The Online Photographer

Around the Web on a Friday

Photo Nation (Photographer Unknown)

The Talbot that wasn't
The unpreposessing little photogram at left is alleged to be "the talk of the photo-historical world" at the moment. The "intense speculation," kicked off when the leading Talbot scholar, Larry J. Schaaf, proclaimed it not a Talbot, is that it might be one of a lost set of experimental results by the circle of one Henry Bright, a group that included Sir Humphry Davy, Thomas Wedgwood, and James Watt, predating Talbot and Daguerre by decades. And if it is, then it might not only rewrite the early history of photography, but do something really important—perform at auction. (Nothing excites the art world like money, bestowed discriminately and plentitudinously.) You can read more at the world's best photography magazine, a.k.a. the New York Times.

WTF, HS?
And about that photo at the top of this post—it obviously shows a mob of terrorists, bent on uncovering secrets of our air power. We want to know where Homeland Security is and what they think they're doing, letting all those nicely-dressed and no doubt clean and polite Agents of Evil snap away with impunity.

OT: Blue Jeans Cable strikes back
This has nothing to do with photography, and it's already been picked up by a large number of online traffic generators and trackers (digg, slashdot, etc.), where you may have run across it. But it's both stirring and a bit funny as a response to corporate bullying. The short take: Monster Cable has a reputation for scaring the bejesus out of tiny companies by threatening lawsuits, in order to get licensing fees it doesn't deserve, but this time it picked on a "little guy" company that happens to be run by a retired corporate litigator.

Daily Show takes on the Paparazzi
In the episode of 4/16/08. Available on iTunes and possibly elsewhere. (Memorable quote: "You are not the press just because you happen to have a camera.") The same episode features the Daily Show's team coverage of the Pope's visit.

Up-rezzing: mixed methods
Martin Doonan has followed up on Ctein's comparisons of various methods of up-sizing digital files with a series of investigations of mixed methods, to see if he could get "the best of both worlds"—that is, the fine detail of Photoshop Bicubic with the sharp results of Genuine Fractals. He says he's close to a repeatable, scriptable enlargement routine.

'What We Bought'
Eric Etheridge has posted the second in his "The Missing Criticism" series, reviving lost critical essays that remain worthy of attention and making them available (with the authors' permission) as .PDF downloads. (Don't worry, our link doesn't go straight to the .PDF.) This time it's Tod Papageorge's essay on Robert Adams's What We Bought.

Nikon D3X rumor updates
David Kilpatrick at Photoclub Alpha explains the latest flurry of rumors in a piece called "Nikon D3X 24.4 megapixel sensor leak." Meanwhile, here at T.O.P., both Carl and I have recently received Pentax K20D's (although I haven't yet received a lens—I'm waiting for the 35mm ƒ/2.8), so look for some upcoming posts about that one in the not-too-near, but not-too-distant future.

Only nine?
Finally, for the photographer who has almost, but not quite, everything: the Paparazzi Play Set. (Here's a U.S. Amazon link should you actually want to buy this.) "Now you can bask in the spotlight of your very own red carpet experience, without the indignity of having yourself splattered across the brain-numbing pages of fatuous magazines. These nine members of the worlds [sic] snapping media come complete with the ethical and moral depth of an earthworm, are blissfully mute, and will make you feel as adored and sought-after as you no doubt should be."

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Mike (Thanks to James Wilson, David Emerick, and Oren Grad)

James Mollison's Gallery Debut

James Mollison's international gallery debut will take place at Hasted Hunt Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, 3rd Floor  New York, NY 10011, (212) 627-0006, from June 12th to August 16th, 2008. There will a reception for the artist on Thursday, June 12th from 6 to 8 PM.

"'The Disciples' are panoramic format portraits of music fans photographed as they leave performances. The groups are distinctive because they have dressed in the style of the singers or bands they have just been watching. These are 'fans' all seemingly caught at the same moment in front of a seamless background as they leave concerts ranging from Marilyn Manson to Dolly Parton. The images bear a keen relationship to Richard Avedon’s classic group portraits of the Chicago Seven and the Joint Chiefs.

"Mollison lives in Venice. He was born in Kenya in 1973 and grew up in England. After studying Art and Design at Oxford Brookes University, and later film and photography at Newport School of Art and Design, he moved to Italy to work at Benetton’s creative lab, Fabrica. His work has been widely published throughout the world."

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Mike

Ghosts I-IV

Many people have mentioned Nine-Inch Nails' "Ghosts I-IV" project, two hours of impulsive instrumental soundscapes by Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, and Alan Moulder, with some help from Alessandro Cortini, Adrian Belew, and Brian Viglione. Aside from being an interesting experiment in music distribution, it features a 40-page downloadable .PDF booklet of photographs by Phillip Graybill and Rob Sheridan that NIN calls "visual aesthetic accompaniments to the music from the recording process and the outside world."

You can stream the music from the site or download or purchase multiple versions (although the $300 Ultra-Deluxe Limited-Edition package is sold out already) in a variety of formats. There is no charge to download the .PDF alone.

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Mike  (Thanks to David Rea, Michael Arcila and others)

Play to Your Strengths

Every essay I write for TOP has the inestimable advantage of inspiring direct, raw feedback. This is very helpful to me as a writer...the feedback immediately points out the deficiencies of the articles by making it clear exactly where and in what way I had been unclear. Often, it points out to me where I should have made my underlying assumptions more explicit.

E. O. Hoppé, Robert Frost, Poet, U.S.A., 1926

One of the points that arose from my book review of E.O. Hoppé's Amerika the other day is that several people assumed that my comments could be generalized to all of Hoppé's work. There are several lessons I need to continually keep in mind (and, not infrequently, relearn) as a reviewer. One of them is never extrapolate. If the Tannoy Mercury M4 was a good loudspeaker, you can't assume that the Tannoy Mercury F4, the M4's very similar replacement, is also a good loudspeaker. You have to listen afresh and evaluate anew. If Canon's CMOS sensors are known to have certain shared characteristics, you can't assume that Nikon's or Pentax's implementations of CMOS sensors will necessarily share all, or any, of those attributes. You have to clear your mind out and look.

So I take it for granted that unless otherwise specified, when I review a book I'm only reviewing that book. The things I said in the Hoppé review pertained explicitly to the pictures in the book, not all his pictures. As I said in the comments, I would never want to presume that what's true about some of an artist's work necessarily extends to all of his or her work—especially if I haven't seen it! In fact, the opposite—it's important to remain open to the idea that other bodies of work might be different. You have to look at the work at hand, first, and second, take it on its own terms.

E. O. Hoppé, Margaret Storm Jameson, writer, England, 1925

It turns out that E. O. Hoppé had earned his worldwide fame as a portraitist of the great and the famous. There's a good website showing excellent online representations of a fair sampling of his portraits, which are assured, well crafted, and elegant, if somewhat conventional. Worth seeing. And quite different in many ways from the work in Amerika.

Michael Jordan, Baseball Player
There are just some things that people are better at, or best at, and that goes for photographers every bit as much as for individuals in other walks of life. Ansel Adams had a terrible color sense; August Sander did a fair number of landscapes. Even Michael Jordan, one of the most transcendent athletes of modern times, couldn't make it as a baseball player. One of the great keys to accomplishment applies to photographers too: you've got to play to your strengths.

One test I apply to artists to judge whether a certain style or a subject or a mode of working is central to them or not is to ask, if you threw it out—if it disappeared—would it change our estimation of them? You can throw out Michael Jordan's accomplishments as a batter and it doesn't do any injustice or harm to his reputation as an athlete, does it? Toss out Their Satanic Majesties Request and you haven't changed anyone's estimation of the Stones (except maybe for the better, "She's a Rainbow" aside). Ernst Haas did a fair amount of work in black-and-white, some of it very competent and quite pleasant, but if it disappeared tomorrow it wouldn't change his major accomplishments or history's view of him. You could throw out all of Sander's landscapes without affecting his significance to photography.

These thoughts don't apply to a great many hobbyist photographers, who are just trying to have fun, who will try anything, and who really have no idea what their strengths might be. For anyone hoping to create something coherent and lasting, though—anyone trying to accomplish something—knowing your strengths and not spinning your wheels chasing things you're not good at is key.

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Mike  (Thanks to Robin P)

Pop Econundrum

I've been reading a lot of "pop economics" books in the past ten months or so—you know, things like Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Alain de Botton's excellent Status Anxiety, and The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs, who was on "The Daily Show" the other night. Anyway, the one I've been reading most recently is Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, by Dan Ariely. I wish I could reconstruct for you the path I took to find it—it started with a link recommendation from Adam McAnaney—but I'm afraid I don't recall the sequence of events. I found it in the business section, no less, a part of the bookstore where I seldom venture.

Anyway, the book, which is even lighter and easier to read than most pop econ books, has a simple thesis that is entirely contained in the title. The idea is that even though classical economics predicts that people in their roles as agents in the economy will perform as "rational actors," in fact people not only act irrationally, but do so in highly predictable ways. The book's ideas probably aren't particularly revolutionary, and the "experiments" set up by the author (a professor) and his professor friends are sometimes so simple that they resemble play, at least in the simplified accounts of them he gives here. Presumably he writes them up more rigorously for more scholarly publications.

I'll give you just one example of the experiments. Passing students are offered a choice between an expensive chocolate, a Lindt truffle, for the reduced price of 15¢, and a common chocolate, a Hershey's  kiss, for 1¢. Since the Lindt truffle ordinarily costs much more than 15¢, a solid majority choose that option. But when the price of each option is reduced by the same amount, one cent—the Lindt truffle then going for 14¢ and the Hershey's kiss for free—suddenly the response changes dramatically, and most people choose the free Hershey's kiss. This is one of many experiments offered to prove that people find "something for nothing" to be irresistible, even when it might not be technically their best option.

To make a long story short, I've found that a lot of the ideas in the book have a direct relevance to how camera purchasers behave. In one fascinating section, Professor Ariely first demonstrates the persuasiveness of the "herding instinct," noting that people are experimentally more likely to want to join a longer line to get something than a shorter one, but then he goes on to claim that brand loyalty is in a sense "herding" with yourself. That is, you buy one Canon camera, then you buy another, and another, and another, and, since you've bought Canons in the past, you're much more likely to buy one in the future. You're in effect "lining up behind yourself" to buy a Canon—same old herding instinct, it's just that your past selves are the other members of the herd. Hmm. Very interesting.

In the part of the book I'm reading now (Chapter 8, "Keeping Doors Open: Why Options Distract Us from Our Main Objective"), he actually uses cameras as an example, to make a point I've made myself in the past. My formulation of the idea is that the less difference there is between two cameras, the less it matters which one you choose. Thus my standard answer to the inevitable XTi vs. D40 (now XSi vs. D60) question. When people ask me whether they should get the entry-level Canon or the entry-level Nikon, my answer is "Yes, you should."

Although that's seen as, um, unhelpful, it's actually a considered answer: what I mean is that you should stop worrying about the choice, buy one, and get on with taking pictures. It doesn't matter which one you choose. They're both excellent cameras, and you'll get accustomed to either one after you use it for a while.

Faced with two similar options, a quick decision would be best. However, it turns out that we (irrationally) experience options not chosen as losses, and human being are very averse to loss. "In fact," says Prof. Ariely, "choosing between two things that are similarly attractive is one of the most difficult decisions we can make. This is a situation not just of keeping options open for too long, but of being indecisive to the point of paying for our indecision in the end." That helps explain why people are so fanatical about inconsequential aspects of camera-buying decisions.

Interesting stuff. And as the author notes at the end of the chapter, even when one is aware of the irrationality of indecision, it doesn't tend to help us make our own decisions any faster or more easily. To which I can only say: amen, brother.

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Mike  (Thanks to Adam)

Remembrance Of Things—Part 2

By Ctein

(When we last left our hero, he had a mere 45 GB of photographs to sort through. How did he cope?! We now return to the story in progress...)

There were a whole bunch of obvious duplicates I could weed out. Tee's work habit was to stock iPhoto libraries with all the original camera files in subfolders named "Originals." Those that interested her got copied into the parent folder of "Originals." I used Bridge light table windows (screenshot below) to compare the contents of each dated folder with its Originals sub-folder. Why Bridge? Because it happened to come with my copy of Photoshop. Really, any image viewing program that lets you display large numbers of photographs on one screen with associated metadata, lets you sort them by different criteria, and lets you select ones to move or delete ought to work just as well.

This is where it occasionally got tricky. Most of the time files of the same name in those two windows would be the same photograph, but they'd have slightly different file sizes. Tee's workflow involved re-saving the photographs rather than merely duplicating them. Doing some careful, direct pixel-by-pixel comparisons in Photoshop, I found only the most trivial differences, so I kept the larger version. Occasionally I would find files of the same name where the "copy" was markedly larger. This was a guarantee that Tee had made some sort of alteration. I always preserved both versions of those photos.

This sounds a lot worse than it really was. It was entirely visual work; I'd queue up some jazz, put on some headphones, and zone out to the music while I mowed down duplicates. After a week or so, I'd made my way through all the library folders, and Tee's hard drive had shrunk by another 8–9 GB. Now came the hard work.

Half of the photos resided various project and works-in-progress folders; they usually duplicated or were derived from the iPhoto files. Fortunately Tee often carried the camera's image number through the naming process. I could use Mac OS's Spotlight utility to search on a string like "0194" and scan the list to match photographs across folders. Some projects derived from a couple of specific days' photographs. Once I'd paired up two folders this way, I'd usually find they had a whole bunch of photographs in common. (I also wrote down these folder connections for future scholars.) Others derived from years of photographs and I had to do wild-card searches on frame numbers for most of the individual photographs to find their sources.

Derived photographs could be very subtly different. Tee reworked images in stages, and I needed to preserve all the intermediates. I wrote a time-saving Action in Photoshop to compare photographs. It pasted one photograph as a Difference layer over a second photograph and added a curves adjustment layer that increased the contrast four-fold (below). If there were any differences, they jumped right out.

Once, there were two photographs that had different version letters, but I honestly couldn't see any difference between them. The Action showed that Tee had removed four birthmarks from the subject—not exactly obvious!

I'm pretty well convinced I didn't miss more than 1% of the duplicates and didn't mistakenly delete even a handful of unique images. Now the hard drive was a svelte 30 GB. After I wrote "readme" RTF's for the files in the new archive, explaining to future scholars what I had done and how I organize all the files, I wrote two copies of the archives back onto the hard drive that had been provided. Then I burnt four sets of DVD's on Kodak Preservation DVD blanks. Nothing is certain, but these are as good as you can get. One set stayed with me, one with the executor of the state, a backup copy went to my friend Laurie Edison's home, and the "official" copy to the University.

A few files got munched when I burnt my DVD's, probably 1 in 10,000. Bless Photoshop's Contact Sheet II function for catching them for me. I created an Errata folder, containing fresh copies of the munched photos for inclusion in a catalog CD. I also copied my "readme's" and my folder cross-reference notes to that CD. The bulk of the CD was a set of about high-resolution JPEG files—the full set of of contact sheets generated from the DVD's of Tee's work. 12 images across, 12 images down, and about 130 sheets in all, as illustrated last time. The sum total of an artist's digital life. In two handfuls of gold disks. A strange thing to contemplate.

And equally strange—viewing all those photographs in chronological sequence, over and over, was a little like viewing a stop-motion encapsulation of someone's life. By no means the sum total of those years of living. Still, an important subset of them, sitting on my hard drive, presenting itself on my screen as I scrolled through page after page of images, finally arriving at the very last folder, shown above. Dated 7/27/06, it contained mostly photos of Tee. More self portraits? I have no idea. Either way, they're the last photos in her files.

Tee's life ended exactly one month later.

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Ctein

Newseum Opens in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Polshek Partnership Architects

Newseum to Open in New Home Friday

By Brett Zongker, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP)—A mangled and twisted metal tower that once broadcast radio and television signals to New York City from the top of the World Trade Center has a new home at the Newseum, Washington's monument to press freedom and other protections of the First Amendment.

The tower is just one striking artifact inside the high-tech journalism museum, which also includes large sections of the Berlin Wall, archival video and newspapers dating back nearly 500 years, and thousands of other objects to wow news junkies.

The Newseum opens Friday in a $450 million ultramodern glass building on Pennsylvania Avenue—prominently seated on the last available site between the Capitol and the White House. The opening caps seven years of planning and construction after the original and much smaller Newseum closed in Arlington, Va., in 2002....

READ ON at the Associated Press website, ap.org

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Mike

Featured Comment by Charlie H: "A great friend of mine produced the Pulitzer series. He's the one asking the questions that you don't hear. It was a Herculean effort tracking down all the photographers and getting them to sit down for an interview, and it took several years to complete. In fact, one of the interviews was shot at my house. I was responsible for supplying lunch, shrimp poboys. I haven't been yet, but I will be going up soon to see it. I do not believe that any public funds were used to build the Newseum, so I don't know what anyone's gripe is. The tradition of a strong and independent press is one of this country's greatest assets and that we are recognizing it is a good thing in my book. I wonder what year China's newseum will open?"

Random Excellence: Jack Brauer

Jack Brauer, Elbert's Moonshadow, from the top of Colorado

Moonlit mountains and the last colors of sunset, as seen from the summit of Mt. Elbert, the tallest mountain in Colorado at 14,440 feet, Sawatch Range, February 2006.

"I spent three hours on the snowy summit on this calm winter night, in awe of our planet, before I made my way down under the moonlight."

Lots more at Jack's Mountain Photography website.

 
Jack's house (in Ouray, Colorado, north of Durango, in the southwest region of the State). Jealous? I am.

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Mike (Thanks to Jack)

Stinehour Press to Close

The Stinehour Press of Lunenburg, Vermont, has announced that it will cease operations as of Monday. Stinehour has a longstanding reputation as one of the best quality book printers in America. The Press has won more than 50 awards for its books and has a long and prestigious client list.

Stinehour published many photography books over the years (by itself or in collaboration with other printers, designers, and binderies) and enjoyed a well-deserved reputation for the superlative quality of its productions. "Printed at the Stinehour Press, Lunenburg, Vermont" was for decades virtually the stamp of excellence in photography book printing and design. 

Founded by Roderick Stinehour in 1952, the Press was owned by the Stinehour family until it was sold to an Irish conglomerate in 1998. When the parent company decided to leave the printing business in 2001, Stinehour was purchased by a small group of its managers. The group now lacks the capital to modernize the press's physical plant and equipment sufficiently to enable it to compete for business.

A skeleton crew from among the current 21 employees will stay on to complete ongoing projects, and management says it will do all it can to help its highly skilled workforce to transition.

Focus magazine posted the entire Stinehour press release on the Large Format board, and here is a link to the article in the Burlington (VT) Free Press.

Really good reproduction of photographs in books has never been an automatic process, but requires care, attention, judgment, and craft. The artisans of Stinehour Press created many beautiful examples over the years, which remain as a testament to the company's devotion to the art of fine bookmaking.

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Mike (Thanks to Oren)

Geoff Wittig comments: This is a genuine tragedy, the demise of one of the few genuinely artistic book printers in America. Stinehour was chosen by Joseph Blumenthal for his seminal works The Art of the Printed Book, and The Printed Book in America. Christopher Burkett, one of today's finest practicing color landscape photographers, worked at Stinehour Press in the late 1980s doing their 4-color offset printing.

Back in the 1920s–1930s, fine book printing was recognized as an art form in its own right. Truly gifted artisans like the Grabhorn brothers and Bruce Rogers printed books whose artistic qualities matched the words they carried. Stinehour Press was a living link to that artistic tradition, surviving in an age of giant publishing conglomerates grinding out multi-million copy first-printings of the latest Grisham thriller.

And now they're gone too.

Sigma DP1 Review

Just posted: "Sigma DP1: The Future Meets the Past" by Edward Taylor.

[NOTE: There's a technical problem with the review page. When clicked on, the two vertical pictures are opening at sizes that are much larger than the image files, which shouldn't be happening. The overlarge size makes the image quality look excessively poor. The horizontal pictures are opening properly. I have sized both vertical pictures at the sizes they appear on this page, i.e., when they're not clicked on, so please judge them as they appear that way. I've submitted a Help Ticket to TypePad and will work to resolve the issue as soon as I can. Apologies to Ed for the problem.]

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Mike 

The Mystery of Connoisseurship

By John Camp

After looking seriously at many images over a long period of time, a person develops a sense of quality that is distinct from personal taste, or from "good taste," or from fashion or contemporary politics.

All of those issues are confusing, and is one reason why students and younger photographers and painters (and critics) swing so wildly from one style to another, as they are influenced by successive artistic discoveries.

The finest artists in the great styles (landscape, street, portrait, etc.) impress a personal aesthetic on their work, a genius in a certain kind  of perception. His or her techniques can be imitated, but the genius can't be—and the genius is what a connoisseur is looking for. For example, there are probably a million plein air painters in the U.S., but none of them are Monet....

If you look at enough images, for long enough, you begin to see that quality is everywhere, in every great style, and so is the crap. It is further confused by the fact that the same artist—Ansel Adams is a good example—can produce both masterpieces and rather lame potboilers. And that generally crappy photographers have, on occasion, produced something really extraordinary.

A couple of years ago a guy named Malcolm Gladwell published a book called Blink, in which he discusses the high quality of instant, instinctive, intuitive judgments about all kinds of complicated problems, including those of art connoisseurship. He talks about how a famous art guy hurried to (I think the Getty museum) to look at a recently acquired ancient Greek statue, and the instant he saw it, knew that it was fake—even after it had been certified by experts as a genuine masterpiece. Further tests proved him correct. He simply knew the subject so well that the quality he expected wasn't there in this object, and he knew it was wrong.

Blink actually has a lot to say about this kind of judgment, and how the mind works behind it. (The same guy wrote The Tipping Point.)

Not that there still aren't disagreements; but, generally, there is much broader agreement than disagreement on which artists are really good, and which individual pieces are genuinely masterpieces.

For me, the biggest problem is fashion. Back in the early '90s, I became attracted to the floral photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, and even paid several thousand dollars for a print. I still have it, and the print hasn't changed, but the longer I look at it, the more it seems to be...a little inane? We'll know more in twenty years or so, when the veils of fashion and politics have lifted a bit....

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John Camp is a journalist. This is his first post for TOP, although he has contributed many comments.

Florida 'Gators

Charles Mason, a longtime TOP reader from Fairbanks, Alaska, has been endangering himself in the Florida Everglades over the past few days. I'm not sure he was in mortal peril from this guy...doesn't he look a bit fat, as if he'd already had his photographer for the day? But if getting up close and personal with Florida 'gators wasn't dangerous enough, Charles says that, while shifting around for a better shooting angle, and with nothing but flip-flops on his feet, he came within inches of stepping on a water moccasin.

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Mike  (Thanks to Charles)

E. O. Hoppé and Eugene de Salignac

I had intended this to be "book week," in which I planned to publish some of the book reviews I have by others still awaiting the light of day, as well as churning through some of the many books I have awaiting review by me. But we had to pause yesterday while I made another Implacable Enemy, something I inadvertently do from time to time, and Edward Taylor has written a nice review of his new Sigma DP-1 that I'd like to post soon, probably later today or tomorrow. Besides, it's obvious I'm not going to make much of a dent in the book situation anyway, without letting them take over the website indefinitely.

Still, there are two that I'd like to discuss briefly, and they deserve to be discussed together, and not just because they arrived chez Johnston in the same box from Amazon. They are E. O. Hoppe's Amerika: Modernist Photographs from the 1920s and New York Rises: Photographs by Eugene de Salignac.

I've been hearing about E. O. Hoppé for years—his name almost always associated with a word like "underrated" or "forgotten" or "underappreciated"—but had never seen much of his work, so I figured it was high time. Since my memory is mainly visual, my most vivid impression of Hoppé was a mental image of Bill Jay's characteristically excellent portrait of him in old age, which I was pleased to find online. Bill had hunted him down in a nursing home in 1972.

Bill also made efforts to resuscitate Hoppé's reputation. With Cecil Beaton, he secured for Hoppé an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society, which had been Hoppé's fondest desire, only weeks before the older photographer died at the age of 95. Fascinatingly, Bill also says of Hoppé: "Rarely in the history of photography has a photographer been so famous in his own lifetime among the general public. All photographers revered him; Cecil Beaton simply referred to him as The Master." (Bill Jay, Occam's Razor, which I am dismayed to see is out of print, p. 143. You can find the essay here, filed under "E." It's a PDF.)

Looking at the pictures, this fame is, frankly, mystifying. The meaning of work does change with time and fashion; innovations can be eclipsed, and the needs of a public and a society—what it wants reflected of itself, what it hopes its artists will say about it—is more evanescent than we give it credit for being; a study of the many figures in all the arts who were hugely popular during their lifetimes but are then dismissed by posterity, sometimes utterly, would be fascinating. What I see here is work that is not modernist, but transitional between pictorialism and modernism, hesitantly and somewhat indiscriminately employing the visual tricks and tropes of both. It's not assured technically: Hoppé seems to misplace focus, consistently putting it too far back, as if his ground glass were mis-calibrated and he never figured it out. Phillip Prodger, in comparing Hoppé's subjects with similar themes by other famous photographers such as Evans, Sheeler, Strand, Weston, Stieglitz and Coburn (and the painter Edward Hopper) in his introductory essay, unintentionally demonstrates Hoppé's comparative weakness, his inability to construct an assured picture even out of promising material.

E. O. Hoppé, 6th Avenue at 42nd Street, New York City, 1921

In fact, "unassured" is as good a word as any for what I see in these pictures. Hoppé seems to be always searching for a means of organizing his subject visually, aware that there's a picture in in the vicinity somewhere but seemingly never able to quite find it. He casts about this way and that for modes of approach, now heroic, now ironic; here classical, there iconoclastic; first descriptive, next impressionistic. (These pictures were originally published under the title Das Romantische Amerika—Romantic America. Phillip Prodger claims that the title was "partially ironic," but an English version was subtitled "Picturesque United States." ) The work just lacks confidence. The best pictures seem like near misses, and the worst are no less approximate than snapshots.

Bill Jay, Emil Otto Hoppe in a nursing home, England, 1972

From one extreme to the other
The case of Eugene de Salignac couldn't be more opposite, in so many ways. The front flaps says, "From 1906 to 1934, Eugene de Salignac shot over twenty thousand 8-by-10-inch glass plate negatives of New York City. As the sole photographer at the municipal Department of Bridges/Plant and Structures during that period of unprecedented change, he documented the creation of the city's infrastructure—bridges, major buildings, roads, and subways." He was not only not famous among the public in his lifetime, he was almost irredeemably anonymous during his lifetime, and might have remained so had it not been for the visual acuity and detective work of Michael Lorenzini, who performed a rescue operation to save de Salignac from the dustbin of history almost on the order of Berenice Abbott retrieving the plates of Atget from the trash. (It took Lorenzini a fair amount of sleuthing just to unearth de Salignac's name. We still don't know what he looked like.) It's a fine story, and enlivens the book's verbal essay. But it's the pictures that carry the volume.

Eugene de Salignac might have been just a workman (a blue-collar photographer, one might say) doing a quotidian job for a salary, but his vision is consistent and bold. He's the soul of capability, organizing well-composed pictures out of complex situations, readily handling tough situations and confidently playing with unusual and quite sophisticated arrangements (see the picture of the cable-oiler on the Williamburg Bridge on p. 57, for example, or the now-famous cover picture). He seems an authentic prototype for what some modernist art photographers strive for. (That giant W has probably made some contemporary art photographers jealous!) Of course, out of 20,000 pictures it's probably possible to make any number of different cases for what kind of photographer he was, like a fanatic extracting one or two lines from the Bible to defend some wacky worldview. I won't say I know where this book's small sample of his work places de Salignac in the pantheon of photographers, but I enjoyed the book a lot more than I thought I would.

The two photographers even visit the same theme once. Compare Hoppé's nondescript, approximate, vague and fuzzy view of the Woolworth building made in 1921 (p. 65 in book #1) with de Salignac's magnificent, crisp, no-nonsense and supremely descriptive picture of the same building made in 1914 (p. 6 in book #2). No contest.

It's very tempting to draw pat conclusions from the contrast between these two books by these two very different photographers—the famous artist aiming high but harboring the more modest talent, and the unassuming, near-nameless workaday pro transcending his day job to rise to genius. I can't say it's an unappealing object lesson. The two of them might be a good embodiment of David Bayles and Ted Orland's story, in Art and Fear, of the pottery instructor who divided his class in half—one half to be graded on the basis of a single perfect pot, and the other half judged purely by the number of pots they could churn out. The moral of the little tale was that the people who threw the most clay also learned how to make better pots. There's something to be said for approaching photography as if it were a job, even if it's not.

Eugene de Salignac, Williamsburg Bridge, view showing Kent Avenue Yard "W," 20 feet, for "WSS" to be placed on towers March 20, 1918 [WSS stands for "War Savings Stamps"; the letters were erected on the south side of the Manhattan tower during World War I.]

The pat answers aren't the right answers, however. I've pawed through my share of vast forgotten archives in my time, and I'm here to testify that many workaday jobber photographers were plain hacks, their work no more graceful or well-seen for being plentiful. Talent is rare, period, and de Salignac (like Arnold Odermatt and Mike Disfarmer, two other talented photographers with anonymous, earthbound jobs) was gifted, plain and simple, no matter what his job description or work instructions. It may be, however, that de Salignac's pictures—or Michael Lorenzini's selection of his pictures—simply conform to modern tastes and expectations better. (Much better.)

I'm going to shelve these books next to each other. The two of them really do add up to more than either one alone, and I'm glad I encountered them together. But for a buy recommendation for others, the de Salignac is the one to have, assuming you have an interest in one or more of the following: pre-WWII America, documentary photography, large format, men at work, architecture and construction, or New York city.

(And by the way, if you haven't at least browsed Bill Jay's lovely website of portraits, you really should. I published a portfolio of his portraits of photographers in Photo Techniques a decade or so ago, and I've been a big fan for much longer than that. He really is one of our very best portraitists.)

______________________

Mike

2008 Pulitzer Prizes for Photography

The 2008 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced. The winners in the photography categories are, in "Breaking News Photography," Adrees Latif of Reuters, "for his dramatic photograph of a Japanese videographer [Kenji Nagai —MJ], sprawled on the pavement, fatally wounded during a street demonstration in Myanmar," and, in  "Feature Photography," Preston Gannaway of the Concord (N.H.) Monitor "for her intimate chronicle of a family coping with a parent's terminal illness."

Preston Gannaway, from her Pulitzer Prize-winning feature photo-essay "Remember Me."

Both awards carry a $10,000 honorarium as well as considerable prestige.

_________________

Mike (Thanks to Bob B.)

Featured Comment by Brommers: "Personally I thought that the 'Remember Me' series was a beautiful set of photographs, and is very worthy of recognition.

"It is true that a lot of photojournalism awards go to those who photograph hardship and suffering, but it is dealing with such subjects that in many cases can be much, much harder than with celebratory projects. The unfortunate truth is that whilst there is plenty of good going on in the world, there is an equal amount of bad too; ignoring this fact would not make it go away (though I agree that the media does often like to sensationalise stories, but I do not think this is the case with 'Remember Me').

"Instead of celebrating our own successes and well being, is not better to try and help others who are suffering? And if that can be done through photography, then I'm all for it. If those photographs help EJ (their youngest son) remember his mother better in the future, so that he may know how hard she struggled to stay alive for him, his siblings and father, and how much she loved them, then is the project not a success? I would say so."

In the News

The best strategy
In the wake of yesterday's political news, I find myself wondering if Mark Penn fired himself. I mean, he was the Clinton Campaign's top strategist. So is he the guy who realized that getting rid of him would be a good strategy?

Hillary: So what should we do?

Mark Penn: Looks like we should fire me.

Hillary: You're the strategist.

And once he's gone, who's going to strategize firing the next guy who deserves to be fired?

Pogueisms
David Pogue of the New York Times must be extremely knowledgeable about computers, because every time he writes about cameras he performs a flawless imitation of someone who doesn't know much to start with and yet doesn't bother to keep up. This time out he writes about a 60-fps Casio (the Exilim EX-F1) which allows you to take up to 60 pictures at once and then edit them later, so you can pick the best one. Our correspondent calls this "a time machine." The miracle is illustrated with a "slide show" consisting of 25 pictures of a gymnast taken with too low an ISO and too slow a shutter speed…making it immaterial which frame one might go back and pick after the fact, since all of them are blurry anyway.

Think that's bad? How about this: "The historic feature of Sony’s Alpha A300 and A350 digital cameras is the back-panel screen. It lets you frame the shot before you take it, just as you can on pocket cameras; you don’t have to hold the camera up to your eye." Back-panel screen? Does he mean the LCD? And that long locution "frame the shot before you take it...don't have to hold the camera up to your eye" is apparently the Pogueism for live view. Reminds me of a refrain I used to harp on with high school students: "I want nouns." (No thingamajiggies; no whatchamacallits.) And not just nouns, but the right nouns. The ones that are fit to print. I've never heard anyone call an LCD on a DSLR the "back-panel screen" before. Is that like the look-through hump (prism) and the grabbable thick place (handgrip)?

I won't even get into that "historic" claim.

And while we're on the subject of the Times
…See what I risk for you?!?*

____________________

Mike

*Well, okay, so I'm closer to Alfred E. Neumann than Shaw and Orchant, but I'm not above making a fast grab for a little credit where ever-so-little is due.

Featured Comment by David Pogue: "Man, I don't know what side of the bed you woke up on. But it must not have been the one that makes you realize, 'David Pogue is writing for the New York Times, not a photography magazine. He writes for a nontechnical audience, and has been instructed to avoid jargon like "LCD" and "live view."'

"On the bad ISO, blurry shots of the gymnast: Evidently you stopped reading before you got to this paragraph: 'It contains a tiny light sensor (about half an inch diagonal, versus 1.1 inches in a beginner S.L.R.). As a result, its light sensitivity is poor. Except in bright sunlight or studio lighting, those burst-mode shots are dim or disappointingly blurry.'

"But never mind all that. It's possible to disagree without being such a miserable cuss."

Mike replies: My little blog is getting way too big...I can't make fun of anybody without them reading it any more. (Although I haven't gotten a comment from Hillary Clinton or Mark Penn, so I suppose that's not strictly true.)

If your editors really obstruct you from using proper terms, is that, um…smart? How are your readers going to learn anything? Couldn't you have written the same sentence but inserted the clause, "the common term for which is 'live view'"? Really, we don't need less accurate information circulating in this field, believe me.

In any event, live view didn't originate on the Sony A300 and A350, and despite those cameras' somewhat slicker implementation of the feature, to call them "historic" is hyperbole at least.

My apologies for the miserable cussedness.

Featured Comment by Ctein: "This is kind of interesting; Mike and I are usually in sync about camera articles and reviews. But this time, I'm entirely at the opposite end of the scale from him. I thought David Pogue's review was excellent. Really well written and nailed the important points, both pro and con (note here that I am speaking from a position of ignorance, because I haven't actually had a chance to play with this camera, either). I think he did a very good job of calling out the feature and explaining why people would want it as well as the things they would find very aggravating, doing so in a concise way and getting the emphasis right, and (what I always find difficult) doing it for a patently lay audience.

"As for the photos used to illustrate it, well, both Mike and I know better than to criticize a review because we don't think the photographs are wonderful. We get that kind of crap from readers all the time. Even so, I thought his choice of photographs was smart. If there's one thing that those of us who've done action photography go to great pains to point out, it's that a motor drive doesn't guarantee a good action photograph (isn't even necessary for one). You still need to be able to compose and frame and focus and (historically) if you need to stop action you better load up with really fast film and have one of those incredibly expensive ƒ/2 lenses. Firing off a whole bunch of frames per second doesn't mean any of them will be sharp. Folks who have never done this don't realize that; David gets the point across.

"I think the photographs that David used to illustrate the camera are very typical of the kind of photographs an amateur who buys this camera would produce until they got damned good. More important, they both illustrate the primary selling point of the camera and  one of its big disadvantages—weak low-light performance. But even if they weren't on point, I'd still consider them good enough for demonstrating both the benefits and pitfalls of this technology.

"Haven't looked at any of the other articles you alluded to, because frankly, I'm not interested in a referendum on David Pogue. All I can say is that based on this one article I'd hire him to write reviews for me in a moment. But I will make one observation—criticizing someone for their precise choice of technical and non-technical terms when you don't know what the manuscript looked like before and after the copy editor got done with it is not exactly reasonable. I don't know what it's like at the New York Times, but most publications I wrote for didn't have me review an article before it went to press. Mike (and my other editors at  PHOTO Techniques) were the exceptions, even among photo publications, let alone ones directed at a lay audience."

Featured Comment by Eamon Hickey: "The Times's writing on photo gear frequently makes me cringe, too. But I've always suspected that it's the copy editors, more than the writers, who impose weirdnesses like 'back-panel screen' on the paper's copy. My assumption has been that they consider terms like 'live view' or 'LCD' to be industry-specific jargon and think that average, non-photo-geeky readers won't understand them. Another clumsy construction they often use is 'eyepiece viewfinder' when they mean optical finder. So anyway, I wonder if Pogue is partly turning verbal sumersaults in order to forestall objections from persnickety copy editors.

"Another one that screams 'we actually know approximately zero about this topic we're pontificating about' is The New Yorker magazine's styling of the acronym "SLR." Completely uniquely in the world as far as I know, they style it with periods—i.e. "S.L.R." It always looks completely wrong to me, like mustard on pizza. In this case, I'm positive that it's the magazine's famously idiosyncratic copy desk that's responsible."

Mike adds: The Times always addresses people as "Mr.," "Mrs.," and "Miss," too, which is increasingly anachronistic. It's especially clunky when it refers to people from foreign cultures who are criminals—people who would never be called by "Mister" in their own cultures, and who don't deserve an honorific in any case.

The New Yorker's vestigial oddity is its insistence on putting book titles in quotation marks instead of italicizing them. David Remnick is a superb editor, and no-nonsense—he unceremoniously did away with the magazine's lovely old-fashioned typeface, and ghettoized its surviving humor, even, regrettably, nixing the funny little column-fillers that used to appear at the end of many of the articles. But he let the magazine's habitual error with book titles stand. That's all it is, too—an error. Nothing charming about it as far as I can see. Probably comes down all the way from Ross.

Review: 'André Kertész: The Polaroids'

By Ken Tanaka

André Kertész: The Polaroids
Introduction by Robert Gurbo
128 pages. W.W. Norton, 2007.
$35 ($23.10 at Amazon)

Link to Amazon U.S.

Link to Amazon U.K.

The recent announcement of the discontinuation of Polaroid’s consumer films sent me on a search for notable Polaroid photographic art works. I did not have to search long. It seems that there has been a small but devoted group of photographers and artists with a strong affinity for Polaroid film. Of all of the Polaroid work that I’ve found thus far, however, none has touched me as strongly and deeply as a group of recently published Polaroid images by the late André Kertész.

Like any of Kertész’s images these would stand strong on their own merits in the absence of any context. But a spot of back-story, as provided by Robert Gurbo, the book’s author and the curator of Kertész’s estate, makes the collection all that much richer.

It was the 1970s and Kertész was nearing the end of his nearly 70-year career, much of which had been spent in relative obscurity. He was deeply mourning the recent death of his wife and lifelong closest friend, Elizabeth. Approaching 80, Kertész’s own health was also failing.  One day musician and photographer Graham Nash, whom Kertész had befriended during this period, gave him a Polaroid SX-70 camera as a gift. Kertész found the new technology of "instant film" to be liberating. (A balance disorder had kept him from doing his own darkroom work for nearly 40 years. Being able to shoot and develop his images autonomously was a revelation to him.) Indeed, by all accounts the transformational effect of the Polaroid photography on Kertész was rather remarkable. In his introduction Robert Gurbo remarks, "...a sad old man waiting to die had become one who could not wait for the next click of the camera."

The 65 images presented in this book, dating from the late 1970s until shortly before Kertész‘s death in 1985, were all captured in, or from, his apartment near Washington Square in New York where he and Elizabeth had lived since 1952. Many are still lifes, some are golden hour shadow play, others are casual portraits of visitors to his home. Together and individually they present a striking and very touching reflection of an immensely talented, but lonely, photographer nearing the end of his road. But these images also show that same creative talent embracing and exploring a new medium. This was clearly a man far more devoted to results rather than methods. We can only wonder how Kertész might have embraced digital photography.

In today’s "bigger is better" world of photography this little book of Polaroid images, reproduced in full size, serves as an important reference point regarding the intrinsic qualities of good images. To be sure, the world has many images featuring rich, essential detail that require enormous prints. But as a stroll through many photo dealers’ galleries will confirm today, size is most often being used to fraudulently suggest quality and importance (and to inflate prices). Kertész’s little Polaroids, like most of his images, are so far above today’s feet-by-feet images selling for seven figures that it’s laughable. The quality of these images would endure at any size, but they’re particularly special and precious at the size of a Polaroid "instant" snapshot.

I am personally grateful to Robert Gurbo for bringing this mostly unseen body of André Kertész’s final work to print, and to the recent exhibit which it accompanies. (The quality of the printed images is also outstanding.) It’s become one of the books that’s always on my desk serving as an almost-daily visual drinking fountain of inspiration and instruction.

_______________________

Ken

Featured Comment by Stephen Gillette: "On my birthday in 1981 my dear wife presented me with From My Window, a book of SX-70 images made by Kertész. She knew my great esteem for his work, and I had been shooting with an SX-70 myself.

"For some strange reason, I recall being ambivalent about the book. The images were not exactly classic Kertész: these were color, square, and reproduced actual size (small). I expressed polite thanks. The book found a spot on the shelf, and there it patiently waited.

"Over the years, like a lapsed friendship rediscovered, this book has provided unexpected delight. It has returned to my ripening attention and appreciation, year-after-year. What a marvel of emotionally-potent delights!

"Kertész has stated that he sought to create 'atmosphere' in his photographs. The mystical potential of art is no better displayed than in his Polaroid images, created with such a simple, reduced camera system. (Simple, but elegant, the SX-70.)

"I look forward to seeing this new book, and to being freshly inspired by this old friend."

Mike adds: And may I just point out that the retail price of From My Window in fine condition is currently about $200 to $250. Photography books are not only great to have, they're great to collect.

Pentax: Sky Officially Not Falling

The other day a reader contacted me with some apparently dire news. His dealer had just told him that "Pentax USA has let go of all their sales staff and management."

Well, no. What happened was that ownership of Pentax by Hoya—long reported in the photo industry press—became effective five days ago, on April 1st. Ned Bunnell, the President of Pentax Imaging USA, is not only a businessman, he's also "one of us"—that is, a dedicated, longtime photographer who is passionate about all the same things we all are. So I asked him if he'd clarify. Here's some of what he told me:

"...As we’d previously announced, Pentax officially became a wholly-owned division of Hoya Corporation on April 1. As we had officially stated, and I’d commented on in one of my blog posts, being a division of Hoya will definitely help provide the funding, direction, and resources to grow our business in the United States. Our growth will require adopting new strategies and making changes to the way we do business. One crucial area of change that I immediately started to address when I became President in October was to develop a new channel strategy. In looking back, as you know we were late to enter the digital camera market, and further, we didn’t address the need to change the way we sold and supported sales of our cameras.

"What we have initiated on April 1 is shifting from a regional territory sales model (that we’d used since the the film days) to creating a new sales organization structure of 'account' teams focused on specific channels, including photo specialty, on-line, mass merchant and national distributors. The changes we are making now are really no different than those made over the past few years by our competitors and other companies in consumer electronics.

"We also had to address how selling cameras has changed, and therefore each of these new account teams will be staffed by both 'account' managers who will focus on improving our business with each channel partner, and 'sales support specialists' who will provide logistics, merchandising and training assistance. Since these new roles require pretty unique skill sets, we offered our current sales force an opportunity to apply for these new positions or accept a very generous resignation package. While many of the sales force choose to leave the company, we retained some of our staff and will be looking for new account managers and sales support reps ('Pentaxians') to help us spread the word about how great Pentax cameras are.

"I hope you can see that each of these steps we are taking is a positive step to grow our business and that our loyal customers should not fear we’ll go away.

"As I’ll be posting an update about these change on my blog, there’s no need for you to keep these comments anonymous. By the way, I’m a frequent visitor to TOP and really enjoy your writing and commentary."

Here's Ned's blog. And just for fun, here's a picture from it, taken at the Easter Hat Parade in NYC a few weeks ago, one of a number he posted on his site (K20D, 31mm Limited lens):

Reminds me of the great children's book Go, Dog. Go! by P.D. Eastman:

"Hello!"
"Do you like my hat?"
"I do not."
"Good-by!"
"Good-by!"

____________________________

Mike

Random Excellence: Wayne Levin

Wayne Levin, Mark Under Breaking Wave

Wayne Levin, Fish & Swimmers, Ironman Triathlon

I published a portfolio of Wayne's work in Photo Techniques in the '90s, and was pleased to find his website recently and reacquaint with some work I knew and see some new stuff. There's more at the Robert Koch Gallery. Print prices range from $950 to  $4,000.

He has two books in print, too: Through a Liquid Mirror and Other Oceans. I don't know of another photographer like quite like Wayne. As usual, you can click on the images to see slightly larger versions.

________________________

Mike  (Thanks to Wayne for permission to reproduce these)

A Drum Major for Peace

"Every now and then I guess we all think realistically about that day when we will be victimized with what is life's final common denominator—that something that we call death. We all think about it. And every now and then I think about my own death and I think about my own funeral. And I don't think of it in a morbid sense. And every now and then I ask myself, 'What is it that I would want said?' And I leave the word to you this morning.

"If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. And every now and then I wonder what I want them to say. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize—that isn’t important. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards—that’s not important. Tell them not to mention where I went to school.

"I'd like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others.

"I'd like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody.

"I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question.

"I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry.

"And I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked.

"I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison.

"I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity.

"Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won't have any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that's all I want to say."

-                            -—M.L.K. Jr., in a sermon delivered at Ebenezer 
-                            -Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, on February 
-                            -4th, 1968, two months before his death.  
-                            -© The Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr.

I can find little information online or in my library about the famous photograph taken of the slain Dr. King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, which is now a civil rights museum. It was taken by one Joseph Louw, an assistant producer of a film being made about Dr. King's planned march in Memphis. Eric Meola reports on The Digital Journalist that Louw gave the exposed film to Ernest C. Withers for development, and Withers, who often fed his own civil rights images to LIFE magazine (many of which were then published under other photographers' names), secured for Louw a payment of $50,000 from LIFE for the roll of film.

Dr. King was killed at a time when he saw his influence eroding. Demonized by segments of the white population, under constant harassment from government agencies, and the victim of continual threats, he was also under pressure from more militant younger black activists, who rejected the commitment to nonviolence King had patterned after the examples of Mohandas Gandhi and Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, he had returned to Memphis for what was essentially a do-over: a repeat performance of an earlier march that had turned violent despite his leadership.

"He was only thirty-three when the tide of public opinion turned against him. They called him a rabble-rouser. They called him a troublemaker. They said he was an agitator. He practiced civil disobedience; he broke injunctions. And so he was turned over to his enemies...."

-                            -—M.L.K. Jr. on Jesus, from the same speech

Human beings as a whole deplore nonviolence; the human race can abide almost anything, but it cannot abide peacemakers. (A recent book makes all too plain the malevolent antipathy of Winston Churchill toward Gandhi. "Gandhi-ism and all it stands for will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed," said Churchill, who also wanted Gandhi to be allowed to starve himself to death in prison. He was talked out of it by his advisors.) Martin Luther King came to the same end as Gandhi and Jesus before him. Perhaps it was inevitable, and the time and place were only arbitrary, but it happened to be forty years ago today, on that nondescript hotel balcony pictured above.

"Blessed are the peacemakers."

-                            -—Jesus, Matthew 5:9. (Cf. Matthew 5:21.)

_______________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Chris Y.: "Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–1963 by Taylor Branch has to be the best book on King's era...one harrowing story after another—King, his staff, the freedom riders, the clergy and the Federal officials who eventually got on the right side of the struggle. They don't seem to make them like that any more...."

'AH' in Decline

Apropos the comments to Geoff's Arizona Highways Photography Guide Review, people might be interested to know that the magazine itself is experiencing considerable difficulties. Here's a link to a July, 2007 article by Dennis Wagner of The Arizona Republic (a newspaper, ironically suffering declining circulation itself) detailing the magazine's mission, history, and current woes.

I find this stuff interesting. As many readers know, I used to be the Editor of a national newsstand photography magazine, a bimonthly. However, the main page of this very website—certainly not the largest photography site on the web by any stretch—got considerably more page views in each of the last two days than my former magazine's  subscription circulation and newsstand sales combined. (I'm not sure our average daily readership beats theirs—although it might—but on our good days it sure does.)

Who pays for that?
The emerging problem of the decline of print appears to be: who then pays for reporting? And in our own field, who pays for original photography, whether it's photojournalism, documentary, or features? The internet does some things better than print, but as a society we still need newspapers, magazines, and books—at least until a new model emerges that provides support for what we've had in the past.

I've always thought Arizona Highways was a great idea, even though what it offered was never my personal cup of tea. In fact, in an ideal world, every state would have a magazine that supported statewide reporting and photography documentary and features.

I've also always thought that major cities should have "official documentary photographers" whose job it is to get out and document the ever-changing face of our cities and neighborhoods. I suppose taxpayers, who are notoriously penny-wise and pound-foolish (in the U.S. that would be "cent-wise and dollar-foolish"—we'll raise the roof over misspent millions but never bat a pretty eyelash at unaccounted-for billions) would never go for it. It's still a good idea. Why rely on random chance to document our ever-changing world?

Too bad something like that was never established in the 1850s. If it had been, it would be so entrenched by now that you'd never get rid of it. As it is, it's something we'll never have.

____________________

Mike