The Online Photographer

Iraq: The Space Between, by Christoph Bangert

Reviewed by Stan Banos

Iraq: The Space Between, photographs by Christoph Bangert, Introduction by Jon Lee Anderson

PowerHouse Books, October 2007. $35 / $23.10 on Amazon

Whatever you may think about the current debacle in Iraq, Christoph Bangert's photos in Iraq: The Space Between are some of the most compelling to have emerged from that living hell. And that's because his eye goes well beyond mere newsprint criteria—how anyone creates "art" under war conditions is truly beyond reason. Aiming cameras and deciding proper light and framing while others are aiming guns is hardly conducive to the creative process. And yet Bangert, like Capa, Meiselas, and Nachtwey before him, manages to thrive under just such conditions. His bold colors and dynamic wide angle scenarios are matched and counterbalanced by content that can be: dramatic (grievously wounded or grieving civilians), ironic (the fragile female beauty of an adolescent entrapped within a nearly deserted house almost reads like a fashion spread), or both (the lush color of a truck's canopy surrounding suspected insurgents is downright Egglestonian). All this from a guy who relaxes by then going on a cross-country solo excursion across the continent of Africa.

But despite the dramatic content and composition described, I can't be too enthusiastic in my endorsement due to the presentation and layout of the book itself. Many of the photos in Iraq: The Space Between are two-page spreads that do not fully extend to either side (to avoid cropping). It's bad enough that the picture gets "interrupted" by being run across the gutter, but the viewing experience is then further disrupted by an annoying blank white border to one side of the image. Imagine having a white matt solely to the left or right of a photograph at a gallery exhibit!

One photograph that truly exemplifies the problem is a minimalist composition involving a barrier in the desert. The barrier consists of nothing more than a striped horizontal line that divides the photograph into two equal halves of earth and sky- which in turn then finds itself competing with the white "border" section to the left of the picture. The entire photo is effectively thrown off balance and incorporated into what becomes one very confused and discombobulated graphic.

So you can imagine my surprise when I removed the dust jacket—only to find a smaller, more modest reproduction of the same image on the book's cover! Without the noise of the gutter and the off-centered layout, the original composition became immediately apparent and easily appreciated. To make matters worse, other individual, unrelated photographs are often joined back-to-back as a disconcerting "panorama" of images, effectively reducing and nullifying the inherent power and composition that these singular images were originally intended to portray. Such a presentation should only be considered when the individual images are too weak to stand on their own.

As you may have gathered, I'm not particularly a fan of the bigger-is-better syndrome when it comes to "mutilating" photographs by running them across both sides of a two-page spread. And while all the photos of Iraq: The Space Between do not fall under the "fine art" category (some were taken from the window of an armored vehicle—the limited embedded access no doubt hindered as much as it helped), the arrangement and presentation of anyone's images in such a slipshod manner is a disservice to all involved. These powerful and eloquent photographs deserve better, and this book serves as a potent primer on how not to assemble and present what remains a most outstanding series of images.

________________________

Stan Banos

Featured Comment by Greg Heins: "I'm still waiting for the book that runs the text across the gutter."

RetouchShoppe

Get your photos massaged like the pros...Thomas Villarreal and Giulia Scalese at RetouchShoppe are looking for a few new clients. The charge is a flat fee of only $100 per picture, and you don't pay until you are completely satisfied. See the before and afters at their website. (Note: the "before/after" switch is all one switch that toggles back and forth...you don't have to click on "before" or "after" to get one or the other. That might be obvious to some but it confused me at first.)

______________________

Mike

Amazin'

Sincere thanks to the many people who have been doing their Amazon ordering through our links (bottom of the right-hand column). Some people are getting some really nice presents for Christmas or Hannukah, is all I can say.

I did want to mention, however, that I have been obliged to remove the link to Amazon France. Our application the its Affiliate program was refused; they said the website was not active. There are people out there reading this site from la belle pays, aren't there? I'd be curious to have your confirmation of this.

Anyway, my apologies to anyone who would like to order from Amazon France through the site but can't.

___________________

Mike

A REAL Rare Opportunity

Not long after I published Geoff Wittig's recent review of Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs and Writings, I was surprised to receive the following email from one Chris Green:

In 1983, four or five lifetimes ago it seems, I was the production director for Callaway Editions when the Stieglitz Photographs and Writings book was created. I spent many weeks of very long days working closely with Steve Stinehour and his team at the Meriden Gravure Co. in Meriden, Connecticut and the Stinehour Press in Lunenburg, Vermont. 

I did all of the press supervision, working directly from the Stieglitz originals, as well as a wide variety of other tasks related to the production of the first edition, first and second printings. This book was truly a labor of love by people we considered the best in the business.

I’ve kept 10 sealed copies of the first printing of the first edition for the last 25 years, waiting for an opportunity to find good homes for them with people who will enjoy and appreciate them. The books are in their original shrink-wrap inside their original sealed shipping cartons. They have never been opened since they were created. Having read the recent review and discussion on your site about a recent version of the book, it occurs to me that some of your readers might give these first editions good homes.

I’m not interested in trying to make a lot of money from these books. It’s not about the money. It’s about finding knowledgeable people who will appreciate them for their extraordinary quality.

I just did an inflation check on the Web. Given the books’ original MSRP of $125.00 (1983 dollars), their equivalent sticker price today would be [$251.75 to $262.22 based on several inflation calculators]. 

I am willing to sell these books for $250 each, plus shipping (and tax for NJ residents). This seems like a fair price to me, and I cannot, in good conscience, simply give them away for $50.

Yes, there have been many, many reprints of this book since the first edition, and there are many variant versions which are readily available at relatively low prices. Having said that, though, these are the real deal, and these are the only ones where the printing was constantly monitored against the originals.

-

This happens from time to time in book collecting—a true stash of pristine originals shows up and come on  the market ever so briefly. I mentioned earlier that I happen to have a first edition of this book in my own library already, so I passed along Chris's offer to several photographer, book dealer, and book collector friends, and several people, including Michael Reichmann and Geoff Wittig himself, have each claimed one.

...But there should still be five or six left. $250 is a lot of money for a book, but it's an excellent price for a pristine first edition of this one. Chris has offered to include with each book a letter of provenance restating the information from his email above, which can only add to the interest of the books.

If you'd like  to commit to buy one, please leave a comment, and I'll forward them to Chris in the order received. (T.O.P. isn't taking a cut or handing the exchange—you'll deal directly with him.)

_________________________

Mike

P.S. To answer the inevitable question, yes, if it were me, I'd definitely crack open the packaging and tear off the plastic and look at the book. It might be worth slightly more as an investment in its original packaging—who knows?—but what's the use of owning a fine book if you can't look at it? Even a rare old bottle of wine should one day be raised in a toast among friends and tasted.

NOTE: I have forwarded the first thirteen or so names along to Chris, for what I believe are six available copies of the book. (The emails came in too rapidly for me to do better than that.) Even if several people don't follow through, they're probably all gone now. Thank you for your interest, and I'm sorry if you missed the opportunity!

The Eye of the Blind

It's probably high time we moved on from our "photo-ontological" musings, as people who are not interested in the topic must be getting bored by now. But before we go I'd like to add one more idea and one recommendation to the mix.

Actually, the recommendation is only a "what he said." Those who are talking in the comments about Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House (both great fun and easily recommendable, although not entirely applicable to today's art world and its main concerns) should check out Michel Hardy-Vallée's recommendation of David Davies' Art As Performance. Davies begins his book with several long quotes from Wolfe—and a gentle critique of him, which is also, um, desirable. Art As Performance is a somewhat more difficult book (although still very readable) but, in the end, it's a more rewarding one.

The following is just something I want to throw up for your consideration. It seems to me that a number of readers are confused between photographic rendering that needs to be interpreted and an alleged departure from the "straight," or real, or reportorial principle.

Photographs show (or "tell us") certain things and don't tell us other things; but all photographs still need to be interpreted, often based on the viewer's knowledge of photographic techniques and means, and all such interpretations are provisional, with greater or lesser foundations of evidence. In that respect they're like any other attempt to arrive at truth, whether you're an historian trying to interpret what happened in the past or a reporter trying to put across what happened in a news event or a judge and jury trying to weigh the truth-value of evidence to come to a determination of guilt or innocence. No truth is absolute, perhaps, but that doesn't mean there is no truth.

The provisional aspect of the facts contained in a "straight" photograph do not mean that there are no facts there. This can be proven in a number of ways, but perhaps the most obvious way is that you can extract facts from pictures that the photographer didn't specifically intend to point out, or perhaps wasn't even aware of. Astronomers were able to pinpoint the exact moment that Ansel Adams's "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico" was taken, but that wasn't because Adams was specifically trying to show what time it was by astronomical means when he took the picture.

In John Lehet's barn photograph two posts ago, for example, the primary fact I'm pretty sure of is that there was a barn there. That has a pretty high evidence-quotient even in his "expressive" photograph and I'm fairly certain of it. I'm also pretty sure I've gotten a reasonably accurate idea of the relative positions of the barn, shed, and tree, and that the barn has a metal roof. Now, I personally know what "infrared" or partial-infrared rendition looks like, so I'm not fooled into believing that the field and tree are covered with snow (although the evidence of this is somewhat less sure); someone who has never seen an infrared photograph might be immediately convinced that the meadow is snow-covered, and we could argue about what the fact in the photograph actually is. One of us would be right and one would be wrong—there was either snow present in the meadow when the picture was taken or there wasn't—but neither of us could be 100% sure of our conclusion based solely on the picture. We'd have to admit that our conclusions were provisional. (Cf. Roger's Fenton's cannonballs.)

Now consider what the photograph tells us about...oh, I don't know, let's say, what State it was taken in. There, the evidence is minimal or nonexistent. We can make a stab at a guess (e.g., "it probably wasn't Hawaii"), but it would just be speculation. It was taken somewhere, but exactly where is a fact that the picture itself doesn't obviously contain.

The point is that none of the aspects of technical photographic rendering put forth by people as being "unreal" are actually departures from "straight" photography, necessarily. Whether a photograph is luminance-only (i.e., black-and-white or monochrome), whether a sky  has a creamy tone or some objects are out of the depth of field or rushing water is motion-blurred—all such things merely affect the quality of the evidence the photograph offers, and perhaps increase or decrease the necessity of interpretation. You can still pull some facts out of the picture based on interpretation (having seen unnumbered pictures of motion-blurred running water, for instance, I am unlikely to conclude that someone has gone and hurled dry ice into a stream), and other facts remain fugitive or absent. But that's the situation with any photograph. And it's the same way with any other attempt to determine truth, whether it's a statement in a history textbook or an assertion by a witness in court.

The change that has overtaken "photography" is simply that a larger number of facts contained in new pictures are now less secure. If the moon in "Hernandez" had been Photoshopped in, or moved, then the time of day based on its position would no longer be a fact contained in Adams's picture. If you can't reasonably determine from the picture whether the moon was Photoshopped in or not, then "a" fact  about the time of day is still retrievable, but its quality as evidence plummets—it might have been such-and-such a time of day, or it might not have been. You might not care; Adams might not have cared. But the difference is real.

The only reason this matters is that the only thing that is interesting about many photographs, or what is most interesting about them, is the evidence they give of something that actually was. In Paul Strand's famous picture of the blind beggar woman, we can have a high degree of confidence that her sign actually said "BLIND" and that her left eye actually appeared to be open and peering at something in that wonderful furtive manner. If our confidence in either or both of those facts goes from 98% to, say, 30%, then the enigmatic, emblematic, numinous masterpiece becomes more like a mild joke with about the same level of interest as a Hallmark card or a New Yorker cartoon. The fact that we can't tell what color her cloak was isn't something that makes the photograph unreal, and it's no reason to throw up our hands in a fit of relativism; it's just one fact that the photograph doesn't happen to contain, is all. One of many (she might actually have been totally blind, for instance; the picture doesn't tell us that).

That's just the way it is. This is nothing that digital photographers need to have a chip on their shoulders about, but neither does having such a chip on one's shoulder change anything. Our newfound digital freedom gives us a lot—an awful lot—but it also taketh away; and I think it's wise to be aware of that.

_______________________

Mike

Qualifying Photography as Art, or, Is Photography All It Can Be?

By Christopher Bedford, Words Without Pictures

With medium specificity a passé historical concern confined chiefly to the pages of art history, it may seem prosaic and anachronistic to question the position and relative validity of a single medium—photography—within the world of contemporary art. In addition, the same question may seem patently irrelevant to those who might justifiably point out that many of the most eminent, critically lauded, and well-collected artists of the twentieth century—Thomas Demand, Jeff Wall, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Cindy Sherman, and Andreas Gursky, to name a few—all use the camera as their primary instrument. Furthermore, the status of photography as art is rarely drawn into question, and the market currency of the medium is beyond dispute. But does it necessarily follow that the fundamental ontology of photography as a practice has been fully interrogated, understood, and integrated into the discourse of contemporary art, assuming its rightful place alongside traditional media like painting, sculpture, and drawing, as well as new media such as installation and video? In other words, does photography exist as photography in art history and criticism today? And if not, why not? Is photography—and by derivation photography criticism—all it can be?

READ ON

_________________________

David Emerick

Featured Comment by Michel Hardy-Vallée: "All right, since we're tackling the hardcore questions of medium and ontology, why not have a look at David Davies' Art As Performance and Gregory Currie's Ontology of Art [OOP —MJ] instead of academic bloggers?

"The fundamental problem in the discussion of medium with respect to photography is that nobody makes the distinction between vehicular medium and artistic medium.

"Vehicular medium is the manifest substrate of a work, oil paint for instance, whereas the artistic medium is the system in which the physical medium is purposefully organized, for instance by articulating lights and shadows in the case of a painting.

"That definition comes mostly from Joseph Margolis, but Davies reuses it a lot.

"The point is that these concepts help to make sense of the weird uses that contemporary art makes of photography. In an near-absurdist manner, you can argue that Jeff Wall's works are made in the vehicular medium of photography, but function within the artistic medium of painting because it borrows so much from it.

"Various artistic media have developed around the vehicular medium of photography, and people often wrongly believe that because someone uses photography that their works must conform to certain canons, and anything else is a bastard form. For instance, look at the way ƒ/64 people looked at Pictorialists: the latter were seen as traitors to the ideal of photography. The fact of the matter is that they were functioning in different artistic media, even when they were using exactly the same vehicular medium. The latter does not entail the former.

"As to the problems of photography critique, I'd like to direct the dedicated readers to two great little books of relevance published by Routledge, Art History Versus Aesthetics and Photography Theory edited by James Elkins."

Reality and Photography

By John Lehet

I've been doing Buddhist practice for about as long as I've been doing photography—a long time. I took them both very seriously a long time ago, and I'm quite immersed in both again in this decade. And it's funny, they both have the some of the same effects and are synergistic with each other. What photography reveals to meditation, and meditation reveals to photography is the same: little of what passes for ordinary reality is real; it's all ephemeral illusion. No photograph is real. Looking right at something without any camera around is very seldom getting close to grasping reality either. We are lost in our thoughts and our ideas of the world, and we so rarely see it. The camera sees something, and records it. Is the exposure reality? Are we getting closer to understanding what's real when the image is straight? I don't think so. I think we go farther astray.

Twenty-five years ago I was only shooting with a view camera, and I carried sheets of infrared film as well as Tri-X.  I'd studied technique; I knew a thing or two about making a good print, which meant manipulating tonal values. As a good printer I knew that almost any print was a departure from a straight print by the time I had done my Zone System work on the negative chemistry and burning and dodging on the paper. Since the infrared sheet film so rarely worked out in those days, I always exposed a sheet of Tri-X for a given subject if I bothered to set up the camera for infrared. Sometimes the IR exposures were unreal. But sometimes at their best looked more "real" than the Tri-X, more accurately conveying the luminous vibrance that I can experience from foliage and light.

The barn photo was made on infrared sheet film in 1981. I used to print it on silver chloride paper, and then tone it heavily in selenium. The split toning effect sometimes was a good thing—Olivia Parker made at least one beautiful portfolio of contact prints using this technique way back. Now I still use this technique, but I use a Photoshop layer instead of the long selenium soak. It was spring, and the grass and foliage was new and practically glowing. I was only shooting black and white then.

The maple tree (top picture) also was made on 4x5 sheet film in the late '80s. The light was changing and a storm moving in. Both of these infrared shots convey the luminosity and intensity of the scene much better than the regular film counterparts. Both actually need a bit of work to be printable, especially the maple.

The jawbone is straight, 4x5 Tri-X (or was it Plus-X?). There is a little bit of burning to get the tones of the foreground in line with the image.

Now I'm shooting digital. Are my images any less real? Were my straight photos any less strange or unreal?

Really real
A good photographer is an artist, unless he or she is just a good photographer hired to document architecture or horticulture—and even then there's room for art. What being an artist might mean is too long for this post, but it means something far different from "stenographer of straight, unadulterated reality." Perhaps through vision and technical skill the photographer can convey some reality. Hopefully the reality communicated by a good photograph resonates much more depth in the human heart and spirit than the merely clear and accurate portrayal of some subject in front of a lens. The distinctions of "straight" and "digital" are not helpful, I think, compared to the bigger questions of what makes a good photograph and other questions of how technique and vision work together to create one. Or the bigger questions of what is real, and what might be real in a photograph. I mean really real, from a human perspective. How we resonate with our world, and create it with our minds.

________________________

John

An Etymological Proposal

By John Hansen-Flaschen

A recorded still image that has been deliberately modified to alter the visible content of a scene captured through a lens can be called a photoplast. The adjective is photoplastic. The process of making photoplasts is photoplasty. An individual who makes photoplasts is a photoplaster.

-plasty means means "molding, grafting or formation of a specified part" (Oxford English Dictionary). The Greek is -plasti, from plastos, molded, from plassein, to mold.

Photoplasty relates to a family of medical terms that refer to surgically modifying or "molding" the body, such as rhinoplasty and angioplasty.

The meaning of the word photoplast is reasonably self-explanatory and is not perjorative. Photoplast is not currently listed in English reference dictionaries. However, no term so straightforward is likely never to have been used before. Indeed, a Google search reveals several highly technical meanings for photoplast or photoplastic, one in cell biology and one or more in engineering. Kodak made or makes a photoplast material and photoplast darkroom plates.

Notably, in the 1920s, the inventive photographer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, was also interested in the use of cameras to make images that are optically true, and in the ability to modify those images post-capture. He used the term photoplastic for metaphysical photomontages he created in 1920's, but the term did not propogate then.*

To “certify” that a still image is a photograph, not a photoplast, an image might be published with the symbol [circle G] , analogous to © [circle C] for copyright and ® [circle R] for registered.

Widespread adoption of this new family of words and certification convention might go a long way toward restoring the integrity of photography as a documentary medium.

______________________

John

*See here.

John Hansen-Flaschen, M.D., is Chief of Pulmonary Medicine and Medical Director of the Penn Lung Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Rare Opportunity

By Richard Sintchak

As a young stamp collector when I was a boy I remember gazing in awe at the old, rare upside-down stamp that was worth a fortune.

Well, don't look now but I think we have an opportunity to pick up for relatively cheap a rare verison of an old Buffalo Bill Cody photograph at the NYT website.

Jump on it before they realize their mistake!

___________________

Richard

A Carload of Corn

"A Carload of Corn"

When I was putting together yesterday's post and wanted a picture that was obviously fabricated, I remembered seeing a large collection of old-fashioned "tall-tale" postcards somewhere on the web. Turns out the one I found is from our own local Wisconsin Historical Society site, which has been doing a great job of putting its excellent collections of vintage photography online. The whole collection is formally known as "Exaggerated Postcards 1900–."

Not too many photographers know this—or, if they do, they don't think about it often enough—but State historical societies can be great resources for seeing original vintage photographs. The late John Szarkowski immersed himself in the WHS collection early in his career, and Michael Lesy drew heavily on the WHS  archives in putting together his famous 1973 book Wisconsin Death Trip (surely something close to the antithesis of the postcards under discussion).

Whether you find such spoofy, goofy tall-tale postcards charming or alarming is up to you, of course. (Something just occurred to me—I wonder whether a there's any correspondence between a liking for these postcards and a liking for verbal puns? I wonder if our favorite punster, Herman Krieger, is reading this. Maybe he could be our bellwether on this.) Kinda fun to see a lot of them together, though.

"I Landed Him Myself"

_______________________

Mike  (Thanks to Andy Adams)

Featured Comment by Herman Krieger: "Actually, my photos are rather straight; it's the captions that give some people corniptions."

Photographic Terms

Photography: Generic name for mechanical image production using light as an agent.

Photograph: A product of photography, usually, but not always, a physical object or a printed or published picture.

Traditional Photography: Photography using optical/chemical means, usually film- or emulsion-based, including all the technologies that predated digital imaging.

"Straight" Photography: A term coined in the 1930s by members of Group ƒ/64 and others referring to photographic pictures that respect the lens image (except as regards color, if only because for a long time color photography was impracticable). Now potentially applicable regardless of the recording medium.

[Photographic] Print: A photographic picture reified on a substrate, usually paper.

Digital Imaging: Generic term for pictures recorded on sensors or that can be stored as computer files.

Digital Photography: Photography using digital cameras.

Digital Image: A picture in digital form, usually but not always originating from a sensor capture or scan.

Photo-illustration: Manipulated or modified pictorial images derived from photographic [digital or analog] originals.

Digital Illustration: Umbrella term referring to manipulated or modified images that include elements that are not photographic in origin, or that rely heavily on software.
-

Terminology doesn't define
It doesn't take a great deal of reflection to deduce that there are among these terms both overlap and ambiguity. But that's okay, because terminology doesn't define—it describes.

For one thing, in many situations the photographic aspect of a photographic representation is meant to be transparent: thus, a photograph of a painting reproduced in a book about art might be referred to as a "painting," or a digitized representation of a film negative is referred to as a "negative" even though the first is a photograph and the second is a digital image.   

A 4x5" film negative. See how that works?

The most annoying problems might arise when a work in one category has slight aspects of another. Ansel practiced "straight" photography (of a stentorian and virtuosic character, but straight still), but in one case he photographed a landscape in which some numbers had been spelled out on a mountainside (the year of a graduating class, if memory serves) in white-painted rocks, and he retouched this feature out of his picture. This is prehistoric potatochopping, to be sure, but does it make the picture a photo-illustration? Not really. It just crosses that boundary. (Unless you want to argue that all of Adams's unpeopled, pristine wilderness is essentially a distortion, but that's another discussion.) And obviously, digital images that look exactly like straight photographs, but aren't, are a special case; they seem to add to our store of visual facts but they're fiction. (Novels, in English-language publishing at least, almost always have the word "novel" on the cover.)

Not a photograph

Photo-illustration and digital illustration are essentially synonyms, but, hopefully, enough distinction will eventually emerge to make the difference useful. (For a good example of a guy who's very good at photo-illustration, in his case of the commercial variety, check this link.)

There's a term I personally detest, and that's "digital photograph." No such thing. Either be brave and call it a photograph, or be precise and call it a digital image, I say. However, I don't get to say.

Incidentally, my own interest and allegiance is mainly to straight photography. If a picture doesn't respect the medium's potential connection to the real world, why not go be a watercolorist?

I was powerfully tempted to add one more term:

"Expressive" Photographs: Pictures exploiting peculiarities of photographic materials and equipment, optical peculiarities of lenses, or modes of capture.

...But I sense that that's just me talking to myself, inventing distinctions I wish pertained; I don't think that one relates to either common or easily-intuited usage. The rest of the definitions above are reasonably widespread and well accepted.

_____________________

Mike

Featured Comment [excerpt] by John Camp: "One of the old guarantees of cameras was that in some sense, the 'scene' was out there—not only in the artist's mind. If you can't get a straight shot of it, for some reason, then (in straight photography) it didn't exist. I've mentioned somewhere else the L.A. Times faked photo of an American soldier in Iraq who seemed to be menacing an Iraqi and his small child. The scene was composited of two photographs taken at about the same time, but the composited photo presented a radically different view of the situation than the straight photos, and might have had a powerful political effect if the fakery hadn't been detected. So that's the problem—if a scene doesn't exist, but has to be composited, then it didn't exist—and to present it as if it did, as a straight photo, is a form of lying.

"Artists compose artificial scenes, and in fact somewhere in the U.S. right now there is an art show of 'multiples,' which are variations on a scene which slightly change the arrangements of people, horses, etc. (The ones I saw in a review were by Degas, at a race track.) But paintings, by their nature, advertise their artificiality—nobody believes that the horses and the jockeys stood absolutely still and posed for the eight or ten hours—or six or eight months—it took to do the painting. Manipulated photos, presented as straight, don't have this built-in check. So you get  National Geographic moving pyramids to get a better (but impossible) view, etc. People argue that Adams manipulated photos with filters, with dodging and burning, etc., and he did, but what he was doing was changing the conditions of the machine (with filters) or the light (with dodging) but usually he was not attempting to change the conditions of the scene itself (though he apparently did in the example cited by Mike.) IMHO, that photograph is also a lie.

"The problem is not so much with the image itself, as the presentation of the image. If you present it as straight, and it isn't, then you're not telling the truth."

Featured Comment by Gordon Lewis: "It seems to me that many lovers of digital photo manipulation want the advantages of verisimilitude (i.e. 'it looks real') without being restricted to reality itself. But they can't have it both ways: Once viewers begin to doubt whether what they see is a close representation of what was happening in front of the camera at the moment of exposure, then the game is over. The crowd no longer believes in magic. They can only be impressed by how good a performer you are. Ironically, in such an environment, reality becomes that much harder to accept. The audience won't believe you even when you're telling the truth (or as close to it as you can get). The credulous will still gasp in wonder, but many viewers will offer little more than a cynical yawn."

Sandy King's...Ultralight

By Oren Grad

If the very idea of dragging a 4x5 view camera into the field makes you weary, spare a thought for Sandy King, who has just taken delivery of a brand new 20x24" camera built to an innovative design by Richard Ritter. An emeritus professor of languages at Clemson, Sandy is well known in the large format community as a practitioner and teacher of "alternate processes" such as carbon, platinum/palladium, kallitype and Van Dyke.  Sandy's new camera has 48" of bellows draw, but folds down to a very compact 28x28x7" and weighs just under 23 lbs, which makes it an ultralight for the format. Really! Not only that, but Sandy got a 12x20 reducing back for the camera to boot.Congratulations to Sandy—we look forward to seeing where he'll go with this delicious new tool.

_________________________

Oren

Featured Comment by Julie Heyward: "Who makes a lens that gives coverage for 20x24"? And what would be 'normal' focal length for that size? Just curious."

Oren replies: Normal is, of course, just the diagonal for the format.  In this case, the diagonal is about 31.25", or 794mm.  Actually, it will be just a bit less than that, to allow for the fact that the picture area on the negative is always a bit smaller than the nominal format size.

There are several lenses that will cover. ["Cover," for those unfamiliar with the term, simply means that the size of the aerial image circle cast by the lens is large enough that will fill the entire piece of film with "imaged objects"—i.e., the picture. —MJ.] Most of them are old process lenses originally designed for the graphic arts industry.  The very longest of the classic Dagor and Protar Series V lenses will also cover, though these are scarce and tend to be very expensive. Among currently manufactured lenses, there are only three that I'm aware of that will cover—the Schneider Fine Art XXL 550mm and 1100mm lenses, which are designed for precisely this kind of use, cover with plenty of room for movements, while the 600mm Fujinon-C is said to just barely cover if you stop way down.

On the Large Format Photography Forum, Sandy mentioned that he has a few lenses that will work.  He identified the two best as the 550mm Schneider Fine Art XXL, and an old 30" Goerz Red Dot Artar.

Here is a related discussion thread.

The best known 20x24 cameras are the famous Polaroid 20x24's:

http://www.mammothcamera.com

http://elsa.photo.net

Featured Comment by David A. Goldfarb: "People like Sandy (and myself sometimes) who use cameras larger than 8x10" are often using processes that require contact printing like carbon and platinum/palladium in Sandy's case, albumen in mine.  The options are to make an enlarged negative from a smaller format or even a digital original using digital or conventional means, or using a bigger camera.

"The digital negative process has the attraction of being able to use digital controls while ending up with a handmade print with a traditional process that has its own distinctive look that can't be produced any other way, plus you can enlarge bigger than any camera you might want to use or take the kind of photograph that is only practical with a small camera and end up with a big print using a contact printing process.

"Personally, I think a contact print from a big negative straight from the camera has a kind of three-dimensional quality that enlarged negatives don't have, but this depends in part on the print medium, since not every handcoated process has enough resolution to show the difference between a camera negative and an enlarged negative, and resolution isn't everything.

"For portraits, a large camera can make the portrait session into something of an "event" that engages the portrait subject as well as the photographer.  The camera is a large presence in the room.  More lighting is needed, and/or more cooperation from the subject to hold still for the exposure.  I usually switch places with the subject, so they can see what I'm looking at on the groundglass and understand what is happening and when they need to hold still, and they become more involved in the process."

Featured Comment by OC Clicker: "Is film still available for this format, or does Sandy have to
make his own glass plates?"'

Oren replies: Yes, film is available. Twenty by twenty-four has been cut under the Ilford and Kodak special order programs; Freestyle Photographic Supplies sometimes has panchromatic emulsions from Forte or Efke in stock in that size; and Fotoimpex will also cut some of the eastern European emulsions to order in any size.

Oh, yes—if you have a minimum of about $10,000 to burn, you can also get Kodak to cut color film.

Twenty by twenty-four HP5 Plus or FP4 Plus in this year's Ilford cut was roughly $24 per sheet.  The TMY special cut was likely a bit higher than that, the Forte or Efke emulsions when you can get them probably a bit cheaper. Makes 11x14 look like a bargain.

Holders are also expensive. Alan Brubaker charges $850 for a 20x24 holder. Lotus is €945, which is $1350-$1400 at current exchange rates. Quality Camera doesn't show a price for a 20x24 S&S holder; I imagine it's a custom-build item.

Random Excellence: Friedlander in Adams Land

Until I ran across it while browsing at the Fraenkel Gallery site, I had no idea that Lee Friedlander had treated this motif. What a delight.

Fraenkel has a nice selection of Friedlanders online, from the 1950s to now.

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Mike

Follow-up: Rats, I thought the Adams and the Friedlander were taken at the same place. Wrong-O. Turns out the Friedlander is Lake Louise, near Banff, Alberta, and the Adams is Tenaya Lake in the Yosemite Valley in California. Kinda takes the fun out of it, although it's pretty close visually. Thanks to Peter Robinson for setting me straight. —MJ

Photo Sites

Some objections have been raised to the listing linked in the previous post. So what are the best photo sharing sites? Chris S. nominates altphotos.com, for instance, and Howard French obviously likes flickr (I don't, so much, because I dislike the everything-oversharpened-all-the-time look).

I typically visit Trek Earth, because at least it's organized around identifiable places—the tendency of most online photographers to not identify, and thus seemingly not to even care about, where on Earth their pictures were taken drives me insane—and pbase and PhotoSig because I'm a lens nut and those sites identify pictures by the lenses used to make them.

Any other good ones? Reasons?

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Mike

Dare You to Go Look At Them All

I don't mean to throw a further wrench into the proceedings, but, apropos the "is photography dead" and terminology threads, consider this...it's VirtualHosting.com's list of the 100+ Places to Post and Share Your Photos Online.

One hundred plus?! That surprised even me. I only frequent two or three of these places, and I'm quite sure I haven't seen more than a small fraction of what's available at those places. If the web is not up to a billion digigraphs* online yet, it's only a matter of time.

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Mike

*And some of it's phart

Maybe Photography Really IS Dead?

An article in yesterday's New York Times suggests that it might, at least, have a gangrenous limb.

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Ken Tanaka

Featured Comment (excerpt) by yunfat: "...the funniest part of the whole Guggenheim exhibition is when the security guard asked me to put my camera away while looking at the [Richard Price] Cowboy pictures. I wonder if the museum realizes the ridiculousness of asking people not to photograph a photograph of a photograph."

Featured Comment by JL: "It occurs to me that we should consider this, too: While Mr. Krantz was presumably making a good living helping a giant corporation peddle a cancer-causing product—a product that has killed millions and millions of Americans—by milking romantic myths about the West, Mr. Prince was (see last month's Vanity Fair) scraping by in a run-down NY apartment, trying to make the best art he could, and with no guarantee that anyone would ever care about his work, let alone pay him for it. Now, who are you feeling sympathy for?"

Photography and—?

Okay, game time. There's a lot in a name...without arguing the fundamentals here, let's say (as a game) that you were going to designate "photography" any picture that essentially respects the lens image, whether it's recorded on film or digitally. Then you were going to name a second category of digital imaging in which the pictures are deliberately modified to make them different from the lens image(s) they originated with.

And, no, adjustments to the picture to make it more accurately reflect a scene—dodging and burning, color correction, amelioration of purple fringing, choice of medium (carbro or platinum) etc., down to and including proper exposure—don't count as manipulation.

Again, please don't argue the premises here—just think of a name. A really good name would have a couple of features, it seems to me—it would not just modify the word "photography"; it would have to conform to the various noun and verb forms; and, most importantly, it can't be perjorative or derogatory—it would have to be something that its practitioners would be proud to call it, proud to identify themselves with.

And please don't take the teenager's plaint...yes, I know it doesn't matter what we decide, I know we'll never make it stick, etc.

I'm just interested to hear what you'd call it.

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Mike

Cliché

By Ctein

----------"We cannot be so insecure as to avoid clichés at every pass."

- ---------------------------------------—M. Johnston, 6/2/95

-

I do not know if our 'steemed editor is really as vehemently anti-cliché as he recently asserted, but such was not always the case. He gave me this wise advice a dozen years ago when he caught me apologetically referring to a photo in my portfolio as being something of a clichéd subject.

I've taken his words seriously since. And, in a nice coincidence with recent discussions, my eye was attracted just last weekend to such subject matter. So, I noodled around with it and produced the following photos. I like them all; a few of them I'm very happy with. I won't tell you which ones; I leave them for you to contemplate sans comment.

(And, by the way, it seems I've answered my question in the affirmative as to whether I could switch on the fly between B&W and color when using a digital camera.)

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Ctein

Large Format Resolution

By David A. Goldfarb

Resolution isn't everything in large format (LF), and often the most distinctive LF effects involve using classic lenses or techniques that reduce resolution but produce a look that can't be produced any other way.

That said, I posted a demo a while back on my website to give some idea of what an 8x10" neg is capable of —at the link, use the links underneath the picture to click up through successive increases in resolution to get an idea of how much information is really there. Bear in mind that this was scanned on an old Agfa Duoscan that has an optical resolution of 1000 ppi (about 1/5th of what is practical on a drum scanner), and the largest image in the demo is 50% of full resolution. Even so, you can easily see individual bricks in the building next to the school bus. The film is T-Max 100, and the lens is a single-coated Goerz 12" (305mm) ƒ/6.8 Gold Dot Dagor from the 1940s or 50s—a fine lens, but not as sharp as a modern plasmat. So I haven't done anything really to go out of my way to maximize resolution, and still...well, most people who haven't seen an 8x10" negative are impressed by the demonstration.

And just to show you the interesting "low resolution" side of large format, below is a scan of an 8x10" albumen print from an 8x10" neg, made with a classic 360mm Voigtlander Heliar lens at a wide aperture (about ƒ/5.6).

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David

Christmas Sales

Encore Data Products is having a "Ten-Off" sale. To get there, click on the ad in the left-hand column. To get $10 off on any order over $99, use the coupon code "TENOFF." Sale is good through Dec. 7th.

Our friend Alain Briot at Beaux Arts Photography has released a brand-new seminar on DVD and CD, this one centered on a subject many photographers are in need of information about and that Alain knows well (he is one of the scant handful of photographers in America who makes a living selling prints): it's called the Marketing Mastery Workshop on DVD. And in a nice gesture to T.O.P. readers, Alain is offering the first 40 buyers from T.O.P. a substantial discount. Check out the details at the link.

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Mike