The Online Photographer

It's Edwin Land's 100th birthday today.

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A Mystery of the West is Solved

By Kirk Johnson, The New York Times

DENVER—The gifted young idealist who slips the bonds of civilization and prevails against the wild, or fails in the trying, is a recurring theme of the American West—not to mention Hollywood.

Everett Ruess in many ways defined the template. A poet, painter and confidant to a leathery set of Western artists in the 1930s, including Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams, the 20-year-old Mr. Ruess rode off into the desert of the Southwest in 1934 with two burros and a notebook full of dreams, never to be seen again. Over the next 75 years, the West became tamer, but Mr. Ruess and his legend did not, and the lingering mystery of his disappearance only added to the romantic aura of the time and fueled the periodic search for evidence of his fate.

Now the circle has been closed...

READ ON at nytimes.com

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Storm Chaser, Revised

The revised and expanded edition of Jim Reed's book, Storm Chaser: A Photographer's Journey (Harry N. Abrams) hits bookstores today. It includes 16 new pages, for a total of 194 color photos.

You can preview the new paperback at the website, which features more than 40 photos from the book, excerpts, testimonials, a video of storm chasing, media interviews, purchase information, and more.

The new cover is a shot of Jim running up to a tornado while testing a pre-production model of Nikon's D700.

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Polaroid Art Has Price But No Place

Stuck in limbo, for now, is Polaroid's collection of photos taken by some of the biggest names in 20th-century art.

By Jennifer Bjorhus, The Star Tribune

Late one night last November, Doug Kelley sat in his family room in Bloomington, sifting through a stack of the day's legal work. Kelley is the court-appointed receiver in the Tom Petters case, a surrogate CEO running what's left of the jailed businessman's companies and squeezing out cash for the investors Petters allegedly bilked of $3.5 billion.

In the stack of legal papers was a bid for the assets of Polaroid, which Petters had bought four years earlier for $426 million and moved to Minnetonka. A small line item in the bid caught his eye: The Polaroid Art collection. $10 million...

READ ON at startribune.com

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New Works by Photography's Old Masters

By Randy Kennedy, The New York Times

When the three weathered cardboard boxes—known collectively, and cinematically, as the Mexican suitcase—arrived at the International Center of Photography more than a year ago, one of the first things a conservator did was bend down and sniff the film coiled inside, fearful of a telltale acrid odor, a sign of nitrate decay.

But the rolls turned out to be in remarkably good shape despite being almost untouched for 70 years. And so began a painstaking process of unfurling, scanning and trying to make sense of some 4,300 negatives taken by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour during the Spanish Civil War, groundbreaking work that was long thought to be lost but resurfaced several years ago in Mexico City.

What the center’s scholars have found among the 126 rolls over the last several months are a number of previously unknown shots by Capa, one of the founders of the Magnum photo agency and a pioneering war photographer, and by Taro, his professional partner and companion, who died in 1937 when she was struck by a tank...

READ ON at nytimes.com

Mike
(Thanks to Vance Cowan, Jim Reed, Mike Budd, and David Goldfarb)

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One way I'm a victim of TOP's success is that I've gotten on a number of PR firms' mailing lists. Not that I mind, but the applicability of much of the information I'm sent is so ambiguous—it's not obviously right for us, but it's not obviously wrong, either, which obliges me to investigate it more carefully. Considering the sheer mass of the incoming, it adds up to more work than you might think.

One thing I don't usually choose to publicize are contests. There's nothing wrong with contests—there are usually good and bad examples of anything, and that includes photo contests. I guess I don't really care much for them in general, however. Maybe half are exploitative in some way, either knowingly or inadvertently (see the linked essay for chapter and verse about that). Conventional wisdom says they're involving for readers, but my feeling is, why "involve" people using a mechanism in which 99.9% of the participants end up as losers? That doesn't seem quite faithful to the spirit of photography to me...photography is not so strictly hierarchical that one best shot has to stand above all the rest. That's no more accurate to the way photography actually works than kindergarten competitions in which everybody wins and nobody loses.

In the only contest I ever designed myself, there were three judges and each judge got to pick his or her own first prize winner...and then had to defend the choice in print. The three of us came up with very different winners.

(I still think mine was the best.)

I've just added to the archives a brief 2008 essay originally published in Black & White Photography magazine called "On Photo Contests." I don't think my editors there liked the essay much—probably because the magazine itself runs contests! You know what they say: oh well.

ADDENDUM: Here's the winning photograph in the Zone VI contest that I mentioned in the comments, sent along by Peter Pflasterer (thanks, Peter). The picture is by Phillip Dunn, then of Austin, Texas. This is scanned from the poor-quality halftone printed in The Zone VI Newsletter.

Peter remembers that there was a "big stink" about the winner, which seems understandable since Fred Picker and most of his followers were large-format Zone System photographers!

I'm pretty appalled by how bad my memory was for this picture. I haven't seen it in 27 years, granted, but I really only remembered the landscape, the fact that it was taken in a pickup truck bed, and the girls on the far right and the far left; I elided the figure with her back turned, which is understandable, perhaps, but I also didn't recall the hugging adult. Very strange; my visual memory for pictures is usually a lot better than that.

Featured Comment by Stan B.: "I can see why the photograph won—(as you yourself said) it's very much alive, spontaneous and...imperfect. The composition isn't quite there, the photo is split into halves, yet the action on the left together with the almost surreal image on the right is dynamic enough to make it work anyway. And I bet the majority of complainers submitted those technically perfect, classically overcooked, picture postcard nature or landscape compositions. A lifesaver thrown to a drowning man."

Digital might be obliterating film in the hearts of enthusiasts (and consumers), but it seems to be lagging behind somewhat when it comes to visual representations of cameras in the popular mind. This is the current cover of GenLux, billed as "The only luxury fashion and beauty magazine created expressly for today's affluent Southern California woman."

Really? So affluent Southern California women these days are making cool snaps with Canonets?

Not that I disapprove.

Along the same lines, there's a PBS promo ad that shows a young girl ostensibly photographing with an old Rolleiflex, which you'd think would be about as familiar to her as corsets or hook-and-button shoes. I think that one might be a spot for "Antiques Roadshow," though, in which case it would make sense. But I'm sure I also saw a recent ad (for what, I don't recall) that featured a svelte young goddess wandering about in sun-drenched meadows snapping pictures with an old Hasselblad.

Of course it's possible she was from Southern California.

Anybody seen any other examples lately of old film cameras doing stand-in duty when "generic camera" needs to be signified in ads or elsewhere in pop culture?

Mike
(Thanks to Steve Rosenblum)

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Featured Comment by Matthew Carter: "Rebecca Romijn with an Argus for Bebe."

Featured Comment by Julian Barkway: "After reading this article on how vintage film cameras are being used as props in glamour shoots I remembered a flyer I recently received from my bank. Here it is almost in its entirety (the page that's missing is the only one without pictures). Sadly it was on textured card so the scan is not the best....

"The cover grabs the attention straight away:

"But that's not all. You open it up to find a double gatefold:

"Check out the cameras and the books. Not only is she gorgeous but she has taste! Doesn't look like she's reviewing her finances, though—unless she's figuring out how she can get yet another Leica for the collection.

"But wait! There's yet more:

"Look how she is desporting herself alluringly amongst those cameras! And that sexy close-up, too. It's almost pornographic, I tell you! But it's that final shot of her caressing the Leica that clinches it for me...I think I might be in love... :-)

"Oh, and the flyer closes with a shot of all that lovely gear:

"I've no idea what they're selling or whether I need it, but I'll take six!"