Revisiting a couple of topics from the last couple of months:
Photo: W. Eugene Smith
First, a wonderful collection of Kodachrome photographs from the vaults of Fortune magazine, dating from 1939 to 2002, from artists as diverse as Dmitri Kessel, William Vandivert*, Dan Weiner, Robert Doisneau, and Alex Webb, as well as several not at all known for shooting color, such as Ansel Adams, Ralph Steiner, Walker Evans, and W. Eugene Smith (Smith's picture above was taken in 1957 for an article about the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company's then-new building in Hartford. The picture didn't make the issue). A tiny sampling online, but good to look at. (Coincidentally highlights one of Kodachrome's often hidden benefits, too—its good dark-storage archivability.)
We were talking about Kodachrome when it went the way of all things last month.
Photo: Luc Novovitch
On a related note, TOP reader Luc Novovitch passed by Kodachrome Basin State Park in Utah last week on his way to Escalante, and he confirms that the park is still there and still has the same name! (There was some question.) Above is a shot he took on his way through.
Photo: Stan Semuskie
In a "Featured Comment" to our post about adding an aerial shot to your portfolio, photographer Stan Semuskie told a cool story about being hired by Forbes magazine to shoot the home of Nike founder Phil Knight, and how he had a blast that day shooting everything he could see from the chopper. Stan has now put some of the selects from that shoot online; you can practically feel the rush of the air and the beat of the blades. Fun stuff.
On the often visually irritating Life.com site, Astronaut Bruce McCandless is
joined in space by a watermark and two enormous floating arrows.
Life.com has put up a set it calls "The 21 Greatest Space Photos Ever." I have to say I think the jury's still out on Life.com. The JPEGs are often of...well, variable quality, and the interface gets in the way of enjoying the pictures. Take #15 in the linked set, for instance—"the immediately recognizable human form" in the "vastness of space" yes, but then, the two arrows that also appear to be floating in the vastness of space compete with the human form and detract somewhat from the visual impact. (Speaking of that shot, I wonder if Astronaut Bruce McCandless is any relation to Chris McCandless, the protagonist of Jon Krakauer's fine if troubling book Into the Wild
—there's a movie
, too—I recall that when my father was a Director of NASA, one of the people under him was Walt McCandless, father of Chris.)
Finally, the always delightful Shorpy.com has some better JPEGs of the late Julius Shulman's architectural work than I was able to link to the other day, including a large, good-quality digitization of Shulman's signature picture.
Mike
(Thanks to Marc Rochkind, Luc, Stan, Robert Lee, and Werner J. Karl)
*Whose former assistant Carl Leonardi is a TOP reader.
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of the work we cited as among the best of 2007.
) that showed a lot of the composite parts, but of course lacking one unifying sensibility. Anyway, Damion Berger's "In the Deep End" is the first time I've ever seen anybody actually pull it off. Great set. Don't miss the slideshow—this is work that really coheres as a set, and each of these pictures is better in the context of all the others.
