The Online Photographer: Photographers, current

<|-- removed generator --> The Online Photographer: Photographers, current

+ Sponsors

Resources

Photographers, current

Tuesday, 28 May 2013

The Biggest Photographer in America

He lives in the biggest house, he smokes the biggest stogie, he has the biggest feet. I met Jay once—Arthur Kramer introduced us. I'm sure I was a lot less memorable to Jay than Jay is to me. There are all sorts of this-er or that-est photographers, but Jay, the leading commercial pro of his generation and not even really a pro at heart, is just the biggest. He has a basketball court in his studio. In Manhattan. That's big.

This video has been out for a while, but Svein-Frode suggested it in the Comments to yesterday's post and today seems like a good day for it.

If the day comes when just a few humans are going to be allowed to live forever, I'm casting a vote for Jay.

Mike
(Thanks to Svein-Frode)

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.

TOP's links!

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

Amie Adams aka @mammaloves: "Thank you. I've needed inspiration lately. I stopped carrying my camera and I hate that. I need to find the joy again."

Jim Bullard: "He has an incredible eye. I know that is cliché but I don't know how else to say it. He sees photographs where no one else would. I'm not usually inclined to have heroes but he's an exception. He's just awesome."

Dennis: "Jay is my photographic idol—he's everything I'd love to be in a photographer. When it seems that every serious photographer does 'projects' or 'series' it's refreshing to see such a great photographer just going out with his eyes open and looking for things that will make great photographs. I don't buy other photographers works in print form (I buy books) but I'd love to own the shot that shows up first when you click on 'Recent Work' on his website—the cityscape with the Christmas lights on top of one roof. I've seriously toyed with the idea of spending $5k to attend his week-long workshop, but I know that as much as I'd enjoy it, I wouldn't have time to exploit the lessons learned."

Kenneth Tanaka: (partial comment): "Watching this profile today led me to the revelation that Jay has probably been one of the most powerful influences on my own photographic approach for many years. It never occurred to me that watching another short film of him many years ago really tattooed me with his brand of 'Look, it's all around you, dummy!' philosophy for finding images. But it really was not until today that I realized his influence on me. Perhaps I'll have the chance to meet him one day."

john crowley: "I think it's time for the 'Big Book of Jay.'"

Mike replies: Amen.

Posted on Tuesday, 28 May 2013 at 12:56 PM in Photographers, current | Permalink | Comments (33)

Thursday, 23 May 2013

Meet Photographer Andrew Borowiec

I've just spent a bracing hour in the company of Andrew Borowiec, thanks to Stan Banos's Reciprocity Failure blog. Starting with this short introductory video:

...and moving on to this longer but even more rewarding slideshow. (There's been such relentless rosy-hued propaganda through TV advertising about how lovely and perfect the Gulf Coast is that I've been in need of a corrective.)

We're not quite there with the medium of the narrated online slideshow yet, but I think it's a particularly amenable way to look at photographs—a modern multimedia version of a book that pairs pictures with accompanying text, my favorite form.

Hope you can take the time. Andrew has four books under his belt, two of which are still in print: Along the Ohio (Creating the North American Landscape), Cleveland: The Flats, the Mill, and the Hills, Historic Architecture in Canton, 1805–1940, and Industrial Perspective: Photographs of the Gulf Coast. His website is here and his gallery is here.

Mike
(Thanks to Stan Banos)

TOP's links!

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

Doug Howk: "Great video. Interesting that he too finds the panorama image best format for his Gulf Coast series (I use a 7x17 for much of my Florida work). I have his Cleveland book which is an excellent survey of Cleveland's industrial area. As a teenager I vividly remember accompanying my father through that area as he went from one side of town to the other while conducting his TV repair business at people's homes (a profession in the past). There was even a whale processing plant in the flats that stunk to the high heavens but was a crucial part of the perfume industry."

Dave: "I lived in the Akron area when I was first getting into photography. At the time I was only into taking pictures of waterfalls and sunsets. Northern Ohio seemed like a photographic wasteland to me. Now that I'm into photos of old buildings, I kick myself for the missed opportunity. Because I was looking for ruins to take photos of, I didn't really notice that part of Ohio. The place seamed downright prosperous to me. Yes, there were abandoned factories and run down neighborhoods, but there were also many new subdivisions and budding high tech industries.

"Borowiec's photos look great; they are right up my alley—ruins porn disguised as Joel Sternfeld or Stephen Shore (I mean that as a compliment). However, if he wants to be a proper documentarian, I think he needs to point the camera at some of the progress that's springing up in the rust belt."

Posted on Thursday, 23 May 2013 at 11:29 AM in Photographers, current | Permalink | Comments (17)

Wednesday, 01 May 2013

Sebastião Salgado's TED Talk

I'm actually too busy to watch all of this right now. Please tell me if it's good or not good! (I will give thanks for the subtitles...listening as I worked didn't go so well. But then I have trouble making out accents [as well as handwriting].)

Just posted today.

Sebastião's new book can be pre-ordered. If my email is any indication, this book is being very eagerly awaited.

Mike

Rod Purcell adds: "Hi Mike—Salgado's Genesis book is already released in the U.K. My copy came last week. However good you think it will be, it's better. You have to be impressed by the commitment the guy makes to his projects and the range of his output. It is also a demonstration on the power of B&W photographs. The Genesis exhibition is currently on display in London (until 8 September).

TOP's links!

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

Jeff: "Inspirational and important, on many levels."

Jack: "Yes, it's good and worth your time, especially the last minute when he shows a photo of his parents' farm, before and after. The before is the farm as the result of years of erosion, the after is the same exact photo location after the 2.5 million trees he had planted had grown up. A wonderful and unique example of renewal that can be achieved."

Zach: "Really really enjoyed the Genesis exhibition at NHM in London. Locals should definitely go. Huge prints and relatively uncrowded even on weekends (compared to, say, the wildlife photographer of the year show which is quite unpleasant at peak)."

Geoff Wittig: "I can hardly wait for this book. Salgado's Africa is a wonderful book, but to my surprise the two images that stopped me in my tracks were landscapes. So a book that features more of them...."

matt scooler: "Saw the book at AIPAD a few weeks ago—the book is very nice (and quite heavy—Amazon shipping weight is 8.7 pounds), however it truly pales in comparison to the gigantic two-volume limited edition set which I would recommend to any of your wealthy readers interested in his photography."

Mike replies: Shhh, don't tell Geoff.

V.I. Voltz: "I pre-ordered Genesis and received it a couple of weeks ago. The printing is beyond reproach, but too many of the photos traverse the gutter, several look even more over-processed/manipulated than before; enough that it makes looking through the technique hard, and the portrait format doesn't work especially well for my viewing position. I am glad I have it, but it isn't Workers or Migrations."

stefano: "I saw the book last week here in los angeles at the Paris Photo exhibit. it is beyond any expectation; as far as I am concerned, this is the best photography work ever published—you must see it to believe it. the 'small' and inexpensive version is good too, but once you see the full size behemoth(s), you are sold!"

Posted on Wednesday, 01 May 2013 at 04:46 PM in Photographers, current | Permalink | Comments (19)

Tuesday, 30 April 2013

'Wonderland'

I've posted two links to the renewed edition of Jason Eskenazi's fine book Wonderland in the past couple of days. I've just heard from Jason, who says, "Wonderland stocks are dwindling fast. Last 100 copies. Prices will change very very soon.

"Just giving your readers a heads up. Thanks!"

A very small book in covers of thick, rough cardboard, the pictures are divided by the gutter and fill each spread, but the binding allows the pictures to open fairly flat. Although unconventional, it seems to work well, and if you give the pictures sufficient attentiveness the book is very moving. Not for nothing has it received widespread attention and praise.

Here's the link one more time. You can read a little more about Jason here.

Mike

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

Stan B.: "The book reads like an encapsulated volume of life fully lived, with all the grandiose drama and poignant smaller moments so characteristic of Russian poetry. Life and love, youth and longing, unsparing reality and the rituals we humans create, celebrate, and endure. All within the confines of two grey slabs of cardboard. It's the perfect portable photo bible you'll want to have with you wherever you go, just to remind yourself what good photography really looks like. Meet your maker out in the cold cruel world with this on ya, and they may not know if you can take a picture worth a lick, but they will know you got taste!"

Posted on Tuesday, 30 April 2013 at 09:49 AM in Photographers, current | Permalink | Comments (5)

Monday, 29 April 2013

Great Photographers of the Digital/Internet Era

Some example pictures by a few of the photographers nominated by TOP readers as standouts of the current digital/internet era, in response to the "Dare I Ask?" post. In no particular order. The reader who mentioned them in parentheses (unless there were many, or none).

Hedi Slimane [male, French], from Fashion Diary (Eddi)

Angela Bacon-Kidwell [female, from the U.S.] ("...Even though she's guilty of placing angel wings on a human, which was a ubiquitous trangression in the early days of digital and one that I thought I could never forgive." —latent_image [hey, even Koudelka's done that...sort of. —MJ])

UPDATE: Angela Bacon-Kidwell responds: "Just for the record the images of mine that you refer to having 'angel wings' are not digitally altered. They were actually there. I have a new image with 'paper angel wings.' I wonder if it might resonate with you. :-) Thanks for the shout out and intro to your site."

Loretta Lux [female, German]

Christian Coigny [male, Swiss] (Eric Kellerman)

Tommy (Toshihiro) Oshima [male, Japanese] (Bob Blakely). This is Solo Sniper: Daido Moriyama in the streets of Soho, London.

Jason Eskenazi [male, from the U.S.] (Rory Challands). Note that Wonderland is back in print, and can be ordered directly from Jason at his website for only $32. Cool. Much better than paying $73 to $900(!) at Amazon. —MJ.

[To be continued...]

Posted on Monday, 29 April 2013 at 12:32 PM in Photographers, current | Permalink | Comments (7)

Saturday, 27 April 2013

G'day

TOP is off on Saturday, for regular housekeeping...as in, you know, the cleaning of the actual physical house. I hate doing it but I like having it done.

We will do much more about this business of the post-1995 photographers. I'm working on a samplings post. Thanks for all the responses.

It's always fun to research photographers I haven't heard of. And what do you know, look what I came across—a "Random Excellence" photographer from way back in 2008, Hin Chua, has a lot of new pictures in the set called "After the Fall." (I thought it was a new project at first.) It's a type of photography you probably know well, but unusually well done. None of the pictures taken alone does a whole lot for me, but somehow taken altogether the set becomes meaningful. Take a relaxed, extended look.

See you Sunday.

—Mike, Organizing Apprentice and Journeyman Housekeeper Ordinaire

UPDATE from Hin Chua, Monday a.m.:

Dear Mike (and everyone),

Thanks for posting my series again! Hopefully two posts in six years doesn't consist of TOP overexposure! Mike, when I started getting into photography in 2005, your columns on photo.net were a regular reference for me; I've always valued them.

Embarrassingly enough, the current 'After the Fall' work on my website dates to about early 2010, which means I have about three years of work yet to show the general world. As William notes, yes there are hundreds of images involving thousands of miles of travel that quite rightly didn't make the cut. Whatever they say about keeping your website updated as a best reflection of oneself is true, and I've been too guilty of that. I have to admit in public the current sequence looks a little long in the tooth and will be better for the new photographs.

But the site will be updated this year, and the long-term goal is a book. I'm clearly working at a slow, deliberate pace here. And hopefully in a year or two I'll get my act together and kick it up a gear ;-)

Best,
Hin

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

William Barnett-Lewis: "Thank you for the link to the Hin Chua 'After the Fall' series. I've done a fair bit of that style of work, though rarely at his level. There are a number of delightful 'surprise' images there that tickled my personal photographic aesthetics. The best thing about it, though, is that it's a carefully edited and presented series—there were, doubtless, many more images taken than presented. To look at even an extended series such as his is a relief in a world where most people seem to think uploading everything on their SD card is all they need to do. This is, at least for me, why it works even better as a whole than even the individual well done images do. There is as much care in the crafting of the series as in the crafting of the images themselves."

Mike replies: Agreed.

Softie: "'None of the pictures taken alone does a whole lot for me...' I beg to differ. Some of those pics in 'After the Fall' are among the finest compositions I've seen in years: particularly the stack of concrete pillars with the graffiti heart."

Posted on Saturday, 27 April 2013 at 01:00 AM in Blog Notes, Photographers, current | Permalink | Comments (7)

Thursday, 25 April 2013

Dare I Ask?

Apparently lots of people don't like lists very much. I think adamct, in the featured comment to the previous post, nailed the reason why I do. Still....

Well, I'll forge ahead anyway.

Who are the ten greatest photographers?

Dare I ask? But keep reading....

This is going to be a big challenge, and it's going to tax you. It's an experiment that could well end up being a failure. But instead of the usual GOAT-type list, let's see if we can crowd-source—er, TOP-source—a list of TODAY'S great photographers: that is, photographers who came along after the advent of digital, after the advent of the Internet.

I.e., not the old graybeards or grannies who made their bones in the '60s and '70s. Not the people who have been retreaded through the museums for years now, or who are on their third or sixth or tenth book. (No matter how much we love those people. And we do, of course.) I'm talking about people nobody would have heard of before 1995 or so.

Where to start?
The first, almost mandatory inclusion, in my mind, would be Vivian Maier, in that she's almost exclusively an Internet phenomenon—to me she's one of the sensations of c. 2009, not of the years in which she worked. But she's cheating, since she's a film photographer from mid-century who only came to prominence during the digital era. (Call her the Eugene Atget of the digital age.)

Whether you only want to assay a nomination or two, or concoct your whole list...here's my challenge for you: who are the greatest photographers of the digital era? (Regardless of their actual chosen medium.)

Gauntlet duly thrown....

Mike

TOP's links!

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

Marcus: "Bryan Formhals and Blake Andrews put together an interesting list a year ago with a nice little twist: '10 Oeuvres Aspiring Photographers Should Ignore,' a list of photographer's styles that have been copied to death and run their course."

Mike replies: That's wonderful. I'd never seen it before. Thanks.

And that is definitely one distinct hallmark of the digital/internet era: common styles being copied unto death.

Terrence Morrissey: "One to add to the list, Joey Lawrence only 23 years old."

Mike replies: Too obviously commercial for me. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Rory Challands: "My choice for number one would be Jason Eskenazi. He's an uncompromising New Yorker, whose refusal to go for commissions has made his professional life tougher than it should have been. He was turned down by Magnum, and was scraping a low wage as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC while his book, Wonderland: A Fairytale of the Soviet Monolith, was selling out in the shop there.

"Wonderland (though it could do with a bigger format so the page break doesn't split each photo down the middle), is my favourite recent photography book. It's an elegy to the people of the former Soviet union, and documents the human relics of that fallen empire in the decade following its collapse.

"Jason is a master of photographic depth. He doesn't take pictures of things. He take pictures of the relationships between things. Each of his photos is beautifully layered with a rhythm that takes your eye dancing sadly through the frame. It's classic black and white street photography/photojournalism that doesn't break any moulds or claim any new inventions. But it's so exquisitely felt and executed that his name should be listed in the hall of Greats.

"He's obviously sacrificed to take the images he does. I hope he doesn't question too much whether its worth it. It is."

[Ed. Note.: Wonderland is back in print, and can be ordered directly from Jason at his website for only $32! Cool. I did not know. Much better than paying $73 to $900(!) at Amazon. —MJ.]

RobinP (partial comment): "Whoa!—shock and horror. Thanks, Mike, perhaps you've just pointed out one of the failings of the 'digital era'; or maybe I just live in the past...nearly all the books on my photography shelves are of artists who produced their best work long before 1995."

Mattias: "Rinko Kawauchi. She is to Japanese photography of the last decade what Moriyama was to the '60s and Araki to the '70s, a true original with a distinct vision. About the only thing she seems to have picked up from her peers is, in her early career, the diaristic content à la Araki, which she has progressed away from."

Dave: "This is a brilliant idea. Because I can't think of a single photographer for this list, I can't wait to see the results. I'm looking forward to being inspired by the finalists."

Stan B.: "Before the digital era I could at least name most of my faves off the top of my head; now...it's like expansion teams gone wild. I've well exceeded your suggested limit—so cut me off where need be:

"Taryn Simon, Zoe Strauss, Aaron Huey, Matt Black, Mark Steinmetz, Eva Leitolf, Leon A. Borensztein, Brenda Ann Keneally, Brian Rose, Jens Olof Lasthein, Scot Sothern, Doug Rickard, Jason Eskanazi, Bruce Haley, Thomas Michael Alleman, Thomas Kern, Robert Gumpert, Vanessa Winship, George Georgiou, Dave Jordano, Valeri Nistratov, a holy host of others, and of course, Vivian...."

Derek Lyons: "These lists always end up being lists of the 'most widely known'...because really there's no other way to find common ground."

Posted on Thursday, 25 April 2013 at 06:19 PM in Photographers, current, Visual Culture | Permalink | Comments (113)

Wednesday, 03 April 2013

He Shoots He SCORES!!

Hey, remember Nick Laham? We wrote about him when he was forced to turn a Tampa restroom into a studio and shoot some portraits with his Apple iPhone. Well, his picture of A-Rod (the one we featured) made Page One of The New York Times on Sunday.

There's been a lot of teeth-gnashing, hair-tearing, and garment-rending about how publications no longer care about professional-quality work from pro cameras, but you could look at it from the opposite perspective too—you could claim pro photographers aren't on the hook to keep contantly upgrading to the latest and best professional DSLRs any more. They can just use their iPhones like "everybody"* else.

Mike
(Thanks to Steve Rosenblum)

*Except us. We'll use good-quality point-and-shoots or better, thanks.

Click here, dammit Gumby.

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

Mark: "I haven't seen a copy of the actual newspaper myself, but I can't help but think that this is an entirely appropriate usage of a camera and technology and a testament to the skills of a professional photographer. Eyeballing the size of the photo relative to the size of the page, it can't be more than about 6x6" (or 15x15 cm). Even if it were printed at 300 DPI, that would only be a bit more than 3 MP for the image—and newsprint was almost never a medium for high-resolution photography in the first place.

"Furthermore, if any story allowed for the use of a nostalgic instagram aesthetic, I would have to see it as a story about an aging baseball star.

"Lastly, I know that I couldn't have improvised a studio in a bathroom and captured those expressions no matter what camera I was using. So doesn't that argue in favor of professional photographers rather than professional cameras? In terms of resolution, even a two-page spread in Time, National Geographic, or Elle could easily be handled by the previous generation of full-frame cameras. There's something liberating in that, if only we could remember and pay attention to it."

Henry Rogers: "I like that picture! I wouldn't like it any more if it had been taken with much more precise equipment."

Posted on Wednesday, 03 April 2013 at 09:10 PM in Photo equipment, Photographers, current | Permalink | Comments (20)

Monday, 25 February 2013

Followup: Twofer! ...And We're Back On Topic

One thing I will say for BMW...it's a popular subject. Yesterday's post about BMW brought in far more traffic than normal for a Sunday.

I did go to the car show, and got a pleasant surprise. As I rounded the doorway into the Classic Two-Seater Sports Car room, this is what I saw:

Whoa, what?

A bonus for Mikey, that's what. Turns out an enterprising local photographer had piggybacked on the Auto Show to stage an exhibit of his work. He's a retired commercial professional from West Allis named Tom Ferderbar.

Photographer Tom Ferderbar

Here's Tom. We had a nice chat. He knew the late Arnie Gore, a local pro who was a good friend of my father's. He was showing two sets of work in the Two-Seater room: black and white from Yosemite National Park, and color from a project shot along the old Route 66. And he kinda liked the GX1, too.

One of Tom's Yosemite pictures next to a 1991 Lotus Elan.

The color work was done on 6x6 and with Canon DSLRs, and the black and white was all 8x10" Tri-X. The giant prints—I forgot to write down the size, although you can get an idea from the snapshot above—are digital prints made from scans. Tom told me that buyers sometimes ask for silver gelatin enlarger prints, but he can't make them this big, and he says he thinks the digital prints are better anyway. The main advantage, he said, being that he can burn and dodge much more precisely.

I was too polite to ask him if he'd sold any. His prices were right stiff, too.

As you might even have guessed, Tom studied with Ansel Adams—he took a workshop with Ansel in the 1960s (I think it was). The week-long workshop included a private dinner for two students at a time at the Adams home with Ansel and his wife Virginia. Cost for the week? $100.

• • •

The nice thing about going to the Auto Show on the weekend is that you get to meet some of the owners of the gorgeous old cars being displayed. In Tom's room I got to talk to the owner of a perfect 1959 Corvette, as well as a guy who had owned his restored 1957 Ford Thunderbird since new. That's pretty unusual. I also talked to the owner of a Bugatti Type 57 that must have been the rarest car on display at the whole show. He had just gotten it back after a five-year engine rebuild. I didn't even want to know what that cost. I must have been well into six figures.

Best of show: A used Fiberglas-bodied Superformance Cobra on display at Harry's Toys. Harry's is my favorite exhibit year after year, no question. Harry has been dealing in cool fun fine used cars since he was 16. In his day he's sold more Excaliburs than anyone alive. He sells mostly used cars skimmed from his sizeable wholesale business, but he also just took on a brand of Canadian three-wheeler that must have been the strangest vehicle at the whole show. He likes telling the story of one customer from Switzerland who has bought 35 cars from him! If I were a rich guy, I'd trade one used car for another every two years at Harry's for the rest of my life, like clockwork.

Oddities: #1: This might sound strange, but the muscle cars of today are Mercedes-Benzes. In some of their cars there are so many engine choices that they'll offer a 400+ HP bi-turbocharged V8 and then a more powerful option above that. They have a station wagon that will pin a Viper's ears back, and I'm not joking.

#2: I was looking forward to sitting in a Golf R, my current dream car, but, strangely, the VW display did not include a Golf R. Or a GTI. Or a Golf. That's right, no Golfs of any flavor in the VW area. That's just strange.

Hot tip: If you happen to be in the market for a mainstream sedan, make sure you see the new 2013 Mazda 6, a Camry/Accord competitor that's new this year (they've only been on sale for four weeks as I write this). The car looks good in pictures, but in person it's gorgeous. Especially in an as-yet-unidentified smokey blue color. Even the cockpit design is superb. Coming from a company that has been notably styling-challenged in the past few years (remember the cat-car?), that's like a mope who's batting .119 suddenly stroking a game-winning grand slam.

It's really an unusally pretty car for its segment. And it starts at $20k.

Fiat Abarths are nicer than I thought they'd be, too, but who are those cars for? I can't picture men buying them, and I can't picture women buying them. And I think those are the only choices.

It's my birthday today, so I'm going back to the Auto Show this afternoon. Playing hookey two days in a row...what a slug! But the nice thing about going to the Auto Show on a weekday is that there aren't nearly as many people, and you can get better pictures of the cars. Today I'm shouldering the Big Dragoon...gotta get some snaps of that Cobra. Who knows if I'll ever see one again.

Mike

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

Christian: "I am in love with that first B&W photo with the tree and the waterfall. I can't even see it that well in your picture, Mike, but I am quite smitten. When I grow up I would love to make pictures of that caliber."

Tom Kwas: "FYI, for the years I worked in Milwaukee, Tom had the premier advertising studio in town; and was a genuinely nice guy. Everyone wanted to work there, and they always had the best facilities and equipment. He was blessed, if I can use that term, with owning that studio during what would be the golden years of advertising photography in this market area. He was of the perfect age, such that when he decided to retire, the business market in general was already on the wane, and many of the local businesses that had national and international markets, had already sold themselves to larger concerns not located in this area, and moved their advertising and marketing departments out of this area to their home offices.

"He probably owned his studio when Milwaukee was still the 13th–15th largest metro area in the country, until by the early '90s, it had shrunk to the 38th largest market area. Perfect timing! No studio now exist in this market area that was like his. End of an era...."

Posted on Monday, 25 February 2013 at 12:16 PM in Exhibits, Photographers, current | Permalink | Comments (35)

Friday, 15 February 2013

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.

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.]

(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)

Thursday, 24 January 2013

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.

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

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

Thursday, 13 December 2012

'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.

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

Saturday, 01 December 2012

Another More Curious Portrait

David Douglas Duncan, Bougainville, Solomon Islands, February 1944.

So why "curious"? The photographer was one Lt. Richard M. Nixon*.

Mike
(Thanks to Lachlan Young)

*Who was a distant cousin of mine. <—That's the smallest type I can use.

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

Jon Porter: "Interesting photo. Duncan references his Bougainville meeting with Nixon in Self Portrait: U.S.A. It opened the door to an exclusive photo op with Nixon at the '68 convention."

Posted on Saturday, 01 December 2012 at 12:06 AM in Photographers, current | Permalink | Comments (16)

Thursday, 29 November 2012

Random Excellence: Gueorgui Pinkhassov

By Gueorgui Pinkhassov

All things considered, Magnum photographers are probably the once and future "élite of street."

From a large set here. And here he is on Magnum Photos.

Mike
(Thanks to robert e)

There's a short video overview of the book here.

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

Troels: "He is also to be found on Instagram."

Mike replies: Some of those shots on Instagram are amazing. It can be almost discouraging to encounter someone so talented....

Elisabeth Spector: "The content of Pinkhassov's images is as compelling as any I've seen, but it is his use of color that has me holding my breath as I look at each successive image. His use of red, the way it drives the energy of his compositions and punctuates the details, reminds me of music somehow—notes across a page that tie all of his work together into a larger piece of art. His use of blues and greens is a little more subtle, but no less delicious. I swear I got goosebumbs when I started to see all of those colors pop out of his images—uncannily like Fred Herzog, my favorite color photographer—but certainly not derivative in any way. His story-telling and use of framing,light, layers, etc. would make these great photos in B&W, but it is his use of color that really puts the images in another league (for me, anyway). I generally dislike street photography in color, and I just realized why: most such images don’t seem to use color to create a better or more interesting image. In fact, color seems often to be used when the tonalities just don’t work well enough in black and white. But with Pinkhassov and Herzog, color is at least an equal player, used just as deliberately as all of the other components and creating a full orchestral effect (way beyond the effect of just a strong solo or quartet), if I can keep using that analogy. What a treat…thank you for this post. Now I know where to get my fix when I don’t have my Herzog (Vancouver Photographs) handy to pore over."

Mike replies: I know exactly what you mean Elisabeth. Many "photographers in color" (as opposed to color photographers) don't seem to realize that every color photograph is about color, and if the color doesn't work then the photograph doesn't work. It really is like a different, co-equal problem, as if you do have to layer one artwork over another. It's enormously difficult to get it right, and uncommon to find photographers who get it right. It's definitely the outstanding thing about Herzog.

Dave: "Thanks a lot—these photos put me in a day-long depression. This guy is so good that I might just throw away my camera and give up. From now on, when you post 'Random Exellence' make sure it's a style of photography most of us could at least try to copy. These photos are just too good."

Posted on Thursday, 29 November 2012 at 11:11 AM in Photographers, current, Random Excellence | Permalink | Comments (27)

Tuesday, 20 November 2012

Meet Harry Taylor (and Matt Morris)

Photo by Harry Taylor, from "American Tintype"

Matt Morris has created a slight but beautiful film about Harry Taylor, a photographer fromWilmington, North Carolina. Following the death of his mother, Harry turned to the ancient medium to tintype to help "take away the static." The film is less than four minutes long but serves up a remarkably clear window into Harry's journey to where he is now, and does a good job of sampling, or implying, the richness and depth of his methods and concerns, and his photographs.

This is an example of what used to be called "alternative process" photography—the deliberate use of an offbeat or antiquated process for expression. Of course, nowadays all optical/chemical processes are "alternative," so it remains to be seen what name the old alternatives will acquire in the new age.

Filmmaker Matt Morris has promised to stop by TOP later today to answer questions and field comments, so if there's something you'd like to ask him, please do. I can't promise he'll address every comment but at least you'll hear directly from him about his work.

You'll like this, I think—

American Tintype from Matt Morris Films on Vimeo.

Mike
(Thanks to Matt Morris Films)

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

Matthew Miller: "Mike, Harry actually gives an answer to your question in the film: antique process."

Eric Rose: "I tend to like these tintypes better than some I have seen. The ghoulish portraits made by some tintype practitioners leave me quite cold."

Howard Sandler: "Really enjoyed Matt's film. I appreciated the variety of close detail shots interspersed with the wider views, and the slow rotating zooms on the tin types was an effective use of the Ken Burns effect. Loved the way the credits 'developed' too."

Colleen Leonard: "My first contemporary tintype experience was Joni Sternbach's surfer series and then had the pleasure to see Quinn Jacobson at work at the Foire de la Photo in Bièvres, France. Tintypes are going strong in Paris thanks to him I would say. Soho Photo Gallery has a tintype exhibition on in NYC right now—Masterplaters collective. I really think tintypes are the thing to do right now. Everything digital is not."

Robin Dreyer: "I'm also happy to report, having met him a couple of times, that Harry is a really good guy."

John Sarsgard: "It's all about giving yourself permission to do the work you love, whether it be tintypes, photograms, photoshop, or whatever, then finding the elbow room in your life to do it. Film, digital, large format, manipulated, wet plate, and all those choices ain't the issue. You don't have to argue with the world about what's best. You just have to do what you love and also make a living."

Posted on Tuesday, 20 November 2012 at 10:08 AM in Photographers, current, Photographic aesthetics, Visual Culture | Permalink | Comments (27)

Thursday, 08 November 2012

Quiet Combat

Danny Lyon, The Walls, 1967

By Jim Hughes

I first met Danny Lyon in 1968 at a sprawling Museum of Modern Art exhibit of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work. A mutual friend introduced us. I was relatively new on the scene, a young photo magazine editor, and Danny was an up-and-coming star at Magnum. His resumé already included The Bikeriders* and The Destruction of Lower Manhattan. I remember a huge mane of curly hair with the texture of steel wool, and cowboy boots that clicked on the MoMA Sculpture Garden's tile.

As he turned on a heel and clicked away, Danny Scowled, "I have no use for camera magazine editors."

Nonetheless, and despite the attitude, it would not be long before I began publishing Danny's powerful photographs. One essay in particular, "Life Inside," a 14-page black-and-white documentation of Texas prisons taken mostly from the prisoners' perspective, proved particularly revealing. Conversations With the Dead was the book that resulted from the project. I assigned Dan McCoy, a Black Star photographer who had been writing a column for Camera 35, the magazine I was editing at the time, to conduct an in-depth interview to accompany the essay in America: Photographic Statements, a new kind of U. S. Camera Annual that I was putting together. It would include a portfolio from Eva Rubinstein, the first published essay by a young Jodi Cobb, who went on to be a staff photographer at the National Geographic, Jill Freedman’s "Circus" pictures, Bill Owens' Suburbia before it became a classic book, Robert Frank’s The Lines of My Hand, and Martin Schneider's color expose of pollution in America. Frank was interviewed by Sean Kernan, another fine photographer who regularly wrote for the magazine, and Schneider's no-holds-barred Q&A was conducted by Bob Nadler, Camera 35's technical editor.

For his interview with Lyon, McCoy was to meet Danny at an undisclosed location in the Southwest. But when he called as instructed for directions, McCoy was told there would be no interview. Danny suggested he would interview himself and mail it in.

After all, he pointed out, he had recently declined to be interviewed by The New York Times. McCoy, who had just been inside the Utah State Penitentiary for eight days photographing for the movie version of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, understood that Lyon was (and is) unique among working photographers. "He is a loner who guards his private life and its location with missionary zeal," McCoy noted.

"You are asking for a freedom in your answers that you are unwilling to give the interviewer in his questions," McCoy suggested to Lyon that day. "What kind of interview is it when the person interviewed determines both the questions and the answers?"

After a good deal of back-and-forthing, a compromise was reached. McCoy could conduct the interview then and there. The published result was appropriately titled, "Conversations From a Phone Booth on Route 66..."

Evidently, Danny Lyon liked our layout, approved of the concept for the Annual as a whole, and didn’t hate the interview. Over the years, we became friends. At one point, I even published a set of his black and whites whose borders he had hand-colored in magic marker. Well I remember the day in 1983 when we were to meet at our office to select a retrospective portfolio for Camera Arts, and I came out to find him lounging on the couch in our waiting room, launching perfectly folded paper airplanes at our long-suffering receptionist!

When Camera Arts was unceremoniously killed in a kind of corporate coup de grâce a couple of months later, Danny surprised me by writing an elegy for Aperture: "Jim Hughes, who…brought Camera Arts to its preeminent position among the popular photography magazines, has lost magazines the way a good cavalry officer loses horses in battle. Shortly after he published W. Eugene Smith’s essay 'Minamata' in Camera 35 in 1974, that magazine was sold (out from under him) by its owner, the American Express Company.

"We have lost our democracy, mostly through lack of courage. That was ultimately Camera Arts' finest quality, and its fatal flaw. In a world that nourishes mediocrity, it tried to be bold…. In this sad time, with our powers usurped, aesthetic success guarantees failure."

Or, as a friend cryptically noted upon learning of my magazine's death, "Sh*t rises!"

Kirk Decker kindly wrote in a comment to my recent piece on Ralph Steiner: "I still have the entire Camera Arts run. It was a great photography magazine, and I was crushed when it was over."

So was I, Kirk, so was I. Come next June, thirty years will have passed since that sad time, and I can honestly say I still haven't fully recovered. I suspect that was the point at which I began to understand, or at least recognize, my own reclusive impulse: the need to stay within oneself in order to see beyond more clearly.

Jim

[*I really hope you bought this when I told you to—take a look at the current price on the paperback reissue, which as I recall was $15 when I recommended it. —MJ]

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

Neil Swanson: "I also have every issue of Camera Arts. Dog eared they are. Wore them out. Nothing since has been as good. I was turned on to many many people I still admire. I also own The Bikeriders, and Suburbia ( signed by Bill at a Fred Picker workshop). I have an old original copy of Eugene Richards' Dorchester Days. I mailed him cash; a brown envelope came with a signed book. Decades later I heard him speak at a VII Seminar. He signed it again, much to our mutual surprise. He hadn't seen a copy of the book in ages."

Posted on Thursday, 08 November 2012 at 02:28 PM in Jim Hughes, Photographers, current | Permalink | Comments (7)

Sunday, 04 November 2012

Twin Photographs

By Peter Turnley

An amazing twin story.

This morning, I was looking at my brother David's Facebook page and I came across an astonishing coincidence, if you can call it that. I saw that he had posted a photograph he had made of a man drinking a glass of wine at a bistro in Paris in 1973. As I looked at it, I realized that I had photographed the same man, in a different bistro, when I first went to Paris in 1975.

One has to think about the chance of this happening. In a city of more than 10 million people and a seemingly infinite number of cafés, not only did we photograph the same man, two years apart, but both of had come across the guy in a different bistro, and both of us photographed him at a bar counter with a glass of red wine...wearing the same coat. I must confess that after a life of experiencing the often unusual realities of being a twin, with a brother that also spent a life in photography and who is also a world-class photojournalist, this discovery really has me shaking my head with amazement.

Photographs by David Turnley (above), Paris, 1973, and
Peter Turnley (below), Paris, 1975.

If you'd like to see more about some of the rather surprising and amazing aspects of our twin lives and careers in photography, have a look at this "60 Minutes" piece from CBS called Double Exposure.

Peter

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

Jeff: "Have you considered that you may have photographed his twin brother?"

Vincent: "Never underestimate the compulsion of french people to hang around in bars. I can say: I'm one of them."

Posted on Sunday, 04 November 2012 at 12:05 PM in Peter Turnley, Photographers, current | Permalink | Comments (14)

Friday, 26 October 2012

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

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

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

Thursday, 18 October 2012

Mark Surloff: That Was Fast!

A spread from the "page flip" feature on Mark's new website

After reading your comments on our post about him the other day, Mark Surloff completely revamped his website to make it much easier to navigate. It's now split into four screens with 24–39 images per screen with one-click navigation—plus there's a "Page Flip" feature that shows the pictures in virtual book form. Take a look.

I'm also pleased to report that T.O.P. has entered into negotiations in principle to publish a book of Mark's work. We've already spoken to Mark, raised an initial $2,000, and have a handshake agreement with a very good book publisher who specializes in top-quality reproduction. We're in the early stages; more news as plans progress.

Mike

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

Rob Morris: "Maybe in time for Christmas?"

Mike replies: No, but maybe by Spring.

Matt Greer: "Mark's pictures are terrific—I really enjoyed them. One thing that sticks out for me in his photos, as well as those of some others, is that I don't feel the contrast is pushed to the max. I have this urge whenever I attempt to make an image in B&W (even colour images) to get a point as close to white as possible, and a point as close to black as possible, and work the curves to really enhance the mid-tone contrast. I don't mean to suggest that these images lack the necessary contrast— they don't. I feel like Mark used an appropriate amount of restraint in adding contrast to his images. Maybe it wasn't restraint—maybe it didn't cross his mind to push everything up to 11, and maybe that's why he's been able to create to many excellent images. I clearly have much to learn, and will spend much more time enjoying and studying Mark's work."

David Paterson: "Lovely, lovely work. The kind of pictures that make me want to go out and take pictures."

Posted on Thursday, 18 October 2012 at 03:45 PM in Books, Photographers, current | Permalink | Comments (29)

Monday, 20 August 2012

A Book for John Claridge?

John Claridge, Sweet kiosk, Spitalfields 1967. "See my reflection in this picture. She was so proud. Afterwards, she and her friends came out to be photographed." (Text courtesy spitalfieldslife.com, which just put up another new post of John Claridge's East End work today.)

I received this comment this morning from Jan Davis for the 'John Claridge and William Gedney' post:

I am so pleased that your wonderful website has picked up on John's wonderful pictures of the East End. I was lucky enough to be his Producer for a number of years, and was in awe of his talent both in the Advertising Industry and in his personal work. He was never without a camera,and he inspired a generation of Photographers, and still does to this day, both in the U.K. and further afield.

His work on the East End is so important as a history that needs to be kept alive, not only for those of us who were born there, but to future generations. The people living there had many trials and tribulations to face but did so with humour and dignity, which shows so well in John's pictures.

As we all feel, now is the time for a book of all these powerful images, so that they will forever remain as a tribute to a generation gone by. John had a very special place in their hearts and they let him into what would have been a very private place.

So I just wanted to say that...I'll help. Especially if the book is a proper monograph with good reproductions. TOP has had good success helping to publicize selected photo books in the past*, and also in helping to publicize Kickstarter projects, including a couple of book projects.

Just so you know, John and Jan.

Mike

*Although I don't seem to have been doing a whole lot with photo books recently, have I? Hmm. I'll have to see about that.

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

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

Posted on Monday, 20 August 2012 at 11:23 AM in Photographers, current | Permalink | Comments (14)

Portals

Search

WWW
T.O.P.

Recent Posts

+ Sponsors

Resources

Photographers, current

Tuesday, 28 May 2013

Thursday, 23 May 2013

Wednesday, 01 May 2013

Tuesday, 30 April 2013

Monday, 29 April 2013

Saturday, 27 April 2013

Thursday, 25 April 2013

Wednesday, 03 April 2013

Monday, 25 February 2013

Friday, 15 February 2013

Thursday, 24 January 2013

Thursday, 13 December 2012

Saturday, 01 December 2012

Thursday, 29 November 2012

Tuesday, 20 November 2012

Thursday, 08 November 2012

Sunday, 04 November 2012

Friday, 26 October 2012

Thursday, 18 October 2012

Monday, 20 August 2012

Portals

Search

Stats