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Photographers, historical

Friday, 16 April 2010

Henri Cartier-Bresson at MoMA and Elsewhere

Hcb

You're probably aware that there's a major retrospective exhibition of the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, until June 28th. A few ancillaries:

• There's a fine show review by the admirable Peter Schjeldahl of The New Yorker called "Picture Perfect" that you can read online. Crisp, short, rich as chocolate, and one of the few appraisals I've read in recent years that isn't hagiographic. Critic Schjeldahl takes a rather dim view of the master. Although that is in a sense a very traditional take—the old-fashioned stance of art critics was to be patronizing of photography whatever else they did—he makes some astute points and digs up a couple of wonderful quotes. The essay is one of those rare ones that's both an opposing view and, in its own way, right. Recommended read.

Moderncentury • The new show catalog by MoMA curator Peter Galassi, Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century,  is now available. (Here's the U.K. link—different cover in the U.K.) If you are to have only one H.C.-B. book, or if you are new to him, I still recommend the big monograph Henri Cartier-Bresson: Photographer, which we are very lucky to still have in print. If that's too steep for you, I very much enjoyed Clement Cheroux's chock-a-block little pocket-sized introduction, ten bucks and cheap at twice the price. Good stuff.

• Finally, although it brings up less than pleasant memories of his rather daffy interview of Henri himself (which I reviewed here), Charlie Rose has interviewed Martine Franck, Henri's widow and the co-founder of his Foundation, which provided most of the prints for the MoMA show. The interviewed aired last night, as far as I can tell. I can't make the Charlie Rose website work—none of the links function for me—but maybe you'll have better luck.

Mike
(Thanks to numerous readers)

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Eric Rose: "Charlie Rose interview can be seen here."

Posted on Friday, 16 April 2010 at 10:39 AM in Books, Exhibits, Photographers, historical | | Comments (29)

Friday, 09 April 2010

Ansel Redux

 By Jim Hughes

One thing leads to another. My recent post on Ansel Adams got me thinking, and I dug into my collection of old photo magazines and found a "Proof Sheet" column I wrote for the January 1980 edition of Popular Photography. I had interviewed Ansel for a second time, this time in New York City in 1979.

This master of the optical/chemical darkroom and the silver print had an interesting, even prescient perspective on digital photography, which at that point in time was but a blip in anyone's consciousness.

As I wrote at the time: Few people realize that this titan of the straight and clear image (in his early days in photography, this represented a revolutionary concept) looks forward to the day when certain select students of his work will be able to interpret one of his negatives in new media, even using computer enhancement.

"I figured, what the hell is the use of having the negatives stored away in a trunk," Adams told me, explaining one of the motivating factors for his playing such a central role in the establishment of the [then new] Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson, which will house the Adams archive. "Stieglitz canceled every one of his negatives by putting a little 'x' in the corner. You can't print them. The only ones I've canceled are from Portfolio VI, which I withdrew from circulation in accordance with my agreements, and Portfolio V, which I actually canceled...and I'm sorry I did.

"I've always said that the negative is the score, and the print the performance. I want it to be possible for people in the future to perform my negatives. After all, when I was playing the piano, I was playing the music of people who had been dead for quite a few hundred years, and who had never heard the sounds of my modern piano -- they had written for the harpsichord, the clavichord. I actually feel that in the next few years—it won't be very long—the electronic image is really going to be the medium in photography."

Later in the piece, I wrote: No doubt there are photographers who don't like Adams' work, but they, too, must admit his importance. His intense and spirited presence through the years has helped make it possible for all photographers to enjoy the manifold rewards of legitimacy. Does Ansel have a philosophy of giving?

"If you're a professional, you contribute to the profession," he replies. "There is an underlying attitude for support, a pouring back of interest and thought. Musicians teach master classes. Doctors do research, write papers, give time to charity. The artist is a professional.

"If the art gives the artist life, then the artist in turn should give the art life. There has been a lack of understanding of this concept in photography. But you just can't live an independent, selfish existence. You lose on it."

Jim

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on Friday, 09 April 2010 at 03:42 AM in Jim Hughes, Photographers, historical | | Comments (15)

Tuesday, 06 April 2010

Ansel Adams, a Gentle and Generous Man

By Jim Hughes

In response to Mike's recent post about The Portfolios of Ansel Adams, Carsten Bockermann commented: "I bought The Portfolios of Ansel Adams on my first visit to the U.S. It was back in 1982, I was 16 at the time. The lady in a little bookstore in Carmel said 'Oh, that's too bad, you just missed Mr. Adams. He left a few minutes ago and went to the barber shop.' Needless to say, I found out where the barber shop was and got my copy signed right there, in the barber's chair."

Anselbynewhall I first met Ansel many years ago, at his home in Carmel, an unimposing structure at the end of a winding path leading to a bluff overlooking the Pacific. The place was not easy to find, but Maggie Weston, whose gallery I had just visited, had given me excellent directions. I wanted to interview Ansel for a piece I was writing on the intersection of art and commerce in photography, and he had graciously agreed.

In the midst of our conversation, my tape already spinning, I heard a chime. I looked toward the front door to see two small figures silhouetted against the wavy glass. Ansel answered the door himself. A middle-aged couple, tourists recently arrived from Japan, I soon learned, stood in the doorway. They wore broad grins. The man held a copy of Ansel's latest book.

"Autograph, please," the man said, handing the book to its famous author.

"Of course, of course," Ansel responded in a gentle voice that belied his craggy, weathered visage. "Please come in. You are welcome in my home."

It was clear that Ansel had not expected more visitors, but neither did he seem to feel the least bit put upon by their unannounced arrival. He asked them to spell their names, slowly please, then carefully wrote a personalized inscription, complete with a flourish, in their book. They bowed. He bowed. I even bowed. Then the man pulled out a snapshot camera and photographed his wife with Ansel Adams, the world's most famous photographer. She in turn photographed her husband with Ansel. Finally, they handed me the camera and I photographed all three, arm in arm, posing in front of Ansel's magnificent fireplace, beneath a huge antique gong that hung suspended above the fireplace.

With another kind of flourish, Ansel gave the gong a rap with a four-foot padded mallet, and the house reverberated with ancient tones. I imagined that even the whales migrating just offshore must have heard that deep, booming sound. More smiling and bowing followed. More unspoken communication between disparate cultures.

Finally, Ansel motioned his new friends, myself included, toward the grand piano in an ell just off the living room. He sat down to play, something short and sweet. I don't remember what the piece was. But if it wasn't Mozart, it should have been.

Jim
(Inset photograph by Nancy Newhall)

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Featured Comment by R. Edelman: "In 1983 I took a weekend trip to Carmel from San Francisco. While I was walking in Carmel, a Cadillac pulled up to the curb and parked. I figured that it had to be Ansel Adams' car, as the license plate read: 'Zone V.' A young man was driving and Ansel Adams was the passenger. After Mr. Adams got out of the car, I walked up to him and said: 'Mr. Adams, your photography has given me great pleasure over the years.' Well, he acted as if he had never received a compliment before! He smiled, grabbed my hand and shook it, and thanked me. What a gentleman!"

Featured Comment by Nancy Ori: "I think that I know Jim from many years ago. Let me know if that is true. My memory seems to be so full of so many things that stuff seems to get pushed to the back somehow.

"Anyway, nice story.

"I visited with Ansel many times at the Carmel house...usually with a cocktail in hand...he loved his cocktails too. I was a teaching assistant at his workshop series for eight seasons, probably some of the most important and memorable formative years for me as a young photographer.

"I have had a lifetime now as a professional photographer and teach all over the place. I try to always bring forth what I learned at Ansel's workshops...patience, sharing, looking, thinking, caring.

"In my experience, he was like a Santa Claus. You just wanted to hug him...which he was not opposed to. He was truly larger than life...being a big person didn't hurt either. But it was his energy that was so impressive. Granted, when I knew him in the late '70s he had already been discovered and had a lot of people around him to help with everything, but he had so much energy and excitement for his craft.

"I try to think about and draw inspiration from my times spent standing next to him on Glacier Point in Yosemite. What an awesome view and experience. There will always be great photographers coming along but no one like Ansel."

Posted on Tuesday, 06 April 2010 at 06:03 PM in Jim Hughes, Photographers, historical | | Comments (22)

Namir Noor-Eldeen, 1984-2007

Noor-eldeen Namir Noor-Eldeen (Reuters file photo)

War encourages casual murder and probably always has, but the most egregious examples are still dismaying. Thanks to whistle-blowers inside the American military and the under-funded wiki site Wikileaks, which anonymously publishes sensitive information "of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical interest," it's been all over the news in the past 36 hours that Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, his driver and assistant Saeed Chmagh, and 10 other people were senselessly murdered by soldiers from American Apache helicopter gunships in July of 2007—just as Reuters has long suspected.

The widely released 17:47 video, edited from a 39:17 original, clearly shows the "targets" wandering casually on the ground, not engaged in fighting, while the gunners impatiently sought any plausible excuse to open fire.

By all accounts cheerful, helpful and energetic, the then-22-year-old Namir Noor-Eldeen had been interested in photography since boyhood. He was one of the first Iraqis recruited by Retuers for a program intended to train photojournalists who had local ties and local knowledge. Chris Helgren, the former Reuters Chief of Photography who instituted the program, said of Noor-Eldeen before his death that he "started from nothing and is now the pre-eminent photographer in Northern Iraq."

Dean Yates, Baghdad Bureau Chief for Reuters, said "Namir and Saeed were much loved members of the Baghdad bureau. They were always smiling and cheerful despite the horror in their country and the risks they took in their work."

Chris Helgren again: "When he first came to my attention, Namir was an energetic teenager in the northern city of Mosul whose family was involved in photography and video. He took an interest in the trade, and with training, and a few critiques, it quickly became obvious he was going to become one of the new stars in Iraqi photojournalism. He had an urgency that suited the front pages of the news business but also a tender eye that brought humanity via quiet moments to a vicious war. One of the first pictures he sent me was of bewildered U.S. Army soldiers surrounded by a flock of sheep; another I remember was of a wounded Kurdish girl with her legs in bandages while wrapped in a faux fur coat, or one of a boy picking up shards of broken plates in the family dining room after an ammunition dump blast rocked their house."

"Namir was an editor's dream," former Reuters Chief Photographer Bob Strong said. "He was the best photographer in Mosul, he was on top of every story, and if he didn’t shoot the pictures himself, he knew where to find them. His nose had been broken more than once, he'd been shot in the leg, detained, harassed and threatened, but his quick smile and energy never faded. He lived more in 22 years than most people do in a lifetime and it’s very very sad to know I'll never get one of his bearhug greetings again."

You can see a slideshow of some of his work here.

Reuters has long sought the release of the helicopter video under the Freedom of Information act, but the military stonewalled for more than two years.

Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh were the fifth and sixth Reuters employees killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion (there has since been a seventh.) All but one are believed to have been killed by Americans. They are among 139 journalists killed in Iraq between March 2003 and October 2009, 36 of whom were photojournalists. Noor-Eldeen and Chmagh are profiled in the multimedia presentation Bearing Witness: Five Years of the Iraq War (see profiles > Dean Yates) and the incident in which they were killed is covered in a 2009 book about the troop surge, The Good Soldiers by Pulitzer Prize winner David Finkel.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Gene Forsythe: "A most disturbing set of videos. Even more disturbing, but perhaps only to be expected, is the inflammatory nature of the editing of the 'short version' of the video. I understand that is considered 'freedom of speech.'

"My grandfather (I am 61, by the way) served in WWI. His opinion was that war, in general and in all specifics, was 'mass insanity and mass murder.' My father, who served in WWII and Korea and earned the Air Medal, encouraged my brother to move to Canada when his draft number was about to come up in 1970. He felt the only thing that he learned from his experiences was that war released the moral bindings of human beings and reduced them to the lowest behavioral level.

"I have to agree with both of them...and that insanity can also be defined as walking around in a combat zone with, or near someone with, weapons—either of which makes you a target and places your life in someone else's hands.

"The whole event was seemingly (since I don't know what else was going on in the near locales) without rationale. But I can't draw much else as a conclusion, much less blame a specific person for this specific event. It was madness in action."

Featured Comment by Pete Jackson: "This makes me sick and it is beyond me how anyone can defend it."

Featured Comment by Clinton Bersuch: "I am so angry at some of the outrageous things being said here about American military personnel that I'm not sure where to start. And yes, I watched the video. I guess this is my last day of reading TOP. All I'll say is I'm glad I never donated to Mr. Johnston nor used his Amazon or B&H links or bought anything from the businesses who advertise on this blog."

Featured Comment by HT: "I wonder what the reaction would be like if it was Iraqi aircraft firing down at American journalists and their medical support vehicle."

Featured Comment by G: "It's worthwhile to listen to the interview with Finkel on today's edition of NPR's 'Talk of the Nation.' [Direct link isn't possible; look down the list. —Ed.] The Pulitzer Prize winner, who has seen more of the actual war than the vast majority of civilians, and who was embedded that day, takes a very equivocal view, refusing to condemn or acquit the Apache pilots. As others have said, a lot isn't seen in 18 minutes of a 37 minute video, and as Finkle said today, 'there are no good days in war.' May all the casualties of these wars rest in peace."

Featured Comment by Doc: "Ladies and Gentlemen, I have spent over 20 years serving working with and leading the young men and women who currently serve in our armed forces. They are not uneducated kids! They are the best trained and educated force to ever go afield.

"I have watched the entire clip and can say with a great deal of certainty that some of those individuals were armed.

"As to the sound of a helicopter making people run, if you hear a noise (even a loud one) often enough you tend to ignore it. Also, based on the clip the Apache was firing from a long distance. It’s only the magnification of the gun camera that makes it look like he’s close by. It is entirely possible that the people on the street didn’t know he was there until the rounds started hitting the street.

"Now to the folks who have taken offense to the language and the 'gallows humor' I would like to ask one question. Exactly how do you propose that we cope with what we do for a living? I can say for myself alone that when I was doing my job the only thing that was important to me was the safe return of my crew.

"I will not say that a mistake was made, nor will I defend the idiots who suppressed this information for over two years. However I would ask you to remember that it was only after the fact that it was found to be a 'friendly fire' incident (personally I hate the expression).

"Lastly, I would like to thank Mike for the site and for bringing this information to a very wide audience. Everyone killed in war deserves to be remembered."

Posted on Tuesday, 06 April 2010 at 11:11 AM in Photographers, historical, Photojournalism | | Comments (73)

Monday, 05 April 2010

Six-Tenths of a Second, Two Lives Forever Changed

By Michael Granberry, The Dallas Morning News

From the moment he lunged out of the shadows and pulled the trigger on his .38-caliber Colt Cobra, Jack Ruby did more than blast his way into history.

Lee Harvey Oswald, the man suspected of killing President John F. Kennedy two days earlier, suffered a single, fatal shot from Ruby's gun.

But other men standing in the basement of the Dallas police station on Sunday morning, Nov. 24, 1963, saw their own lives change, none more so than a pair of photojournalists who captured the moment in black and white.

For Robert H. "Bob" Jackson, then a 29-year-old photographer for the Dallas Times Herald, taking a picture of Oswald's murder meant winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1964.

Beers
"I was there. I was prepared. But I didn't get it." Photo by Jack Beers.

But for Ira Jefferson "Jack" Beers Jr., who worked for The Dallas Morning News—and who took an almost equally vivid picture—the basement events left an entirely different legacy.

Those who knew him say he never recovered from missing the Pulitzer by six-tenths of a second—the time between his photograph and Mr. Jackson's....

READ ON at dallasnews.com

-

Mike adds: This is a great and very poignant story that we've covered before, but I've never seen the story written up as well as Michael Granberry does in this classic 2004 article. Well worth a visit if you've never read it, and even a revisit if you already have. I enjoyed encountering it again this morning.

ADDENDA:
Side-by-side photos by Beers and Jackson (Jackson's is heavily cropped as per usual).

Uncropped (or less-cropped) version of Jackson's photo.

Mike
(Thanks to a "friend of the site" who prefers to remain anonymous)

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Featured Comment by Steven Alexander: "To the lower left of the Beers photo, but out of frame, was I. As a film cameraman for NBC I filmed the entire event, from Oswald entering the garage, through the chaos, to the subduing of Ruby. My film shows Ruby entering the scene, drawing the gun, and firing. The muzzle blast and a still flash overexpose one frame. It was then, and still is today, the most historic image I ever captured. People still ask me about it.

"Later that Sunday afternoon I went out to the large bus-like vehicle that was the NBC live television site to see if I could view the film on the air. When I stepped into the bus, my stomach turned over when I saw the can of unprocessed film sitting on a table in the bus. NBC had broadcast the shooting live and had recorded it on video tape.

"I guess I'm an early victim of the electronic revolution affecting the silver nitrate capture. Yet today I do see those frames of mine every year around the end of November. I got no credit or recognition for that effort, but went on to spend the next 25 years making motion pictures of many other important news stories—eighteen in Washington, D.C."

Featured Comment by Lou Spirito: "Interesting that this article fails to mention that there was a third still photographer in the basement that day. I've spent the last several months working on a project about the career of former UPI and Washington Post photographer Frank Johnston. He was on assignment for UPI in the basement positioned near Bob Jackson. While he also missed 'the shot,' he never once conveyed a sense of disappointment. Indeed, he seems astonished to recall the fact that he was witness to the event. The two frames he shot, in my opinion, complete the story of the fleeting event when presented along side Jackson's image. The two frames can be seen via Corbis here and here."

Posted on Monday, 05 April 2010 at 02:37 PM in Photographers, historical, Photojournalism | | Comments (19)

Saturday, 03 April 2010

The Portfolios of Ansel Adams

You learn something new every day. Or, if you start out knowing very little, like me, you can learn two new things a day.

Two things I learned today: The New York Graphic Society (NYGS)'s Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs and Ansel Adams in Color are in fact companion volumes. The former is much thicker, but they're the same height and width, and have similar white dust jackets over white bindings decorated similarly with pictures. They go together. Make a matching pair. Didn't know.

Portfoliosofaa I also completely missed the fact that my personal favorite Ansel Adams book, The Portfolios of Ansel Adams, was reissued in paperback in 2006. (I've had the book since forever, if that's any excuse.) And now the second edition of the reissue is out. I didn't notice when that happened either.

Now I know.

We've discussed in the past that different people work most comfortably in different forms; some people think in terms of books, some people think in terms of single images, others extended essays, or exhibits framed and hung in gallery spaces, or magazine features. (People will ask me what form I work in, and I'll be forced to say "great motley heaps of crap piled in odd and provisional corners of my house, such that I cannot find a single [expletive deleted] thing that I am looking for when I need it." That's the form I work in. Apparently.) Anyway I think Ansel worked most naturally in portfolios. He created and marketed portfolios all his life, and all his portfolios have a modulated quality, balancing variety and consistency. He seems (to my reading of his work anyway) to have been most comfortable with small sets of original works rendered elegantly and luxuriously. The Portfolios of... is not his most major book, but it's the one that gives us a window into his own thinking about his pictures through his personal editing of them, and it's his most interesting book in my view.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Carsten Bockermann: "I bought The Portfolios of Ansel Adams on my first visit to the U.S. It was back in 1982, I was 16 at the time. The lady in a little bookstore in Carmel said 'oh, that's too bad, you just missed Mr. Adams. He left a few minutes ago and went to the barber shop.' Needless to say I found out where the barber shop was and got my copy signed right there, in the barber's chair."

Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "Portfolios is a wonderful book for a number of reasons. It shows the text for each portfolio, including colophons, and even reproduces the actual typefaces used. This is great for 'type dorks' and book collectors like myself; you can see the exact presentation Adams was aiming for. Fortunately for him, San Francisco was (and still is) home to America's largest concentration of fine art book printers. The early portfolios were printed by the esteemed Grabhorn brothers; most of the later examples were designed and typeset by Adrian Wilson, another widely admired book printer.

"The evolution of Ansel Adams' portfolios as displayed in the book to some extent paralleled his artistic development over time. As John Szarkowski pointed out, the early portfolios contained mostly new work, while subsequent portfolios included an ever greater proportion of older images. Either teaching and writing left insufficient time or his muse had fled, but Adams' output of artistically worthy negatives declined precipitously after about 1950."

Posted on Saturday, 03 April 2010 at 12:29 PM in Photographers, historical | | Comments (7)

Tuesday, 30 March 2010

Memories of Marshall

Zimberoff-1
Tom Zimberoff and Jim Marshall

By Tom Zimberoff

I had to buy onions today. I just couldn’t bring myself to write about Jim Marshall, I suppose, until something that ordinary and evocative opened a sluice of memories and tears. Some of you will understand why.

For another reason I waited to see what others had to say. I didn’t want to repeat the obvious encomiums and tropes describing Jim’s irreconcilable and invidious utterances. Nonetheless, in spite of himself, Marshall made very many friends, and every individual memory they share is priceless.

I heard about his somnolent passing—a blessing, but ironic—within hours. It hammered me unexpectedly hard. The news sent me wandering on foot through Golden Gate Park for a couple of hours to take the edge off. Walking home, still restless, I decided to do something cornball and sentimental. (Marshall could be that way himself sometimes.) I bought flowers and a candle—pumpkin-scented, not votive, was all I could find—to lay by the entrance to his home.

As I stooped down with my offerings I saw light under the door. Oh come on! Was it a hoax? Or was I having one of those flashbacks? I rang the bell. More footsteps. Sh*t! I should have gotten really hammered. The door opened and, kindly, Jim’s indefatigable, indispensable, and saintly sidekick, Amelia Davis, greeted me with a hug. She had just arrived herself from elsewhere in New York. She invited me in. Her companion Bonita was there to support her. More tears. I drank some of Jim’s whiskey. I left hoping that these digs, very familiar to me, could remain a shrine for other photographers to visit. Hell of a place.

It’s a so-called "railroad flat," a narrow passageway with rooms off to one side. On either wall throughout its length is a gallery of framed photographs; not Jim’s but those of his friends, including some historic icons (i.e, both the photographer and the subject), given to him and hung with curatorial pride. Jim’s office was in the back on a kitchen table cluttered with tchotchkes and memorabilia, as was the entire abode. An adjacent door led to his rumpled bedroom, where a television usually presented football games or old dramas with the volume turned up loud. His enduring archives are carefully stored in file cabinets in the center rooms; every negative numbered and immediately accessible by card catalog and, hitherto, in Jim’s remarkably acute memory. The front parlor contains stacks of Marshall’s matted and signed prints, lots of CDs and LP record albums and photo books. There, too, were his Recaro racing seat and the saddle from a long-gone Triumph. This room faced onto the street and the blinds were always drawn—in every room. God help anyone who parked without permission in the driveway directly below! A decorative fulmination of epithets applied with a rattle-can of spray paint would be visited upon your vehicle. And Marshall did love cars. I don’t know how many of his acquaintances know that he was also a prolific documentarian of goings on at the Bonneville Salt Flats speed trials back in the late '50s. In his garage was a beloved Mercedes-Benz. The Stealth Benz he called it. It had more side- and rear-facing radars plus other evasive electronic paraphernalia than avionics in an F-117. Speakers and flashing panel lights alerted Jim to perform evasive maneuvers.

I remember a non-stop drive riding shotgun with Marshall from San Fran to Ketchum, Idaho at 100+ mph much of the way. Jim wasn’t wearing a hearing aid yet, and every time we got an audible hit on the reconnaissance gear it nearly sent me through the sun roof. We could hear befuddled state police on the scanners catching sight of us going in the opposite direction, trying to make U-turns as we sped away. We didn’t get caught, continuing even faster and then ducking behind rest stops. Capture would have been costly, to say the least, armaments considered.

Years ago, I shared a hotel room with Marshall after a night of drinking in LA. An early-morning phone call didn’t put either of us in the best of spirits but the picture editor of Rolling Stone, Laurie Kratochvil, on the line from three thousand miles away, must have been sorrier to hear Jim’s curses; not for the wake-up call but for neglecting to offer him assignments in years gone by, and yet asking for stock photos to publish in a commemorative issue. That diatribe must still be ringing in her ears.

Of course, the Chronicle ran Marshall’s obit on the front page. If he could have pulled off a Tom Sawyer, he would have exclaimed, “They didn’t run it above the fold, motherf*ckers!”

Zimberoff-2

One time in New York, when we had failed to hail a cab, Jim ran into the middle of 10th Avenue and body-blocked a limousine. We got in and offered the driver a hundred bucks to take us to a party. I think we were with Robert Farber. Jim offered the driver a non-pecuniary tip that was well received. Later that night in the Whiskey Bar, Jim passed out, asleep in a chair clutching his Leica (I loved to see him react when, during one distraction or another, I would hide it from him.) The apparent groom of a honeymooning couple made a snide remark to his young bride about the lowlife drunk slumped across the table. Oooh, it felt good to point out the pictures on the wall to this now contrite couple. They picked up his bar bill. (I told Jim I did. Oh well. Hey, it worked!)

Jim introduced me to two women, one of whom I married briefly. Much later, I fell in love with the other. But I digress. Jim shot my wedding. The father of the bride almost got shot too. Well, he wasn’t actually the father but my brother-in-law acting in that guise to give away the bride. My sister’s husband is a belligerent and short-fused fellow; but he couldn’t hold a candle to Jim. Thinking Marshall was merely a hired hand, and having no patience that familiar phrase "Just one more!", as my bride was about to descend a staircase in full regalia with string quartet accompaniment, Jim was shoved aside. I don’t think I have ever seen anyone else muster as much self-control as Marshall did that day. That’s really something for him.

When I stopped shooting years ago, I gave Marshall some bricks of film I had in my fridge. He loved Tri-X. But the last time I saw him, at my own recent exhibition opening, he proudly showed me the new digital Leica M9, engraved with the Jim Marshall moniker, bestowed on him by the German factory moguls. I would like to see the pics he made that night.

Last year I was asked by the Doobie Brothers’ manager to shoot a comeback album cover. I had already hung up my cameras. I knew that Jim shot the first Doobie Brothers cover decades earlier. I suggested he do their last. I think that may have been Jim’s swan song assignment. I’d like to think so.

The apotheosis of Jim Marshall begins.

Tom Zimberoff
San Francisco
March 28, 2010

[Asterisks added to profanities in the text to avoid triggering spam blockers and firewall protections. —Ed.]

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Posted on Tuesday, 30 March 2010 at 10:22 AM in Photographers, historical | | Comments (5)

Saturday, 27 March 2010

'People of the 20th Century'

The other day, writing about August Sander, I said, "I never did buy, and have not seen, the 7-volume set. I've heard a few things about it, both good and a little more reserved than that, but I'm too cheap to drop that much money just to find out for myself."

Very shortly thereafter, Yellowstone Traders came on board with an ad for their super-soft buffalo-hair (warmer than sheep's wool) photographer's gloves (you can get them full-finger, fingerless, or one of each—the fingerless one for your shooting hand).

And a little money came over the transom. I decided to interpret that as a sign from God.

So I bought the 7-volume set. For, naturally, the longtime price of $195.

Merely a matter of hours after that, we got a comment from a reader called dovydas that the 7-volume set only cost $122.85. What? I looked, and sure enough. This was...of interest. Since I had just paid $72.15 more than that...or 37% more, as Amazon helpfully calculates for me on the sales page.

So the next morning I called Amazon. After some discussion, the nice lady decided to make a "one-time exception" for me, and credit me back the $72.15.

Whew. (You go, God.)

The "7-volume set" is of course August Sander: People of the 20th Century by Susanne Lange, Director of the Photography Collection/SK Cultural Foundation, in Cologne, Germany, with essays by Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, a scholar on the staff of the Foundation, and made with the cooperation of Gerd Sander, the photographer's grandson and an expert on his grandfather's work. First published in Germany by Schirmer/Mosel, and in the U.S.A. by Abrams, to mark the 125th anniversary of Sander's birth. It's the most complete set of Sander's work extant, with 1400 pages overall and more than 150 never-before-published images.

It just arrived. 

7volset

(Once again with a camera included for scale.)

I am pleased to report that it is magnificent. If you think about it, Sander's great document of the Weimar years is for most of us a myth—that is, we see a few, or a few dozen, or (in the case of single-volume books) maybe a hundred examples, and we're told of the existence of the project as a whole, but we never really get to see more evidence of its existence. There are lots of things here I've never seen before. This is a feast.

The reproduction quality is very, very good—not exact duplicates of original prints by any means, but plenty good enough to allow you to concentrate on the pictures. The paper is of very high quality. The size of the pictures is perfect—just one photograph per spread, with the title on the facing page. Exceptionally clean. The text is in German, English, and French. The typography and design are elegant, refined and restrained.

Rather touchingly (because nobody's going to remove the dust covers), the sleek cloth bindings are all different colors.

7volset-2

(Okay, and you wonder where Moe's hair stylist got his inspiration.)

This is the sort of thing that warms the cockles of my heart, although I'm not sure that the medical establishment would agree that my heart has cockles. It is very important to the history of photography in the 20th century, very good as bookcraft, and very cheap: if I get my calculator out, the new price comes to $17.55 per volume. I've paid more than $122.85 for one book in the past. Just not often.

For the sake of balance, I'll mention that the slipcase box is not of very high quality. The sort of thing they probably intend for you to throw away, but of course you can't unless you want to cripple the set's resale value, since book collectors are such sticklers for original condition.

At any rate, a strong, nay urgent, buy recommendation, if you have any interest in this work, or think you might have in the future. I realize that for most people's libraries, a one-volume greatest hits will be more appropriate*. And I can see why such a set as this would sell slowly—'tis indeed a lot of Sander, and the cost establishes (or established) a highish bar, even for mavens such as myself. Yet this won't be around forever, and it's the sort of thing that will become unobtanium one day (like the two-volume hardcover set of Kinsey, Photographer that I didn't buy when I could and now will never get to own). It's worth having in any solid library of photography books, and it will always be worth having in any solid library of photography books. The as-of-Thursday price makes it a fire sale—if not a trample-the-security-guards-at-the-door kind of sale—for those interested. (The price is €152 at Amazon Germany and £101 in the U.K. )

Right away, takes its place at the very heart of my own little library. I'm sure I will spend many contented hours with it. Myth no more.

Mike

*If that's you, I recommend Schirmer/Mosel's August Sander: Face [of] Our Time (in Deutsch, Antlitz der Zeit) from Schirmer's Visual Library, a near pocket-sized recreation of the book with which Sander introduced his project to the world. Small, but it's only $9.95, and it's a nice little volume and a nice taste of the work.

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Posted on Saturday, 27 March 2010 at 11:14 AM in Books, Photographers, historical | | Comments (22)

Thursday, 25 March 2010

Artists Ain't Saints: Jim Marshall, 1936-2010

By Ctein

I'm feeling mildly discombobulated. I just found out an hour ago that Jim Marshall died in his sleep last night (Tuesday night) in his hotel room in New York City; he was there for another show opening and to give some lectures. There are no details at this time. I imagine his body simply...stopped. He was 74, and honestly it was amazing he made it this far.

There's a photo of Jim himself here.

Jim didn't treat that body well. Understand that I hate the term "substance abuse." Our strait-laced, puritanical society considers any use of mind altering substances outside of the legally-accepted norm to be "abuse." Sorry to burst that bubble...wait, no, I'm not sorry at all...but society is filled with highly productive people who spend substantial amounts of each day in, um, altered states. They use, they don't abuse.

Well, that wasn't Jim. Jim abused. He abused in spades. His clean and sober periods were short intermissions in a lifelong tightrope act. Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll epitomized most of Jim's adult life (okay, I'm guessing about the sex part, but, you know, given the temper and the times, it's kind of hard to imagine it any other way.)

Blog131figure1

Copyright by Jim Marshall, all rights reserved

I started printing for Jim in April of 2001. Six dye transfer prints of this photograph of Miles Davis. Up to that point I had run my business on a cash-up-front basis. Made billing and bookkeeping a hell of a lot simpler. I told Jim that's how I worked and he said, "Sure, no problem!" By the third invoice, he was having me run an account for him. It just kind of happened. Jim was one of those forces of nature; he liked to do things his way, and the whole world warped itself to make it possible.

Practically the first thing Jim told me was to make a print for myself of anything I printed for him and he'd sign it. For all I know, my collection of Jim Marshall prints is worth more than everything he paid me over the last decade. He could alternate between being ridiculously tightfisted and incredibly generous. Mess with his intellectual property rights and he would go for your throat, literally and legally. Lots of people tried to rip him off, sometimes people who should know better like major magazines and television networks, sometimes just people who thought they could get away with putting a photograph of his on a T-shirt. Jim made a lot of money off of the many people who tried to rip him off. But ask Jim for something, almost anything, and if he didn't think you were out to rip him off, he'd say yes.

Blog131figure2

Copyright by Jim Marshall, all rights reserved

I digitally printed this photograph for Jim late last year. I thought it was one of the best photos of his I'd ever printed; it was like rich velvety chocolate. When I brought my copy to him to be signed, I told him how good I thought that photo was and that I was going to give it to my best friend as a birthday gift, because she was a huge Miles fan. Jim said, "That's cool. Print up another one for yourself and I'll sign that too."

Unless you follow the music business or have been a fan of Jim's, you really have no idea how many famous photographs he made. Check out the collections on his website, and be sure to click through the little square thumbnails; they're crops for identification purposes, not the whole photograph. People going to that site to buy work know what they're looking for, and the thumbnails work as commerce, not as a good displays of art.

But there's a whole body of Jim's work that's hardly known, civil rights photography that he did in the South before he became famous for music photographs. It's serious, profound, fascinating work. He should be famous for it. Of course he won't be. He'll be remembered for his iconic music photographs, unless some curator "rediscovers" him 50 years from now.

Not endearing
Then there's the other Jim. It drove me crazy that he'd casually throw out epithets like "nigger," especially because I knew that if there were ever a white man who didn't have a racist bone in his body (and I'm not convinced there is) it was probably Jim. It's that Jim didn't care; when he felt like being offensive, he was oblivious to who he offended and how. He just vented. Some people would say he spoke his mind. Some, from a distance, might even think that was an endearing trait. I was there. It so very much wasn't.

And if he was on a tear, you didn't want to be in his way. There's a story that in his younger days he and Hunter Thompson got in a pissing match and Hunter Thompson backed down. I entirely believe. Nobody wanted to be on the wrong side of Jim, and we all did a lot of tiptoeing and a certain amount of fancy footwork to make sure we didn't get there.

It didn't always work. Two years after I started printing for Jim, he took great offense at something I did. I insisted upon giving him an estimate for a rather large job before I started on it. It set him off; he was hugely offended that I didn't trust him to pay me no matter what the job cost. Go figure. Have I mentioned that Jim was not entirely rational?

He was so upset he wouldn't even talk to me about it. Ever. I didn't hear from him again for four years.

I got off lucky. A colleague of mine who was doing custom film processing for Jim some years ago had a gun pulled on him! Kind of soured that relationship.

Finally, Amelia, his walks-on-water assistant, convinced him in 2007 that he really needed to be dealing with me if he wanted to get any more dye transfer prints made. But he still couldn't stand the idea of talking to me. Everything had to go through her as an intermediary. That nonsense went on for about eight months. I knew it was ridiculous; Amelia knew it was ridiculous. Jim was being...well...Jim. But by this point I'd figured out some of Jim's buttons. I made a nice digital print of one of my photographs he really liked (the Apollo 17 liftoff), signed it to him personally, giftwrapped it, and gave it to Amelia to give to him as a Christmas gift.

Mid-morning, December 26, the phone rings: "Hey, Ctein, buddy, it's Jim. I really love that photograph. Thanks so much, man! I need some stuff printed, when can you have them for me?"

And life was back to normal with Jim Marshall, if I am allowed to use the words "Jim Marshall" and "normal" in the same sentence. I managed to avoid ticking him off after that, although there were a few perilous missteps along the way. It worked out okay; if he pushed too hard, I pushed back...very, very carefully. And rarely without consulting with Amelia, in case I was about to misstep. Sometimes I felt like dealing with Jim was not like walking on eggs—it was like walking on hedgehogs. Barefoot. At least he never threatened my life.

The last time I printed for Jim, it was three dye transfers of Jimi Hendrix in his blue shirt and a digital print of Janis on her psychedelic Porsche, a previously unprinted and unpublished photograph. Not the same one that's in his books. This one has the trademark Janis grin. I like it better.

Blog131figure3

Copyright by Jim Marshall, all rights reserved

And that's all he wrote. Possibly the most generous and irritating man I've ever worked with. I'd be surprised if I ever meet anyone more generous. I sure as hell hope I never meet anyone more irritating. Alkie, druggie, abusive, and open-hearted. An exhausting combination.

F*ck that sh*t
Some of you reading this may be mildly offended by the tone of what I've written. Or even majorly offended. Too bad. This is the kind of attitude that Jim respected and liked. I'm really sorry he's gone, and he'd be happy to know that I'm really sorry he's gone. Jim always wanted badly to be liked. And I really did like that royal pain in the ass. But if I got all pious and holy and handwringing on him now, his ghost would rise up to haunt me, rattling chains and saying, as Jim frequently did, "F*ck that sh*t, man!"

I can't wait to see the photos the man is gonna send back from hell. They are going to be dynamite!

Jim Marshall, dead at 74. I could say R.I.P., but honestly I think that would be altogether last on his wish list.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column on TOP appears every Thursday morning.

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Featured Comment by Paul: "Of course my favourite Jim Marshall images are those of Jimi Hendrix. I suppose there will be one big party this weekend up in the sky. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and loads more all posing for Jim Marshall. There will be one very lonely M4 missing his owner down here."

Marshallleica
One of Jim Marshall's M4 Leicas

Featured Comment by David Seelig: "I knew Jim for 25 years or so nice obit Ctein and very accurate as to how Jim was, I will miss him."

Featured Comment by Nick Despotopoulos: "As the guy whose company built & ran Jim's website for the past year plus, a collector of his work and a close friend since 1988 I can say that Ctein has it the way it was man...no sh*t! Also let me say that working with Ctein on Jim's stuff for the past few years has been a pleasure—he's a true professional. Now where's that bottle of Wisers Whisky...Nick Despotopoulos, Groovy Collectibles LLC for groovycollectibles.com."

Featured Comment by Jeff Kausch: "Jim was an Advertising Photographers of America San Francisco Executive Board Member, a close friend of many APA members, and a central character in the Bay Area Photo Community for decades, so we have created a special section on the APA SF blog to help honor him. Photographer Jock McDonald and agent Norman Maslov are just two of Jim’s friends who have already contributed. If you have any stories or photos of Jim or relevant links to share, please email them to us. Thanks."

Featured Comment by Fern: "Thank You...you have so beautifully captured the essence of this man. Through the lovely Amelia I had the honor of meeting Jim. While perusing his photos one afternoon when he graciously offered to donate any photo I wanted for my special breast cancer fundraiser, and before I could even think about leaving after being mesmerized for hours by his incredible work, I had to celebrate some occasion with Jim, who would simply not allow me to decline several shots of fine whiskey. I also had to work really hard at graciously declining his requests to come away with him for the weekend! Rock on Jim!"

Posted on Thursday, 25 March 2010 at 12:25 AM in Ctein, Obituaries, Photographers, historical | | Comments (69)

Wednesday, 24 March 2010

August Sander

Sander

I'm wondering if anybody has seen this book, and if so, what you can tell me about its quality, especially the quality of the reproductions...? Schirmer-Mosel is usually pretty reliable in that respect, but it's never wise to take too much on faith.

In a way, I'm haunted by Sander. At the end of 1982, beginning of 1983, I saw a show at the Corcoran in Washington called "August Sander: Photographs of an Epoch (1904–1959)." Geoff Wittig spoke the other day about going to see the New Topographics show "obsessively," and I certainly visited that Sander show "obsessively"—the school I attended was in the museum's basement, and there was even a back way up. I'd go meditate on Sander prints that winter the way some people go outside to take cigarette breaks.

I don't think I've ever seen a better illustration of the old dictum that you've got to see original prints—and that reproductions (and now, online JPEGs) are no substitute. Even the prints made from Sander's original negatives by his son Gunther (or were the modern prints made by his grandson, Gerd? I don't recall now) don't measure up. The original prints were so...soulful. I was deep into learning how to be a printmaker at the time—I later earned my living as a custom printer, and that expertise (largely anachronistic now) is what led me into writing for darkroom magazines—and Sander's charcoally blacks seemed fathomless somehow, more like darkness than like paper. I've never seen prints quite like his, before or since.

Sander was famously attempting to photograph "types." Of course his people are not types, they're individuals. But I think the key to his great project (one of the great beacons in photo history arguing the merits of pursuing a consistent, persistent long-term project) is that his sociological ambitions allowed him to cut through the usual petty tyrannies of portraiture. They allowed him a crucial documentary distance. Let's face it, most portraits have a purpose—they're either made for some client or they're made for some specific reason. Their purpose is almost never just to show what someone looked like on the particular occasion the picture was taken. Sander's portraits are connected, representative, and objective, in a way that modern ironic art photographers often reference but seldom equal.

Sander's "sociology" had a spiritual aspect too—after all, his lifelong muse and guide was Goethe.

In Sander's case I've actually preferred to own cheap books, where the reproductions forthrightly do not pretend to measure up to the originals. Books with higher aspirations seem less honest somehow—by implicitly purporting to represent the work faithfully, their lies go underground, become furtive. Poor reproduction flies its inadequacy like a flag, and doesn't put on airs.

I never did buy, and have not seen, the 7-volume set. I've heard a few things about it, both good and a little more reserved than that, but I'm too cheap to drop that much money just to find out for myself.

Still, every so often I get a hunger to revisit Sander, and I find myself, in my mind, heading up the back stairs at the Corcoran again, to go visit those rows of prints alone....

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on Wednesday, 24 March 2010 at 10:33 AM in Books, Photographers, historical | | Comments (24)

Tuesday, 23 March 2010

A Photographic Love Story

Margarethardman
Margaret Hardman by Edward Chambré Hardman

She became his assistant at age 17; he was ten years older. When they parted, she tormented him with tales of other lovers. They exchanged increasingly warm letters, and ended up happily married for years. She ran the household and the business, not unlike thousands of other husband-and-wife photography businesses down to the present day. When she died, of cancer, he mourned, heartbroken, for the rest of his long life.

Their love story is preserved in their letters and papers.

The more forceful personality, she was a fine photographer in her own right, and recently curators have been trying to sort out his pictures from hers—giving her her first solo show more than 100 years after her birth (in Liverpool, England).

They were working photographers. A scrap of doggerel she wrote for him:

Happy days and health and fun
And easy smiling sitters
(Not the kind that growl and scowl
And give us all the jitters)

It's a nice photographic love story, from Britain's Guardian.

Mike
(Thanks to Gavin McLelland)

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Sean: "I watched a great documentary on Edward Chambré Hardman on BBC Four a couple of years ago. Narrated by one of Liverpool's favourite sons, John Peel, it can be found on YouTube and should not be missed."

Mike replies: What a lovely show—I really enjoyed that. Thanks for the link, Sean.

Posted on Tuesday, 23 March 2010 at 08:54 AM in Photographers, historical | | Comments (13)

Tuesday, 16 March 2010

Two Deaths

NASA photographer William Paul (Bill) Taub, 1923–2010

"Though he was rarely credited by name, Mr. Taub took nearly every official picture of the astronauts who led the nation's early forays into space and played a central role in shaping public perception of NASA's work." From the Washington Post obituary by Emma Brown. He died on February 20th.

TaubNew York City welcomes Apollo 11 crewmen. Pictured in the lead car, from the right, are astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Commander; Michael Collins, Command Module Pilot; and Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., Lunar Module Pilot. The three astronauts teamed for the first manned lunar landing, on July 20, 1969. Taub's photographs appeared in Life magazine, Look, and National Geographic, among others. Photo by Bill Taub, NASA/washingtonpost.com (Washington Post caption).

Taub-2Bill Taub (seen getting a blood test as part of the quarantine procedure for Apollo 11)

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Civil Rights Photographer Charles Moore, 1931–2010

TOP reader Terry Manning, Multimedia editor of the Montgomery [Ala.] Advertiser, writes:

Mr. Moore worked here for a while during the early years of the Civil Rights Movement. I had the chance to meet him in 2005 when he came to document the 40th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery March, better known as Bloody Sunday.

He was a nice man and very down to earth. Nothing in his demeanor betrayed his legendary status. And if I recall correctly, he shot the event in 2005 with a Canon SLR and brought along a point-and-shoot digital because he was wanted photos for keepsakes and so he could shoot video. Even at his age, he was still learning. A real loss.

Charles Moore died on March 11th.

Moore Birmingham, Alabama, 1963. Photo by Charles Moore, Blackstar/Eyevine

Moore-2 Charles Moore

 

Powerfuldays

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Charles Moore's book, Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore (U.K. link).


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Mike
(Thanks to Al Benas and Terry Manning)

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Featured Comment by Jim Metzger: "I was at the parade in NYC for the Apollo 11 Astronauts. My father owned a liquor store on the corner of Bleecker Street and Lafayette Street. I was 15.

"In those days the parades ran a much longer route than they do today and my father's neighborhood, which is north of City Hall, was all light manufacturing then. (It is NYU territory now). Not many people were on the street. I stood on a step stool and got off three frames from my Nikon F (bought second hand by my father as a gift) as the parade passed by.

"I immediately dropped my Tri-X at Berkey Photo Lab on 13th street for processing. Imagine my dismay when the film came back, perfectly exposed, except for those three frames. They were missing! I never saw them again. My opportunity to shoot for Life, Nat Geo, or Time was crushed (he said tongue in cheek).

"I had a home darkroom shortly thereafter.

"Berkey is out of business, serves them right, and I still have the Nikon."

Featured Comment by Steven Alexander: "I remember how cool Charles Moore was in the most trying circumstances, at Oxford, Miss., when any outsider but especially the press were in real danger of bodily harm, he just quietly did his job and helped other do theirs. It was a pleasure to work around him and as everyone has said he was a gentleman. As a photojournalist his work was clear and to the point, tight and involved. I am so glad to have known him."

Posted on Tuesday, 16 March 2010 at 11:25 PM in News and Occasions, Photographers, historical | | Comments (11)

Wednesday, 17 February 2010

Larry Sultan Video

Sultan Photo by Larry Sultan

Daylight Magazine has a nice 5-minute video presentation about the work of the late Larry Sultan, made in collaboration with Obit Magazine.

I mentioned, in the "Blue Guitar" post, having just seen some of Larry's work in the Vernacular show in Chicago.

A shame there's no current book of his work.

Mike

UPDATE: It turns out Larry's book The Valley is still available in the U.S. I've never even seen the book, though, and I've never knowingly seen any of the work from it, so I can't say anything about its contents.

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Posted on Wednesday, 17 February 2010 at 07:17 AM in Photographers, historical | | Comments (10)

Thursday, 11 February 2010

The Impatient Sailor: Prokudin-Gorskii Revisited

P-g 100-year-old color photograph: Church of the Resurrection in the Grove, Kostroma, 1910

It's been a while since we linked to Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii back in 2007. Recently the MediaCenter blog of the Denver Post helpfully strung together some of his pictures from the Library of Congress collection on a page, making them easier to look at. The oldest ones just turned 101 years old.

I particularly like the ones where a small element in the picture is out of color register because it moved between exposures, like the impatient sailor in Crew of the steamship "Sheksna." Hold still, ya jerk!

You can read a description of Sergei Mikhailovich's technique here. (And you complain about ISO 3200!)

Prokudin-Gorskii, who documented the old Imperial Russia from a rail car, left his homeland in 1918. His archive is now at the Library of Congress of the United States.

Oh, and if you like early color photography, I heartily recommend David Okuefuna's The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn's Archives of the Planet. French banker Albert Kahn's mission was no less than world peace: he felt that documentary photographs would foster international understanding and dispel hatred. His project ended when he was bankrupted by the Great Depression. The write-up calls this book "a history buff's delight," and I have to agree. It's kind of late in the game to go inserting new landmarks into the standard history of photography—the accepted outlines of which are already pretty well calcified—but Kahn and Pokudin-Gorskii belong.

Mike
(Thanks to Pete Wilkinson)

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Posted on Thursday, 11 February 2010 at 08:02 AM in Photographers, historical | | Comments (14)

Friday, 29 January 2010

H.C.-B.: The Invisible Man

By Jim Hughes

More than any other practitioner, I think, Henri Cartier-Bresson has defined the art of small-camera photography. Defying categorization (that bane of any true original), H.C.-B., neither photojournalist nor documentarian, seemingly traversed the earth in search of telling human images—decisive moments, he himself called them—that in their inevitable lyricism strike me as unspoken tone poems in black and white. It is too easy to say that he photographed people, often at their most vulnerable, or even that he captured the essence of their lives, both of which were certainly true. He somehow managed to photograph time itself, stopping that great equalizer in its tracks. It is almost as if the instrument of his art—and make no mistake, it is the music of life that he played—existed on another plane entirely.

Yet when I looked upon that instrument, it appeared to be a camera, nothing more. Indeed, the day I first met Cartier-Bresson, he was wearing not the famous black-taped classic Leica I expected to see, but an even more miniaturized version, the then-brand-new Leica CL, a superb design now long-discontinued and highly sought after, that was no bigger and almost as simple as some of today’s ubiquitous point-and-shoots. The International Center of Photography in New York (then located at 94th and Fifth on Museum Mile in what had once been a grand old mansion) was planning an exhibit, and as a photo-magazine editor I had been invited to meet the great man in person. History was everywhere. We gathered in one of the upstairs meeting rooms. Cornell Capa, ICP's founder and Robert's brother, was there. The conversation, conducted at first in a kind of Anglicized French no doubt to accommodate me (Cartier-Bresson made his reluctance to speak English quite obvious), quickly turned to Magnum, an unusual cooperative of independent-minded photographers who never seemed able to agree on much of anything, but who nonetheless managed, individually and as a group, to produce work of unparalleled excellence.

I had expected to encounter the gentle soul of a poet. Instead, the quirky man to whom I was introduced was edgier than I could ever have imagined, possessed of a sharply caustic intellect that, I realize in retrospect, might actually have been calculated to put people off—or perhaps just people like me. He was, I'd been told, an aristocrat. He talked of his growing frustration with (or maybe it was disdain for) photography, and his concomitant need to return to his roots: drawing and painting, the few examples of which I’d seen had left me cold, left me wondering how a great master in one field would fail so completely to recognize his mediocrity in another. But no matter. If Henri Cartier-Bresson chose to be full of himself, I was sure he’d earned the right. Genius is as genius does.

At one point, a young man with a Nikon F appeared at the open door. I paid him little mind; at ICP, one regularly encountered young people carrying cameras, all eagerly shooting each other's nooks and crannies as they earnestly went about learning how to make incisive pictures. But this fellow was different; he seemed barely out of his teens—if indeed he was—and he appeared to be genuinely starstruck. It is not often one gets to meet one's true-life hero in the flesh.

"Monsieur Cartier-Bresson," the young man exclaimed in what sounded like his best prep-school French as he brought his Nikon to his eye, moved in and squeezed off a series of exposures with, I think, a 105mm lens. At the last ka-thunk of the mirror, Cartier-Bresson sprung to his feet, literally sprung as if his wiry body had been coiled tight, just waiting for a reason to release itself.

"You must not photograph me!" he shrieked, his English suddenly crystal-clear. "No one is allowed to photograph me! Everyone must know that..."

Continue reading "H.C.-B.: The Invisible Man" »

Posted on Friday, 29 January 2010 at 06:39 PM in Jim Hughes, Photographers, historical | | Comments (48)

Monday, 18 January 2010

Dennis Stock and Visual Haiku

Feininger
The model is Dennis Stock and the photographer was
Andreas Feininger, at LIFE Magazine

By Jim Hughes

I was saddened to learn last week of the passing of my old friend Dennis Stock. I was surprised to read in obits and tributes references to him as unknown or under-appreciated, since in my circles back in the day he was a legend of sorts—although not, like some, of his own making. Dennis was never by nature a glad-hander, nor would he willingly suffer fools. By some accounts, he was "difficult," but I never found him to be.

If memory serves, I first met him in 1969, when the magazine I was briefly editing, Travel & Camera (formerly U.S. Camera and soon to be reinvented, without me, as Travel & Leisure), used his wonderful color photographs for a National Parks issue. "I'm glad to see you're not a member of the 'old boys' club' around here," I remember him announcing with a wry grin some time later at Pop Photo, where I had landed to do the Annual. Thereafter, we had many a long conversation, over lunch or in my office. He had strong, well thought out opinions, and they might spill out at the drop of a hat, so to speak. I found him to be as much philosopher as photographer. For some reason, he brought to mind a Talmudic scholar, although we never talked religion. In any event, there was nothing shallow about Dennis Stock.

In 1974, he did a book for Kodansha, A Haiku Journey, for which he undertook to follow the path of "The Narrow Road to the Far North" traveled by the 17th century Japanese poet Bashó, whose haikus Dennis illustrates with photographic poetry of his own. As Dennis wrote in a text for the book:

While reading haiku, I have often sensed a visual perception that must be at work while the poet writes. The haiku form, in its conciseness and with its candid expression of detail, reminds us of what is also necessary in photography. We reach into nature, frame poised and focus selective. Then with shutter-speed response, we freeze the fleeting moment—leaving just enough unsaid for the viewer to add or extract at will. There is a subtle collaboration between artist and audience—and so it is with appreciating a haiku.

...We were separated only by three centuries and the breadth of a blade of grass, and I sensed Bashó at my side.

Jim
(Thanks to Tyler Monson)

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Featured Comment by Rod S.: "I recall reading a fascinating interview with Dennis Stock that appeared in Popular Photography around 1977–78. What stood out to me then as a 21-year-old was the clarity of his insights into his actions and responsibility as a photographer. His comments impressed me to the extent that I put the interview into the hands of a best friend and insisted he read it (he, too, was impressed). Indeed, I can still visualise one of the pages, a left-hand page that had a central photo of Mr. Stock leaning on one knee."

Jim Hughes replies: Rod's memory is correct. A black-and-white and color portfolio by Dennis Stock was published in the March 1978 edition of Popular Photography. I know because I have the yellowing, dog-eared copy right here in front of me, which I saved, of course, because I wrote the text, helped select and sequence the photographs, and conducted the interview you mention, which appeared separately at the back of the magazine.

Here's a little of what I wrote back then, in the intro: "[Stock's] color photographs of nature are as sensually lyrical as his black-and-white pictures of people are intellectually cutting, and his opinions on the current state of photography make a lot of people uncomfortable, myself included. "I look for humor and beauty in life, and that's an unfashionable position these days," he says. The fact is, Stock has mellowed a lot. When I first encountered him in the late 1960s, I had the audacity to ask what lens he used for one of his National Parks photographs. 'Tell your readers that I shoot through the bottom of a Coke bottle,' he barked as he hung up. Now, he can note, 'Equipped with 35mm SLRs and a collection of lenses, I trip, stumble, trek, and climb into a playground of promise....'

"He has a lot more to say, and he says it with the zeal of a man whose religion is photography."

By the way, the photograph Rod recalls so vividly, of Dennis on one knee, a camera in one hand and a daisy in the other, was made by Dan Budnick, another old friend.

When Dennis was 18 and just out of the Navy, he took a course with Berenice Abbott under the GI Bill. "It wasn't quite right," he told me during the interview. "I asked her where I could get a job as an assistant." She sent him to "a man by the name of Smith. So I went up to see this man by the name of Smith—it was W. Eugene, of course—and he said he needed an assistant and hired me. Well, Gene can be very naive. I was this brassy kid off the street, who [still] knew nothing about photography. Gene needed somebody with real qualifications. So I worked for him about two weeks. But in the parting moments, he said in his sweet way—you know, I adore the man—'You ought to work for a guy by the name of Gjon Mili; he'll really kick your ass around.'"

Dennis worked for Mili for four years, and presumably the ass-kicking worked—"four years of real apprenticeship, European style. $25 a week, unlimited time for developing, printing until three in the morning, learning, learning, learning. Smith was right. Mili was a very good master, very demanding but very generous. I had a classic upbringing in photography."

In 1951, Stock won first prize in LIFE magazine's young photographers' contest, soon joined Magnum at the invitation of Robert Capa, and the rest, as they say, is history.

When I asked Dennis to comment on the then-current (1978, remember) state of photographic education, he replied in typically direct and irascible fashion:

"Bear in mind that a large portion of our critics, educators or historians cannot take a good picture or recognize one. So it's very easy for them to lionize the [William] Egglestons and the types who indulge in craftless banality. Push them up. It's perfect for them. Damn it, when I came into photography, a Smith, a Mili, a Haas, a Cartier-Bresson...boy, they were hard to reach for. You never believed you would reach that level, but you tried like hell. But they were immense distances ahead of you. Well, look who's coming down the pike now. How many people are doing Les Krims photographs? Ralph Gibson? I'm sorry, who's doing Diane Arbus? Everybody and his brother! They're easy to imitate. It's most distressing."

Okay, enough of my trip down memory lane. But a little history does go a long way, don't you think? 

Posted on Monday, 18 January 2010 at 06:28 PM in Jim Hughes, Photographers, historical, Photographic aesthetics | | Comments (23)

Sunday, 01 November 2009

Lost Ziegfeld Photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston

Acjmaybe Alfred Cheney Johnston [see the first Featured Comment below for details]

By Ava Land

Gibsongirlstamp Alfred Cheney Johnston was discovered by Flo Ziegfeld of the famed Ziegfeld Follies. Flo was a master of publicity and when he saw what "Cheney" was capable of creating with a large studio camera and glass plate negatives, Ziegfeld hired the young photographer on the spot. Cheney was shrewd beyond his years thanks to being mentored by family friend and famous illustrator Charles Dana Gibson who became famous for the Gibson Girl drawings. Gibson advised Cheney to make sure every photograph of his had the name, Alfred Cheney Johnston, clearly stamped on it. Thanks to that bit of advice Cheney would become world reknown [sic] for his amazingly beautiful photographs of the gorgeous stars of the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway...

READ ON at articlesbase.com

[articlesbase.com bio] Ava Land is a freelance magazine and web writer. For more information on the stunning photographic images of Alfred Cheney Johnston go to: http://alfredcheneyjohnston.com.

Mike
(Thanks to Eolake)

Ed. Note: A wistful, semitragic story, I thought, of a photographer done in by another depression. Eolake and I aren't sure if the photograph here is by A.C.J. or not, although it sure looks like one of his to me. Does anybody have the book? Also, A.C.J. is no relation to me, at least as far as I know—although if you go back far enough, to the 1500s and earlier, we're doubtless both distant scions of the same eponymous Scottish border clan. Inset: Gibson Girl 32-cent postage stamp.  —MJ

Featured Comment by Eric: "Page 111 of Jazz Age Beauties: "Helen Henderson, ca. 1922–25. Henderson appeared in the Follies of 1923 and 1925 and played the part of 'Other Hostess' in Night Hostess in 1928."

Mike replies: Thanks Eric!

Posted on Sunday, 01 November 2009 at 01:04 PM in Photographers, historical | | Comments (4)

Thursday, 29 October 2009

Roy DeCarava

The saga of the Africans in the Americas—black history—is one of the great stories of the Western world, central to what the United States has been, and what it is now, and one of our most complex and enduring dramas. That story's greatest visual poet in the 20th century was Roy DeCarava, who has just passed, at the age of 89. He was in my opinion one of America's greatest photographers.

He was a black radical to his essence, often bitter out of proportion to his own success and importance, but in his art he was infinitely generous, almost tender, quietly creating an extended lyrical portrait of a people he felt were being ignored and undocumented.

Photography can't show the universal except in the specific, and he found his subject in life in Harlem, often centering around music. His pictures are free of cant and advocacy; they aren't political, they aren't pressed into the service of a message. He gives to his subjects what he always wanted for himself and his work: respect, regard, acceptance.

Like many black and white photographer artists, Mr. DeCarava* created his own tonal palette for his photographs. He chose to print with extremely low contrast and so dark that details often barely emerged from blackness, in what I have always felt was a sort of visual allegory for his feelings about race, pushing both effects past what many observers could accept. So much so that both book publishers and now online sources have chosen to "fix" his intentions for his work by making his pictures more conventionally contrasty, and lightened. The Times' Lens blog has failed in this respect—their presentation of his pictures yesterday accompanying his obituary misrepresents the work. 

Peter Galassi's retrospective, an indisputably great book and one of the finest volumes in my collection (it completely captures me every single time I look through it), treads the edge of this tendency with perfect adroitness, adding just a little of the air of lightness and just a little extra contrast, preserving the feel of Mr. DeCarava's prints while making them easier both to look at and to see.

Mrdecarava
Roy DeCarava, from Budd Mishkin's NY1 interview

I've long felt that photography—indeed, all art—is partly a matter of personal chemistry, in the same mysterious way that romantic chemistry works. Some work speaks to you and touches you in ways that are visceral and emotional, not just formal and intellectual. Some work matters in ways that obliterates all the noise and haste of rank and disputation and competing claims, and of dense artspeak. I just love Roy DeCarava's work, just love it, and often return to it. It's made me happy that he reached contentment in his old age; he always knew the significance of the great monolith of his life's accomplishment. Tonight I'll put on some of the of the music he loved (Ben Webster's Soulville, maybe, and, naturally, Coltrane) and look through one of my treasured books of his, sending this artist all praise and humble thanks.

Mike

*My policy has long been to refer to everyone by their first names here, under the premise—overly hopeful though it may be—that we are all not only equals but friends in our shared passion for photographs and photography. (A few older, established photographers and éminences grise have indeed objected.) But for some reason I cannot do that with Mr. DeCarava, especially now—he always demanded respect, and was prickly about even its cursory forms. I don't think he would appreciate my calling him by his given name at any time, and especially on this occasion.

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ADDENDUM: Janne Moren has discovered that James Pomerantz has posted Christopher Knight's 1996 L.A. Times review of Roy DeCarava's Retrospective show online.

Featured Comment by Aaron: "Terry Gross of Fresh Air replayed a great interview with Roy DeCarava today: well worth the listen on npr.org."

Posted on Thursday, 29 October 2009 at 04:05 PM in News and Occasions, Photographers, historical | | Comments (29)

Thursday, 22 October 2009

Graflex Graphic

Weegeead


PubliceyeI ran across the old camera ad above entirely by chance the other night while browsing through a 1945 issue of LIFE magazine on Google books. Of course old Arthur Fellig is long gone now—he died at the end of 1968—but Joe Pesci played him in the movie "Public Eye," which is as close to immortality as most photographers are likely to get.

The cameras linger still. There were so many Speed Graphics and Crown Graphics made that they're still common on Ebay. (Like this one—but note that this is not an endorsement.) Many of them work fine, too, or can be made to work fine. You can mount a modern lens if you want to, but the old 127mm and 135mm Ektars and Optars and so forth are pretty good. With just a little mechanical aptitude you can figure out for yourself how to reverse the front standard to get a little front tilt. Its primary limitation as a tripod camera—a field view camera substitute—is that the back is fixed and can't be rotated to vertical. The old press guys just rotated the camera, same way you do your SLR. Like the cat at the bottom of the picture below. Or they took a wider view and cropped to what they wanted. The negative was so big you can do that.

Pressphotogs The ones with the top-mounted rangefinders are the latest, but why not an earlier one? There's no shame in toting a tatty Graflex—maybe the opposite. Cheryl Jacobs Nicolai, who's been much in evidence on TOP the past few days, owns and uses one that dates from the 1930s. As long as the bellows are sound—and the shutter works—you can usually get them taking pictures again.

Graflexbook The ad mentions two books, and you can even still get those. A little digging turned up a copy of Graphic Graflex Photography on Ebay. It was penned by the indefatigable Willard Morgan. And The Naked City is still in print—sort of. The available paperback is un-recommendable because of its poor quality reproduction. That's not poor quality in a good way, either. I'm not going to link to it. Hold out for a hardcover from the '40s, which shouldn't be too expensive if you find a later edition at a used bookstore.

The Naked City would be a good candidate for reissue, but I'd like to see it as a replica of the first rather than a remake. The hardcover from the era has a certain rough but robust charm. Paging through it, you can easily imagine why the pictures hit the more constrained and upright societal norms of the day like a bomb. It's a period piece as much as a masterpiece of photography.

Mike

Weegeethefamous
"Weegee the Famous"

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Featured Comment by Dave Karp: "Pick up a Crown and take a trip into a different era. Make photos with a Kodak or Wollensak lens made in N.Y. Look through a groundglass augmented by an exquisite Kodak Ektalite fresnel. Experience a beautifully engineered and extremely well made piece of photographic machinery. Delightful."

Featured Comment by Martin Rich: 

Realcameras

Featured Comment by David: "For those of you visiting NYC for the Javitz show or to shop at B&H, the 'gentleman with the hat and the Speed Graphic' [left, in Martin Rich's picture above  —Ed.] is Louis Mendes. He and his camera are kind of a local fixture around town. Funny to see him mentioned thrice and photographed twice in the comments."

Featured Comment by Carl Leonardi: "One of the only cameras you could love and hate all at the same time. I really think the camera was made for people with four hands. One to change flash bulbs—one to focus—one to change the film holder—and one to hold the camera. Oops, and one to cock the shutter. Great camera when I was in the army—although I reached for the Leica most of the time."

Screenshot1 

Screenshot 

Featured Comment by Robin Dreyer: "I've owned—and heavily used—several of these. There's good website devoted to Grapic cameras: graflex.org, where you will find geneologies, suggestions, instructions, loving essays, and a forum.

"A few notes for prospective buyers. The 'Speed' Graphic has a big clunky focal plane shutter that—if it works right—goes up to 1/1000, hence the name (that was pretty fast back in the day). This is no advantage on a tripod, so a better choice is the 'Crown' which is the same camera without the extra bulk and weight of the shutter—you just use the lens shutter.

"The top of the line if you aren't using it handheld is the 'Super' also called the 'Super Speed' even though it doesn't have the focal plane shutter. This model is just like the Crown except it has a rotating back—nice for people using their Graphic as a view camera.

"These cameras were entirely designed for handheld use—hence the viewfinder, sports finder, rangefinder, shutter button, etc. But if you are putting it on a tripod and focusing through the glass, you don't have to care whether any of that stuff works (even thought it's all ingenious and cool).

"And the best thing of all is that they made hundreds of thousands of these and they've never really acquired collectible status, so they don't cost much and there are lots of parts around A Crown Graphic with an Ektar or Optimus lens is still the cheapest way to get into large format—this setup will easily make negatives as sharp and richly detailed as what you get from a Hasselblad. And there's no reason you can't put a nice modern view camera lens on them, either.

"Finally, these are beautifully made industrial machines intended for camera-abusing professionals. They do have limitations in the camera movements department, but they are a joy to use."

Featured Comment by K. Praslowicz: "I love that Weegee has an ad for Graflex, and a pretty much identical one for Burke & James."

Featured Comment by Greg Smith: "Hah! Used one in the army as battalion photographer. Wonderful old thing. Had a Polaroid back for it, a closet full of film, and had a lot of fun with that, too.

"But my favorite memory was finding a box full of flashbulbs the size of 100W incandescent bulbs that were absolutely packed with fine magnesium (a guess) wire gauze. Man, they were bright when you set one off. Chain of command photos of new lieutenants, basically a polite mug shot, I would be about six feet away, ƒ/200 gazillion, the Sergeant-Major snickering as he turned his head away from the explosion of light that he knew was coming, and the new lieutenant smiling naively, deer-like, just before he lost his eyebrows to ash and left a Hiroshima-like shadow on the wall behind him...I think they were bulbs for night-time scenes, like football games, designed to light one half of the field. Tremendous fun. You didn't so much trigger that flash as detonate it...."

Featured Comment by Cheryl Jacobs Nicolai: "I have and regularly use a '38 Speed Graphic and a 1950s Press King 4x5, as well as a host of old folders of various sorts. Each of them has a distinct personality and a quirk or two, which make them very rewarding to shoot. My friends are constantly bringing me old camera gear they've come across, to see if I can do anything with it. I've gotten a few strange looks on commercial shoots busting out the old gear, but the results speak for themselves."

Posted on Thursday, 22 October 2009 at 09:31 PM in Books, Cameras, old, Photographers, historical | | Comments (50)

Thursday, 08 October 2009

Irving Penn, Fashion Photographer...

Penn-9

Penn-8

Penn-4 

Penn-5 

Penn-6

Penn-7 

Penn-12

Penn-11 

Penn-2

Penn-1

Penn-10

...I could go on, but I think you get the point.

Mike
(Thanks to Yuanchung Lee)

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Question from Don Bryant: "There has been a suggestion on an internet forum that Penn didn't actually do his platinum printing. Of course anything can be written on the net but the suggestion was made by someone very knowledgeable about the world of platinum printing. I don't know if that is true or not but the rumor is out there. But I have to ask, if the rumor is true, does it matter? I was fortunate to see a couple of large exhibits of his work and was a great admirer of the work I saw firsthand. His dye transfer color prints were great as well. I recall coming back to the exhibits three times to soak it all in."

Answered by Keith Trumbo: "Regarding Mr. Penn and some vague internet accusation questioning whether he made his own platinum prints: I worked for Mr. Penn for many years alongside him as he made his platinum prints. He made the developers, he coated each one personally. I was lucky enough to be an extra pair of hands to help get his work done. Yes I was one of many that helped him in one aspect or another in the production, but I want this to be heard loud and clear—Penn personally made his own platinum prints."

Featured Comment by Calvin Amari: "At least with respect to Penn's career, the institutional guardians of fine art photography are well over marginalizing his commercial work as a fashion photographer. Indeed, things more generally have gone so far to the other extreme—witness the most commercial of Annie Leibovitz's photos with all their gooey appeal displayed in art museums—that I suspect that some readers don't fully appreciate the sardonic nature of Mike's post.

"Despite working at Vogue magazine since 1943, Penn did not have an exhibition at MoMA until the mid-Seventies show of the cigarette butt series that, to me at least, must be seen in their monumental original size to be fully appreciated. Much of the ambiguity of the pictures—both optically (their resemblance to ancient ruined marble columns) and intellectually (the questions of whether he was both literally and figuratively inflating something prosaic into something larger than it can become)—does not come through in reduced size. But there was another sort of ambiguity or tension regarding the exhibition as well. John Szarkowski in his wall essay acknowledged in passing Penn's commercial work in the world of 'haute couture or cuisine' and said, with what appeared to be almost an apologetic sense of embarrassed dismissal, that 'one might guess that he [Penn] has only rarely enjoyed more than a cursory interest in the nominal subject of his [fashion] pictures.' 

"At the same time, it is hard to escape the sense that Penn was not being sardonic himself about this issue of his primary home being located in the ghetto of commercial photography. He had to be smiling to himself and at himself that, after three decades at the top of the profession, cigarette butts became his key to the pantheon. It's not that Penn pulled a fast one, per se. The cigarette butt work reflects keen intellect and craft, but it is interesting to contemplate all the subtle elements of the wit and schmaltz that Penn also brought to that particular proceeding."

Posted on Thursday, 08 October 2009 at 02:41 AM in Photographers, historical, Photographic aesthetics | | Comments (25)

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