The Online Photographer

Bill Jay's Vision

Jim and Evelyn Hughes, 1981. Photo by Bill Jay.

By Jim Hughes

More than three decades ago, Bill Jay jotted some words in the left-hand margin of a print from a photograph he'd snapped of me and my wife Evelyn at an SPE conference (I discovered the image itself only recently on a website devoted to Bill)*: "Jim is now editor of the photo-magazine Camera Arts. (I was amazed to find that I was listed as contributing editor although I had never been asked.) Jim is a refreshing change from the typical academic artist—he is irreverent, opinionated, direct, and speaks simple English. I like his writing for the same reason—I can understand it, and I agree with most of his opinions. I only wish he would reply to my letters......"

I had known Bill since 1968, when he had just been named editor of the British magazine Creative Camera, and he and his publisher, Colin Osman, were touring the States. They were looking for photographers who might inspire their readers back home and paid me a visit at Camera 35, which I was editing at the time. Bill and I had a lot in common; I came to like and respect him enormously. (Later, Bill and Colin had a rather acrimonious falling out and Bill started his own magazine, Album, which published only 12 issues that quickly became classics.) Eventually, Bill resettled in the U.S., became a distinguished educator at Arizona State University, and authored untold numbers of uncommonly intelligent articles and books.

My uncommunicative nature notwithstanding, I did publish that article of Bill's I'd been holding, in the third issue of Camera Arts, April/May 1981. I titled it "The Petrified Forest." Bill retitled it later, on his 2007 website, "Incest in Academia."

In it, he wrote:

Ten years ago, I was ardently engaged in a continuous and seemingly hopeless battle to establish 'photography as art.' The battle was being waged on many fronts in many lands by scores of committed individuals. My own particular frontline was England, where commentators wrote that I 'led a crusade rather than a campaign' and waged it with 'missionary zeal.' Others were no less zealous for the cause throughout Europe and America. In the past few years, the greatest rout occurred in the U.S.A.; photography has decisively stormed the art establishment. Here, at least, the battle is won. But...if I could have predicted the results of the victory I am not so sure that I would have been such an energetic fighter in the cause.

Photography-as-art has led us into a morass of problems that denigrate the medium. I am thinking of the fact that galleries—and not the photographer's peers—are now the arbiters of taste and photographic merit; that 'success' is equated with fame and not with an individual's struggle to transcend self; that photographic journalism is riddled with pompous, unintelligible art-jargon and that clear, informative prose is hard to find; that photographers' egos have become so inflated that the individual's integrity has floated out of sight; that differentness, perversity, and slickly presented banality is touted as photography of the highest quality; that gallery and media hype has replaced a long-term committed paying-of-dues and that instant 'stars,' created by publicity and comprising nothing more substantial than hot gases, have diverted attention from the serious worker who has quietly struggled to maintain his or her vision and faith over many years; that something inexplicably yet intrinsically photographic has been killed in the fight for art acceptance.

I can't say that Bill Jay softened his position in the decades that followed. In his acceptance speech upon receiving an Infinity Award in 2008 from the International Center of Photography, he declared:

Almost everybody I have met in photography I have a photograph of. I can look at that picture and hear the tone of voice of the photographer in that picture and recall clearly the subject matter of our conversations. But I have no desire to be considered a photographer. I got into photography because I loved the medium and I admired the people who became photographers.

Since photography has been hijacked by the art market I am feeling more and more alienated from the medium of photography that I first fell in love with. Where I came from, the term Artist was something that was bestowed on a person after a lifetime of achievement. So for a student photographer to call himself an Artist was ludicrous. I'm not against the idea that photography can be singled out as Art but only after a body of work, over a long period of time, has entered the pantheon of high achievement, rather than a 20-year old MFA student touting wares around the New York gallery scene.

And my big fear is that the histories of photography in the future will be based on the photographers who were saleable through galleries, not through the best photographers in the medium.

We need people who understand the history of the medium and have standards, who are saying 'photography has something extraordinarily important to say about our culture, our society, our political system'—these are the things we should be looking at and caring about.

Where are those people? I mean I don't read them, maybe they exist and I am just too isolated. But—and you say am I angry? I don't think I'm angry, I'm just sad…the medium just doesn't seem to exist in the form that I originally loved.

Writing for the Saturday Arts section of The New York Times ("An Art World Gathering, Divided by Money," Dec. 8, 2012), Patricia Cohen termed the recent Art Basel Miami Beach a "celebration of wretched excess." As Cohen reports, "Prominent art writers and critics...have been attacking the art world, arguing that the staggering sums of money being spent on works are distorting judgments about art and undermining its long-term cultural significance. [...] In its special edition for the opening day of the fair, The Art Newspaper asked whether 'the art world is facing a crisis of values' because of the 'pernicious influence of the market on art.'"

I regret to say that photography, now for the most part elevated to at least stepchild status in the heady world of fine art, has fallen prey to the seductress called Commerce. There is no denying it. And we can place at least some of the blame on no less an eminence than Bill Jay, the iconoclastic editor, writer, critic, scholar, historian, and teacher of photographic values who passed away too soon only a few years ago.

As you may have noted a few paragraphs earlier, he admitted as much himself.

Years ago, probably at about the time Bill photographed us, Evelyn and I, Charlie and Regina Reynolds, David Lyman and Kate Carter, and Bill Jay—I don't think he had a companion that night—all went out to dinner after a long day of portfolio viewing at the annual meeting of the Society for Photographic Educators. I think this was in Colorado.

Charlie entertained us with card tricks (besides being a picture editor of note, he was an accomplished magician who rarely performed in public; he preferred designing stage magic for the likes of Doug Henning); David and Kate regaled us with stories of miscreants who tried to pass themselves off as serious students at the Maine Photographic Workshops; after dessert, Bill, who evidently fancied himself to be something of a graphologist, asked to see samples of our handwriting. I showed him my driver's license, which contained my nearly indecipherable scribble. He nodded knowingly, and asked if I had an earlier example. Turned out I did: an ID card I'd signed when I was in grade school, and had transferred from wallet to wallet as they disintegrated over the years. Every letter in the painstaking script of my youth was clearly legible.

After some intense study, he announced, "Jim, you are trying to disappear!"

"What does that mean?" I demanded. "You obviously want to be a hermit," Bill answered, laughing, his hands gesturing with a flourish toward some sort of distant infinity.

Actually, I told the group after some introspection, his prescient observation was not entirely inaccurate. I had recently purchased a dilapidated old fishing camp on a pond in Maine, and was driving up for long weekends and vacations to make it at least habitable. It was about as far away from my workaday world in New York as I could imagine. But it wasn't until spring of 2009—close to the very day that Bill died in his sleep at his new retirement home in Samara, Costa Rica—that we finally sold our Brooklyn brownstone after 42 years, and moved to the Arts and Crafts bungalow we'd purchased for our own retirement a few years earlier.

"Snowed in" at our hideaway in Maine, 2012. Photo by Jim Hughes.

Another far more famous writer now lives in our former Brooklyn home. His name is Martin Amis (yes, the novelist, Kingsley's son). Based on what little I've read about him lately, he seems as comfortable shining in the spotlight as I am made uncomfortable by the very thought of it, shunning the attention it brings whenever possible. Like Bill, Amis is now a transplanted Brit, as they say in the tabloid press that seems to dog his every step.

Bill Jay in 2002. Photo by Burk Uzzle.

But I think that's as far as any comparison can be stretched. Bill Jay wrote fact, not fiction. And he clearly saw the dangers of chasing fame and fortune. Bill was a genuine visionary in the art we all love.

Jim

*The JPEG of the finished print of Jim and Evelyn reproduced at the top of the post is from the BillJayOnPhotography website referenced in the opening paragraph. The original written-upon workprint can be seen at the website of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College, Chicago.

Ed. Note: "Pond" is what lakes are called in Maine.

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Steve Rosenblum: "The book On Being A Photographer by Bill Jay and David Hurn influenced me more than any other prose I have ever read about photography. Required reading."

[The paper book is available as a POD on Lulu, and there is a Kindle Edition. —Ed.]

Ralph Steiner Moments

Ralph Steiner, Typewriter Keys, 1921

By Jim Hughes

I met Ralph Steiner when he was already in his 80s. He arrived in my office at the original Camera Arts lugging a big cardboard box filled to the brim not with prints, as I'd expected from a legendary photographer, but with reams of typewritten pages—long, complex stories written in an inimitably impish yet amiably wise style about all aspects of photography's art and craft. It was from one of those stories, for example, based upon years-long correspondence between Ralph and Ansel Adams, that I first learned how much Ansel disdained the word "pre-visualization," calling it redundant (which of course it is). It was in fact Minor White, Ralph noted, who had applied the "pre" to Ansel's own theories of visualization when talking about how the Zone System could help photographers imagine, in advance, at the time of film exposure, what the final expressive print should look like in black and white.

Thereafter, whenever he was in town, we would try to have lunch at a small, inexpensive restaurant I liked. It was located around the corner from our offices at One Park. Ralph was a wonderful conversationalist, a veritable font of knowledge, and not just about photography. One day, as we were about to enter the restaurant, Ralph pointed to an exterior wall decorated with elaborate tilework, an eclectic collection of various designs, styles and architectural eras that were never meant to go together but did manage to add some much needed color to an otherwise drab stucco exterior. I had wondered about the building's history. "A long time ago, I used to live in this neighborhood," Ralph told me that day. "This place was our local grocery. The building's owner once had a tile business, which at some point failed, probably during the Depression. Rather than selling or trashing his leftover stock, the man had decided to use it to decorate his building before renting it out. As you can see, he was a pretty good craftsman, but no artist."

Ralph's writings were so interesting, and to my mind so important, that I promised him a regular feature in the magazine. After which, he proceeded to inundate me with postcards with scribbled ideas for articles, etc. He addressed the postcards to "Jim Choose," since as editor, he felt, I was the one whose job it was to select what went into every issue. He signed each pithy message "St. Einer," complete with a little stick drawing depicting his head as a view camera, its bellows drooping toward the ground.

Ralph lived in Vermont, but spent his summers on Monhegan Island, something of an artists' retreat, off the coast of Maine. When he learned I was working on a summer "camp" of my own in Maine, he asked if my wife and I would like to spend a weekend with him and his wife on the island. "I’ll make reservations for you both on the ferry, which is usually booked solid weeks in advance," he said. On the appointed day, we drove down from Camden to Port Clyde, parked in an all day lot, arrived at the dock, I think at 6 a.m. for a 7 a.m. departure, and checked in. Our name wasn't on the list. Looked again, for every conceivable spelling, including "Jim Choose." No luck. There were, in fact, 90 people ahead of us on the waiting list. The nice lady in the booth called up to the captain in his wheelhouse who stuck his head out a window and said something like, "Everyone knows Ralph, I would have remembered, and he never said a word." She suggested that we might be able to charter a private boat, or maybe a seaplane, for the trip. All were booked solid. We considered calling, except there was no individual phone service on the island back then. So we thought, what the hell, it's a beautiful day and a picturesque harbor, let's just wait. At 7 a.m. the nice lady found us on a nearby bench. "Well," she said, "the first 88 must have gone off to enjoy the sun, so you're next!"

When we arrived at the dock on Monhegan, we saw the strangest sight. There was this apparition in a bright red shirt at the bottom of the gangplank, waving a big red flag at the end of a long pole and yelling "Welcome, welcome." It was Ralph. He hadn't forgotten we were coming. He just hadn't remembered to make the boat reservations. "What's with the flag?" I asked when we finally disembarked. "Well," Ralph explained, "When Zero Mostel used to come here in the summer, he would shamble down to the dock wearing all black and wave a big black flag at all the people on the boat. 'Go back,' he'd scream. 'Go baaack.' Now that he's gone, I thought I'd carry on the tradition, just change it a little to make it a bit a more affirmative. I'm a photographer, you know, not a goddamned famous actor."

Jim
(Image credit: Haggerty Museum of Art, gift of Therese and Murray Weiss)

Jim Hughes is the major biographer of W. Eugene Smith and the founding editor of the original Camera Arts magazine. He writes occasionally for TOP.

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.

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Kirk Decker: "The article that Ralph wrote for Camera Arts comparing Edward Weston and Paul Strand is one of my favorite photography articles ever. I was in high school, and Edward was my photo hero. At that time I had just enough money to buy volume I of the Daybooks and a CA subscription. Best youthful money I ever spent. I still have the entire Camera Arts run. It was a great photography magazine, and I was crushed when it was over."

Mike replies: Re your last sentence: Amen, and ditto.

Weston Book Update

Seems we crashed Lodima Press's bookstore last night for quite some time. It's back up and running now.

At this point it looks very likely that Edward Weston: Life Work will sell out entirely in this sale, and most likely well before Tuesday. So if you find yourself sitting on the fence about it, you may not want to hunker there too much longer.

UPDATE: The edition sold out at about 9:10 p.m. tonight (Friday). (There are a few copies of the deluxe edition still remaining.) Our thanks to everyone who participated—I really hope you enjoy the book!

And my sincere thanks to Michael and Paula for making this possible.

•     •     •

One of the treats of this book is "A Couple Collects Edward Weston," the brief joint essay by Judith G. Hochberg and Michael P. Mattis that introduces the magnificent plates. They manage to convey both personality and erudition, opening a well-lit window into the passion and enthusiasm collectors feel for the objects of their hunt. We're taken from their beginnings in collecting to their decision to concentrate on Weston...

Michael and I both consider Weston the "Picasso of Photography." One needs only to think of his mastery of past modalities and invention of new ones, his success in a variety of genres, his economy of line, his self-knowledge as an artist, his intense relationships with other artists—and with the women in his life.

...all the way to their debt to those charged with the care of the Weston archives and their friendships with the Weston family members who are alive today. Talk about economy of line, or of word...the essays are short and sweet, but insightful. 

I thought it was interesting that the idea of an exhibit of their Weston prints went from a "dream" to an "obligation," and that, by the time the exhibition became a reality, it was the only way they themselves could see all their own Weston prints on the wall at the same time.

Edward Weston, Dunes, Oceano, 1936. This is a JPEG of the Met's print.

My first encounter with Life Work was interesting. Art critics from Ruskin to Berger talk about the "aura" of original art-objects, and I'm sure you know the feeling yourself—the special qualities that convey when you're looking directly at the real thing on a museum or gallery wall. There's a sense of immediacy and connection—Goya touched that!—and a sense that the veil of intermediacy has been removed: you're face to face with the art itself, and all its secrets are there for you to see. It needs no "translation," requires no imaginative help.

I've of course seen many original Westons in my life, and got to know one of them—Dunes, Oceano, a.k.a. White Dunes—intimately, because one of the schools where I taught had an original print of it on the wall. The plates in Edward Weston: Life Work are the first time, I think, that I've ever felt, from a book, that feeling, that sense, you get when looking at the real thing. It's a feeling I know well, and I felt some of it—more than a glimmer—from looking at many of the later plates in the book. Remarkable. I'm not sure any book has ever done that for me before.

I mentioned "Red Ceiling" yesterday, which is apropos, because Eggleston is on record saying that reproductions have never captured it. (And he's right, at least in my limited experience.) He's quoted in this passage from Mark Holborn's introduction to Ancient and Modern:

The first [dye transfer prints Eggleston] had made were of the image of Greenwood Moose Lodge, a sombre, windowless edifice against a blue sky, and The Red Ceiling in 1973. He was so impressed with them that he knew dye transfers were going to provide him with his medium. He immediately sent [MoMA Photography Department Director John] Szarkowski a print of The Red Ceiling, which was to become one of his most famous images. The cross of white cable leading to the potent, central light bulb, was what he described as a "fly's eye view" in the guest room of his friend, a dentist in Greenwood, Mississippi, whose choice of decor included an adjacent blue room; he [that is, the friend] can be seen naked, his walls daubed with graffiti, in The Guide. The house with the red room was subsequently burned down and his friend murdered, yet far from having any sinister connotation, the red room was immensely pleasing to Eggleston. "The Red Ceiling is so powerful, that in fact I've never seen it reproduced on the page to my satisfaction," Eggleston claimed. "When you look at the dye it is like red blood that's wet on the wall. The photograph was like a Bach exercise for me because I knew that red was the most difficult color to work with. A little red is usually enough, but to work with an entire red surface was a challenge. It was hard to do. I don't know of any totally red pictures, except in advertising. The photograph is still powerful. It shocks you every time."

Those of you who own a dye transfer print of your own from one of our two dye sales can probably well imagine what he means.

But I think that, for example, Weston's famous Pepper No. 30, plate 43 in the book, among others, really is reproduced satisfactorily on the page. Of course you're not fooled into thinking you're looking at a real print, but for me, at least, it imparts that same "direct" feeling, the feeling that you're seeing the picture itself, without translation into ink.

Michael A. Smith tells a story about this:

In Edward Weston: Life Work, there are a few photographs that have never been reproduced before, many that have been reproduced very seldomly, and a few that have often been reproduced. One of the latter is the famous Pepper No. 30. We know the collector who owns Edward’s own copy of Pepper No. 30. Edward considered it the best print he had ever made from that negative. Eventually, Edward gave the print to Brett. And Brett gave it to a friend whose father was Brett's closest friend and who had grown up around the Westons. The friend sold it to this collector in 1974. (Way too soon.)

When we showed the collector the book we published, he brought down this print of Pepper No. 30, which we had seen previously, and placed it next to the reproduction. We (me, Paula, the collector and the collector’s wife) looked very carefully at the print and at the reproduction, trying to find differences. There were a few, but they were virtually imperceptible without extremely close scrutiny, and even then, truly, there was hardly any difference between the print and the 600-line screen quadtone reproduction.

After about three minutes of this intense looking the collector's wife said, "You know, I think I like the reproduction better."

Bet her husband didn't like that.

Mike

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Random Excellence: P. H. Emerson

Peter Henry Emerson, Confessions, 1887

Although his pictures look romantic and pictorialist to us today, Peter Henry Emerson, a wealthy, intelligent, and eccentric photographer, clashed with the photographic establishment of his day in championing a more direct and naturalistic style. "Confessions" depicts and old woman and a young woman washing dishes in a fisherman's yard. (Note the similarities to this photo.) It was included in his book Pictures from Life in Field and Fen, now essentially unseen outside of museums.

The classic North American study of Emerson is by Nancy Newhall, wife of Beaumont. Beaumont Newhall, if you don't know the name, was the author of a longtime standard American history of photography (I'm not sure of this, but in 75 years I don't think it's ever been out of print) and the first Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art; but Nancy (who allegedly had an affair with Ansel Adams) was no slouch as a scholar herself. The two most readily available books about Emerson right now are John Taylor's 2006 book The Old Order And the New: P. H. Emerson And Photography, 1885–1895 and Christian A. Peterson's 2008 study Peter Henry Emerson and American Naturalistic Photography. The latter concentrates on Emerson's considerable influence on his younger admirers in America—one of whom was Edward S. Curtis, who we were discussing recently.

Peter Henry Emerson

Emerson was related to the American transcendentalist and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson.

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.
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Accidents of History

I was mulling some more about our friend Edward Curtis (born in Wisconsin, by the way) and his epic project, and a thought occurred to me. This might be a trivial observation (trivial, maybe, but still not superficial) to people whose business or expertise is art history, but it fascinates me that artists are often perceived very differently by their contemporaries, in their own era, and, say, a century later. Certain artists conform much better to the values and tastes of their own times, others conform to the values and tastes of later times.

(I even think that tastes in historical artists express certain times—I wrote a school essay once reflecting on the fact that Rembrandt was considered the primus inter pares among painters in the 1950s in the U.S.A., according to polls of the public, the very greatest of all, and Beethoven the greatest composer, whereas thirty or so years later it was Picasso and Mozart who had segued into the top spots in the conventional wisdom. I read all kinds of things into that, some of which might even have been true.)

Painting by one of the most celebrated French painters in the 19th century, and possibly the highest-priced artist in the world in his time

Painting by impoverished, mentally ill Dutch artist working in France in the 19th century who worked in obscurity

In some ways this is accidental, one might even say—who knows, at any given time, what the unknowable future will value?

Seems to me that Edward S. Curtis, as a photographer, was in some ways the victim of this. He didn't know exactly what future years would expect or value most highly, and one could argue that he guessed wrong; his pictures are formally staid, romantically inclined, and crafted more or less in line with the techniques of the pictorialists, who were advanced artistic practitioners at the time Curtis began his great project in 1895. How was he to know that the modern era would value loose, free composition, irony, detached ambiguousness, scientific documentary exactitude, and transparency to the materials? Atget, who was photographing at the same time as Curtis, but in complete obscurity and relative poverty, is considered the superior—certainly the more photographic—photographer now. Curiously, both were motivated by the same thing—an attempt to capture worlds they thought were vanishing before they disappeared.

By Edward S. Curtis, active 1895-early 1930s

By Eugene Atget, active 1897-1927

I sometimes try to imagine what a future century will think of various contemporary photographers. I have no idea, of course—this kind of cultural blindness is insuperable—but I'll bet Henry Wessel will be valued a lot more a century from now than he is by his contemporaries. And that people then will wonder what we saw in some of our own historical moment's most exalted art stars.

Mike

P.S. As an aside—this seems to keep coming up the past few days—Curtis "won" a very early version of a "genius grant"—financier J.P.Morgan (himself the subject of one of the most famous photographic portraits) gave Curtis $75,000—in installments, of $15,000 a year for five years—in 1906, to help him with his project. That's more than Uta Barth got from the MacArthur Foundation...it would be the equivalent of about $1.8 million in today's money. And despite that, Curtis impoverished himself publishing his magnum opus, and struggled with money through his later years.

UPDATE: NPR has just posted—today—an interview with Timothy Egan about his brand new biography of Curtis, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher. I've added a link to the book below. Thanks to Chad Thompson for this.

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Vivian Maier at the Chicago History Museum

By Kenneth Tanaka

The legend of Vivian Maier lives and looms even larger this fall!

Earlier this month the Chicago History Museum opened an excellent new exhibition of the late, previously unknown Vivian Maier's work titled "Vivian Maier's Chicago." Unlike an earlier show at the Chicago Cultural Center this is a wonderfully simple yet sophisticated exhibit that manages to capture a previously unshown dimension to her work in a relatively small space.

This exhibition of previously unseen Maier work is very thoughtfully and cleverly presented. The center of the smallish gallery space is occupied by large board-mounted prints suspended by cables. These enormous prints, actually of top quality (although I would have preferred them untoned), form small spaces that visitors can explore freely.

The perimeter walls of the gallery are banded by a continuous strip of enlarged contact sheet-style prints of some of Maier's Rolleiflex 120-size film rolls. We see all 12 6x6 frames of each selected roll, the progressive sequence of how she worked a subject, the stinkers with the gems. This is perhaps the richest possible presentation of Maier’s work for others to study, especially other photographers. I think I could have spent hours in there!

For me, this presentation affirmed that Vivian Maier was every bit as talented, and then some, as the best of the more renowned street photographers of the last century. I don't care if she was an odd duck. (As if Winogrand and Frank weren't? Yah.) And I care much less that the art museum /art criticism world has its collective head so deeply up its collective arse as they so clearly do on Maier's work. She was a great unknown talent and deserves to be shown and shown as intelligently as the Chicago History Museum is now doing.

The exhibit will be up until "Summer 2013." If you have any interest in Vivian Maier’s work, or even in good street photography, find a way to go see this show. Really, just go.

Can't get to Chicago?
Also noteworthy is a new book of Maier's work scheduled to be published by CityFiles Press on October 16th of this year. I have not been able to browse the book yet but from its appearance (in a vitrine in the exhibition) it looks to be a much larger collection (288 pages) of her work than the earlier 136-page book. Hopefully of more mature and refined print quality, too.

It's called Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows. That link's to Amazon.com (USA); here's the U.K. pre-order link.

Ken

UPDATE from Richard Cahan and Michael Williams, authors of Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows and curators of "Vivian Maier's Chicago" at the Chicago History Museum: "Thank you all for your enthusiastic comments about the Chicago History Museum show and the book Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows. We can assure you that the scans supplied for the show were straight grayscale images without any toning. One image, added at the last moment, now appears to contain a slight pinkish tone. We hope to replace that soon. We do not consider Vivian Maier's work to be nostalgic or sentimental. We are glad that so many people are enjoying the show. No plans for a traveling exhibit right now—so come to Chicago in the next nine months or buy the book."

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Now THERE Was a Strobist!

O. Winston Link, Hotshot, Eastbound, Iaeger, West Virginia.
The plane is probably a Korean-war-era Sabre.

So would you call the following an O. Winston Link link, or just an O. Winston link? I think you could get away with the latter, because what photography buff wouldn't know who you were talking about if you just said O. Winston?

Anyway, CNN World has posted a set of pictures. (That's the Link link.) Not too well prepared for the web, perhaps—but if you're unfamiliar with Link, be sure to read Elizabeth I. Johnson's short but informative little writeup at the link. (Click "Story" if it doesn't come up when you go there.) Now there's a strobist! Though not a Strobist.

These pictures really don't cut it as tiny, pale JPEGs surrounded by visual clutter—but that's all the more reason to try to make it to the exhibit that the presentation supports, at the Link Museum (101 Shenandoah Ave., Roanoke, Va. 24016, 540/982-5465) starting November 9th.

His pictures also capture '50s Americana like a fly in amber. Like the one up top. I love his interiors—they're like microcosms.

And what does the show support? The publication of a new book of Link's remarkable and all but unique body of work. (David Plowden is the only one I know of who's come close.) The book is called O. Winston Link: Life Along the Line: A Photographic Portrait of America's Last Great Steam Railroad. It bears an October 1st date of publication, but it's available now.

Hmm. My library doesn't have a Link title. I'll be anxious to hear how the reproductions are in this book—good reproduction is as key for O. Winston as it is for Yousuf. You know who I'm talking about.

Mike
(Thanks to Deb B)

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Featured Comment by Mike Plews: "I love OWL. He was the living proof of the adage that 'anything worth doing is worth overdoing.' I too hope the quality of this book is up to snuff."

Featured Comment by Bill Mitchell: "That's my favorite small museum in the whole world."

Question from Paris: "I've always wondered how Link got the F-86 perfectly framed on the screen at the precise instant the train went by. Photoshop?"

...Answered in this Comment by Kevin Purcell: "I've wondered whether the aircraft image on the screen was captured live in one shot. I've heard it claimed that was the case and that it was just lucky timing that they got an aircraft (in the Yule documentary [mentioned in Kevin's other comment —Ed.]) but it seems not to be the case:

His timing was perfect—he wrote of being able to see only the locomotive's distant headlight coming down the tracks—but it wasn't enough. The explosion of light washed out what was on the movie screen at the moment; he had to print the image of the plane from a negative he'd made separately of that night's showing. The film, Battle Taxi, has been forgotten. But Link's picture holds up as a one-frame narrative of 20th-century transportation.

"It seems OWL really did want to make a statement about the future, the present and past of 1950s America in a single photograph."

Featured Comment by Charlie Dunton: ""The CNN piece makes it seem like this exhibit is temporary, and maybe some part tied to the new book is, but the museum has on permanent display between 250 and 300 16x20" silver prints. They are displayed in a fantastic space and there are texts for just about every print that give the backstory. I try and get here at least once a year.

"Several years ago the museum had some 16x20 estate prints of Link's work for sale at the museum (no longer available—this image was $4,000). The drive-in image was described in the brochure as his most famous. Some other facts about the image from the brochure: The movie was 'Battle Taxi,' about the Korean War. The couple are sitting in Link's car, a '52 Buick that appears in a number of other photos he made. The setup for the shot was one of his largest, requiring 42 No. 2 bulbs and 1 No. 0 (on the couple). You can see the backs of the reflectors near the train. And perhaps most interesting from a photographic perspective, the shot required two negatives—one without flash to capture the image on the movie screen, and one with flash for the overall exposure. According to the sale brochure, the two negatives were printed on a single sheet of paper from which a copy negative was made for subsequent printing.

"There is a wall-mural-size print of this in the museum with the challenge to find the five modes of transportation depicted in the image. I've never actually felt I had the answer."

...Answered in this Comment by Dennis Mook: "I had the pleasure of meeting Link, seeing and discussing his work with him long before he became popular. A very interesting man. He was a N.Y. commerical photographer by profession and did his highly technical night steam engine photography as a personal project. I hold much admiriation for his vision and his skill.

"His wife not only stole and sold his photographs, but kept him as a virtual prisoner and isolated from his friends and the public during this period. Luckily, much of his work was recovered in a storage facility in, I believe, Pennsylvania.

"About the photo you present, there are five forms of transportation shown in the photograph: airplane, train, automobile, truck and bicycle. See if you can find them all.

"I agree with you about David Plowden. I have most of his books and he captures the fast disappearing infrastructure of America like no other.

"I can highly recommend Link's two books, Steam, Steel & Stars and The Last Steam Railroad in America. Both are excellent in every way."

Featured Comment by John Camp: "I've got three Link prints, and I've always found them a little embarrassing as a guy who tends to like Modernism...there's just so much going on in all of them. It's not like you contemplate them, really; they're like walking through a room and glancing at a TV set. Notice in the above photo those little black dots along the tracks—that's the back side of the flash stands. You'll see them in most Link photos. My favorite photo of his is the one of the people in the ol' swimming hole with the train going overhead. If you go to this link and click on the photo, you can see a big version of it.

"Link, by the way, did not do limited editions, and you can buy silver prints for very reasonable prices; although some would suggest he was not a world-class printer."

Seeing Henri in a New Way

As I mentioned yesterday, it's Henri Cartier-Bresson's birthday today, which Jan Kwarnmark thinks should become an international Street Shooting Day. Peter Turnley has some nice thoughts about Henri on his Facebook page (click on the "A La Sauvette" link). I was talking to Peter this morning and he had some interesting thoughts about it—he mentioned that when we think of Henri we tend to think of the "decisive moment" meme, and André Lhote's notions of geometry, and surrealism, and all the other ideas that come up along with the name, and we find it hard to remind ourselves of Henri's humanity and his faith when he went out every morning that the pictures were out there waiting to be found. It's like really listening to overly familiar old music. Sometimes it takes some extra effort to break through the crust of familiarity and see the pictures again as moments of life being lived.

Can't resist another plug for my favorite Cartier-Bresson book, the one that to me makes the central case for him and his work. The book I'd have if I could only have one of his. Tonight I'll get it out and go through it again, slowly.

Tomorrow I'll ask for people to send in links to street pictures they took today. I'm really hoping to be able to get out myself, but it's up in the air at this point. Later this week we'll do something more about new street photography, leaving the old chestnuts behind.

Mike

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Featured Comment by John Garrity: "Yes, Mike, you're right—that is the one single H. C.-B. book to go for. The pictures are essentially those of his master portfolio, which was placed with various museums around the late 1980s. One picture per page, with none chopped up by the gutter. Thames & Hudson also have a Martine Franck book [U.K. link], but sadly a fair few are hurt by running them across two pages."

'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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John Claridge and William Gedney

It might be that the world seems to be recently discovering some previously little-known archives of 1960s-era photography because the photographers are now older and making efforts to push their work out into the world; or perhaps it's just that we now have enough perspective on this time period that it is acquiring historical distance sufficient to allow our interest; or it might be simply that I like photography from that time period, and that explains why I'm paying attention to it.

William Gedney, Teenage Boy Rolling a Cigarette, 1964

Two photographers of that period have crossed my wake in recent days. One is William Gedney, who died in 1989 and whose work was the subject of a now-unattainable book that I thought we recommended here on TOP although I can't find any mention of it now. He made two trips to Kentucky spanning only 29 days, in 1964 and 1972, and the work he did there is now part of a comprehensive online archive of his life's work that includes more than 5,000 pictures.

William Gedney, Vivian Cornett Fixing Daughter's Hair, 1964

William Gedney's Kentucky work is the subject of a series of posts by Roger May at Walk Your Camera—an easier way in than diving directly into the unedited archive (although I'm not sure I entirely agree with Roger's picture editing—then again, there's the big Duke University archive if you want to make your own choices). Here are the Walk Your Camera links:

Looking at Appalachia | William Gedney—Part One
Looking at Appalachia | William Gedney—Part Two
Looking at Appalachia | William Gedney—Part Three

-

John Claridge, no title given, 1963

Vanishing London
The East End of London has been much discussed of late because run-down parts of it received a makeover for the Olympics venues. This is not firsthand knowledge on my part, but apparently the term "East End," denoting an area which appears to be more or less in the middle of present-day London, refers to an area just east of the original Medieval walled city. Traditionally it was poor and overcrowded (the Salvation Army was founded there, after an epidemic worsened already bad conditions), and apparently parts of it were improved by being wiped away in favor of temporary sporting facilities.

John Claridge, Accordion player, Spitalfields, 1970

The gentle author of a small blog called Spitalfields Life has been mining the early work of a photographer named John Claridge, who came up from the East End to become successful in advertising. His pictures of the East End were taken between 1959 and 1982, many of them when he was no more than a boy.

Here are the posts:

A Nation of Shopkeepers by John Claridge
John Claridge’s East End
Along the Thames with John Claridge
At the Salvation Army with John Claridge
In a Lonely Place
A Few Diversions by John Claridge
This was my Landscape
John Claridge’s Spent Moments
Signs, Posters, Typography & Graphics
Working People & a Dog
Invasion of the Monoliths
Time Out with John Claridge
Views from a Dinghy by John Claridge
People on the Street & a Cat
In Another World with John Claridge
A Few Pints with John Claridge

Great fun. I've been enjoying making my way through these.

Mike
(Thanks to Howard French and Ian Goodrick)

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Featured Comment by Patrick Medd: "At last, my favourite photographer on my favourite photography website! I've been chasing after John Claridge's work since I first read a magazine feature on him 20 years ago. One of those rare photographers whose monochrome and colour work is equally compelling (to me). Indeed the colour photographs shouldn't work; pictoralist in many ways, heavily filtered, diffused...but he's not afraid to let large parts of his pictures render as pure black, and his use of this aesthetic appears magical to me. Check out his series of portraits taken at 'The French'—a pub in Soho, which are on his website."

Featured Comment by Tim Auger: "The East End has suffered two phases of comprehensive urban planning: one was implemented by the Luftwaffe, and the second by postwar planners and architects building stained-concrete housing fit for the masses, but which they themselves wouldn't be seen dead in (and which the masses don't like much either). It was called 'slum clearance.' And traffic management schemes. A lot of the old stuff's gone. The East End's a lot better than it was 10–20 years ago, but the intimate texture of urban life that you see in these pictures is pretty lacking now. Except in some of the recent concentrations of ethnic minorities maybe, which do have a good atmosphere."

Featured Comment by Cliff: "For more of Gedney see Shorpy." 

Mike replies: Ah, that's where I'd seen his work before. Thanks, Cliff.

Featured Comment by Roger May: "Thanks very much for mentioning/linking to my series on William Gedney. Admittedly, I'm no photo editor. I could've easily posted hundreds of images, but only requested permission to use less than fifty. It's my hope that more folks learn about Gedney's work and share it with others. Again, thank you!"

Mike replies: 'Tis I who should thank you, Roger!

The Irving Penn Archives

By Ken Tanaka

One of the unfortunate consequences of today's noisy age of communication is the deflation of "great." It seems that to grab any attention in the daily cacophony anything passable, or even momentarily competent, must now be called not "fair" or "good" but immediately declaimed as "great."

But genuine greatness can neither be achieved nor assessed so casually. Within the worlds of art and photography, greatness lands slowly and is gradually acknowledged through the lens of time. Irving Penn was indisputably one of the greatest photographers and artists of the 20th century, with a career that spanned nearly seventy percent of that century and a body of work that's astonishing for its variety and quality. Although best known for his fashion and portrait photography, Penn's artistic interests and accomplishments meandered to other genres of photography and even occasionally into non-photographic art forms.

In 1995 Irving Penn donated his archives to the Art Institute of Chicago. His transparencies, contact sheets, prints, drawings, notes, correspondence, even some of his cameras are all housed at the Museum. It's an enormous body of material which, although well-organized upon intake, has occupied man-years of work by a devoted research team, with the support of the Irving Penn Foundation, to sculpt into the recently-opened Irving Penn Archives site.

I really think that most TOP readers will love this. A warning, though: don't expect to casually jump in if you only have a few minutes to spare. Grab a beverage, sit down at a cozy spot and just enjoy immersing yourself in all things Penn.

If you’re not very familiar with Irving Penn, I envy you: you’re in for quite a new treat. I also envy you if you are familiar with Penn: I can virtually guarantee that you'll delight in learning something new about him or his work.

Regardless of your Penn-savviness, spending study time in the Penn Archives may, at the very least, recalibrate your working concept of what qualifies as a "great photographer."

Ken
(Illustration: Irving Penn, Large Sleeve, 1951)

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Doisneau is 100

Google is celebrating the centennial of the great French photographer Robert Doisneau's birth today—have a look at its home page.

Doisneau died on April Fool's day 1994.

It's funny, but I've never owned a good book of Doisneau photographs. Of course, like most people, I probably have a book's worth in my mind.

Mike

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Shorpy and Addie

Well, damn, I deserve what I get for mentioning taxes in a lead-in. Let's pretend I didn't do that, okay? It makes me feel kind of useless to spend my time not publishing comments.

More on topic, Jim Nash mentioned that there are some large JPEGs of Lewis Hine pictures at shorpy.com, as indeed there are. Including many which I've never seen before, which is exciting for me.

Those of you who don't visit Shorpy, or have never heard of it, might not know that the site itself is named after the subject of a Lewis Hine photograph:

December 1910. Shorpy Higginbotham, a 'greaser' on the tipple at Bessie Mine, of the Sloss-Sheffield Steel and Iron Co. in Alabama. Said he was 14 years old, but it is doubtful. Carries two heavy pails of grease, and is often in danger of being run over by the coal cars.
(Photograph and caption by Lewis Wickes Hine.)

Shorpy Higginbotham died in a mining accident, aged 31.

Poking around the Hine photographs on Shorpy, I was interested to see how the site's community dives into researching the pictures and their elements. Consider this one—the commenters have figured out the real name and age of the "newsie," the location of the store, and even the fact that the toilet paper in the window was made by the Waldorf Company, whose employee education program was the ancestor of the still-thriving Waldorf Schools.

That led me naturally enough to the site of Joe Manning, "author, historian and geneologist," whose site I have actually surfed past before, looking for pictures, without realizing its full import. Joe's "Lewis Hine Project" involves tracking down what happened to the subjects of some of Hine's pictures.

February 1910. Addie Card,12 years old, anemic little spinner in North Pownal Cotton Mill, Vermont. Girls in mill say she is ten years. She admitted to me she was twelve; that she started during school vacation and would 'stay.' (Photograph and caption by Lewis Wickes Hine.)

One of Lewis Hine's most famous child-laborer photographs is of Addie Card, an "anemic little spinner" in a Vermont cotton mill. A book author, Elizabeth Winthrop, wrote a novel inspired by the photograph, imagining the life of the girl in the picture, who she named "Grace." But she became curious about the identity of the real person in the photograph, and asked Joe Manning to help her find out more about her.

Joe Manning's account of several months of detective work starts here.

It's not a fast read, but his search certainly succeeded—he was able to track Addie Card through marriages, divorce, a lost child, and all the way to her headstone (she died in 1993). He met a number of her descendants and uncovered several later pictures of her, and one possible earlier one, including a picture of her as an old woman.

Based on Joe's researches, Elizabeth Winthrop wrote a short article for Smithsonian magazine about Addie, which can be found here.

And to think, there are probably similar stories waiting to be uncovered about so many of the pictures on Shorpy...if you've never visited, don't do it when you're in a hurry.

Mike

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Labor

Those of you with regular salaried jobs, with benefits, working for big employers, should be feeling grateful right about now. You can be thankful you don't have to pay self-employment tax. And I pay every morsel of my own benefits with after-tax cash, too. I am my own welfare state. Guess that's why I work nights and weekends.

And speaking of labor, I've always liked Lewis Hine, the pre-eminent photographer of the workingman. Not necessarily because of a visceral attraction to his photographs; to me they're more meaningful than they are aesthetically pleasing (although some of them are that). Hine himself, who remains opaque to me except through the window of his work, was a bootstrapper, self-made, an upright man with a heightened sense of ethics as well as empathy, a man on a mission whose mission actually succeeded. (Of course now our capitalists have simply moved our bad labor practices to other countries, but never mind.) He virtually invented social documentary photography, or at least helped greatly to define it. It's not easy to be clear about what you're doing when no one's ever done it before.

Hineograph by Lewis Hine

At his most grandiloquent he called his photographs "Hineographs." Self-promotion, it must be admitted, was not his genius.

You'd say he was an American success story, except he was more or less the opposite: a self-made, hard-working, moral, inventive, creative, caring person who contributed immeasurably to society...but ended up forlorn and forgotten, begging for work. Nobody cared about him or supported his work in the later part of his life (Stryker turned him down for the FSA, in which he was desperate to be included), finally losing his house and being forced to apply for welfare in his old age (yeah, I know. Quiet, please). Even his archive went nomad, given the Dear John by MoMA before finding refuge at George Eastman House after a waystop at the Photo League.

It's a bit dangerous to recommend a BBC video to a worldwide audience, because sometimes they're not viewable everywhere. But here goes. Worked for me, in quiet backwater Wisconsin USA. Tasty, if you're able to see it.

Regarding that new book by GEH's Alison Nordström they talk about, it puts me in an increasingly familiar quandary: I'd love to have it, but I can't have everything, and I already have several books about Hine, including Passionate Journey which has already gotten rather pricey. But can I afford not to have the new one? It includes an entire facsimile of the justly famous Men at Work—which however you can buy in an inexpensive reprint. What to do, what to do. One thing's for sure...he who hesitates is lost, or, rather, he who hesitates will pay through the nose later. Note those prices for Passionate Journey.

At least I could write it off my taxes.

Mike
(Thanks to Christian Kurmann)

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Featured Comment by Paul Butzi: "Hine is of my photographic heroes, if only because he uttered the words 'If I could say it in words, I wouldn't need a camera'—eerily similar to Robert Frost's response when asked to explain a poem: 'You want me to say it worse?'

"It seems to me that Hine is to social documentary photography what Louis Armstrong is to jazz trumpet—if you're go to work in that field, you first discover that the very first thing you need to do is learn how to do everything they did. The second thing you discover is that they covered an awful lot of ground, so just catching up to them is not so easy as you might expect. Most social documentary photographers today fall far short of Hine's aspiration: 'There are two things I wanted to do. I wanted to show the things that needed to be corrected. I wanted to show the things that needed to be appreciated.' His ability to do both at once has not often been matched. Salgado comes to mind, and then I start to have to work to come up with names."

Les Pères Spirituels

Peter Turnley with Robert and Pierrette Doisneau.
(Their daughter took the picture.)

I was talking to Peter Turnley about our upcoming print sale of a selection of his Paris pictures, which starts next Sunday, and something came up I thought you might be interested in.

Like most top-level photojournalists, Peter's always felt a debt of gratitude to his professional journalistic associates—his editors at Newsweek, the people at Corbis, gallerist Agathe Gaillard, Pierre Gassmann of Picto, and mentors such as Howard Chapnick of Blackstar. But besides those important people, there are what the French call les pères spirituels—"spiritual fathers," although the term might just as easily apply to brothers or sisters or mothers. It implies seeking out a different kind of support—and a desire to belong to a deliberate tradition encompassing more than just oneself.

John Morris, a dean of photojournalists and Peter's great good friend

Starting when he was young, as a new immigrant to Paris, Peter made a deliberate effort to get to know the great photographers of the city. He found the great French master Robert Doisneau by simply looking him up in the phone book. "I didn't have any agenda," he says. "I just wanted to meet him, to be in the orbit of this guy's spirit." He ended up working as Doisneau's assistant.

One lesson Peter remembers is that Doisneau could put his hands on any of his negatives from the previous thirty years within thirty seconds, and he never went to bed before he had developed, contact printed, and captioned every roll of film he'd taken that day. (Peter thinks he would have loved the digital age.) What this meticulous organization did was to allow Doisneau's entire life's work "to breathe, to live, almost like a living organism." Work that you can't find, that you can't share, might as well be lost.

Willy Ronis with one of his most famous pictures

Other encounters were more serendipitous. In 1975, his twin brother David—also a top photojournalist, now teaching at the University of Michigan—called from New York and told him to be on the lookout for an up-and-coming photographer named Josef Koudelka. Peter had never heard the name before.

Not long after that, he was in the Jardin de Luxembourg sitting on a bench with his girlfriend and a man walked by, and Peter noticed him surreptitiously taking their picture, so he jumped up and ran after him—"Did you just take our picture?" The man seemed nervous and claimed to be a tourist, but Peter had noticed his two beautifully brassed Leicas, which were hardly tourist cameras. It was Koudelka.

Josef Koudelka

Koudelka keeps things simple. Some time later, as the two shared a meal at the offices of Magnum Paris, Josef told Peter something he always remembered. He said, "My idea of a good life is I wake up in the morning, I go out and walk, and I make three films [i.e., shoot three rolls —Ed.] a day."

"It does sound like a good life," Peter says. (Does to me too.)

With Édouard Boubat

Peter's a very intense guy—that might be an understatement—and as you hear him talk about these people you can hear his enthusiasm take wing. The man who became his best friend among these pères spirituels was Édouard Boubat. They met because Jim Hughes (who also writes for TOP from time to time) had published both their work in the same issue of 35mm Photography. The two became close friends—they met several times a week whenever Peter was in Paris, for many years. (Boubat died in 1999.)

As with many of the great photographers he knew, they seldom talked about photography. The topics of discussion always had to do with world affairs, an engagement with the issues of the day, with...well, life. These days it seems like photography consists of an endless roundel of keeping up with cameras and software. It's important to remind ourselves, at least now and then, that a lot of what's important about photography isn't about photography at all.

Agathe Gaillard

I guess the point here is that it's important to know where you come from, and whose work yours builds on. Peter used his many-decades project of Paris pictures to decompress from high-stress photojournalistic assignments, but it wasn't just that. He was eager to belong—belong to the grand tradition of the great photographers of Paris. Knowing many of them personally was a big part of that enthusiasm.

André Kertesz taking a picture from Peter Turnley's balcony, Paris.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Andrew Molitor: "Great little piece here, this is the kind of thing I love on TOP! Also, some really good portraits here. Love the one of John Morris, a classic look and a wonderful face.

Featured Comment by Jim Richardson: "Among the luminaries mentioned I was heartened to see the name of Howard Chapnick. Few people warrant the kind of admiration I feel for Howard and all that he did for photography, shepherding young photographers, standing firm for the value of images, working to put photography squarely in the mainstream of serious culture. He made my first book happen, shaping a mass of images into a coherent documentary, and along the way treating a very young photographer with serious consideration. And he was a supremely kind and decent man. One other thing. He headed Black Star, the photo agency. So his hobby was to bet on horses that had "Star" in their name. Pretty human."

Featured Comment by John: "One of my favorite TOP posts ever. You'll likely be back to gear tomorrow, but why not make it editorial policy to once a week address themes like this? 'Wednesday: Photography Unplugged.' The community needs it.

Featured Comment by Debbie: "Wonderful post about a wonderful human being. I gave myself the gift of a workshop in Paris with Peter last May and all I can say is in addition to all of his 'Peres Spirituels' he is now forever one of mine. His delight in sharing his knowledge and his own mentors is unique and life changing. Thank you Mike and especially thank you Peter."

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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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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Ansel Adams at the LCDM

If you noticed things were a little quiet around here yesterday, it's because Michael McCaskey enticed me to unchain my ankle from the leg of the desk and venture out into the north prairie sunlight to the Ansel Adams exhibit at the Lake County Discovery Museum (a.k.a. LCDM) outside of Chicago. (The "Mystery Man" post yesterday, which got away from me somewhat and ended up taking up most of my morning, was intended just to be a lead-in for this.) Matt Witkovsky, Curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, was able to join us for an informative and engaging hour before his many duties took him away. Looking at photographs with Matt, as you might imagine, was a treat for Michael and me. The Museum was kind enough to open early for us, so we had the exhibit to ourselves for an hour before the crowds arrived. My thanks to Andrew and the staff for their hospitality.

And the crowds did arrive. Despite being located in Wauconda, on a 3,000-acre former "gentleman's farm" that's part of the Lake County Forest Preserves and quite a hike from downtown Chicago (Lake County is the northeasternmost county in Illinois and Wauconda is near the western edge of it), Katherine Hamilton-Smith, Director of Cultural Resources for the Preserves and the person responsible for the exhibition, told us that the show is drawing well over 500 visitors a day—which Matt mentioned is as good as the attendance at some AIC shows. That's the drawing power of Ansel, definitely the most popular American photographer of the 20th century. To call his appeal "robust" might be understating things; the public never tires of Ansel Adams. He's evergreen. (Inset: the picture from yesterday: Ansel, clowning, in 1930, by his wife Virginia, doubtless with a little help from him.)

For anyone interested in attending, the show closes at the Lake County location on Sunday, but travels next to the Cedarhurst Center for the Arts in Mt. Vernon, in southern Illinois, where it will be on view from February 25th to May 6th.

Unidentified museumgoer peering at Tenaya Lake and Mount Conness, Yosemite National Park. Ansel Adams has always been a
favorite with the public.

The show consists of 70 prints that Ansel made for his daughter Anne Adams Helms (the Helms family is the one with Illinois roots, hence the connection). I wasn't able to quite get the skinny from the various parties, but evidently the prints are largely the same ones that comprise "The Museum Set" that Maggi Weston proposed to Ansel in 1978 as an autumnal summarizing of the best pictures of his career. He completed a number of those sets, but his long-range plans were interrupted by his death in 1984. Matt says the scholarly accounting of the various sets and groupings that exist is all over the place. (Maybe John Sexton knows more about the subject. I'll ask.)

I first saw the Museum Set (whether it is the same group of pictures or not, I don't know) when it was brand new, at its first showing at the Washington, D.C. gallery of Harry Lunn, the legendary photography dealer who was responsible, among other things, for making Ansel wealthy. I think I've seen an appreciable number of Adams prints only once since then, at the National Gallery, and that wasn't recently. So getting to see so many original prints again was a treat. Like visiting with old friends.

Ansel Adams, Georgia O'Keeffe and Orville Cox, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, courtesy Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

Although most of the "greatest hits" are present—many of which I, too, never tire of—both Michael McC. and I chose as our favorites pictures that are not very characteristic of Ansel. One of the ones Michael especially liked was the famous portrait of Orville Cox and Georgia O'Keefe, one of the few famous AA pictures taken with a 35mm camera (a Contax). "Best of Show" for me was also a portrait, a large-format portrait called "Mrs. Gunn on Porch."

Ansel Adams, Mrs. Gunn on Porch, courtesy
Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

You can't "see" it very well from this rather poor JPEG, but the print is lovely, the picture unaffected and direct.

I'm almost certain I've never seen an original print of Mrs. Gunn before, although I could be wrong. (I'm no longer convinced, as I was for most of my earlier life, than I can remember every single photograph I've ever seen, a conviction that began in early childhood but was probably never literally true). Anyway, it's of a genre I now think I like best in LF, and maybe in all of photography, that is if I could ever say such a thing: the environmental portrait. It's also tonally "quiet," especially for Ansel.

As an aside, speaking of that, one thing I think is interesting is that the tonal properties of Ansel's work have been "changed" by the passing of more time and history. When I was young he was quite extreme in printing style: he walked a technical razor's edge from deep shadows to brilliant highlights, accentuating the contrasted edges and layers of light and dark that he loved so much. He inspired a legion of imitators, of course, who collectively changed the way we expect black-and-white photographs to look. (One of my friends used to refer to "zippy-zappy Zoners" to describe both the look and those who indulged it most.)  Anyway, my point is that he looks gentler now than he used to...less zippy-zappy, you might say. The prints have not changed, but now that local contrast and unsharp masking are as easy as moving a virtual slider, visual convention has gone even more over the top and Ansel no longer looks so radical tonally.

Ansel Adams, Church and Road, Bodega, California, courtesy
Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

Ansel's picture of Bodega Church in Sonoma (above)—also a star of Hitchcock's "The Birds"—shows his tonal style, which used to be extreme and now isn't, at least not quite so much. I've always thought this picture was influenced by Wright Morris, the starkness of whose pictures of prairie sunlight has never been surpassed. (By the way, this was taken in 1953, by coincidence the same year Penn Camera started out in business.)

Another interesting thing we learned yesterday was that the Lake County Discovery Museum has the largest public collection of postcards in the world. Learn something new every day, I always say.

The LCDM, which will be moving to new facilities soon, regularly holds shows of postcard-sized art inspired by its huge holding of postcards.

All in all a very pleasant show, and a fine way to spend a morning ignoring my bloggerly duties. Thanks to Michael for inspiring and organizing the trip.

Mike
(Thanks to Katherine Hamilton-Smith)

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Featured Comment by Steve L.: "Looks like you and I were doing the same thing on the same day, but in different parts of the country. My sister and I were at the Ansel Adams exhibit at the Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute Museum in Utica, N.Y. It's also one of his "museum sets", prints made by the man himself in 1970 I believe. I've done quite a bit of B&W printing (silver based in the past, digital now), and I found the quality of his prints simply breathtaking. It's the first time I've seen any of his work in person and it was well worth the trip. The exhibit ends on Sunday. Anybody in the area should definitely have a look."

Featured Comment by Jim Ullrich: "At the Missoula (Montana)Art Museum is a display of 130 of Ansel Adams's prints until April 15, 2012. These are privately owned by a former Dell Computer CFO who wanted to get an anniversary gift of four prints for his wife. He could not get 4, but could get 138 from the collection of the Friends of Photography. More of this story can be found in an article by Joe Nickell at the Missoulian.

Featured Comment by Bruce: "This show was such a treat. I brought my copy of Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs and sat in awe as I compared the prints to what I saw in the book. One image from Hawaii that I thought was okay in the book was just jaw dropping in person. I sneaked a few shots with my Fuji X100 as souvenirs. I was lucky in that there was no one there that day and spent a couple of hours with these magnificent images."

Mike replies: That's a great thing to do. It really opens your eyes (mind?) to the difference between good reproductions and original prints. Online JPEGs are another tier below good book repro, too.

One thing I worry about is that not enough people are seeing enough good prints these days. Just yesterday I was surfing around flickr, and kept coming on comments like "Great B&W tones!" left under B&W pictures that I thought were just tonally atrocious. I mean really, remarkably, unredeemably bad, not just a difference between my taste and the photographer's. And there they were, drawing praise and positive reinforcement. That seems like a "blind leading the blind" kind of problem to me, and is perhaps the result of not enough people being familiar enough with good work firsthand.

Featured Comment by AlanRossPhoto: "I’m glad you all had a chance to see the show, and I am glad Anne is still making it available. In fact, that is exactly why Ansel created the Museum Sets—so the work could be acquired by institutions and public-minded individuals on a not-for-profit basis, and keep the sets available for continued public viewing."

Alan is former Assistant to Ansel Adams and a wonderful photographer in his own right. —Ed.

Edward Weston: One Hundred Twenty-Five Photographs

I can't recommend this per se, because it looks like I'm not going to actually see it—so I can't evaluate it as an example of bookmaking nor appraise its reproduction quality. I've been in discussions with Ammo Books about it, and it looks like they're short of review copies because the book is a limited edition. I could buy it, but I already have several deluxe, slipcased collections of Edward Weston's work, including California Landscapes and the large-format edition of the Maddow biography.

A picture of Ansel by Edward that I've never seen before?! Hard to
believe. But there it was.

However, that front-and-center caveat aside, Edward Weston: One Hundred Twenty-Five Photographs (here's the U.K. link , and here's the link from The Book Depository) looks like a superb prospect for anyone whose library is lacking in the work of this most seminal and influential of American art photographers. It covers his entire career from the early pictorialist work through the last, almost abstract pictures from Point Lobos. It has many of the greatest hits—the Westons nobody should be without—but also seems to give special consideration to us photographers, seeing as it includes some of his portraits of photographer friends as well as personal pictures of his great love Charis and his sons as young men, at his elemental California home (it was almost a shack), Wildcat Hill.

I'd be eager to hear from anyone who owns this, or has seen it, as to what you think of its quality as a book. I'd hate to be in a position of seeming to recommend something that people are going to be disappointed with in any way.

The book comes in a slipcase and a cardboard outer box and is limited worldwide to only 2,000 copies.

Mike

ADDENDUM: The title of Edward's picture is Ansel Adams (After He Got a Contax Camera), 1936. Below is perhaps Andreas Feininger's most famous photograph, taken for LIFE magazine.

Andreas Feininger, The Photojournalist [Dennis Stock], 1951

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Featured Comment by Jason in Hawaii: "The book is amazing! I hate to say it, but it's almost too nice, to the point where you don't even want to remove it from the box for fear of damaging it. Note that I said almost. This book is meant to be studied for hours. It's big, the reproductions are the best I've seen of his work (although I must admit I've never had the privilege of seeing his prints in person), and each photo is accompanied by an appropriate quote from the man himself. I haven't read the introductory essay yet, but I intend to spend several hours consuming this one! It succeeds as a piece of art, and as an investment, although it would be a shame to stash this one away. It was meant to be enjoyed for its content, and on this level, it's a resounding success!"

Featured [partial] Comment by tom frost: "I received a copy and the photos are excellent. However, from my quick scan, it looks like they were all reproduced with the same ink set, despite reproducing early platinum work to late glossy silver prints. I've seen a bunch of the originals at CCP, and his print color varied more than the book exhibits."

'Chez Mondrian' and Other Small Pleasures

By Jim Hughes

Some years ago, a photo dealer and good friend from San Francisco was staying as our houseguest in Brooklyn for a week. One evening he returned from Manhattan carrying a large brown paper bag under one arm and a bottle of my favorite red wine under the other. After dinner, when the dishes were cleared, he retrieved the bag from his room and placed it, with a flourish, in the center of our dining room table. "I have something I think you’re going to appreciate," he announced. Ah, dessert, I thought—maybe Junior's famous cheesecake, a Brooklyn legend.

My friend pulled two old shoeboxes from the bag and dumped their contents on the seven-foot table, creating a small mountain of what looked like playing cards. Except they appeared to be photographs. Like the deft dealer that he was, my friend, palms down, in what seemed like a single motion, spread the cards out in front of us. "Pick a card, any card," he said in his best dealer's voice. I reached down and picked one of the larger ones, about the size of a 3x5-inch file card, but thicker. Only when I pulled the card toward me did I realize that it was familiar. There, depicted on a small hall table in the foreground, was the glowing vase with its artificial tulip, and through a doorway, only partly seen, a staircase rising like the very spirit of art. Rectangles and curves were layered in a composition of formal perfection. "Chez Mondrian," I exclaimed in a burst of recognition. At that point, Alley, our irrepressible calico, perhaps sensing my excitement, hopped onto the table to bat at an exquisite, golden-hued miniature of a fork on a plate. I shooed her off (a moment repeated as the evening wore on). Not until I began to examine the other prints—sliding the pictures around as if they were kings and queens in a giant game of solitaire—did it dawn on me that the miniature images, many familiar, as in from books and exhibits I’d seen, seemed to exhibit a particularly distinctive style.

"Are these vintage prints from André Kertész?" I asked. Our guest nodded. Some of the pictures seemed to be variously cropped contact prints from André's folding 4.5x6-cm and 9x12-cm plate cameras, others small-scale enlargements from the 35mm Leica the photographer was said to have begun using as early as 1925, about the time he arrived in Paris from his native Hungary. All were little gems, lovingly rendered by Kertész himself before an allergic reaction to photographic chemicals drove him from the darkroom.

Where could this treasure possibly have come from, I wanted to know. From the back of a closet in André's Greenwich Village apartment, I was informed. The shoeboxes had evidently lain untouched for many years. The legendary photographer, to his way of thinking never fully appreciated in his adopted country—and still bitter about it, as he might tell anybody within earshot—was in need of money. My friend indicated that he was going to try to sell some of these small prints. How much? I remember numbers ranging from $1,200 to maybe $3,500. I passed on the implied offer. Indeed, I rationalized, I could be just as happy purchasing a beautifully rendered and enlarged 8x10 or 11x14 silver print, signed by Kertész and printed under his supervision, for a few hundred (and a few years later, I did just that, buying at auction an 8x10 "Chez Mondrian" for $700—it hangs in our living room today, directly facing my favorite arts and crafts Morris chair).

André Kertész, Chez Mondrian, Paris, 1926

Years later, I happened to attend the 1996 round of auctions in New York. Astonishingly, the little print I have since called "Alley's Fork," after my rambunctious cat, sold at Christie's for $90,500, at the time a record for the photographer. A month later, "Mondrian's Pipe and Glasses, Paris" auctioned at Sotheby's London for $98,000—and it wasn't even signed. But that was only the beginning. The following spring, Christie’s held an auction within an auction, with its own special catalogue. All Kertész. Its original 21-print core had been discovered, like the shoeboxes in a closet, three years after the photographer's death in 1985 at age 91, in a folio tucked away between books on a library shelf. These prints had been made on creamy color postcard stock, presumably because it was more affordable back then, and had been presented at André's first exhibit in Paris. The poet Paul Dermée wrote for the occasion: "No rearranging, no posing, no gimmicks, nor fakery. Your technique is as honest, as incorruptible, as your vision. In our home for the blind, Kertész is 'Brother Seeing-Eye.'"

My sentiments exactly.

Christie's Lot 176, "Chez Mondrian," the cover illustration for the catalogue, brought $300,000. All told, the 37-print collection netted $1.36 million. Of course, bear in mind that an early Mondrian painting had previously sold for $1.8 million, by itself surpassing the entire Kertész collection auctioned that day. Indeed, an example of Mondrian's mature work would soon sell for $5.5 million. And those were 1997 dollars!

Memento mori
And here's a final postscript about André Kertész, the man I consider to be the most graceful photographer who ever lived. In 1985, I was shown a just-processed 35mm black-and-white contact sheet from a roll of film shot by a photographer from another country. This photographer, a great admirer who made a point to visit his hero whenever he was in New York, had gone to André's Washington Square apartment building and was let in by the doorman, who recognized him. He found the apartment door open. Not surprised, he knocked. Receiving no response, he entered, and discovered his friend stretched out on a couch. The visitor tried gently to wake him. Again, no response. During a nap, evidently, André had died peacefully in his sleep.

Rather than contacting authorities immediately, this man, being a foreigner, called a close friend of Kertész's, also a photographer of note, who happened to live nearby. The contact sheet I saw clearly showed the two younger photographers, while still alone with André's body and in what was no doubt intended to be a final photographic homage, taking turns posing for the camera, each evidently wanting to be recorded with an arm embracing the earthly remains of a giant, hoping perhaps that a little of his amazing spirit would rub off before it disappeared forever into the ether.

As subsequent events have shown, as long as the wonderfully lyrical photographs of André Kertész remain for us to admire, there is little chance of that.

Jim

Jim Hughes is an occasional contributor to TOP—for more of his work, click on his name under the Categories header in the right-hand sidebar. He now lives in Maine.

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Featured Comment by Jeff: "Touching end to this article; thanks for sharing it.

"I believe another vintage print of 'Chez Mondrian' sold in 2005 at Sotheby's for $464,000; I don't recall the size.

"I can't remember the year, but some time ago (perhaps in 1996 as Jim recounts), some of the carte postales by Kertesz went to auction. Kertesz prices hadn't yet hit the stratosphere, so I thought I might get lucky bidding on a far lesser known picture. Fat chance...it soared past my price point in no time.

"I should have learned my lesson. On a visit years earlier with a dealer friend in New York, I was shown and passed on a small contact print...about 1.5x2.5 inches...of a simple but lovely landscape by Kertesz. Not signed, but priced extremely high, or so I thought....$15,000. Plus, I wasn't sure how I'd frame such a precious little thing. Live and learn."