The Online Photographer

A Strange Sort of Product Review, Part I

This is actually "on topic."

...For me, anyway. I've been working for photography enthusiasts for something like 22 years now, and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that many people have a particular slant to their interest—their own particular way of enjoying photography.

A big part of my own enjoyment, as regular readers know, is photo books. I don't buy a lot of them, but I've been interested in photographic books literally since I was a child (my earliest photographic education came from looking at thousands of American Civil War photographs, mostly in books). And, if you're interested in something consistently over enough years, objects accumulate.

(Pace Calvin Amari, below, I had a friend in Maryland who bought himself one nice photograph a year as a birthday present to himself. The collection was impressive when I knew him—I believe he had more than twenty prints at that time, including some by very big-name photographers—and that was seventeen years ago. If he kept going, the collection must be stunning by now—he had collected some photographers early on whose work has since appreciated into the stratosphere, and would be unobtainable by mere mortals now. He was definitely a mere mortal, who worked for county government for a living.)

Anyway, what I'm saying is that I have a lot of photography books.

That leads to an odd problem: shelving.

I don't know if you know this, but bookshelves are difficult to buy. Most furniture stores, even many good ones, even many big ones, hardly have anything in the way of bookshelves. Those that do usually mostly carry bookcases for people who don't like books—good for six feet of paperbacks. Some stores, when you ask for "bookshelves," will lead you to display cases with shelves made of glass—great for knicknacks, not good for actual books. The biggest bookcase I have at this moment came from an office supply store, and I believe I had it in my room when I was eleven.

That's not the only problem: Photo books tend to be oversize. Some are short but deep; some are thick and heavy; some are just plain big. One of the biggest books I have is Todd Hido's House Hunting, which is very close to 17 inches high. That's not even very big to some art and photography book collectors, but then again, it's the rare bookcase that can accommodate a 17-inch high book. 

The deepest book I have is 16 inches deep, which means it sticks out of the only oversize bookcase I have, which I bought (the bookcase, I mean) at Ikea in Maryland in maybe 1989 or '90. That one is 34 1/2 inches high by 33 1/2 inches high by 15 inches deep, outside dimensions. I intended to buy more of the same unit as finances allowed; but by the time I was ready to buy a second one, Ikea had discontinued them.

That case filled up about fourteen years ago, and has stayed that way ever since. Thus, it's of limited (read: no) use in dealing with new acquisitions.

Critical information
This year is about to be over, and I'm not ready. For one thing, longtime readers with good memories might recall that I shared some of my New Year's Resolutions for 2009—three, to be exact—not one of which I have managed to fulfill in the intervening 352 days. So, in an effort to squeak my #1 resolution (as I put it then: "Moar bookshelve") in under the wire before 2009 is over and 2010 gets here, I figured I might try to buy a bookcase for photo books before the year's out.

Here's the crucial, critical piece of information I discovered in 2009: unfinished furniture stores.

They're the place to get custom-made, real bookcases in the sizes you specify. You can choose your style, your size, the wood you want, the dimensions, and the finish; you can choose open style, or request doors.

So, today I bought a bookcase. It was very expensive by my (cheap!) standards. But I'm tired of having stacks of expensive photo books piled hither and yon in the nooks and crannies of my house.

Disgrace! This is no way to treat good photography books.

I intended to buy two, but decided on just one when I heard the (gulp) price.

The one I ordered is 36 inches wide. It has a deeper base that is 36" high and 18" deep—that's about 30" of usable space, which I'll divide into two shelves, one for books that are tall and wide and one for books that are short and wide (so-called "landscape format" books, which give 8- and 10-inch bookshelves fits). The 4-foot top section is 14" deep on the outside dimension, which itself is deep enough for many photo books. Both sections will have glass doors (my house is very dusty, and dust is very hard on books). It's made of oak. The shop is going to finish it and deliver it. It's supposed to take six to eight weeks.

I'll continue this "product review" when it gets here.

So that's it: one resolution down, at more or less the last minute.

I have a new resolution for 2010, and it's a biggie. It entails a major change for me, a fundamental change of emphasis for my photography. But I'll tell you about that when 2010 gets here.

Of course, I might not actually get to it in 2010.

I'm taking tomorrow off. See you sometime on Sunday. But remember my tip: if you're searching for high quality oversize bookshelves for photography books, unfinished furniture stores are the place to look.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "About 15 years ago I was confronted with the problem of what to do with all my books, as they relentlessly accumulated in unsteady piles around the bedroom. 'Gotta do something about that, or I'm sleeping on the couch; I don't want to be crushed by a pile of falling books,' said my long-suffering wife. Coincidentally I found At Home with Books: How Booklovers Live with and Care for Their Libraries, a coffee-table tome full of gorgeous photos of spectacular home libraries. Sort of 'interior design porn' for bibliophiles.

"This gave me big ideas, and I cast my greedy eyes on the large unfinished space above our garage. My wife rolled her eyes, sighed heavily, and said 'knock yourself out.' One of the advantages of living in the boondocks is ready access to cheap raw lumber and affordable skilled craftsmen. A carpenter we know filled the space with custom-designed bookshelves to conform to the gable-roofed shape. The shelves get deeper from ceiling to floor as the walls recede, accommodating larger books toward the bottom. The shelves themselves ride on adjustable metal tabs and can be placed at any height. Perfection! My wife extracted a promise that she had the right to divorce me once all the shelves were filled. Seemed entirely reasonable at the time.

"Unfortunately, that was 15 years ago. Since then, I've managed to fill every last nook & cranny of the copious shelving, and I'm back to tottering piles of my latest acquisitions scattered across the floor of my 'library.' Gotta get around to 'de-accessioning' a bunch of the less worthy books...real soon now. The 'divorce thing' so far I've managed to finesse by keeping the wife out of the room. But I think she suspects something."

Mike replies: Unfortunately, the overriding mandate with shelving is, "more." Shhh, though—I'm trying to delude myself that one 7x4' bookcase is going to be enough for me, just because it's enough for me now.

I've told this story before, but I'll tell it again. When I was young I worked as a carpenter, and one job I had was building bookshelves for my friend the bookseller William F. Hale in an apartment he'd rented across the street from his shop. He actually lived there for a while. We covered every available surface in shelving—every room, the halls (using nominal 6" lumber, for paperbacks), most of the bathroom, above the refrigerator, above the doorways. It wasn't long before you could barely get into the kitchen because of the stacks of books on the floor. Bill had to move out. No room for him.

When last heard from, Bill—who eventually married a woman who was also a bookseller—had acquired a large octagonal barn out in the country, fitted elaborately with shelving to hold some 80,000 books. Rumor has it that it has long since been filled to overflowing.

Featured Comment by Paul: "It's a brave man who posts a picture of his bookshelves! Obviously, you are a collector of discriminating tastes, as evidenced by Jim Marshall's Trust. I got a signed copy of that and have been enjoying it a little every day. For me, his work has more depth than what is mostly available now from the highly skilled, but over-produced work of professional rock photographers. Just my two cents' worth."

The Future of the Photo Book

The meaning of the photo book has changed radically in the digital era, sez me.

Some time ago (not sure if anybody was listening, or cared) I made the point that photo books were how photographers communicated. Sure, serious photographers had shows—but despite the "occasion" of a show, the hard filter it placed on editing, the ideal nature of the presentation—the fact is that very few people saw them. A gallery owner puts a great deal of resources into presenting a show for a month. So does the photographer, who often uses the fact of the exhibit as a "crash" motivation to print a set of work and often has to pay for framing, too. The preparation can be a significant investment of all sorts of things: money, time, psychic energy, creative energy.

And then how many people see it? A few dozen to a few hundred, maybe...hopefully the right ones. The right people, I mean. Maybe, if the show is in a museum and the museum is prestigious, the show is seen by a few thousand people. But in that case, a lot of them might be random tourists. And then, the month is over, the show is taken down.

Photo books, on the other hand, endure better through time. They're more widely disseminated, yet they hit their target audience more cleanly. They can be seen by more people. People can experience them without having to buy or own them. They're just as hard a filter for redacting a body of work, for the most part (books are often the record of shows, in the case of show catalogs, for that matter.)

Photo books weren't just a reflection of the culture of photographers...they were the culture. They were how you kept track, how you saw work, how you learned who was doing what, how you "saw" shows you missed.

That's all changed.

The internet has a vastly greater reach. It's far, far more democratic. It's greatly more accessible. You can see more work with it, by several orders of magnitude. The photo book has been supplanted as the way to look at work. Most of the work I see these days is online. (Although I still crave seeing original prints; I just don't get much opportunity.)

So is the photo book dead? Dying?

Not hardly. In fact—against the odds, one might have guessed—it's flourishing as never before. This could possibly be because we're in a sort of renaissance period and we just don't know it because we're in the middle of it; it might also be because the digital era has gotten so many more people interested in photography that the audience has simply grown (well, there are more people on Earth than there were in 1978 or 1953, too).

However, the purpose and usefulness of the photo book has changed. Allow me to state a general problem using a specific example:

Let's say a photographer gets an idea. His idea is that a good place to go photograph might be, oh, let's say, a yard sale. (You could pick anything, I don't care, it's not important to the concept.)

Internet version: So I went to this yard sale for an hour last Saturday. I took forty pictures. Here are the best thirty-six.

Book version: I've been to more than three dozen yard sales over a five-year period and have probably taken more than two thousand exposures. Here's the best one.

The internet is great for sharing photos. It's a revolution in itself. It's convenient, democratic, robust, vibrant. I'm not saying it isn't any of those things, so please hold the complaints! But the problem is that it's a Great Pacific Garbage Patch of pictures. That's its nature. There are billions of photographs on the web. One person cannot look at all the photographs on one big photo-sharing site—I mean cannot, it is not possible, even looking at three pictures per second all day long as a full-time job—and there are thousands of sites.

So what's missing? Editing. Winnowing. Sifting. Curating. The creativity of culling. The imposition of a viewpoint. Redaction. Call it what you will.

The internet is a junk heap. It's every frame that comes back from the drugstore. It's the contact sheet, the raw material, the unsorted mass. The first draft. In that context, what will rise in importance will be the opportunities and the occasions we have for selecting only the best of the best, for making extended visual arguments, for the creativity and inventiveness inherent in limits, for the formalized set of photographs that puts a photographer's best foot forward, no fluff, no excuses.

That's the future of the photo book, in my opinion. The form of the books won't change, because they needn't. Their purpose and meaning within the culture of what we do is what's evolving.

Mike

P.S. I originally meant to write a post on this topic to participate in Andy Adams' and Miki Johnson's crowd-sourced blog post about the future of the photo book. Alas, missed my deadline. Some things never change....

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Featured Comment by Paul: "Okay, it's not important to the concept, but have you seen this?"

Dipping

Just curious—has anyone read Max Kozloff's The Theatre of the Face? I'd be interested to know what you think of it.

I found Kozloff too weighty and impenetrable when I first encountered him. Lost to memory is whether that was because of the particular piece I ran up against, or should be put down my own jejune unformed intellect of the time. More recently I've been enjoying dipping into my copy of Lone Visions, Crowded Frames, which is slowly winning me over to Mr. Max. (Mad Max? K? I daren't be too flippantly familiar, because he's out there, and he could find me....) Take this intro to one essay, for example:

By and large, artists aren't widely heard of in our culture unless their work is priced off the charts or they're censured for sexy subjects. War photographers don't typically enter the news unless they get shot. Hearing of such deaths, we may feel momentarily shocked, as if we had been impudently denied our natural right to reportage from dangerous areas....

How could anyone not keep reading that?

Dipping into PHOTO:BOX at random (and, as an aside, what do people think of that?) from time to time reminds me that it's been a long time since I really read much photography criticism for pleasure, or indeed for any other reason than self-improvement. I read out of duty, now, mostly.

Do people ever read about photography? That's another thing I wonder about. I mean criticism, history, or theory? Kozloff, Coleman, introductions to monographs, Geoff Dyer maybe? Time for a poll:

Online Surveys & Market Research

(If you can't see this poll box, please go here.)

I feel a distinctly old dog: most of the books that formed my own education are long out of print, dusty and uncontemporary. There are a number of books (such as The Theatre of the Face) that I'm curious about, but often not, it seems, quite curious enough to actually read them. I've reached that stage where I know enough to merely argue with authors I read, in my head. Maybe I should revisit some of the books that influenced me when I started out, and see what I think of them now.

Mike

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Mike adds: I'm very encouraged by this poll. I'm not really even sure why...I basically agree that you don't necessarily have to read about photography to be good at it. I guess it's just something I enjoy so I hope other people enjoy it too....

Featured Comment by Jez: "While I love reading about photography, I usually don't get much further than introductions to monographs as I find most writing on photography dry and humourless. Having said that, Dyer's Ongoing Moment that you linked to above is absolutely fantastic. I've read it twice already and find myself dipping back in from time to time. If only more people could write about photography like that. And don't get me started on Sontag. What a tedious little book that is...."

Featured Comment by Yuanchung Lee: "I love A.D. Coleman. He's among my favorite writers on photography, next to Robert Adams, Szarkowski, and Papageorge. Definitely my favorite non-photographer writer. (Coleman, by the way, shows up in that terrific documentary about Shelby Lee Adams which was recently shown on Ovation. Great film; made me love S.L.A. even more.)

"Geoff Dyer, not so much—a bit smarmy, not enough editing. But I have the book, and have been planning to re-read it, so may change my mind. Sontag, no. (Coleman's critique of On Photography is devastating, and right on). Barthes, a big fat no. (Though I confess that despite a master's in philosophy, i only understood about 35% of what he wrote)."

Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "I want a book of photo criticism to make it worth my while to to read it closely. I lose interest if it doesn't quickly make a valid point or follow a logical thread.

Some have struck me as very worthwhile because they were brilliant, or perhaps reasonably perceptive—or at very least entertainingly catty. Geoffrey Dyer's The Ongoing Moment falls into the latter category; he's certainly not a member of the "academy", and some of his judgments are questionable. But he doesn't beat around the bush with his opinions, and sometimes says what the rest of us are thinking. (I chuckled at Dyer's analysis of Stieglitz's nudes of the much younger O'Keefe: hey, look who I get to sleep with.)

A.D. Coleman's books are wonderful; erudite, insightful, strong opinions backed by solid evidence. His brilliant essay on the very deliberate erasure of William Mortensen from photographic history by Beaumont Newhall et al. should be required reading. It sharply demonstrates how artificial and incomplete the 'canon' of photography-as-art really is. The late Bill Jay's collected musings are warmly entertaining, but really don't rise to the level of criticism. I'd much rather read a collection of David Vestal's pithy commentary, which sadly is not available in book form.

Among current photo criticism titles, Terry Barrett's Criticizing Photographs is a very approachable introduction to the conventions and jargon of criticism for interested amateurs, and it's often used as a college level text on the subject. After reading it at least you'll know what academics are talking about. Michael Fried's Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before is a turgid, tendentious book-length essay arguing that huge cinematically constructed photographs by Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson et al are the most significant art on the planet. Hookay.

Photography After Frank by Philip Gefter is a cut-and-paste collection of old articles and new essays that tries to connect Robert Frank's The Americans to subsequent "post modern thought" and confections like Jeff Wall's; the corpse doesn't quite fit into the coffin, but some sections are interesting. Ian Jeffrey's How to Read a Photograph: Lessons from Master Photographers turns out instead to be more like "how I personally read a photograph," wherein the author draws all sorts of unsustainable or frankly imaginary conclusions from "readings" of images famous and obscure.

I read 'em so you don't have to.

A few others: Frank Van Riper's Talking Photography (2002) is a bit dated now, but contains some very enjoyable essays on photographic craft and art. Vicki Goldberg's Light Matters is a collection of her essays across several decades; some are really good, others not so much. Overall they lack the elegance and coherence of A.D. Coleman or the deep thought behind Robert Adams' essays.

Edward Burtynsky's Oil

Edward Burtynsky et al., Burtynsky: Oil
Hardcover; 140 pages
Steidl Photography International
Published October 31, 2009
14.4 x 11.5 x 1.1 inches
(U.K. link )

Reviewed by Geoff Wittig

Many of the 20th century's greatest landscape photographers consciously embraced an environmentalist ethic in their work. Ansel Adams's long association with the Sierra Club and his tireless devotion to conservation is of course well known. Eliot Porter, Ray Atkinson, Robert Glenn Ketchum and many others pictured the dwindling remnants of pristine landscape as a redemptive Eden, worth preserving before it was all paved over.

While many folks have continued pursuing this idiom, in a world with six billion people and relentlessly increasing pressure on the environment it's harder to find unique corners of wilderness that haven't been photographed already. Confrontational images illustrating environmental degradation have been a feature of work by photographers such as Richard Misrach, Ed Kashi and Robert Glenn Ketchum. (Ketchum seems to slyly insert a few shocking images between more traditional pretty landscapes.) There can be a kind of formalist beauty to such photographs, but it's obviously a much tougher challenge than rendering a snow-capped mountain or forest waterfall attractively.

Edward Burtynsky has built a career in fine art photography meeting this challenge. He began photographing conventionally beautiful landscapes in large format. As he relates in the video Manufactured Landscapes, he had an epiphany while attempting to photograph in the Appalachian mountains of Pennsylvania. He realized that every bit of landscape within sight had been completely reshaped by coal mining. Nothing was "natural." The landscape as reshaped by man instead became his subject.

Oil is Burtynsky's latest book. The extraction, distribution, consumption, and declining availability of petroleum are all explored through his large-format photographs.

The opening section examines extraction and refinement. The immense size, geometric order and rectilinear shapes of production fields and refineries make for images of striking formal beauty despite the subject matter, all rendered in fine-grained detail. The cover image, reproduced inside, is a vast diptych of a California production field with endless ranks of derricks, shot in warm late-day light. Another image shot from the air reveals the colossal scale of tar sands extraction.

Next is "Motor Culture," images of the world oil has made. Aerial shots of geometric highway interchanges, the immensity of exurban sprawl, endless rows of new cars awaiting shipment—even Bike Week in Sturgis, South Dakota, gets the same monumental treatment.

Last, and darkest, is "The End of Oil." In this section Burtynsky shows us the final result of the process: rusted out, oozing abandoned oil fields, endless ranks of junked cars and airplanes. Some of the most affecting images show unbelievably vast piles of discarded tires, or the grim oil-soaked reality of recycling in the developing world.

Following the images are essays by curator Paul Roth, writer/photographer Michael Mitchell, and economist/ecologist William E. Rees. Their essays provide a sobering perspective on what the extraction of petroleum, the consequences of its exploitation, and the predicted decline in production mean to civilization and the planet. The essays bracket a short, ironic postscript group of photographs of Detroit's decaying abandoned auto factories.

Oil is a remarkable book for those concerned about where, as an industrial civilization, we are headed in the future. The beautiful photographs of nominally unappealing subjects may cause a bit of cognitive dissonance compared to photographs of a pristine mountain lake; but they're beautiful just the same.

For those interested in Edward Burtynsky's work, there is an embarrassment of riches currently available in book form. Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky, catalog to the 2003 exhibition, is still available, though its reproductions are marred by poor shadow detail (U.K. link). China (Steidl, 2006) has very good reproductions, which beautifully depict the country's vast factories and frenzied urban construction, together with older coal and steel facilities (U.K. link). Finally, Quarries (Steidl, 2009) (U.K. link) applies the same immaculate large format photography to the mining of marble, granite and limestone. Reproductions are again excellent; large vehicles look like Matchbox toys inside gleaming marble pits in the earth. Great stuff if you like this kind of photography.

Geoff

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Featured Comment by Gavin: "I work in the oil industry, mostly installing offshore platforms and laying pipes, not something Mr Burtynsky has photographed, but it is nice to see some really good, truthful pictures of any kind of industry. The manufactured landscape is all around us; most of the 'wild' landscapes here in the U.K. are anything but. I used to live down in the SW of England and Dartmoor, a popular haunt of landscape photographers, was once one of the most industrialized areas of the World (probably) as tin and lead etc. were mined. It doesn't take much effort to find the remains of the mines and smelters if you know where to look."

Featured Comment by Moose [responding to Gavin]: "From a broader perspective: 'Southern England, for example, is one of the largest structures ever made by man. We think of it as nature: the beautiful expanse of towns, villages, forests and moors that extends from Cornwall to Kent and from the south coast to the Midlands. We think of it as natural, but of course it is man-made, almost all of it. It wasn't there three thousand years ago. It is a consciously created structure, perhaps 300 miles by 100 miles, and it has been created slowly, patiently, over a period of about a thousand years.' Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Book One, 'The Phenomenon of Life,' pp. 28-29."

An Interview with Simon Roberts

Simon Roberts, South Downs Way, West Sussex, 8th October 2007, from We English

By Ailsa McWhinnie

Simon Roberts is a British photographer who for a number of years worked on assignments for magazines and weekend supplements. His eventual disillusionment with being asked to produce what he describes as "the definitive story" on a topic, and then being given three days in which to do it, led to him embarking on a year-long trip across Russia. The resulting images were published to great acclaim by Chris Boot, under the title Motherland.

The success of Motherland put him in the position where he was able to raise funding for his next project from Arts Council England, the National Media Museum and the John Kobal Foundation. His latest book is We English.

Simon lives on the south coast of England with his wife Sarah and their children Jemima and Florence. Of his daughters, he says, "Jemima was conceived in Russia and Florence as we traveled through England, so I can’t go traveling any more as we can’t afford any more children!"

Ailsa McWhinnie: We English is photographed in a quite different style from Motherland. What prompted the change?

Simon Roberts: It’s not quite the departure it might look. There are a couple of pictures in Motherland that inspired the direction I took with We English. One in particular shows a Victory Day picnic at Yekaterinburg [a major Russian city on the eastern side of the Urals]. Victory Day is a very important public holiday when the Russians celebrate victory over Nazi Germany. When I blew the picture up for an exhibition I became really interested in the relationship between these constellations of people and the geographical space. There are all sorts of little signifiers in the photograph, such as the silver birch trees—which are a motif in Russian landscape painting—but also when you look more closely you’ll see balloons in the trees, so it becomes a natural landscape adapted by human presence. It was something I decided I’d quite like to explore in the England work.

Sunday picnic, Yekaterinburg, from Motherland

AMc: What inspired the project that became We English?

SR: I was quite struck by the relationship between the Russians and their geography, and it started me thinking about my relationship to England. I started to want to explore that sense of identity. There’s a very rich tradition of British photographers photographing the British landscape, from Benjamin Stone in the 1890s to Bill Brandt and Tony Ray-Jones, but there had been a bit of a lull more recently, so it felt quite timely to go on this journey. My generation has travelled abroad a lot, there’s this sense of the "exotic other"—and I’ve done it myself with Russia, albeit trying to take an anthropological approach. However, it was really important I wasn’t derivative of what had gone before in terms of photographing Britain—I had to find my own voice. So in summer 2007 I started exploring different ways of photographing.

Motherland was shot using a Mamiya 7, because I needed a light camera when travelling—but this time I started playing with a 5x4-inch camera and began to see something quite interesting when the people in the picture appeared small in the frame. I wanted the landscape to be as important as the people within it, but to make sure the people weren’t so small you wouldn’t be able to make out the detail of what they were wearing and how they related to one another.

AMc: So did you try to avoid the places that have formed parts of other photographers’ work?

SR: No. I deliberately went to New Brighton [the seaside town photographed by Martin Parr in his book, The Last Resort]. The pictures didn’t end up in the book, but I certainly went to some of these places because they’d been done before. I was intrigued, because historically we’re doing many of the same things we did a hundred years ago, it’s just we’re wearing different clothes. A lot of old traditions and festivals are being revived by local councils who are looking for new ways of getting tourists. Actually, there are very few photographs of that sort of event in the book, because I wanted to steer clear of events that were being quite deliberately marketed and promoted. The images that ended up in the book often depict quite mundane activities.

AMc: Were there any surprises as the project got underway?

SR: It was interesting to see that people are quite parochial. They end up doing things very close to where they live: the guy fishing on the banks of the river, or the Sunday-league football, these are very ordinary things, but to the person doing them they’re very important, so I wanted to make them more grand—and that was one of the challenges. When you’re doing a project in your own back yard you have to learn to tune into the ordinary things you see every day that you don’t consider to be a photograph—so in many ways I was looking for the "non" photograph.

AMc: You invited members of the public to submit ideas for places or events to photograph. How successful was that?

SR: What I liked was not just the suggestions themselves but also the way that people talked about them. What’s interesting is the way they think about England. A lot of it is about memory—how they remember a place and how that might be different from how they experience it now. If the person was writing from abroad, it would often be to suggest something they missed about England. I probably photographed only five or ten percent of the ideas, but it was a great way of generating interest. Other ideas would come from local newspapers, or I’d stop by the local village hall and see what was posted on their noticeboard. There were probably 12 main anchorpoints—places I wanted to be at particular times in the year, such as Ladies Day at Aintree—and then I’d build in other places around them.

Ladies’ Day, Aintree Racecourse, Merseyside, 4th April 2008

AMc: Even though you worked with a 5x4 camera, which by its very nature slows things down, the pictures are still very much about the "decisive moment"—I get the sense of you waiting for the choreography to come together.

SR: It was very challenging because often there were a lot of people in the frame, and how do you find the decisive moment when there are a hundred people moving around? Sometimes I would just take the picture and not really be too bothered if one person was standing in front of another, or if a lamppost was coming out of somebody’s head. But another reason for using 5x4 was because everyone’s a photographer now—whether with a mobile phone or a high-end DSLR—and I had to ask myself what differentiates me from them? So by using a 5x4 I was actually making a very public statement that I was there to take a photograph of this landscape.

People were quite interested in what I was doing but, more importantly, they didn’t feel threatened. If I’d been on a beach walking around with a 35mm camera I suspect people would have felt a lot more threatened. Funnily enough, I was getting quite spontaneous pictures with a very cumbersome piece of equipment. It would take five or ten minutes to set the camera up, so people would get bored with watching me and end up carrying on with what they were doing. There are only a couple of frames where you can see in the distance that someone’s looking at me, but generally it’s almost as if I wasn’t there.

AMc: What other considerations were there?

SR: I shot using only a 150mm lens, which is pretty much how the human eye sees, and I always wanted, where possible, to have an elevated position as this gives a greater sense of the people and their relationship to the landscape. So often I would photograph from the roof of my motorhome.

I wanted to explore the notion of leisure because often this is something we do quite subconsciously, and what people do with their leisure time not only says something about them as individuals, but us as a collective, too. I also knew I only wanted to work outside, to give a sense of the pastoral. And even though I worked in cities, too, there is still a sense of people gravitating towards the green spaces.

Mad Maldon Mud Race, River Blackwater, Maldon, Essex, 30th December 2007

AMc: Why England and not Britain?

SR: Because of devolution, and with Scotland and Wales having a lot more local power politically and to some extent economically, there is a sense of Welshness and Scottishness, but people often see being passionate about being English as rather dirty. I deliberately put the flag of St. George on the cover because I wanted to be quite provocative and suggest there don’t have to be right-wing connotations to it. I’m not suggesting I’m a nationalist, but I do find it interesting how people align themselves with a geographical border.

Saunton Sands, Devon, 23rd May 2008

AMc: Would you say the photographs are romantic?

SR: I was certainly inspired by romantic paintings of England, but even so there are probably only one or two images you would describe as picturesque. I did deliberately photograph in quite evocative light sometimes to try to generate a particular feeling, but yes, I did want to create quite beautiful pictures—and unashamedly so.

AMc: Thank you very much Simon.

SR: Thank you.

Ailsa

We English, by Simon Roberts
Hardback, 112 pages
Published by Chris Boot Ltd. 
Price £26.20

(U.S. link)

For more information visit www.we-english.co.uk

A major exhibition of the work will be on show at the National Media Museum, Bradford, from March 12th to September 8th, 2010

Motherland, by Simon Roberts
Hardback, 192 pages
Published by Chris Boot Ltd
Price £15.75

(U.S. link)

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My friend Ailsa McWhinnie, now a freelance writer and book editor, was founding editor of Black & White Photography magazine. My thanks to both Ailsa and Simon. —MJ

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Featured Comment by Len Salem: "I would also recommend Simon Roberts' blog. You can go back through its archives and see how the project matured, how he interacted with contributors to the blog to research ideas for his work, how the project grew, the final sequencing and editing and so on—as well as lots of interesting asides of a photographic nature on the way. I find it really interesting to follow such a motivated photographer as he develops his work."

Polaroid Warholia

There's a small show of Andy Warhol Polaroids of 1970s and '80s sports stars at Danziger Projects, partly viewable online. You can also read Kathy Ryan's admiring comments at the World's Greatest Photography Magazine. (Note that this appears in a fashion section, not an arts one.)

I'm not sure I agree with her about the intrinsic merit of the photographs; seems more like celebrity culture cutting both ways, with the photos themselves left over as talismans, artifacts. Is it really so deathlessly fresh to picture Jack Nicklaus nuzzling a golf club, Ali with his shirt off, Dorothy Hamill with her skates slung around her neck? Not convinced. Of course I haven't seen the actual...artifacts. The show is up until December 12th at Danziger Gallery, 534 West 24th Street, New York City.

The vagaries of taste
I was never grabbed very hard by Polaroids per se. Taste is a strange and mysterious thing—I love snapshots, have a protean appetite for looking at them, adore books of snapshot collections (in fact I have a veritable pile of snapshot books here that I've been meaning for some time to write up in a massive group review). Show me a large enough pile of snapshots and I will find you an inadvertent masterpiece, with all the charm and magic that only serendipity can create. 

Above are two samples from a new group that Rodger Kingston recently uploaded to his SmugMug page of his Kingston collection. Of course we're not looking at "mere" snapshots there, but expertly chosen ones. Rodger is a rare connoisseur; his selections are, in effect, edited. Curated. I'm not saying "found" ephemera and snapshots are all I'd want to look at. Still, I have great natural affection for that stuff.

You'd think I'd love Polaroids. And I'm not saying I don't appreciate the high points—I think of Jamie Livingston's great archive, preserved by Hugh Crawford. You can't help but be moved by that. And yet, I've been meaning to write—trying to write—trying to find the right things to say—about The Impossible Project for some time now, and the words have a hard time coming. The only thing that come easily to mind are flip jokes about the appropriateness of the name. The project seems quixotic even to me, and I'm a very impractical guy.

Roped in
And the other day, when I bought PHOTO:BOX at Stan Banos's recommendation, Amazon's "Frequently Bought Together" come-on roped me in, and I bought The Polaroid Book along with it. It should be the kind of book I'd just love. Another copious, well-made, almost ridiculously high-value book (I mean, for less than eleven bucks, they're giving this away—it is a very generous and well-made book for that price—or twice or three times that price). It's part of Benedikt Taschen's 25th Anniversary Special Editions series (his is a story in itself). It has an incisive Introduction by the last Director of The Polaroid Collections, Barbara Hitchcock, and the selection of pictures is an embarrassment of riches. To circle around to where this started, there is even a Polaroid of Andy Warhol wielding his Big Shot. And yet, I've paged through The Polaroid Book three times now, and can't sort out how to feel about it. I like it. I just don't love it.

There's something so self-conscious about Polaroids....

It doesn't seem enough to say that anyone who loves Polaroids should own it. I know there are people who really love Polaroids, who are genuinely excited about, and fervently hopeful for, The Impossible Project. Here's where I need a guest reviewer, someone with deep, real enthusiasm for that particular medium. Maybe I should ask Hugh....

Mike

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Featured Comment by charlie: "I have owned The Polaroid Book in its last release for I think four years. Since then, it has become my go-to book when I need a good dose of pure photography. Were I forced to choose just three photo books to have for eternity , this one would be in that list. I also prefer the cover as it mimics the old Polaroid logo and packaging."

Mike replies: Now you're making me feel bad...what's wrong with me, anyway?

Featured Comment by Sean Murphy: "I'm trying to decide, was it instant photography or Polaroids that I loved. I love slides and instant photographs, because they are the actual picture. Made right in your camera that you can view directly without intervening tools and tech. But the slide still had to be developed somewhere else in space and time. With instant, the alchemy of the darkroom tray happened in broad daylight as you watched, right in your hand! Its getting hard to appreciate in our digital-camera-wifi-upload-to-the-web times, the satisfaction of making a picture on the spot that you could give to a friend or family member on the spot.

"Shooting with folding Polaroids using 'wink lights' and 3000 speed B&W that you had to rub that acrid fixer on, the sleek metal and leather of the SX-70 and pack film that always came with fresh batteries, sometimes morphing the image with a stylus for goofy effects, waving the print by the white tab at the bottom, as if that would make it develop faster, all the variations that came after down to the cameras for kids that shot little Polaroid stickers.... I guess I do love Polaroids, they were just plain fun!"

Featured Comment by Hugh Crawford: "Well Mike since you handed me that can of worms and that fine looking can-opener...

"As a fan and for many years a user of Polaroid, a big fan of Andy Warhol and his work, and sort of an obsessive about on-axis and penumbral lighting, I thought I'd like the Warhol show at the Danziger Gallery more, but it didn't do that much for me. The best thing about it was that it was that it is right across the street from the Bruce Davidson show at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, 505 West 24th Street. that show is quite wonderful. It's an interesting show to view with the Robert Frank show up at the Met.

"Odd coincidence number one: today's photo on my wife's blog otbkb.com was taken walking out of that gallery last Friday.

"Maybe it's the white seamless backgrounds or something, but those Big Shot photos look a little to much like they were made with a photocopier or a stat camera. Writing that down makes me think 'of course Andy wanted to become a photocopier, well duh...', but the qualities of the Big Shot pictures shot against white seamless that are so good when they are made into silkscreen paintings just don't do a whole lot for me in their original form.

"It's funny, I took a lot of photos of Warhol, and I took a lot of Polaroids of artists , but no Polaroids of Warhol.

"Odd coincidence number 2: a video of Andy Warhol and Truman Capote taken while I was photographing them showed up on youtube recently; I think it was maybe my first job after college. 

Hugh photographing Warhol not with a Polaroid. Note Alfred Stieglitz moustache.

"As for Polaroids in general, for me a lot of what makes them interesting it that they straddle the boundary of being an image and an object. Unlike most modern photographic prints, a Polaroid is fixed in its final form in the context of its making. A Polaroid portrait has most often been held by its subject at the time of its creation. These are qualities that Polaroids share with Daguerreotypes and wetplate collodion processes like tintypes and ambrotypes, but I think that the quality of the Polaroid being an artifact possibly held by its subject is much stronger with the Polaroids.

"The other interesting thing about Polaroids is not so much that they are imperfect and idiosyncratic visual interpretations of the world (because all photographic processes are imperfect and idiosyncratic visual interpretations of the world) but that the success of the Polaroid practitioner depends on anticipating and committing to that translation before the moment of exposure.

"Conventional late 20th century photo processes all allow or even demand a considerable amount of post exposure manipulation and visualization, and digital photography demands even more, whereas Polaroid demands that all decisions about the image be made prior to exposure.

"I just happen to be in the midst of cataloging another Polaroid based project (it's Mnemonic, it's Mimetic, and it's Memetic!) that encompasses all of this.

"Odd coincidence number 3: Andrew Lampert, Czar of the Cosmic Baseball Association, figures mnemonically in the the Robert Frank show, the Jamie Livingston Project, and this other thing I'm working on."

Featured Comment by Bill Poole: "I love The Polaroid Book, and I have always loved Polaroids for many of the reasons already mentioned. They hold a fascination as one-of-a-kind objects, like Daguerreotypes and tintypes. And they do have a view-camera-like quality, since the image is recorded full-sized. And then there is that soft color, which Cosindas exploited so expertly—Portra-like before Portra came along. Ya gotta love it—I did, and my Polaroids from the '70s are among my favorite images (and not just because my friends all look so young in them)."

Two Lovely Books

Manuel Alvarez Bravo has a heavy burden on him: he is widely considered the greatest Mexican photographer.

While I suppose every country needs its go-to name, I've never been quite convinced. It's not that the pictures I saw lacked coherence, or conviction. Just that they didn't all seem very compelling.

But then, how do we know photographers? I first encountered just one picture—the one in Szarkowski's Looking At Photographs. (Accompanied by one of the weakest essays in that fine book, I regret to say. Uh, Rapunzel?) Then I saw a magazine article or two. Then, a motley of small or indifferently published books, some with only a chapter or a section on Alvarez Bravo. I don't recall ever having seen any original prints, although I might be forgetting one or two encountered in group shows.

The very best monographs are more than just pretty picture books. They actively make a case for the photographer, by showing the photographer in his or her best light.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo: Photopoetry, published by Thames & Hudson in Britain and Chronicle Books in the USA last year, is by far the best monograph I've encountered on this photographer. The selection is comprehensive and first rate, the layout unobtrusive and the sequencing expert, the reproduction quality consistently excellent—the ink on paper has an almost sensual yumminess, good enough to give you that familiar but often elusive visceral sense of gratification. I've known many of these pictures before, but I sense from this book that I have only known "of" them; I never really saw many of them until now. (There are twenty never-previously-published pictures, too.) This is really an example of the highest function of the best monographs: they make you feel like you really understand a photographer's work. Sometimes for the first time.

Bill Jay, Manuel Alvarez Bravo in London, 1980

It's curious how the best retrospective monographs go out of print and become scarce, so one generation has a chance to "know" a certain photographer and the next generation doesn't; I realized recently that all of my favorite monographs by André Kertész—there are a handful—are out of print and hard to get now. So how do people know Kertész now? Probably more flittingly and furtively than I know his work.

We never see all of a photographer. Only a subset. Whether that subset is enough to let us grasp a sense of the whole life work is the key.

Well, here we have a chance to really get to know Manuel Alvarez Bravo. I venture to guess that this will remain the standard monograph on Alvarez Bravo for some time to come—most probably even after it goes out of print and becomes hard to get. It's difficult to envision a better one. It really helped me "get" Alvarez Bravo. The first book on him I've truly enjoyed.

Nicely made book, too.

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A recent book I got that I really didn't like is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: The Photographic Work, published by Stiedl & Partners. I understand the book was in part underwritten by a Kirchner museum, and I don't know the rest of Kirchner's work; he's primarily known as a painter. Perhaps this record of his photographic activities is of interest to specialists. Whatever its hidden merits, as a photographic book I found it resoundingly unconvincing. Described as "a skilled photographer" in the publisher's writeup, what I see is a manifestly unskilled photographer (have a look for yourself—there are some sample spreads at Steidlville) whose only virtue is that his pictures are now antique, and whose lack of skill is not ameliorated by his having had anything in particular to say. (As a photographer, I mean. I have nothing to contribute about his painting.) I think I understand the difference between "good" bad and "bad" bad, and this is just bad—I see a photographer who hasn't any idea what he's after and doesn't know how to get it, one not so much exploring as bumbling. 

It's my own fault. I took a flier on this, without really knowing anything about it. It looked enticing, and it's from Steidl—how bad could it be? Steidl is the leading photographic book publisher in the world right now (Jorg Colberg has done us all a favor in presenting a translation of an excellent interview with Gerhard Stiedl, on Conscientious). But I confess I'm a bit down on them right now. It sometimes seems that in their creative white heat to rush book after book to press, they're not being as thoughtful about content as you'd like them to be. I also admit that I've been a bit too overenthusiastic about buying their product—a touch of white heat about that, too—and I feel like I've gotten singed a time or two. Skip this one, and be careful about getting too caught up about the rushing cascade of titles from Steidl—there's absolutely some wonderful stuff coming from them, but it's not all wonderful.

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Finally, a very different kind of book—one never destined to become a collector's item and that would get the boot from any self-respecting high-end gallerist's art library, but that is a delight pro populo nonetheless. I wrote not long ago about a couple of books of this type—"samplers," I called 'em. I should have waited! Stan Banos recommended Photo:Box the other day, and because I trust Stan's eye I promptly ordered it.

It's fantastic. It was originally published in Italy, but the translations are so well managed you won't notice. A smallish (7x9", 18x23 cm) but hefty brick of a book, it takes standard sampler form: one picture from a photographer accompanied by a mini-essay. But there are two ways it departs from the norm: the quality of the reproductions is really amazingly good, especially considering the bargain price (though they'd be good enough at any price), and the write-ups are lively and engaging. I should disclose that I haven't read all of it yet. In what I have read, there is some repetitiveness, and the insight is a tad uneven; but the writing is far better than just the ordinary rote "content" of pasteurized, processed book-product.

There's a lot to look at in Photo:Box (so called, by the way, because the cover wraps all the way around and closes with a magnetic flap). It's divided into sections: Reportage, Portraits, Nudes, Women, Travel, Cities, Art, Fashion, Still Life, Sport, and Nature. A great many of the classic pictures are just the ones you'd want to see from each photographer (actually there are 250 pictures by 200 photographers, so a number of photographers are represented by more than one picture, in different sections), and there are some lovely surprises, too. Inevitably in this sort of production—or, indeed, in any history of photography text- or coffee-table book—the earlier photographers are more canonical than the contemporary ones; but you won't mind, because the contemporary selections are so nicely chosen and so entertaining. And just as the German PhotoWisdom has German photographers well represented, so Photo:Box has Italian photographers aplenty, especially in the "Fashion" section. It's not a drawback. The only thing you might need to be aware of is that there are a lot of nudes in the book—and not only in the "Nudes" section—so it's not appropriate for things like middle school or high school art department libraries.

There are also a surprising number of pictures included that I've reproduced or discussed on TOP in the past—I didn't count, but at least eight or ten, maybe more.

Published just last month by Abrams in the U.S. and Thames & Hudson in the U.K., Photo:Box attempts to be a history of photography in pictures, and it does pretty well at that. Regardless of how well you feel it succeeds at that grand ambition, though, I think virtually any photographer of any skill level and any level of knowledge would thoroughly enjoy it. You'll like it the first time you leaf through it (if you have the stamina to make it all the way though at one sitting, which you might not, there's so much), and you'll find it an ample cornucopia to return to again and again, to dip in to the write-ups and savor the nice reproductions anew. A lively and vigorous compendium. 

Here are the United States and United Kingdom links.

Again, as a book, not a collector's piece, never likely to appreciate in value, not "essential"—but very highly recommended. You'll love this. And at less than sixteen bucks for 512 very high-quality pages, how can you go wrong? Don't miss. Fun and filling.

A round of applause for Stan for finding this one.

Mike

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Featured Comment by John Camp: "Regarding Ernst Kirchner, there have been a number of books in the last few years about famous painters using photography. Some are obvious cobbled-together catalogs of personal snapshots paired with more famous paintings, and have little to say about anything, but others are extremely interesting. Degas, for one, was seriously influenced by the way cameras crop scenes to produce surprising point-of-view effects, and he often used those odd (for the time) points-of-view.

"More recently, I encountered a very nice book called Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera. Rockwell was a fine illustrator, not a great painter—but his virtually daily use of the camera in constructing his complicated, multi-layered illustrations is really eye-opening. He didn't do the photography himself, but served as a director, and the results of the complicated scenes he created are almost like photographic forerunners of the stuff you see from Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson...but done in the 1930s and '40s.

"It's also interesting to see how he took a real individual in a photograph, and reshaped his features into a kind of stereotype (the brash kid, the comical guy with a squashed hat, the prissy old lady, etc.). He actually shot a nude once, but the photographer was so embarrassed that he wouldn't come out from under the dark cloth.

"The book is straight-forward and free of art-world cant. Although I'm not really a Rockwell fan, I am a fan of this book."

Mike replies: That's fascinating. I was into Rockwell as a child (I drew all the time back then), and I never knew he worked from photographs, much less from photographs he directed and had made for him.

My favorite photographs by a painter are in the book Pierre Bonnard: Photographs and Paintings from the Collection of the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, published by Aperture in 1988, long out of print. (It was originally published in Paris as Bonnard Photographe by Editions Philippe Sers in 1987.) The pictures are charming snapshots of domestic life, clearly made as visual notes, and I suppose I must record that they are "bad" photographs—but to my mind a very good sort of bad. A few of the pictures in that book have never left my mind.

Featured Comment by Stan B.: "I just happened to pick up Photo:Box waiting for it to stop raining; as you pointed out, it's not the kind of book you'd expect much from. And bam—the quantity and quality really threw me! This is one unbeatable compilation at that price. Will be ordering it and Eugene Richards' A Procession of Them as soon as I get home from work today (through your link, natch). Haven't bought a photo book in a good half year and am looking forward to these two...."

Featured Comment by Javier: "In my humble opinion the best Mexican photographer is possibly Lola Alvarez Bravo, Manuel's wife. I discovered her by chance: a Mexican friend had the habit of offering me a book about Frida Kahlo, the national icon, each time she came to visit. I do not like Kahlo, she even disgusts me, but found some of her best pictures were taken by this confusingly named photographer. Initially I even thought it was a mistake, and they should be credited to Manuel. Later on I discovered she married him, assisted him for years and after he dropped her (a nasty story) the only thing she could do to earn a living was photography, and she decided to keep the family name. She was a fabulous portraitist and an excellent photographer on her own, always obscured by Manuel's fame.

"By the way, Manuel also had Graciela Iturbide, probably the second best-known Mexican photographer, as an assistant. I heard her recently reminisce about those days. It seems he taught her to develop a personal vision, which she did, but when she asked about technique, the great Manuel told her all she needed to know was on Kodak's instruction sheets..."

Mike replies: The first monograph in English of Lola Alvarez Bravo came out two years ago, and I haven't even seen it yet. Have to figure out a way to find that to take a look....

Peregrinations on the East Side with Art

I got to meet John Dominis last Saturday. I had lunch with my friend Art Elkon, who then took me around to the VP Gallery on East Buffalo Street in the Third Ward. VP specializes in the work of LIFE magazine photographers; gallery owner Bill Appleby told me his is one of eight galleries worldwide that does. I think it was eight—maybe it was four. (Numbers mean little to me. I have trouble remembering my own phone number.) The gallery's reception for for the artist was in progress.

I asked John, who was a longtime staffer for LIFE (you can see a picture of him here, taken by Marc Riboud) if his picture of the Black Panther salute by runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the Olympic Summer Games in Mexico City in 1968 was his most famous picture. He was quiet, then allowed as how that one "wasn't much, as a photograph." He named his (also well known) Donner Pass picture as one of his own favorites.

John Dominis, Southern Pacific Steam Engine, Donner Pass, California, 1949

There were fifteen or eighteen pictures of John's on view, and he said he could have put up just as strong a show with fifteen or eighteen entirely different ones. I made some sort of assenting noise, and he added that that couldn't go on forever—he said he probably didn't have more than a hundred or so pictures of the same quality, from a whole career.

Most of his pictures, for those who are interested in such things, were taken with a Leica and a 35mm lens. (The Donner pass picture looked like medium format to me, although I didn't ask.)

One of John's cover shots from 1964, reprised in 2004
(note Photoshopping of Ringo's head)

 

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My own favorite of John's was one of the few pictures in the gallery that was new to me, of Mickey Mantle descending into the dugout and flinging his batting helmet aside in disgust after striking out. And not just because I like seeing Yankees frustrated (although there's that). A great classic 35mm shot.

John Dominis, Mickey Mantle Having a Bad Day at Yankee Stadium, New York, 1965

Another picture in the gallery that I'd never seen before—with photo geek interest, even—was a great shot by Bob Gomel of Malcolm X taking a picture of Muhammed Ali (then Cassius Clay) in a club after Clay's victory over Sonny Liston. You can see that one here. There was also a gorgeous large print of Margaret Bourke-White's famous DC-4 shot on sale for a cool $42,000. TOP isn't quite that successful just yet, so I had to leave that one on the wall, but it was nice to see. Bill explained to me that the print takes many hours to spot, because there are lines running through the middle of it, owing to the fact that the negative was once stored folded in half!

After the VP gallery, Art and I went around to Debra Brehmer's Portrait Society Gallery, where Art himself had some pictures up. Debra had asked him to take some general establishing shots for an exhibit of Ringo White's collage assemblies, which are made entirely of detritus Ringo finds on beaches. Art's lakescapes were taken with his trusty Canon G9, and looked great printed big.

Art Elkon with his trusty G9 at the Portrait Society Gallery, Milwaukee, Fall 2009

As a final note about all this, Bill Appleby thinks that the weighty tome The Great LIFE Photographers (it's the size of a small phone book—despite which, the reproduction quality is quite good) is the single best one-volume book on the subject, and for a limited time he's offering copies signed by John Dominis for $70 each. Contact Bill if you're interested. I believe he said John will be doing the autographing on the tenth, so contact Bill before then if you want one.

(Also, just FYI, the book will be coming out in paperback soon.)

A nice "day off." It's always a good day for me whenever I get to look at real prints.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Jim Hart: "I'm of an age where there's not much I look at and say 'If I had the money, I'd have that.' Mostly it's better to want something than to actually have it, I've found.

"Usually it's some type of automobile (which explains the C5 Corvette that was in the garage for awhile; I didn't have money, but it turns out I did have the credit line).

"But Ms. Bourke-White is my all time favorite photographer and if I had the money that print would be on the wall, along with a number of her other works.

"I have no idea why her work hits me where I live, and it's probably better that I don't know—but man, she just rocked.

"Just my 2 cents.

"Which leaves me $41,999.98 short."

Two Great Educational Books

If you're a beginner: I can recommend Peter Stepan's 50 Photographers You Should Know. (Here's the U.K. link.) It's part of a series of similarly-titled books put out by Prestel USA which includes titles like 50 Architects You Should Know and 50 Women Artists You Should Know. As such, it's in the nature of a primer, giving the reader basic background and a sample or two of each of the featured photographers' work. Please, don't send me emails three weeks from now complaining that the book is superficial and too basic for you because you've heard of all these photographers before. This is for people who haven't ever taken an introductory-level history of photography course or read one of the all-in-one texts such as Newhall (which I'm amazed and concerned to see is out of print—what, is civilization ending?) or Rosenblum. If you're in the proper target audience, however, the book provides the goods: it's nicely laid out, with good examples and capable write-ups, and, most importantly, these are 50 photographers you indeed should know. That I could readily name another hundred or more you should also know is neither here nor there. The book fulfills the promise of its title.

This would also make a useful gift for any young person you know who's just getting interested in photography.

If you're more advanced: If, on the other hand, you've been involved in photography for a while and already know a thing or three about it, and you feel you're pretty well up on a lot of the basics, then I recommend Lewis Blackwell's excellent new tome Photowisdom: Master Photographers and Their Art from Chronicle Books. (Here's the U.K. link.)

It's the same sort of thing as 50 Photographers You Should Know—a sampler—but it's on a whole 'nuther level.

The text bits have no real consistency (although many of them are interesting), because they were each written by the photographers themselves. The good side of that coin is that the photographs were chosen by the photographers too. There were a large number of pictures in this book that I've never seen before, which is pretty unusual for me these days, especially with this sort of book.

Two more things you should know about the book: first, the photographers chosen are a really good mix. (And if you think it's easy to come up with a good list like this, you should try it some time.) Too many books of this sort confine themselves to certain "ghettos" of photographic practice; Photowisdom makes a good effort to span some of the gaps, and it really does provide a wide variety of current practitioners (perhaps a little weak on landscapists, but that's understandable given that they're so well covered elsewhere). Books of gallery art photography especially tend to cluster around a group of "usual suspects" and snootily ignore working photographers, documentary photographers, and journalists. Any book of this type can't possibly include everybody, and it can't do justice to every kind of photography; but this book feels right, presenting a well-chosen matrix that feels free, wide-ranging, and inclusive. (The editor, Lewis Blackwell, is the former Group Creative Director of Getty Images.)

And the second thing: it's a beautifully made book, with a clean design and well-above-average reproduction quality that serves the content well. And that's important. Whereas you're likely to see many of the images in Peter Stepan's book elsewhere, the images in Photowisdom might be the only reproductions you'll see of the chosen pictures, so it's more important that they make a good account of themselves.

The combination of great picture editing and great reproduction quality make the book a visual feast. If the previous book is one you should give someone else, this one should be a gift for you—put it on your Christmas list. Or shoot the link to your S.O.!

Andrew Wyeth by Andrew Zuckerman

If you look for this one in the bookstore, be a little careful, because there's another current photobook of roughly the same size and shape with the word wisdom featured prominently in the title. Ironically, the photographer-author of that book, Andrew Zuckerman, is one of the photographers featured in Lewis Blackwell's book (represented by his amazing portrait of Andrew Wyeth, whose face late in life looked like it was made of melting wax. Incidentally, if you do get the book, compare the book reproduction of this picture with the web JPEG here—nolo contendere, and a good object lesson in the superiority of good printed reproduction over the admittedly very convenient computer screen).

Especially if you don't feel like you're quite up with the hot photographers o' the moment, this one might be good for your continuing education. It was for mine.

Mike

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Question from Miserere: "Mike, Any chance you could provide a list of the 50 photographers included in 50 Photographers You Should Know? If you have better things to do than type out 50 names for us (and who wouldn't!), I would at least like to know if there is a good mix of nationalities or if the list leans heavily towards U.S. photographers. While my knowledge of photographers is by no means large, it is sadly biased to those on this side of the pond (I'm writing from Boston)."

Mike replies: I believe Peter Stepan is German and the book was originally written in German; it was originally published by Prestel Verlag in Munich. So there wouldn't be any overt reason for it to be overly USA-centric. If you'll forgive a rough accounting—a few of these numbers might be one off either way—I counted 2 Hungarians, 10 French, 19 Americans, 8 Germans, 2 from the U.K., 1 Italian, 1 Russian, 1 Japanese, 2 Czechs, 1 Turk, and 2 photographers from Mali (formerly French Sudan). That doesn't quite add up, does it? Forgive me...I don't own the book and I counted a bit too hastily. So if anything it could be faulted for being light on Japanese and non-German European photographers—as well as being a bit preferential to Mali!—but otherwise I think the balance is okay. Tough to be fair to every country with just fifty picks overall.

Graflex Graphic

I 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.

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.

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

"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: 

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."

 

 

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."