The Online Photographer

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)

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

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

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

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

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

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

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

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

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)

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

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

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

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

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

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

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

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

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)

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

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)

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

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

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

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.

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

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."

Eisie in Print

I've just added a bit of interesting stuff to the "Victory Kiss" post below. It's always fun to compare well-known pictures to little-known variants. (Shades of Bob Jackson and Jack Beers.)

If Alfred Eisenstaedt—for several decades one of the most prominent and well-known photographers in the world, and originally the quintessential Leica photographer (a position he seems to have lost in more recent times)—is getting far enough removed in history that he's less than comfortably familiar to you, you might want to seek out a copy of Witness to Our Time, first published in 1966 by Viking Press, reissued 1980*. It features a foreword by no less than Henry Luce, and is about as deluxe a production as mainstream photography books got in '66: gravure black-and-white printing, color plates generously interspersed. It's not easy to find anymore, exactly, but it's not hard to find either: they printed scads of them at the time, so it's quite possible you could still run across a copy in a garden-variety used book store. Many libraries will still have copies. It's almost quaint, but this was considered a big "coffee-table" book at the time. In the '80s, more or less, books this size became more the rule than the exception, and "big" books now have to be much bigger.

Check abebooks.com.

It's still a pleasure to look through. If you're not up to a search for the 1966 gold standard, check out a much more modest but somehow equally pleasing book called Remembrances from Little, Brown's Bulfinch imprint that came out a dozen years ago or so. Although not remotely a special, fancy, or arty book, Remembrances has very solid reproduction quality (it has a less cropped version of the V-J sailor's kiss than Witness), is very much a pleasure to peruse, and can serve as an ideal introduction to the wonderful Eisie.

Mike

*I haven't seen the reissue, so no thoughts about its adequacy.

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

A Victory Kiss

If it seems vaguely that an American holiday went by yesterday without you realizing quite what it was, well, it was the anniversary of the day this famous picture was taken....

What I want to know is more about this statue. Is that a permanent thing? Is it still there? Not many photographs have been turned into public sculpture—at least, not when the purpose of the sculpture was inspired in part by the fame of the photograph.

Eisie, fully armed for peacetime

Mike
(Thanks to Vlatko Juric-Kokic)

UPDATE: It turns out there's a Wikipedia page about the statues—there are several of them, and they apparently travel. (Thanks to Bob Blakley for this.) They're called "Unconditional Surrender," and the sculptor's name is Seward Johnson.

Perhaps because of a copyright dispute over the famous Eisenstaedt photo, sculptor Johnson has claimed that his statues were based on a less-well-known photograph of the same kissing couple taken by a Lt. Victor Jorgensen. Jorgensen's photo is in the public domain.

Photo by Victor Jogensen

News to me; I hadn't known a variant existed. For our purposes, what's probably most interesting is the differences in skill between the two photographers. Same couple, same place, same moment (or very, very close to it—note the position of the walking sailor in the background in both photos), but very different photographs.

Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Mathew Brady Goes to War

One of the stranger-looking refugees was a short, bearded man with a straw hat and spectacles, and a watch fob dangling from his belt—along with a sword concealed awkwardly under his overcoat. A contemporary said he looked like "a Paris art student." This confused apparition, more comical than belligerent, was Mathew Brady, the most famous photographer in the United States.

From Ted Widmer's "The All-Seeing Eye" at the WBPM*

The linked article is a good short introduction to Mathew Brady, another of history's more interesting photographers. In mid-20th-century America, Brady was considered pre-eminent in the history of American photography. Not so much recently; his star has fallen, as it did over the course of his life.

One of my favorite books about Brady, perhaps oddly, is a book written for young readers by a man named George Sullivan, who specializes in writing books for adolescents (he's written more than a hundred). I spoke to George on the phone at one point and it turns out that Brady has been a special interest of his for much of his life—he even owns Brady memorabilia and collects his photographs.

The book is good on the facts and seems short on the drama—Brady's life lends itself to drama—but that's because so much misinformation exists about Brady's life, and many of the more vivid stories turn out to have been shined a mite too hard. George Sullivan's brief was to create an accurate and sober short portrait that's as reliable as he could make it. It may have been targeted at teenagers, but it's a good and conscientious little book; we'd be lucky to have more like it, frankly.

(Children are better served than adults in one area: books written for them tend to be more adequately illustrated. I've been manfully toiling my way through Douglas Brinkley's epic-length Wheels for the World lately (Douglas is an admirably skilled writer, but needs to learn to strive for concision—then again, it's a quality Dostoevsky and D. H. Lawrence lacked as well), and if ever a book cried out for better illustrations than the obligatory small signature of bad reproductions on plate paper stuck like a tiny lifeboat into the middle of a sea of text, it's that one. As with Bill Bryson's At Home, which I read a few months ago, it sends me repeatedly scuttling to the computer to Google illustrations on my own.)

Called Mathew Brady: His Life and Photographs, George's 1994 book has not been out of print for long and is still findable.

Mathew Brady in 1875

The longtime standard pop bio is James D. Horan's Mathew Brady: Historian with a Camera, which at one point must have been in every middle- and high-school library in America, and the best of the more recent books is Mathew Brady and the Image of History by Mary Panzer, which came out in 1997 but is still available in paperback. I've had that book since it came out in '97 but have yet to read it, alas. Mary is curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D. C.

Mike

*The World's Best Photography Magazine, a.k.a. the New York Times

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Seldom a Great Picture

"It's seldom you make a great picture. You have to milk the cow quite a lot and get plenty  milk to make a little cheese. Hmm?"

From the short film—really an audio recording—Cornell Capa made of Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1973. Available on DVD from Microcinema.

The last time I saw this was when Frank DiPerna showed it to our third-year photo class at the Corcoran School in 1984. Nice to hear it again.

Mike
(Thanks to Tom Kaszuba)

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Edi Weitz: "Matching the 'you have to milk the cow' quote is the wonderful insight that 'your first 10,000 photographs are your worst' which I think (?) is also from HCB. Thanks for the link!"

Auction Season in New York

Ah, springtime. Warm wafting breezes, daffodils poking their merry petals through the wet earth, and the hammer coming down.

PDNonline has posted a nice update today about the Sotheby's Spring Auction that took place yesterday in New York City. They have a JPEG of the rare Man Ray that drew the auction's highest price of $410,500. The print of Untitled (Photomontage with Nude and Studio Light), 1933, is one of four—the other three are in museums—and "is the only one mounted, signed, and stamped by Man Ray."

Apropos our recent discussions about limited editions, the article has this to say about the Sotheby's auction:

Nearly all of the top sales were for unique or very rare prints. Even the Avedon portfolio, which was an edition of 75, had a unique provenance as it was a gift from Avedon to a close friend.

'When you really get into the nitty gritty of it and start trying to nail down the extant prints, you realize that in many instances they are unique or are close to unique,' [Sotheby’s photography department vice-president Christopher] Mahoney says of the vintage photographs, which were often printed in small quantities because the market was small in the early 20th century. 'That’s what people will step up for. That is what the sophisticated collectors are looking for.'

Collectors do understand and expect, however, 'that contemporary photographers edition their work,' he added.

Oh well.

The article notes that Christie’s will hold its spring photography sale tomorrow, and Phillips De Pury’s sale takes place on Saturday.

Meanwhile, in Vienna, the next Westlicht Auction—Number 19, scheduled for May 28th—features the earliest Nikon known: Nikon I, serial number 60924. It was made 63 years ago this month; Nikon started production in March of 1948 and made one camera that month and two cameras in April, of which this is the second. So this is the third Nikon ever made and the earliest one known to survive. The new Westlicht catalogue will be published online at the end of this month, in case you're eager to spend the €140,000 to €160,000 that Nikon No. 60924 is expected to fetch.

Finally, speaking of Westlicht and Vienna, some more really good news from there: it looks like the so-called "International Collection" of the old Polaroid Corporation will not have to be broken up after all. Randy Kennedy, writing in the Arts Beat blog at the New York Times, reports that Westlicht's Photo Gallery, which is connected in some unspecified way with the people behind The Impossible Project, has purchased the entire collection. No word on whether the collection of 4,500 pieces by 850 photographers will be kept intact for good. An exhibit of selections from the collection will open at the gallery on June 17th.

Mike
(Thanks to Ken Tanaka, Rob Atkins, and Oren Grad)

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by robert e: "A.D. Coleman has been reporting exhaustively on the dissolution of Polaroid's collections for nearly two years. There's more detail about the sale of the International Collection in this post from February, along with his own insights. The buyer is WestLicht-Peter Coeln GmbH. '...This purchaser is an entity formed by former advertising photographer Peter Coeln, director of the the WestLicht Schauplatz Museum in Vienna, Austria. So these works will leave the Musée de L’Elysée and enter the WestLicht museum’s collection.' The sale price was $775,000. According to Coleman, the Musée de L’Elysée, which had conserved and exhibited the collection for 'nearly two decades,' will not be compensated."

Grabill of Deadwood

J. H. C. Grabill, General Miles and staff. Six military men on horseback on a hill overlooking a large encampment of tipis, 1891.

It's all there—stagecoaches, Indian chiefs, tipis, bluecoats, 1880s steam engines with oversized smokestacks and cowcatchers, and the sole survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn—true views of the Old West. A selection of John C. H. Grabill's work, culled from the Library of Congress archives, at the Denver Post's pblog.

We have only a brief window into J. C. H. Grabill's life. Nothing is known of him before he opened a studio in Sturgis, South Dakota, near Deadwood, in 1886. He was already an accomplished photographer by then. In 1891 he moved to Chicago and operated a studio there until 1894. Then he disappears again.

He is known now from 188 photographs he sent to the Library of Congress for registration of copyright between 1886 and 1892. He photographed with a 10x12-inch view camera and made albumen prints.

Deadwood was a famous frontier mining town; the West's most famous murder happened there when Wild Bill Hickok (the original "quick draw" gunfighter) was killed in Deadwood's No. 10 Saloon during a card game. He was holding two black eights and two black aces, which ever since has been known as a Dead Man's Hand. His murderer, Jack McCall, was buried with the noose around his neck. Wild Bill is buried between Potato Creek Johnny, and, as a joke on Bill, Calamity Jane, for whom he had no affection in life.

John C. H. Grabill also photographed the aftermath of the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890.

I particularly like the one below—I know you can guess why.

J. H. C. Grabill, Colorado. Three buildings with signs reading: Grabill's Mining Exchange, Photographs, and El Paso Livery; river and houses in middleground; mountains in background, 1888.

Mike
(Thanks to John Camp)

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Tom Judd: "I went to the Library of Congress site and found the complete collection, with hi rez TIFF files. I downloaded a few favorites, and after some Photoshop work printed them 12" wide. Holding a large print in my hands was a real trip back in time. A much stronger experience than just viewing them on the screen. By the way, re the foreground building with the sign 'J.C.H. Grabill's Mining Exchange'—just like now, photographers in the late 1800s had to have something else going to earn a living!"

Featured Comment by carl frederick: "I couldn't take my eyes off them, anticipating the next one more than the last = my personal definition of a great set of photos."

A Few Updates (and a Movie Review)

• Martin Parr: After writing about the reprint of Martin Parr's famous The Last Resort, I neglected to mention what I myself did. Although not a natural fan of Martin's work, I decided he was too important not to be represented in my library, so, a year or two ago now, I got Martin Parr by Sandra S. Phillips, from Phaidon. I've recently rearranged all my books, so of course I can't find it to refresh my acquiaintance with it. Like most things around here, it's around here somewhere. But it struck me as a serviceable overview that includes a good sampling of the better-known pictures, one that doesn't take up a lot of space or require a stiff investment. Of course if you're into social documentary, color photography, English photography, or if you just like Parr, you would want more than that.

• Meanwhile, back at the café: Don't miss the new postscript at the end of Peter Turnley's Egypt post. Brings it all full circle.

-

Bob Burnett, The Tangerine Hotel, Burbank

• Many more notes: Following up on the last Music Notes post, there are several new mixes now up at C60Crew on Mixcloud. Always great soundtracks to my mornings, even the cuts that aren't for me. Photo above by Bob, from his "Dark Wood" mix of "improvisation / electronica/ float / cello / sound textures," who says it's "Near Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills Cemetery, where I found the graves of Liberace, Freddie Prinze, Bette Davis and Ronnie James Dio." If I ever go to Burbank I'll know where to stay.

• The Woodmans: I did get to Chicago on Monday, and had a fine time. I don't socialize much. I spent the second half of the trip on the verge of being lost, ending up at my friend Gabi's newly-acquired vintage two-flat in an old neighborhood near Lake Michigan. You know those friends who you think are just so unique in the world you can't believe they're not world-famous, celebrated far and wide by one and all? Gabi is one of those for me. Her new place combines high ceilings and 19th-century charm with newly-finished hardwood floors and an ultramodern starkness in the bathroom and kitchen, suffused thorughout the airy rooms with soft light and a comforting feel.

With Gabi navigating, a more relaxed drive down Lake Shore Drive on Chicago's lakefront brought home again that beautiful city's magnificence—few cities in the world can hold a candle to Chicago for architectural spectacle. It must be seen. We walked right past the Chicago Cultural Center where the Vivian Maier show is hanging, kicking ourselves for not leaving enough time to stop in and see it, to the Gene Siskel Film Center, my first time there. As you might expect, it's a nearly ideal place to see movies, up a long and broad flight of stairs, with small, intimate theater spaces gleaming with subsidized wealth.

I thoroughly enjoyed the film. It's not entirely about Francesca the photographer—by necessity, the filmmaker, C. Scott Willis, concentrates on her surviving family, who are all artists. The interviews are articulate and in places quite moving, and the absences in the film are almost as eloquent. The film is in part about the life of artists—how they work, how they exist. And it can't escape being the story of a family marred permanently by the suicide of one of its members—about the sense of loss and pain and permanent mystery a suicide leaves in its wake.

I do feel it gave me a very good handle on Francesca Woodman and her art. I can't shake two parallel feelings: that she was not a major photographer, and that she would have been, had she not felt so fragile and depressed that day she stepped off into space from a high building. If you've studied the biographies of enough artists, you begin to get a feel for what constitutes their "early work"—their initial explorations, before their genius really gels. The seed of their later work is in it. Woodman's "early" work is almost achingly suffused with that sense of genius to come...it just never did, is all. The "early" work is all there will ever be. As with most suicides, I blame her for that, a little. Suicide might be romantic, but persistence is more courageous. I admire the elderly.

I have a hard time separating the movie from the rest of my evening—Gabi's bon mot about the movie score as being "too Philip Glassy" and the homemade pizza she and her housemate attempted to ruin but didn't, and Blue, the world's most timid and laid-back pit bull, who I find enormously likeable even for a dog. I found the film thought-provoking and moving to watch, even engrossing. I thought it was great while I was looking at it. It leaves less of a residue, however, than I thought it would, and the perfect little experience of it seems like just part and parcel of a larger experience, enjoyable throughout.

Two things I'll remember: George Woodman reporting that after his daughter's death he couldn't even read because he simply couldn't concentrate on anything (reading is a big part of my life, and I empathize), so he turned to the poems of Emily Dickinson because they were the only things he could find that were short enough for his fractured attention span, one by one chewing up all eighteen hundred of them. And the hopeful upturn of the film's end, when we see the huge installation that Betty Woodman has been working on throughout the film go up at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. Parents lose the most when a child kills herself, and yet it's inescapable that they always get blamed, at least a little. The delighted smile on her face when she saw her creation in place took me back to when she said in a halting voice that she can face the pain but cannot even touch the guilt.

A fine documentary about art and artists. Not essential, and at the same time well worth seeing. If and when it appears in a streaming format, I'll try to pass along a heads-up.

Mike

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman, On Being an Angel, 1977

Falling squarely into the category of "Photographers You Should Know" (but might not yet) is Francesca Woodman, who is receiving a flurry of attention right now.

And who is Francesca Woodman?

Given that her complete catalogue is composed almost entirely of work she produced as a student, the posthumous critical esteem for American photographer Francesca Woodman is astonishing. Unlike music or math, where precocious displays of talent are not uncommon, photography tends not to have prodigies. Woodman, who committed suicide in 1981 at age 22, is considered a rare exception. That she has achieved such status is all the more remarkable considering only a quarter of the approximately 800 images she produced—many of them self-portraits—have ever been seen by the public.

Now, on the thirtieth anniversary of her death, Woodman is having something of a moment. In coming months, her work will be shown by several British galleries, and later this year San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art will mount a major retrospective of her work, the first of its kind in the United States. In 2012, the show will travel to the Guggenheim. The Woodmans—C. Scott Willis’s thoughtful new documentary about the photographer and her family—opened last week at Film Forum in New York.

Those are the opening two paragraphs of Elizabeth Gumport's article "The Long Exposure of Francesca Woodman" at The New York Review of Books. (If you're able to follow up on only one of these links, that's the one to hit.)

It took 24 years for her first retrospective monograph to appear, Francesca Woodman, by Chris Townshend, from Phaidon. It is, fortunately, excellent. (It's no longer in stock but still available in Great Britain.) I don't own it but I was able to spend some time with it in the bookstore at the AIC when I went down to see the H.C.-B. exhibit a few months ago. I guess I have to forbear from showing you the book cover, as it is not "school and workplace friendly." (Americans can embrace every sort of depravity, but god forbid we show each other, in polite company, any hint of pubic hair.) But it struck me when I saw it as a rich trove and worth the asking price.

Quoted in the publisher's material:

Art critic Arthur Danto said of Woodman's photographs, "It is impossible to view her work without being drawn into the vast questions it raises about life, art and the meaning and embodiment of sex.... Her work unfolds over time like the oeuvre of a brilliant and precocious poet, like Keats or Rimbaud, whose voice is present in every line."

The association to tortured poets of distinctive voice and expressive bodies of work is apt, although I might have chosen different ones. Baudelaire, or even Chatterton. Speaking of whom, Alastair Sooke, writing in The Telegraph, notes that "Rightly or wrongly, Woodman’s suicide remains the prism through which many people see her predominantly autobiographical work, which has an intense, intimate and introspective flavour." To which her father, George Woodman, retorts, "...there are people whose attraction to Francesca's work is bound up with their sense of her tragic story and without the tragic story they might not be so interested in the work. But I don’t think that, as a way of 'reading’ her work, this is particularly productive."

In reading about Woodman, a sense of her father emerges as a realist who struggles to bring the more high-flown critics back down to earth, even as the art world increasingly bestows the hagiographic apparatus of its approval. And yet, whenever I read quotes from him, a little voice in the back of my brain pipes up that history is written by survivors.

And yet the photographer still tells her story, in a way. The trick is to let the work speak. In Woodman's case, though, it's tough to take the work as it is and let it stand for itself. It just...brings up so much. There are certainly echoes in it of numberless high school girls' photography class self-portrait experiments, and some critics have run with that, casting her as an apotheosis of the romantic juvenile. Robert Boyd says, "...another thing many might feel looking at her work is jealousy. She was producing brilliant photos when she was still in high school." There are also echoes of many photographers, Meatyard and Arbus and Cindy Sherman (who greatly admires Woodman and has a lot in common with her, as the Sooke article discusses—excerpt below), and of the work of just as many poets. The work is engrossing, but it's a riddle. It is enigmatic, eloquent but not clear. Maybe immutably so.

"...I have been mesmerised with her history," [Cindy Sherman] says. "We were both in New York at the exact same time, living in the same neighbourhood, close in age and circumnavigating the same art world, both expressing ourselves through photographing ourselves. Yet we never met or knew of one another."

Today Sherman is a great admirer of Woodman's art. "She had few boundaries and made art out of nothing: empty rooms with peeling wallpaper and just her figure. No elaborate stage set-up or lights," she says. "Her process struck me more the way a painter works, making do with what's right in front of her, rather than photographers like myself who need time to plan out what they're going to do."

'The Woodmans'
And of course there's the movie, mentioned earlier. Movies are just so frustrating for me...the closest place to me it's showing is Chicago, and I guess I should be thankful it isn't farther away than that. I guess I have to molder away waiting for the DVD. (Tauntingly, an Amazon search for "The Woodmans" brings up "The Woodsman," a 2005 Kevin Bacon film. No, no. What a difference the placement of an "s" makes.)

Here's the trailer. (You might as well be frustrated too.)

Mike
(Thanks to James Bulloch, Dave Kee, Archer Sully, and Cal Amari)

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Luis C. Aribe: "There was an article on F. Woodman by Richard B. Woodward in The Wall Street Journal of January 19th, 2011. Committing suicide at a young age seems to be a good career move for artists—the Sylvia Plath Effect, as Woodward calls it—even for photographers, though it has its obvious disadvantages."

Mike adds: A taste of that article: "...we can't escape. The bony finger of death points at all the photographs, videos and anguished journal entries, forcing us to see them as foreshadowing the end."

Featured Comment by Calvin Amari: "Much art of significance is ambiguous. That is not to say that it is unfocussed or muddy, but rather that a purposeful ambiguity is present as a device that serves the artist's purposes. Although it may do some harm to the poetry of Woodman's work to break it down is such an analytical way, she does consistently employ the ambiguity of simultaneously revealing and hiding. That may not seem so much, but much art of significance is simple as well. To have developed—at any age—this device as a signature element of her work, to have done so in a way that is not heavy and labored, is no small thing. In fact, it is quite a big thing and not at all common.

"I confess years ago I came to Woodman's work many years ago a bit too skeptically, viewing it as typical student work of a particular genre but with a back-story that the art world would eat up. In the beginning of the Woodman phenomenon, a small portfolio of work was published and it seemed that these oft-reproduced photos were the 'signature' images of her best work. In the intervening years, however, I have seen perhaps hundreds of vintage prints, many not reproduced in the books and catalogs. What is striking—if striking is the right word for an appreciation that has developed slowly and continuously—is that so many of Woodman's images succeed at the same high level as those somewhat famous signature pieces. Years of exposure, so to speak, have convinced me that she is the real deal."

The Vivian Maier Show: A Brief Review

By Dave Fultz

I went to the Vivian Maier show at the Chicago Cultural Center this morning. If you’re in the Chicago area, do go; it’s worth it. The show is nicely mounted and this morning there were no more than 10 people there so there was no problem in standing for a long time looking at a print.

I think the jury is going to be out for a quite a while on the judgment of whether she was one of the top street photographers of the 20th century. For one thing, they are a long way away from cataloging the more than one hundred thousand negatives she left. Who knows what images lie in those boxes?

My reaction to the work is more modest than some. I do think she was very talented but the exhibition images overall left me pleased but not stunned save for a couple images. Her portraits of children are wonderful: direct, spontaneous, clear-sighted and sometimes quite humorous. Her portraits of adults on the other hand are curious. There is a peculiar sort of neutrality to many of them that some might say is a discursive style choice but that I find lacks the direct human connection that is so often the mark of truly great street photography. It could be that I'm projecting what I know of her character from the Chicago Magazine story, but I don’t think so. I also wonder about the effect of looking down at the Rolleiflex screen at the moment of exposure.

Photos by Vivian Maier / The Maloof Collection

There are several stunners in the show. The picture of the (probable) vagabond sitting in a doorway (above) is simply magnificent. Deeply sculptural. For some reason I kept thinking of the Pietà even though the subject is not at all the same. Here, although you can sort of see the image in the online JPEG, the presence and power of a real print makes a huge difference. The picture of the two boys (below) is very powerful. At first glance it looks a little "Our Gang"-y but as you continue to look you realize this is very complicated, disturbing, odd. Wonderful. There are a number of other first-class portraits in the show.

I can’t help but wonder if some of the enthusiasm for the work arises from people's sheer pleasure at looking at prints from 2 1/4 B&W film again.

The curators included two display cases with her cameras and some curiosities. The last thing I looked at before leaving the exhibition was a handwritten note, probably from a camera-store counterman to the guys back in the photo lab. It said, "Do Best Job—So NO Redo!! Customer is very particular!!"

Get to this show if you can!

Dave

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

'The Variegated Town of Montreal'

Speaking of "then and now" views, check out the nice (if somewhat slow-loading—you have been warned) William Notman / Andrzej Maciejewski pairings at the McCord Museum of Canadian History website. Andrzej Maciejewski did a really nice job of matching the historical Notman photographs. Includes interiors as well as exteriors, and check under the "Photographer" tab for Andrzej's comments (there's even audio, if you mouse over the pictures). Ed Hawco told me about this.

It struck me as I looked that it's not an entirely fair way to appraise the progress of the city, for the simple reason that the early photographer—Notman, in this case—has a free hand to present the most comely views, whereas the modern photographer is constrained in what he can present by what the historical photograph shows. As is clear from one view (#3) that is now almost completely blocked by buildings, this in some cases leads to modern photographs that one wouldn't necessarily take or frame the same way if one had a free hand.

As I've no doubt said before (TOP will probably end when I've told all my stories at least twice), I've always wondered why cities don't have official photographers—just someone to wander around on a permanent basis capturing records of the way the city looked as it evolved. I suppose the politicians would find it an easy expense to cut, but if it were permitted it would be valuable for the historical record and for civic pride, identity, and interest.

Mike
(Thanks to Ed and several other readers)

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by John McMillin: "Years ago, I was briefly an 'official' photographer in Golden, Colorado. The local historical society hired and (barely) paid me to photograph each facade in a historical district. There's probably a little of this documentation going on at any moment, but not enough. When I came to Denver in the late '70s, it had a wealth of dilapidated post-industrial buildings downtown, and a busy railyard, that were far more colorful than today's designer-styled instant urbanist paradise. I documented those old relics a bit, but not enough. When they're gone, the photography stops but my memories remain, fading.

"Gotta put in a good word for Montreal here. I visited for the first time in October, and it was a visual delight. I was especially drawn to scenes of rooftops. There must be a law, or at least a custom, against leaving any roof flat or unadorned. Instead, they're steepled, ornamented, castellated in a most elevating style. Montrealers like to view their city from commanding locations, like the Olympic Tower, or the old church belfry by the Old Port. When an historic government building was being renovated, the whole structure and scaffolding was wrapped in plastic sheeting neatly printed with the building's windows and details. That's pride showing!"

Featured Comment by Jeff: "My favorite is the audio from #8, Notre Dame Church. Very 'TOPical.'"

Mike replies: I hadn't heard that yet when I read your comment. Made me laugh. Good catch.

Featured Comment by Andrzej Maciejewski: "Thanks for posting this. I agree that each city large or small should have a photographer who would document streets, buildings, parks, etc. It would not be such a huge expense to the city, but there would be something left in the archives. I was looking through the archives of a few cities in Canada and the state of them is rather less than poor (except for the Notman archives in Montreal but this is only because he was a successful commercial photographer who sold these city views at the time)."