The Online Photographer

Photographer Unknown: French Tennis Star Suzanne Lenglen, 1926

What a pity that the photographer of this iconic sports shot from 1926 is not known. You can buy a low-priced modern print of this picture here.

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Mike

"Rain in the Forest II" by Animesh Ray. I was searching for example pictures from the Nikkor AIS 28mm ƒ/2 lens when I came across this elegant shot of two lovely and dignified Indian women in the rain by Animesh Ray, on Trek Earth. Animesh used an F3 and Kodak Tri-X film, and lucked out when he got water droplets on the lens that lent some very atmospheric flare to parts of the picture. (Apropos the item above, note that this is an editorial usage, not a commercial one, so model releases aren't required. I did get permission from Animesh, for which I hereby thank him.) He has several unusually beautiful pictures on his Trek Earth pages…check out this one and especially this one for example.

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Mike

The picture is titled Buba Subacuática (Buba Underwater) and it was taken by Albano Garcia. Click on the image to see a somewhat larger version. It seems to me like a cross between classic underwater swimmer pictures by Cartier-Bresson or Kertész and a Picasso...

André Kertész, Underwater Swimmer, Esztergom, 1917

Pablo Picasso, The Dream

...But if I may be so bold, I like it better. You can see more of Albano's work at his website, called Flaneur.

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Mike

Actually, according to photographer Jesse Millan, known as stop.down on flickr, no cameras had to die in the making of this shot. He suspended the ball from a thread and gave it a little spin, then asked the young batter to swing harmlessly at the air. "No harm to the camera."

Found this on a photo blog called goldengod.

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Mike

One of a series of extraordinary still lifes by Martin Klimas.

SEE MORE

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Mike  (Many thanks to the Monkeysquirrel)

Chuck Kimmerle photographs in and around the geographic center of the North American continent, in the northern plains of eastern North Dakota and northwest Minnesota. Chuck used to be a photojournalist and now concentrates on his fine art work, specializing in non-natural landscapes shaped, as he says, "both by nature and the farmer's plow."

His work has a quiet beauty to it and his website is well worth a visit when you're in a contemplative or reflective mood.

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Mike

Featured Comment by Mike Hess: "Having met Chuck before when I was a student at the University that he photographed for and having been exposed to his work, everything that has been written here by Mike is spot on. His style is unique and effective. It would seem that photographers that spend time in eastern 'Nodak' and western Minnesota develop an affection for rural 'scapes. Another great photog worth looking at is the late Jerry Olson. His work has been an influence on me—every time I look at it, I want to go out and find the magical places that he creates."

Vincent Laforet, Me and My Human, 2004

Skaters at the Lasker Rink in Central Park are dwarfed by their shadows, at least in this aerial view by Pulitzer-prizewinning New York Times photographer Vincent Laforet, February 22, 2004.

Prints of this picture (and a great many others) are available for sale at The New York Times Photo Archives.

I love this shot. First you tend to read it as abstract, then you start reading the shadows—the two parents holding the child by the hands, the skater with one leg in the air, the lone figure in the middle (who I notice somewhat later) in that peculiar insecure-skater posture, knock-kneed, wings out for balance. The colors and the vividness of this remind me somewhat of Kent Phelan's St. Louis Stadium picture, although of course they're very different.

Interestingly, given our recent discussions here, I notice that the Times used to put very prominent watermarks (a large "T" in a circle) over a large portion of its archive images offered for sale, but has recently stopped doing so. Do you suppose it's because they now realize that they benefit from free advertising and that small reproductions such as this one don't threaten such sales? I might use up TOP's telephone budget for the month and call New York later today and try to find out. (Whoa, original reporting? This site is really getting uppity....)

I might add that I love looking through these archives. Yet another guilty pleasure, I'm afraid.

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Mike

Featured Comment by David A. Goldfarb: I don't think there's a tall building nor any nearby structure near Lasker Rink where you could get this vantage point. I often photograph birds near there at the Harlem Meer. I was thinking maybe he commandeered a cherrypicker that could have been changing the floodlights around the rink, but hunting around on the 'net, well, it seems occasional TOP contributor Eamon Hickey has already interviewed LaForet about this image in 2004, and it is indeed an aerial....

By Martin Munkácsi, 1928 (hand-worked negative)

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(Thanks to Dibutil, and Oleg O. Moiseyenko) 

Question from Scott Kirkpatrick: "What's a "hand-worked negative"? Something like a Gene Smith ferricyanide bleach job to get all possible detail out of a long-scale negative? Does this have something to do with why the stands in the background are greyed out while the figures in the foreground are crisp and contrasty?"

Mike replies: One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons is of a crow sitting on a windowsill, saying, "At the risk of being obvious, I'm a talking crow." Well, at the risk of being obvious, a hand-worked negative is a negative that's been worked on by hand. When photographers used bigger cameras they got bigger negatives, so they could retouch directly on the negative, which is the job Edward Weston used to complain so bitterly about when retouching the portrait negs he did for pay would keep him indoors instead of out photographing for his art. The pictorialists often took retouching further, essentially "drawing" on their negatives to bring out properties and qualities they wanted in the image. In many cases the easiest manipulation was that you could "draw in" extra highlight density. The ultimate example was probably the French photographer Robert Demachy, the great gum printer, who believed a photograph wasn't art unless the negative had been altered by the photographer (that's his "Study in Red" above right), although many of the pictorialists also did it to some degree. Munkácsi was working before the "straight" aesthetic was elaborated in the 1930s, and so, although he wasn't a pictorialist, he used some of the technical conventions of pictorialism that were standard for the era, including hand-working of negatives. If you click on his image above to get the larger version, you can clearly see hand-drawn crosshatching in various places on the two figures. The folds of the clothing and the hands of the figure on the left have been worked on as well.

The light background is a result of overexposure due to excessive UV. These days, lenses have coatings and sometimes even cement between lens elements that cuts UV, so that an additional UV filter isn't really needed. In the '20s, before lens coating, and when they sometimes used organic cements (purified pine pitch, even) for lens elements, a UV filter had a larger effect. It was sometimes called a "haze-cutting" filter; the light background you see in this picture and many other pictures of the period is, in effect, the "haze." I often quite like the effect, personally, although of course it depends upon the picture.

by Ming Thein.

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Mike