The Online Photographer

Moriz Naehr, Gustav Klimt, at his studio on Josefstaedter Strasse, Vienna, 1912. Photo: Getty Images

Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Eugenia Primavesi, 1913. Photo: Toyota Municipal Museum of Art

There's a Klimt show at Tate Liverpool from the 30th of May—lucky Liverpudlians. JPEGs from guardian.co.uk, mod. auct.

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Mike  (Thanks to David E.)

ADDENDUM: Artnet provides an auction record for a print of the Klimt portrait from November of 1999, spells the photographer's first name Moritz (and his last Nähr, although æ is an acceptable way of rendering ä), gives the date as 1910, and shows a whole print thus:

Artnet will also provide auction sale price searches, but ten searches in a month's time costs $30, and I'm not that curious! —MJ, thanks to Antonis

You probably already know of Benjamin Lowy. A warning, if you want to call it that:  you can spend a lot of time at this guy's website. An incredibly rich, solid, vibrant, varied, moving body of work. (I've always wondered what a series of pictures based around gas stations would look like (Eddie Russia's Twentysix Gasoline Stations notwithstanding).)

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Mike

Sanders McNew, Accountant, Kansas

Sanders McNew explores the tension between the concepts of "portraits" and "nudes" in flattering but unretouched photographs of real women.

Mostly nude portraits (not workplace/school friendly)

A very short article about the work

Sanders' Self-portrait

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Mike

Featured Comment by The Accountant from Kansas: "Millions of people every day alter their body in some way: plastic surgery, shaving their beard (or legs, and so on), cutting/coloring their hair, doing their nails, getting tattoos/piercings, putting in their color contact lenses, going on a diet, covering themselves in makeup, building muscle, and so on. There is no 'real-ness' about a person except for how they exist at any given second in time. That's what Sanders captures. These people are 'real' because there didn't exist any preconceived notion of how they should look: someone else's 'real'...before I modeled for Sanders I asked him 'how should I show up? Should I have my hair and makeup done?' and his response was 'This is a portrait. Come how you want to.' He was capturing my real, not his real, or anyone else's real. No art director's real, no makeup artist's real, no photographer's real. My real. The fact that the images are not retouched? I think that ties in to being 'my real.' By retouching an image, the photographer is inflicting their own sense of real on 'my real.' They thought the light should have hit me differently, they though that freckle shouldn't have been there, they thought that scar was distracting. By leaving the image unretouched, Sanders is in fact showing 'my real' and not 'his real.' It's a portrait, it's about the subject.

"A few of the comments mentioned the presentation of Sanders' images. One even mentioned 'a box of images' with no rhyme or reason. In my opinion, if Sanders ordered these into galleries or made them anything but a 'box of images,' it would be inflicting his own sense of 'real' onto them. By categorizing the images into groups, this tends to say that somehow these images are related by something. By not categorizing the images, this shows us how individual each shoot is. Nothing ties them together other than what they all contain (naked, portrait, B&W). Each shoot is unrelated to the next because each person contains a different 'real' at any given time than the next person. A box of images is exactly what these portraits are.

"Why naked? Well I'm sure Sanders has his reasons, but for me I see it as a way to get something honest out of your subject. I know that if I were wearing clothes I would find something to distract myself. To 'do something' in the image. By being naked, there are no pockets for me to put my hands in, no collar of my shirt to fiddle with, there is nowhere for me to look other than the camera. I am forced to show the camera a real emotion. When you're naked, what else do you have to do other than talk to the photographer about world politics or how funny last nights episode of 'Scrubs' was? By eliminating the clothing it forces the subject to use what they have left: their facial expression, which I feel is the most important part of a portrait.

"As for some of these girls being 'professional models,' I don't feel that this really makes any difference. They are all 'real' people being captured in a moment of time. Their high level of comfort in front of a camera is their 'own real' just like a non-model's level of comfort in front of a camera is their 'own real.' Most of these girls are not people you would see on the street and think 'Wow, she must be a model." Even if some of these girls model for a living, they are still daughters, sisters, mothers, neighbors, addicts, religious, fearful, loved, travelers, students, artists, excited, nervous, or any other noun or adjective that I can use to describe a person with eyes that have seen the world and have a story to tell.

"Obviously I have some bias about Sanders work since I have shot with him but I wouldn't have posed in front of his camera if I didn't feel that his work is brilliant."

Mike Chisholm, from Brilliant Corners

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Mike

Supernova Remnant Cassiopeia A

Cassiopeia A is the most recent supernova in the Milky Way and is among the most-studied objects in the sky. The supernova occurred ten years before the death of Spinoza and twenty years before the publication of Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, but it was not widely observed by astronomers of the era.

Photo credit: NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team

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Mike

Featured Comment by Lawrence Siegel: "You might be interested to know that a large number of Hubble images are now on display in Baltimore's Walters Art Museum as part of a show entitled MAPS. The images are knockouts!"

Featured Comment by Thiago Silva: "It's a common misconception to assume that satellite and astronomical 'photos' are real color. In fact, 90% of the images you see are in fact composites of bands taken at different wavelength intervals, or single bands which are mapped to a color scale. Most of these images are in a spectral range invisible to us, and are assigned a 'false color' to be better interpreted by our eyes.

"An example:



"A perfect real color view, right? The city is gray, the vegetation is green, the water is blue. All good, except that this image is a composite of short-wave infrared, near-infrared and red channels. The SWIR is assigned to red, because soils reflect more in that range. NIR is assigned to green, because it's where vegetation reflects the most. And the red channel is assigned to blue, since only wavelengths in the visible range penetrate water bodies. Had this image been a real color [image], the vegetation would be almost black, the waters a murky brown, and the whole image would be very foggy as most of the atmospheric interference occurs in the blue range.

"These color assignments are still grounded on knowledge about optical and electromagnetic theory, and are defined to highlight features of interest to the scientists. As our eyes can see a much larger range of color than of shades of gray, we use it as a tool to analyze images. But they are not 'artistic' choices. Some of them look more 'artistic' than others, and those probably are the ones disclosed to the press, but it is wrong to assume there is no science behind the color mapping."

Featured Comment by Simon Griffee: "Hubble site —> Behind The Pictures —> Color as a Tool."

Andri Pol, Airshow

(See, now isn't that more fun than Photoshop?)

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Mike  (Thanks to Adrian)

Jack Brauer, Elbert's Moonshadow, from the top of Colorado

Moonlit mountains and the last colors of sunset, as seen from the summit of Mt. Elbert, the tallest mountain in Colorado at 14,440 feet, Sawatch Range, February 2006.

"I spent three hours on the snowy summit on this calm winter night, in awe of our planet, before I made my way down under the moonlight."

Lots more at Jack's Mountain Photography website.

 
Jack's house (in Ouray, Colorado, north of Durango, in the southwest region of the State). Jealous? I am.

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Mike (Thanks to Jack)

Wayne Levin, Mark Under Breaking Wave

Wayne Levin, Fish & Swimmers, Ironman Triathlon

I published a portfolio of Wayne's work in Photo Techniques in the '90s, and was pleased to find his website recently and reacquaint with some work I knew and see some new stuff. There's more at the Robert Koch Gallery. Print prices range from $950 to  $4,000.

He has two books in print, too: Through a Liquid Mirror and Other Oceans. I don't know of another photographer like quite like Wayne. As usual, you can click on the images to see slightly larger versions.

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Mike  (Thanks to Wayne for permission to reproduce these)

John Moore, Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery / Getty Images

By Greg Heins

The most memorable photograph I've seen in the past couple of years is by John Moore, a Getty photographer, taken in Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day weekend of last year.

I find it an unspeakably poignant image; I come back to it again and again. The remarkable physical beauty of the young woman, the angel-wing-like curves of her hunched shoulder blades, the soft backlighting, the bits of gaudy color beyond her, the two people watching way beyond the graves, everything about it is just completely evocative. To me, it adds something to know that Mr. Moore is himself a war photographer (he was, for example, the photographer in the car just ahead of Ms. Bhutto's when she was assassinated) who was visiting the cemetery that day with his very pregnant wife and young daughter. His account of the day can be found at the Getty blog.

There's really nothing more to say.

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Greg

Featured Comment by alkos: Somehow I see John Moore's photograph together with this one by Jim Nachtwey:

Roy De Carava, Coltrane and Elvin, 1960


Ray K. Metzker, Chicago, 1957

Lawrence Miller Gallery, from the show Post-War Perspectives, 1945–1960

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Mike

A small but fine selection of the work of the superb Czech photographer Jindřich Štreit can now be seen online. I found the interface a bit funky and I had to leave the page alone for a while as the images loaded, but the small portfolio (Štreit has been working for decades) is well worth seeing.

Featured Comment by John A. Stovall: "Even more of Streit's work can be seen here along with a short biography and with a more user friendly interface."

Featured Comment by Geoff McCann: "I stumbled upon Jindrich Streit's exhibition in the House of the Stone Bell, Old Town Square, Prague, purely by accident last week. We had spent the previous day at the Czech National Gallery and decided to have a day off from galleries and museums. Fat chance! Wandering through the square I spotted a poster for Jindrich's exhibition, which was into its last day so we just had to go. Amazing, humbling work. The website doesn't do it justice. To see these works expertly printed (some very large) was just beautiful.

"On the way out we popped into the bookshop just in case they had any of his books for sale. Lo and behold they had one which contained most the work in the exhibition, so my wife kindly offered to buy it for me. The woman behind the counter asked if we would like Jindrich to sign it. As we were leaving Prague the next day we said no. To which she replied that it was not a problem as Jindrich was in the building! She dashed off uttering over her shoulder that she was going to find him. Returning a few minutes later she suggested we follow her. So, we met Jindrich Streit and his wife Agnes in the coffee shop of the House of the Stone Bell and he inscribed my book!

"Chance is a wonderful thing. Needless to say this encounter made the holiday."

And, in case you missed this in our comment sections the other day, the late cinematographer Jamie Livingston, who died at age 41 in 1997, left an archive of almost 6,000 Polaroid SX-70 shots, taken one per day (with only minor lapses) for 18 years. "Photos of  friends, girlfriends, objects, landscapes, ball games, and New York City scenes, are interspersed with shots of famous people like Philip Johnson, Keith Richards, Lionel Richie and many others Livingston met in his career as a music video and commercial director and cinematographer." Hugh Crawford is now putting them online. There is no way to describe or even indicate the breadth and richness of this vast archive with one picture, so please don't nitpick my almost random single selection; go spend some time with the archive. Brief background information can be found here.

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Mike  (Thanks to Geoff McCann and Hugh Crawford)

ADDENDUM from Mike: By a strange coincidence, out of the thousands of Jamie Livingston's Polaroids the one I chose to illustrate this posting is actually of Hugh Crawford, who is doing so much to preserve and publicize this unique body of work. That's Hugh and his wife-to-be at their wedding rehearsal dinner, with Hugh's niece, who was their flower girl. Jamie Livingston was their best man. I had no idea it was Hugh and his wife when I chose and posted the picture. 

UPDATE from Hugh: "In answer to all the questions about Jamie's working methods, Jamie had a hard and fast rule that he would only take pictures once a day. If he took a photo of the light passing through a bag of potato chips earlier in the day, a hundred long-unseen friends staging an impromptu parade later that evening would not make it as a P.O.D. because the picture for that day had already been taken. Once I was running across 34th street at around 11:30 at night with Jamie and the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey elephants, and asked if the P.O.D. was coming up, and the answer was, 'Nope, took it this morning.'

"I'm always stunned how people who never knew him or anyone in the pictures and all the individual arcs of lives and deaths and relationships connect so vividly with the work. We had an exhibition of reproductions of all six and a half thousand or so photos on the tenth anniversary of his death and his 51st birthday at Bard College where he started making them just before he graduated. At the reception party for the show, over and over students would come up and say how much they identified with the photographs and how much they wanted to have a life like Jamie's."

In response to the previous post, David Goldfarb sent this picture. It shows Grant's Tomb and the Riverside Church in Manhattan, looking south along the Hudson River. David took the picture from the window of his apartment on the 20th floor of a 21-story highrise building at 125th and Riverside Drive. He says he's photographed the same scene "hundreds of times." The snow-covered lawn is where The White Stripes were playing in the image posted in the Featured Comment to this TOP post back in October.

It's often a source of wonder to me that color photography so infrequently uses color to any advantage—many viewers seem to prefer color simply for its verisimilitude—it shows what was, just because it was—without any thought to whether it the colors in a picture have any aesthetic affect or impact. Color can ruin pictures for me, as often as not. I like the subtlety and harmoniousness of the color in this. It helps that I love winter scenes, and that I much prefer landscapes that don't exclude the presence of humanity. This one even has some echoes to a painting I've written about before, one that I have emotional associations to from my youth—Pieter Brueghel the Elder's "The Return of the Hunters." It's also got a strong sense of a particular place, which is important in my view.   

Taken on Polaroid Type 809 film, in the winter of 2005. Click on the image to see a larger version.

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Mike (Thanks to David)

If you like portraiture or are fascinated by peoples' faces, don't miss Eric Myer's engrossing Stereotypes I, II, and III, three series of user-selected recombinant portraits. Myer is a Malibu, California professional specializing in location and portrait photography for advertising, editorial and corporate clients. Photo District News pegged "...his signature portrait style: clean, ungimmicky, character-driven shots of real people on location."

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Mike (Thanks to John Hogg)

Tom Kaszuba, Lighthouse Sanctuary (New London Ledge Lighthouse off the New London Connecticut coast)

Photographer Tom Kaszuba used an 87-second exposure with his Canon 5D to smooth out both the sea and the sky in this striking seascape. (Click on the image to see it larger.) You can see more of Tom's work by visiting his web gallery.

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Mike (Thanks to T.K.)

It's been too long since we checked in with Juan at The Water Molotov.

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Mike

Featured Comment by Charles Mason:

"Just thought I had to send this along. I saw J. Buhler's shot, and did a double take. This frame, from a Polaroid Negative (remember those?), was made when I pulled up to my bank one day. I pulled in beside the truck and saw I had a Peanut Gallery watching me. Grabbed the camera and shot this out of my car window before anything changed. Of course, if I had to bet, I'd say no one ever shot a very similar picture to this one, but then I saw the one on your site. Amazing coincidence, I'd say."

Until I ran across it while browsing at the Fraenkel Gallery site, I had no idea that Lee Friedlander had treated this motif. What a delight.

Fraenkel has a nice selection of Friedlanders online, from the 1950s to now.

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Mike

Follow-up: Rats, I thought the Adams and the Friedlander were taken at the same place. Wrong-O. Turns out the Friedlander is Lake Louise, near Banff, Alberta, and the Adams is Tenaya Lake in the Yosemite Valley in California. Kinda takes the fun out of it, although it's pretty close visually. Thanks to Peter Robinson for setting me straight. —MJ

"Chain Link Sky" by Greg Heins. Check out his website, Greg Heins Photography. I also really like "Only" from the same portfolio. Like "Chain Link Sky," it's an example of the type of thing a great many photographers try, but very few make work. And there are some tree shots that make me smile...very playful. A lot to like here.

As for me, I've been suffering from writer's block for the past few days, but hopefully I'll recover soon.

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Mike

Ralf Brunner tells a story without words in 58 photographs.

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Mike (Thanks to Richard Sintchak)

UPDATE: Here's "the real link," to the story on Ralf Brunner's own site (thanks to Martin Winkler). In some ways the format of the spurious site is an advantage—don't neglect the fact that the story is a sequence of pictures from first to last, and on Ralf's site should be viewed left to right, top to bottom, all four pages in order. Much more powerful that way.

Maarten Boerma wrote to say, "I live in the Netherlands. At the moment there is a very beautiful exhibition called Belgicum in Antwerpen, Belgium, of the Belgium photographer called Stephan Vanfleteren. He is famous photographer in the Benelux."

There are a number of fine projects on Stephan Vanfleteren's website, including (under "Recent Projects") a whimsical sequence from a bicycle race. These two pictures are from a series on hobos in the United States. According to the website, "Vanfleteren works as a freelance photographer for the weekend supplement Zeno in the newspaper De Morgen [The Morning]. He also works for international magazines and invests a lot of time in personal projects." Well worth exploring for those outside Benelux who don't know his work.

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Mike (Thanks to Maarten)