The Online Photographer

David Alan Jay 1952-2013

I was very saddened to be reached by news of the death of David Alan Jay, who succumbed to his longtime disease at the age of 61 last October. David Jay (he was often called by both names together) was the Editor of Photo Techniques (itself recently deceased) from 1985 to 1994, when he handed the reins to me. (The magazine was called Darkroom Techniques and then, after it merged with Creative Camera magazine, Darkroom & Creative Camera Techniques [D&CCT] while under his stewardship. More recently it has been called Photo Technique [singular instead of plural].)

David's magazine was a true reflection of the man himself: courtly and courteous, unsensational, rigorous, and highly ethical. David had a "dread disease" (Flannery O'Conner's phrase)—a hereditary degenerative condition that had killed his mother in her 40s. I apologize that I cannot specify what it was—medical nouns do not stick in my head. (Each time we talked of it, I had to ask him again.) At any rate he told me in no uncertain terms that he always felt himself doomed to live half a lifespan: when he was 46 or 48 he said to me that he felt he was already living on borrowed time.

David loved to talk on the phone, and I talked to him regularly throughout my tenure at PT and for a number of years afterward. Unfortunately his disease gradually made it harder and harder for him to speak and to be understood, and our phone friendship gradually tapered out in the early-to-mid 2000s. I had not spoken to him in probably seven or eight years at the time of his death.

David Alan Jay

My favorite David Jay story, just one of many:

Like so many wordsmiths, David was an introvert, and the Photo East show in New York City (now called Photo Plus Expo) frequently overburdened his circuits (as it did mine—the constant stream of demands on one's attention would be enough to test a politician or a movie star, and it could sap the socializing resources of an introvert dry as a desert gulch within hours).

Fred Newman of Darkroom Innovations (now called The View Camera Store) had commissioned Ron Wisner of Wisner Classic Manufacturing Co. to build him a 20x24-inch view camera, and Fred shared space in Ron's booth at Photo East, where his huge view camera was put on display.

So when the "demanders" got to be too much for him, David Jay would go to the Wisner booth and get under the dark cloth behind Fred's giant camera—and stay there. He'd just stand there, quietly, motionless, for an hour or more, alone in the midst of the crowds, recharging his introvert's batteries and escaping from all the insistent demands, watching the steady stream of showgoers pass the booth upside-down on the groundglass. Makes me laugh even now.

David Jay told me when I took over that any reader who wanted to participate fully in the life of the magazine had to own three things: a view camera, a spot meter, and a densitometer. After he left D&CCT, David and his wife moved to an old farmhouse in central Illinois, where they made an agreement: his wife got the house, and David got a finished and insulated 40x25' outbuilding on the property. There he had his laundry machines (laundry, which he apparently enjoyed, being one of his household responsibilities), his darkroom, his library, and his workshop. Apart from his space-age custom-designed and -built enlarger and many other cunning computerized darkroom gizmos of his own invention, I'm sure he was never without the three essentials. He was way too unsentimental to be buried with them (there were no funeral services, at the request of the deceased), but there would have been a touch of poetry in it if he had been. I can only imagine the many happy hours he must have spent in his domain at that remote farmstead way out on the Illinois prairie, "forty-five minutes from anything" as David put it.

61 is young in absolute terms, but I know it's much longer than David Jay himself expected his life to last. I hope the last years were not too hard. Farewell, friend.

Mike
(Thanks to Wendy Erickson)

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Geoff Wittig: "The passing of David Alan Jay, David Vestal, and Photo Technique magazine within a short span seem to punctuate the end of an era. Reliable and thoughtful information on visualizing, creating and refining the optimum print as a physical artifact seems to be fading into the sunset. Certainly in print form this is true; even stalwart sources such as Lenswork magazine are relentlessly shifting their emphasis to online access.

"Ctein's recent comments got me thinking. Physical prints obviously comprise a small and ever-shrinking percentage of photographs going forward. But I dearly hope the vast and expanding sea of digital images can sustain enough of this shrinking sliver to maintain it as a living, breathing artform rather than yet another 'alternative process' performed on occasion as a parlor trick. Because for me, at least, the beauty of a perfectly crafted print trumps the gaudy appeal of that glowing image on the LCD."

Richard Kelley: "I was shocked to hear of David's passing. I was lucky enough to have been one of David's friends while we were going through Journalism School at Indiana University. He was just an outstanding guy, always ready to offer an idea and always positive about life. He was a pleasure to be around at a time when the competition was so fierce it kept many of us in our own little silos. He never spoke about the disease, but knowing David, that's not surprising. At the end, he went his technical direction and I took my documentary path and I just lost track of him with the passing of the years and work. When I saw his face in the announcement, I was just stunned. Those who never met David really missed knowing a true gentleman and a very decent man. Thanks for crossing paths, David. It was a pleasure learning from you."

David Vestal: A Wonderful Life

Written by Jim Hughes

For years, every Christmas season after David Vestal moved from New York City to the Connecticut countryside, my wife and I would receive a small envelope postmarked Bethlehem, CT. Inside, neatly wrapped in archival tissue, would be a meticulously printed 2 1/2 x 3 3/4-inch black-bordered silver image of one of David's photographs on a piece of 3 1/2 x 5-inch black-and-white paper. Sometimes it would be signed on the back in David's unmistakable script, other times it would bear a cryptic "DV MCHNY," his version of "Happy Holidays." I never asked, but I wouldn't have put it past this brilliant, humorous, quirky and understated man to have moved to Bethlehem just so he could send those exquisitely crafted gems to his friends around the world with that postmark. In any event, we always regarded the prints as little treasures.

Christmas Print received from David Vestal.
The photograph was dated 1987.

I met David Vestal on the pages of Popular Photography, where I learned much of what I knew about photography as I was growing up in the 1950s (it was a good magazine back then). In 1966, three years after I'd moved to New York to get married (50 years and counting!) and just as I'd accepted my dream job as editor of a photography magazine, Camera 35, I read a long piece by David in Pop Photo entitled "'...a great unknown photographer' — W. Eugene Smith." Unlike the usual technical fare in the magazine, it was more like one of those classic New Yorker profiles, full of quotations and contrasting opinions from friends and enemies. Vestal presented a fractured, stream-of-consciousness view of one of photography's heroes. One of my heroes. The story left an indelible impression.

As David later told me, the idea for the story originated on the Amazing Randi's late night radio show, where a panel consisting of Popular Photography's Charlie Reynolds, John Durniak, and Vestal had sat down with Smith to discuss the world's problems. Smith, having famously resigned from LIFE and subsequently failed, to his way of thinking, with his impossibly ambitious Pittsburgh project, had been feeling much maligned of late. On the air, he said, "I wish someone would do an honest story on me." Later, David sent Gene a note offering to do one, and in return received a note from Gene penciled on a torn piece of paper: "No Spray Gun Job."

In the resultant article, Vestal began: "W. Eugene Smith is an unknown photographer hidden behind a reputation. Like other legends, his has a core of truth and a thick coating of fantasy. While the whole business is much too tangled to sort out, I don't doubt that he is partly responsible for his myth.

"...It seems to be true that Gene can't work with some people because of his llimitations: and that others can't work with him because of theirs. And at the end of some of his successful jobs, the feeling on both sides—his and the editors'—has been one of pain and defeat.... I don't much understand Gene; most of the people I've talked to seem to understand him still less: and it's a fair guess his own self-understanding is full of holes. Certainly, he spends energy and passion on defense and justification he doesn't need.... He feels he is on trial with every undertaking, and the feeling somehow is converted into fact. But how all this happens is not understood."

Young buck that I was, I felt I needed to meet Smith, and eventually did, a year or so later, when I worked up the nerve to call the number under his name in the phone book. I went to his legendary loft. Published a portfolio. Became a friend. As some may know, I managed to help him get back to the U.S. after he was brutally beaten while taking photographs for his Minamata essay about mercury poisoning in Japan. In fact, I published that essay in Camera 35 in 1974, and ultimately, after his untimely death, spent a dozen years researching (with my wife) and writing the biography, W. Eugene Smith: Shadow & Substance, published in 1989.

Much of this was due in no small measure to David Vestal, with whom I've had a long history. In the middle of 1969, about when I met Smith for the first time, I hired David to join the staff as associate editor of both Camera 35 and Travel & Camera (the magazine that the venerable U.S. Camera had turned into when Tom Maloney sold his publishing company to American Express, which magazine two years later would once more metamorphose, this time into Travel & Leisure, leaving me to again concentrate on Camera 35). I seem to remember something about a change of editors at Pop that didn't sit well with David at the time.

David lent us his usual cerebral self, and did great work. In 1971, David even served as editor, with Regina Benedict as his picture editor, of the U.S. Camera Annual. But he soon seemed to tire of the constraints of the staffer's life. I think he was uncomfortable with corporate cubicles, assigned stories, and regular paychecks. David Vestal was nothing if not a free spirit. So back he went to writing and photographing what he wanted, when he wanted—and, of course, the teaching of small classes for photographers that had always been his lifeline.

David's own teacher had been the legendary Sid Grossman of the Photo League in the late 1940s (before that, David told me, he had been a student of dance, a fact that didn't surprise me, considering the lyric grace of his own photography). A list of David's students, who stayed with him as fast friends well past any sort of "graduation," is impressive: Charlie Pratt, Lilo Raymond, Helen Buttfield, Larry Siegel, Maggie Sherwood (how many old Villagers remember her Purple Houseboat gallery?), Shalmon Bernstein. I'm sure there are many others I can't think of at the moment. David once worked as Ralph Steiner's assistant, but Ralph would often call himself David's student as well. They had a lot in common, including no-nonsense writing styles.

In 1972, having personally benefited from so much of David Vestal's writing, I asked him why he hadn't put all that wisdom and knowledge between the covers of a book. He shrugged, and said something like he'd probably never get it done. "And how would I support us?" he wondered. I knew it was an issue. I doubted if his wife Agatha, a former student who photographed under the name Ann Treer and also designed jewelry, made enough to support both of them during what could turn out to be a long project. So I told David what I knew about writers from the past (I mentioned Henry James and Ernest Hemingway) who early on survived by serializing their work in magazines like Harper's Weekly and Scribner's, respectively.

I proposed a similar scenario to David. He could write, and illustrate, a chapter every month or so for Camera 35. We would pay him regular page rates as stories were published, or in advance if he needed. We would ask one-time only rights; he would not have to sign any sort of contract, and he would be free to sell the finished product to the book publisher of his choice and keep that money as well. I never mentioned the arrangement to my own publisher, and I was never asked. "It's a win-win for you," I said. "And we get a great series."

David agreed. The headline on our March 1972 cover announced "Exclusive: David Vestal's Book of Craft—An Advanced Course in B&W Photography for Beginners and Others." On the table of contents, I noted, "Beginning in this issue, David's Vestal's long-awaited first book: a complete education in 'straight' black-and-white photography...in serial form."

The opening page for David Vestal's "Book of Craft"
as it appeared in Camera 35

He was committed, and I was confident he would deliver. Here are some random excerpts from that first chapter:

"Look through the viewfinder at anything you want to photograph, then move around until you like the way your picture fits in the finder's rectangle."

"Get close enough to fill up the picture with what's most important. Get far enough away to include everything you need in the picture. What's important? You decide. It's your picture; you're the photographer. No one else can say what's important to you."

"If your seeing is good, your pictures should be good, even if they are slightly overexposed or out of focus. If they are lively or pertinent, and worth seeing, that is what matters. Only weak pictures need perfection. Strong ones can survive considerable faults."

—From "David Vestal's Book of Craft," Chapter 1: How the Tools of Photography Evolved, Camera 35, March 1972

Over two and a half years, Camera 35 published 21 chapters of David's "Book of Craft." The resultant book was published at the end of 1974 by Harper & Row as The Craft of Photography, By David Vestal, but I have to say I preferred our title. It was just a bit loftier, a little more befitting of the author. From our final chapter:

"The Zen people say that a novice sees mountains as mountains and water as water; later, he sees that mountains are not mountains and water isn't water; and finally (if and when enlightenment turns up), he once again sees mountains as mountains and water as water. This time he knows the score. Photographers go through the same process.

"...Technique is a means, not a goal. This is the beginning, not the end."

—From "David Vestal's Book of Craft," Chapter 21: What to Do With Your Pictures, Camera 35, August/September 1974

Over the course of the next several months, David, for reasons he termed "feelings of loyalty" to his original editor, who evidently was back on the job, struggled with a decision to return to the fold at Pop. Finally, he did. I understood. In any event, in those heady days the photo magazine business was something of a "moveable feast," as Hemingway might say. In July of 1975, Camera 35 itself was sold out from under me (that's how I felt, at any rate) and I too moved, accepting the editorship of the so-called "Annuals" division of Popular Photography, eventually leading, several years on, to my editing the then-new Camera Arts magazine. Along the way, David continued writing for me. Here are some more excerpts:

"Everything in a photograph comes from light and is seen as light. I don't just mean that, technically, light makes the picture exist. I mean that light conveys all the feelings and all the information that makes the picture work. Light carries both data and expression.

"Any photographer who is not alive to light is in trouble."

—From "The Language of Light," by David Vestal, Invitation to Photography, Summer 1976

"People often forget that the zone system is descriptive, not prescriptive: so remember that it is something to use, not something to obey."

—From "The Minimal Zone System," by David Vestal, 35-mm Photography, Winter 1977

"Claptrap trouble. [Edward] Steichen's most ambitious opus, the 'Family of Man' show [at MoMA], was widely promoted as the greatest thing since firmament. It was enormously popular and drew record crowds. It was lousy.

"'The Family of Man' included many strong and beautiful photographs, but they were murdered in front of your eyes by a showmanship that did not suit them. Most of the commercial-lab prints were too big, many were poor in quality, and all of them were jammed into too little space in ways that were too complicatedly clever. The good pictures were diluted by the inclusion of more mediocre ones. This wasn't communication, it was an assault. The show was also too popular to see well—rush hour in the subway.

"Those were the minor problems. The big mistake was to treat the photographs as raw material to illustrate a sentimental and essentially verbal (script by Carl Sandburg) idealization of our species. There is much to be said for mankind, but this was syrup pretending to have muscles. It was colossally mediocre; a still-photo counterpart of Cecil B. DeMille's Bible epic movies, and as convincing.

"Moral: Show good pictures only, and hang them so they can be seen well; don't try to show ideas. Intelligent or not, ideas are not visible."

—From "Getting the Hang of It," by David Vestal, 35-mm Photography, Summer 1978

"Ridiculous...is the word for all formulas, rules, and prescriptions that try to tell you how big to print any picture that the prescriber has not seen. There are no exceptions. The cleverer and more plausible they are, the more important it is to remember that they are nonsense: pernicious twaddle.

"When Abraham Lincoln's straight man asked, 'How long should a man's legs be?', Abe came right back with: 'Long enough to reach the ground.'

"Print size offers no punch line as good as that. However, when asked 'What size should be print be?', we can say: 'Big enough to fit the picture.'

"If you ask right, the picture will show you."

—From "How Big is Big Enough," By David Vestal, 35-mm Photography, Summer 1979

In September of 1982, two years into its brief but brilliant life, David joined the staff of my last magazine, Camera Arts, again as associate editor. His profile of Roy DeCarava ("In The Key of Life," Camera Arts, May 1983) proved to be one of the most finely wrought pieces I'd ever had the honor of publishing. In the next issue, addressing the allegedly technical topic of enlarging, David wrote:

"I should add that both originality and spontaneity are vastly overrated qualities. You can be both spontaneous and original, yet do nothing worth doing. And you can't be either thing on purpose by trying. Both are purely by-products of being yourself and not following the herd, and they have little or nothing to do with intentions. Like scarcity, they add no value, though they can be used to raise the price. Leave them alone. If you have them, fine. If not, don't worry—other qualities matter more."

—From "Enlarging Your Vision," by David Vestal, Camera Arts, June 1983

The quotation above came from the penultimate issue of Camera Arts. The July, 1983, edition marked its sad death. And now, my old friend David Vestal is gone as well.

While at Ziff-Davis (publisher of Popular Photography, et al), I had been able to perform a similar service for David's The Art of Black-and-White Enlarging (also Harper & Row, in 1984) as I had with his The Craft of Photography, by initiating the serialization of its contents in advance, this time in various of our magazines.

It was my pleasure.

One day in 1970, Charlie Reynolds, picture editor of Popular Photography, came crosstown to have lunch with his friend David Vestal, then associate editor of Camera 35. They returned to our office, then conveniently located on 32nd Street a few floors above the Spiratone store, with a rumpled restaurant placemat in hand—on the back of which was scribbled an almost indecipherable maze of names of people in photography, all connected by a bunch of lines and arrows. I took a long look and turned the mess over to our art director, Leo McCarthy, who produced what we decided to call "The Whole Photography Chart No. 1," which the authors, Reynolds and Vestal, laughingly claimed traced the entire history of photography and its various influences and confluences from its very beginning to the summer of 1970. Needless to say, Chart No. 2 was never produced. I must apologize for the condition of this spread from my only surviving copy of the September 1970 issue. Somewhere along the line, I obviously dumped a cup of coffee on it!

One of David Vestal's memorable mantras was, "Don't ask why. Ask why not."

As I understood his quiet words, everything is possible for those able to turn negatives into positives.

Jim

©2013 by Jim Hughes, all rights reserved

For many years, Jim Hughes was the editor of Camera 35. Later, he was the founding editor of Mike J.'s all-time favorite photo magazine, the original Camera Arts. His books include the superb biography W. Eugene Smith: Shadow and Substance—The Life and Work of an American Photographer, and the monograph Ernst Haas in Black and White. Retired now, he writes occasionally for TOP (see his other articles by finding his name in the "Categories" list in the right-hand sidebar). He lives in Maine.

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Open Mike: Eminences Grises

Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013, seen here on his release from Victor Verster Prison in 1990, with then wife and fellow activist Winnie Mandela.
Photo by Peter Turnley.

The world is taking appropriate note of the passing of Nelson Mandela, one of the incandescent leaders of the age. Celebrated the world over, Mandela was perhaps the world's greatest natural leader since Gandhi.

It's curious that human beings are so much more impressed with violence than peace, with cruelty rather than kindness, with aggressiveness rather than gentleness, with competition rather than cooperation. For instance, here in the U.S. we have a hand gesture used by drivers, univerally understood, that means "f--- you." (It's actually illegal in most states—you can be ticketed for using it.) But we don't have a corresponding hand gesture which would mean "sorry / excuse me / please forgive me / I meant no offense." Yet wouldn't such a gesture be at least as useful?

Similarly, the world has a name for leaders who are narcissistic, sadistic, and ruthless—we call them "dictators." But we have no distinct, vivid, universally understood name for leaders such as Mandela, who change the world for the better through benevolence, spiritual steadfastness, kindliness, and wisdom.

Too bad.

Our friend Peter Turnley was present with his camera when Mandela was released from prison. You can see a short video of Peter's reminiscences here.

David Vestal 1924-2013

The world will take much less note of the passing of another éminence grise, one from the far smaller field of American photography. Master teacher, colleague, author, and friend and mentor to a whole generation of photographers, David Vestal died last week at his home in Connecticut. He was 89.

A career educator, he taught photography at the Parsons School of Design, the School of Visual Arts, and the Pratt Institute. More modestly, I learned photography from David, from a Dektol-stained copy of The Craft of Photography open on the tiny counter of my makeshift first darkroom underneath the basement stairs.

When I became Editor of the recently deceased Photo Techniques magazine in 1994, one of the first things I did was to contact David and ask him if he'd like to write a column. He readily assented. The previous Editor was incredulous—he'd been trying for years to get David to write more than just an occasional article for the magazine. Turned out my timing was lucky—David had just retired from teaching, or rather, gone very part-time, and he suddenly had more time to write. His column far outlived my tenure at the magazine.

For many years he published Grump, a private photo newsletter. Every Christmas, Grump subscribers would get a tiny signed original print in a folded rectangle of interleaving tissue. On the tissue would be written in pencil, "MC HNY."

He was the author of both Craft and The Art of Black-and-White Enlarging, both wonderful books about how to print in the darkroom. He wrote many columns for Photo Techniques. He and I always intended to collect and publish them; no telling what will become of those plans now.

David loved the fax machine; he hated the telephone, which would call him out of his basement darkroom where he was immersed in work and then stop ringing before his bad knees could get him up the stairs. The fax machine let him reply at his leisure.

I have a quote from David taped to my computer, a principle which he believed was the cure for what ailed many a student, and possibly a lot of the rest of the world as well. It's characteristically pithy (David loved pith):

"Do your work." —DV

R.I.P.

Mike
(Thanks to Oren Grad)

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Les Myers (partial comment): "I am very sorry to learn of David Vestal's death...I still have many back issues of PT because of Mr. Vestal's columns. His writing style—short sentences, active verbs, etc.—inspired and helped me fine-tune my photographic philosophy and darkroom techniques. Thank you for alerting us to his passing."

jean-louis salvignol: "Peter speaks of that major historical event exactly as he lived and photographed it: with a tremendous intensity and without any trace of pathos."

Dennis Mook: "David Vestal couldn't compete with Mr. Mandela in changing the world. But David changed my world. Over many years, I hung on his every word, learning from him in whatever media he taught. I read and reread his words to ensure they sunk in. I didn't know he passed last week. Thank you. Both men give me reasons to pause for some thought and introspection."

John Garrity: "A couple of days ago I posted a promised book and a few connected prints to David Vestal only to hear in the afternoon, from a mutual friend, of his death.

"Well back in the last century, when first seriously attempting to make photographs, like many at that time, I looked to the writings of Ansel Adams for practical advice.  Unfortunately, to me, Adams's books (first editions in black covers) at initial and all subsequent readings, were essentially incomprehensible.

"A frustrating while later, on a visit to the USA, I discovered David's writings—articles in Popular Photography magazine, which, along with those of Bill Pierce [a current TOP reader —Ed.], were models of clear, problem-solving practicality. I also obtained a copy of The Craft of Photography. Subsequently came the even better book, The Art of Black-and-White Enlarging, with its combination of demonstrative and exemplar photographs, clearly structured writing and a number of valuable test techniques. Sadly, its publication coincided with a hiatus in the publishing industry and it was poorly distributed, with limited sales. (If you wish to learn how to print black-and-white negatives well in the darkroom, it clearly and logically answers virtually every question you are likely to have about making effective, stable prints on silver halide papers. It also answers the equally important questions you didn't even know needed asking.)

"However, before then, while still grappling unsuccessfully with the practical mechanics of the medium, I'd stumbled across an annual collection of international photographs—probably a Popular Photography item. Among the portfolios by Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, etc., etc., was a single small image centred on a page surrounded by editorial text. It showed not much more than a nondescript door, neither old nor new.  So quiet that you could flip the page without really registering it. Yet that picture was the one that stuck in my mind. Not those of the chest-thumping heavy hitters.

"David repeatedly made quiet photographs that at first sight could be dismissed as dull. However, the truth of their quiet ordinariness mask their power. A day or so later you realise they have contrived, burr-like, to lodge in the mind. They also force you to look anew.

"Despite being included in books such as The New York School (by Jane Livingston, 1992) (the thesis of which David disagreed with), his reputation as a photographer seems sadly limited. Living in the UK it is impossible for me to be entirely sure why, though I suspect a number of combining factors.

"As Mike has said, he focussed on doing the work. He photographed the ordinary quietly. He didn't spend time or energy promoting himself. He wasn't pompous. He was a sceptic who cheerfully pointed out the absence of the emperor's clothes. He wasn't unkind—he acknowledged others, though in private he could occasionally skewer someone who deserved it with a telling phrase. He didn't make big prints, or woolly statements. He characterised the Zone System as descriptive rather than prescriptive, after getting a complete understanding of it directly from Ansel Adams himself.

"He generally worked in single images, rather than projects or themes. (Though two trips to Brazil, first with his late wife Ann Treer in the '60s, then revisiting in the '90s, resulted in a few self-produced books made from inkjet prints. Similarly, I suspect an excellent small show or publication of pictures of his back yard in Bethelem, Connecticut, could be easily assembled.) He didn’t believe in limited-edition prints.

"He honoured and would try to support the work and reputation of others. He focussed much of his energy on writing. Writing clearly as possible in the mass media. (He blogged before blogging was invented. Firstly his newsletter GRUMP, then after a short pause 'FINITY, which continued almost to his end.)

"I hope someone can make a good book of his work—with no pictures running across the gutter [something David particularly disliked —Ed.]

"A good man, whom I, and many, will sorely miss."

Saul Leiter 1923-2013

Saul Leiter

Saul Leiter, a color photographer's color photographer, died a week ago today.

I suspect he'll be one of those photographers we learn more about as time passes, rather than less; he strikes me as a figure who will be known a century from now, once all the claims and pretenses and strivings of more effortful reputations have had a chance to fall away.

He photographed like everyone imagines a painter would: with an intense focus not on what was in front of the camera but on what the camera made of it.

He wasn't particularly famous in the 1950s when he did his most innovative work—or rather he was, briefly, but the moment soon faded. He reportedly didn't particularly seek fame and was sanguine about its ups and downs. But he was very lucky to enjoy a golden sunset to his life, thanks to the protean German publisher Gerhard Steidl, who published Early Color in 2008, a book that was in intense demand at the time and that revitalized attention and regard for Leiter. (We played a small part in helping publicize the book: TOP readers bought many hundreds of copies.)

Saul Leiter's only magazine cover?

Our friend Jim Hughes, who writes occasionally for TOP now, thinks that maybe the November/December 1981 issue of his magazine Camera Arts might be Saul's only magazine cover—at least featuring his artistic work. Saul was one of Jim's sources for Shadow and Substance, his biography of W. Eugene Smith. And a little-known fact, in Jim's words: "Gene Smith set Saul on his quest for personally meaningful visual images by giving him his first real camera, a 35mm Contax, in the late 1940s." Of Saul himself, Jim says, "Saul was wise, amusing and self-deprecating, to say the least. His perspective on life seemed to me to be very interior, with everything seen at oblique angles."

There are many nice things on the Internet about him from this past week: primarily the New York Times obituary. There is a film about Saul Leiter out there, one of many that I evidently don't get to see*.

News of his death has sucked dry the available supply of the recent books, but stocks of Early Color and Kehrer Verlag's Saul Leiter will allegedly be replenished soon. (I have not seen the latter.)

The piece you really should not miss is Teju Cole's beautifully written little piece for the New Yorker's Page-Turner. Called "Postscript: Saul Leiter (1923-2013)," it is an epitaph for a fortunate artistic life.

Mike
(Thanks to Stephan Miller, John Bax, and Jim Hughes.
If anyone knows who took the photo of Leiter at the top, please let me know.)

*Being at the letter-to-the-editor-writing stage of my continuing emergence as a curmudgeon, I actually wrote an email to the manager of the local multiplex. With 16 screens and two three-story-high "UIltrascreens," I pleaded, couldn't at least one screen be devoted to small films for serious thinking adults? Much to my surprise, I received a long response. He said they were sympathic, and they were trying to do that, but the films for the local market are chosen by the "main office" or whatever he called it, and the faceless corporate managers there make all the decisions. Those entities do not appear to have a very high opinion of sophistication of the citizens of Waukesha, unfortunately.

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Larry Watson: "I had a nice email exchange with Tomas Leach, the film-maker of In No Great Hurry, the documentary on Saul Leiter. I, too, had not seen it and I am a big Saul Leiter fan. One can subscribe to their mailing list for updates about seeing the film. Mr. Leach said they are hoping for a week in NYC in January. He also said that hopefully, Netflix and iTunes may carry the film, but that 'for a small movie like this, they are very slow....' I was also able to watch an interview on YouTube with Saul conducted in Amsterdam, I believe it was in 2011.

"As far as magazine covers, I thought I saw covers he did for Bazaar and Vogue when he was doing fashion photography. I only have a little book by Thames & Hudson. Look forward to seeing Early Color when it is reprinted."

Ailsa: "Thank you for the New Yorker link—it's always good to read such a warm, appreciative piece of writing. As for the cinema issue, I am lucky enough to live just a five-minute walk from one of the south's best cinemas—the Duke of York's, in Brighton (famous for the pair of can-can legs on its roof). Every now and then, my husband and I discuss moving out of Brighton, but when I think of living more than a mile or so from some of the best films you could hope to see, I become slightly panic-stricken. And if anything demonstrates that the public has an appetite for 'arthouse' films, it's this: the Duke of York's recently opened its second cinema in Brighton—a city with a population of only 270,000."

Mike replies: Still, that's about four times the population of Waukesha. And, I really must visit Brighton some day!

Open Mike II: R.I.P. J.J. Cale

This picture (by Gijsbert Hanekroot) should go in the blank white space*

He was known to the public at large as the writer of Eric Clapton's hits "After Midnight" and "Cocaine." But then, he never wanted to be known to the public at large.

Oddly, people cover "Call Me the Breeze" on Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute albums...even though Lynyrd Skynyrd's version was a cover of J.J. Cale.

He was called J.J. rather than the name he used in the first half of his life, John, to avoid confusion with the Velvet Underground's John Cale.

Neil Young once said, "Of all the players I ever heard, it's gotta be Hendrix and J.J. Cale who are the best electric guitar players." Eric Clapton said simply that J.J. Cale was the person he most admired.

If you're unfamiliar with him, download "Naturally" from iTunes, his 1971 debut effort for Denny Cordell and Leon Russell's Shelter Records. You'll either be hooked or you won't be—Cale was laid-back to a fault, and sounded just like an old black man even when he was a young white man. The modality is country blues, the riff on it unique.

I adore the song "Magnolia." But "Clyde" no less, really.

My favorite of his albums is probably Shades, with its cover reminiscent of a pack of Gitanes. Most people have a favorite album, one or another, often the one they got to know first.

Late in life he said, "If it weren't for Eric Clapton, I'd be selling shoes now."

He died of a heart attack on Friday, age 74. On jjcale.com it says, "Donations are not needed but he was a great lover of animals so, if you like, you can remember him with a donation to your favorite local animal shelter."

You know what's playin' Chez TOP today on the downstairs system. J.J. Cale on scratchy old vinyl. Perfect art.

Mike
(Thanks to Steve Rosenblum)

"Open Mike" is a series of off-topic essays by Yr. Hmbl. Ed. that appear here on Sundays.

*But I don't want G*tty climbing up my a**.

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

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Featured Comments from:

Andrew Molitor: "Cale's a perfect metaphor for a lot of what I think about photography. Some of his best recordings are just some session players he grabbed from someplace and a drum machine. You don't need a bunch of gear to make great music. You don't even need good gear. You didn't even need gear capable of making particularly high fidelity recordings. What you need, what you can't escape from, is some great music. Extending this to photography is left as an exercise for the student!"

Hans Muus: "Don't know where to begin—there are so many Cale songs that I love. 'Crazy mama,' on the first album (Naturally), will always be one of my favourites (note the beautiful, archetypical wah-wah slide guiter by Mac Hayden that fits in so well with the groove that J.J. Cale is laying down). And I was there  at the (single) concert Cale gave in 1974 in Amsterdam where the backstage picture by Gijsbert Hanekroot was taken that TOP is linking to! J.J. Cale, sitting on a chair, half of the time with his back to the auditorium, seemed a little shy. The show lasted exactly sixty minutes—we were actually surprised it was over so fast. To my (young) mind, there were quite a few old blokes in his band—but they all played marvelously, including the almost invisible master himself. (In the Europe of that time, rock music was pretty much a youth-only thing.)

"In later years, my musical friends and I have practiced hours and hours on end trying to emulate the typical Cale sound. It is all about laying down the right groove, in which each single instrument involved does very little individually, but what it does has to be just right. A true joy when it happens (not very often...) and a thing of beauty when you hear it practiced by J.J. Cale and his friends.

"I hope he has not suffered much and may rest in peace. Been listening to his music (LPs and CDs) for the past two days to no end."

Dave Brubeck 1920-2012

Dave Brubeck just died. I grew up on rock and came to jazz late, like a longtime Catholic converting to Buddhism, so Brubeck is still relatively new to me. If you don't know him, try this if you can get it in the next 37 nanoseconds before it sells out. CDs of five of his best records for what amounts to shipping cost. My favorite is Time Further Out, but all five are excellent.

Or if you'd rather not, try this—a quick taste, suggested by Steve Gilbert. The laugh at the end is the drummer, Joe Morello, reportedly relieved that he got through it.

Mike
(Thanks to Steve, Michel, and others)

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Paul De Zan: "I have very little in common with my father, except for the LP collection he assembled in the '50s and early '60s, before he started to lose interest in absolutely everything around age 35; an unhappy marriage and innate overcautiousness will do that to you. When I was small, the music in our house came from tinny AM radio, which I ignored, and from dad's kit-assembled Harman-Kardon Citation V tube-fired amplifier. And the music was Dave Brubeck's music, a bit of Ellington, later Stan Getz, never Miles, but a lot of Dave Brubeck. Brubeck wasn't jazz to me, he was music to me for the first 10–12 years I was on this rock. Paul Desmond was the first musician whose death I grieved. Dave's is just the latest. Sic transit gloria mundi."

Sal Santamaura (partial comment): "To get a sense of the man's true greatness, watch this short video segment."

Steve Biro: "I am 55 years old now, which means I was about five when Time Out featuring 'Take Five' was issued by Columbia. Perhaps it was exposure since (and probably before) birth to my parents' swing records that prepared me (I really enjoyed Benny Goodman as a child). But even at that young age, I was hooked instantly. I honestly cannot remember a time when I did not love both the album and song. It kicked off a lifelong love affair with jazz and the broader world of music. Sure, like most people my age I loved the Beatles and all that came after them. But jazz was and remains my musical center. And I owe it to Dave Brubeck. We are all very fortunate to have had him with us for so long. God speed, Dave. And thank you."

Digital Photography Pioneer

R.I.P.

-

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

David Ralph: "A search of the Rochester newspaper, the Democrat and Chronicle, reveals that Bryce Bayer's passing eluded their attention. Not that much different than Kodak's own appreciation for the import of the invention."

Malcolm Browne and the Burning Monk

Photo by Malcolm Browne for the Associated Press, 1963

It's one of the very few photographs that anyone can visualize instantly from a verbal description. "The burning monk." You know the picture.

Malcolm Browne was the photographer; he died yesterday after a long and full life.

I knew little about the photo and nothing about him. I was fascinated to learn from the obituary that many foreign journalists and photographers were alerted a day in advance to show up for the event—but only Malcolm Browne did.

Good call.

I decided yesterday that I should mentally replace the word "iconic" whenever it appears with the word "famous," which is more often what people mean. But is this photograph ever...famous. An image check on the web reveals tattoos, T-shirts, macabre spoofs, a rendering in Lego, colorized versions, posters, art prints, on and on.

Malcolm Browne worked for the Associated Press when he took the picture, which was voted the World's Best News Picture of 1963 at the seventh World Press Photo contest in The Hague. He joined the New York Times in 1968.

As for Thich Quang Duc, who had acquired such mind control that he meditated peacefully as he perished, his death was not in vain. His protest actually did influence international policy.

...With a little help from the only foreign photographer who showed up to witness it.

Mike
(Thanks to Pierre Munson)

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Featured Comment by Photoelectric: "The Austin [the car —Ed.] in the photo, in which Thich Quang Duc arrived that day, is still parked in a garage at the Thien Mu temple in Hue. It's rusty and neglected and would be totally unmemorable except for that photo, which gives it a strange sort of power when you see it."

Featured Comment by Rob Atkins: "Unfortunately, self-immolation of Buddhist monks has been in the papers with disturbing frequency lately, as the Chinese government continues its repression of Tibet."

Featured Comment by PWL: "Remember seeing this photo as a kid, when it first came out. Shocking. It was photos like this, plus the stuff that photographers like Larry Burrows did (I particularly remember 'One Ride With Yankee Papa 13') which made me realize that war was very different—and a lot uglier—than what we were presented with in TV shows like 'Combat.'"

Featured Comment by peter: "Interesting Malcolm Browne's commentary on the event...."

'Most Generous Magnum Member Gone'

Martine Franck, Pauline Doohan's and Brian Gallagher's wedding,
Tory Island, County Donegal, Ireland, 1996.

R.I.P. Martine Franck, 1938–2012. She died yesterday, after a protracted illness. A "shy" but accomplished photographer, she joined the Vu Agency in the 1960s, and became a full member of Magnum Photos in 1983. She was Henri Cartier-Bresson's wife and President of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation.

Martine Franck, U.S. photographer Paul Strand, Orgeval, France, 1972.

There's a thoughtful and informative obituary by Olivier Laurent at the British Journal of Photography website, and several portfolios available to look at at Magnum.

Martine Franck, Shechen Monastery, Bodnath, Nepal, 1996.
(Photos courtesy Magnum.)

The title of this post was a tweet by Magnum photographer John Vink.

Mike
(Thanks to Pete)

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Memories of Dick Zakia

By Barry Myers

I first met Dick when I was a student at RIT in 1970. I enrolled at RIT in 1969 but dropped out then weeks later. After two quarters of being a non-degree student, I decided that I wanted to get a degree, but on my own terms, designing my own program of studies, which drifted far from RIT's policies at the time. After several disheartening and heated meetings with the Photography School’s dean and other RIT administrators, I was pointed in the direction of the college's director of educational research, Dr. Richard Zakia.

My only experience with the name was through the Photographic Sensitometry I had taken the previous year, taught by Hollis Todd, using the text he co-authored with Dr. Zakia. I was apprehensive at best.

At our first meeting I was one angry, frustrated, anti-establishment young man, and I recall him as a sympathetic soul who made me feel at ease, who was also interested in furthering educational opportunities at RIT. After additional meetings where I showed Dick some of my work and put together a detailed proposal for a program of study, he scheduled a meeting with the administration. Recognizing that Dick was the diplomatic one, I let him present my case, and watched him convince a skeptical administration that a custom course of study could not only be done, but would benefit them as well.

The last picture of mine that Dick asked me to send him for his collection.
It shows a groom and his partner at the Del Mar Racetrack,
for a recent book project.

From that time onward, our relationship became one more of friends than that of research director and student. Dick had me out to his house several times where I met his family, and I also had him and his wife over for dinner as well. Every four or five weeks we would have lunch together in RIT's faculty dining room to talk about our work. By that time I was taking an independent study with him in Visual Perception—an area where he became a noted authority and which I think was his first love, especially as it related to photography.

Generous, facilitator, teacher, innovator, insightful and intuitive are words that I think of as I think of Dick. Many of my life experiences turned on these. While at RIT, he introduced me to Ralph Haber at the University of Rochester, then head of the Center for Visual Science there, and with whom I did two research projects. Dick had a way of visualizing how people with seemingly very different interests might benefit from working with each other.

On one occasion, he introduced me to Jim DeCaro, then a civil engineering teacher at the newly opened National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) who wanted to make instructional television programs for his students on surveying. As I was taking a television production course at the time, Dick suggested I direct a 10-minute production on surveying as my term project. Jim and I hit it off, and produced the program, and I then went on to write another 15 programs for him. Jim later became the Dean of NTID and is now the director of Pen International, an organization that trains faculty to apply innovative technologies to expand the career opportunities for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. After graduate school at the U of R, I wrote a series of television and audio programs for special needs children which were hosted by Fred Rogers.

After I left Rochester in 1974, Dick and I only saw each other a few more times. He'd call when he was in Washington, and going to the National Gallery with him was a very special treat. He loved to talk about the paintings, how they worked from his point of view, and how much in awe he was of the artist's intuitive vision.

We kept in touch, by letters, phone calls and of course, recently by email. He would tell me about his travels, what new book he was writing or revising, and about his family. I sent him photographs from projects I was working on and occasionally he'd see one he really liked and ask me to send him a print for his collection. He used several of my photographs in his books and I feel honored to have had them included.

My deepest condolences go out to Dick’s family and his many friends, colleagues, and students. We all have been influenced and changed.

Barry

Barry Myers has been a professional photographer since 1972, dividing his work between commercial and personal assignments that concentrate on people and their relationships to work, family, and community. His book Del Mar at 75: Where the Turf Meets the Surf comes out in June.

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Richard Zakia

Dick Zakia in the summer of 2011. Photo by Willie Osterman.

I was just reached with the news that Richard Zakia has died, last March 12th.

Richard (born Rashid Elisha) Zakia was one of the great photography teachers of his era in the United States. A member of the stellar 1956 graduating class at the Rochester Institute of Technology that included Carl Chiarenza, Peter Bunnell, Bruce Davidson, Ken Josephson, Pete Turner and Jerry Uelsmann—and that numbered Minor White and Beaumont Newhall among its teachers—he did a stint at Eastman Kodak as an engineer out of school, and then returned to RIT, where he taught for 34 years, eventually serving as the chair of the Fine Art Photography Department and Graduate Program in Imaging Arts.

He was the author or co-author of 13 books, and edited, with his colleague Leslie Stroebel, the mammoth third edition of The Focal Enclyclopedia of Photography. His most interesting book to me is Perception and Imaging, a fascinating and learned tome on how we see, how the camera sees, and where the twain meet. His most recent book, with co-author Glenn Rand, is Teaching Photography: Tools for the Imaging Educator, published in 2006.

Our condolences to Dick Zakia's family, his friends, and his many students.

Mike
(Thanks to Barry Myers)

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Featured Comment by Slobodan Blagojevich: "I second your choice of Perception and Imaging...it has been the most influential book in my photographic library. I used to study perception in business school (as in: in marketing, perception is reality), but in photography, Zakia's book was an eye-opener. I often use the concept of optical illusions (mentioned in the book) to introduce the concept of cognitive biases in decision making: we are by now, being familiar with certain well-known optical illusions, quite ready to accept that our brain can play tricks on us, but we are somehow still very reluctant to accept—or, even worse, to consider—that our brain can play tricks on us using cognitive biases."

The First To Go

I want to apologize for the lack of activity around here on Tuesday—I was reached by news of the sudden death of Marina Finch, an old college buddy from Dartmouth, and I was just plain feeling sad all day. Memories kept coming back to me all day long. And I was beset with regret—I always assumed I would see Marina again someday, and I just took that for granted for far too long.

Marina Finch scalloping out of her little Grady White boat, c. 2008.
Photo by Martie Mack.

Marina lived a very interesting life. She was an EMT and a scalloper out of Sconset, a village at the eastern end of Nantucket island. Out of college, she spent winters in Colorado, waiting tables at night and skiing in the daytime; summers, she'd do the same on Nantucket, spending the days at the beach. This went on for so long that her friends worried she'd never settle down. Finally, in an effort to get serious with her life, she joined the Peace Corps—which promptly dispatched her to an outrageously beautiful island in the South Pacific, where she was given the best apartment on the island in return for teaching English to bright-eyed island children. "I can't win," she wrote. Can't lose, was more like it.

She married a guy who was a pilot for an island-hopping airline, I heard, and that's when I lost touch with her. I didn't even know she was back on Nantucket, and obviously she'd been there for a long time.

Marina was one of those people who have such strong, outsized personalities that, once you know them, you can never forget them. She had great spirit, strong, almost volatile passions when I knew her, a keen intelligence, and always, always a deep and abiding sense of humor. She left friends literally all over the world—tributes poured in from Scotland, New Zealand, the mountains, the seashores, both coasts. I wouldn't have guessed I had ten memories of the times we spent together—I don't remember much from those days, an unfortunate side effect of pre-recovery addictions—but as the day wore on I rediscovered ten times that many, back in the recesses of my mind. Put the Grateful Dead on and raised a glass of club soda.

That's the bitch about middle age. Pretty much everybody makes it through their first fifty years; pretty much nobody makes it through the second fifty. It's only a question of when. The first to go are never easy for those who stay. My thoughts go out to her family.

Mike

The Real Photographer Has Now Died

You've probably heard me say before that all photojournalists work hard but the really lucky ones labor all their lives and also leave a legacy of one single shot that becomes iconic, world-famous, part of the Zeitgeist, the culture. For example, Sam Shere's picture of the crash of the Hindenburg, or Nick Ut's of the napalmed Vietnamese girl; Alberto Korda's endlessly reproduced "Guerrillero Heroico," or Joe Rosenthal's "Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima." The one picture becomes a career compacted, like carbon into diamond; the precious transcendent pinnacle, symbolic of a lifetime of work.

That makes it especially heinous when somebody steals that one picture from you. That almost happened to Stan Stearns, who died last Friday, March 2nd, at the age of 76.

Stan was the one photojournalist covering the JFK funeral who got the poignant shot of 3-year-old JFK Jr., then known as "John-John," saluting his father's caisson and casket as it passed by.

The Washington Post tells Stan's story from that day. First, he asked around to see if any of the other guys had gotten the shot. None had (although television captured it). So he decided to detach from the proceedings and rush the picture back to the UPI's Washington bureau.

"The bureau chief almost had a hemorrhage," Mr. Stearns told the Annapolis Capital in 2009. "I never saw a man turn as white as he did because I was not with the entourage going to Arlington. Then the big boss from New York overheard that and he said, 'You better have it or you’re fired on the spot.'"

He had it.

The picture made the front pages of newspapers worldwide....

The Baltimore Sun quotes David Anderson, a friend of Stan's and founder of the Professional Photographers Organization of Greater Annapolis, who said Stan "was very proud of that photo and talked about it a lot."

Lifted!
Little did Stan know, though, that for years, another photographer was busy taking credit for his most famous shot. That story itself has become part of photography's lore now. Our coverage started in this post and most importantly continued here (with a bit of rare-for-us original reporting), and a follow-up here.

Stan Stearns with his most famous picture. Photo by
Gene Sweeney Jr./Baltimore Sun

There's a good obituary of Stan at the Baltimore Sun, written by Mary Gail Hare. The picture above is by the Sun's Gene Sweeney Jr.

The New York Times published an obituary of Stan Stearns too. But, fittingly, it also published a discussion of the O'Donnell affair that stands as its obituary editor's "worst nightmare," in Clark Hoyt's Public Editor blog.

Let's have no more of that, at any rate. Let the credit for the John-John picture belong to the man who took it:

Stan Stearns, R.I.P.

Mike

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Eleanor Callahan Has Died

Lewis Kostiner, Harry and Eleanor Callahan, 1996

Many people familiar with the history of 20th-century American photography know Eleanor Callahan. If you don't yet, you have something to look forward to.

Wife, muse, and frequent photographic subject of Harry Callahan, one of the major American photographers, she has died, in Atlanta, at the age of 95.

In 63 years of marriage, often using his wife as a model, Harry Callahan slowly created a tender portrait of connubial life that, in his pictures, conveys an unparalelled sense of quiet intimacy and personal connection. (I've often said that Eleanor seems present even in some of his pictures in which she does not appear.) She deferred all credit to him, but of course she holds the status of collaborator in their work together.

One of Harry Callahan's many famous photographs of Eleanor

I was surprised to find that the elegant 2008 book Eleanor is still in print. There's also a DVD , which I haven't seen.

Here's the obituary from the WBPM, and an earlier 2007 article.

Harry died in 1999.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Rob Atkins: "I almost feel as though a somewhat distant relative has died. Studying Callahan's photographs of his wife and collaborator for so many years—decades, actually—Eleanor Callahan long been a part of my understanding and love of his work."

Featured Comment by Kenneth Tanaka: "She was here at the AIC in 2007 for a retrospective of Harry's work. I did not personally meet her but remember my astonishment when Liz Seigel introduced her in the audience during her lecture. May we all have such remarkable circumstances in long lives! Thank you for your patience and indulgence, Eleanor!"

Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik, R.I.P.

Sunday Times correspondent Marie Colvin.
Photo by Bryan Adams, 2008, from the
National Portrait Gallery (U.K.).

One wonders when the world will have had enough...

...Had enough of the depraved and despicable regime in Syria slaughtering its own helpless people.

The rest of the Arab world and the wider world at large seem just as helpless. The U.N. can't even pass a resolution condemning the mounting atrocities. And that's just words.

I wonder if you can imagine just for a moment that the U.S. Army had set up its field guns around Jacksonville, Florida or Columbus, Ohio, or El Paso, Texas (all about the size of Homs) and began shelling mercilessly. And every citizen who tried to flee was at the mercy of hundreds of snipers. Imagine if the British Army were to do the same to Liverpool or Nottingham or Leeds. Imagine, just for a moment, what it might be like if it were to happen to you, in your home town.

Unthinkable? Maybe. But it's happening to Syrians.

Why? Because a corrupt and immoral regime is frightened for itself. Frightened by what might happen if it loosens its grip on power.

That regime is ruthless. Everyone else is helpless.

Courageous Syrian dissidents who were doing all they could do—getting the word out, hoping the rest of the world will choose not to be helpless—are dying too. Citizen journalist Rami al-Sayed was killed on Tuesday. 

'She was wonderful'
Everyone says nice things about the dead once they're gone, and evidently that's a social convention you're supposed to observe at all costs. That must be for the feelings of the survivors, since the dead themselves are presumably past caring. However, by all accounts that I can find, correspondent Marie Colvin really was a remarkable person, loved by all who knew her and admired by those who didn't. Plenty of people described her when she was alive in the rosy terms people conventionally reserve for the deceased.

Reportedly, one of the last things she saw in the days before her death was a Syrian baby dying before her eyes.

Don't imagine that one happening to you. That's too much.

I hope they make a movie about her life. I can see Meryl Streep in the title roll, looking almost as good in an eyepatch.

She and French photographer Remi (or Rémi) Ochlik (pronounced osh-LEEK) were killed by the Syrian government when a shell slammed into the building they were in. Direct hit; instantaneous death. Remi Ochlik had won a World Press Award First Prize only weeks ago. Here are some of his pictures. Some people say pictures have to stand alone; but are pictures worthy of more attention when a life is risked to get them? When the risk sometimes ends up the wrong way? The pictures at that site came at a cost.

Remi Ochlik, described as quiet, soft-spoken,
reserved, brave, and ambitious

Neus Agency photojournalist Olivier Laban-Mattei told AP Television News that Ochlik was unlucky, not imprudent. "I am persuaded that he did not take unnecessary risks," said Olivier. "He was caught in between bad luck and ballistic reality." Just doing his job.

I'm always sorry to have to write about the deaths of yet more journalists. It happens all the time. All too frequently. Sanctimonious noises will be made about how nobody's death is more important than anybody else's. But still, the ones that touch us are specific deaths, usually people to whom we can feel a connection, who we can differentiate as individuals. That's just the way it is, just the way we humans are.

Through it all, one wonders when the world will have had enough.

Mike
(Thanks to Judith Wallerius)

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Featured Comment by Jim Hamstra: It is so sad to hear of the deaths of these brave journalists who by sneaking into the country are getting the truth out. Hopefully the tyrants who are killing their own people will someday be brought to justice but I'm afraid many more will die first.

"We spent last April touring Syria. It was my third photograph trip in Syria and I have always found the people to be very friendly and helpful. Things were really tense when we left as the killings had started. Twenty nine people were killed in Homs the day before we got there and we saw funeral processions at the mosque behind our hotel. When we got back to Damascus we were the last two people left in the hotel and the owner drove us to the airport saying he knew all the back roads and would get us there safely. The hotel was right off Martyrs Square which was then a staging area for thugs. I had hoped the trouble would be over soon and had a return trip planned but as I follow the news I don't see much hope. It seems so sad that there is no one that can help the people and no end to the violence. Thankfully there are people in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon that are helping those than can escape. Why is the U.N. so helpless?"

Michihiro Yamaki, 1933-2012

Michihiro Yamaki of Sigma being presented with the Golden Photokina pin by Oliver P. Kuhrt, Executive Vice President of Koelnmesse GmbH, on the opening day of the CP+ Camera and Photo Imaging Show in Yokohama, Japan, last February 9th (photo courtesy Sigma).

A pioneer of the photo industry has died. Mr. Michihiro Yamaki, founder of Sigma Corporation and its longtime Chairman and CEO, passed away on January 18th. Michihiro Yamaki began working in the optical industry while still a student, and started Sigma when he was just 28 years old.

The heart and soul of Sigma Corporation for many years, he was passionately interested in photography. In the last years of his life he was shown great appreciation throughout the industry, awarded Person of the Year from The PhotoImaging Manufacturers and Distributors Association, the Hall of Fame award from the United Nations, and, at the CP+ photographic show in Japan, the Golden Photokina Pin from Photokina—its highest honor.

Our respects and condolences to his family and all those who knew or worked with Mr. Yamaki.

Mike
(Thanks to Jim Kofron)

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Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Awwww...

Doppelgang, 2001–2012

There are few things in life better than a good dog. Years ago, my mother decided to try a small dog in her small Georgetown home, so she went to a breeder and got a miniature long-haired silver-dapple Dachshund with one blue eye she named Wolfgang. Maybe ten pounds soaking wet, Wolfgang was an outsized character, a little Napoleon, brash and full of himself, never afraid to challenge dogs four times, or even eight times, his size. By the time Wolfie got old—spirit undimmed—my mother had gotten remarried, and my stepfather also had grown very fond of Wolfie. So they went back to the same breeder and got a puppy who turned out to be Wolfie's great-great-great-great-great-grand-nephew—also a miniature long-haired silver-dapple Dachshund with, yep, one blue eye. Although his temperament was completely different, he looked just like Wolfgang. So of course they named him Doppelgang.

(The joke, if you're not familiar with the word, is that doppelgänger—which I think means "double walker" in German—means a double, lookalike, counterpart, or alter ego—in literature, sometimes of a ghostly nature and occasionally sinister, although that last doesn't pertain here.)

Alas, today will be Doppie's last day on Earth. Wolfgang died with his boots on, so to speak, in a spectacularly catastrophic car accident that miraculously spared his owners and the younger dog; Doppie, in keeping with his milder nature, will go to sleep for the last time today at the vet's. He has been ill for some time.

I once said the only thing wrong with dogs is that they don't live long enough; my mother's cousin Ham Schirmer answered, "That's just god's way of making sure you get to know more than one."

My sympathetic condolences to Jane and John, and everyone else who knew their dear little Dopp, who really was very sweet. He gets blessed on his journey with that highest of compliments: "good dog."

Mike

P.S. If you've never seen the Nova show "Dogs Decoded," I highly recommend it—I've seen it twice now and found it completely fascinating. It's available for streaming on Netflix and from iTunes as well. Plus, they rerun it on Public Television now and then, so you could just keep a lookout.

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Eve Arnold 1912–2012

Eve Arnold on the Set of Becket, 1963. Photo by Robert Penn/Magnum

Eve Arnold, the first woman to become a Magnum photojournalist, died last Wednesday at the age of 99. An American expatriate, she lived in Great Britain for many decades.

From The Telegraph, the story of her two most important early lessons:

Eve Arnold was self-taught, her only tuition being a brief course in 1948 with Alexey Brodovitch, the celebrated art director of Harper’s Bazaar, at the New School for Social Research in New York. The class, which included ambitious professionals such as Richard Avedon, mercilessly criticised Eve Arnold’s amateur efforts.

For the class assignment, however, Arnold ventured into Harlem to record the black fashion shows that took place daily in deconsecrated churches. On seeing her, the hitherto feline star model "Fabulous" Charlotte Stribling began to mince down the catwalk like a white model. "Lesson number one," recalled Arnold, "pay attention to the intrusion of the camera." In the next class, Brodovitch singled out her pictures for their freshness.

As no American magazine of the period would publish photographs of black people, Eve Arnold’s husband sent her pictures to Britain — to his friend Tom Hopkinson, the editor of Picture Post. The pictures were printed but the text changed, so that its tone was snide. Henceforth, vowed Arnold, everything she wanted to say would be in the photograph.

There are encomia all over the web, including:

The obituary from the World's Best Photography Magazine;

An audio segment on NPR;

An excellent video presentation of her and her work at Magnum;

Another article from her adopted country; and

Her most recent and most accessible book of the sixteen or so she published. A new book, All About Eve, will be published by teNeues next month, on February 15th, and can be pre-ordered now. I hope she got to see it.

Mike
(Thanks to Doug Howk)

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Willard S. Boyle, Digital Camera Inventor, Dies

A moment of appreciation for Willard S. Boyle, who passed away on May 7th. Dr. Boyle, a Canadian, with his co-laureate, American George E. Smith, won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physics for the invention, at Bell Labs, of the charge-coupled device (CCD), which made the digital camera possible.

There is a good obituary article at the Los Angeles Times. The writer notes that the CCD "allowed engineers for the first time to store a visual image in digital form, revolutionizing photography and a host of other fields. CCDs are at the heart of smartphones, camcorders, telescopes, supermarket bar-code scanners, fax machines and scanners."

Dr. Boyle was a resident of Wallace, Nova Scotia, where he died of kidney disease at the age of 86. He is survived by his wife, three children, and 11 grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

A quote, from the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame: "Know how to judge when to persevere and when to quit."

Mike
(Thanks to K.T.)

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Featured Comment by Carl Blesch: "I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Boyle when he retired from Bell Labs as a research executive in 1979. I was new on the staff of our in-house company newspaper, the Bell Labs News, and an executive retirement profile was considered a reasonably meaty yet low-enough risk story to assign to an entry-level writer. A few months earlier, my wife and I had taken a vacation in Nova Scotia, indulging our hiking and my photography passions. So I had the perfect chit-chat to get my interview with this scientific leader and down-to-earth Canadian off to a good start."

Featured Comment by Lancelot Gobbo: "Bill let me take his photo (with a CCD-containing camera, of course) when he came to see me one day:

Brian Lanker 1947-2011

Brian Lanker, Katherine Dunham, from the book I Dream A World

The NPPA has let us all know that Brian Lanker, a quintessential newspaper photojournalist (I always liked this shot), died suddenly yesterday evening, after learning only a few days ago that he had a fatal cancer.

Lanker won the Pulitzer Prize in the same year that Nick Ut won for his world famous picture of the so-called "napalm girl"—Brian's set was a sort of bookend, in that it showed a woman giving birth by the then-new Lamaze method of childbirth.

Improbably—he hadn't known the couple before photographing them for the story—the woman later became his wife, and the baby whose delivery he photographed his stepdaughter.

He is perhaps best known for his book I Dream a World : Portraits of Black Women who Changed America. Just recently out of print, it is one of the very rare photography books that have been huge bestsellers, crossing over to find fans among many people throughout our culture.

Our thoughts and condolences to all his friends, and especially to the Lanker family.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.