Christie's will auction The Diann G. and Thomas A. Mann Collection of Photographic Masterworks two weeks from now. The auction will take place on October 4th and 5th at 20 Rockefeller Center in New York City.
It's pretty much all "greatest hits." A few samplings:
Edward Weston, Nude, 1934. Estimate $30,000–60,000
Dorothea Lange, White Angel Bread Line, San Francisco, 1933. Estimate $100,000–150,000
Paul Strand, Blind Woman, New York, 1916. Estimate $70,000–100,000
Edward Weston, Pepper No. 30, 1930 (printed 1940). Estimate $150,000–250,000
You can see the entire catalog of the collection, with nice JPEGs, at this link. A PDF of the show catalog can be seen here, and the print catalog itself can be ordered from Christie's here.
Mike (Thanks to Dierk)
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Andrew John: "The estimated prices imply that some people have lots of pocket money. Are they happy? I'd love to hear the reaction to this auction of that poor man in the bread line."
Also expected on the 25th is the announcement of the Fuji GFX 50R, the rangefinder-style counterpart to the medium-format SLR-style GFX 50S. The new camera is expected to be somewhat lower spec and somewhat less expensive.
But we'll see.
And Sigma is expected to introduce a portrait lens in mounts for both Micro 4/3 and Fuji X-mount this week—a 56mm ƒ/1.4. I'd be in the market for that, so I'll be watching. But given that I have a Micro 4/3 camera and a Fuji X camera at the moment, the choice as to which mount to get could mean I'd be making a hard choice between the two cameras and formats, and it could potentially make my head explode. So if you stop hearing from me.... :-)
[UPDATE: Oh, sorry, "brain fart." The new Sigma will be Micro 4/3 and Sony E-mount, of course. Sorry for my confusion. Or wishful thinking, whatever. —Ed.]
Mike (Thanks to Hugh Crawford)
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Most of this comes, directly or (probably) indirectly, from 4/3 Rumors: Apparently Panasonic will introduce a full-frame camera on the 25th of this month, six days from now—next Tuesday. (Photokina begins the next day and runs through the 29th.) It will be one of those "development" announcements, or pre-announcements—it will not announce the rollout of a camera that's nearly ready for sale, but one they're working on for next year. Supposedly it will have a body similar to the GH5's, no sensor-shift IS, excellent video, and have "way more" than 30 MP. The specs they'll release on Tuesday are believed to be pretty firm.
There are two reasons why the announcement's noteworthy: one is that it puts an exclamation point on the Q4 2018 FFM tipping point, with many companies deciding all at once to follow Sony's lead into full-frame mirrorless; and the other is that it marks the first departure of a major member of the 4/3 consortium into a format other than 4/3.
Personally, I think what underlies all this is that the camera companies are being chased. "Serious" interchangeable-lens cameras are going to have to flee from the smartphone juggernaut if they aren't already.
This doesn't mean Micro 4/3 is doomed—it would be jumping the gun considerably to say that—but I think the cameramakers are already thinking more about differentiation than they would have if they still had the camera market to themselves. As ever, I could be wrong, but that's my sense of it.
Mike
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Andrew: "The interesting thing about the Panasonic FF camera possibility is the relationship with Leica, which I believe would continue. They can both concentrate on the FF format, which is Leica's bread and butter. Leica would maintain all-out lens designs for its own FF cameras (i.e. the SL, which might have a v.2 soon) while working with Panasonic on still-very-good but cheaper FF lenses. I love the G9 (+ "PanLeica" 12–60mm) and a FF version of that camera would be divine. In any case, a FF camera from Panasonic would be telling. Where would that leave Olympus?"
LensWork 138 arrived in the mail the other day. The cover says it all: the 25th anniversary issue, with 88 images from the publication's first 25 years.
I enjoy collections, and this one's special. So many reminders of great portfolios past. Don Kirby is here, and Huntington Witherill, Cosmin Bumbut (I own an original of Cosmin's, framed and hanging in my house), Clyde Butcher, Fay Godwin, Shelby Lee Adams, Bradford Washburn, John Sexton, Phil Borges, Wayne Levin, Merg Ross, Lois Greenfield, Ryuijie, Michael Kenna, Jay Dusard, Cheryl Medow, Bill Jay, and so many more. (And so many more than that couldn't be included.)
"Our little corner of photography uses the medium as a means of artmaking," Maureen and Brooks write in the introduction, "—of personal exploration and personal expression." Always with respect toward craft, too, one might add. You can purchase the print edition or the extended digital version here.
Twenty-five years of independent publishing! It's an amazing, amazing achievement. Admiring and sincere congratulations to Maureen Gallagher and Brooks Jensen, and all the artists they've featured and supported over their first quarter of a century.
Mike
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Eric Brody: "Congratulations to Brooks and Maureen. Lenswork is a wonderful publication. It's unique in its focus (pun intended) on photography, not on cameras or lenses (despite the title) as well as its ad free content. I listen to Brooks' podcasts regularly and marvel at his ability to keep going and keep being creative in his approach.
"I knew him when he lived in Portland and were part of a group of photographers who shared work regularly. My first 'workshop' was with him, Stu Levy, Stewart Harvey, Barry Peril (now sadly deceased) and others at the Oregon Coast in the early '80s. It was the start of my own journey in photography."
Most of the cats that you meet on the streets speak of true love, Most of the time they're sittin' and cryin' at home. One of these days they know they better get goin' Out of the door and down on the streets all alone.
—The Grateful Dead, "Truckin'"
It's the birthday today of the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. He was born in 1908 and would have been 110 today.
In some quarters that makes today "Street Photography Day," although I find suspiciously little on the Internet about that apart from old TOP posts. Maybe this is just something I imagined, or dreamed.
But anyway, today we go out and take a picture on the street. Here's my contribution, presented with the two-legged subject's permission:
The doggie is the spiritual advisor of the pilot. Her name, appropriately enough, is Sidecar Sadie.
I'm sure you have not failed to note Sadie's cool goggles! Those weren't just for the picture. She wears them when she rides.
I actually took this last week. It was taken with the 2018 equivalent of a Barnack camera—a smartphone. Not that I would have minded taking this with a real Barnack camera*, not at all.
So the idea today is to get out and take a picture—any picture. You can award yourself life points for conforming to the genre of street photography, for any similarity to the work of Cartier-Bresson, or for technical appropriateness of any sort as understood by you. You're very welcome to share.
Main requirement: be cool and have fun.
Mike
P.S. To put your image in our Comments, please use this code:
Where the bit in quotes is an image on the Web. Make sure the original image is not wider than 470 pixels wide, or it will be cut off.
*A Barnack camera is any Leica before the M3 of 1954. All were derived from the original designs of Oskar Barnack, hence the name.
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Jan Kwarnmark [you remember Jan —Ed.]: "To be honest, it's my own idea. I simply claim this day as dedicated to street photography. I used to send a mail to TOP, to Peter Turnley, and write on Facebook. Some people think it's a nice idea and respond kindly. I suggest we meet in a special café in Gothenburg at noon. Until now one friend has said he will come. After all, street photography is is something you do alone. Walking around in a crowd has nothing to do with it. By the way, is there really an 'official' way to make August 22 The International Street Photography Day?"
Mike replies: Aha! And sure enough, you're the guy who emails me about it year after year. Well, I'm on board. Why not?
Photo by Hans Muus
Hans Muus: "Shot one day before HC-B day, hopefully close enough. Folding doors at ground level (presumably the house was build as a small shop a long time ago) on a medieval square in the centre of my hometown, Utrecht, Netherlands. I liked the way the two blokes were sitting there, reading quietly. Took a sneaky (pardon, 'candid') shot. Too far off. And they noticed me. Walked up closer, moving my camera aside. 'Goedemorgen!' 'Sorry...English.' 'I see, good morning! I just took a picture of you, because you make such a nice image the way you're sitting and reading, but it doesn't feel good to do it secretly—mind if I take another one?' 'Not at all—we'll just smile!' When it is done friendly, I really love subtle British irony. I think I smiled. 'Or just keep on reading, if you will.' So they did.
"Later that same day I brought them a small print, which was appreciated. And I wonder, the contraption on the otherwise empty chair at the right—does it suggest one of the men has a handicap—anyone?"
I learned something new about the iPhone 7+ camera(s). Smartphones are handy in that you can sometimes get them into spaces where an IL camera won't fit, but the "selfie" camera on the screen side of the phone doesn't focus as close as the main camera modules on the back. I couldn't see to compose this picture any other way than by using the "selfie" camera, and it wouldn't focus on the eggs. The nest is right under the eaves and I couldn't get the phone far enough away.
These eggs have apparently been abandoned, which is making me unaccountably sad, probably because it echoes the rest of the sadness in my life. A mother robin raised an earlier brood in my robin condos under the pavilion (there are now three nests, which are re-used year after year), and I even got to see one of the fledglings make its first flight—a first for me—because I dropped something by mistake and scared the little guy right out of the nest. There has since been a second batch—robins will raise up to three batches of eggs per season—but the mother of the second batch seemed more nervous than the others, and never entirely got used to me and the dogs like the others did.
Then one day she wasn't at her nest, nor the next day either, and I became concerned. The third day I saw a robin standing on the edge of the nest and I thought, good, she's back! But then two more days went by with no signs of life. That's when I decided to stand on a stool and, carefully, not touching anything, use the phone camera to spy into the nest; I wanted to see if some predator had gotten the eggs and they were gone.
As you can see, the camera showed the eggs still there. But it's been two days now since the photo and I haven't seen any further signs of the mother.
It's such an enormous investment of effort to raise a brood of chicks that robin parents will abandon the task if there isn't a reasonable chance of success. If the mother is killed, of course, the eggs are doomed. The male can't incubate the eggs and doesn't know the other necessary behaviors such as turning the eggs. But the mother will often abandon the eggs if the male is killed, too—one website notes that the male performs "finishing school" for the fledglings, teaching them how to gather food and other worldly skills. Without him, the youngsters' chances of survival go way down.
What I suspect happened in this case is that the mother was killed and the bird I saw hanging around the nest on the third day was the male. But I'm no ornithologist, and of course I have no way of investigating or knowing what became of this poor family. Whatever happened, it appears that the eggs in this blurry picture are never going to become birds to add to the ever-diminishing avian population, alas.
Mike
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Congratulations to all our French readers for France winning the sporting world's most coveted trophy, the World Cup!
Does anyone have a World-Cup-related photo they own the rights to? I'll gladly post it.
(Or, you can post it yourself in the Comments, using the code:
The image must be on the Web and cannot be wider than 470 pixels.)
Congratulations also to the great Novak Djokovic for his fourth Wimbledon Men's title and his successful comeback from injury.
Mike
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Andy Sedik: "Four years ago we took a trip to Germany so that we could watch the World Cup matches in Germany with friends and family. We were in Berlin at a friend's house when Germany won. She drove us to the Ku'damm afterwards so we could join in the celebration. We got a few hours of sleep before heading to Brandenburg Gate for the celebrations. The routes were blocked but as we walked side streets we noticed people lining the sidewalks. Fans were guessing the team bus might pass by and we figured if we were going to see the team this would be our only chance. We lucked out and they passed right in front of us. I've been in San Francisco when a local team has won a championship and it was nothing like what I experienced when Die Mannschaft won the World Cup."
kirk Tuck: "I'm a bit confused; did your French readers actually participate in the field play? Why are you congratulating the spectators? It's the players who won the game. Hate this whole idea of the 'home' team being the entire country. What did the rank and file citizens of France do to capture the world cup? And I have to correct you on one more thing. The World Cup for Soccer is hardly the most coveted sports award. That honor would surely go to a gold medal for any Olympic swimming event. Soccer is only a sport for those who can't swim.... Delete as necessary to retain world peace."
Mike replies: Wait...the Mac post was the one that was supposed to get all the arguments, not this one!
A nice thing—my rep from B&H Photo, Izzy Flamm, actually made a trip out from NYC to see me yesterday. I've always had good contacts at B&H—Itzhak (Isaac) Buchinger, then Menashe Wodinsky, and lately Izzy. Izzy lives in Lakewood Township, New Jersey, which Wikipedia calls "a hub of Orthodox Judaism." More than half of Lakewood's ~100,000 residents are Orthodox. Izzy commutes two hours to New York City each way. He rather liked my commute, which consists of a) coming downstairs and b) moseying out to the porch.
We had a great visit, and we are cooking up a number of ideas for ways of working together. I'll keep you posted going forward.
I think Izzy enjoyed his brief trip to our area. (My town has 5,000 people, and they're building a new building across from the B&H Superstore in Midtown that will house more people than that.) All the same, it was very kind of him to come all this way to meet me. Thanks Izzy.
Mike
P.S. I have one more post for today, a "Random Excellence," but I'm awaiting permission to post the picture. My hopes are fading at this point, but who knows, maybe I'll get lucky before the end of the day.
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Tex Andrews: "You know, I'm not that surprised. There was a time when B&H rocked that gruff-to-the-point-of-rude NYC thing, but in my dealings with them for the past decade they have been unfailingly polite, helpful, dare I say it, even gentle, in their dealings with me. Henry Posner has done a great outreach job over at that infamous site (in the midst of a family tragedy a year or so back, at that...). I feel like B&H has decided to be...good. I liked that they seem to have expanded their religious holidays as well, in a way that makes me think that take their faith seriously, as opposed to what I'm seeing from some others. I was sad to hear about their labor issues out in Brooklyn because it seemed so out of character with what I have been experiencing."
Mike replies: B&H's warehouses at the Brooklyn Navy Yard as well as the one in Bushwick have been closed, and fulfillment has moved to a newer, larger facility in Florence Township, New Jersey, just south of Trenton. From what the news reported, all the warehouse workers from the Brooklyn facilities were offered jobs at the new facility. The old Navy Yard warehouse, with no further connection to B&H that I'm aware of, is reportedly being converted to movie and television studios.
By the way, in case you're curious, "B&H" stands for "Blimie and Herman," the first names of the man who owns B&H Photo, Herman Schreiber, and his wife. Herman (Izzy used a nickname that sounded like "Heshy" but I don't know if that's the correct spelling) is still living and still comes in to work.
Chip McDaniel: "I've been dealing with B&H for over 30 years now by phone and Internet and in both the old 17th Street store and the new one. Even when they were doing 'gruff-to-the-point-of-rude NYC thing' that Tex Andrews refers to above, they were always fair and transparent about which were USA goods and which were gray market. I once had a shipment of an expensive lens go missing, and they shipped another the day of my phone call, even though the courier service showed delivery of the package to my home. In my experience this is typical of B&H and actually of 'gruff' New Yorkers in general, who, when asked for directions or other help, go out of their way to be helpful. Also, B&H's prices were always great, and they still are. I'm glad that you are a click through for them and wish you a fruitful future collaboration."
Mike replies: My favorite gruff-to-the-point-of-rude NYC story: I was walking from Columbia University to Penn Station with a suitcase once (not realizing quite how far it was), and about ten blocks north of Penn Station on 7th Avenue, after walking for quite a long time, I saw two policemen standing on the sidewalk casually talking to each other. I approached them and said, "Excuse me, officers, can you tell me where Penn Station is?" Both cops abruptly fell silent and looked me up and down from head to toe, as if they were completely affronted that I had dared to interrupt their conversation. Finally one of them cocked his head to the south and said, in a thick New York accent and a scathing tone of voice, "It's right down the f---ing street!" He then turned his back on me and they resumed talking. I had to try hard not to laugh.
TOP is takin' a coupla days off for the firecracker holiday. Gone fishin', back Friday.
I'd admit that I'm one of those weirdos who think we in the USA have been better off if we'd just stuck it out as part of Great Britain. The only thing about that is, if we had stayed together as one country, you know full well that what is now the United Kingdom would have rebelled by now and gone back to being independent. The only likely difference is that we probably wouldn't have burned down Buckingham Palace in the process. We'd have let those soccer hooligans go peacefully.
:-)
But enough with the thought experiments, it's a holiday! Have a nice one, if you're celebrating. Let's be safe out there.
Mike
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Close call last night! Driving home from a gathering, a doe leapt the guardrail in front of me and sprinted into the path of the car. At 60 miles per hour I slammed into full ABS mode and took extreme evasive action, using all of the opposite lane (no oncoming traffic, fortunately) and going into a four-wheel skid first in one direction in the other—and then neatly recovered. I essentially drove around where the deer was about to be, at sixty miles an hour.
I felt pretty proud of myself afterward. I didn't panic, I reacted instantly, the car performed well, and I performed well. I didn't touch the deer, which was fairly amazing considering she leapt directly into the car's path and left very little room to maneuver.
I've learned to be alert for deer on the road at dusk and twilight.
And you know what I was thinking? That the image of the deer suspended in midair above the guardrail in the light of the brights over the right front fender of the car was a picture. It looked really neat. I can see it right now in my mind's eye.
Mike
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Bill McFadden: "Nice job driving. My uncle who was encyclopedic about 'the outdoors' taught me that where there is one deer, there will almost always be more following. His lesson paid off one night on my way from Wilkes-Barre to Elmira. I slowed for a deer crossing ahead and the impatient driver who passed me hit the second deer at 60 mph. That picture is still in my neural archives 65 years later."
Nick Van Zanten: "In Michigan, it's always a good idea to drive with a doe permit handy, that way, if you were careful you can eat her. Odds are pretty good (one in 80) that you will collide with one. I got mine a couple of years ago, but the guys in the truck behind me had the doe tag. Sheesh! I got the $1,500 body shop bill."
Mike replies: I don't want a body shop bill, and bully for the dudes in the pickup, but, speaking just for myself, tick-infested roadkill does not appeal as dinner! :-)
Steve Rosenblum: "I'm very glad that you and the deer ended up unhurt. However, despite your pride in your reactions and response, what you did was unwise. According to law enforcement and natural resources folks, swerving to avoid hitting a deer is much more dangerous than hitting the deer if you can't stop in time. If you swerve the chances that you will lose control of your car and hit a tree, another car, or end up upside down in a ditch are higher than if you hit the deer and stay in your lane. If you Google 'What to do if you're about to hit a deer with your car' you will find numerous postings from official sources supporting this approach.
"A relative of mine was driving home at dusk from fishing on the Madison River in Montana when an elk jumped up on the road in front of his car and he did what you did. He ended up swerving off the road, rolling down an embankment, and hanging by his seatbelt upside down in his (now completely totaled) rental car. Fortunately, outside of having to extract some pieces of shattered windshield glass from his skin he was OK. He doesn't do that anymore."
Mike replies: Thanks for the information, but—well, it was a reaction, not a thoughtful, considered strategy. And being who I am, I'm also thinking about the deer, not just myself, and I doubt I can relearn that. At least not on the gut-reaction level.
However, thinking back on it, I think I applied pressure to the brakes incrementally (though quickly), because my long-ago driver's training was to not slam on the brakes because of the risk of going into a skid. So one thing I'm going to do is practice panic stops a few times. The local speed limit is 55 MPH, even on winding, hilly two-lane roads, and most people drive 60–65 MPH or even faster. I usually set the cruise control for roughly 62 or 63 MPH. Driving that speed, when no one's in sight, I'm going to practice slamming on the brakes a few times. I need to retrain myself to let ABS keep me from skidding and stop the car as quickly as possible.
And by the way, last night the wildlife I encountered was a fox kit that was checking out some roadkill on the centerline. I saw the reflections of his eyes from far away, and was driving slowly by the time I came up on him.
Jim A.: "This is one of the few concerns I have when riding my beloved motorcycle. Even though I live in a state where this sort of accident is a rarity, I always keep an eye peeled. Here are some interesting insurance stats on the likelihood of collision with deer for each state."
In the formerly United States at least, it's Memorial Day, the day on which we remember those who died in our country's wars in active service. It used to be May 30th; now it's the last Monday in May, which is today.
Traditionally, it's also considered to be the unofficial beginning of Summer in the U.S. Today's a genuinely hot day here, and the boats are on the lake, the trees are fully leafed out, and the robin in nest #1 has hatched her first brood. Cold April is a distant memory already.
On this day I try to remember that no one (or very few people, at least) wanted to give his or her life for their country. What they wanted to do was serve, then come home and grow old. Some of them didn't even want to serve, but got conscripted into it. Not only can they not speak for themselves, but no one can speak for them, either—this is what offends me about all the treacly, sentimental pap we tend to get bombarded with on days like this. Safe, live personages putting words into the mouths of the dead.
...Not the words I'd put there either. Personally, if I had realized I was about to lose the whole world and everything in it at age 19 in the hell of the Argonne Forest or the muck of Midway Atoll, I'd feel pretty ripped off. Who would choose to "pay the ultimate sacrifice"? Some live, some die, and who gets to survive and who must perish is a grim lottery, one that is mostly a matter of chance.
Along those lines, we can also be thankful that relatively few soldiers have died in recent decades, compared to costlier wars. Although that makes no difference at all to the men and women who were lost. Or their suffering families, who should also be in our thoughts today.
But here's the important thing: the war dead were called to serve, they answered, and then they paid the price. All honor to them. It's worth remembering that before the Battle of Midway, to name just one example, the U.S. mainland was distinctly threatened by the Japanese fleet; after Midway, that threat had effectively evaporated.
Whatever your opinions of war and service, we should save a few moments between beers, barbecue, family and fireworks today to contemplate the war dead.
It's their day, not ours.
Mike
ADDENDUM American wartime military casualties by war:
American Revolutionary War 4,435
War of 1812 2,260
Mexican War 13,283
American Civil War (estimated) 750,000
Spanish American War 2,446
World War I: 116,516
World War II: 405,399
Korea 36,576
Vietnam 58,200
Gulf War 382
Iraq and Afghanistan 6,831
[Source: Historical Statistics of the United States (Millennial Edition), quoted by Samuelson, Robert J., in "The horror and honor of the Civil War on Memorial Day," Newsweek magazine, May 25, 2014. Samuelson gives the figure for Iraq and Afghanistan at 6,809 as of May 2014, so I looked to Wikipedia for an updated figure.
Further investigation indicates that most of these figures are total military deaths from all causes rather than direct combat casualties alone. The 750,000 figure for the American Civil War appears to come from a study by historian J. David Hacker published in Civil War History Volume 57 No. 4, December 2011. An article about the study in BBC News magazine (online) describes it as "a paper that used demographic methods and sophisticated statistical software to study newly digitised US census records from 1850 to 1880." —Ed.]
P.S. As I mentioned in the previous post, please be mindful of our Comment Guidelines. The brief version at the top is easy and quick to read. Thanks!
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Mike Plews: "Memorial Day is a tough holiday for me to process. I'm a veteran, Army Security Agency from '67 to '71 but never got close to Vietnam. My father was in from 1923 to 1955 and saw a lot of combat in the 4th Armored Division in Europe. He is buried in the military cemetery in San Diego.
"My only remaining uncle was an 18-year-old POW in the Battle of the Bulge.
"Last September I had the pleasure of getting a little pissed with my cousin's husband who flew Dust Off in Vietnam.
"We just buried a old friend who suffered the kind of cascading organ collapse associated with Agent Orange exposure. His family found military bits and pieces all over his condo and asked me to come over and explain their significance. They told in interesting story. He had been a specialist in the 11th Armored Cavalry. He had a Combat Infantryman's Badge and three Bronze Stars. He never spoke of this to us. We all knew he had bad case of PTSD but he never went to the VA about it. He was a high school teacher and still in the closet and perhaps he feared being outed. We'll never know now.
"I am sharing this not to brag up my family history. It is to let you know where I am coming from.
"I believe the best Memorial Day address yet was given by Lieutenant General Lucien Truscott in 1945 at a military cemetery in Sicily. No full record of his actual remarks remains, only fragments as it was not written down. Truscott stepped up, waited for silence, turned his back on the crowd to face the dead and apologized."
The problem as I see it is not that old media is dying, but that the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater—in this case meaning that we lose the culture, ethical norms, and practical production methodologies of the content of the news...the structures that have been put in place over decades, even centuries, to insure a good semblance of impartiality, fairness, accuracy, and a bright-line separation between reporting and opinion. We also lose the hard-won structures of fair payment for honest work. The Internet might be more convenient, more easily tailored to suit, more on-demand, and cheaper, but there are few similar safeguards in place yet. All that we're losing—all that hard-won, well-evolved culture that goes along with the medium—we're going to have to learn all over again. Alas.
Then again, corporatism had already gone a long way toward corrupting old media anyway, so maybe it's a wash. That's the fault of the failure of anti-trust legislation and laws.
However, I've always regretted the fact that modern human beings give so much primacy so absolutely to capitalistic filters. With product categories, there are usually a few survivors that honor the best of the bygone past—consider for instance that you can still buy, brand new, a film Leica. That's as it should be, sez me...a throwback, yes, but it's a throwback that honors the best of the past.
But that's life I've always had the idea that LIFE magazine should have been institutionalized somehow. Imagine a picture magazine that arrived into the households of every American every week, telling selected stories in still photographs of all aspects of American life, news, and culture. Yes, we can get a good analogue of the same thing online if we go looking for it. The difference is that a magazine freezes the images into final form, the editing plays a major part in shaping the stories, and—most importantly—having one such publication "set aside" in that way would provide shared common experience across the culture. That's what would have made it valuable...it could have been a shared context to provide a basis for discussion and understanding.
I guess the only way such a thing could happen is if the government were to subsidize it, and that can't happen in the United States (although it does with NPR and public television). Certainly not now.
Hopefully, a few large English-speaking newspapers will make the transition to online versions, as seems to be happening. I subscibe to the essential New York Times (others choose The Wall Street Journal) and The Guardian.
The idea of a subsidized picture magazine is an impractical, impossible idea and I acknowledge and accept that. But that doesn't stop me from wishing it had somehow come to pass. Sometimes, culture provides triumphs—things that are valuable above and beyond their grubby, quotidian bottom lines. It's too bad that so many of those things have to be swept away simply because the business climate or the underlying technology, inevitably, changes.
Mike
"Open Mike" is the not always off-topic Editorial page of TOP. When the moon and the stars align, it appears on Wednesdays.
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Lee Rust: "When I went to journalism school in the early 1970s it was all about who-what-when-where-why, and how to be a responsible gatekeeper for the inner sanctum of public news and information. The operating principal was that a well-informed citizenry could make rational decisions if they were presented with a professionally moderated and curated data set.
"Underlying everything was the explicit assumption of a civic responsibility that was rigorously held separate from the base demands of commercial advertising profitability and subscriber revenue.
"If in fact that journalistic ideal was ever actually achieved in the romantically idealistic past, there is absolutely no doubt that it has been thoroughly discarded in this cruelly cynical Internet era.
"These days, all ad-based media function as some form of entertainment or another and the only rule is the rigid numbers game of eyeballs and ears. You get 'em and you're golden, you lose 'em and you're toast. It's that simple. For subscription-supported media the world is somewhat less harsh, but the steadily rising number of competitors continually dilutes the potential base of support for any one outlet.
"Holdout exceptions might be news outlets like The Washington Post or others that are owned and operated by exceedingly wealthy and/or obsessively dedicated individuals or organizations...but these are by definition a dwindling minority. [See also John Camp's comment on this point, in the Comments section. —Ed.]
"Meanwhile the cost of production is ever increasing, especially if physical materials like paper have to be processed and distributed. We will say goodbye to the physical editions of just about everything, especially for specialized audiences like Shutterbug, and hard-copy periodicals will be strictly luxury items.
"Now, the virtual gatekeepers are Facebook, YouTube, Google and all their derivatives and imitators. The robot algorithm that generates the Google News page is driven strictly by what people actually choose, rather than by what they might need.
"Barring the failure of the technological infrastructure due to calamity or catabolic collapse, we are living in a new normal and will each have to make a special place for ourselves within it. That's why some of us are here in front of our personal devices reading theonlinephotographer.com instead of shutterbug.com."
JohnMFlores: "About that cool Janus motorcycle...I considered riding one cross country in 2016 because the style evoked an earlier era. But as you know, I ended up following George A. Wyman's trip with the electric Zero instead. On Memorial Day, Richard Worsham, a co-founder of Janus Motorcycles, will begin his own trip across the country from San Francisco to New York City astride one of his own. Read more here."
I have five Apple devices. Of those, by far the worst is the one I have to use most of the day every single day, the 2012 Mac Mini that I use as my work computer. It overheats and crashes frequently and it's not all that powerful when I'm doing things in Photoshop. Why Apple can't make me a competent basic computer in a smallish (but not overly small) box, that doesn't @!#%#$ overheat, is one of those problems that's annoying chiefly because it shouldn't be a problem at all.
The phone (mine's an iPhone 7+) is my favorite "thing" ever, large or small, tech or mechanical or art-object—favorite all-time. Well, actually I liked the 6+ a little better because the button was real, but "same difference" as we said when I was a kid.
I'm writing my book on a 21" iMac that I like a lot (it's not connected to the Cloud and has almost nothing on it), and then I have an older MacBook Air laptop that I don't use except when I'm traveling. Which means, I hardly ever use it.
The device that I need the least is the one I'm most attached to: my iPad.
When I first got it, I couldn't figure out what to do with it. Now it's like Linus's blanket: I take it to bed with me every night, and it's what's in front of me when I eat alone. I use it mainly to watch videos, movies, and snooker (snooker's my no. 1 spectator sport), and I read books on it. It migrates around the house.
It's fantastic to look at pictures on. It's just the right size to hold in your hands, and the Retina screen shows off digital images nearly ideally. I like looking at pictures on it.
You've probably already gotten your Mom a present. Just thought I'd add a suggestion.
Alternately, try flowers!
Mike
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Ernie Van Veen: "The boys and I bought an iPad mini for my wife got Mother's Day five years ago. She's never been a fangirl of tech stuff, but she was, as we say in Australia, 'chuffed' when she got it. She uses it every day for everything from Facebook, to news, blogs, email, and reading, and she takes it in her handbag everywhere we go because it's her first choice for photography. Lately she's been complaining about the limited storage space...I think it may be time for a new one."
Eolake: "I couldn’t agree more about the iPad. Love of my life since the first one. Tip: make a search on Amazon for Tablet Grip. There are many different kinds, and when you hold a tablet in your hand, it makes a big difference. (There are some for phones too.)"
james wilson: "I keep my mini cool with Macs Fan Control. It is a great little app that increases the fan speed in response to processor. I batch process hundreds of images at a time and the fan goes faster and faster to maintain a normal temp. I love my little Mini, no problems."
Mike replies: Thanks. This seems to be working well. It's not clear what the best settings are or what the target temperatures should be, but I was able to get the case cooled down quite a bit and the CPU temps down from 210°F to about 180°F. Hopefully that will help with the crashes, but of course it could be something entirely different causing those.
My friends and I have been following this story for several weeks. The news is that renowned American photographer Nicholas Nixon has been removed from his teaching position at MassArt for inappropriate and unacceptable conduct. All parties are tight-lipped as the lawyers presumably circle in the skies above.
Although not exactly the Terry Richardson of art photography, The Boston Globe reported yesterday that Nick Nixon had long been accustomed to "going too far" as the headline of yesterday's article suggests. "It felt like the conversation always led back to sex," one student said. After Nixon asked students to analyze pictures of his own penis, Robin Myers, a 2012 graduate of MassArt, told the Globe, "Artists are always pushing boundaries between provocative and inappropriate, and then that line gets crossed and it becomes very clear. The penis photo incident was where that line became very clear for me."
I met Nick Nixon only once, when I was a student and he was at the beginning of his fame; he's ten years or so older than I am. He came to the Corcoran to give a talk. I was impressed with the matchless virtuosity of his then-new style of close, candid photography using an 8x10 view camera and a wide-angle lens, and the idea that was impressed on me most strongly at the time was that he had initially determined to change his technical style every year...until, that is, he alighted on the right one, which he has stayed with ever since. I even owned a few of his prints for a while, thanks to cameramaker Keith Canham, although I was too poor to be able to keep them. (My Sally Mann prints I could keep, because she wrote letters on the back of them and folded them up to put them in the envelope!)
In fairness to Nick, no students brought complaints against him. The investigation was pursued by the newspaper. At the same time, it seems undeniable that his behavior was inexcusable. As the Globe article reports, "...some of Nixon’s alleged behavior astounded Lorie Novak, a professor of photography & imaging [sic] at New York University. 'To ask undergraduate students in your class to pose nude for you is unacceptable, and from my point of view one of the very definitions of sexual harassment,' Novak said. 'The student is powerless.'"
Agreed, full stop. Still, a sad story and a precipitous fall from grace for someone who had been one of the leading lights of American art photography over most of my adult lifetime.
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Kenneth Tanaka: "Sad? Sure. I met Nixon briefly about ten years ago at a small talk/dinner. He seemed rather quiet, modest but secure. Seemed like a rather nerdy academic-type. I never connected well with much of his work with the exception of his Brown Sisters project (which I keep running into) and some of his Boston cityscapes. (His horror stories of making those from windy rooftops with a huge view camera were more memorable than the images.) Honestly, if the BG report is true, and it certainly seems to be well-checked, what the hell was Nixon thinking? I have never taught an academic class but his excuse about helping to get students out of their boundaries is just plain bull. I'm confident I could conjure at least a dozen better strategies for accomplishing that goal with students. I guess we just never really know what's in someone's mind or, worse, what some people will do when they have power over others.
"Just this morning I was reading the most recent recap of architect Richard Meier's antics which also went on for decades. A lifetime of some remarkable work largely becomes anonymous because this guy, like Nixon, couldn't control his urges. Frankly I have no sympathy for these men and their creepy peers; they can live in hell for the rest of their lives. I had to keep it in check when I was in control of many people in a bigger business. Hopefully we're turning a corner on people not tolerating various sexual and emotional abuses in their work places, although human nature never changes."
John Camp: "I have a hard time getting too upset about this level of 'transgression.' You gotta grow up sometime, might as well be in college. You don't like what the professor suggests, tell him to stick it. In the current climate, he'll get the idea, especially since tenure, or the prospect of tenure, is the Holy Grail in 21st Century academia.
"I'm not sure, exactly, why colleges hire serious artists to teach. There seems to be to be an essential conflict there—transgression has been a byword for artistic endeavor at least since the Renaissance, and sex was usually the major vehicle for that transgression. In a major reversal from the later 20th century, colleges now seem to be taking a much more protective attitude toward students and their delicate psyches. If you wish to protect them, why would you hire somebody whose stock-in-trade is transgression? I mean, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sally Mann, Jock Sturges, Helmut Newton, Jan Saudek, Ruth Bernhard, Man Ray, Edward Weston...you wouldn't want any of those perverts influencing your snowflake."
Fra Angelico, Resurrection of Christ and Women at the Tomb, 1440–2, at the Museum of San Marco
I tried to write a combination April Fools / Easter post, but, fortunately, my head exploded. If it hadn't, I would have offended all sorts of people, only vaguely even knowing what I was doing.
Speaking of Sony, the 55mm Zeiss lens arrived here, but the A7III, not yet.
Did you know you can hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir online at BYU-TV.com? What a treat. I heard President Nelson of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recite "Abide With Me, 'Tis Eventide":
Abide with me; ’tis eventide. The day is past and gone; The shadows of the evening fall; The night is coming on. Within my heart a welcome guest, Within my home abide.
O Savior, stay this night with me; Behold, ’tis eventide. O Savior, stay this night with me; Behold, ’tis eventide.
Abide with me; ’tis eventide. Thy walk today with me Has made my heart within me burn, As I communed with thee. Thy earnest words have filled my soul And kept me near thy side.
O Savior, stay this night with me; Behold, ’tis eventide. O Savior, stay this night with me; Behold, ’tis eventide.
Abide with me; ’tis eventide, And lone will be the night If I cannot commune with thee Nor find in thee my light. The darkness of the world, I fear, Would in my home abide.
O Savior, stay this night with me; Behold, ’tis eventide. O Savior, stay this night with me; Behold, ’tis eventide.
It's a hymn that was written during the American Civil War, with music by Harrison Millard and lyrics by M. Lowrie Hofford. Certainly given gravitas by the grievous suffering and loss of that war, which claimed more American lives than all of America's other wars combined. (When we turn on each other, things can be dire indeed.)
It's a glorious day here. Snowflakes this morning (!), and it's chilly, but sunny and Spring-like.
Personally, many of my relatives are at the home of Stan and Teresa Noyszewski in Chicago today, and I dearly wish I was with them.
Happy Easter to all!
Mike (Thanks to David B. Elesh)
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The lower branches of the fallen oak. Some of the broken sections are twelve inches in diameter.
I'm still experiencing significant aftereffects of the storm—power was off for 30 hours and it's been restored, but unfortunately several circuits in my house are dead, including my entire office (and that whole end of the downstairs). I assume this has something to do with the handoff between the backup generator and the power from NYSEG (pronounced "nice egg," our local power utility), but I haven't yet been able to get through to anybody who can help.
So I'm breaking my rules and writing from the book computer, upstairs. Hopefully just for today!
They had a lot of snow in Britain and Ireland too, I hear.
Out and about Yesterday and the day before were days to be prized here—dramatically gorgeous—and I did what was, for me, a lot of shooting. I went out several times.
Two things I noticed to mention. For one, I actually filled up a whole card. "Ran out of film."
Many of you probably do this regularly, and have long ago worked out protocols for making sure you have extra cards in reserve and handy. But I habitually shoot sparingly, normally of static subjects, so I ordinarily spend a lot more time thinking and looking than I do actually shooting, and it's been so long since I've filled up a whole card that I can't even remember the last time. So on my third jaunt out of the house...whoops. No more card space. It's also been a long time since I left the house with anything more than one clean card in the camera—I just so seldom need it.
I think this was because, much to my surprise, I found myself shooting action. I don't usually do much of that. I'm guessing those of you who shoot action are used to shooting a lot of exposures. Or at least a lot more than I usually do.
Something and something else And that brings me to my second observation, which is that whenever I go out meaning to shoot something, I almost always end up shooting something else. I first learned this when I spent a year shooting with a view camera long ago (I'm not naturally a large format guy, as I wrote about years ago). Frustrated with my tendency to shoot carefully pictorial compositions, once I just swung the camera around and took a picture of what was behind me. Then I started doing that whenever I set up the camera, and found that the "behind my back" picture was better about one out of five times.
This teaches an important lesson, at least for me, which is that whenever you go out to shoot, you can find something. It just might not be what you think it's going to be. It certainly wasn't for me yesterday. (More about that later.)
That thought was expressed to me by the great Ralph Gibson when I interviewed him many years ago. Paraphrasing, he told me something like this: I've been doing this for so long, and I'm good enough at it, that whenever I head out with the camera I know I'll come back with something.
Or actually, it teaches two important lessons: the second is that while you're shooting one thing, remember to stay alert and alive to every other possibility, everything else around you. Even when you know where the pictures are you never know where the pictures are.
Documenting is different Anyway: fun day, out an about with the X-T2. Shooting is fun and it cures all the other ills associated with the hobby of photography.
I did some more documenting of my downed tree, too, which is an ~80-foot oak (I paced it off), about three or four feet in diameter at the base. It came up by the roots because the ground is so soft now. It was a violent event: the fall snapped many living branches, some of them eight or ten inches in diameter, raggedly in half; the corpse of the tree in the yard is a jumble of broken wood and tells a vivid tale of the forces of the fall.
I'll have some more pictures of that, too, when I get back up to speed. Documenting the felled tree, knowing it won't be there long, reminded me of another of my beliefs, which is that shooting in a documentary mode—just for information, to show the reality of a scene to someone else in a photograph—is to us photographers like scales and finger exercises are to a pianist. It keeps you in practice and cleans up your mind, clearing away all your arty and pictorial and compositional quirks and pretensions. We should all do that every now and then just to keep us healthy, even if only as an exercise. (As I think I once said, photography isn't about photography, it's about the world.)
I don't have my usual footer macro up here to add to the bottom of this post, so I'll just sign off and leave it at that. More anon. March has been quite the month so far.
Mike
[UPDATE: Got the power to the office restored about 1:30 thanks to troubleshooting help from the generator people. All is well. —MJ]
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Bryce Lee: "Running out of space on an SD card is interesting. Normally those of us who were raised in the era of 20- (later 24-) and 36-exposure rolls of film learned early on to be small 'c' conservative when deciding upon exactly what we want to photograph. I still function in film mode when out doing my photography, regardless of the capacity of the inserted SD card. An old habit difficult to break."
Stan B.: "'I don't care so much anymore about "good photography." I am gathering evidence for history.' —Gilles Peress."
Joseph Reid: "One of the best yard-care/exercise experiences I had while owning a house in Upstate NY was having a sick tree felled professionally and the trunk cut into two or three long sections. Then I took over and made firewood out of them using wedges, sledgehammer and axe. I could only do a bit at a time and it took several weekends. But it was great, exhausting stress relief. Splitting those trunk sections was a primal experience."
Joe: "Re 'Even when you know where the pictures are you never know where the pictures are.' Oh my, yes. So true. And that principle brought me to a habit that I've developed: When I'm shooting a subject, of course I always reach a point where I'm finished. I've covered all the angles, I know I've got the good shot in the camera, I've done what I came for. I'm tired, it's in the can, and I'm eager to go home and dump the images onto the computer. But for the past few years I've made it a habit to stop and take a one-minute break to walk through the location, looking up and down and behind and inside, thinking: what else is here? What did I miss? Isn't there one more shot I can take home? I swear, 50% of the time I'll frame a shot that hadn't occurred to me before, and 50% of those times my favorite shot will come from that last idea."
Mike replies: That comment says the same thing my post did but much better. Lovely.
Ann: "About 20 years ago, we lost a 30-foot oak. No storm, no soft ground. I was just sitting at home reading a magazine one night, and it fell over with a huge crash. Rotten at the base of the trunk. The interesting part was that we had just the week before finished building a six-foot-tall cedar fence. The tree fell on a section of that beautiful, sturdy, brand new fence. The posts on either side of where the tree fell were intact and standing up straight. The section that the tree hit, however...shattered. Not a single piece of wood left in between those fence posts that was longer than six inches. That falling tree was a powerful force."
Lillian Gish in a still from the D.W. Griffith short film The Mothering Heart, 1913. "She is tender hearted, demonstrated by her appreciation of the flowers and the rescuing of a puppy." (Wikipedia)
Happy Valentine's Day to everyone!
[Forgetful males, this is your reminder: it's today. Don't go home empty-handed. Especially, don't go home not knowing what day it is. That way lies trubba. Ye have been alerted!]
An inventive (and really quite odd) V-Day promotion fished from my inbox.
Hope you have a serene and loving day, with nary a harsh word spoken or thought betwixt sweeties of any description.
Domestic harmony and peace to you, brothers and sisters—
Mike
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...And Daylight Saving (not "savings") Time begins only one more month from now, on March 11th! Yay, I say.
Early risers might not like that, but only a quarter of us, roughly, are "larks" who are early to bed and early to rise. For those of us who sleep a little later, additional daylight later in the day is a plus without an offsetting disadvantage.
Sunset is already an hour later than it was at its earliest on and around December 8th of last year. The dark days of Winter are lifting in the Northern hemisphere. Spring, although far from here, is coming.
I like this time of year. It feels...hopeful, somehow.
Mike
P.S. Wikipedia relates the preposterous fact that DST was first proposed by a single fellow, an entomologist from New Zealand who wanted more daylight hours in the evenings to collect insects. Its first major proponent in England wanted more light in the evening to play golf. I'm not making that up. The reason for its adoption in the U.S. is more pedestrian and practical...it saves energy (or at least it did then), and, although it certainly existed earlier, it got firmly established here in the 1970s following the energy crisis of that decade.
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
David B: "And then there is Arizona which stays on Mountain Standard Time (MST) year round—except for the Navajo Nation which uses MST and MDT. The downside of year-round MST in Arizona is that sunrise occurs around 5:15 a.m. in the summer. The blue and golden hour come much too early in the morning! Evenings are okay...."
Bill Tyler: "Speed's comment about the complexities of time for computers is well taken. Here's a link to just a little of the tech info. As one example of the evils of DST, consider the poor innocent who tries to compute the duration of some task. He/she reads the clock at the beginning and end of the task, and subtracts the two times, right? Well, what if DST transitioned in the middle. The task might have taken an hour less than the computation, or the computed value might even be negative! There are numerous examples in the computer literature of serious errors that came about because of flawed assumptions about time.
"Not DST related, but time related, is the rare occurrence that happened in the year 2000. Years divisible by four are leap years, except if they fall on a century year such as 1900, except if they fall on a century year divisible by 400 such as 2000. So we had a leap year not for the usual reason, but for a reason two steps removed from the usual one. And then there are leap seconds...."
Phil: "In 1954 I was in the Army in Indianapolis. The Met was performing at the University of Indiana in Bloomington, so a friend and I decided to drive down for the 8 p.m. performance. When we got there, we found we were two hours early, because Bloomington was CDT...one hour for different zone and one hour because we were on DST and Bloomington was on standard time. It was a four-hour opera, so we didn't start home until about 2 a.m. our time, with a two hour drive ahead of us."
Patrick Dodds: "Can. Worms. Opened."
Clayton: "Someone said that DST helped them discover a way to avoid cold feet while sleeping. They cut a bit off the top of the blanket and sewed it onto the bottom."
That was truly the most entertaining Super Bowl in a very long time, maybe ever.
Not the best-played game; how do two teams get that far without either one of them having defenses? It defies conventional wisdom, as well as logic. Still, it made for great entertainment.
The underdog won, the play of the evening was a super-slick trick that came off neat as you please, and the champs went down setting records as they went. Can't beat that.
Now, the NFC East doesn't have Philly to kick around any more, Dick Vermeil has finally been avenged (he took the Eagles to their first Superbowl and lost, for those who don't remember or never knew), and the city of Philadelphia actually has sports heroes who aren't fictional. Previously, the city's greatest sports triumph was a movie character named "Rocky," lovingly commemorated in the city's most famous sports-related public statue. (In the movie, Rocky trains on the steps of the Museum and has a triumphal moment alone at the top when he realizes that yes, he can do it.)
Philly fans went kinda crazy afterward—as usually happens in cities where they're not sure they'll ever get to celebrate again. If Boston had won, there would have been a hundred people dressed in cozy mufflers in Harvard Square sipping hot cocoa and high-fiving each other.
I hope you Philly photographers got out and exercised your cameras' awesome high-ISO capabilities. When the Redskins won—back in the quaint bygone era of telephones tethered to the wall, film cameras, and liberal democracy—I will admit that I failed miserably to get one good picture of the night-of celebrations.
I have to say that for someone who doesn't own a television (I watched the game online), an abrupt three-hour-plus immersion into television culture was as much a shock to the system as a "polar bear" jump into the waters of a freezing lake. The strange fantastical flurry of bombast, jingoism and marketing manipulation was relentless and exhausting. As far as the commercials were concerned, Dodge got added to my list of "never patronize no matter what" companies for their misappropriation of Dr. King. But not because it was breathtakingly cynical—that's common enough—only because it was breathtakingly clueless. In a sea of tastelessness, it's truly tough to rise above the waves, but Dodge sure did it. Anyway, it's not significant—Dodge was already on my Never Patronize No Matter What list, on account of the fact that I once owned a Dodge.
By this time next year, we will all be asking each other, "who won last year, again?" But it was great fun. The Great Annual American Hooligan Holiday came off in high style.
Mike
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Henry Heerschap: "My first new car was a '78 Dodge Omni, perhaps one of the ten or so worst cars ever made in the US. It had a similar effect on my future buying habits. One of my kids got given a PT Cruiser by my dad and I had similar thoughts, though I really liked the interior layout of that car. Anyway, we've been Mopar-free ever since. Anyway, when I saw the MLK Ram ad, I sat there with my jaw dropping several inches. I suspect some heads are rolling this morning."
Mike replies: One can hope.
My Dodge experience was a Neon Sport, which was a fun and fast car when it was new. However, after six months it was two years old, and by the time three years had gone by it was 15 years old. There are good reasons why you almost never see a Neon (1995–2005) on the road today—they aged in dog years.
Mike replies: That's hilarious. Like Jaywalking for bookish types. Thanks for the link. (By the way, I knew all five answers.)
psu (partial comment): "I think the lesson of the last three Patriots Superbowls is how thin the margins are between a win and a loss and how densely those margins are populated with luck."
Bob Cook: "It's not often that I agree with you about things social, but your comments on the Dodge commercial are pointedly accurate."
Mike replies: It's good to have someone who doesn't agree with me agree with me.
Stephen F Faust: "Re 'I hope you Philly photographers got out and exercised your cameras' awesome high-ISO capabilities': Yep, and the celebrations were a street photographer's paradise!"
Dave Jenkins: "I didn't watch the game, (although I was pulling for the Patriots) so didn't see the commercial. Sounds as if it was in pretty poor taste. I will, however, speak up on behalf of Dodge automobiles. I'm sorry yours did not serve you well, but we have had terrific service from ours. In 2003, we bought a Grand Caravan which my wife drove until 2008. At that time, we bought a 2007 Grand Caravan for her to drive and I inherited the older one. Last year I sold it with 245,000 miles on the odometer and still running great, because we had bought a Chrysler Town & Country for my wife. So I'm now driving the 2007, which currently registers 207,000 miles and which I plan to drive for several more years. These Dodges have been wonderful cars for us, and we don't baby them."
John Camp: "The thing about the Dodge advertisement was that you started out being only moderately embarrassed, but your embarrassment deepened the longer it went on.... But I looked at it again this morning and found nothing objectionable about the images, and if you close your eyes and only listen to the words, no problem there, either. I think it was the idea of using the speech to make a buck that did the damage."
Mike replies: Perhaps "The issue is not so much who owns King's intellectual property but the uses to which it is put. The estate sometimes seems more inclined to go for the commercial main chance than to get King's words and thoughts disseminated in an appropriate context."
The words are by a writer named Michael Hiltzik, in an article on the LA Times website called "That Dodge trucks Super Bowl ad shows it's time to loosen the King family's grip on MLK's legacy," a web page so occluded and confused with ads—including one for a competing brand of pickup truck—that I had trouble reading the article.
The article notes that the Ram truck ad "...was seen as a landmark in crassness. That was true not least because in the speech excerpted for the ad, a 1968 sermon entitled "The Drum Major Instinct," King spends some considerable time excoriating the advertiser-driven quest for material acquisitions, including cars."
(From the sermon, via kingcenter.org)
Mark Roberts: "Someone's re-edited that Dodge commercial using a different portion of that same MLK speech. The effect is profound."
Steve Jacob: "An old friend of mine has worked as a marketing and branding consultant for several major companies over the years. She defines the habit of swamping consumers with ads as 'dead-horse marketing.' For many brands, dead-horse marketing is counter-productive. Consumers frequently boycott brands that interrupt movies, games, YouTube, or other passive pastimes. Many brands haven't got the message yet. When they do, it will be the end of commercial TV. Unfortunately, it also means more sport will only be available live on pay-per-view or subscription."
anthony reczek: "I watched (as much for the commercials as anything and for the first time this season), and made it through the first half. I had a different response to the Dodge Ram ad—it was wonderful to hear Dr. King's voice and words, like a breath of fresh air in the ad wasteland. The ad itself would have been much more effective if the creators weren't so ham-handed in trying to connect it to their product; a five-second photo and voiceover 'brought to you by...' at the very end would have sufficed. Full disclosure: probably will never buy a Dodge Ram truck (also don't eat Doritos, or drink Pepsi or Bud Light etc., etc.)."
Mike replies: You know, you're absolutely right. A simple "brought to you by" approach would have ennobled the company and earned gratefulness from hearers. It would also have opened King's spoken words up to multiple interpretations for different groups of people—specifically relating to the kneeling protests by black players earlier in the season. People would probably be praising Dodge on the morning after if its agency had taken that approach.
I wish Martin Luther King Jr. mattered more right now. I'm not saying he's been marginalized, but we seem to see him now from a great distance, as if from far off in the gauzy clouds, or as if he's entered the realm of legend, like the murdered dragon-slayer Siegfried in the Song of the Nibelungs.
I'm going to take a little bit of a risk here. Many people out on the wild 'n' wooly tubes of the Internets don't know it, but it's illegal to quote more than a few paragraphs of someone else's work. So those people you see reposting whole articles on forums "for the convenience of others," or whatever, are actually breaking the law. This maybe skirts the edge of what's permissible. But I'd like to share with you a few teaser paragraphs written by one of my favorite writers, Louis Menand [below, left], in an article titled "Been There: The Presidential Election of 1968":
In close elections, such as those of 1960, 1968, and 1976, the vote is essentially the equivalent of flipping a coin. If the voting had happened a week earlier or a week later or on a rainy day, the outcome might have been reversed. But we interpret the result as if it reflected the national intention, a collective decision by the people to rally behind R., and repudiate D. Even when the winner receives fewer votes than the loser, as in 2000 and 2016, we talk about the national mood and direction almost entirely in terms of the winning candidate, and as though the person more voters preferred had vanished, his or her position barely worth reporting on.
Millions more Americans voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and in 2012 and for Hillary Clinton in 2016 than voted for Donald Trump, but the Trump voter is now the protagonist of the national narrative. People talk about how Americans want to roll back globalization—even though most Americans who voted appear to want no such thing. The United States is one of the few democracies that does not have a coalition government, and a winner-take-all electoral system breeds a winner-take-all punditry.
Later in the same article he continues:
People who write and argue about politics are ideologues. They hold a coherent set of positions that they identify as liberal or conservative (or some variation, like libertarian or leftist). But, to millions of voters, those terms mean almost nothing. These voters do not think in ideological terms, and their positions on the issues are often inconsistent and lacking in coherence. Given the option, they will sometimes identify as moderates or centrists, but that tells us very little about how they will vote.
The fact that voters are often responding to nonideological cues helps to explain the volatility of the electorate.
1968, as is often repeated, was a pivotal year in American history; whole books have been written about it, including ones by Mark Kurlansky and Charles Kaiser. It was the year of the My Lai massacre, the year the Beatles' White Album came out, the year Bobby Kennedy was killed, the year American cities burned in widespread rioting, the year the movie Planet of the Apes was released, the year Yale University went coed, the year Richard Nixon became President.
Menand's article argues that "Politically, the most important event in the United States in 1968 was...the assassination, on April 4th, of Martin Luther King."
Puts MLK back into context, on MLK Day. Good article. Reading it is a good way to remind ourselves of the remaining relevance of Martin Luther King.
Original contents copyright 2018 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:
B.J.: "On M.L. King day, I do not think one can do better than read M.L. King himself. I recommend 'Letter from Birmingham Jail.' It is easily found on the web with a Google search."
Ray Hunter: "A Louis Menand reference on The Online Photographer! It doesn't get any better than this! As a long-time fan of Menand's writing (and The Online Photographer), I find his considered opinions concerning the American culture thoughtful, even wise, sometimes very witty, and always beautifully-written. I also would recommend his American Studies and The Metaphysical Club to individuals who enjoy good writing that concerns American history. Thanks!!"
Chuck Albertson: "I can see Menand's point about MLK's murder being the most significant political event of 1968, but my clear recollection of that year is of an endless series of equally Bad Things that hit like bowling balls rolling off the roof. Except for Apollo 8 and the Stones' release of 'Beggars Banquet,' but they were both at the end of the year.
"Given his theme, I was a little surprised he left off the late Joe McGinniss's The Selling of the President 1968, which was a great behind-the-scenes look at Nixon's television campaign (overseen by Roger Ailes!), where the rubber of his law 'n' order pitch, among others, met the road. The book's publication was met with about the same reaction that Fire and Fury has been today."
Mani Sitaraman: "Without getting too far away from the topic of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it is worth noting that 1968 was a pivotal year, not just in American political and cultural history, but in many countries around the world. General strikes and student activism in France, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the year the Cultural revolution in China really picked up steam, the emergence of Maoist rebels in India; the whole world seemed to be going up in flames.
"The French have a term for the socially activist young people of that time: Soixtant Huitard, literally, 'Sixty-Eighter.'
