The Online Photographer

Random Excellence: Stephen Gillette

Stephen Gillette, Tondi (Big Sur #13), pigment on mulberry paper, 11.75 x 8.25"

By rights, these shouldn't work, and I guess I'm not sure all of them do, at least not equally. But some of them sure do. As a friend of mine once said, "it's not the idea, it's how it looks." If you live near Big Sur, you can see them. Here's the scoop, and some more.

(By the bye, I think the prettiest one is #5, but Eolake already posted that one on his blog, so I'm not going to ditto it. Take a look at all of them and pick your own favorite.)

Mike

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."

French Government has Oeuf on Face

The French government has egg on its face over an archive of rare and extremely valuable Henri Cartier-Bresson prints that it lost not once, but twice—some of which are now resurfacing on the private art market.

According to an article in The Independent, it seems Cartier-Bresson gave 551 vintage prints to the French government, most of which came from a 1955 exhibition at the Louvre Museum in Paris. Some were made by the photographer himself—unusual because, for most of his career, he had other people make his prints for him. (He was, or claimed he was, allergic to darkroom chemicals*.)

The archive was later discovered to be severely damaged by water leaks in the basement of the museum facility where they were being stored. Reluctantly, after inspecting the damage in 1991, Cartier-Bresson agreed that the prints should be destroyed.

Ten years later, Cartier-Bresson recognized a print from the archive being offered for private sale. He made a formal complaint, and the sale was stopped.

Since the photographer's death in 2004, more of the supposedly "destroyed" prints have been showing up on the art market. Where did they come from? Nobody seems to know. The Cartier-Bresson foundation has formally demanded that the French government admit that it did not destroy the prints; the French government says the prints now turning up must have come from some other souce. (I'll trust Martine Franck, Cartier-Bresson's widow, who recognizes the prints as having come from the archive.)

There's plenty of motive for skullduggery: a single one of these prints can be worth more than a quarter of a million dollars.

Pass les oeufs, please. Plenty of shamefulness to go around.

Read the article here.

Mike

*I sympathize—I'm allergic to washing dishes.

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Featured Comment by Andre Moreau: "For those who read French, here's the original article from the Le Monde newspaper."

The AIPAD Show 2009

Regular readers will probably already know that the AIPAD Show (AIPAD is the Association of International Photography Art Dealers—say "AY-pad") is going on in New York City this weekend, at the Park Avenue Armory.

The AIPAD Show is the "other" North American trade show for photography. Enthusiasts, pros and equipment geeks are all over the VISCOMM Show at the Javits Center, which is the trade show for gear 'n' "stuff," but relatively few know about the AIPAD Show, which is the trade show for pictures.

Imagine a hundred or so photography galleries from all around the world renting booths in the same exhibition hall and bringing all their best, most salable stuff, both historical and contemporary, to display and sell, and you've about got the gestalt. But not before adding seminars, talks by famous photographers (Bruce Davidson, whose books we were discussing recently, is one of the presenters this year), and "exhibitions within the exhibition," including one this year that features treasures from the George Eastman House collection. It's a trade show, and dealers, collectors, and museums (well, curators) are quietly conducting business in the background, but there's a huge cornucopia of original work on display for the casual browser as well. (The cover of the illustrated catalog from the 2009 show is shown at right.)

Naturally the risk is that most of the work you'll see is work that is proven to be salable, so it's more of a "greatest hits" parade and not the best place to get a handle on recent, new, and innovative work, but the sheer volume of work on display means you get to see a little bit of everything.

For instance this year Charles Schwartz Ltd. is offering a rare silver-gelatin print of W. Eugene Smith's famous "In the Garden," which will certainly be priced well into six figures.

 

W. Eugene Smith, In the Garden

This is also the weekend for my annual vow to attend the AIPAD Show the next year, which I never do. (This year I even have airline miles that are about to expire, and I am kicking myself, hard, for not putting those two things together. Ow.) But I hereby dutifully so vow. Set up that football, Lucy, I'm a-comin'.

The DLK Collection blog is there and doing a booth review, spilling the beans on prices, too, which is interesting. Here's the link to Part 1, but be sure to check for updates. Here's the New York Times review.

Mike
(Thanks to John Camp)

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ADDENDUM: The proper title of the Smith picture is "The Walk to Paradise Garden," as Scott Kirkpatrick has pointed out in the comments.

Featured Comment by Michael W: "Even better coverage by James Danziger who also has a booth at the show."

Danziger Projects booth, The AIPAD Show, NYC, 2009

Carleton Watkins and the Getty

By John Camp

Of the major art museums in the United States, few could possibly be as big a pain in the butt to get to as the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Built on a mountainside over a screaming freeway, you plunge down the exit, circle around and under the freeway, pay the $10 parking fee, lose your car in a gargantuan underground garage (write the parking level on the palm of your hand, or you may never see your Camaro again) and then wait in a Disney World-style line for a tram that runs up and down the mountain. Slowly, up and down the mountain.

The latter part of this journey is accompanied by shoals of rugrats on school excursions who, upon inspection, seem to be learning nothing whatever about art, or anything else, while efficiently preventing any possibility of quiet contemplation of the museum’s paintings, prints and photographs. (Yes, I have not only children, but grandchildren, God bless them all, and keep the little ones out of the art museums until they’re at least eleven, is what I say; and for those twelve- to sixteen-year-old hormonal cases, a carefully chosen display of Helmut Newton prints should keep them occupied, quiet, and possibly even inspired.)

Over the years, I’ve been to the Getty a dozen times, and it never seems to get better. I wouldn’t even go, except for the glorious “Young Italian Woman at a Table,” by Paul Cezanne and an excellent sea painting (Van Tromp, Going About to Please His Masters, Ships a Sea, Getting a Good Wetting, by J.M.W. Turner, above), and a few others.

On Friday, I visited a dozen or so paintings and then went down in the basement to look at the “Dialogue Among Giants: Carleton Watkins and the Rise of Photography in California.” For lack of a better phrase, Watkins was a man-and-nature photographer working generally out of the San Francisco area from the 1850s through the 1890s.

Much to my amazement—and I can’t guarantee this was true—it seemed to me that the Watkins galleries were as crowded as the European painting galleries, possibly because the show was to end a couple of days later. As is the case with many photography shows, there were too many photographs on display, not all of them in pristine condition, well-printed, or well-photographed.

But that’s a quibble: they were fascinating. (And large: Watkins worked mostly with mammoth plates, up to 18x22 inches.)

Carleton Watkins, Primitive Mining. The Old Rocker (self-portrait as a miner), c. 1876.
Collection of the Society of California Pioneers, The National Gallery of Art

Watkins seems to have anticipated several strands of documentary photography, such as the early workman/industrial photography by Lewis Hine or August Sander, with his photos of lumberjacks and miners, taken on location, with their tools. The brutality of their labor is clearly written on their faces and in their bodies: you could throw Jacob Riis and the WPA photographers in the influence-mix, as well. Watkins even anticipated contemporary environmental photography, with his images of the tremendous damage done by hydraulic gold mining in the California mountains.

'Adams was a trained and self-conscious artist, while Watkins was more akin to a reporter'

Most notably, though, he took pictures of the wilderness, and especially Yosemite. I knew that Yosemite had been extensively photographed before Ansel Adams, of course, but wasn’t aware to the extent that Watkins had anticipated all of Adams’ great themes—the high walls, the waterfalls, the serpentine rivers with the light playing across them.

Adams had better equipment, of course, and, I think, a better eye. Watkins (who worked first with daguerreotypes and later with glass plates, out of a darkroom built into a wagon) tended to go for an almost academic, or just simple, composition—the river leading into the distance, the carefully placed foreground/background items to define a scenic view, the high viewpoint looking across the deep valley. It seemed to me that he “went there and took the picture,” whatever the picture was when he got there.
Adams, on the other hand, apparently had an idea of what the photograph should look like, and then went back repeatedly to the same places, until nature cooperated and provided him with that image. The two approaches are quite different, probably because Adams was a trained and self-conscious artist, while Watkins was more akin to a reporter.

One especially interesting aspect of the show was a 360-degree panorama (I believe of San Francisco), by Eadweard Muybridge, who later became famous for his stop-action photos of horses and then human beings. The literature provided by the Getty suggests that Watkins was Muybridge’s mentor; and Watkins took a photograph of Muybridge seated beneath a Giant Redwood. Watkins also began shooting panoramas before Muybridge, and may have taught something of the technique to the younger man.

The Muybridge panorama especially caught my eye because it was an example of an early multiple (13 separately-framed shots) that seemed to anticipate his later multiple studies, which were done in time, rather than space—but you can see the idea forming on the wall. Muybridge’s biggest failing, of course, was that he had too many vowels in his first name.

The Watkins show is over, but if you’re in L.A. and want to go to the Getty, there’s no admission charge to the museum. However, parking is pretty much mandatory—Daniel Boone couldn’t walk into the place—and costs $10 per car.

The museum website is here.

Carleton Watkins in Yosemite is available in hardcover through Amazon. Here's the U.K. link.

John

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Featured Comment by Daniel Jansenson: "Regarding parking: you can also take the Metro Rapid bus (line 761), for $1.25. More info here." [WARNING: link is a .PDF download.  —Ed.]

Featured Comment by thompsonkirk: "On the theme of Watkins: Don't miss Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867-1957 by Terry Toedtemeier (the late curator of photography at the Portland Art Museum) and John Laursen. Beautiful reproductions of Watkins' and later photographers' work in Oregon's Columbia Gorge."