The Online Photographer

Helen Levitt

Reviewed by Geoff Wittig

Helen Levitt
Powerhouse Books, 2008
Monograph / Photography / New York City
Clothbound, 12.25 x 12.75 inches, 168 pages, 74 tritone and 68 four-color photographs
ISBN 13: 978-1-57687-429-5
$60.00 ($37.80 / £24.38 on Amazon)

Link to Amazon U.S.

Link to Amazon U.K.

-

Books that are actually about photographs, rather than photography, are distinctly in the minority on the shelves of your local Borders or Barnes & Noble. And among books of photographs, cute and trendy titles (like, say, Fearless Women or anything by Anne Geddes) greatly outnumber serious monographs. And of this miniscule number of genuine books of photography, smaller yet is the number really worth your time. Helen Levitt is one of those books.

Published as the catalogue of Levitt's retrospective exhibition at Germany’s Sprengel Museum Hannover, the book is a collection of her most iconic black & white street photography, interspersed with equally compelling color images. I confess that street photography is not one of my usual interests; yet as I turned the pages I recognized one photograph after another. These images had all previously caught my eye in magazines or "best of" collections due to their visual impact. Levitt's photographs are often poignant, frequently funny, but never sentimental. Having lived in New York City in the early 1980s, my consistent reaction to her work is "yes, that's exactly what the city feels like."

As a physical object, this book is quite large at 12.25 x 12.75". The design is restrained and elegant, with a simple dark green cloth cover. Photographs are printed one to a page, large enough to see what's going on in the picture, yet with generous margins. Reproduction quality is up to the best of modern standards; black and white photos have luscious tonality with detail right into the shadows, while the color images have the distinctive flavor of 1960s–1970s Kodachrome. "Text by Walker Evans" is a bit of shameless hype on the Powerhouse Books website; the sum total text is a single paragraph by Evans analyzing and praising Levitt's photo of three children playing in Spanish Harlem. The minimal text is at least cleanly set in Janson type.

If street photography is your thing, save up and buy this book. Levitt's last retrospective, Crosstown (2001) promptly sold out and now goes for $950; so Helen Levitt might be a smart investment even if you're not especially fond of the genre. Me, I just like the pictures.

_____________________

Geoff

Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "Very good write-up, Geoff.

"I just received a copy of this book last week. You are absolutely on-target with your keen comment regarding the book being about photographs rather than photography. There are no supplementary notes provided with any of the images. No dates. No titles. They would be entirely superfluous. Just look.

"Helen Levitt's entire lifetime body of work is really about photographs rather than photography. Put simply, Ms. Levitt's images are all about the end result. Not the technology, which has not changed radically during her many decades of shooting. Nor the technique, which is largely a matter of walking around with a surgical eye and keen reflexes. Just look.

"I find most street photography vapid. Helen Levitt's work is way beyond an exception with me. Even as a lifelong urban dweller I find it captivating. It was a cold, dreary day when my copy of Helen Levitt arrived.  I made a cup of coffee, sat down with the book, and was completely immersed in Helen's world for the next two hours.

"Helen Levitt rarely gives interviews or makes any personal appearances. In 2002, however, NPR's Melissa Block was able to get a very brief interview with Levitt at her Greenwich Village apartment. It's very well worth the read, and the listen."

Mike adds: I haven't seen the new Helen Levitt but I have Crosstown and the 1991 Helen Levitt published by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, plus a couple of earlier titles the availability of which can now be classed as "fuggedaboudit." Not known by a single iconic book, Miss Levitt seems to publish serial retrospectives. The 1991 SFMoMA book, still readily obtainable in softcover, is fully girded with the trappings of scholarship, with major illustrated essays by not one but two major curators; Sandra S. Phillips' essay alone is buttressed by more than four (!) double-columned pages of notes. Yet Miss Levitt didn't like the book—when I asked her, she wouldn't sign it for me. She didn't approve of the reproduction, which was too dark and contrasty (although the color pictures in that book more closely represent the wonderful dye transfer prints of some of her color work I saw in a gallery exhibit in New York around the time that book came out. To have one of those hanging on the wall would be a decent reason to want to be rich).

Crosstown remedies that problem: the repro is much more faithful to Miss Levitt's  quiet, un-insistent prints. The picture editing is better too, sometimes with two pictures facing, sometimes with one on the right-hand page of a spread, and rarely, for sequences, more than one picture per page. The book overall has just a hint of that feeling of being amalgamated from different "bodies of work" from different periods; the modern black-and-white pictures seem too sharp, giving them a certain hardness. The pictures that seem least "of a piece" with the rest are not color ones, but an Evans-esque subway series. One remarkable thing about the book is how completely the last color shots fit with the earliest black-and-white ones from the '30s.

One way or another, it shouldn't be too hard to own some Helen Levitt in the pages of a printed book. Every ten, or fifteen, or twenty years another opportunity comes along. As Geoff and Ken intimate, it really doesn't matter what your normal taste in subject matter might be. Helen Levitt is sui generis.

Featured Comment by Hugh Crawford: "I think that the color photograph of the man standing on Central Park West is a fine example of a photograph that works in color but not so much in black and white.

"In color, the vendor's blue and orange umbrella picks up the colors of the man's skin and shorts, and the group of people on the far corner with the orange and white umbrella are picked out of the rest of the picture because they share a similar color palate. This sets up the tension of the man leaning on his cane towards the group on the far side of the street but looking past the vendor. You get this whole triangle of tension in the  color photo, but if you convert it to black and white you just get a guy in shorts on the street corner.

"I think it's a good example of a way that color photographs can use color in a mode of formalism that is color specific. It's a completely different language from black and white.

"I don't know if there is 'too much information' in that photo, but I know that in black and white there isn't enough information to make it more than a literal record. In color it is a 'long read' as they say; eventually the little figure a third of the way down the left hand edge becomes the focus of attention after you unwind all the directional cues and color associations."

Speeding up Photoshop with an External Drive

By Ctein

You're about to read a follow-up to an article that's yet to be published. I'll have an article in the July/August PHOTO Techniques magazine on how to extract the maximum performance from Photoshop. Post-deadline, Other World Computing loaned me a couple of high-performance external drives to test as Photoshop scratch drives. I report on them here. Isn't time-twisting fun?

The OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro 'Quad Interface' drive (above) contains a 750 GB, 7200 RPM, 32 MB cache drive and has eSATA, FireWire 800 and 400, and USB2 ports. It lists for $230. I connected that drive to my MacBook Pro with the $39 APIOTEK EXTREME Dual eSATAII Express Card 34 Adapter (right).

The OWC Mercury On-The-Go FireWire 800/400 + USB case with a Hitachi 200 GB, 7200 RPM, 16 MB cache drive runs $190 after rebate. That's not the biggest but it is the fastest laptop drive out there. I installed one in my MacBook Pro and it has a sustained throughput around 60 MB per second, says Lloyd Chambers' DiskTester. That's twice as fast as many laptop drives.

My test was a merge of twenty 35 MB images into a single panorama, which you can kinda see above; the original is almost 60 times bigger! You can view a small section at 100% scale below. Photoshop reserved 26 GB of scratch space to render the assemblage. Using my laptop's internal drive as the scratch drive, Photoshop took around 10 minutes to assemble the panorama.

Next I tested the On-The-Go drive. Connected as a FireWire 800 device, DiskTester reports it's as fast as my internal drive; connected via FireWire 400, performance dropped by over 40%. How did this translate into Photoshop scratch performance? Via FireWire 400, rendering time was identical to the internal drive, while FireWire 800 trimmed a full minute off of the render time. The results would more dramatically favor the On-The-Go drive if I were running a "stock" internal drive or a normal assortment of foreground and background tasks (I can't test that because it's just about impossible to get reproducible results).

Just for a joke, I tried USB2, which slowed the drive by a factor of 3–4! Maybe with the right drive and the right glue circuitry USB2 lives up to its specs, but it never has on any hardware I've used. Worse, Photoshop doesn't play at all well with USB2; it still hadn't finished rendering the file after over 2 hours! You want good scratch drive performance? Stick with FireWire or eSATA.

The OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro sustained eSATA read speeds approaching 95 MB/s. Write speeds averaged 80 MB/s, but there was a great deal of variation in write speeds that I could not pin down; sometimes it was low as 70 MB/s, other times it matched the read speeds. No question it's fast; I'm just not sure exactly how fast.

The On-the-Go Drive

Under FireWire 800 performance dropped by a modest 15%. FireWire 400 racked up 38–40 MB/s, close to the theoretical limits. A drive this good needs FireWire 800 or eSATA. Still, even FireWire 400 scratch performance was respectable, trimming almost a minute off the rendering time. FireWire 800 clipped almost 2 minutes and eSATA saved almost 3. That's really impressive.

Both drives are good ways to goose up Photoshop. If you are a traveling photographer, the On-The-Go drive will perform at least as well as your internal drive and probably substantially better. If you're working from a desk, the Mercury Elite drive will give Photoshop a real kick in the pants.

Two tips—first, don't make the mistake of filling these drives up with other files if you want to use them for scratch. Typically there's a factor of two performance difference between the front and back ends of a drive. You want that fast front space for Photoshop scratch files. Reformat the drive as two partitions, reserving the "front" end of the drive for a dedicated scratch partition.

Second, if you really want maximum performance, set up a RAID 0 SATA array, like Lloyd recommends on his website. I expect that doing that would cut my photomerge rendering times by a full factor of two over the internal drive. For a several hundred dollar investment, that's a pretty good performance return.

_____________________

Ctein

New Zeiss C Biogon ZM Lens

Carl Zeiss has announced a new addition to its increasingly popular ZM range of Leica M mount lenses. The slower maximum aperture of the C Biogon 35mm ƒ/2.8 allows the new lens to be "exceptionally compact" for a lens with the highest level of image quality, making it a good match for the C Biogon 21mm ƒ/4.5. In particular, Zeiss says the lens has virtually no distortion. Zeiss even says "You can even use the lens like a 50mm standard lens for digital rangefinder cameras with crop factor 1.3"—meaning, of course, on an M8 (although the correct number is actually 45.5mm-e). The C Biogon consists of 7 elements in 5 groups and weighs 200g, and should be available by midsummer with a price less than that of the 35mm ƒ/2 ZM.

_______________________

Mike

Advertorial and its Discontents

As I work to put the finishing touches on T.O.P.'s "New Camera Recommendations" list, which should be posted soon, I thought I'd add a few words about magazines.

First of all, to reiterate something Roger Hicks mentioned on the Rangefinder Forum, it takes a few issues before a new editor can put his or her ideas into practice, so it's important to resist the temptation to judge a new editor's intentions too soon.

In terms of what I'm going to say next, it's important to make a disclaimer first. I'm a regular contributor to Black & White Photography magazine, and I've been a fan of the magazine for a long time chiefly because I can almost always count on seeing interesting and rewarding pictures in it—publishing work several tiers above the usual photo-magazine chum was Ailsa McWhinnie's real strength as Editor, although it wasn't often appreciated as such. But I'm just a "contractor." I've never visited the home offices, never met or communicated with the publisher, and have no say in how the magazine is run or what its direction is. Although I've had a good and cordial relationship with my editors there, I don't speak for them in any way, shape, or form.

That said, in my opinion the most worrisome signal that can come from any niche magazine is an increase in "advertorial," which might be defined as "editorial content transparently meant to do the work of advertising." In my view, an increase in advertorial is the single worst choice a magazine can make, and the most reliable early sign of decline.

Advertorial is to ad salespeople what catnip is to cats. (You might substitute more extreme drug metaphors here.) Once an ad sales department starts feeling desperate, the temptation to pressure the editors to help make ad sales easier is almost overpowering. And once a magazine starts off down that road, the temptation—and the pressure—is always to do more and more of it, never less.

It's all too easy to hit "ceilings" with niche magazines—circulation reaches plateaus, ad sales stagnate or trend downward in tough economic times. That can be very frustrating. The temptation for the people on the magazine's business side is to do "something, anything" to break those bounds and rev up the revenue. 

The trouble is that almost nothing alienates a specialty magazine's core audience more effectively than advertorial. Savvy readers know exactly who's being pandered to and why. And yet niche magazines by definition must first and foremost serve their niche! Yes, it's tempting to try to broaden the magazine's appeal, bring in whole classes of new readers, add value for the advertisers, reduce the subscribers' median age. But in the process you give up your publication's real greatest strength: its core readers. Once those people start feeling manipulated and betrayed, you trigger a gradual disaffection and a slow attrition. It might take years to play out, but it will eventually cripple the publication.

There's only one reliable way to improve the business situation of a niche or hobbyist magazine, and that's to serve the core audience as well as possible. That's hard enough, believe me. But the happier they are, the better the magazine's fortunes will eventually be. And without them, a niche magazine ultimately can't prosper.

Again, just one man's opinion.

______________________

Mike

ADDENDUM: A couple of the comments indicate to me that there might be a basic misunderstanding afoot. One commenter said, "The magazine editors should realise that this is how you lose old friends," and another said, "Let's hope [this post] is seen by the new editor at [the] magazine." (Italics mine, in both cases.)

I must not have made this clear: it's not editors who are responsible for advertorial. The editors typically fight against advertorial (note that I speak generally; I just don't have specific knowledge about B&WP). It's the business side—publishing and ad sales—that usually drive such things.

At many magazines, the business side and the editorial side are often at odds. It's not like they're enemies, exactly. They both want the magazine to do well, and of course editors are hired by, and work for, publishers. But they have different agendas as to what "doing well" means and how to go about achieving it.

It's important to understand this distinction if you want to be clear about what's going on. Some magazines even have two mastheads—one for editorial, with a chief editor at the top, and one for business, with a publisher or corporate owner at the top. Grab a few magazines you might have lying around the house and study the masthead(s) for a few minutes. See if you can separate the business people from the content people.

The traditional ideal is for the editors to stay out of the business dealings of the publication entirely, and for the publishers to give editors complete autonomy over the contents of the publication. The reason is that they serve different masters: editors are supposed to be entirely on the side of the readers, addressing their interests, taking their side, trying to please them; the ad sales people are mainly concerned with the interests of the advertisers and trying to keep them happy. The two have different constituencies, you might say.

Both "sides" are concerned with circulation numbers, but ultimately for subtly different reasons—editorial because it's a mark of the health of the publication and also because it speaks to how well their contents are serving their audience; and ad sales because it's a mark of the health of the publication and also because it's how they entice advertisers to buy space—the greater the number of eyes that see it, the better an ad might perform.

Advertorial essentially represents a capitulation from both sides. It's the business side saying, in effect, we can't move ad space without promising to deliver editorial coverage to the advertiser along with the ad space, and the editorial side saying, in effect, we're giving up control of our contents, meaning we've lost control of our independence and integrity.

The reason advertorial is such a bad sign is not only that it is essentially an acknowledgment that this mutual capitulation has taken place, but also because it's a very distinct first step down a slippery slope. That lost ground can be very difficult to regain. The situation gets worse and worse until the publication has no more integrity left, core readers drift away, editorial endorsements mean nothing any longer and aren't effective anyway, advertisers drift away, and the title goes bye-bye.

To name one example of this, I recall when a once-proud American magazine used to run one-for-one ad + editorial specials. The advertisers would buy half a page or quarter page or full page, and the magazine would "throw in" an adjacent equivalent amount of space that contained "editorial" coverage of the advertised product. On more than one occasion, I caught the editors slipping up and failing to change the case of the supposed editorial matter—in other words, instead of referring to the advertising company as "they" and "their," they'd slip and leave it as "we" or "our," thus exposing the likelihood that the advertiser or one of its agencies was providing the text for the "editorial" half of the package anyway.

That magazine no longer exists, and little wonder. Readers aren't idiots.

To end on a positive note, I'll mention a few examples of parties who know how the game is supposed to be played. At the magazine I edited, Ilford, Inc. once uncharacteristically demanded a specific ad placement...which surprised me, until I learned that it wanted to make sure its ad was not placed near a review of one of its papers, because it wanted to avoid even the appearance of quid pro quo. That was pretty stand-up, I thought. And, although I don't remember all the details, David E. Davis, former editor of Car & Driver, founder of Automobile magazine, and currently publisher of the e-mag Winding Road, once got blatantly threatened by the biggest car company on Earth, which told him to bend to its demands or it would pull all its advertising (this happened in the early days of Automobile, before the new magazine was really even on its feet). This is the kind of intense pressure that can cause even good organizations to buckle. David E. sucked it up and told them to go screw themselves. The General yanked its advertising—from all its divisions. It was a body blow to the fledgling magazine—from what I heard, it took years before its bottom line recovered fully. (And note that he was the publisher, not just the editor.)

That, folks, is integrity. —MJ

New Editor at B&WP

Elizabeth Roberts has taken over as the new Editor of Black & White Photography magazine, from David Corfield, who took over from Ailsa McWhinnie. David, whose tenure was short-lived, was an "editor-at-large," not working daily at the main office. I don't know the reasons for David's decision to leave, but suspect it simply involved conflicts with his other enterprises and activities. Liz was Deputy Editor of the magazine under Ailsa, and is very familiar with its history, writers, and audience. I had a long talk with her the other day, and I'm looking forward to seeing the  direction she will bring to the magazine.

I'm currently at work on my 65th monthly column for the magazine—time really does fly!

____________________

Mike

P.S. Here's what the subscriber cover looks like, more or less...sorry about the reflections; I don't have a copy stand, I just slapped my copy down on the back deck and photographed it.

As Craig Ferguson might say, Remind you of anything?

Color Picture

Mike Johnston, Color Picture, 2008 (this evening just before dark to be exact).

To follow up on the previous post, I've decided I was wrong about Udayan Behera's picture. I guess the water color does have a jade/alabaster/onyx thing goin' on, like the reader named Carl and one other person suggested in the comments, and upon further reflection I think it's not as unattractive a color as I first thought. And the B&W conversion is indeed too flat, as others claimed—the color variation in the water does add subtlety and visual interest. So, despite my initial reaction, I guess that it's better as an example of a picture that works in color, and thus ought to be in color, than the opposite.

Sometimes I suspect that color disturbs me in the way that flowers disturbed Degas (a critic I read claimed he made flowers his main subject only once, and was known to have had an aversion to them). My initial reaction to "too much color" is often negative. Black and white has an easier, more immediate and more natural appeal to me. However, I do understand that other people feel the opposite.

In response to several comments that really raised my eyebrows, I have to say that anyone who thinks that B&W merely signals "pretentiousness" should make an attempt to, um, get over that. It's liable to give you a severely distorted view of photography.

It's also a little amusing to someone of my generation to hear such a thing. I grew up (I was born in '57) in a culture where, with the sole exception of the fine-art world, color photography always had greater prestige. It was more expensive, harder to do, and books and magazines and finally newspapers that offered color illustrations were understood to be offering added value. Millions of people put up with the towering inconvenience of living-room slide shows just to get that Kodachrome color. B&W was widely understood by the public at large to be cheaper, more common, more "old fashioned," and less prestigious. For a number of years before USA Today came along, black and white was most prominently seen (by the public, at least) in newsprint.

One commenter said, "I suggest that you replace your lady's portrait with 'Afghan Girl' by Steve McCurry. In B&W it's pretty ordinary—in color it is one of the great photographic icons of the 20th century."

Although this comment isn't wrong, it's important to note that it misses the point of what I was suggesting. I didn't say that great color pictures ought to have been taken in B&W. (Although I can think of a lot of Technicolor movies I think should be black-and-white-ized.) I recommended converting color images to B&W temporarily, while you're editing and working with them, as a way of getting to know the picture better and understanding how it works—checking to see if the meaning of the picture is still coherent, and to see if the structure, composition, and blocking of lights and darks holds up, or not, without color. By this measure, Steve McCurry's picture does fine:

It's not better in B&W than it is in color—or, at least, I would have a hard time evaluating if it were, since I'm so used to the real (which is to say the color) version—but I don't think anyone would question that the B&W version, the plain "luminance structure" of the picture you might say, is sound. If he had taken it on Tri-X, it would still be a strong and well-seen photograph, if perhaps not a world-famous one. In that sense it's a positive example of what I was suggesting, not a negative one.

The apple picture (all three variations are the same picture) was taken with the Pentax K20D and 35mm DA Macro lens, handheld. Do you see the dark bird's-head shape in the middle of biggest reflection in the apple? That's a lawn chair my son was holding over the apple in a futile attempt to reduce the reflection. In the "Learn Something New Every Day" Dept.: Lots of light gets to a shiny Red Delicious, even at dusk.

_________________________

Mike

"Color Picture" variation 1 (virtual red filter)

"Color Picture" variation 2 (virtual green filter).

Featured Comment by hywel: "I read an interview with Steve McCurry, somewhere on the internet, a couple of years ago now, in which he said that all his colour pictures worked in B&W. I can't find it now, I have searched, but I remember it well because it made me think, 'perhaps that's why he's one of the few colour photographers I like,' and it's also the reason that no picture in my hands makes it though photoshop without turning B&W at some point."

Color Junkies

As everyone knows, black and white is better than color.*

Now, I know that in some cases, color is…warranted. A naturalist—who was also a nature photographer, and note that the two aren't the same thing—once made the argument to me that the colors of the animals and the plants he photographed were part of the essential visual information he needed to capture and convey about his subjects, a position I dubbed "the bird-feather argument." I grant the bird-feather argument: it's important to know whether a bird is brown or red. There are a number of other reasons why color might be warranted. Although it isn't my intention to enumerate them here, one more I might mention is that sometimes color allows you to pack more information into the frame of a picture, for instance in the color pictures in this post.

The two classic raps against color (you come across them again and again in the literature) are that it is "too decorative" or that it is "too literal." These strike me as true controversies, because they live on and on.

There's also the undeniable fact that some photographers are good at color. They see it well, understand how it works, and manage to integrate it into what they choose to take pictures of. In these all-too-rare cases, color is not just warranted, it is (and this always surprises me) desirable. But if you ask me, color in photographs is still like seeing large numbers of people out in public dressed in clothes that are way too revealing—although occasionally a treat, for the most part I'd just really rather not see it. It falls into the category of "too much information."

Take this photograph by Udayan Behera and published online in National Geographic.com's Your Shot —> The Daily Dozen.

Ack! It's an interesting shot, well seen, and it looks like an interesting place. But do I really need to see so much of this horrible color? Coloristically, it has the charm of a lump of mucus, or something that grows on old bread. Like some old fat dude in a Speedo, I'd really rather not see it.

Ah. Much better.

Some things are just better left to the imagination.

I will admit that a lot of pictures are color/B&W neutral. They can be either-or. That's probably because the huge majority of them, like the huge majority of all photographs, aren't art, don't pretend to be art, don't function as art. I really don't give a kick whether Herman Q. Publique takes his vacation scenics, or his missus, Gertrude O. Publique, takes the kiddies' birthday pictures, in color, or not. It doesn't concern me. Until the rise of photo-sharing sites, I never got dragged into it.

More often than not, color ruins pictures. And here's why: photographers are color junkies. Give the average Herman or Gertrude a color camera, and all judgment flies out the window. Suddenly, all kinds of things previously recognizable as not being a picture become flat-out irresistible. Why? Why, just because it's a color. Instantly, everyone's a bleedin' Ellsworth Kelly. We'll call this Johnston's Curmudgeonly First Law of Kelly Color: Color distracts, and bright, saturated primary colors distract absolutely. I think when I'm old and terminally crotchety and running around half-addled with Oldtimers, whenever I see someone taking a picture of red flowers I'll probably chase them off with my cane. ("Yes, officer. I was taking a picture of those tulips over there when that old coot charged me brandishing his cane and yelling 'Don't do that! Stop that!'")

Did you know that all those austere white stone buildings that have lasted from ancient Rome and ancient Greece weren't really white? Scholars think that, in their time, they were painted all sort of lurid colors. People love color.

To call color pictures "too decorative" or "too literal" is to start with the work and proceed from there. Me, I always start with photographers. They're who I care about. So I have two suggestions for people who routinely photograph in color. First, when you get a photograph you think might be a keeper, go into Photoshop and convert it to black and white.

Oh, now, calm down, Festus, I'm not saying you should leave it in black and white—just look at it that way for a while. You can change it back.

But this'll tell you something important. Because if it's not a picture in black and white, chances are pretty good that it's also not a picture in color, either.

(There are exceptions. Let's not dwell on that.)

This portrait, for example, still looks like a picture to me in black and white. So far so good.

Second, convert it back to color and apply massive amounts of Gaussian blur to it. Like a radius of 60 pixels or so.

Again, I'm not suggesting you leave it that way. (Duh.) But this will let you see the colors more or less by themselves. Again, just look at it that way for a while. Do the colors work as colors? Any clashes? Are the colors ugly or appealing?

If the picture's colors were stripes on a tie, would you wear the tie?

(Or think to yourself, "Would these colors make Mike say 'Eww'?" Don't take umbrage, Evangeline, I'm just kidding.)

Doesn't matter how you think about it. Just look at it. You'll figure it out.

Finally, consider the color version compared to the black and white version. Does the color add anything? A sense of light, a warmth, a feeling-tone, anything? Any positive reason for it at all?

You don't need to write comments and tell me smugly how nobody's going to do this. I know they won't. Junkies just need their fixes. But these aids would help people understand their color pictures better if they did them every once in a while. With color goes responsibility…or would, in a more perfect world.

_______________________

Mike

*Relax. Breathe. Now, slowly, calmly, go get your blood-pressure medication. 

Featured Comment by David A. Goldfarb: "'Feeling-tone'! There's one you don't hear much anymore. I sometimes teach a course called 'Marxist Cultural Theory,' and in this course I'm probably one of the few people in the U.S. at least who still reads Christopher Caudwell, precisely for his concept of 'feeling-tone.' The students usually put Caudwell at the top of the list of things they would cut from the syllabus, but I convince them that if they want to understand Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton, they need to know something about Caudwell. I feel vindicated. Color? Walker Evans was right. Color is vulgar, which is not to say that it is bad, but that it's appropriate for things that are vulgar."

Featured Comment by Carl Weese: "'Can you imagine Rembrandt, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Picasso using only black and white oil paints?' In fact, one of the most famous paintings of the twentieth century, Picasso's Guernica, is a 'gresaille' (monochrome oil painting). All of the other above named artists, especially Rembrandt, did extensive amounts of their work in monochrome printmaking media like etching, drypoint, etc. Artists have been making the color/monochrome choice, and choosing to work both ways, from long before the advent of photography."

(Mike adds, parenthetically to Carl's comment: One could even argue that virtually all painters classically did what I'm talking about, since they worked in sketches and "cartoons" etc. as studies prior to their paintings. In other words, they were establishing the meaning and the structure and the form of their work before adding color. And when they did add color, they had the luxury of choosing the colors, whereas photographers are more often stuck with what's there in the world. Of course that's pre-photography-era painting: not all painters work that way any more.)

ADDENDUM I:

Ad Reinhardt(1907-1967), Painting 1954-58, 78 x 78 inches, Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Australia

ADDENDUM II:

Fred W. McDarrah, Franz Kline in His 14th Street Studio, April 7, 1961 

Gentle Reminder

I just need to remind our brain trust (i.e., readers who comment) of the basic rule around here, which is, "No ad hominem." I'm not trying to control what you say in comments—you can say anything you like and I'll read it—merely attempting to explain why I've edited and disallowed so many comments in the past couple of days.

Ad Hominem [Latin, To the person.] A term used in debate to denote an argument made personally against an opponent, instead of against the opponent's argument.

Gracias,

—T.O.P.'s Minor Majordomo and Sentinel Seneschal

Dr. Charlie

I don't normally indulge in blatant plugs that have meaning only to me, but there are exceptions—my little brother Charlie was featured on a television "news magazine" program in Chicago a few days ago! So I'm feeling proud. One thing he neglected to mention is that he still sees hundreds of his old patients from a poor neighborhood in Chicago without charging them his new "concierge" fees, but without the cost efficiencies of a big practice behind him. He's a good guy, my bro.

If you live in Chicago, you might want to check him out.

___________________

Mike J.

'Sepia Embittered with Black'

"For her photograph of the teenage celebrity, Leibovitz chose a palette strongly redolent of the dirty postcards of yesteryear, sepia embittered with black, a suggestion of eye-blue and lip-red, as if retouched by hand, with never—thank our stars—a hint of pink. The light is centred on the child's sallow, unformed cheek. Her eyes are shadowed and puffy, her lips slightly set, as if she is waiting out the slow shutter-click of an obsolete camera...."

Veteran feminist Germaine Greer weighs in on the Leibovitz controversy at guardian.co.uk.

____________________

Mike  (Thanks to dyathink)

Paul Butzi's Solo Photo Book Month '08

By Gordon McGregor

Photography books are imposing. Big, important collections of the best work the best of us have to offer. Bigger than your average book; glossy, heavy things that dominate coffee tables and bookshelves. Must be hard to make. Certainly my photographs aren't good enough to be in a collection like that. Yet many photographers would love to put a book of their images together. Maybe it is the sort of thing that would be a great end to a career, picking the best of a lifetime's worth of image making. Not something I could do right now, surely? It would take me forever just to find a few images good enough. I'd have to shoot for years more to pick enough just for the first chapter. Even then, how do you put a book together? There's all that layout and type setting and design to do. I don't know anything about that. That's even before you get to think about text, having an essay that explains the images or tries to provide some more insight in to what you were doing. You mean I have to write something too? Books are too hard.

At least that is how I used to feel about photography books. But back in December of last year, Paul Butzi had a crazy notion. Similar to the National Novel Writing Month, what would happen if you tried to create a photography book in a month? From scratch, not dipping into an archive of images, nothing written, just start and finish the whole thing in a month? Take the pictures, make the hard editing decisions, design a layout, come up with a cover, write the accompanying essays and put it all together in 31 days. Several people thought it wasn't a totally insane notion, and SoFoBoMo (Solo Photo Book Month) was born.

Fast forward to April 1st, 2008 (an ideal date to start such a foolish endeavor). Many people started that day. Blogs sprung up sharing the experience. People described the aspirations they had and the struggles that they overcame. Hints and tips were shared about what a book really looks like. I took a long, hard look at the books I've read many times before and started to notice for the first time how they were put together. Some started to share contact sheets of every image taken and expressed their frustrations about the quality of the results along the way. We all made progress towards the goal.

Over 200 people signed up to give SoFoBoMo a shot this year. We settled on a somewhat fuzzy 31-day period, somewhere between the 1st of April and the 31st of May, just to accommodate a variety of schedules. Some are already finished and their books are on display. Others are in the midst of the editing process, many more are just getting started, managing to procrastinate even in the middle of such an accelerated timescale. If you are interested, there is still time to get involved. If you are looking for reasons to join in, this might provide some. Looking at the finished results might give you some inspiration too. I've been amazed at the quality of the work that's been produced in a such a short timescale. I was surprised by how productive I managed to be while making my book. All the hard decisions just didn't seem to be quite so hard any more. I just had to get on with them. There wasn't enough time to waste time worrying.

Books are being created covering a diverse range of topics: street portraits, days walking a dog, coping with cancer, moving out of a home, a daily visit to a local park, volunteers doing what they do, the final days before a deployment to Iraq. The common thread between all of these books is that they are getting done. In a month. From start to finish. I released my book three weeks after I started. Exhausted, I haven't touched a camera since, but I've already started making plans for the next book. I might take a bit longer to do this one but I have a much better idea about what I need to do this second time around. Books aren't so hard after all.

SoFoBoMo now has a home page and there is a list of the completed books, updated as new books arrive.

_____________________

Gordon McGregor is a photographer who occasionally does engineering to pay the rent. He moved from Scotland to Texas 10 years ago and started taking pictures around the same time. Eighteen months ago his photography took a radical shift from never shooting people to not shooting much else.

Gordon's blog

Featured Comment by Paul Butzi: "A minor correction, here...

"It's not really 'Paul Butzi's SoFoBoMo.'

"I came up with the idea, and (at the urging of folks like Gordon McGregor and Colin Jago) sort of formalized things.  I haven't done a lick of work to promote the thing; that's all been done by a list of bloggers too long to enumerate here. I bought the domain SoFoBoMo.org (mostly to prevent some opportunist from grabbing it up to make money from it) but it there was a whole host of people (again too long to name) who goaded me into doing something concrete about a website, and it was Bernie Sumption who did such a beautiful job creating the website in a very short time after I dithered away for months on end.

"So I don't own it, don't want to own it, and more importantly would prefer that no one ever own it. 

"To the extent that it's ever going to be owned, it's owned by the all the folks who have participated (in many cases are even now participating, since it hasn't ended yet) and have shared extensively during and about their experience, and by all of the other folks who have participated as well. And, of course, those who participate in years to come.

"It's not that I don't want my name associated with SoFoBoMo. When I posted the 'rules' I thought that, just maybe, a dozen people would eventually sign on, and if we were lucky perhaps four of us would finish a book. In the end a huge number of people (Gordon says over 200, so I guess he counted) have signed up, and I know of at least two dozen books being completed with more getting finished every day. I'm thrilled to have played a part in getting SoFoBoMo going but want to make it very clear that it's become the wonderful event it is now due to the contributions of lots and lots of people all over the planet."

Quote o' the Day

“An artist’s duty is to reflect the times.”

-                                                              —Nina Simone

A Sunday Walk in the Park

Sunday is off-topic day around here. I occasionally write little off-topic editorials that I originally decided to call "Sunday Sermons." The rub—aye, the rub—is that there's no reason why you'd want to read these things. You come here to read about photography, not what I think about…oh, say, energy policy. So I promised to label them clearly so you could avoid them if you choose.

Well, here's a little problem: I can't stand that name any more. Sunday Sermon? A lame cliché of a name for an off-the-cuff editorial rant if there ever was one. The connotations aren't even right—it implies religiosity, and I'm non-religious, and it implies a lecture from on high, whereas most of my little mini-essays are more like ruminative, meandering chats with a slightly curmudgeonly uncle.

So I've decided to change the name. From now on, if you don't mind, I'm going to call them "Sunday Walks in the Park." (Unless somebody has a better suggestion.)* I spent no time or effort coming up with that name either, and, sure enough, it's no more clever or original than the old name. But at least it's a little more accurate.

So, in case you're one of those who don't want to read my armchair philosophizing on topics far afield from photography, "Walk in the Park" is henceforth the danger signal. You have been warned!

So anyway, here's this week's Sunday Walk: it's called "A Million Millionaires." And remember, it's not about photography. 

_____________________

Mike

*UPDATE: Matthew Allen has suggested "Open Mike," which is perfect, and which I hereby adopt. From now on, the Sunday off-topic pieces you'll want to avoid if you only like reading about photography will be labeled "Open Mike." Thanks to Matthew!

Eight Belles

I was reflecting the other day—in the context of the "debate" over evolution—that it's too bad that the word "ignorant" has become merely another insulting epithet that's exactly equivalent to "stupid" or any of the other perjoratives meaning, or implying, mental deficiency. Because of course a great many people are "ignorant" without being stupid. One could even say, without fear of refutation, that everyone is ignorant of something.

When Maarten B. says, in the comments to the previous post, "I don't understand why they didn't do more to save the horse," he's literally confessing, perfectly rightly, to ignorance. Yet if I were to call him ignorant in reply, it would be taken as a calumny. And that would be unjust, as Martin, if he is a typical T.O.P. reader, is most probably thoughtful and well-educated and quite possibly an expert in his own field, whatever that might be—the opposite of someone who is "stupid" or mentally deficient in any way.

Maarten: a horse with two broken front ankles literally cannot be saved. All the money in the world and state-of-the-art veterinary medical science cannot do it.

Two years ago, a racehorse named Barbaro won the Derby in a brilliant accomplishment that you can see here. Two weeks later, at the 2006 Preakness, he broke down after false starting. His owners, Roy and Gretchen Jackson, decided to spare no expense in attempting his recovery, even though horses can seldom survive a serious leg injury and the odds were slim. (Even if the one leg can be effectively treated, problems develop in the other legs; three legs are not enough to support a thoroughbred. And, unlike many other animals, horses cannot lie down for any length of time.) They almost pulled it off. Barbaro's medical team at the University of Pennsylvania's New Bolton Center, headed by Dr. Dean Richardson, gave Barbaro the kind of no-holds-barred medical care that all but a tiny fraction of the world's humans never see; the total expenses ran into the millions of dollars (which some people condemned as being inappropriate, since it could have been spent on humans—you can't win for losing). Barbaro survived for more than eight months but finally succumbed to his injury. The story has been the subject of books and documentaries. If you're new to all this, I recommend the NBC Sports documentary "Barbaro: A Nation's Horse." It's played for sentiment in parts, but it's a gripping story and it illustrates the very real difficulties of equine medicine. There was also an HBO documentary, although I haven't seen it.

If you care to follow the story, there will be lots of coverage of Eight Belles in the weeks to come. But you should know a couple of things—first, that (however dangerous and inhumane you think horse racing is or is not) this was truly freakish: track veterinarian Dr. Larry Bramlage called it "unheard of" for a horse to be galloping out well past the wire and break down on the far turn. "I've never seen this before," Bramlage said, and he should have seen everything by now. And second, that no horse can survive serious injuries to two legs, most especially if both are hind or fore. There was literally no way to get Eight Belles into the equine ambulance right next to her on the track, much less to save her life. Eight Belles was put down immediately (rather than later in the day, out of sight of the—ahem—ignorant public) simply because the injuries are very painful. But regardless of the timing, euthanasia was not a choice, given her injuries. It was absolutely the only option.

It is indeed very sad, and people are right to be troubled by it. I still haven't gotten over Ruffian completely, and I probably never will.

____________________

Mike

Undefeated Big Brown Wins 134th Kentucky Derby

Kent Desormeaux rides Big Brown past Gabriel Saez riding Eight Belles (5) to win the 134th Kentucky Derby Saturday, May 3, 2008, at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky.(Photo credit: Morry Gash, AP)

Favorite Big Brown, ridden by Kent Desormeaux, won the 134th Kentucky Derby in an impressive show of strength and stamina, with a deliberate, powerful charge from the final turn. Tragically, after running a superb, courageous race, the big filly Eight Belles (left, above), who came in second, broke both front ankles while pulling up and had to be euthanized on the track where she fell—which surely brought back to many people in the racing world shocking echoes of the brilliant and still much-lamented Ruffian.* Big Brown, who became the first horse to win from the 20th position since 1929, won going away, with little sign of fatigue. In fact he had so much energy left over he even tossed his rider after the end of the race.

Track personnel try to hold down Eight Belles after the 134th Kentucky Derby Saturday, May 3, 2008, at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky. Eight Belles was euthanized after breaking both front ankles following a second-place finish in the Kentucky Derby. (Photo credit: Brian Bohannon, AP)

The sad fate of Eight Belles is a great tragedy that marred an otherwise fine race, and our condolences go out to her whole team.

More photos at Yahoo! Sports

_____________________

Mike

*At the link (The 1975 Mother Goose), watch how she's just loping along the backstretch (around 1:00), then watch her come alive just past the half-mile post and turn on the burners, at about 1:13. And then that finish, when she gains ten lengths on the field in the last quarter. What a totally magnificent runner.