesthetic that is eluding me here?" or is the thing just dumb?

Paglen doesn't seem dumb, though he says things that are, in my opinion, dumb, though who doesn't do that occasionally?

In any case, I've read the book through twice in one day, and I just can't decide: Is it really deep? Or is it really bullshit?

The book is here, and for eighteen bucks or so, and, I promise, will give you something to think about, even if you send it out the next day with the garbage.

[Ed. Note: I am toying with a slight change of format, to highlight the authorship of our posts somewhat, owing to the fact that readers inconsistently notice who writes what.]

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

bill vann: "I've seen way too much 'acclaimed art' crap to bother any further. Thanks for the post, seriously, saved me wasting my time, the only irreplacable gift the good Lord gave us. well kind of."

SerrArris: "A book that one reads twice in one day is (in my eyes) definitely worth every cent and should not be thrwon into the garbage. For sure, if you read it twice in such a short time, in a short period you'll feel the urge read it again. I'll definitely have a look at it (that I have deep respect for the other works of Paglen just adds to the words you wrote)."

Hans Muus: "Of one thing we can be absolutely shure, I think, and that is that this art project is meant for us, here and now. And that includes the geostationary move. SF-like speculations miss the point entirely, if you ask me."

Bear.: "Re your ed. note, all of TOP's readers are exceedingly clever, as well as good looking; so we always notice whom has written what."

Mike replies: Thanks for reminding me!

Posted on Thursday, 14 February 2013 at 12:02 PM in Books, John Camp | Permalink | Comments (24)

Gary Briechle Photographs

Gary Briechle
96 pages
Published last December by Twin Palms Press
(U.K. link )

Review by Jim Hughes

One beautiful fall day in Maine a few years ago, I found myself sitting in the Subaru. I was just staring into space, admiring the spectacular foliage and wonderfully clear light while waiting for my wife to finish shopping. Suddenly, my attention was drawn to some activity in the distance on the Village Green. I saw a bunch of young people, wearing what appeared to be typical teenage grunge, gathered around a park bench. There was, if I remember, a blanket on the ground, and a young couple, literally wrapped up in each other, peering over at a man standing behind a big wooden box on an old fashioned tripod.

Approaching dusk made it difficult to see. I crossed the street to get a closer look. The box turned out to be a view camera, probably mahogany, with a well-worn bellows and a large brass lens aimed at the couple. The man behind the camera wore a floppy fedora. He held up a hand and ducked under a black oilcloth slicker of the sort worn by local lobstermen, deftly racked the lens forward to focus, hung his hat over what I soon learned was an antique shutterless barrel lens, pulled out a large dark slide, gently lifted the hat from the lens, and counted silently as the late afternoon light inexorably faded. Finally, he hung the hat back over the lens.

After quickly reinserting the dark slide, the man stood bolt upright and sprinted toward a nearby parking area, leaping over a heavy chain link fence in the process. Walking as fast as I could, I followed him. By the time I caught up, all I could see were two legs kneeling on the pavement. The man's torso had wriggled into a small opening in what appeared to be a makeshift orange-colored tent built into the rear cargo area of a Toyota RAV4 whose rear lid was open. A few minutes later, he extricated himself. He seemed surprised to have had an audience. I introduced myself.

"Oh, I know you," he said with an affable grin. I imagine he meant that he knew my writing about photography, not surprising since he was obviously a photographer himself. His name, he said, was Gary Briechle (he spelled it for me), and he had left the rat race behind in New Jersey to settle in small town Maine a few years earlier. I understood totally, I said.

"Are you doing what I think you're doing?" I asked. "Probably," he replied, pulling out from the back of the Toyota a small white plastic tray full of really murky, and smelly, liquid. "I'm teaching myself wet plate." Wet plate collodion, to be specific, using hand cut glass plates for which he had devised a way to partition an 11x14 back into various medium format dimensions. In the tray was, indeed, a small glass negative that he rocked back and forth in his home-made solution so I could glimpse the image in the lowering light.

"It's all about the light," Briechle said. "The whole process."

"Photography is seeing. Light is beautiful. Pure. I don't like the direction photography mostly seems to be going in. So I decided to take the next step. Backward, some might say. I coat my own glass with an orthochromatic [blue sensitive] emulsion in my portable little dark tent. The reddish light inside is pretty dim at this time of day, and doesn't affect anything. Then I run over to the camera, load the wet plate, remove my shutter hat from the big old brass lens, expose by feel and growing experience, then run the plate, still wet, back to the tent, where I have very little time to develop it out. Wet plate collodion is photography at its most basic. I'm still learning. I'm having fun. It's like magic again."

I thought of William Henry Jackson setting up camp next to a stream on the top of a mountain, his huge camera, a crate full of glass plates and his portable darkroom all strapped to his trusty mule "Hypo."

It's been at least five years since I first met Gary Briechle. In the interim, he has continued to photograph the old fashioned way. His subjects mostly have been friends and family willing to sit or stand for the long exposures in dim light his process requires. He has had a book in the works for years. It is finally published, by Jack Woody of Twin Palms Publishers, Santa Fe, New Mexico. The first edition of Gary Briechle Photographs (the cover of the book says "Photographs" but the publisher lists the book simply as "Gary Briechle") was 1,500 casebound copies. List $60. There is also a limited edition of 25 copies in a clamshell box, with an original print, numbered and signed by Gary, for $800, from Twin Palms.

There are 66 superbly reproduced photographs—complete with the flaws inherent to such a hand-made process—in this handsome 10x12-inch volume. Pages are meticulously coated in lustrous black ink as if they were from an album. The images themselves are reproduced in glossy duotone on glowing white-paper rectangles framed in black. In the right light, contact prints from glass seem to float above the page. The technique is a perfect match for Briechle, who somehow transforms the picturesque outer world that surrounds him into a deeply felt interior vision. Also included at the end of the book are photocopied excerpts from the journals Gary constantly scribbles in. Although there is a brief statement by the photographer on the Twin Palms website, no written introduction, or any sort of clarification, appears in the book itself. Knowing Gary, he probably felt it was better not to explain himself, to let his pictures do the talking. But as a a writer and editor myself, I believe a little context goes a long way, which is why I felt compelled to write my own brief introduction. Thus this review. I can only hope Gary understands.

Jim

Jim Hughes is the major biographer of W. Eugene Smith and the founding editor of the original Camera Arts magazine. His writings for TOP can be found here.

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Posted on Thursday, 24 January 2013 at 10:31 AM in Books, Film and Darkroom, Jim Hughes, Photographers, current | Permalink | Comments (29)

Followup: News About Our Book of the Year 2012

This is a followup on the post "Can I Change My Choice?"

Reader Jeffrey Du Flon has heard from Dewi Lewis of Dewi Lewis Publishing, who says that Pentti Sammallahti's Here Far Away is in the process of being reprinted and will be available from Amazon again in late March of this year.

I'll keep an eye on it and will post a link when the book becomes available again.

Mike
(Thanks to Jeffrey)

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Posted on Wednesday, 23 January 2013 at 12:02 PM in Books, Followups | Permalink | Comments (7)

Just Published Today

Books about photographers and photographer biographies have a spotty history at best, but I'm looking forward to this one nonetheless. Ed-weird—sorry, Eadweard, née Edward—Muybridge (formerly Muygridge, formerly Muggeridge) really was one of the oddest characters in British-American photography (born British, worked in the U.S.). And the deeper you go the stranger the tale gets.

Muybridge

I'll be skeptical of the author's objectivity until I know better—I'm not familiar with the work of author Edward Ball—but gratuitous sensationalism is less likely to be a pitfall than it is usually. With Muybridge you don't need to jack up the drama; he really was stranger than fiction.

Here's the publisher's blurb:

From the National Book Award-winning author of Slaves in the Family, a riveting true life/true crime narrative of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads.

One hundred and thirty years ago Eadweard Muybridge invented stop-motion photography, anticipating and making possible motion pictures. He was the first to capture time and play it back for an audience, giving birth to visual media and screen entertainments of all kinds. Yet the artist and inventor Muybridge was also a murderer who killed coolly and meticulously, and his trial is one of the early instances of a media sensation. His patron was railroad tycoon (and former California governor) Leland Stanford, whose particular obsession was whether four hooves of a running horse ever left the ground at once. Stanford hired Muybridge and his camera to answer that question. And between them, the murderer and the railroad mogul launched the age of visual media.

Set in California during its frontier decades, The Tycoon and the Inventor interweaves Muybridge's quest to unlock the secrets of motion through photography, an obsessive murder plot, and the peculiar partnership of an eccentric inventor and a driven entrepreneur. A tale from the great American West, this popular history unspools a story of passion, wealth, and sinister ingenuity.

It's called The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures. (Here are our links to other purveyors.) Just published today. I've heard that it's another of those pop histories influenced by the success (both artistic and financial) of Erik Larson's rich and entertaining The Devil in the White City, and if so, that can only be to the good.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Doug Howk: "Rebecca Solnit, in River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, has already covered the story. Though Muybridge's work was a precursor to the motion picture, Etienne-Jules Marey's contemporaneous work in France solved much of the technical requirements, eg. 12 images per second."

Posted on Tuesday, 22 January 2013 at 11:30 AM in Books | Permalink | Comments (20)

Can I Change My Choice?

re·voke verb \ri-ˈvōk\
transitive verb
1: to annul by recalling or taking back (revoke a will).
2: to bring or call back.

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"Change of mind is not inconsistency."

—Cicero

Okay, I know this is very eleventh hour (or twelfth—just past midnight, analogously speaking). I know I just said that our Book of the Year for 2012 was the 75th Anniversary Edition of American Photographs by Walker Evans, a current reprint of an important historical book. I even said it was "settled."

Then Here Far Away arrived. And changed my mind.

Pentti Sammallahti was born in Helsinki, Finland, in 1950. He began to photograph at the age of 11, and by age 21 had begun to exhibit. He taught at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki for 17 years, until, in 1991, he was awarded a 15-year grant from the Finnish government—an unusually long endowment and one that isn't given any more. Over a fifty-year career he has photographed in most parts of the world outside of the Americas, mainly Scandinavia and across Russia, the Far East, the subcontinent, and Europe. He is a master craftsman with a deep understanding of printing methods, known for reinvigorating the portfolio form; he naturally works in the form of books. He has published 13 books and portfolios since 1979, which have won many awards.

Here Far Away, published in 2012 by Dewi Lewis Publishing in England, is his first retrospective, representing the best of nearly half a century's work. Reasonably sized and beautifully laid out, it's a substantial 256 pages long, and the reproductions, which the publisher calls "quadratones," are gorgeous. The pictures, mostly rural, enigmatic, and mysterious, are almost pictorialist, painterly and composed. Many of the pictures show the presence of beasts, mostly dogs and birds, but including many other kinds as well—even people, who are often seen as another sort of animal within landscapes or city scenes. Many of the photographs are almost...mystical, if I may, with a sense of lyrical timelessness despite being (for all I can tell, at least) "straight" photography.

Talk about a guilty pleasure. I don't know what blows me away more—the book, or the career. Sammallahti's low profile in the U.S. has blessedly meant that he's mostly new to me (I have a beautiful Nazraeli Press volume of his rural panoramic photographs that is now hard to get, but that's it), which means that most of this work is new to me—which is such a treat for me.

Friends, get this book. That's all I can say. This is just what it's all for. I had some technical problems with the book post the other day and wasn't actually able to finish it—I will add some more titles soon. But I think it's fair to say that even with some strong competition from Vivian Maier and Ray K. Metzker and old Walker, this has gotta be the pinnacle of 2012's books of the ones I've seen. It's certainly one nobody will regret having.

Here's the U.S. link and here's the one for the U.K. You can find links to Amazon in Canada and Germany, and to the Book Depository, which ships internationally, here.

I have a feeling this book is in relatively short supply; it's certainly international in appeal, and the quality of the printing makes me guess they're not just able to churn 'em out. As I write this, Amazon in the U.S. has only 10 copies and Amazon U.K. only six. I had trouble getting my copy—I ordered it several times from two different places before it worked. My copy actually arrived slightly damaged, but no way am I risking sending it back. This gets a place of honor on my bookshelves, and, if you'll forgive me for changing my mind at such a late hour, this has got to be the Book of the Year for 2012.

[UPDATE: Sold out at Amazon.com. They're not accepting orders, either. I'll keep an eye on this in coming weeks and alert people (at least by tweet—@TheOnlinePhotog) when/if they're back in stock. —Mike]

[UPDATE #2, 1/7/13: When I recommended this book it cost about $48 new. I realize the prices for the few copies on Amazon Marketplace are astronomically high. I'll contact the publisher and find out what the story is likely to be; I'm assuming the supply of normally-priced books will be replenished eventually.

I just don't want you to think I'm suggesting you spend $425 for a book! —Mike]

Almost no matter what kind of photographer you are and what kinds of photography you like, I think you're gonna love this.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Mikko Kalavainen: "Great. Now you've spilt (spilled?) the beans about Pentti all over the Internet. Thanks a bunch.

"Just kidding, it's always a thrill to see The Favourite Obscure Photographer (choose your own) featured somewhere. I've got two prints from him on my wall, from the 'Pieniä Eläimiä' (Small animals) series. Which are lovely. That book is cheaper over there though, when compared to Finland. Which is no big surprise. Another coin for your coffer from Amazon then. Thank you!"

Mike Chisholm: "Mike, 100% agreement, and then some. I bought the German edition because I couldn't wait for the English one. I have to say my suspicion is that Sammallahti is either a dog-whisperer or maintains a trained pack. Surely nobody can get that lucky so often with so many characterful mutts, can they? Is witchcraft legal in Finland? Miraculous, moving and at times laugh-out-loud perfect work."

GuyB (partial comment): "What I love is the pagan animism, without sentimentality or anthropomorphism."

Stan B. (partial comment): "A 15 year grant—Finland (and the world) definitely got its money's worth!"

olli: "Delighted to see your recommendation. He featured in a recent post on The Guardian website and I ordered my copy from The Book Depository shortly after. It arrived a couple of days ago and I've been staring in awe ever since. It's a beautifully produced book and the quality of the printing of the images is stunning."

Jim Couch: "No you may not change your mind! I already purchased the Walker Evans book I am pleased to say. I like having the 'Book of the Year' for 2012! Now I have to go and purchase another book? One that may even be sold out! So unfair! :-) Too many books, so little money (and bookshelf space!)"

Colin Dixon: "Last year there was an exhibition of his work, and a talk by the artist, at the Side Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne in northeast England. The book is beautiful but his prints were stunning. A mix of inkjet for the the larger panoramics and silver gelatin. On his ability as a 'dog whisperer,' he said that when he travels he likes to eat tinned sardines, and he saves the fishy olive oil in a small bottle, and when dogs are needed he sprinkles a few drops, and usually dogs start coming around in a few minutes."

Graham Dew: "One can despair at what passes as 'quality' photography these days, and then comes along a book like this that re-affirms your love of the medium. I have a copy as a Christmas present, and it is absolutely beautiful. The images are so elegant, the production first rate and the size perfect. Yes, Mike, you can change your mind!"

Michael Hultström: "In Norway they don't use a translation of changing or revoking one's opinion. They have the wonderful word 'ombestemme.' I think it is used in Denmark as well. What it means, literally, is re-decide. I love it because it doesn't give the image of indecisiveness or a fickle, easily-swayed opinion. It is an active considered decision. It just isn't the same decision as you came to a while ago."

Mike replies: I like it! Funny how various languages have perfect words other languages lack.

Posted on Saturday, 05 January 2013 at 02:23 PM in Books | Permalink | Comments (68)

Photo Books of 2012, Part I

Some of the photo-related books we* enjoyed the most in the past year.

Lewis Hine, by Allison Nordsröm et al., D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc.

I hemmed and hawed before biting on this new Hine book because I have some excellent older ones already, and in a limited library I try not to expend resources of space and money too disproportionately. I'm happy I didn't overlook this. Brought to us by the excellent Alison Nordström, Curator of Photographs at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, it's a very characterful piece of fine bookmaking and a sumptuous visual feast—engaging, informative and great to look at. And it covers every major area of Hine's accomplishments. The chapter headings are "Ellis Island," "Tenements," "Child Labor," "Chicago and New York," "Pittsburgh," "Europe," "Black America," "Empire State Building" and "New Deal." The essays are particularly good as well—I like the non-snooty way Alison writes, and I've always found Hine's story somewhat poignant.

The layout is excellent, varied in size and page placement but with nothing running across the gutter. Enlarged details are used full-bleed as chapter headings, but the same images are included later in complete form with margins. The book also contains a complete, bound-in (albeit reduced size) facsimile of the only book Hine produced in his lifetime, Men at Work. A nice, and unusual, touch. In another nice touch, the book includes a contemporary 1938 critical appraisal of Hine by Elizabeth McCausland of the Photo League.

Alison Nordström is the author who brought us the book TruthBeauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845-1945, about the Pictorialist movement, a book that was popular with our readers a few years ago. That book went out of print, skyrocketed in value, and has recently become available again in a second edition. You don't even have to be particularly interested in Hine to enjoy and appreciate her Lewis Hine—she's very good not only at making these earlier photographic movements come alive, but at making them feel relevant to today as well.

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Waikiki, by Henry Wessel. Steidl.

A personal favorite of mine this year. A superb selection, one of my favorite photographers, and an amenable theme. Presented very elegantly. It's a slight book, good-sized but slender, overpriced for the page count, but it's also a great pleasure to look at. I've enjoyed it many times already and look forward to returning to it again.

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Here Far Away, by Pentti Sammallahti. Dewi Lewis Publishing.

I haven't actually seen this yet, so I can't say it's a book I've enjoyed, and I can't even recommend it. I'm quite excited about it, however. I've been chasing it for half of 2012, and have had my orders for it cancelled not once but three times by different vendors. However, Amazon not only lists it as being in stock at the moment, but I've received a notice from them that mine has actually shipped this time!

The Pentti Sammallahti titles I already have are especial gems, and his books are damnably hard to get. They seem to be fugitive, appearing before you and then flitting away. In print, out again. Phantasmagoric. Just try to lay your hands on the slipcased, long-format Sammallahti by Candace Perich Gallery and Nazraeli Press from 2002, and you'll see what I mean. Talk about unobtanium. (Very thankfully I was able to get that one, more or less by accident.) I'm now hopeful of actually getting Here Far Away in my hands. I'll try to remember to report again once I've actually seen it. If it actually comes.

Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows, by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams. CityFiles Press.

One of the signal titles of 2012. The second book of Maier photographs, this one drawn from the Jeffrey Goldstein holdings. Expertly done by two experienced bookmen, and reviewed in depth on our site by Kenneth Tanaka. Very popular with our readers, and deservedly so.

Walker Evans: American Photographs: Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Edition, by Walker Evans. Museum of Modern Art.

Without question, our 2012 Book of the Year. I'll explain why.

Sadly, it is beyond the scope of this website to survey and evaluate original books of new photography in any meaningful way, principally because our 'Steamed Editor (moi) lives in a backwater and doesn't have access to books past what can be seen in more or less proximate stores and museums, and what we can afford to buy and have shipped to TOP World Headquarters, a.k.a. my tiny Waukesha ranch house. This means that of the thousands of new books published every year, and the hundreds of those that deserve close attention, I see relatively few—too few to fairly single any one of them out as being the best.

At the same time, I've defined the mission of TOP as being "to help connect today's photo enthusiasts to photography's culture: its tradition, history, industries, best practices, accomplishments, literature, theory, legal issues, and current events." We give a lot of weight in book recommendations to books that plausibly wouldn't be out of place in most intelligent, educated enthusiasts' libraries.

It's a bit awkward on the surface to annoint any book published 75 years ago as the "book of the year" of 2012. However, American Photographs is also arguably one of the two most important books in the history of American photography, and surely deserves a place in any good generalist personal library of photo books. The new edition is readily available, inexpensive, well made, and as beautiful as this book ever was.

But all that aside, our readers have emphatically spoken, and to them we must defer. To date, more than twelve hundred copies of American Photographs have been bought by TOP readers through our various links, far and away the best-selling single title of the whole of TOP's 7+ years of existence.

That settles the matter.

(Or maybe not. To be continued....)

Mike

-*This is both the "editorial we" and a literal one. A number of writers contribute book reviews to the site.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Rens Horn: "The beautiful exhibition that goes with the Lewis Hine book can be seen in the Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, until Sunday! P.S. Allison Nordsröm gives a lecture on Sunday to end the exhibit!"

Rodger Kingston: "I agree with you about Alison Nordsröm; she is a great curator with amazing energy, and she is a pleasure to work with. In 1996, when she was Director of the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, she curated 'Fifty Years On The Mangrove Coast,' an exhibition of photographs of the west coast of Florida by Walker Evans in 1940 and myself half a century later.

"As to Lewis Hine, I have a great eBay story to tell. In 2003 I bought two vintage Hines on eBay, 8x10 enlargements of the construction of the Empire State Building. One was a variant of the cover illustration of Allison Nordsröm's Lewis Hine book. They were attributed in the eBay auctions not to Hine, but to the picture agency stamped on the back, and nobody else noticed them, so I got them both for their opening bids of $15 each. I couldn't believe it (and still can't entirely to this day).

"I couldn't really afford to keep them, since my collecting dollars have always gone to my anonymous vernacular collection, so I sent them to Daile Kaplan at Swann Galleries. In addition to being Vice President in charge of Photography at Swann, Daile is a well-known Hine scholar. She chose my 'Sky Boy' for the cover of the catalog, and both photographs were well presented and described.

"Now, this was during the time of a major scandal involving counterfeit Lewis Hine prints when everyone was extremely leery of Hine enlargements, so it was good timing for these two unquestionably genuine vintage Hines. In their favor was age 'silvering' oxidation in the surfaces of the ferrotyped prints, frazzling around the edges from handling over many years, and the stamps on the backs of the prints.

"They sold at auction to a European bidder for $13,000 each, a cool $26,000 for the two of them."

Michael MacLean: "I received the Pentti Sammallahti Here Far Away book for Christmas and have been enjoying it immensely since. You are in for a treat when it does arrive. Happy New Year."

Posted on Tuesday, 01 January 2013 at 07:24 PM in Books | Permalink | Comments (7)

'Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop'

-

"The history of photography is full of disembodied heads."

—Mia Fineman

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Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop By Mia Fineman; Metropolitan Museum of Art, 288 pages. (Link to Amazon Germany, U.K. and Canada.)

Reviewed by Kenneth Tanaka

That photography is an unreliable witness is certainly not a revelation. How many images have you yourself radically altered in the interest of aesthetics, humor, or plain old deception?

You might, however, find it revelatory to learn that photography has been prevarication-prone nearly from day one of its existence. Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop is a fascinating book, and an associated traveling exhibit, in which the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Mia Fineman presents what may be the first scholarly survey of the history of photographic manipulation prior to digital photography. Fineman traces the history of manipulation from the medium's earliest days* up to the 1990s, when the computer began taking over the medium.

Back cover

At this point you might wonder what Fineman considers manipulation. After all, the core processes of developing and printing any chemical photograph involve what could be considered subjective manipulations (dodging, burning). Fineman makes it clear that more radical techniques such as combination printing, photomontage, overpainting, and retouching are the primary interventions she investigates.

The book is organized topically according to the contextual and objective nature of manipulations. For example, the chapter titled "Mind's Eye" considers how photographs have been creatively wrestled to create impossible visions of fantasy and surreality. "Politics and Persuasion" considers…well, you can guess.

Fineman devotes the final section of the book to detailed discussions of each of the book's plates, something that greatly enriches the book's depth and richness as a reference source.

In case you're repelled by my describing the book as "scholarly," don't be. While it's not quite a lively read, it's far from a dissertation. Fineman features plenty of quite humorous subjects and examples throughout the book (as my leading quote suggests). Like every other Met publication I've seen, this is a top-quality tome. The design is clean and easy on the eyes with a logical organization. The 202 works in the exhibition, most of which are presented in the book, are richly printed.

Faking It is a wonderfully entertaining and informative book that I think is destined to become a classic reference work. By taking a deep wide-angle view of this subject Mia Fineman vividly illustrates that people have been manipulating photographs imaginatively throughout the medium's history.

Ken

*Indeed, in the very first pages of the introduction, Fineman discusses what may be the earliest such manipulation in 1845 by Calvert Richard Jones.

Exhibition Schedule
Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York: October 11, 2012–January 27, 2013
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.: February 17–May 5, 2013
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: June 2–August 25, 2013

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Gary Nylander: "This reminds me of a great old book that I picked up years ago called The Art of Retouching Photographic Negatives. Published in 1930, I thought it was quite amazing for its time and for just how good some of the retouched photos looked. Back in 2006 I posted on my own blog about the book."

Posted on Thursday, 20 December 2012 at 12:00 PM in Books | Permalink | Comments (10)

We Hear from Keith Davis

It's always a treat for me when we hear from one of the people we've written about. I got a comment yesterday from Keith F. Davis, the curator who's responsible for the book The Photographs of Ray K. Metzker. I've added his comment to the original review.

If you'd like to know a little more about him, here's a brief article (too brief) called "Collectors' Roundtable: Keith F. Davis on Collecting Photographs." And here's his short-take bio:

Keith

F. Davis received his B.S. degree in Cinema and Photography from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (1974), and his M.A. (1979) in the History of Art from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. He has curated more than 70 exhibitions from the Hallmark art and photography holdings—shows seen in over 300 individual bookings in leading museums across the U.S., and in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Great Britain, France, Spain, and Switzerland. He became the founding curator of photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in January 2006, following the gift of the Hallmark Photographic Collection to the museum.

Curators are, to a greater or lesser extent, institutional collectors. How great a job is that? After John Szarkowski retired from the Museum of Modern Art, he was hired to curate photographs for the PaineWebber Art Collection. He used to call me every so often (I'm sure as just one of a large network of contacts) to see if I could recommend any photographs or photographers he might be interested in. I'm pleased to report that three of the photographers I recommended to him sold work to the PaineWebber collection, including one who'd never sold any prints before. (My brush with institutional collecting.)

I told Keith we'd sold 52 copies of the book through our links, but that was wrong. Actually, 52 copies have been shipped: we cleaned out Amazon's stock. Another 68 copies were ordered that haven't been shipped yet.

I'd be interested in what others think of the book, if by chance you're one of the ones who bought one, and if you've received it already.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Ken Tanaka: "As Mike opined, the book is a winner: 'Not only is it the ideal Metzker retrospective, it's an exemplary photographic monograph, with a substantial, insightful text and superb plates, presented in a robust but no-nonsense, no-pretenses manner.' I can't say it any better. Keith Davis has produced a superb retrospective on Metzker. Having seen lots of Metzker's prints I can also report that the book's plates are spot-on. If you want to get one book that neatly packages one of the great 20th century photographic artists look no further."

Larry: "I am fortunate to live a few blocks from the Nelson-Atkins Museum and have seen many exhibits curated by Keith Davis over the years. First when he was with Hallmark and more recently at the Nelson. They have all been superb. He and his staff are to be commended for the excellent exhibits they have been putting on in the new dedicated photography space in the Bloch addition at the Nelson.

"I want to alert midwest TOP readers of their current show which is a retrospective of Terry Evans. It is an amazing show and will be there through January 20th. It is well worth a trip to the Nelson. Just as important to readers not in the vicinity is the Evans book produced for the show, which is equal to the Metzker book in every way."

Posted on Monday, 17 December 2012 at 03:07 PM in Books, Collecting | Permalink | Comments (4)

Two More Books You Might Like

A few more recent books I think are tasty:

Looking at Ansel Adams: The Photographs and the Man by Andrea G. Stillman (here's the U.K. link) might fall as much into the category of "guilty pleasures" as "must haves." It takes an enthusiastic and involved look at Adams by telling the story of twenty of his photographs, including many of his most famous ones. Copiously illustrated with ephemera, it gives a window into Adams's processes and working methods as well as his everyday life, making him seem more like a real working photographer—and a real person—and less the avuncular dynamo of legend. And a nicely made book, too. (No accident—the author is an accomplished writer and editor and the venerable [founded 1837] Little, Brown is the official publisher of Adamsiana as designated by the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.)

Andrea Stillman met Ansel when she worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. After working together for two years on a major show there, he asked her to come to Carmel to be his assistant in the spring of 1974. As his administrative assistant rather than his darkroom assistant, she did everything from taking print orders to editing his prose for the following six years. She has continued to contribute to his legacy since his death in 1984, editing books, helping with shows, and narrating a TV program.

Ansel and Andrea, Carmel, California, 1975. Photo by Alan Ross.

• • •

The Changing Face of Portrait Photography: From Daguerreotype to Digital by Shannon Thomas Perich is another yummy treat. It dives deep into the fathomless sea of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History's Photographic History Collection. There are obviously treasures there, and this book brings many out into the sunlight.

Rather than looking at individual photographs as a jumping off point, here we get to look at a succession of photographers. Happily, it's not just the "same old names" that (well, for old dawgs like me) are trotted out a bit too often. Yes, we get some heavies—Julia Margaret Cameron, Dorothea, and Avedon (a quirky look at the latter, and I like that too). But the book opens with George K. Warren (who?), and includes Henry Horenstein and Lauren Greenfield. Author Shannon Perich, an Associate Curator of the Collection, is showing some gumption, and I like that. This is not just a same-old-same-old type of book.

She also has a marvelous eye for what to show us. This is a guided tour of rare treats, beautifully and appropriately presented. You won't like all the photographers equally—remembering that most of us will differ in which we like better or worse—but all are interesting, and the sweep across time is a nice sampling.

There's also a valuable section on Nicholas Murray, a photographer whose name comes up far too infrequently these days.

Here's the U.K. link.

• • •

Neither of these books are indispensable, but both of them are treats—as fun as they are interesting. Bravo on both counts.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Posted on Friday, 14 December 2012 at 02:02 PM in Books | Permalink | Comments (11)

Giving the Gift of Vivian

Just in case you're not aware, there are two major archives of the work of Vivian Maier [UPDATE: Wrong! See correction below], the reclusive Chicago nanny whose sprawling photographic remains were auctioned out of her storage locker even as she lay dying. One is controlled by John Maloof, the other by Jeffrey Goldstein. Don't ask me to deconstruct how that came about. But both archives have mounted shows; both have "official" websites; both have published books (Vivian Maier: Street Photographer is John's, and Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows is Jeff's—or rather, it was drawn from Jeff's Maier archive, the book being the creation of Richard Cahan and Michael Williams); and both market Vivian Maier prints.

And both, unfortunately from my view, have been locked firmly into the "gallery model" of print distribution, whereby the volumes are kept low and the prices high, and neither one, it appears, can really adjust to comfortably fit the alternate model of a TOP Print Offer. I've tried. Well, sporadically. Just doesn't look like it's going to work. Seems kinda ironic, to me, but then, I have a distinct selfish interest in the matter. Both of these guys are working very hard (I mean that) to responsibly preserve this photographer's legacy, and they rightly get to decide what's best for her and for themselves.

However, if you should happen to want to give the gift of Vivian this Christmas or Hanukkah, you're in luck. Jeff Goldstein has produced a sumptuous and lovely custom-clamshell-encased deluxe edition of Out of the Shadows that includes the book and your choice of one of three original prints. Limited to a total of 165 copies (55 of each print). At $850 it's not cheap, but then, gift-giving is one circumstance in which it's rather bad form to cheap out. And, actually, it is the cheapest way (I think) to get an original silver-gelatin Vivian Maier print, at the present time.

Here's the link where you can go to buy the deluxe edition and, perhaps more interestingly, to see which three prints are being offered.

I have one of these chez TOP (albeit temporarily), and I can attest that it is a pleasing, solid little package. The craftsmanship of the clamshell is very good, and the presentation is excellent and elegant, even to the signature printed on the stoutly made outer cardboard box. I can't imagine anyone with an interest in Vivian Maier not being delighted to tear the wrapping off this.

Mike

Correction: Actually, I'm wrong. There are three major archives of Vivian's work—the one I left out is Ron Slattery, who was the first person to purchase her work at the storage auctions. This "Chicago Tonight" video will allow you to meet all three of the known current custodians of Vivian's work—John, Jeff, and Ron.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Pamela Bannos: "Hello—I am the person who responded to Stephen Daiter's comment in the first 'Chicago Tonight' program and am featured in the video link in this post. I've been teaching photography at Northwestern University for twenty years. My Vivian Maier research has continued since the TV program aired in August and I will be speaking more about the developing project soon."

Posted on Thursday, 13 December 2012 at 12:08 PM in Books, Photographers, historical | Permalink | Comments (24)

'The Photographs of Ray K. Metzker'

Philadelphia, 1963. Photo by Ray K. Metzker, courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery.

Ray Metzker (b. 1931) used to be a little too "outside" for my taste, like Sun Ra or Anthony Braxton. (Plus, I wasn't interested in his printing style, when I had a professional interest in such things.) As time has gone by, his influences—the Chicago school, you might call it, Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, with some of the formerly radical street photographers such as Lisette Model and Louis Faurer thrown in—have become much more clearly revealed, and Metzker, as black-and-white has plummeted out of fashion and the old gatekeepers whose ramparts he sneaked past have been whisked toward irrelevancy, has dated rather too quickly.

The process has made his work seem both more brilliant, in my judgment, and more important. He is a superlative, original, questing, endlessly inventive shooter, a photographer's photographer—derivative in some ways, but greater even than some of his influences, taking their suggestions and finding further richness in it, like Hendrix playing the blues.

The curator Keith F. Davis, who is responsible for this book and the show it accompanies, is similarly one of photography's quiet treasures. He "gets" photography, which cannot be said for all the major curators right now. The book is The Photographs of Ray K. Metzker, published just a couple of months ago by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. (Here's the U.K. link.)

I think Metzker's stature will increase as time passes. If it doesn't, Keith Davis has at least done a very persuasive job of explaining, and showing, why it should. He has made some very fine contributions to the photography lover's bookshelf. And this might even be the best. It is a glorious book, stuffed with masterpieces dynamic and brilliant. Not only is it the ideal Meztker retrospective, it's an exemplary photographic monograph, with a substantial, insightful text and superb plates, presented in a robust but no-nonsense, no-pretenses manner.

I can't put the darn thing down. It has re-ignited my faith in photography since it arrived.

Mike

P.S. This is the first post I've built at my new standing desk. Do any of you Mac experts out there know how to control the brightness of the screen on a mirrored display? The control on the iMac only works for the iMac display, not the mirrored display.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

David: "Yeah, excellent, Mike. For the first part of this post you built, I thought you were going to take Ray K. to task. The guy's work is brilliant. Nice to see one of my all-time favorites on the TOP pages. Huge influence and someone whose work continues to blow my mind. The photo you featured here is one of my favorites, it's like an opera."

struan: "Ray Metzker's Landscapes book has been a huge influence for me. As with many of my favourite landscape artists, he is best 'known' for other work, but his mix of formal rigour and free association is a heady one. That he breaks so many of the ossified rules of B&W photography, and breaks them so well, is just a bonus."

Keith F. Davis: "Mike: I've just discovered this piece, and very much appreciate your kind comments on the Metzker book. Thank you. I first saw Ray's work in something like 1971 and was deeply impressed at the time—but it all looks even better now, in hindsight. I genuinely love the way he has loved photography over all these decades."

Posted on Thursday, 13 December 2012 at 10:09 AM in Books, Photographers, current | Permalink | Comments (35)

When Is Eliot Porter Not Eliot Porter?

WhenI heard that Ammo Books was reprinting Eliot Porter's great and seminal book In Wildness Is The Preservation of the World, I requested a review copy. No-brainer, I thought: TOP readers will love this.

It pains me to have to give the good folks at Ammo a thumbs-down. I believe they're well-meaning; they gave us the innovative and informative instructional book The Contact Sheet by Steve Crist, now out in paperback (and still recommended). However, not only can I not give their In Wildness... reissue my endorsement, I'm afraid I have to give it a non-recommendation. This is one you want to stay away from.

Danger, Will Robinson.... Avoid! Avoid!

In comparison with the original first edition, which I have, the reproduction in the reissue looks like bad color Xeroxes. The densities are all wrong, the colors are all wrong, the sharpness is missing. It worries me that people who buy this book knowing nothing about Eliot Porter will think this is what his work looks like. It isn't. This is not Eliot Porter.

I think Geoff Wittig agrees with me about this.

Mike

Geoff Wittig adds: I do agree. In the past few weeks I've looked over pretty much everything of Eliot Porter's available in book form. Some is good, a lot more of it is mediocre. One wants to give Ammo credit for reissuing this legendary book, but it's not up to the (1962!) standard of the original, let alone contemporary reproductions.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

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Posted on Thursday, 06 December 2012 at 12:16 PM in Books | Permalink | Comments (1)

Photo-Blacksmiths?

For years I had a bumper sticker on my car that simply said "READ." This is not exactly funny, but I was startled to encounter George Eastman, founder of Kodak*, agreeing with me in his final hour:

...Of course, that's not as it appears: his dying words weren't the same admonition as my old bumper sticker. When you click "Read more," you get what he really said:

I found this on Robert Burley's website in support of his new book The Disappearance of Darkness. I'm not going to link to it here; if you want the book, you should buy it through Robert's site—that way he gets a little more income from it.

Robert has documented the demise of film conscientiously and painstakingly since 2005. The book collects his photographs from his travels, which are indicated in this review at The Economist. The Economist review also quotes Robert Burley saying this:

"I was starting to feel like a blacksmith," he says, recalling the large-format camera kit he would unpack in order to capture his waning industrial subjects.

Good analogy. Photo-Blacksmiths...naw, it'll never catch on.

Mike
(Thanks to Ariel E)

*Also a distant cousin of mine, and I am really not joking.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Posted on Saturday, 01 December 2012 at 10:20 AM in Books, Film and Darkroom | Permalink | Comments (24)

Weston Book Update #2

To keep you all apprised, given the extraordinary circumstance of Hurricane Sandy: I heard from Michael A. Smith again this afternoon. Gradually they are getting combobulated: phone service is back in Pennsylvania although email is not. Michael and Paula have now departed for Paris Photo, as planned, but their assistant (whose name I still don't know) has moved operations to his own residence and is working overtime to get the rest of the books shipped. Two hundred books went out today and Michael is hopeful that all the rest will be on the way by tomorrow.

They are unable to charge credit cards, with their Internet not working, but Michael made the decision to go ahead and send the books before charging peoples' cards in order that delivery not be delayed any longer. He'll actually charge your card (if yours is not one of the ones not processed before Sandy hit) when he returns from Paris.

Some people should have received their books already—some were shipped before the storm. If you've gotten yours, what do you think?

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Mark Johnson: "Hadn't realised book reproduction could be so powerful—you're drawn into the very deep, rich tonalities. The Mexican images on matt surface paper don't have any sense of an overlying paper surface between the image, even the subject, and the eye. The plates are all profoundly beautiful. (I would love to have seen even more of the Point Lobos imagery.) I've not yet had time to read the text—a pleasure to come."

Posted on Friday, 09 November 2012 at 12:06 AM in Books | Permalink | Comments (9)

Photo Book Touchstones

By Ctein

Some chance remarks in Mike's "Incidentally..." post reminded me that I had been meaning to write about books of photographs that I considered important moments in the field (what Mike called touchstones), and why.

Now, understand that these books may not appear impressive by today's standards. I would say that we live in a golden age of photographic reproduction, except that I think it's only going to continue to get better. A touchstone, though, doesn't have to stand up well today. It's a marker, a highlight. The Wright Brothers flight will always be a touchstone of aviation, although it's utterly unimpressive today, technically. I will close with a book that I consider the current pinnacle as well as a touchstone, but most of my touchstones date back to the 1960s and '70s.

First on my list is Gentle Wilderness: The Sierra Nevada, text by John Muir, photographs by Richard Kauffman (1967). Mike favors Eliot Porter, but a case could be made for any of the Sierra Club-Ballantine books of that period. Me, I'll vote for this one, because it's the book that drew me into the series primarily through its utterly luminous blue cover photograph of the Center Basin. I'd never before seen a reproduction with that kind of step-through-the-page clarity, and I rarely have since. It doesn't hurt that the book was printed by Kauffman's own company, H.S. Crocker. (I should do a column about Richard, one of photography's greatest under-appreciated amateurs.)

The entire series is a touchstone. Art reproduction books typically were expensive and good or cheap and, well, cheap. Ian and Betty Ballantine felt that they could make money on affordably-priced, high-quality art books. Even as a college student, I was able to buy the majority of the trade paperback editions of the Sierra Club–Ballantine series. The series was a commercial success that opened the doors to the thousands of good photography books we've had since.

And, yes, by today's standards the reproduction is only adequate. At the time it was a level of quality that had been hitherto unaffordable by mere mortals.

My next touchstone goes to the other extreme: Himalayas by Yoshikazu Shirakawa (1971). The deluxe wraparound slip-covered edition tips the scales at 12 pounds, filled with sumptuous reproductions, full-side, double-side, and even quadruple-side, that positively drip ink. An amazing tonal range and color gamut for the time, and it sold for an amazing price. I can't remember what; I think traumatic amnesia has blotted out the number, but it was the most expensive photography book offered up for general sale in the U.S. I bought a copy because I was fresh out of college and had a great-paying job. I'm still amazed that I did. There are many ways that today's books have better reproduction, but this one just screams "rich," and in a good way.

Ernst Haas, Tobago (from The Creation)

My third touchstone is Ernst Haas' The Creation (the original 1971 hardcover edition, of course). Much more affordable than Himalayas, although it was not inexpensive, and not quite as sumptuous in its reproduction, but it was designed (and succeeded eminently well) to make you fall in love with color. It's a positively lyric book filled with lyric reproductions. I got my copy as a gift, and, sadly, it sustained water damage a few years later. Because I was something of an idiot at the time, I didn't replace it while the book was still in print. I've never seen the 1983 reissue, which seems to be available on Amazon for not too much money. Does anyone know how it compares in quality to the original? [Not very well. Hold out for the original. —MJ]

Lest readers think I pay no attention to black-and-white books, my fourth touchstone is a landmark that ushered in a new era of fine photographic reproduction. I'm talking Ansel Adams. Not the 1974 opus, Images 1923–1974. No, I'm thinking five years later, with the publication of Yosemite and the Range of Light. It's not as superficially impressive as the 1974 volume, until you open the covers and compare reproductions between the two. It's like night and day—the 1979 book has open, luminous tones and lovely shadow and highlight separation that comes immensely closer to conveying the feel of original Adams prints than anything previously done. The reproductions are also sharper and more exquisitely detailed. Put the two volumes side-by-side and there is simply no comparison.

What changed? The advent of electronically-controlled laser platemaking. It revolutionized press work and every subsequent photography book that had pretensions to seriosity had to stand against Yosemite and the Range of Light.

Up till now
Lest any readers conclude that I am hopelessly mired in books of the past, I'll close with two modern works, one of which I'm pretty sure will be a touchstone and the other of which I'm certain about. First, Bruce Davison's three-volume masterwork, Outside Inside (2009). I haven't seen a lot of Bruce's work in the original, but the reproductions in these volumes feel "right" to me. Maybe I'll look back on them in time and find otherwise, but for the present I have a sense that they convey the photographer's vision with a verisimilitude that is uncommon in book reproductions.

Finally, a touchstone that is currently at the pinnacle of color reproduction: Bill Atkinson's Within the Stone (2004). I reviewed this five years ago here. Amazingly, Bill still has copies of this book for sale, although it is out of stock with Amazon. I just ordered three copies; I will have no trouble finding people to give them to as gifts over the holiday season. Read my original review to understand why this is such an amazing book. Everything I said then still stands; nothing else I've seen comes remotely close to this volume for color reproduction, and the price of $40 makes it eminently affordable.

• • •

Those are some of my touchstones, certainly the ones that have stayed in my memory the best and the longest. Let's hear about some of yours!

Ctein

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Thomas Osbourne: "Oh my...I happen to own two of these books, Yosemite and the Range of Light and Within the Stone. I bought the Atkinson book after seeing an exhibit of Atkinson's photographs. Seeing the exhibit was like discovering cave paintings—pure visual poetry. The book is more of the same, but the images are perfectly paired with luminous passages of poetry and prose."

Nigel: "The Atkinson appears to be in stock with Amazon—in the U.K. at least. (Just ordered a copy.)

Charles Cramer: "Ctein, I consider Gentle Wilderness to be one of the great photography books. Kauffman's photographs are absolutely luminous. I would love to read a column by you about him."

Posted on Wednesday, 07 November 2012 at 01:44 PM in Books, Ctein | Permalink | Comments (15)

Quote o' the Day: Sam Abell's Dad

"The unusual wins out over the usual."

—Sam Abell's Dad

-

Mike
(Thanks to Simon Griffee)

NOTE: ...that Sam's book, below, in the footer, which sold well for us when it was new, is available temporarily at a bargain remainder price. The book got mixed reviews, but I don't think anybody could think that it was $16 not well spent.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

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Posted on Monday, 05 November 2012 at 03:28 PM in Books, Quote o' the Day | Permalink | Comments (3)

Weston Book Update

Seems we crashed Lodima Press's bookstore last night for quite some time. It's back up and running now.

At this point it looks very likely that Edward Weston: Life Work will sell out entirely in this sale, and most likely well before Tuesday. So if you find yourself sitting on the fence about it, you may not want to hunker there too much longer.

UPDATE: The edition sold out at about 9:10 p.m. tonight (Friday). (There are a few copies of the deluxe edition still remaining.) Our thanks to everyone who participated—I really hope you enjoy the book!

And my sincere thanks to Michael and Paula for making this possible.

• • •

One of the treats of this book is "A Couple Collects Edward Weston," the brief joint essay by Judith G. Hochberg and Michael P. Mattis that introduces the magnificent plates. They manage to convey both personality and erudition, opening a well-lit window into the passion and enthusiasm collectors feel for the objects of their hunt. We're taken from their beginnings in collecting to their decision to concentrate on Weston...

Michael and I both consider Weston the "Picasso of Photography." One needs only to think of his mastery of past modalities and invention of new ones, his success in a variety of genres, his economy of line, his self-knowledge as an artist, his intense relationships with other artists—and with the women in his life.

...all the way to their debt to those charged with the care of the Weston archives and their friendships with the Weston family members who are alive today. Talk about economy of line, or of word...the essays are short and sweet, but insightful.

I thought it was interesting that the idea of an exhibit of their Weston prints went from a "dream" to an "obligation," and that, by the time the exhibition became a reality, it was the only way they themselves could see all their own Weston prints on the wall at the same time.

Edward Weston, Dunes, Oceano, 1936. This is a JPEG of the Met's print.

My first encounter with Life Work was interesting. Art critics from Ruskin to Berger talk about the "aura" of original art-objects, and I'm sure you know the feeling yourself—the special qualities that convey when you're looking directly at the real thing on a museum or gallery wall. There's a sense of immediacy and connection—Goya touched that!—and a sense that the veil of intermediacy has been removed: you're face to face with the art itself, and all its secrets are there for you to see. It needs no "translation," requires no imaginative help.

I've of course seen many original Westons in my life, and got to know one of them—Dunes, Oceano, a.k.a. White Dunes—intimately, because one of the schools where I taught had an original print of it on the wall. The plates in Edward Weston: Life Work are the first time, I think, that I've ever felt, from a book, that feeling, that sense, you get when looking at the real thing. It's a feeling I know well, and I felt some of it—more than a glimmer—from looking at many of the later plates in the book. Remarkable. I'm not sure any book has ever done that for me before.

I mentioned "Red Ceiling" yesterday, which is apropos, because Eggleston is on record saying that reproductions have never captured it. (And he's right, at least in my limited experience.) He's quoted in this passage from Mark Holborn's introduction to Ancient and Modern:

The first [dye transfer prints Eggleston] had made were of the image of Greenwood Moose Lodge, a sombre, windowless edifice against a blue sky, and The Red Ceiling in 1973. He was so impressed with them that he knew dye transfers were going to provide him with his medium. He immediately sent [MoMA Photography Department Director John] Szarkowski a print of The Red Ceiling, which was to become one of his most famous images. The cross of white cable leading to the potent, central light bulb, was what he described as a "fly's eye view" in the guest room of his friend, a dentist in Greenwood, Mississippi, whose choice of decor included an adjacent blue room; he [that is, the friend] can be seen naked, his walls daubed with graffiti, in The Guide. The house with the red room was subsequently burned down and his friend murdered, yet far from having any sinister connotation, the red room was immensely pleasing to Eggleston. "The Red Ceiling is so powerful, that in fact I've never seen it reproduced on the page to my satisfaction," Eggleston claimed. "When you look at the dye it is like red blood that's wet on the wall. The photograph was like a Bach exercise for me because I knew that red was the most difficult color to work with. A little red is usually enough, but to work with an entire red surface was a challenge. It was hard to do. I don't know of any totally red pictures, except in advertising. The photograph is still powerful. It shocks you every time."

Those of you who own a dye transfer print of your own from one of our two dye sales can probably well imagine what he means.

But I think that, for example, Weston's famous Pepper No. 30, plate 43 in the book, among others, really is reproduced satisfactorily on the page. Of course you're not fooled into thinking you're looking at a real print, but for me, at least, it imparts that same "direct" feeling, the feeling that you're seeing the picture itself, without translation into ink.

Michael A. Smith tells a story about this:

In Edward Weston: Life Work, there are a few photographs that have never been reproduced before, many that have been reproduced very seldomly, and a few that have often been reproduced. One of the latter is the famous Pepper No. 30. We know the collector who owns Edward’s own copy of Pepper No. 30. Edward considered it the best print he had ever made from that negative. Eventually, Edward gave the print to Brett. And Brett gave it to a friend whose father was Brett's closest friend and who had grown up around the Westons. The friend sold it to this collector in 1974. (Way too soon.)

When we showed the collector the book we published, he brought down this print of Pepper No. 30, which we had seen previously, and placed it next to the reproduction. We (me, Paula, the collector and the collector’s wife) looked very carefully at the print and at the reproduction, trying to find differences. There were a few, but they were virtually imperceptible without extremely close scrutiny, and even then, truly, there was hardly any difference between the print and the 600-line screen quadtone reproduction.

After about three minutes of this intense looking the collector's wife said, "You know, I think I like the reproduction better."

Bet her husband didn't like that.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Posted on Friday, 26 October 2012 at 11:57 AM in Books, Photographers, current, Photographers, historical | Permalink | Comments (17)

Edward Weston Book Offer

We've got a nice special offer for you this morning. I'm not great at tooting the horn on my own bridge, but this is absolutely exclusive to TOP—nobody gets this but you.

Edward Weston: Life Work was published by Michael A. Smith and Paula Chamlee of Lodima Press in 2004. The occasion was a major exhibition of Edward Weston prints from the collection of Michael P. Mattis and Judith G. Hochberg. Here's a snip from the book description:

Edward Weston: Life Work is a 110-photograph survey of this great American artist. Containing photographs from all phases of Weston’s long and varied career, from his first nude in 1909 to his final landscape at Point Lobos, California, in 1948, previously unpublished masterpieces are interspersed with his well-known signature images.

To create the book to accompany the exhibition, Lodima went "all in." There's no better way to put it. Michael simply decided to do whatever was required to make the reproductions as close to the originals as possible.

No expense was spared—the printing cost the better part of $170,000. The book reproductions are the same size as the originals, and Michael went to fanatical lengths to reproduce every detail of the originals, including color and surface. To give you an example, on several occasions they flew to the locations where the exhibit was showing in order to compare the printer's proofs directly to the originals on the wall. The printer was Salto of Belgium, the only printer in the world that works with 600-line screen quadtone (with a fifth ink—to match the print color on Weston's early prints—which had never been done before. And the book uses two different kinds of paper, with a softer matte paper used to match the papers Weston used early in his career). I haven't actually tried this myself, but Michael tells me you can't even see the printing dot pattern with a loupe. I can relay a couple of nice stories about the book's over-the-top printing quality, but I'll do that in a later post.

The book was a success, earning extravagant and widespread praise. It has now nearly sold out, and is no longer available from Amazon; only a few hundred copies remain, available only from the publisher.

As the supply of books dwindles, the price goes up...Lodima's standard practice. Published at $195, the book now costs $225. The final 80 to 100 copies have been set aside as "new old stock" to be sold in the future at $1,000 a copy.

But here's the thing—Michael and Paula are friends, and Michael's the guy who's going to be helping me publish TOP's own books. As we were chatting about how to introduce Lodima Press to TOP's readership, I asked if he'd be willing to offer one of Lodima's books to you for a reduced price, and Michael ("Why just 'a' book? Why not our Edward Weston book?") said he'd be willing to offer a limited number of copies of Edward Weston: Life Work to TOP readers for a discount. I asked how much a discount, and he said, "It's up to you. The book has already paid for itself." (Honest.)

So, for a limited time, and for a limited number of copies, you can order Edward Weston: Life Work for $140, plus only $12 shipping within the U.S.

(Michael later told me $150 was a low as he was willing to go, but that the number I picked was close enough.)

$140 is $85 off the current price, which I think is 37.7%. (You'll recall that I'm arithmetic-challenged.)

The book is available to international purchasers too, but it's big, and it's heavy—international shipping will be substantial. No help for it. At least you're not being left out....

So here's how to order—

[Information removed—books sold out on Friday, Oct. 26th at 9:10 p.m.]

• • •

Okay, now there's one more wrinkle to this deal. Lodima also published 100 slipcased deluxe editions of the book, each of which comes with a modern original print of Tina Modotti's famous portrait of Edward and costs $750. Fewer than 30 of these remain, and Michael has agreed to make up to ten of them available to interested TOP readers for $500. Email him for details about this, and be sure to mention that you came from TOP. On the checkout page, the code to enter is TOP250.

I'll write more later about my impressions of the book, and add some more comments about the superlative reproduction quality. But this is long enough for now. Suffice it to say, whether you're a longtime Weston book collector or you want one good Weston title in your library, you'll love this. Would I steer you wrong?

More anon—

Mike

UPDATE 9:05 a.m.: They're being swamped, so if you've written them an email inquiry and haven't gotten a reply, don't worry, your email will be answered eventually in the order it was received.

UPDATE #2 12:10 a.m. Friday: The publisher's site appears to be down. I'll look into it and let you know what's going on tomorrow morning.

UPDATE #3 2:30 p.m. Friday: The shopping cart was back up and working this morning. Several people have asked about the security of Lodima's online ordering—what I'm told is that they are currently in the process of applying for encryption certification, but that the site is secure—half of each credit card number is sent to them separately in a separate email. I'll see if I can get more specific information later, but I'm being assured there is no problem with security.

UPDATE #4 9:15 p.m. Friday: Sold out. There are still several copies of the deluxe edition available; if you're interested, please email Michael at [email protected].

Thanks to all, and we hope you enjoy your book!

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Lyle Allan: "I bought this book when it first came out. I also own a large number of other books about Weston as well and have seen many of his prints (I am still haunted by the gorgeous Weston platinum print shown by James Hyman at the last AIPAD). I can attest to everything that Michael said, this is absolutely, the best Weston book there is. If you don't have it, now is the time."

Nick: "I've been wanting (needing) a Weston book for some time. Giant gaping hole in my shelf without him since he's one of my favorite artists (in any media). Thanks for the recommendation and the deal. I don't normally impulse buy anything over $50 but this is a special exception."

John Sarsgard: "I also got it when first released. I was a student in Michael and Paula's first workshop. They do not have 'that's good enough' in their vocabulary. The reproduction is the finest I have ever seen in a book."

Posted on Thursday, 25 October 2012 at 08:00 AM in Books | Permalink | Comments (48)

Leica Chronicle

Last month, Erwin Puts, the world's leading expert on all things Leica, published a new book entitled Leica Chronicle: an evolutionary history of the Leica camera and its lenses. The book is considerably smaller and handier to hold than the physical version (there was also an electronic version) of Erwin's recent sold-out Leica Compendium. There's a good reason for that: this is the first volume in a projected four-part series.

Here's the roadmap:

Volume One: Leica Chronicle: an evolutionary history of the Leica camera and its lenses, published in 2012;
Volume Two: Leica Practicum: the theory and practice of Leica rangefinder photography (analog and digital), planned for 2013;
Volume Three: Leica Optics: the design of Leica lenses, their selection and use, also planned for 2013;
Volume Four: Leica legend: an icon of modern times, planned for 2014.

Although primarily a reference work, with virtually all Leica cameras and lenses covered or at least mentioned, in many cases the entries are delightfully entertaining little mini-essays spiced with little-known facts, insights into performance, and corrections of incorrect conventional wisdom. For example, I never knew that the 1953 collapsible 50mm Summicron—Cartier-Bresson's favorite lens for decades—had not just a thorium radioactive element, but that the rear element was flint glass so the lead in it would protect the film from radiation.

The book offers many extras as well: a discussion of the most beautiful Leicas, samples of brochure covers, tables of special edition models, extensive information on serial number ranges, and so on. I get the impression that there are gems of insight and information lurking in every nook and cranny of the book's 298 pages.

The timing of publication was no accident: it contains full information about all the new developments announced and introduced at Photokina 2012. I was also intrigued to see the S lenses discussed and dissected. Erwin points out that the Summarit-S 70mm ƒ/2.5 normal lens performs best at its wider apertures, which makes it unfortunate that many owners stop the lens way down due to habits retained from using medium-format film cameras.

A remarkable fact about Leica Chronicle is that Erwin did everything himself: he researched it, wrote it, did the editing, layout, typesetting and design himself, self-published at his own expense—and he's doing the distribution: the book is available from his website. Erwin told me that he produced a large press run and that he expects his supply to last until sometime around Christmas.

I forgot to mention that the book is copiously illustrated. A must for fans of Leicaphilia.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

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Posted on Tuesday, 23 October 2012 at 05:55 AM in Books, Cameras, new, Cameras, old, Lenses | Permalink | Comments (7)

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