The Online Photographer

A Look Back at Photo Magazines

By Ken Tanaka

Mike's article (just below this one) on photography magazines was coincidentally timely for me. Throughout this summer I've been up to my waist in a research project involving photo hobby magazines of the 1950s and 1960s, specifically U.S. Camera magazine. I'm particularly interested in this period for two reasons. First, because it was a relatively prosperous, relatively peaceful, and generally optimistic time in America. Second, because it was also the period just before electronics deeply penetrated cameras. Photography was still a largely mechanical and chemical undertaking that did not demand the prerequisite aptitudes that later eras would require. (That's a significant point, more closely related to my project, which I'll discuss in greater depth in a future article.)

My moldy magazine musings have treated me to many collateral retro delights thus far, some of the best of which I plan to share with fellow TOP readers in the coming weeks. But here are just a few gems to get started.

Let's begin by cutting straight to the chase of photo mags, shall we? If you were following photo mags you know where you usually started your monthly reading, don't you? That's right, you probably started reading a photo mag by perusing the ads in the back. They were troves of tiny-print "deals" on photo hobby treasures (right, from U.S. Camera, August, 1955).

Photography in that period was far more gadget-laced than it is today (if young people can imagine that). In addition to "best prices" on cameras there were mountains of darkroom gadgets all of which promised to help make you a star in your camera club.

The next attraction was the product ads. Magazine ads were the primary ongoing promotional vehicle for camera companies during this period. Television was still new in the 1950s. Kodak ran some television ads, usually near summer and the holiday seasons, in the 1960s. Of course radio was useless for promoting photo products. So we see a variety of large ads for new products each month. This was how folks learned of new products.

Ad designs seemed to be straddling styles much the same way that art of the 1950s and 1960s seemed to straddle the old and new. For example, we see a rather instructional ad for the Rolleicord V (the consumer version of the Rolleiflex) in simple pen-and-ink.

From U.S. Camera magazine, August 1955

Just a few months later, in February, 1956, we see this ad for Nikon’s S-2 rangefinder:

From U.S. Camera magazine, February 1955

Note not only the "modern" design of the ad but also the selection of the photographs that the silhouetted figures are viewing. That image of what appears to be a Mies van der Rohe building really jumps out at me as an icon of "tomorrow." This was a period in which contemporary art was beginning to emerge as a powerful force not just in the art world but also in graphic design. Nikon's clearly trying to make a statement that it's the brand for the future.

Finally we get to the actual editorial content. Yes, there were plenty of "how-to" articles in each issue. But there were also frequent articles dealing with broader and deeper issues of photography in general. U.S. Camera, in particular, often held symposia featuring many of the noted photographers of the day. For example in this same 1955 issue we have such an article titled "Interview with Three Greats" in which Dorothea Lange, Imogen Cunningham an Ansel Adams discuss topics such as "What are the important trends?" and "What did the F/64 group mean?"

From U.S. Camera magazine, August, 1955

The caption reads: "HERE is a picture of the symposium held in Dorothea Lange’s studio for U.S. Camera. The people left to right are Herm Lenz, moderator, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams."

Photography had widely recognized "greats" still living in the 1950s and 1960s and U.S. Camera seemed to exploit them well for such discussions. By contrast, today we really don't have many such figures left. Many of today's best known photographers are principally photographic artists who really have little relationship to photography per se. We do still have treasures such as Bruce Davidson (who recently offered some thoughts about his work on Leica's blog) but they're not being replaced.

One last point worth noting: the camera magazines of the 1950s and 1960s looked terrible compared to today's magazines. The type is rough, the graphic line screens are coarse, the layouts are often nutty and the paper can be frail. Comparing a 1950s photo magazine to, say, an issue of today's British Journal of Photography is a breathtaking object lesson in the progress that printing and repro technologies have made in 60+ years. Really remarkable.

The future of photo magazines
There's little. It's no secret that magazine sales, in general, are in decline, with 2011 newsstand sales reported as being down between 8.9% and 9.2% (depending on the reporter). There's no question that (to cop a line from the film Men in Black) "that ain't gonna grow back." The Web and the growing list of "app" magazines are certainly responsible for part of the decline of photo magazines. The paper publishing medium is relentlessly giving way to the digital medium—which, frankly, is a win-win. With such high-resolution displays flooding the marketplace, and the common availability of relatively cheap broadband data transmission, publishers can produce and distribute a much richer product more quickly than ever. Readers reap great benefits. Advertisers reap great benefits. The planet's environment gets a much-needed break. Printers, paper companies and magazine distributors are the losers. Oh well.

Ken

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Featured Comment by Ed Cornachio: "U.S. Camera? How about Issue #1 when it was spiral bound, and Ed Steichen was one of the editors. (Number 2 was the last to be spiral bound.) I have issues 1 through 15 (missing #4). Interesting stuff."

Featured Comment by Jim Hughes: "Ken: Thanks for giving U.S. Camera its due. As you may know, I started my career in photographic publishing at U.S. Camera Publishing in 1966, when I became editor of its smaller circulation (and by then, more serious) magazine, Camera 35 (my contribution was to try to make it even more serious by putting even greater emphasis on portfolios and photo essays).

"U.S. Camera began as a high-quality spiral-bound Annual in 1935. Photographs were printed well, and large. Tom Maloney, a young advertising man with the vision to put Edward Steichen in charge of choosing pictures, said he lost $5,000 on that first edition. I have copies of the first few Annuals on my library shelves (protected in plastic bags!) and I still regularly study them. In 1938, Tom decided to add a periodical, and started U.S. Camera the magazine as a quarterly in the fall of that year. The 11.5x12-inch publication was priced at 50 cents, and sold out its entire run of 25,000 copies. At the beginning of 1939, with the second issue, the magazine became a bi-monthly. I am fortunate to possess two bound volumes representing the full run of the bi-monthlies, which to my mind represent a high point in photo magazine publishing.

"Indeed, it was the high standards of those early magazines that in great part inspired the objectives I set for myself, years later, as editor of the original Camera Arts magazine, which remains my proudest accomplishment.

"But it is Tom Maloney who remains one of photography's most unsung of heroes. He helped establish Ansel Adams' Yosemite Workshops. He published Ansel's book on the Japanese-American detainment camps, Born Free and Equal. He suggested Edward Weston for a Guggenheim and published his California and the West. He was responsible for Edward Steichen becoming director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art. I could go on, but you get the idea....

"And Maloney did all this in his spare time. His primary business was advertising and public relations. Remember Sylvania's 'Blue Dots for Sure Shots'? How about Sherwin-Williams 'We Cover The World'? Those were Tom's campaigns. And it was his advertising work that supported his photographic 'hobby.'"

Newsstand Watch

I really don't know if my area is representative or not, but I've been noticing that several stores that have traditionally included newsstands have recently reduced their sales areas devoted to magazines. My nearby drugstores have cut the overall size of the magazine sales racks in half, more or less.

Tonight I was in a local grocery store that still had a full-sized newsstand, and I noticed something else. I found a wide variety of titles: there was Acoustic Guitar; Mad magazine (I didn't know that one was still around); the ever-popular Canning and Preserving, and two bow-hunting titles (it's Wisconsin, after all, although we're not going to have a lot of crop to can and preserve this year, what with the drought); I think five magazines about something called "Fantasy Football" (I've heard of that, but I don't know what that is), and five more about motorcycles; SewNews; Scrap & Stamp (the initial "S" was covered up by another magazine, so I thought at first glance it was called "Crap & Stamp"); Yoga for Weight Loss; Combat Aircraft magazine; something called Geek (I didn't look to see what that one's about); a magazine called Rat Rod which of course no self-respecting newsstand should lack; and, for inquiring minds, Reality Stars / Where Are They Now? (I wasn't sure if the second line was part of the book's title or if it was the lead blurb. It took me a while to search my brain to see if I knew the name of one reality star—I came up with "Snooky" and "The Situation," although I don't know if I'm right about that or not. Are those reality stars? In any event, I don't care where they are, although I bear them no ill will.)

But not one photography magazine. Not a single one.

I seem to remember when this happened with stereo magazines, which were easy to find on most general newsstands twenty years ago. In that case I think it signalled a pretty distinct decline in the hobby and in the status of those types of products; in this case it might have to do less with the decline of the hobby and more with the rise of the Web.

Of course at full service bookstores (Barnes & Noble seems to be the only one of those left around here) we have a generous range of photo titles.

I've been away from the publishing business for several years now (I think I wrote my last magazine column in 2009—maybe 2008—and it's been since 2001 that I was an editor). It would be interesting to know the circulation figures in the photography category now.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Tony Collins: My favourite (UK) magazine title is Total Carp."

Featured Comment by Michael T.: "LensWork still exists in print, still true to its beginnings (no adverts). It has also an indepth and greatly expanded (over print) web presence. I tip my hat to Brooks Jensen and the rest of LensWork publishing team! They have adapted (and adopted) to the web and technology well!"

Featured Comment by Tom Swoboda: "Between 1971 and 2010 I lived in a small town that had a storefront newsstand down on main street. Every week on my day off I would spend at least an hour there paging through magazines and leaving with two to four of various types. I now live in an even more rural area and don't have a full service newsstand to visit anymore and I have found, like you, the supermarket and drugstore magazines have shrunk in size but I don't browse them. The WWW has pretty much eliminated my reading of newspapers and magazines."

Featured Comment by Mark Lacey: "We still have heaps in Australia, get most of the English and American rags too. In the long run they will be doomed by the net, like most things I'm interested in. Must say I miss your writing in the U.K. Black & White Photography magazine."

Featured Comment by Macrothemovie: "First: at first glance, it looks like a newsstand in Great Britain. Second: photography magazines are very rare, everywhere. You only find them in art galleries and little else. Perhaps you mean what I call 'camera magazines' which, indeed, are usually very popular."

Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "Yes indeed, the photography magazine market is cratering. Their advertising base is either disappearing or moving to the web. Cell phone cameras are wiping out the digicam market that dominated the field in recent years. Just look at Popular Photography circa 1990, and today. It had three times as many pages, with far more editorial content as well as ads. It's gradually wasting away. There are a goodly number of gear-head magazines, but they seem to arise and fold almost overnight. American Photo has turned itself into People magazine, photo edition, with a repellent (well, to me at least) emphasis on celebrity/sports/fashion photography. It's twilight for photo magazines."

Featured Comment by Kirk Tuck: "I'm surprised that no one has mentioned PDN (Photo District News). Of all the print stuff out there it's still the one I get every month in paper and my local Barnes & Noble always carries copies as well. It's aimed much more at the industry and to more advanced users. After hearing about the demise of print for the better part of the decade it warms my heart to go into a big bricks and mortar bookstore and still see an enormous wall of magazines. Even happier when the magazines feel thicker than they did a year or two ago...."

Featured Comment by Jan: "Not a comprehensive datapoint, but just came across this post called 'Magazines Suffer a Brutal First Half' after reading yours. Might create a chicken/egg situation. If the newsstand shrinks, so do sales and vice versa."

Country Music

And now for your delectation and delight, a country music song.

I am not your perfect host here. I admit to about equal-sized blind spots toward rap on the one hand and contemporary country music on the other. I do like some old-timey country, people like Roy Acuff and Jimmie Rodgers and Jimmy Martin and Mother Maybelle Carter and Bill Monroe and Patsy Cline. But contemporary country strikes me as mainstream pop-rock with a big sign on the door saying WHITE PEOPLE ONLY. I understand that a big part of living music is to define and delimit social groups, but as I've been listening to African-American acts since I discovered a Motown station on the radio in fourth grade, suppressing racial diversity among the musicians I listen to has never been a big concern.

(It has gotten me into trouble a few times. Back when I was in high school I remember walking into an all-black bar on North Avenue with a few friends, rationalizing that it was a liberal era, and we were all citizens, and if black people had a right to go anywhere they wanted to in public then we did too. I swear, before the bravest of my friends reached the end of bar nearest the door, the loud hubbub subsided to a hush, the music got turned off, and a deep, booming voice from somewhere back in the dark reaches of the bar said, "Boy, you got till I count to ten to get your white ass outta here." The last thing I personally heard was "Three....")

Thus I find myself in no position to judge whether this is a good country music song or not. Maybe some contemporary country aficionados will be so good as to step in and school us. I had never heard of the singer before John sent me this link.

I do fancy I can interpret lyric poetry at least competently, and it seems like the video producer's got the song a little wrong—it's not about colorizing old black-and-white photographs (or the music video itself); rather, the line "you shoulda seen it in color" is another way of saying "imagine what it was like in real life."

But, like I say, I don't know the codes.

Mike
(Thanks to John Camp)

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Featured Comment by JW: "Jamey Johnson's double album The Guitar Song is a remarkable country album which bears more resemblance to the good old days of Waylon, Willie, and Cash than any of the new 'country' out there. Truly one of the great acts out there, and from what I have heard, he puts on a superb live show. I was born about 15 years too late to see Waylon live in his prime, but I have seen Willie three times and hope to see Jamey soon. Can't stand the crap that passes as country these days, but there is some hope out there!"

Featured Comment by Henk Coetzee: "Your description of walking into the 'wrong' bar took me back to my student days. My ideas, ideals and activities during the dark days of the '80s in South Africa took me into what were at the time townships and homelands. My friends and I listened to a lot of music which certainly wasn't country. A few like black punk, township jive and even some jazz are good, if quite disparate examples. A lot of the great South African musicians like Abdullah Ibrahim, Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba were living in exile at the time. Imagine our surprise arriving in Gazankulu, a 'homeland' in the north-eastern part of South Africa and finding that country music was really big here. It's still surprisingly popular in Swaziland."

Mike replies: Stan B. sent me an astonishing set of links the other day that relates to that: Seems there was a folk singer-songwriter in Detroit who put out a couple of albums in the 1970s, one called "Cold Fact." They sank like stones in the U.S., so he quit music and became a day laborer for 30 years. Unbeknownst to him, his albums became legendary in South Africa, anthems of the anti-apartheid movement. (Maybe you've heard of him, Henk—Sixto Rodriguez.) But in South Africa it was accepted as fact that he was dead. 

Two South African journalists realized there were many conflicting stories about how he died, so they decided to find out the the truth:

After years of searching, the two journalists finally got in touch with the producer of Cold Fact.

"They call him and they are full of questions," says Bendjelloul. "They ask, 'How was the album made? And the most important thing: How did he die?' And he says, 'No, I saw Rodriguez this morning. He is living down the street!'"

There's a movie about it that's just out in the U.K. called Searching for Sugarman that I gotta see, somehow. Here's the trailer.

Featured Comment by gene lowinger: "I played fiddle with Bill Monroe in the '60s and have been playing bluegrass music for more than 50 years. Country music as you define it (Acuff, Rogers, Carter family, etc....) died when the big studios built new sound stages in Nashville back in the '60s. Since then the music that comes out of Nashville is just trashy songs about male hunks making up to sassy girls. That's what the folks who listen want to fantasize about themselves."

Three Very Important Photographs

Ever heard of Les Horribles Cernettes? You might not have, but they truly deserve a footnote in history. Or rather, this photograph of them does.

But before I tell you why, take a look at this picture:

What is it? The navel of the eponymous orange, taken with a '90s-era Xapshot? From mere appearances, you could be forgiven for thinking this is nothing special. Oh, but you would be wrong, nucleus-breath. This picture took five years to make.

It is the absolute smallest thing ever photographed. Professor Dave Kielpinski and a research team from Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, wanted to investigate how few atoms are required to cast a shadow—and they proved it.

So how many?

Just one.

That's right: this is a photograph of the shadow of a single atom. Just in case you needed something to blow your mind for today. Thanks to Steven Ralser for passing this along.

Photo by Charles O'Rear / Microsoft

Speaking of significant photographs, ever seen this before? Before yesterday, I honestly hadn't. I didn't recognize it. I had to ask Jeffrey Goggin, who sent it to me, what made it so special. (Some of you are chuckling.)

It was taken by American photographer Charles O'Rear, in Sonoma County, California. In most places it's titled "Bliss," but for Dutch Windows OS (or, as I type it, "Window SOS") users, it was called "Ireland," which is a fib.

The Next Web has some tasty details about it, including a surprising shot of the same scene ten years later and some clues about just how much Charles was paid for it.

Oh, and by the way, it was taken on film, and wasn't digitally manipulated.

So what about Les Horribles Cernettes? That happens to be—cue drum roll, please—the very first photograph ever published on the World Wide Web, twenty years and a few days ago.

Somehow, that seems perfect.

Abraham Riesman's great little article about it on Motherboard is a quick read, but also a "must-read" if you ask me. This history of photography, circa now. (Many readers passed along some version of this story—thanks to all of you.)

Mike

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Featured Comment by Rob: "I attended a class taught by Mr. O'Rear at Santa Fe Workshops a year or so after he sold the image. The class was lead to believe that he, or the stock company, was paid over six figures for the image and that delivery services would not ship the image due to its cost and that he had to deliver the original image to Microsoft headquarters himself. He did tell us that the images was as he shot it. He talked about how he went to great lengths to find these kind of unique images and that most he had found could not be replicated. This does not rule out Microsoft doing something to the image once they had it."

Featured Comment by Dave Van de Mark: "Yes, I had to laugh regarding the Windows 'Bliss' photo. As a custom PC builder and repair guy, I can't imagine how often I've see that image (even today). I had guessed it was part of the Palouse in eastern Washington instead of being close to where I live!"

Amen

Another great photography-related New Yorker cover this week. (Subscribers can opt for various electronic versions.)

The artist is Mark Ulriksen, whose other NY'er covers you can see here. I think my favorite is the dog with the ball, although I like a lot of his.

Mike
(Thanks to Peter Szawlowski)

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Featured Comment by Scott: "This cover really struck home, I am, amongst other things, a fully licensed commercial ship captain. I actually did a charter in the Caribbean last week with 16 guests all from one family. The number of photos I could have taken that replicated the above scene exactly were staggering."

Featured Comment by Elisabeth: "The optimist in me is imagining that everyone in the picture is a photo enthusiast, with the four subjects of the first photographer focused on taking artsy photos of the shadow in the sand. The teen on the right is just chimping so that he can perfect the shot on his next try. Then they will all pass around their mobile phones and enjoy a real family moment of bonding over their shared hobby. ;-) "

Featured Comment by Glenn Allenspach: "My wife's siblings are scattered about the U.S. these days, so they don't get together but about once a year any more. The last time the five siblings, their Mom, assorted husbands, wives, kids, etc. were all together there was also a birthday. After the birthday cake was carried into the room, Youngest Sister announced to the gathering, 'I just took a picture of the cake and posted it on Facebook!' And they all whipped out their cell phones to look...."

Featured Comment by S. Tammik: "I agree with many of you, that the cover is beautifully designed and effectively communicates an erie message, that an alarming number of us can relate to. For even more critical analysis on the notion that we need to consider not only what technology does for us, but also what its doing to us, I recommend checking out MIT professor Sherry Turkle's recent TED talk and book. She provides great insight into her ideas about how we are 'alone together.'"

Featured Comment by Doug Reilly: "My day job involves sending college students to study in different countries. This cover encapsulates our worst fear, which is that mobile internet means nobody is ever anywhere really."

Featured Comment by lith: "I took a break from university from 2008–2010...the years the iPhone took off in Oz.

"Before, you could wander the quads and halls of QUT, and chat with other random students. Now, in this 'smartphone' era—not a bloody chance.

"Everyone's got earphones in and their iPhone out, oblivious. Attempting conversation is fruitless—there's only one fruit they're worried about. Any attempt is met with a death stare. How dare you interrupt their game of Angry Birds or their Facebooking?

"I try to appreciate the alarming irony—in the age of 'social' media, we've become more antisocial than ever. It's a forest-for-the-trees moment: 'No, I don't want to talk to you face-to-face; I'm trying to impress this person in Peru I've never met before.'

"The most disturbing thing I see is that social media isn't an evolution of socialising, but rather simply the commodification of something we used to do naturally, for free."

Old Newspaper Archives

A man reads a newspaper on New York's 6th Ave. and 40th St., with the headline: "Nazi Army Now 75 Miles From Paris," on May 18, 1940.
(AP Photo/Courtesy NYC Municipal Archives)

The estimable Alan Taylor at The Atlantic's InFocus has curated another small selection from the 870,000 images from New York City's Municipal Archive, including several previously unseen shots by Eugene de Salinac. Note #26, which is creepy yet has a curious bit of photo-tech interest, too.

There's a second set here.

Speaking of old news photos, there's a seller on eBay who is dispersing some newspaper archives. On a whim I just bought this one, a photo from 1957 called "Car in which Salvatore Moretti, Chicago policeman, was found slain near Joliet." I had no press photos in my collection.

The company claims to be putting up 15,000 old press images a week for auction, which is a little horrifying in its implications (sign of the times). But whatever.

(The JPEG has the seller's watermarks on it, obviously.)

Mike

UPDATE: Turns out there's a known story behind my random eBay find. Sal Moretti was an ex-policeman turned hitman who bungled a mob hit—he carelessly left valuables and papers on his victim's corpse, including a receipt that tied a mob boss to the killing. When his body was found in the trunk of this car, all of his possessions except his comb had been taken, his pockets had been turned inside out, and even the labels of his clothes were cut out. This was apparently a message to other mob hitmen: be more careful about what you leave behind. Moretti's murder allegedly made other hitmen so nervous that several subsequent victims of mob murders were found with all their clothing removed.

The car in the picture, which had been stolen, was found in Joliet presumably because at the time of Moretti's murder his brother was serving time in prison there.

The full story (much, much fuller) is here. Thanks to Andy Kowalczyk for the link.

The man in the picture is a Joliet Sheriff named Roy Doerfaer or Doerfler.

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Featured Comment by Andrew: "It's amazing how many images have been put up for sale on the Internet. Some images are available as a single print, other images have multiple prints available—although the sellers generally don't tell you how many copies they have. I've bought a few, and I've seen a couple re-listed again—in each case they are all original prints, on single weight fibre based paper, usually with a Roneo'd (copied) description of the photo stuck to the back. For the price they are a great way to collect original, interesting photographs, and at the same time preserve some history...."

Set Those Expectations Low

Something that occurred to me as I've read up on street photography over the past few days: it sure is a hard way to make a living.

If photography is like writing—a few people make it pay, others just love doing it—then street photography is more like poetry. You'd better enjoy doing it and get personal satisfaction from the results, because it's never going to make you rich or famous.

At least if you make Photoshopped portraits, gauzy idealized landscapes, or do weddings, there are people who will pay for that. Street photos? Not so much.

Photography in general is like the rocks on the lee shore: it takes the ambitious, munches them up, and sends them to the bottom. The only difference is that, even in the days of sail, the perilous shoals didn't claim so many victims. Most ambitious photographers I know work hard at it for a few years, then assess their success along with their conspicuous lack of recognition and wealth, and move on to making a living at something more sensible.

That's why I typically recommend that people keep their day jobs and remain amateurs at photography. Photography is a superb hobby, one of the best. It's when you try to make a living at it that it is so likely to resist you.

I don't think other hobbies have this problem. I mean, consider, say, fly-fishing, or building plastic model planes. Very few people who do those things—or most other hobbies—assume they're going to "go pro" someday. Very few people try. It doesn't generally come up.

"Wow, that's a really amazing Revell-Monogram Bf 110G-2 you've built." "Yes, thanks, actually I've been thinking about turning pro." "You've backpacked to the top of Mount Hood six times? You should try making a living at that."

There sure are some great street photographers out there—more than I'd realized. Street photography isn't easy. It takes a particular knack, as well as time and devotion. To say I'm impressed is a big understatement. There's lots of talent out there.

But if you want to be famous, or if you plan to make a living...well, try poetry. It should be easier.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Stan B.: "Although street photography has been enjoying somewhat of a revival of late (mostly online), not only will you not make money at it—you generally won't get much recognition from the art market. Galleries usually look down on the stuff—it's been done; too yesterday; the 'seventies revival' is over. It's kinda like what I imagine the world is like for jazz aficianados."

Featured Comment by Dave: "You think it's tough to be a street photographer alone, try doing that and poetry! I've learned to love ramen!"

Featured Comment by Miserere: "When people (friends, friends-of-friends, family...) see my photos they often say 'these are great! You should go professional!' To which I reply. 'you're right, I'm going professional this very moment; please pay me $500 for this print you liked so much.'

"I always get a blank stare.

"I then proceed to explain that to be a professional street photographer I would need to sell 8 prints for $500 each month in order to make a living in my area of the country. They don't realise that 'being a pro' means other people, just like them, need to cough up money to sustain me in my 'proness.' My little act really brings it home to them.

"I think I've played this out on most of my family and friends by now so they know not to tell me I should go pro anymore when they see some new photos they like. I really appreciate it too as it had long since stopped sounding like a compliment."

Featured Comment by Maggie Osterberg: "Once again, I'm reminded how much being a photographer is like being a musician or songwriter. (Two things that have a lot of overlap, I've noticed—many musicians are passionate photographers and vice versa.) So much that this quote from Robert Fripp could apply to your post:

The business of the amateur musician is music. The business of the professional musician is business.

"When I was in my 20s, I raced bicycles. When I needed more cash to keep up my gear, I took a job wrenching at a bike shop and after a year of working on other people's bikes, I never wanted to wrench on another bike again.

"The best way to ruin a perfectly good hobby? Have someone pay you to do it.

"Unless they're paying you to do your own thing and only your own thing, in that case, you're one of the lucky ones. You're HCB or Bono or Thom Yorke or Irving Penn.  Or maybe you teach and make art photos, like Minor White or David Goldes.  But most of us will just soldier on, without patron nor employer, making photos or art or music, just because we have to."

(Weekend) Update

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Does DxOMark Matter?

After yesterday's post, Ed Grossman wrote:

I wonder what the DxO scores for the cameras that shot the evenly illuminated, richly detailed vintage images at shorpy.com would be? [...] Makes me wonder how valuable those scores are in a majority of imaging scenarios. I'm thinking, 'not really that much.'

There are a couple of things to understand about this, I think. To begin with, it's important to understand that, roughly speaking, the entire history of photographic techniques, with a couple of important sidesteps, has been a steady march toward greater convenience, not greater quality. (The one really big sidestep was the advent of practical color, which was indeed a qualitative evolution. But we'll leave that aside for now.) Cameras got smaller, chemicals got less toxic, glass plates were done away with, processing got automated, lenses got faster, films got faster and less grainy, and so on. As this progression went on, new kinds of photographs were enabled by each new increment of technology: from the head-clamps of the 1840s to the stop-motion of Lartigue; Capa hiding a Leica under his coat to take a surreptitious picture of Leon Trotsky lecturing, obviously not something that would be possible with a stand camera; Erich Salomon taking candids of politicians in "smoke-filled rooms" with his Ermanox; ordinary civilians sending their Kodaks back to the factory to have the negatives processed and the film reloaded, and so forth. In that sense the march to greater convenience also made a qualitative difference in pictures.  But from a purely technical standpoint, the main or primary (note: not the only) driving force of progress has always been convenience, not quality.

The next thing to understand is that the culture of digital has been quite different than that of film before it. Three aspects of this strike me as important. One, digital imaging was driven early on mainly by non-photographers, or at least people who needed little inculcation and training in the guild secrets of an old craft. The drivers of digital were computer people, in the main, not even primarily photographers in the traditional sense—most photographers went along in self-defense, starting with staff news photographers who had to learn to use pool digital cameras. Certainly, far more people are "digital imagers" now than the number of people who would have considered themselves "photographers" when I got into photography in 1980. Two, early digital was insufficient. In at least one of two ways. Either the technology was accessible and the image quality was insufficient (the first digital camera I used, an Agfa, in 1997, had 780,000 pixels, and the technology to make prints at home wasn't really there), or the image quality was sufficient but breathtakingly expensive (the 6.2 megapixel Kodak DCS460 of March 1995 had a list price of $35,600). So the early years of digital were consumed with an anxious search for adequate, affordable quality—resulting in habits of mind which have definitely continued to now: some photographers virtually center their hobby around exhaustive comparisons and evaluations of image quality, even now that it's no longer necessary to do so. Many of you remember how much we were consumed in the first five years of the present millennium with the question of whether digital could, or had, matched the quality of film—not a question anybody cares about any more. Three, the swift shift away from printmaking and toward online viewing of pictures has been accompanied by what Michael Reichmann famously dubbed "pixel-peeping"—it's as if even the most casual hobbyist has suddenly been visited with the ability to do the digital equivalent of looking at negatives under a microscope. Really, only dedicated photo-tech researchers (amateur and professional, few in number in any case) were doing in 1980 what anyone can do now on their computer screen with the click of a button.

This has resulted in a whole generation of photographers who have been constantly reinforced in the notion that "image quality" is an essential building-block of a successful photograph. Actually, it isn't. Actually, it isn't at all. One can find examples of anything, and I'm sure you can find examples of photographs that "work" primarily because of resolution or color accuracy, but most simply don't. You could also find examples of just as many photographs, if not more, that work primarily because of poor image quality or lower resolution or color inaccuracy.

You just don't get any "points" for using the camera with the best sensor at a given point of technological development. Nor do you have any points taken away for not having the absolute latest and greatest and best, assuming what you have is adequate for what you're trying to do. As an example...imagine you could identify the single photographer who was using the absolutely optimal available consumer digital technique for, say (picking a date out of a hat), October 2003. Is that enough by itself to commend his pictures to our attention now?

But that by itself doesn't mean that keeping apprised the current state of sensor technology isn't interesting, or that people "shouldn't" be interested in it.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Nicholas Condon: "I spent a couple of hours at the Corcoran Gallery today, much of it looking at the work of graduating students. There were several photographers whose work did little for me, a couple that I liked very well, and one (whose name has already escaped me, dammit) whose half-dozen prints were absolutely amazing. I don't know how the photos were taken, processed, or printed; it wasn't marked. If I think back on them, I could say that whatever was used produced images with excellent detail, minimal grain or noise, and plenty of dynamic range. More 'image quality' would not have made them any better, but less resolution or dynamic range would have started to hurt them at some point. The photographer had obtained sufficient equipment and sufficient technical expertise for the job at the hand; she need not spend any more time worrying about such matters.

"Could I have made these photos with my (not so expensive or cutting edge) cameras and lenses? Well, I'm sure my equipment could manage the job, but the photographer needs some significant upgrades...."

Mike replies: Cool. My alma mater. I was in that show myself once....

Every time I write about this, a few people make the mistake of thinking I'm saying that technique doesn't matter. That is not what I'm saying at all. (In fact, I've never said that.) I'm saying "image quality" by itself is not enough to make a photograph work. Which is, I think, indisputable. I'm also saying that some photographs work better with what's generally considered "poor" technique than they would work with what's generally considered "good" technique—and I think that's indisputable as well. Neither of those statements is the same thing at all as saying that technique or image quality doesn't matter. The technical properties of an image and its appropriateness to what's being shown or expressed or reported or recorded are often an important part of the picture and its message.

All the Photographs from the 19th Century

In this still-interesting 1000memories post, the astonishing assertion is made that today, humanity takes as many photographs every two minutes as were made in the entire 19th century.

Even if the datum is off by half or double (1 minutes, four minutes), or more, it's still a really amazing notion.

Mike
(Thanks to Stan)

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Help Send Carl West!

It's the twilight of the all-American drive-in theater. Photo by Carl Weese.

Our friend Carl Weese, who has written numerous posts and articles for you here on TOP, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to help him fund the final leg of his drive-in theater travels before it's too late. You probably recall that one of Carl's pictures in our Platinum Print Offer from back in 2010 was of a drive-in movie theater, and that Carl's drive-ins had, at that time, just been featured on the New York Times Lens blog.

For years, Carl's been documenting the remaining drive-in theaters in the East and Midwest, often making epic trips in his little truck that keep him away from home for weeks on end. He's made it as far west as Montana. Well, also for years, he has intended to make one giant swing out to the West Coast and through the areas of the country that are least accessible from his home in Connecticut in order to document many of the drive-ins out there. It's the last piece of the puzzle he needs to finish up the long-term project he's been working on for ten years. Before now, knowing that it's going to be a big, long, hard task, he's put off that last leg.

But now, he can't wait any longer. The reason is that theaters are being forced to make the switch to digital projection. That works fine for year-round, indoor theaters, but drive-ins are a seasonal business, often run on a shoestring. Most of the still-surviving drive-ins just won't be able to justify the huge expense of converting to digital. Many also make ends meet by showing older, classic movies that are only available on film. Drive-ins have been in decline for years, but chances are that digital is all but the death knell.

So the time has come for Carl: it's now or never. A scant few years from now, many of the surviving drive-ins all over the West Coast will have closed their gates for good. Carl does photograph abandoned, overgrown drive-ins, but he'd rather not photograph ruins. He'd rather photograph as many as he can while they're still going concerns. A big part of the eventual book is going to consist of the people who own and run the theaters (a lot of whom are, shall we say, colorful) telling their own stories. (Carl says, "There's no such thing as a boring drive-in theater owner.")

Carl is very good at traveling light and cheap (well, okay—not light), but the trip's going to cost a heap. He plans to make a giant figure-8 loop to hit not just the west coast itself, but the southwest on the way out and the central corridor on the return. The trip will keep him out on the road for six weeks. If you can, head over to Kickstarter and allow him to make his pitch—there's a short video as well as the same information in writing. (Maybe it's me, but I just like the video too.)

Take a look and see what you think. Even a small donation helps a lot. Help send Weese west!

Mike

UPDATE: I'm happy to report that Carl's project was 100% funded in a little less than 21 hours. Don't be reticent about making a contribution if you haven't already, however—the rewards will go to everyone who wants them and Carl has said that all of the money raised will be put towards the project. Congrats to Carl and thanks to everyone who helped!

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

Featured Comment by Jesper Lauritsen: "The Pike print is one of my favorites in my little print collection. I just love it! Of course I am backing this Kickstarter project!"

Featured Comment by Rod Graham: "I grew up in NW Arkansas. When I was a kid we'd go to the Hwy 71 Drive-In Theater, halfway between Fayetteville and Springdale, with a big bag of popcorn made at home beforehand. Had some of my first dates there as a teenager (yes!). I'm now 61 years old and for the last twenty years that beloved piece of ground has had a Walmart Supercenter sitting on it. Yes, I'm in Carl; good hunting!"

World's Best Bus Art

We've seen some really very creative "busvertising" but I think this Dec. 2009 effort gets the palm—by Denmark's Bates Y&R agency for the Copenhagen Zoo, from Coloribus via Andrew Sullivan. The Creative Director was Ib Borup and Peder Schack was the A.D.

I think I know people who wouldn't get on this bus.

Mike
(Thanks to Bob Burnett)

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Featured Comment by Rick Bennett: "You can count me amongst people who wouldn't get on that bus. Well, maybe if I was in a tight squeeze."

Featured Comment by Eolake Stobblehouse: "As a Dane, I can tell that Copenhagen has a nice tradition for bus art. Years ago they had a series of busses which were not even commercial, but were painted by commissioned fine arts painters, some were great."

A Sign of the Times

This seems apropos, given the very entertaining shenanigans at the soon-to-be-ex Kodak Theater in Hollywood last night. Intelligent Life, a satellite of The Economist, actually published a picture of a movie star on its March/April cover...that had no Photoshop retouching done on it. Very daring, and a great rarity in this day and age—so much so that Editor Tim de Lisle wrote a blog post about it (his comment about the fragrance is exquisite—I loved that).

It is a "curious sign of the times" that a photograph could be unusual for being just a photograph, isn't it? Looks like there's intelligent life at Intelligent Life.

Steve Forrest was the photographer. Graham Black is the Art Director at IL.

Mike
(Thanks to Mark Scholey, Graham Black, and Tim de Lisle)

And a P.S.: Congratulations, France!

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Featured Comment by Simon: "Intelligent Life—I love it. Great content, one of the few magazines still worth buying, and one of the few editorial outlets that really treats contributors well. Not a coincidence in my humble opinion."

'Believing Is Seeing' by Errol Morris: Book Review

By John Camp

Believing Is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography) by Errol Morris (Penguin Press*, 2011)
At Amazon U.K.
At The Book Depository

This is possibly the most astonishing photography book I’ve ever read, and in a number of different ways. If you are particularly interested in looking at good photos, however, this may not be the book for you, because it does not contain many good photos.

Most of the photos it does contain are reproduced as small images, and the reproduction quality is not high. Those few that are large have gutters running through them. Most of the originals are not very good, either. One, a Walker Evans, is arguably great—but what you are shown, large, is a severe crop...with a gutter running through it.

Nevertheless...

Regular readers of TOP are probably somewhat familiar with Morris, whose work has been discussed here before.

Inspired by two sentences in a Susan Sontag book, Morris set off to investigate whether or not the British photographer Roger Fenton staged a photograph he took during the Crimean War (1853–56.) His conclusion is complicated, and I won’t get too deeply into it here.

Suffice to say that in contemporary terms, Fenton most likely staged a photograph—but that neither he nor his contemporary audience would have thought so. He produced a photograph that reflected a particular situation, but he had to move a bunch of cannonballs to do that. He was so innocent of our contemporary attitude that he took two photos of the same scene, a few hours apart, one showing cannonballs and one not, and displayed and published both of them.

Our contemporary view is somewhat different, as a longtime, award-winning Sacramento Bee photographer found out a few days ago. He was fired because he manipulated a photograph of one bird trying to take a frog away from another bird.

I suspect Fenton would have been appalled. Accuracy, he might have argued, is one thing. “Truth” is something else.

So is human charity, which is pretty goddamn short in the newspaper business if you ask me.

As interesting as the Fenton investigation is, it was, for me, the least interesting of Morris’s investigative essays. And, I would add, his investigative technique, for a photo geek like myself, is nearly as interesting as the content of the essays. But not quite as interesting.

The four sections of this book are entitled “Crimean War Essay (Intentions of the Photographer),” “Abu Ghraib Essays (Photographs Reveal and Conceal),” “Photography and Reality (Captioning, Propaganda, and Fraud),” and “Civil War (Photography and Memory).”

Morris really likes parentheses.

Of the latter two essays, the first discusses whether or not Walker Evans manipulated the contents inside a sharecropper’s house to conform to his fairly developed sense of aesthetics; this was hard to decide, and the best we can come up with is, “He may have.”** This essay then meanders into the question of whether or not the FSA photos taken during the Depression functioned as documentation or propaganda, and winds up with an investigation of photos taken during the Israeli-Lebanese war, published by the Reuters news service.

The other essay is about a photograph found grasped in the hand of an unidentifiable dead soldier after the battle of Gettsyburg during the American Civil War. The photo was of three children, and may have been the last thing the dying soldier saw. The photo sparked a nationwide search for the soldier’s wife and children, based on a close investigation of the photo’s content by newspapers all over the country. The search was successful, and the wife and children were found. An interesting and astonishing story, given the media limitations of the time (the photo had to be described, rather than reprinted, in the newspapers.)

But the investigation that really blew my socks off was into the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse photos from the war in Iraq. The first section of this is entitled, “Will the Real Hooded Man Stand Up?”

In the West, the most famous symbol of the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison was a photo of a man standing on a box with a pointed hood covering his head, and with electric wires running under a poncho-like garment that he was wearing.

The New York Times ran a front-page story about the hooded man, with a large photo of the man holding a photo of himself standing on the box, with the hood, etc. The headline said, “Symbol of Abu Ghraib Seeks to Spare Others His Nightmare.”

Well, guess what? It ain’t that man under there.

Though he even had the photo printed on his business card, the guy in the hood was somebody else. The proof? Right there in the hooded-man photo: his hand. The man The Times did the story about was in the prison, may have been tortured, but was known as “The Claw” for a mangled hand he suffered when an antique rifle exploded during a wedding party some years earlier. The hooded man’s hands, which were plainly visible, were not mangled.

In fact, to this day, nobody knows who the hooded man was, or if he’s still alive.

Even more interesting, though, was Morris’ investigation of a photo taken of a pretty blond American soldier, Sabrina Harman, who worked at the prison. In a photo that Morris says is much more famous in the Middle East, Harman is shown bending over a dead man, flashing a big smile at the camera and giving a “thumbs up.”

The photo absolutely convicts Harman of...what?

That’s what catches Morris’ interest. He investigates in depth, and among other things (not all of which he discovered himself), he finds that Harman was not amused or happy about the dead man, and that she deliberately took photos so that might have been used in evidence for a murder, when nobody else would do that. They were, he said, evidentiary photos, not photos taken for amusement.

He reproduces letters that Harman wrote to her “wife”—Harman is gay—in which she essentially condemns the Army and the way the prison was run. “We might be under investigation. I’m not sure, there’s talk about it. Yes, they do beat the prisoners up and I’ve written this to you before. I just don’t think it’s right and never have. That’s why I take the pictures—to prove the stories I tell people. No one would ever believe the shit that goes on. No one. The dead guy didn’t bother me, even took a picture with him doing the thumbs-up.” A bit later in the letter, “If I want to keep taking pictures of those events—I even have short films—I have to fake a smile every time.”

Of course, much of what Harman wrote could be seen as self-serving, produced by a woman who saw trouble on the horizon.

But, in Morris’ investigation (he always takes things to extremes) he contacted a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California who was an expert on facial expressions.

The psychologist, Paul Ekman, says Harman was showing a “Say cheese smile” which has nothing to do with pleasure or enjoyment. It is a very specific expression, which he says is well-known to experts. It’s essentially a forced smile, aimed specifically at cameras, and says nothing about the thoughts or feelings of the person behind it. In other words, whatever Harman felt, she wasn’t showing pleasure when the picture was snapped—a photo which led directly to a New York Post headline that said, “The ghoul next door was jail abuse fotog.”

And so on. You really have to read the essay to get the full impact of Morris’ investigation, but one thing is clear—the CIA or some similar black agency committed a murder in the prison, and got away with it, mostly by convicting a bunch of bottom-end soldiers (who were, indeed, guilty of abuse) and convincing the world that justice had been done.

If you believe Morris, it hadn’t been—not even close.

And I believe Morris.

What I’ve just written is a sample of a fascinating book (for those fascinated by such things, anyway.) Believing Is Seeing contains much more, including, somewhat to my pleasure, what I see as proof that Reuters knowingly distributes anti-Israeli propaganda photography.

And the book demonstrates clearly that much too often, “believing is seeing,” but shouldn’t be.

John

*I write books published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, which is owned by Penguin.

**In a conversation I had Thursday with the well-known photojournalist David Burnett, he quoted Arnold Newman as saying, “Five percent of photography is inspiration, 95 percent is moving furniture.” I thought I might steal this quote in discussing the Walker Evans essay (Evans may have moved furniture) but decided I wanted to get the exact wording of what Newman said. When I looked online, I found that not only was Newman cited, but so were several other photographers—and several photographers made the same quip in direct interviews, and were credited with it by the writers....

John Camp is a bestselling book author who writes thrillers under the nom de plume John Sandford. He was formerly a Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter.

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Featured Comment by MM: "I appreciate this review and don't want to sidetrack talk about Morris's book, but (with regard to the Sacramento Bee incident) I'm curious how many photographs the reviewer thinks an experienced photojournalist should be allowed to doctor at the expense of his employer's credibility before he gets a pink slip. Two photos? Three? Would it be cynical for the newspaper to assume that the time the photographer was caught was not the only time he had ever submitted a doctored photo, or to assume that if he hadn't been caught he might have done it again?

"As Morris makes clear, notions of 'truth' in photography are elusive at best; that ambiguity is inherent in any representational medium. But let's be honest: most sentient adults are aware that every photo is at best only a representation of 'the thing itself'—in fact, even a small child knows that a photograph of an ice-cream cone is not the same as the ice-cream cone itself. From firsthand experience (their own snapshots) members of the general public know that photos are cropped, and are taken from only one of many possible angles, and that timing and lens choice and other decisions are all highly subjective. That knowledge is part of the public's 'photographic literacy,' the set of mental tools that citizens of the developed world rely on for reading photographs. They are tools every sighted member of the general public has honed from viewing literally millions of photographs (hundreds of photographs a day, in all kinds of contexts, for thousands of days).

"But those tools cannot be used by viewers to 'read' a photograph when a photograph that looks undoctored and is presented as undoctored is in fact doctored (and while the definition of 'undoctored' varies greatly, I've never heard one that allowed for this example). A deliberate attempt by a photojournalist to portray a scene that the camera did not record falls into a different category than 'general ambiguity of the medium,' it seems to me. The fact that every photograph can have multiple interpretations does not relieve news providers of their obligation to leave reportage photos undoctored so that readers might have a fighting chance of reasonably interpreting those photos.

"The Sacramento Bee's punishment (dismissal of the photographer) may seem harsh to those who have not worked in journalism, but every photojournalist knows the rules going in and is reminded of them constantly (John Camp tried his hand at photojournalism, didn't he?). Newspapers in the Internet age have no unique commodity to offer besides public trust, the loss of which would put them out of business entirely. That's why reader trust is a precious asset of which newspapers must be as protective as possible—charity be damned. Call me naive, but given a choice I'll read the newspapers that have a zero-tolerance policy on the doctoring of reportage photos, thank you very much."

Context and Significance

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Here's what the old guy who took this picture told me about it: "This guy was the worst a**hole client I ever had! He made my life miserable from start to finish and to add insult to injury, shorted me on my bill! Unbelievable. But I owe him backhanded thanks, because he was the last straw—after I was rid of him, I quit photography in despair and founded the firm that made me a millionaire."

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Portrait of my beloved uncle, who raised me. After his death, I realized this anonymous executive portrait of him taken by his company was the only portrait of him I had. I will always treasure this picture.

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Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago

Ansel Easton Adams
American, 1902–1984

Portrait of Sigurd Varian, 1953

Gelatin silver print
32.4 x 26.7 cm
Signed and mounted on board
Gift of Robert L. Meyer, 1988.394.2

© The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.

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Last Tuesday, I met Michael McCaskey, Ken Tanaka, and the head of the photo department, Matt Witkovsky, and several other curators at the AIC for a private viewing of some prints from the Institute's collection—mainly Ansel Adams prints, which Michael wanted to see. Ken, a longtime TOP reader whom I've befriended, volunteers at the museum regularly, and he had pulled the prints prior to our arrival.

It was the first time I'd ever gotten to see different vintages of "Moonrise" side-by-side, although I've seen comparisons in books. Very instructive. Matt also put up a number of Westons, including some prints made by Weston himself, which were stunning. He also pulled some 19th-century salt prints, including an amazing huge one made in 1850 by a photographer whose name I can't recall.

We were speculating about this one by Adams—was this somebody Ansel knew, or was it a commercial portrait he did for pay? About all I could comment on were the fellow's extraordarily bushy eyebrows, rendered a little too vividly by Ansel's sharp lens and sheet film.

We met in the Viewing Room of the AIC, which is open to anyone by appointment. "There are a few guidelines," Matt explains. "Specific pictures must be chosen by you in advance, and several weeks' notice is required. Visits should be an hour or less, and there is a limit on the number of visitors in the group. Sadly, we can't offer free admission, but there is reduced price entry for students and some other constituencies."

Ken and I are thinking of organizing a small TOP gathering later in the year to look at and talk about a selection of the museum's masterpieces.

As you can imagine if you've ever seen original Ansel Adams prints, this small JPEG doesn't really do the print much justice.

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Sigurd Fergus Varian (May 4, 1901 – October 18, 1961), with his brother Russell, founded one of the earliest high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. Born to theosophist Irish-immigrant parents who helped lead the utopian community of Halcyon, California, the brothers grew up in a household surrounded with artistic influences, and showed an early interest in electricity. After early careers in electronics and aviation, they came together to invent the klystron, which became a critical component of radar, telecommunications and other microwave technologies.

In 1948 they founded Varian Associates to market the klystron and other inventions, and went on to become the first firm to locate in Stanford Industrial Park, the birthplace of Silicon Valley. Russell was a lifelong supporter of the Sierra Club and Sigurd helped found the progressive housing cooperative of Ladera. Both were noted for their progressive political views, and Varian Associates had innovative employee policies that were ahead of their time. They "pioneered profit-sharing, stock-ownership, insurance, and retirement plans for employees long before these benefits became mandatory," according to the Silicon Valley Engineering Council. In 1950, the Varians were awarded the John Price Wetherill Medal for the development of the klystron, and were both inducted into the Silicon Valley Engineering Council Hall of Fame in 1993. [Source: Wikipdia, mod. auct.]

So this is a portrait of an authentic silicon valley pioneer, and an important scientist.

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It's also a picture of the photographer's friend. Sigurd Varian was introduced to Ansel Adams—the two were close to the same age—through the composer Henry Cowell, who befriended Sigurd's brother Russell in 1911. Cowell was later Ansel's music tutor. Ansel became friends with the Varian family; Russell, Sigurd, and Ansel all knew each other through their activities with the Sierra Club, and Russell and Ansel were hiking companions for many years.

Both brothers died before their time—Russell from a heart attack while hiking in Alaska in 1959, and the subject of this portrait, Sigurd, when he crashed his private plane near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico in 1961.

There is a companion portrait of Russell Varian by Adams in the AIC collection, which we also saw on Tuesday.

•     •     •

So then. The picture at the very top is the way Ctein likes to look at pictures, without verbal support. This post is a "riposte" to that, but not a counterargument necessarily: Ctein's way is still valid. You might still legitimately wish to look at all pictures—even this one, even knowing what you now know about it—without words to sway you.

Maybe the first two "captions" even demonstrate one reason why. They are of course fake, intended merely to illustrate Gisele Freund's contention that the meaning of a photograph can easily be changed by changing the caption (and this shows, too, how controlling the presentation of context can be a creative option for the photographer. Note also that both could at least potentially be true simultaneously, which is often the case with even wildly different captions). The third, not fake, is the real catalog entry from the AIC's digital collections online, from which you learn the identity of the photographer and the name of the subject. The fourth tells you where and how I encountered the picture. In the fifth you learn a bit about who the person in the photograph was; and in the last, something about his relationship to the photographer, which tells us a little about a crucial question that attends the backstory of any photograph: why did the person who took the picture take it? What was it to them?

So now you know a little about that photograph. More than you knew at the top of the page. Not nearly all there is to know. And, unless you happen to have encountered the print yourself, you haven't even seen the photograph yet...just a little thumbnail JPEG on your computer screen. (Or, more precisely, seven of them!)

For a more in-depth inquiry into the context, significance, and meaning of one photograph, consider Errol Morris's "Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?" published in three parts in The New York Times in 2007. He wanted to answer a few simple questions about two old photographs.

The point is that virtually every comprehensible photograph has these kinds of facts in back of it. These facts might be trivial or mundane; they might be unknown or not recoverable; you might want to know them, or you might not; and they represent just one "mode of approach" to a photograph. But they are there.

Or, you could just look at the guy's absurdly bushy eyebrows and shrug and wonder who the hell he might have been, like I did when I first saw the print last Tuesday.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Stan B.: "There are pictures I definitely want to know so much more about, and those I'm perfectly happy to just look at—but I always want to have the choice."

Featured Comment by RobR: "I agree completely with that, Mike. While there are certainly photographs that can stand alone an be valued, even the most iconic of them gain depth when words provide context. In my gallery, I encourage photographers to put a story-more than a caption-with pictures. Viewers always respond positively to that addition. One of the first shows I had taught me that. Take a look at these powerful portraits and read the paragraph that accompanies them. The addition makes a world of difference."

Featured [partial] Comment by Greg Bolarsky: "I can honestly say the captions didn't change my 'eh' response one bit. Ansel did many portraits and most of them were unremarkable. This is no different, regardless of the importance of the subject. The extra information makes me think about the man in the portrait, not the portrait."

Featured Comment by Jordan: "The Varian name will be familiar to anyone with college-level chemistry training—the Varian company made one of the first turn-key nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers, easy enough to learn that students could use them with minimal training. They are still one of the largest NMR spectrometer companies in the world—these things are daily tools for research chemists."

Featured [partial] Comment by Jeff: With regard to seeing original prints, I hope your readers are aware of the many ways to do this. You mention AIC and its viewing room. I can attest that there are many well-regarded museums around the country that are all too happy to grant access to their photo archives. A call to the photo curator will provide information on  the museum's policies. Curators are sometimes delighted to find someone interested in seeing the works of photographers whom the curator also admires. These photographs, like much of the the museum's collection, rarely get shown otherwise to the public. My most recent such visit to the Baltimore Museum of Art led to seeing some marvelous vintage Paul Strand prints; the quality of one in particular just knocked me out.

"But there are many other avenues besides museums. Just about every well known photographer has galleries and dealers who specialize in their prints. If one doesn't know these dealers, one way to meet many of them is to attend the annual AIPAD exhibition in New York. This year's show is March 29 to April 1. Another photo and art show occurs simultaneously in New York, this year on March 31 at the Lighthouse. While in New York, this is a good time to see the auction previews at Christie's, Sotheby's and Swann, which happen in advance of the auctions the following week.

"Other parts of the country also have wonderful access to vintage prints. In Tucson, Arizona, for instance, there is the Center for Creative Photography (CCP), which retains the archives from many photography greats, including Adams, Weston, Callahan, Winogrand and many more. Visitors can put on white gloves and handle vintage prints that would command a small fortune at auction.

"For folks serious about keeping up with the latest exhibits, auctions, dealer news, and so forth, subscribing to The Photograph Collector for $150 per year is a worthwhile expense."

Featured Comment by John Williams: "This is an image I see every time I enter the lobby of my employer Communications & Power Industries who were spun off from Varian Industries some ten to fifteen years ago. I happily discovered Sigurd and Russel's photos in Ansel Adams: An Autobiography. Ansel really enjoyed this 'mad scientist' assignment given to him by LIFE magazine. He referred to the Varian brothers as large, charmingly homely men. Their klystrons (with some refinement) are still being built today, and very likely if you watch satellite television the signal you receive has been sent up to the satellite via one of their devices or an offspring."

PX PLZ*

Notice anything missing? Read on for the answer.

By Ctein

I'm of the persuasion that feels that most decent art is capable of speaking for itself. With occasional exceptions—and there are always exceptions—I think that work that cannot be understood in its own vernacular is not successful work.

Photographs are, for the most part, meant to be looked at. If I can't appreciate it without knowing journalism's "5 Ws"—who, what, where, when, why, and how—it's likely not a particularly good photograph (of course, tautologically, photojournalism and narratives cannot be held to such stricture). The most common sin I find photographers committing when they present their work is talking over it.

I belong to a small circle of photographers who, about once a quarter, have a "print potluck." Everybody brings a dinner dish and up to 10 prints. It's a great motivator to force us off our duffs and actually make new prints. The work varies from better-than-decent to breathtaking; the group's coordinator does work that is stunning (and I would introduce you folks to it if he would ever get a friggin' website up, and yes, I'm talking about you, R.A.).

Still, everyone talks over their work. It's not just that they don't have enough confidence in their work to let it stand on its own 3-legged easel. I find it genuinely distracting. I want to concentrate on the photograph, thank you.

Those of you who know me will be astonished to learn that I, by careful and conscious effort, am by far the most taciturn of the presenters. Saying close to nothing when showing my work gets people's attention directed at the work. I wish more photographers were like me.

Which brings me to Pier 24 in San Francisco. Like so many photography museums, this was created by one man, Andy Pilara, to house his collection. It hosts long-running shows (six months or more) featuring work from his collection and from other major collections. It springs from the typical collectors' problem: if you are serious about collecting art, you will quickly exceed the capacity of your house. And if you're a really rich collector, you typically solve this problem by endowing a museum to build a wing to house your collection, or you build your own museum.

In other respects, this is far from a typical photography museum. It is free to the public, an unfortunate rarity in the United States these days. All you need is an appointment. Its doors are never open to walk-ins. Entry is by reservation only, during the operating hours of the museum (roughly 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Thursday).

You make your reservation up to 30 days in advance, for a specific day and two-hour block of time. You will not be admitted early. You may not stay late. An attendant will come looking for you a few minutes before your allotted time has expired. They will find you, even though the museum has something like 27,000 ft. of exhibition space and two-dozen-odd galleries. That is because Pier 24 admits no more than 20 people at one time!

Most of the time you'll have an entire gallery to yourself, no distracting crowds, no concerns about getting in the way of other attendees or vice versa or distracting them with your heated artistic discussions with your visiting companion (assuming you have one...or are comfortable talking to yourself). It's your own personal humongous viewing room.

Is this what you're looking for?

The most unusual aspect of Pier 24 is that there is no textual information in any of the gallery spaces, not a single word. It is purely a photographic experience. The only identifying information is a number set into the floor in the middle of the gallery. You can pick up an exhibition book when you enter the museum. On the page devoted to that gallery, you will usually find the name of the photographer. Sometimes, not always, you will find titles for the works on the wall (the exhibition book has photographs of the walls with the hanging work for identification; the real hanging work doesn't even have identifying numbers). On very rare occasions you will find some sort of artist statement.

The experience is indescribable. Hence, I am not even going to try. I was amazed, amused, and slightly appalled at how disconcerted I was by being made to look at photographs with no external information. It was almost a compulsion to want to know something about the backstory, at least who made the photograph.

I resisted; I never looked in the exhibition book until I had thoroughly studied the work in a gallery. In most every room, that additional information didn't change my appreciation of the photograph one bit. Given how compelling the urge was to acquire that knowledge, I thought it would. The urge was real; the actual need, as it turned out, was not. In a few cases, the additional knowledge did alter my opinions and impressions but 90% of the time it turned out to be irrelevant.

A singularly peculiar and enjoyable experience. One I plan to repeat.

Check it out: http://www.pier24.org. Currently they're between exhibits; the best way to find out when the new one will be mounted (and thereby give you first chance to make a reservation to see it) is to sign up for their newsletter.

Ctein

*Yes, the XKCD cartoon is one of my favorites. (Don't forget to check the mouseover texts.)

Scheduled viewings of Ctein's verbal creations can usually be reserved for Wednesdays. It's just that the museum just happened to be closed yesterday.

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Movies and Photography

A car thief and a Minox "spy camera" feature in the plot of
Louis Malle's famous Ascenseur pour l'échafaud.

You can tell a real movie lover because their list of all-time best or favorite movies doesn't contain mostly films from the years of their own teens and early twenties. Those are, certainly, the years of our lives in which movies matter most to most people.

My best movie-watching experiences came from those years of my life, but for a different reason. At Dartmouth, in the years when I was a student there or lived nearby, the Dartmouth Film Society showed a pair of movies twice a week. If I'm remembering correctly, one set started on Sunday afternoon and the other on Wednesday or Thursday. Each of the two movies was screened twice a night and students could attend as many screenings as they liked. I saw many classic movies twice or three times, or even more.The movies were shown in a vast and luxurious 3,000-seat auditorium with a huge screen and an excellent sound system.

At every movie there was a student standing at the door of the auditorium passing out "notes." These consisted of background essays on each of the movies you were about to see. They were the best essays written for film courses by then-current Dartmouth film students. Collectively these were of a very high standard—fresh, vital, thoughtful, and well-written.

For years and years afterwards, I missed those handouts when going to movies.

My film education took in the whole history of the movies up until then—the late '70s—including foreign, historical, and rare art-house gems, and films in every genre. But even with the Film Society's capable help, somehow I missed Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows).

Missing Malle
Every now and then we write here on TOP about a peculiar genre..."movies about photography." For instance, The Return*. I'm still not sure this is even valid...even just restricting the list to dramas that touch on photography as a plot device or as part of their subject matter, the swings are hugely wide—between great films and movies that suck; between movies that treat photography with sensitivity and insight or with only clichéd superficiality; between accurate depictions of photo techniques and depictions that are laughably wrong. My brother's a doctor, and can't watch a lot of "medical" dramas because their technical medical aspects are so poorly researched or presented. That doesn't happen as often with movies that include photography. But it does happen.

Ascenseur pour l'échafaud can't be called "Film Noir," since that was a French term for a certain genre of dark American thrillers that shared a certain range of styles and themes. And I guess film mavens argue as to whether Ascenseur pour l'échafaud is early French New Wave or just one of the prototypes for New Wave. Not qualified to comment. But it really is noir, in everything but name. And as far as movies that touch on photography are concerned, I think it belongs on the short list of the good ones.

Like a lot of noir, there are a few places where the plot almost but doesn't quite parse. I've never heard of anyone jovially waving off a fender-bender, for one thing, especially when the car is a Mercedes gull-wing. Probably the most dated and unrealistic aspect of the movie is that Malle, ever the woman-besotted romantic, requires us to believe that the two principal players are in love. If there's anything that seems unrealistic and unbelievable in modern movies, it's two people who actually are in love.

It's a bit odd to recommend a great classic, because most people will have already seen it, and even more will already know about it. It borders on the ignorant, like saying, "Hey, I saw this great war movie the other night. It's called Gone With the Wind. Ever heard of it?" But if you missed this one, like I did, you should put it on your list. It's a fine film. And has lots of interest for photographers...without giving anything away, consider Henri Decaë's camerawork in the famous scenes where Jeanne Moreau is wandering the nighttime streets of Paris in a daze...and notice when, where, and how we first see the two lovers together in the same shot.

The only thing missing for me is the Film Society handout.

Mike

*Periodically people contact me asking where to find an old post on TOP that they remember. I can't even find half the old posts on TOP that I remember. Even though I wrote them. For instance, I'm sure I did a post about a movie concerning a turn-of-the-century woman trapped in an unhappy marriage who finds herself through photography. But I'll be damned if I can either remember the name of the movie (my "proper noun aphasia" again—I remember the visuals, and have a really hard time with the labels) or find the post. Anyway, I'd link to it, but I can't. If anybody can find it, please fill me in.

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Featured Comment by Judith Wallerius: "Found it! It's hidden in one of your summary-posts. The title is 'Everlasting Moments.' I only did find it because I remembered that Roger Ebert had written about it as well; his review is here (and well worth a read). Probably time for a 'movies' category, is it not? Because you just know that in six months, someone is going to email you and ask, hey, didn't you write something about a movie with a Minox and a car thief...?  :-)"

Featured Comment by robert p: "Knowing that you are a jazz fan, I find it hard to believe you can write about L'ascenseur a l'Echafaud without mentioning that the music is by Miles Davis. The CD on its own is fantastic, even if you haven't seen the film."

Mike replies: I had an appointment and was very rushed this morning. Not much of an excuse!

A Question

From B.J. Segel: "As an aside, a semantic question. Why do we 'capture images' when using digital, but 'take pictures' when using film? I see this all the time."

•     •     •

Interesting...it does seems like it means something, doesn't it? But it's not easy to say or guess what exactly. Someday after we're all gone, some semiotician will probably write a graduate Ph.D. thesis about this.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Clay Olmstead: "In the Deep South, they say, 'make a picture,' which is more poetic and more accurate at the same time."

Mike replies: I think I'm going to adopt that.

DC Wells adds: "In the South, when folks make pictures, they do it by 'mashing' the shutter button. Both terms seem standard for both film and digital photography."

Mike replies: That one I think I won't adopt. The sere, prim Yankee expression "pressing" does nicely for me. Mashing is something I associate more with potatoes (taters?).

Ben S. adds: "Clay Olmstead is spot on, except for one bit of dialectal pedantry: folks in the Deep South don't say, 'make a picture'—more precisely, we say, 'make a pitcher.' One never can tell whether we're talking about sweet-tea or photographs."

Featured Comment by Yoram Nevo: "In Hebrew the word stayed the same for digital as it was for film."

Featured Comment by Michael: "The original digital cameras were video field capture devices. They 'captured' the 288 lines in an analog video field and stored them on some form of media. Geeks and nerds invented the technology, used it, and improved it. Some of our words stuck."

Featured Comment by Alex Kirtchik: "What about the much simpler verb that is 'to photograph'? That works for any sort of, um, picture-taking in Russian!"

Mike replies: That's the title David Vestal has always preferred, too, as a means of avoiding pretense and the whole "artist" question: people who photograph are photographers, and that's title enough. It would follow the other way, too—what photographers do is to photograph.

Comment o' the Week: Good Ol' Days

From Dogman:

Among the wonderful memories of doing daily newspaper photography in the '70s & '80s was the hurried darkroom work. NOT!

You have never lived a full life until you have faced an 80-mile round trip night sports assignment to a barely lit high school football field where you were expected to obtain outstanding action photos in less than 20 minutes so you could meet an early deadline for the regional edition. Shoot your Tri-X at 1600 although the Luna Pro is showing that is almost two stops under, hit the country road and exceed the speed limit while trying to avoid the deer wandering around the route, get to the darkroom to constantly agitate the film for 3–4 minutes, give it a water soak for another few minutes, print it wet in an autofocus Leitz that's constantly shifting focus due to the wet negatives buckling, print a soft and crappy shot with equally crappy print quality on #5 Kodabromide or #6 Brovira (whichever is available) and give it to the sports desk dripping wet to barely make the deadline.

...and then go to your next assignment for the weekend edition society page.

Boy howdy!  Those were the Good Ol' Days.

Great one.

I've long subscribed to Carl Weese's late '90s idea that B&W film photography was already perfect but that digital represented the real coming-of-age of color photography. Now I also like the idea that digital frees film photography...frees it from all its heretofore onerous practical and quotidian duties such as Dogman so vividly describes above. Now we can use B&W film only when we really want to.

It was Ron Wisner who said, also in the '90s, that B&W film photography would eventually join all the other obsoleted methods of graphical reproduction as a much smaller but greatly more prestigious fine-art printmaking medium. Nobody needs stone lithography, or woodcut, or copperplate etching any more for commercial image reproduction, but none of those things has gone away. (Just like view cameras or, say, platinum-palladium printing have not gone away.)

Could've been worse, Dogman. You could have had to use something like this.

Those media can move over now, and make room; there's a new one about to join their club. Digital does the utility work (and, I'd say, color, too, although some might still argue that) better. Optical/chemical monochrome film photography—highly evolved, completely mature, fully worked out, and beautiful in its own right—might finally get what its proponents have always sought...an elevation in its status as an art medium.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Walter Glover: "My sentiments entirely, as one who uses digital capture for the sake of commercial expediency and B&W sheet film for the soul and contentment of producing fine crafted work."

Circles

Yesterday's discussion of sensor aspect ratios had several people mentioning circular sensors. It's my understanding that sensor fabrication technology doesn't permit non-rectangular shapes, but I'm far from an expert. However, a couple of people mentioned that very early Kodak cameras—the original "You Push the Button, We Do the Rest" box cameras—created circular pictures.

Indeed they did—here's an example. I have a book around here someplace that gives chapter and verse on early Kodak prints, but I'll be danged if I can turn it up, so I can't give you the dates during which the round prints were de rigeur for Kodakery.

Early Kodak camera with a print. You can clearly see the circular mask
on the film magazine. From an old issue of Studio Light.

In any event, they didn't last for long, I don't think.

Oval prints were very common for many decades, especially for portraits.
Photo courtesy Cornell University Library.

Circular prints have perhaps been the rarest of the basic shapes, unless you include triangles and diamonds and various trapezoids and other shapes that essentially never occur (for more on one such offbeat shape that wasn't uncommon, see below). Oval prints (and oval vignettes) were much more common at one time, being popular for portraits and portrait mats. They're out of fashion now, of course. Long, skinny panoramic shapes are probably ten times more common than circles.

Emmet Gowin included a number of circular images in his influential and beautiful 1976 Knopf book, currently available in a very nice reprint (one of those books you need to buy before it's gone again). Again just going from memory, I believe he made these by mounting a medium-format lens on a view camera so the whole image circle is recorded. I have to say "circular images" rather than "circular prints" here, because it's obvious from the books that the backgrounds, black or gray, are part of the pictures; the image area might be round, but the prints are rectangular. 

New York State driver's license pictures used to be round. These three show TOP reader Carl Leonardi's father at different ages.

Many fisheye lens pictures are circular, because that's how the lenses see. This one's by Geoff Fox, from his website.

Many fisheye pictures are just goofy, all about the gimmick and little else.

Reminds me that a magazine I once worked for had purchased a Nikkor 6mm fisheye, at great expense—thousands of dollars (here's a picture of it, which will give you an idea why it cost so much)—to do one cover shot with. In the eight or ten years since that cover had been done, the publishing company's photography department had not been able to figure out a single additional use for the lens.

The one cover looked nice, though.

Photo by Sam Wang

Very few photographers I know of work in circular format consistently, although many "technical tourists" may have made one or two such pics. One of the former whose work I published a portfolio of in Photo Techniques magazine was Sam Wang. I recall Sam as a good guy and a good photographer. He was a friend of Phil Davis's and Fred Newman's, a photography teacher, if I'm remembering correctly. He used the circular shape in an interesting way that didn't seem forced, I thought.

Ted Orland, Even Ansel Adams Had to Earn a Living

Another odd shape, although not circular, is the sort of proscenium arch that can be found on certain 19th-century photographs, including a few Daguerreotypes. I have a beautiful original 20th-century print by Ted Orland called "Even Ansel Adams Had to Earn a Living" that uses the same device. (The print was a gift from my former editor and friend-I've-Never-Met Ed Buziak. Signed inkjet versions are available from the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite.)

The "proscenium arch" shape was not uncommon in the 19th century. This is a Daguerreotype of Treasure Island author Robert Louis Stevenson as a child.

Doubtless the original reason for the "proscenium arch" shape, most of the time, was to hide cutoff or lens vignetting resulting from excessive rise. Early lenses didn't cover very well, and it isn't uncommon even now for large format photographers to overdo their front rise.

Above is a modern example of physical vignetting from front rise. This example resulted from the photographer leaving a lens hood on a 60mm Distagon and forgetting that front rise was in use. The camera was a Hasselblad Flexbody.

Mike
(Thanks to Carl Leonardi, Kent Phelan, and Roger Bradbury)

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Featured Comment by David Bostedo: "I'm not a fabrication expert, but I do design chips for a living.

"There's nothing inherent about a round sensor that means you couldn't make one. The main reason you don't want to make round sensors is that one sensor can't abut to other ones, therefore wasting area on the wafer. Chips are manufactured as wafers of arrays of the chips. (Here's a good picture of the way chips are arrayed on a wafer.)

"In order to make a round sensor, you'd have to use the same area of the wafer as a square sensor. At that point it's cheaper and easier to make a square sensor, and just create the circular image in camera.

"As far as why wasting wafer area is expensive, it's based on the size of the chip, and consequently the number of chips you can fit on the wafer. As chip size increases, the number on the wafer goes down, and the percentage of the chips that work properly goes down. Both of those mean more expensive chips.

"So wasting area with round sensors would drive up the cost of the sensor for no good reason."

Featured Comment by Robin Dreyer: "A current body of work that's based on round images is Deobrah Luster's 'Tooth for an Eye,' which documents murder sites in New Orleans. She shoots with an 8x10 and I'm pretty sure that, like Gowin, she's using a lens that doesn't cover so she can get the whole image circle."

Featured Comment by Mark Sampson: "The round Kodak photos came from their very first cameras, which had no viewfinder; you merely pointed the camera toward the subject. The round print gave you a level horizon, no matter what. (That idea didn't last long.) And the George Eastman House had one of those 6mm Nikon fisheyes on display, back in the '70s and '80s. It was mounted on a camera with a big prism viewfinder and you could actually look through the lens—it was just spectacular."