The Online Photographer

Random Excellence: Ralf Dujmovits

Photo by Ralf Dujmovits

Every now and again some remarkable picture, eloquent and unusual, makes its way around the world. One of the latest is this one, showing human overcrowding on Mount Everest, the world's highest mountain. It was taken by Ralf Dujmovits, an experienced mountaineer who had turned back from the summit of Everest because of dangerous conditions, only to be "astounded and horrified" by the site of this long queue of tourist or hobby climbers trudging upwards.

He says the sight gave him the "oppressive feeling that some of the people in the picture would soon be dead." Four of them were. Others ended up crowding the hospitals of Kathmandu being treated for hypothermia and frostbite.

Dujmovits describes the craze to ascend Everest at any cost a "mass hysteria," and has pleaded with the Nepalese government for stricter regulations.

Kate Connolly wrote about the picture and the photographer at The Guardian.

Mike

P.S. As regular readers know, I'm a big fan of outstanding nonfiction writing. Mountaineering boasts an extensive literature, the excellence of which might account in part for those long lines on Everest (although most of us are content to remain armchair adventurers). Two of the very best books of the genre that I can heartily recommend are British climber Joe Simpson's 1988 book Touching the Void, an absolutely gripping biographical account of a near-disaster that will have you on the edge of your aforementioned armchair; I'll just warn you, don't start this one unless you have time to finish it. It was an extraordinary worldwide bestseller (here's the U.K. link). More pertinent to this photograph is of course Jon Krakauer's extraordinary Into Thin Air, a first-person account of the events of May 1996 on Everest by a man who started out as a journalist (for Outside magazine) who meant to write an article about an ascent, and who ended up being one of the primary participants in an appalling disaster that made news all over the globe. The book has one of the most disturbingly unsettled endings in literature, which is of course very appropriate; the new edition linked here contains an account of the ongoing controversy and Krakauer's continued struggles with the ghosts of his past. Undoubtedly one of the greatest mountaineering books ever, and among the true masterpieces of nonfiction literature of recent decades. Not to be missed (although Touching the Void is a shorter, easier, and, in terms of its ending, more satisfying read).

At least read the short book description of Into Thin Air at Amazon.

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Featured Comment by John Nollendorfs: "This picture from the Chilkoot Pass during the Klondike gold rush is much more interesting! At least those fools were after something tangible, like gold!"

Featured Comment by Darin Boville: "Tilted image? Sure looks like it to me."

Featured Comment by expiring_frog: "To address the question of 'why,' I strongly recommend Rob Macfarlane's book Mountains of the Mind, an eminently readable cultural history of how climbing mountains captured the public imagination. Two other classics worth mentioning are Maurice Herzog's Annapurna, possibly the most famous mountaineering book ever (about the first ascent of an 8000m peak and subsequent horrific retreat), and Reinhold Messner's The Crystal Horizon (first solo Everest climb, without oxygen). Messner's climb is particularly pertinent because he was the only person on the mountain that day, with only his girlfriend and a liaison officer at base camp, the polar opposite of the current tourist logjam."

Featured Comment by Peter: "As a climber myself I have always advocated that Everest should have the top 500 meters blown off by a big bomb. Then K2 would be the highest mountain in the world and you cannot drag tourists up there!"

Featured Comment by Avi Joshi: "Being a Nepalese, this makes me sad. Sadder still to think that no regulation change is likely to happen when the country is in such a political disarray."

Question from Alan Farthing: "Mike, what's your view on the tilted image?"

Mike replies: I searched for the picture and was not able to find a larger JPEG online; it doesn't appear to be on Ralf's website. Virtually all the instances I was able to find (500+, only four pages of which I looked at) reproduce the same angle as the one at the top of this post. The image appears to originate from an Outside magazine article that also shows the same angle of tilt. At least, they seem to be the most reputable publication publishing it. If that's the case, then they should be the ones taking editorial responsibility for the photograph (As you probably know, the web is not good at determining primacy of publication.) I haven't had much luck asking publications questions like this, because often the people who know the answers are tough to locate, and then once you locate them they're not sure if they have permission to speak to you or not. This makes some sense if you consider that you're essentially asking them if their publication misrepresented the facts, which is not an easy question to get a straight answer to (although a strong denial can be worth something).

Enlarging the image as best I can, it appears from the degree of uprightness of the climbers that the slope shown in the picture is indeed somewhat exaggerated—not as much as Darin suggests (they're clearly not on a flat plain or they'd all be pitching over forwards), but maybe eight or 10 degrees. The figures are just not quite distinct enough to tell for sure. However, our perception might be skewed somewhat by the fact that they would all be carrying large, bulky packs.

The picture rotated 10 degrees counterclockwise looks subjectively about right to my eye when I enlarge it to enough to see the climbers better; possibly a little less might be better, and I can't really tell what's most accurate.

Enlarged detail at CCW 10 degrees. Look at the figures in the middle, remembering that they have bulky packs on their backs.
Click on the image to see it larger.

As several people have suggested, he might simply have tilted the camera to get the greatest number of people in. If his point was that there are too many people on the mountain, showing more of them would be more important information that showing the angle rectified. I'd guess it's possible he was using a very small fixed-lens camera; we know he's not going to be carrying a DSLR and a zoom lens on the way back from a summit attempt. According to reports there were 300 people on the mountain that day, and there aren't 300 people in the picture.

If someone who speaks German would like to try to contact Ralf and ask him, that would probably be the best way to get to the bottom of it. As someone who does this kind of research all the time I'd guess our chances of getting a substantive answer would be on the low side—Ralf appears to be a busy man of action who probably has better things to do and probably doesn't spend a lot of his hours at the computer—but it might be worth a shot. To avoid peppering him with many questions, why doesn't someone volunteer to me? We'll delegate one TOP translator. He might be more likely to answer if he gets one query as opposed to twenty or whatever.

Darin adds: After further research it appears that the original image that Mike posted isn't a still image per se but a still frame of a video. In the link they show the line of climbers in two cuts. The first part looks right in terms of tilt. However, the second part starts off right but then rotates—at least that is my judgement. This can be seen most easily if you grab the video and advance it frame by frame—about halfway in the rotation is most obvious. I tried to use stitching software to position but not distort a selection of screen grabs from the video but my software insists on stretching parts of the image. Maybe someone else has the skills to make a few measurements or to use stitching software more to this purpose.

"My take home points so far on this are: 1) The image is tilted to a pronounced degree. More, I think than Mike's version but less than mine. 2) Given the sweep of the video--the arc of his arm had to travel—this is probably nothing more than heavy clothing getting in the way and pulling the camera out of level at the right extreme. 3) However, the chosen still frame is still misleading—and at the same time not misleading. The ground was nowhere near as tilted at the spot where the hikers were packed most dramatically—misleading—but there were indeed many, many hikers coming up the steeper parts of the trail and on the mountain in general, as the rest of the video shows. I'll leave it to others to debate the ethics here."

Mike replies: I think I'll have to disagree with you here. I don't think the picture is a frame grab; at least, I can't find the exact same pattern of climbers in the video that I see in the still. And, without going into forensics, the video makes the frame grab seem essentially accurate to my eye. My 10°-corrected detail again:

Versus a frame grab from the video:

That's looking pretty close to me. (Of course, I do get that you're saying the video camera itself is tilted; it's just that it doesn't look that way to me, so we can disagree there.)

But now others can judge for themselves...good find!

Random Excellence: John Slaytor

Photograph by John Slaytor

John Slaytor mentioned his work almost in passing in a comment yesterday. To make this darkly emotional series of portraits, John says, "I photographed commuters in trains from the outside of the train as they passed me by, approximately one and a half meters away at forty kilometers an hour. I couldn't see the commuters and they couldn't see me."

To photograph them, he had to work at ISO 12,000 and 1/3000th sec.

Another reader, John Krumm, said of the subjects of these portraits, "So many look like they are being led to their deaths, or...just lost a loved one."

To look at these, I let my eyes linger on each shot for longer than usual before clicking on to the next one, thinking about the context, of a subway car full of strangers rushing past in a blur, returning from their obligations or destined for them.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Mahn England: "These extraordinary photos for me evoke a story that my Dad tells of his mother, Ella, who raised his two brothers and him single-handedly. Ella explained to Dad that, in her busy life working and raising her sons, the only time she had to worry about life was on the train going to and coming home from work."

Featured Comment by Kenneth Tanaka: "Now we're talkin' photography with creative vision! 'Lost in Transit' borders on the sublime. It's simply wonderful work. I bow.

"However, John's series is excellent but it's by no means new or made possible by digital cameras. The idea and its pursuits are very, very old.

"During the 1930s Walker Evans  covert created a remarkable body of covert images of fellow subway riders using a camera concealed under his coat.

"Ten years later Stanley Kubrick, the great film director before he was the great film director, was doing the same.  (Kubrick was a very accomplished and knowledgeable photo enthusiast.)

"Fast forward to the 1980s when Magnum photographer Bruce Davidson was snappin' away on the NYC subways, producing a fabulous book of the work.  (He was also lucky to have survived a few beatings and muggings in the process.)

"No, capturing people in-transit is as old as transit.  But John's still done a nice job with this small series."

Mike replies: I think I'll have to disagree with you insofar as you're implying that this is old hat. (Although your tour via links is wonderful.) Considering just Walker Evans's pictures, I think John's pictures are better than Walker's, and that technology is indeed the reason—he could presumably take hundreds or thousands of pictures from outside the subway cars as they hurtled past, whereas Evans was limited to photographing whoever he sat across from, until he got up and moved or until they got up and someone else sat down. It might not be different in terms of basic subject matter, but John's pictures are far more beautiful, and I find them far more moving too. Evans's subway pictures feel more like a willful gimmick to me. Although a few of them are quite beautiful, in general his artistic choices were very limited, and the pictures show it. John could capture true candids, with no intrusion on his subjects if he chose (I presume the one picture of the man looking at him was taken when a train was stopped?), whereas many of Walker's subjects were looking right at him and presumably knew or suspected what he was up to. Like this one:

What Evans got for the most part was people being wary toward a stranger; what John Slayton manages to convey in many of these portraits is a soul alone.

From the first time I saw them decades ago I've never found Evans's subway portraits convincing as a group. They always felt like a failed experiment to me. John, on the other hand, has succeeded in doing what one suspects Evans only wanted to do.

Just my own take, of course, my own guesses.

Featured Comment by John Camp: "I agree with Mike on this. I think that when the others were shooting, people still had on their wary (or social) faces. These people have turned away from the train into a private space—the emptiness outside the window—and so we see their private faces. I also love the moody, tonal effect brought by the lack of light. Good stuff.

"Also, now that I think about it, it's not really obvious to me that, if I'd thought of shooting subway riders, I would have thought about shooting them from outside a moving train. There's a pretty well-known landscape photo in a rather sere landscape of the Southwest somewhere, showing a train crawling across the vast  landscape from some distance (I can't put my finger on exactly who shot it.) But the fact is, I see such a thing almost every time I drive from L.A. to Santa Fe, and it just leaps out at you: here's a nice photo. All you have to do is see it, once, to have that thought. How many people have seen these portraits flashing by at night in a subway, and haven't thought to do this?"

Reply from Ken Tanaka: "Mike, Better? Worse? The works are not on the same basis for such absolute judgements. John's series is more emotionally evocative and seductive than Evans's. It poses more questions than it answers. But Evans's series is, I believe, quite valuable for its matter-of-fact documentary value. Which, come to think about it, is the what I see as the core value of most of Evans' work. Personally, I prefer looking at John's images, too."

Featured Comment by Don: "Wonderful series of portraits, but I found the sweeping statement alongside them detracted:

These portraits, which are not confined to any one ethnic, gender, social or age group show the universality of our society's resignation to its loss of freedom.

"The daily commute is grim, but everyone is there by free choice. I'd suggest we have more freedom now than ever before (well, for those in western democracies, where these were taken). Freedom from: disease, early death, starvation, aggressive 'tribes' (mobs are here still, but we can avoid them), religion, lack of education etc. Instead, we freely choose to give up laying in bed all day because we want to go earn more cash. That's the photographer interpreting his viewpoint onto the images, one which may well not exist. We are not forced to be slaves to consumerism. We may feel enslaved by circumstance, but actually we are not.

"What makes me despair is not a lack of freedom, but how we squander it.

"It also makes me consider how selective editing could produce a different set—smiling faces going on holiday, meeting a loved one, chatting with a friend etc.

"Definitely randomly excellent though."

Mike replies: It's interesting what you bring to the photos, but somewhat ironic that you object to the photographer's interpretation when you have such an involved interpretation of your own.

Reply to Don from Ed Hawco: "I don't think one has to look very far to find many social and artistic reactions to the kind of 'loss of freedom' that John Slaytor is talking about. It's not the kind of absolute loss you'd experience if you were thrown in jail (although arguably that would bring a kind of existential freedom as you are no longer required to work in order to be fed and sheltered).

"The 'rat race' can most definitely be oppressive, and many people have a lot less freedom to choose than you might think. I've been a victim of that rat race, and it can crush your will to live. I live modestly, don't over-spend, am not mortgaged to the eyeballs, etc., so it's not like it's 'my own fault.' But I must work, and there have been times when my choices have been very limited.

"Driving two or three hours a day through congested traffic, or riding two or three hours a day on crowded subways and commuter trains can really grind you down, especially if the job you finally get to is not one you enjoy but is the only one available for the time being.

"No, it's not like living in a concentration camp or in North Korea, which is why Slaytor qualifies is statement by referring to the loss of 'existential' freedom. But make no mistake; millions of people in the so-called 'free world' are miserable and feel trapped in their circumstances."

Featured Comment by John Slaytor (the featured photographer): "Many thanks, Mike, for allowing me to share my work with such an intelligent audience whose comments I have appreciated.

"Reader John Krumm stated:

So many look like they are being led to their deaths, or...just lost a loved one

"This comment for me is very pertinent since the documentary film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann was the major trigger for my project. I also photograph funerals and I have come to realise I do so for the same reason that I photographed the train commuters—I want to promote human dignity, and I've found, ironically, that this is best done when the subject is oblivious to my camera.

"At this point I should note that TOP also influenced my exhibition since it introduced me to Saul Leiter's masterpiece, Early Color, which has had a profound impact on my understanding of how colour can affect mood.

"Recent work similar to mine for me would be Michael Wolf's Tokyo Compression and Philip-Lorca diCorcia's Heads series.

"Like many others, I have experimented with photographing fellow passengers from within carriages but have come to realise that there are few unguarded moments.

"Referring to Don's comments, for my exhibition I photographed 4000 images of train commuters before settling on 19 to be exhibited. I was selective in my choice, but not one of the 4000 images caught anyone smiling or chatting. A lot of them caught people plugged into iPods or staring at their phones.

"All of my commuter images were technically flawed; however this seems to have maximised their emotional impact on viewers by allowing the viewer to focus on mood rather than the subject's imperfections.

"Incidentally, the vertical black stripes were caused by the refection of the railway fence on the train windows.

"What I don't understand is why the images are so timeless."

Featured Comment by Derby Chang: "We lucky Sydney-siders have a wonderful photo festival every year, Head-On, just drawing to a close now. John's 'Lost in Transit' was a highlight for me this year. His blog post about his experience at the show is very good reading."

Featured Comment by Ann Courtney: "A neat idea which has produced highly evocative images, people lost in thought and with their 'society' guard down. Every shot shouts loneliness and isolation. Sterling work!"

Mike replies: Those 27 words perhaps sum up this post the best.

Random Excellence: Keith Barkley

One of the stranger sunset pictures you'll see—the sun doing its best moon impression. Keith Barkley says, "I lucked out that the eclipse was ending just at sunset." Also one of the few eclipse photos you'll see that was not shot through a filter.

Some pictures just make you think, "I wish I'd seen that."

Mike

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Random Excellence: Erich Hartmann

Erich Hartmann, Maine, 1987

"Patterns on the Wall"—It's Slate's Magnum theme for today. (Produced by Kate Phillips. Too bad you can't see these full screen, unless I'm missing a tab somewhere.) Here, our title—"random"—really is apropos. I find it curious that Magnum photographs are now so often compiled into random sets, even in books, when one of the reasons for Magnum's founding was so the photographers could control the presentation of their pictures and make sure they were always presented in the proper context. Magnum photographs now most often seem to be seen out of the context of photojournalistic stories. And sometimes in the context of truly random groupings—such as pictures that include wallpaper.

I was pleased to see so many pictures in today's Slate set by my late friend Erich Hartmann, father of my good pal Nick. Erich, a past President of the agency and by that time an éminence grise, was the one who gave me a behind-the-scenes tour of Magnum New York, one of my better photographic memories.

There's a really very interesting book of Magnum photographs—a treasury, in the sense that it's full of treasures—called In Our Time: The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers. It's still available. I used to really love that book, and paged through it, lovingly, many times, but then I learned that Nick has a rather low opinion of it, to the point that I think he might have gotten rid of his copy. (Or maybe he was just considering it). I hope he'll chime in here and speak for himself, but as I recall he felt the book really wasn't true to the aspect of Magnum I mentioned above. I have a poor mind for recalling quotations verbatim, but he said something to the effect that Magnum photographs really weren't meant to be seen in compendiums—even, I suppose, "greatest hits" compendiums with running commentary such as In Our Time.

I'd say more about the book but oddly, I can't find my copy. It doesn't seem to be on my shelves anywhere. I wonder if it's hiding in the house somewhere, or if I loaned it out. I don't think I'd be so influenced by Nick's opinion that I'd have gotten rid of my own copy—the book really is enjoyable, even if you consider its program suspicious.

At any rate, it was good to see a few of Erich's pictures on Slate this morning...even out of context.

Mike
(Thanks to Kent Phelan)

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Featured Comment by Nicholas Hartmann: "Mike, thanks for the shoutout to Dad. I just checked, and the In Our Time book is still on the shelf; it will probably stay there, despite my philosophical objections.

"Further to your first paragraph: Bear in mind that while in the heyday of the cooperative, many Magnum photographers did shoot stories—sequences of pictures that were intended to be seen in a print medium as a group and together with text—others, like Cartier-Bresson, explicitly went hunting for pictures, for individual images that would have power and meaning in isolation. Dad did both: in his industrial and commercial essays, almost always in color, he was very good at creating a coherent narrative that served a client's needs, with the result that he was much in demand and was able to make a living and send his kids to college. What shows up on the Magnum site in these often-silly daily compilations, however, is always a black-and-white picture of his. That body of work, generated with whatever little stealth camera he happened to be carrying with him along with a couple rolls of Tri-X, constituted his 'personal' pictures, a term of art I heard used by his Magnum colleagues as well. By that criterion, maybe all of HC-B's work could be considered 'personal'; his genius was such that he became rich and famous from that alone.

"Magnum is vigorously mining its archives these days, and putting up, I assume, sets of pictures that it thinks will attract attention and keep its name alive. That being the case, I guess I should be happy to see an occasional Erich Hartmann personal picture show up. But wallpaper?! Gimme a break...."

Featured Comment by Jim Richardson: "Mike, I'd like Nick to know that I had one very pleasant encounter with his father some 35 years ago. As it turned out he and I both were shooting assignments for IBM and their editor asked us both to come participate in a internal office seminar he put together for their publications editors. I, being all of about 28 years old, was quite in awe even being in the presence of a Magnum photographer, let alone on the same program.

"I needn't have worried. In person Erich was kind and gracious, a generous teacher willing to humor the young buck with the grandiose ideas. And his presentation was all about practical work, making images that worked for the client, that subtly yet effectively told their story. From such a famous photographer it was pleasure to see and learn that a real pro attends to business and needs—and leaves the ego at home. Thanks for this reminder from another day."

Mike replies: Erich was a gentleman. Nick takes after his father in that way.

Random Excellence: Seth Casteel

Photo by Seth Casteel/LittleFriendsPhoto.com

Well, I like dogs. Check out Seth Casteel's amazing photographs of dogs diving for balls underwater. There's going to be a book in the fall, too.

Mike
(Thanks to Debby Collings)

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Featured Comment by Grant: "Finally, pet pictures that I want to look at. Excellent!"

Random Excellence: Eddy Pula the Famous

Eddy Pula, Drunk Girls

For most of the past five years Eddy Pula has dressed up as one famous photographer or another to cover the Boston Marathon. This year—for the hottest of all 116—he went as Bruce Gilden. That's him as Weegee at the right. ("We all have to get used to wearing different hats," he says.)

The picture above isn't from the Marathon of course—I found it on his blog. Where I also ran across this:

The last post was the most popular ever and for a while I was obsessively checking the viewer count. I would yell out to Rosie, my sister and chief editor, 'We hit the big FIVE NINE!!!' to which she would reply 'Cat videos get 10 times that in a minute, loser' which is true of course, but its cool to think of 59 people reading the bullshit I scribble down.

To me his work seems promising but not fully formed; it seems like he needs to stay himself and keep doing the same thing but just get better. Wonder if he will? "Drunk Girls" is a nice shot but not quite a great shot, somehow. Those faces are sculptural though.

Speaking of which, does anyone remember a guy who published all the pictures on a single proof sheet—also medium format black and white—and we all thought it was great? I wonder what happened to him.

And speaking of Weegee, I've been reading this little book and really enjoying it. Makes me wonder if the other volumes in the series are as good. I can't recommend it yet because of the Pinker Rule, but I'll let you know once I'm done.

DD-B is right; when do people find time to watch TV?

Mike

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Random Excellence: Bobby Neel Adams

I'm fascinated with photographs that show the way things change over time. Bobby Neel Adams creates what he called "AgeMaps":

Bobby [the artist] at age 36 and 6

...which combine pictures of the same person at different ages; and, in a series he calls "FamilyTree," he combines pictures of different family members into one:

Wendy (age 60) and daughter Liza (age 23)

A portfolio is online at The Forward Thinking Museum.

Mike

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Random Excellence: Michael Poster

Photograph by Michael Poster

...Not so much this single image but the whole set, called circus school, which can be viewed on Michael's new website along with several other sets of work.

Not naming any names, but sometimes art museums actually make me a tiny bit angry with what passes for "photography" in some cases. Photography to me is about life, the world, and truth. "Photographs" with zero percent of any of those three things in them sometimes seem like a waste to me. I get...impatient.

Michael Poster is a documentary photographer of considerable seriousness. His work has a lot of those three things in it.

Mike

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Featured Comment by David Adam Edelstein: "Holy cow, yes. This one especially tells a lot of truth about circus: As an aerialist friend once told me, 'leotards are there to hide the bruises from practice.'"

Random Excellence: David Dewhurst

Photo by David Dewhurst

This comes from a new review of the Mazda CX-5 at Winding Road, the online car magazine founded by the late David E. Davis (who was described by Jean Jennings as "the most interesting, most difficult, cleverest, darkest, most erudite, dandiest, most inspirational, charismatic and all-around damnedest human being I will ever meet"). It's one of a suite of 49 illustations.

One thing shooting black and white teaches you is to compose with contrast. So what does that mean? Just that a light line or object stands out against a dark background and vice-versa...and you can work with that.

It's an art form unto itself. There's no better way to hone your eye for this than to study classic black and white films—those old cinematographers could compose with contrast in their sleep; it was the aim of their lighting and integral to the way they saw.

A screen grab from John Huston and Dashiell Hammett's noir classic "The Maltese Falcon" with Mary Astor and Humphrey Bogart—cinematography by Arthur Edeson. The light gives the scene structure and depth, dominated by the vivid line of Astor's face continuing to her shoulder and arm.

The opposite is called a "tonal merger"—that's when the tone of the object and the background match too closely and the separation is lost or is muted. Don't think that shimmer of light on the doorway past Mary Astor's left shoulder is an accident. It's there to prevent a tonal merger.

In David Dewhurst's photo of the CX-5, note how narrow the margin of success is—if the lifted back-right tire had met the shadow of the car, the drama of the picture would be lost. It's that sliver of sunlit asphalt between the tire and the shadow that gives the car its gesture of spirited motion as it dances around the corner.

Mike

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Not-So-Random Excellence: Stephen Gillette

After my post the other day about circular prints, TOP reader Stephen Gillette sent me a link to some of his own work in circular format that I liked a lot. He quipped, "I have a mild addiction for circular images at this point. But it's not a problem. Really. I can stop any time I want...." Maybe he shouldn't; you can tell from the pictures that he's having fun with it, and he seems to have a genuine feel for how to compose inventively this way.

I didn't want to bury this link in the Comments because I thought you'd enjoy taking a look.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Hans Muus: "Amazing how the circular shape is part of the essence of these pictures. No corners—what a difference that makes. Must be very interesting and inspiring to look at the world in this way (don't know if I would be able to do so at all). What an enjoyable, highly personal vision indeed."

Random Excellence: Lindsay McCrum

Photo by Lindsay McCrum

I've been accused of featuring too many female photographers in my "Random Excellence" posts (which, as longtime readers know, means randomly encountered, not that their excellence is accidental). But I can't help what I feel like showing and commenting on. I'll continue to let those chips fall where they may.

This is from Lindsay McCrum's new book Chicks With Guns. She works in both black-and-white and color and, of course, some of the pictures are better than others—the book's cover shot is certainly one that virtually anyone would be proud to have taken. I think I liked LUG denizen Kyle Cassidy's 2007 book Armed America (it's out of print already) better; with Kyle's book, the photographer's stance toward his subject seemed neutral, ambivalent, inscrutable, which made the pictures a sort of tabula rasa for the viewer's own preconceived notions about firearms and their possessors. In Lindsay's book it seems more like an idea that never quite gets buried far enough within the pictures. More like just a theme than anything revealing. A minor cavil.

This woman (where I went to college, only women could call other women "chicks") looks pleased with herself, like a self-satisfied child playing dress-up. But there's just enough of a hint of menace in that expression to suggest that those six-shooters are real.

There's a website, too. For Lindsay's book, I mean.

Mike
(Thanks to John Igel)

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Featured Comment by Mark: "I bought this a while back and while I do understand Mike's thoughts that it feels like more of a theme rather than a fully embedded concept, I think it is more than that. The stories that accompany and explain the background of each sitter, strengthen the 'theme' into a reason for each person owning and using guns, from hunters, to law enforcement, to sportswomen, to those that have them for personal safety. It's never going to be groundbreaking work, but I really like the photos—they work as a series and that's the main thing when producing. Also, it's pretty good quality reproduction in the book too."

Featured Comment by HT: "Wired has some more photos from the book if anyone is interested."

Random Excellence: Robert Phillips

Robert's portrait of Thomas Struth, another leading photographer of the Düsseldorf School, taken last July. (Struth has several famous photographs of people in museums looking at artwork, including the one on the cover of the Stefan Gronert book which you can see in the Featured Comments two posts down from this one.) He had only ten minutes for the shoot.

Here's Robert's website.

And by the way, Ed Kuipers reports that Andreas Gursky: Works 80-08 is the best Andreas Gursky book currently available (here's the U.K. link). The only one I have is this one, which is good, and which is still available new from several sellers for reasonable prices even though it's out of print. A number of Gursky books (of which there are many) have gone way up in price and are no longer easily attainable unless you have big bucks to spend. Not four million dollars, though.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Hans Muus: "I always enjoy TOP—the photographs, the discussions, the width of its scope in general. An education permanente in photography. And then there are the photographers I would never have heard of, of save for TOP. Enter Robert Phillips, just after recently having immersed myself again in Struth and Gursky. I know art (photography) is not a contest, and that at different moments and in different moods different photos speak to me most. That being said, right now the work of Phillips appeals to me more than any of the above. Maybe it is its unpretentiousness, and the sensitivity for context, I dunno. Made me a very happy viewer this morning. Thank you, Mike, for once again pointing the way."

Mike replies: Thank Robert, not me! And by the way, you're allowed. Just because some photographer sells a print for a lot of money doesn't mean you have to like it or even engage with it if you don't want to. I used to quite often make an attempt to "engage" with art I didn't understand, to figure out what I could get from it, and in many cases that's greatly enlarged my horizons. But I also became comfortable long ago with the idea that art is personal and also that what has meaning to us changes at different stages of our lives. In fact I think one of the great distractions of things like record prices for artwork is that it makes everyone think they have to engage in some way with the artwork, or that it has to engage them. Not so. I'm perfectly comfortable with the fact that I'm not moved by Frank Stella or Francis Bacon. Just the way I am and who I am. An expensive picture is just another picture; deal with it accordingly. There's nothing wrong at all with liking Robert Phillips more than Andreas Gursky if that's who you are and where you find yourself. Being honest with ourselves might even be the first prerequisite of joining the audience for art.

Random Excellence: Matt Buedel

Matt writes:

My fiancee's grandparents, Tony and Theda, have been married for almost 70 years and are still devoted to each other every day. They don't get out much any more, but they still live at home and have their independence. I remember the moment of this snap very well. Tony was on his way to retrieve his medication from the bathroom, and Theda stopped him as he passed her in the kitchen for a kiss. It was such a tender exchange.

We visited them recently to talk about whether we could have our wedding near their home so they could attend, and I overheard their "goodnights" while unable to sleep on the most uncomfortable couch in Ohio. Theda had just removed her hearing aid, and Tony asked for a kiss. She couldn't hear him. "Give me a kiss," Tony demanded a little louder. Her own voice rising, Theda responded: "Q-TIPS?!?"

This is a fine shot in the social documentary tradition. It's a formally beautiful photograph, the main subjects executing a practiced pas-de-deux amidst a dense backdrop of domestic detail. It's coloristically harmonious, with a strange sort of bleached blue-green palette, and the light is nice, if also a little strange-seeming—I don't quite parse it; maybe winter light from a window, or even a skylight. (Or a flash, I guess.) It's very balanced, from the green plastic basket atop the fridge to the plastic bottle in the opposite corner, the way Tony's shadow on the side of the fridge is set off by the light reflecting on the tiles over Theda's shoulder. I particularly like the way her fingertips seem to touch the edge of the frame, as if for balance against the slow swirl of visual movement. If the edge of the frame amputated those fingertips (or the top of Tony's head) it might throw the whole composition away.

But more than all that, the picture immediately convinces as a human moment. You can tell instantly it's genuine, taken as it happened, that these people know each other well and have done this dance before. Her expression is enigmatic, but his physical closeness, the way he tilts his head toward her, makes it make sense; you can sense their age, her concern, his stiffness and difficulty moving, their shared past. Her in a housedress, he wearing what looks like pajama bottoms—the casual intimacy of home, the proximity of sleep. Is that a hint of a walker in his right hand?

Just a lovely shot, one of the quotidian moments that pass us by every day, all our lives, that we'd never remember, particularly—and yet that seem precious, if it's two people we know, once we stop to look.

Matt Buedel is the crime reporter for the Journal Star in Peoria, Illinois, an enthusiastic amateur and sometimes semi-pro photographer, and a TOP reader. Here's a link to his flickr photostream, where I found several more gems like this one amongst the jumble.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Tom Buttimer: "Thanks for posting the picture and write-up. This is about life as we live it, quietly, respectfully, and pleasantly. No violence, yelling or arguing, just the day-to-day respect and love we all sometimes take for granted and would miss greatly if we found it suddenly gone. Thanks for making my day brighter."

Featured Comment by Jack Nelson: "I want a 'Q-tips me' t-shirt!"

Not-So-Random Excellence: John Kennerdell

John Kennerdell, Ferry terminal, Dumai, Sumatra, Indonesia

This can't be called random...first of all because John is an occasional contributor to TOP (with his own Category in the right-hand sidebar), but also because this directly relates to our recent posts about a B&W-only sensor and my thoughts on "temptations." For not only does John do some outstanding B&W conversions, but he routinely crops to a square! He referred to these in a recent email as his "Fauxliflex" shots, which made me smile.

Both his Canon 5D's recently died, so this shot was taken with a Canon Rebel.

The reason John sent me the pic was to thank me for the write-up Carl and I did for photo.net about the Pentax 35mm ƒ/2.8 DA Macro.

The lens was developed in cooperation with Tokina, and Tokina sells its version in a different barrel design for both Canon and Nikon mounts. The lens is a true sleeper: an optical paragon, you might even say, and yet it flies almost completely under the radar. It's not even particularly expensive (less than half the price of the Pentax). But very few people know about it.

John wrote, "...You convinced me to try the Tokina version. I don't know if it's an optical twin [of the Pentax DA Macro —MJ] but in any case it's just wonderful. Certainly one of the two most impressive designed-for-digital lenses I've used (the other is the Olympus 50mm macro) and better both technically and aesthetically than the Canon 35/2, which itself is no slouch."

The shot at the top of the page was made wide open. The Tokina Macro 35 is a textbook example of the fact that there is a lot more to any lens than just resolution. It's one of the best lenses you can buy for digital photography, regardless of maker, regardless of price. Always assuming that you don't evaluate lenses like the blind men describing the elephant.

(If you want to purchase one from B&H, however, best hurry, because they're about to go on hiatus for more than ten days for Succos. You have until 7 a.m. ET tomorrow morning if you want anything you order to ship before the break.)

Mike

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Featured Comment by Jim Weekes: "Let me add to the kudos for that lens. When Carl and Mike first wrote about it I was in the process of changing from Canons to Pentaxes. I snapped up the 35 f/2.8 DA Macro for my 20D. It was and is incredible. I got a K-5 and it shone a little brighter on the upgraded sensor. It was so good that I kept my T2i because it weighs so little and got the Tokina version for it. It is just as good. It—the Pentax version—was one of two lenses I took to France for our 30-day stay, along with a 17–135mm zoom. I would say that 80% of my pictures from the Pentax were with the 35mm. If I was to try Mike's one lens and camera for a year it would be the K-5 and the 35mm."

Featured Comment by Miserere: "As a Pentax shooter and photography blogger who has read way too much about lenses, I am as confident as any outsider can be (I don't work for either Tokina or Pentax) that both these lenses share the same optical design and differ only in exterior body design and coatings on the glass surfaces. The Pentax version sports their famous SMC while Tokina uses its own coating formula. As for John Kennerdell, he'd make great photos with a Kodak Brownie, but I'm glad he likes the Pentax/Tokina 35mm."

Featured Comment by Emmanuel Huybrechts: "The Pentax version is much more compact and lighter and has quick-shift (instant manual focus override, so useful). Its price at launch was similar to the Tokina. I'm still kicking myself for not buying it at that time. I finally got this lens (the Pentax) this summer and it was an instant love. A perfect lens, except for the focal length itself. 35mm is in a kind of no-mans-land for me. Not wide enough, not long enough."

Mike replies: That was also what both Carl and I concluded, separately and together. We both want a similar lens in the 24–26mm ballpark. Neither of us are holding our breath.

Random Excellence: The Lazy Aussie

The Lazy Aussie (Andrew McDonald), Falls

"I've just taken my first film shot for at least a decade, dragging the ole 1965 Autocord twinlens [TLR] from a damp shed. It works perfectly! I really never thought I'd shoot film again," writes the self-described "Lazy Aussie," Andrew McDonald of Perth. "I also tested a roll of Kodak transparency, and the colour was so magnificent I have already ordered more rolls. And the difficulty of using the stupid twinlens was almost pleasurable. It's a dumbarse machine that gives superb results only under the most stringent and ridiculous conditions. Love it."

The Minolta Autocord, from the instruction book (courtesy Butkus.org)

Mike

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Featured Comment by Adam Lanigan: "I have been absolutely head over heels for my Yashicamat 124G for the past year since picking it off off the 'Bay. I even took it on vacation recently to NYC (a return of sorts for the wife and I) and snapped barely a dozen digital shots, but filled 13 rolls of 400TX 120. Just getting through the development now (also a new venture for me) and I am in love.

Marcel

"Here's an early scan from that bunch...I met Marcel and his owner outside of a coffee shop early one morning. He very politely obliged me with a nice pose.

"Good on ya, Andrew! It's just such a pleasurable way to shoot."

Random Excellence: Alfred Palmer

Looking almost surreal today, this carefully posed couple could be cutting a wedding cake rather than working on a bomber engine, even down to the "stars in night sky" background. Photo by Alfred Palmer, OWI/LoC, via The Atlantic.

When men were men and women manned the factories: Alfred Palmer and a few colleagues made Kodachrome color PR/propaganda pictures for the Office of War Information after the U.S. engagement in WWII. In that era, color pictures were of limited usefulness in PR (only books could reproduce them, with few exceptions). Most OWI photographs were in B&W.

Their intention is clear: this shot, for example, features the vintage caption, "Hitler would like this man to go home and forget about the war. A good American non-com at the side machine gun of a huge YB-17 bomber is a man who knows his business and works hard at it. Photographed in May, 1942."

The Atlantic In Focus has a selection of OWI photographs in color in a picture show.

Mike
(Thanks to M McAuliff)

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Random Excellence: James Mollison

Eight-year-old Ahkohxet lives with his tribe in the Amazon basin in Brazil.
Photos by James Mollison.

This project (there is a small selection with this short article on Yahoo! and a more extensive one here) reminds me of that project a few years ago showing families around the world with the food they consume in an average week. An outstanding idea for a photography project, uncontrived yet visually eloquent, with obvious sociological interest and a touch of voyeurism too (or is it just me who feels that seeing peoples' bedrooms is just a tad uncomfortably like an invasion of privacy? I feel the same way on real estate house tours). Too bad the book is currently unavailable; I'd buy it.

Mike

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Random Excellence: Carli Davidson

Photo by Carli Davidson

Completely freaky. Stop-action photos of pets shaking their heads, by Carli Davidson. As Subtraction put it, "What I really like about these images is the way they capture something hidden but that’s been right out there in the open forever, until technology came along and allowed us to see it." Not exactly a new idea (cf. Harold Edgerton et al.), but then again, I've never seen any dog and cat photos like these before. Wonderful. Weird. And wonderful.

What these remind me of more than anything are the amazing boxing photos by the old New York Daily News sports photographer Charles Hoff, documented in the 1996 book The Fights (note that according to one Amazon reviewer, a lot of the identifications in the book are mistaken). A different era and a different subject, and different technique, but he often captured human faces frozen in similarly distorted and unfamiliar aspects.

Mike
(Thanks to Dave Sailer)

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Featured Comment by Eli Burakian: "I just got back from Armenia two days ago and happened to meet Carli in the Moscow airport. She had overheard me talking about a photo project I was working on and showed me her photos on her ipad.

"Just thought it was a funny coincidence.

"Although she wouldn't tell me her secret on how to get the dogs to shake their heads, she did relay an interesting story.

"She's been doing this photography for a little while and wasn't getting much traction. She won a PDN contest and that propelled her to the top instantly and now there's amazing amounts of interest in her photography.

"Just a little reminder that you should keep on working on what you love, and eventually if you persevere, your break will come."

Random Excellence: Ken Tanaka

Photo by Ken Tanaka

Scene description: This is a view of the seventh annual Lollapalooza music festival held in Chicago's Grant Park this past weekend (August 5–7, 2011) looking south from Monroe Street. In the foreground is Butler Field and in the distance (at those blue dots) is Hutchinson Field, both of which were shoulder-to-shoulder with pop music fans. In the center, lit in orange, is the famous Buckingham Fountain.

This year's festival sold out to a record attendance of 270,000. It's definitely a (very) young person's event, rather like a commercialized mini-Woodstock each year—complete with drenching rainstorms this year. Despite such massive crowds of high-energy young people, Lollapalooza is a remarkably well-managed, good-spirited, and orderly event, with very few reports of trouble. Gate-crashing was the biggest problem this year.

Tech: PhaseOne 645DM camera with PhaseOne P65+ digital back and Mamiya Sekor D 75–150mm ƒ/4.5 lens @ 90mm.

Mike
(Thanks to Ken)

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Random Excellence: Matt Weber

Matt Weber, $1.15 Taxi Driver, 1988

The subject of Checker cabs (no, this isn't one) came up on Sunday, and reader Matt Weber mentioned that he had a number of pictures of Checkers in the "Cars and Buses" section of his website. As indeed he does.

I don't know how I've managed to miss Matt's site for so long. There's a lot of quiet but sensitive street photography from thirty years or so, and I'm finding a lot there that's good to look at. See if you can spot all the Checkers (not just the familiar shape as a burnt-out hulk), but don't make the mistake of neglecting to explore the rest of Matt's site.

I notice that with most photography, but especially with street photography, I tend to pick and choose—edit in my mind, you might say. There are always some pictures I dismiss, and that's as true of Matt's site as any other. But as long as there are also gems there to find that I really enjoy, I'm happy.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Mike Peters: "Matt has one of the deepest archives of classic NYC B&W street photographs ever. He's the real deal, a pure street shooter who lives a life dedicated to his passion for the city that he lives in, and the images he makes chronicling his time. More people should know of his work, and I'm sure they will in years to come."