The Online Photographer

Lost Ziegfeld Photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston

Alfred Cheney Johnston [see the first Featured Comment below for details]

By Ava Land

Alfred Cheney Johnston was discovered by Flo Ziegfeld of the famed Ziegfeld Follies. Flo was a master of publicity and when he saw what "Cheney" was capable of creating with a large studio camera and glass plate negatives, Ziegfeld hired the young photographer on the spot. Cheney was shrewd beyond his years thanks to being mentored by family friend and famous illustrator Charles Dana Gibson who became famous for the Gibson Girl drawings. Gibson advised Cheney to make sure every photograph of his had the name, Alfred Cheney Johnston, clearly stamped on it. Thanks to that bit of advice Cheney would become world reknown [sic] for his amazingly beautiful photographs of the gorgeous stars of the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway...

READ ON at articlesbase.com

[articlesbase.com bio] Ava Land is a freelance magazine and web writer. For more information on the stunning photographic images of Alfred Cheney Johnston go to: http://alfredcheneyjohnston.com.

Mike
(Thanks to Eolake)

Ed. Note: A wistful, semitragic story, I thought, of a photographer done in by another depression. Eolake and I aren't sure if the photograph here is by A.C.J. or not, although it sure looks like one of his to me. Does anybody have the book? Also, A.C.J. is no relation to me, at least as far as I know—although if you go back far enough, to the 1500s and earlier, we're doubtless both distant scions of the same eponymous Scottish border clan. Inset: Gibson Girl 32-cent postage stamp.  —MJ

Featured Comment by Eric: "Page 111 of Jazz Age Beauties: "Helen Henderson, ca. 1922–25. Henderson appeared in the Follies of 1923 and 1925 and played the part of 'Other Hostess' in Night Hostess in 1928."

Mike replies: Thanks Eric!

Roy DeCarava

The saga of the Africans in the Americas—black history—is one of the great stories of the Western world, central to what the United States has been, and what it is now, and one of our most complex and enduring dramas. That story's greatest visual poet in the 20th century was Roy DeCarava, who has just passed, at the age of 89. He was in my opinion one of America's greatest photographers.

He was a black radical to his essence, often bitter out of proportion to his own success and importance, but in his art he was infinitely generous, almost tender, quietly creating an extended lyrical portrait of a people he felt were being ignored and undocumented.

Photography can't show the universal except in the specific, and he found his subject in life in Harlem, often centering around music. His pictures are free of cant and advocacy; they aren't political, they aren't pressed into the service of a message. He gives to his subjects what he always wanted for himself and his work: respect, regard, acceptance.

Like many black and white photographer artists, Mr. DeCarava* created his own tonal palette for his photographs. He chose to print with extremely low contrast and so dark that details often barely emerged from blackness, in what I have always felt was a sort of visual allegory for his feelings about race, pushing both effects past what many observers could accept. So much so that both book publishers and now online sources have chosen to "fix" his intentions for his work by making his pictures more conventionally contrasty, and lightened. The Times' Lens blog has failed in this respect—their presentation of his pictures yesterday accompanying his obituary misrepresents the work. 

Peter Galassi's retrospective, an indisputably great book and one of the finest volumes in my collection (it completely captures me every single time I look through it), treads the edge of this tendency with perfect adroitness, adding just a little of the air of lightness and just a little extra contrast, preserving the feel of Mr. DeCarava's prints while making them easier both to look at and to see.

Roy DeCarava, from Budd Mishkin's NY1 interview

I've long felt that photography—indeed, all art—is partly a matter of personal chemistry, in the same mysterious way that romantic chemistry works. Some work speaks to you and touches you in ways that are visceral and emotional, not just formal and intellectual. Some work matters in ways that obliterates all the noise and haste of rank and disputation and competing claims, and of dense artspeak. I just love Roy DeCarava's work, just love it, and often return to it. It's made me happy that he reached contentment in his old age; he always knew the significance of the great monolith of his life's accomplishment. Tonight I'll put on some of the of the music he loved (Ben Webster's Soulville, maybe, and, naturally, Coltrane) and look through one of my treasured books of his, sending this artist all praise and humble thanks.

Mike

*My policy has long been to refer to everyone by their first names here, under the premise—overly hopeful though it may be—that we are all not only equals but friends in our shared passion for photographs and photography. (A few older, established photographers and éminences grise have indeed objected.) But for some reason I cannot do that with Mr. DeCarava, especially now—he always demanded respect, and was prickly about even its cursory forms. I don't think he would appreciate my calling him by his given name at any time, and especially on this occasion.

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ADDENDUM: Janne Moren has discovered that James Pomerantz has posted Christopher Knight's 1996 L.A. Times review of Roy DeCarava's Retrospective show online.

Featured Comment by Aaron: "Terry Gross of Fresh Air replayed a great interview with Roy DeCarava today: well worth the listen on npr.org."

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."

Irving Penn, Fashion Photographer...

 

 

 

 

...I could go on, but I think you get the point.

Mike
(Thanks to Yuanchung Lee)

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Question from Don Bryant: "There has been a suggestion on an internet forum that Penn didn't actually do his platinum printing. Of course anything can be written on the net but the suggestion was made by someone very knowledgeable about the world of platinum printing. I don't know if that is true or not but the rumor is out there. But I have to ask, if the rumor is true, does it matter? I was fortunate to see a couple of large exhibits of his work and was a great admirer of the work I saw firsthand. His dye transfer color prints were great as well. I recall coming back to the exhibits three times to soak it all in."

Answered by Keith Trumbo: "Regarding Mr. Penn and some vague internet accusation questioning whether he made his own platinum prints: I worked for Mr. Penn for many years alongside him as he made his platinum prints. He made the developers, he coated each one personally. I was lucky enough to be an extra pair of hands to help get his work done. Yes I was one of many that helped him in one aspect or another in the production, but I want this to be heard loud and clear—Penn personally made his own platinum prints."

Featured Comment by Calvin Amari: "At least with respect to Penn's career, the institutional guardians of fine art photography are well over marginalizing his commercial work as a fashion photographer. Indeed, things more generally have gone so far to the other extreme—witness the most commercial of Annie Leibovitz's photos with all their gooey appeal displayed in art museums—that I suspect that some readers don't fully appreciate the sardonic nature of Mike's post.

"Despite working at Vogue magazine since 1943, Penn did not have an exhibition at MoMA until the mid-Seventies show of the cigarette butt series that, to me at least, must be seen in their monumental original size to be fully appreciated. Much of the ambiguity of the pictures—both optically (their resemblance to ancient ruined marble columns) and intellectually (the questions of whether he was both literally and figuratively inflating something prosaic into something larger than it can become)—does not come through in reduced size. But there was another sort of ambiguity or tension regarding the exhibition as well. John Szarkowski in his wall essay acknowledged in passing Penn's commercial work in the world of 'haute couture or cuisine' and said, with what appeared to be almost an apologetic sense of embarrassed dismissal, that 'one might guess that he [Penn] has only rarely enjoyed more than a cursory interest in the nominal subject of his [fashion] pictures.' 

"At the same time, it is hard to escape the sense that Penn was not being sardonic himself about this issue of his primary home being located in the ghetto of commercial photography. He had to be smiling to himself and at himself that, after three decades at the top of the profession, cigarette butts became his key to the pantheon. It's not that Penn pulled a fast one, per se. The cigarette butt work reflects keen intellect and craft, but it is interesting to contemplate all the subtle elements of the wit and schmaltz that Penn also brought to that particular proceeding."

Irving Penn, Fashion Photographer, Is Dead at 92

Irving Penn, New York, 1951. Photo by Horst

Staley-Wise Gallery

By Andy Grundberg, The New York Times

Irving Penn, one of the 20th century’s most prolific and influential photographers of fashion and the famous, whose signature blend of classical elegance and cool minimalism was recognizable to magazine readers and museumgoers worldwide, died Wednesday morning at his home in Manhattan. He was 92....

READ ON at nytimes.com

Mike
(Thanks to Feli)

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Featured Comment by Yuanchung Lee: "Penn was a magician, conjuring Form and Beauty from the meanest of materials. Regardless of the subject matter, the Penn 'voice' was the same—elegant, concise, and seeming always to capture the essence of the thing. It's a shame to label him a 'fashion photographer' (as the Times headline writer did). Not only because he did all sorts of pictures, but because his work is really the opposite of fashion: It's timeless. Penn obviously did not make pictures to please ephemeral tastes. As for the inevitable comparison to Avedon, well, Penn wins hands-down for me."

Willy Ronis 1910-2009

 

Photographer unknown

The last of the great French mid-century photographers has died. Willy Ronis, who had been on dialysis and in a wheelchair for some time, entered a Paris hospital several days ago. Stephane Ledoux, head of Eyedea Presse, owner of Rapho agency, said he was "bright and spirited to the end." He was 99.

Ronis is best known for his pictures of everyday life in Provence and in Paris, in particular the working-class districts of Belleville and Montmartre. His most famous picture is "Le Nu Provencal," a nude of his wife, Marie-Anne Lansiaux, bending over a sink in a rustic bathroom.

His pictures are lyrical, humanistic, warm, respectful, the opposite of dry, often packed full of information and of the sense of life and the love of people, sometimes shading into the formally pictorialist or the sentimental. He was prolific. He published many books, had many exhibits, won many awards. He decided to become a photographer in 1937, and joined Rapho, the French photo agency founded by Charles Rado in 1933, when it was reopened in 1946 by Raymond Grosset. Other Rapho photographers central to postwar photography in Paris included Doisneau, Boubat, Brandt, Izis, Ylla, Sabine Weiss, Brassai, and Lartigue. Considered one of the greatest photographers during the postwar era, Ronis's influence waned somewhat during the photo boom as the prevailing style became more iconoclastic and distanced.

 

Place Vendome, Paris, 1947

Carrefour Sevres-Babylone, Paris, 1948

Obituary (in English)

Video interview (in French)

Purchase (U.S.): Kathleen Ewing Gallery, Washington, D.C. (Artist's page)

Books: The German edition (bilingual text) of Willy Ronis: La Vie En Passant (life in passing) is still in print and available in the U.S. The Phaidon 55 is available for £4.49 in the U.K. 

Quote: "I never, ever went out without my camera, even to buy bread."

Mike

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Featured Comment by Robin P: "Sad news. Definitely my favourite of the great French photographers. His pictures have a way of renewing my love of the world and its inhabitants whenever I slip into despondant cynicism."

Marcey Jacobson 1911-2009, Mario Cravo Neto 1947-2009

Marcey Jacobson, an expat New Yorker whose creative life was spent documenting the indiginous peoples of Mexico, has died of heart failure at the age of 97 in San Cristóbal de las Casas.

Mostly ignored, she left a major body of work created over many years, finally recognized in 2001 with the publication by Stanford University Press of a generous retrospective, The Burden of Time: Photographs from the Highlands of Chiapas.

Photograph by Mario Cravo Neto

Also sad to report, two days ago the Brazilian photographer Mario Cravo Neto lost his life to skin cancer. Formerly a street photographer, Cravo Neto turned his attention to studio photography during an extended illness and thereby found his muse, which he never again abandoned. "Neto" means grandson; his father was Mario Cravo Junior, famous in Brazil as a sculptor. Peter Weiermair's book, Mario Cravo Neto: Photographs, is unfortunately out of print.

Mike
(Thanks to Ken Tanaka and Helcio Tagliolatto)

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Featured Comment by Jack Nelson: "The New York Times now has a selection of Marcey's photographs on its "Lens" blog.

True Blue Price Rise

For you jazz fans out there, be on the alert that True Blue Music is raising the price on its catalogue of Francis Wolff prints in the small size: "Due to rising costs in inks and paper, the price of the Museum-quality fine art Francis Wolff prints, made with archival pigment inks on 100% acid-free rag paper, will rise from $75 to $100 on September 1," they write. "The image is 7.5" square and is printed on 8 ½" X 11" paper. We will honor the current price through the end of August."

I indulged myself. Using a donation made yesterday from a British gentleman living in the Netherlands (Thanks again, Martin), I took the plunge and ordered a print I've wanted for a long time, of Sonny Clark during the rehearsal for "Cool Struttin'"—one of my favorite pianists, and favorite albums.

And not a bad shot. (I used to have a bigger JPEG of it, but I've lost it...on my own computer. So it goes....)

Mike

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Lillian Bassman in 1951

After we were talking about Lillian Bassman the other day, our friend Marc Rochkind (see below for a link to his blog) found a nifty article about her in the April, 1951 issue of Popular Photography which he has now scanned and put online. The article, by Walter Ian Fishman, is called "A Woman's Camera in a Woman's World." There are a few dated touches, like the line about the "girl and man," which sounds odd and patronizing now, but overall it's a fascinating look at Lillian Bassman at work.

Mike
(Thanks to Marc Rochkind)

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Lesser-Known Photographers

Julius Shulman, who died two days ago at an advanced age after a full life, is one of those photographers who are well known in their sub-speciality but not as well known among the general public—including, even, photography enthusiasts. Mr. Shulman is probably better known among architects than he is among photographers.

For a little more background: we were tipped off by reader Allan Connery to a video of Calgary architect John Brown giving a virtual tour of Pierre Koenig's Stahl House. The Stahl House was the subject of Julius Shulman's most famous photograph, a picture that came to define mid-century Los Angeles modernism. And here's a link to information about the award-winning film about Schulman, "Visual Acoustics," compliments of reader Rodney Dean.

Shulman published or was a party to dozens if not hundreds of books. A Constructed View: The Architectural Photography of Julius Shulman (here's the U.K. link) gives an excellent introductory overview of his work, a brief biography, and useful information about architectural photography in general. For a more forthrightly nuts-and-bolts approach, there's a reprint available in the U.S. of his classic 1962 instructional book Photographing Architecture and Interiors. The latter deserves a place in the library of any aspiring architectural photographer, but it's no longer a good basic introduction to techniques and it won't be the place to go for things like advice on lighting equipment. Mined for more of a holistic approach to a career and a subject by those who wish to know more about Shulman's thinking and methods, however, the title still has a lot to offer, even to generalists. Those who want a more comprehensive survey of Shulman's work will want to seek out Taschen's three-volume Modernism Rediscovered, a treasury of pictures selected from the quarter-million negatives Shulman donated to the Getty Research Institute when he retired in 2004. The book is available in the U.K. but doesn't seem to be in print in the U.S. (It shouldn't be that hard to find if you dig a bit, though.)

A couple more accomplished but lesser-known photographers who've belatedly been getting a little attention recently:

Jimmy Forsyth, Royal Oak Girl, Scotswood Road, 1956

Jimmy Forsyth , also recently deceased, was a methodical documentarian of the "Geordies" of Tyneside (in the Northeast of England). A lifelong Socialist, he was blind in one eye, described as "a single man who was often lonely," and he created his work mostly living on "the meager resources of the dole" (what Americans would call welfare). Ironically, his last book, the very inexpensive Jimmy Forsyth: Photographs from the 1950s and 1960s, was published only a few weeks ago in June (the link is to Amazon U.K.; Amazon U.S. doesn't seem to have this title sorted yet). The obituary at The Guardian is a vivid and charming glimpse into the life of a man who must have been "a character."

Elderly but still thriving, the once and future fashion photographer and classically free-spirited bohemian Lillian Bassman was the subject of a delightful short profile in The New York Times yesterday, written by Ginia Bellafante. The story of her onetime repudiation of photography and her discovery of Photoshop in old age is fascinating, as are the details of her independent life (I was especially touched by the brief description of her lifelong romance, from age 6 till death did the two part).

Lillian Bassman, from the upcoming book Women

She's also the beneficiary of a new retrospective, upcoming from Abrams. Called simply Lillian Bassman: Women, it's only available for pre-order at the moment. The new book, says the publisher, will have "more than 140 of her best images reproduced in stunning tritone, including many never published before and others not seen since they appeared in the pages of the legendary Harper's Bazaar of the 1950s." Much anticipated by fans of fashion photography, Lillian Bassman: Women is expected by October 1st.

Mike
(Thanks to those mentioned, Ade Rixon, Roger Suppona, and all those who sent the Bassman link)

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Featured Comment by Carl Weese: "As mentioned in the Times article, Ms. Bassman has a show of her prints opening tomorrow afternoon (Saturday 7/18) at KMR Arts Gallery in Washington, Connecticut. I understand the artist is planning to attend."