The Online Photographer

Milton Rogovin 1909-2011

Anne and Milton Rogovin, 2001, by Harvey Wang

I've just been reached by the news that the great leftist photographer Milton Rogovin died today, just past his 101st birthday. He was a wonderful, kind, compassionate man who lived a life true to the cause of civic decency, equality, and social justice.

Originally an optometrist, Milton was persecuted during the un-American McCarthyite inquisitions of the 1950s. With his practice in rapid decline as a consequence, he turned to photography to express his values, and for fifty years photographed the poor and the working class with a clear eye—surely one of the few positive outcomes of the McCarthy witch hunts. The title of his most recent (2003) book perfectly expresses his photographic concerns—it's called The Forgotten Ones.

One of the best acquisitions I made this year for my fledgling photograph collection is a wonderful portrait of Milton in his darkroom, by Diane Bush, signed to Diane by Milton—a lovely picture and a lovely print, and one I'll treasure.

Milton Rogovin in his darkroom. Photo by Diane Bush.

It might be hard to shed a tear for a man lucky enough to end his days a centenarian, but it's certainly appropriate to reflect on an upright life well lived. He won't be forgotten.

Mike

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Jeff: "A worthwhile video on 'The Forgotten Ones'..."

Mike adds: For those of you who might have gotten into this pursuit a little later in life, note what the video says...that Milton didn't become a photographer till he was 48! It's never too late.

'The Art of Photography'

[A note from Mike: I have it on good authority that Bruce Davidson's Outside Inside, which Geoff mentions at the top of this post, is slated to be reprinted by Stiedl sometime soon. So please don't buy it at the inflated prices it's been commanding since it went out of print. Just be patient. I'll try to let you as soon as it's available again. —MJ]

-

Reviewed by Geoff Wittig

Bruce Davidson's wonderful three-volume collection is tough to top, but there were a number of other excellent books that came out last year that might be worth your attention. In this post and my next one, I'll discuss four of them.

 
 
The Art of Photography: An Approach to Personal Expression (Rocky Nook, November 2010) (U.K. link)

Mike has pointed out that instructional books on photography are helpful when you're just starting out, but quickly reach a point of diminishing returns as you achieve a measure of skill. Past that point, you’ll learn more from taking your own photographs and from studying monographs. This book may be an exception to that rule. Bruce Barnbaum is an accomplished traditional large format landscape photographer who has taught workshops for many years. He is also known for discovering Antelope Canyon as a photographic venue. He has some very strong opinions about expressive photography, and published the first edition of this book laying out his views in 1994. It went though several self-published iterations, all emphasizing traditional film and darkroom work as a means of artistic expression. This new edition is entirely rewritten, and it’s vastly better in every way, from production values to technical scope and the clarity of the text. The quality of the reproductions of Barnbaum’s photographs illustrating the text are very good; most are beautifully rendered black and white images on semi-matte paper, and the color photographs are also well done.

The author is a lucid writer, and he makes a strong case for his view of photography as an artistic medium. The opening chapter articulates a deceptively simple but persuasive model of photographic expression. Barnbaum argues that what interests you—what you're enthusiastic and passionate about—is the natural subject for your photography. You see it differently from anyone else, and consequently (with appropriate mastery of the process) you can express something about it photographically that may enable others to see it in a new way. Subsequent introductory chapters discuss the perceptual and compositional aspects of photography as the tools needed to define and express what you have to say about your subject.

The middle portion of the book goes into great detail about the technical side of traditional optical/chemical photography, with an extensive discussion of metering, exposure, development and printing within the framework of the Zone System. At every step, the author emphasizes that the primary goal is not to meet numerical targets, but to producing a negative—and subsequently a print—that achieves one’s æsthetic and expressive goals for the image. A striking high contrast print may be eye-catching, but if your intent is to express the serene experience of standing in a misty forest, then your technique defeats your goal. I found Barnbaum’s relentlessly logical approach to maximizing image quality in the darkroom fascinating, though my own darkroom experience is minimal. Included is also a fairly complete discussion of color darkroom work, as the author is an experienced Ilfochrome printer.

The Zone System to the histogram
New to this edition is a remarkably sound and lucid discussion of digital imaging, raw processing, and Photoshop editing. Barnbaum demonstrates the conceptual continuity between traditional Zone System exposure techniques and the histogram. What your digital sensor and raw processor are actually doing "under the hood" is explained in some depth, articulating the logic of "exposing to the right" to maximize potential image quality. Extended dynamic range techniques receive special attention; the author notes that black-and-white film can potentially record up to 15 stops of information with careful exposure and development; by comparison, the 7-stop range of digital capture imposes a significant constraint. (Of course, if, like me you came to digital from slide film, you probably found the additional stop or two liberating!) Intelligent use of extended dynamic range can provide a way out of the straightjacket. Photoshop’s automated HDR function is discussed, as are two simple and very effective layer-based methods of manually blending exposures, followed by a brief discussion of Photomatix. Be forewarned that this is a text discussion, with no diagrams or illustrations; even so it’s quite easy to follow. Barnbaum never panders or condescends. At every step, he emphasizes that he's trying to give you the tools to express your own vision. What you do with them is up to you.

The final section of the book is more personal. The author lays out his views on the nature of creativity, realism versus abstraction, artistic integrity, and more. It’s refreshing to see an intelligent and clearly expressed exploration of these concepts on the page. He occasionally contradicts himself, and some sections are a bit murky. You won’t agree with everything he writes. But he surely makes you think about serious æsthetic questions, and that's very worthwhile—surely a better use of your time than spending hours obsessing over MTF charts!

Geoff-

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

A Note from Photo LA

By John Camp

Saturday was a glorious day in Los Angeles, sunny, temps in the high 70s and low 80s, so a friend and I set out for Santa Monica, where Photo LA continues through today (Sunday) at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Admission price is a stiff $20 per person. To summarize the usual stuff: the place was crowded, I witnessed some actual sales and what appeared to be serious negotiations, so I'd say the sales might have been reasonably good.

I saw less "classic" photography this year. I'm sure there must have been some, but I didn't see a single image by Ansel Adams—although I did see an advertisement at a rare book stand for Adams' Portfolio Number 1 for $95,000. I saw three images by Mapplethorpe, a couple by Irving Penn, a couple by Edward Weston (including a nice "Pepper" printed by his son), others by Robert Frank and Martin Parr, Danny Lyon and Alfred Eisenstaedt, and so on.

More interesting, to my eye, were the trends.

Photos have grown larger with the arrival of high-res printers. Where there were always a few photos printed large at photo shows, you now routinely see full-color photographs that are six feet long. In the case of Photo LA, I'd say they dominated the show. Inkjet prints are now the norm, in all but classic photos. There were some silver prints, etc., but the inkjets dominated. A few galleries still call them "giclée," which is a neologism derived from a French word meaning "nozzle" or "squirt," and, as we all now know, also French vulgar slang for male ejaculation.

There were several pictures printed on transparent substrates with rear lighting, so the light came out of the photo—and they didn't even look tricky.

There were photos going in somewhat new directions—in one case, somebody had shredded an unknown number of colorful, hi-res photos, assembled them into a collage, and sealed the shreddings into what appeared to be transparent acrylic. I would not be willing to vouch for either the archival qualities or the durability of the product, but it was not uninteresting. On the other hand, while it was entirely composed of photographs, it was not a photograph.

There were a number of street paintings that were taken (I think, judging from the accompanying labels) from Photoshopped photographs. In other words, a number of street scenes were composited into one "photo" and then that photo was transferred to canvas, in oil paints. A very nice young woman came over and spoke to me enthusiastically about them, and she was so pleasant that I nodded politely and smiled, possibly hypocritically, but I really didn't like them. They were neither fish nor fowl, and I would prefer one of the other. Also, the painting technique failed to light any fires with me.

Photoshopped work was everywhere, and you know what? Eh. Photoshopped photos, even when done with extreme skill, just didn't look like much. They missed both the hand-craftedness of paintings, and the "referent adheres" of photography, so they mostly struck you as postcards.

Some terrific street and semi-street photography—semi-street meaning on the street, with street people, but posed.

Prices: Why would a relatively unknown photographer think he could get between $3,000 and $5,000 for a print, admittedly large, in an "edition of five?" It's not even a unique object. But, maybe they do. Maybe $5,000 is no longer real money.

Generally, prices seem to me to be about the same as they have for the past several years, even including the pre-bust times.

Lots of names I didn't recognize, for high prices, and images whose style was unfamiliar.

Saw two young women with Rolleiflexes. No young men with them (with Rolleiflexes, not with young women.) Did see a young man with four-foot dreds. Lots of point-and-shoots. Relatively few DSLRs, and those were of the less expensive variety. Lots of black shirts and black jeans; in fact, some of the shirts looked to be 18% photo gray. Facial hair was not mandatory for men, but I'm sure you could get a discounted ticket if you had it.*

All in all, an interesting day.

John

UPDATE: A slight enlargement on the original post:

When I said "Photoshopped...eh..." I was really talking about what were otherwise conventional photos, in which the photographer had gone into Photoshop and pushed all the sliders to the right, increasing saturation, vibrance, contrast, sharpness and all the rest. In other words, photos that did not look natural, but didn't look like anything else, either. Images that are composited with Photoshop may have some potential—I didn't see any that really struck in my mind, other than the oil paintings—but that's not what I was talking about in the original comment.

I also gave somewhat short shrift to the book sellers. There were several book sellers there, and I bought several (non-vintage) books, but the stock would make your mouth water. And your wallet scream for mercy. I bought Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills, basically because I've never understood her work, and thought I would spend some time looking at it. But another volume, The Printed Picture, by Richard Benson, published by The Museum of Modern Art to accompany its 2008–2009 show that was, I believe, of the same name, is fascinating. It basically takes a page or two to examine all the different kinds of image making, starting with cave paintings 30,000 years old, through digital printing. It's a great bedroom book, possible to read a page or two at a time. It seems pretty comprehensive, at 338 large format pages, full color all the way through. [This was TOP's Book of the Year in 2008. —Ed.]

By the way, some of the very large prints were gorgeous. I didn't mean in any way to put them down—they can be just as good or bad as small prints. But they are everywhere. —JC

*Humor alert.

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by david bram: "For the last three years, I've gone to LA as a portfolio reviewer at ReviewLA and have always gone to PhotoLA because I get a free pass. This year, I even got (useless) VIP passes because I was 'media' (fractionmagazine.com).

"This year, the opening night party, which was well attended, was hosted by Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, both of whom received lots of attention from the attendees. When each gentleman entered the auditorium, it was if Elvis had entered the room. They were rushed by fans and photographers. Lots of cameras and lots of flashes. Kind of crazy. This year seemed a bit thin as far as work and traffic were concerned, especially on Sunday, when I spent several hours there. One trend I spotted was food and miniature, plastic people photographs, which I find very odd and not very appealing.

"As for the lack of 'classic' photography, those dealers have defected and formed something called classicphotographsla.com. The only 'classic' dealer I recognized was the Monroe Gallery of Santa Fe, New Mexico, whose booth was jam-packed every time I went by and had many red dots on the walls.

"I am starting to find giant color digital prints really annoying. I've been advising photographers during reviews 'just because you can, doesn't mean you should.' Not everything has to be 30x40 or bigger.

"I am also perplexed by the trend of unknown photographers who have prints for sale at the obscene and ridiculous price of $3000–$5000. These are not realistic no matter how small the edition and certainly do not help the artist or the collector. (I could go on but will save it for another time).

"I did enjoy the free tequila tasting and the people watching. Lots of guys all in black (I was one of them) and lots of women in very short skirts.

"It's a fun time whenever I go and I hope the dealers made some money or at least covered their expenses. I know there is a fair amount of money in L.A., but I am coming home with nothing (not sure I was actually in the market to start with). On the other hand, Brad Pitt stopped by twice, caused a great ruckus, and purchased work (what he purchased was not made public). Unfortunately for me, my bank account is much different from Brad's. With that being said, I am not sure I would have purchased anything, even with an eight figure bank account."

Featured Comment by Dan Milnor: "I've lost track of how many years I've gone to Photo LA. This year, like many of the past, I was greeted with complaints by friends who beat me to the gathering. I found this year's show to be about what I expected, and I didn't find anything too negative to dwell on.

"I was very pleased to see three Chinese galleries in attendance, as well as the Kahmann gallery from Amsterdam and Riflemaker from London, all of whom were friendly, interested and seemed to have a sense of humor when it came to the industry in general.

"The enormous, technology-based print size of the past five years seems to be slowly retracting, but the large prints are still associated with large dollars so I don't see them going away anytime soon.

"I think the economy is reflected in the trends. Derivative work has always been a part of the show, but now I'm seeing derivative work based on work that came out two years ago. I think this reflects the realities of the market. People need money, photographers chase content and galleries do the same. Copy what style of image was hot last year or the year before and then get it on the wall.

"In my opinion, the aspect of the show that hit a home run was the bookseller component, with Phaidon being at the top. Beautiful, editioned books, from various publishers, ranging from a few bucks to $15,000. Book as object is becoming as interesting as anything else in the photo-world.

"My one main question I come away with...where are the young gallery owners? And by young, I'll say 40! We need new blood and new direction in the photo-art world, and I really hope the next generation will step up and show us something new."

Featured Comment by Jeffrey Goggin: "I also visited Photo LA this weekend while I was attending Review LA. Unfortunately, the single most memorable impression I took from the event is that L.A. traffic sucks! I found quite a few places where I would like to photograph someday (or night, actually), but just the thought of having to drive in that city again gives me a headache, let alone actually doing it. On Thursday night, for example, it took me an hour to drive a whopping seven miles, almost evenly split between freeway and surface streets...ugh!

"The second most memorable thing was seeing prints from several of my favorite photographers close-up and personally instead of reproduced in a book or magazine or as a .jpg on a monitor. In the case of the vintage stuff, the reproductions I've seen in books and magazines over the years were about equally split between a) failing to do the original prints justice and b) making them look much better than they do in reality. I was surprised by the latter, because I had simply assumed the original prints would always look better than a reproduction, but I now know this is far from a universal truth.

"The third most memorable thing is a tie between the prices being asked for certain photos—$75,000 for a Helmut Newton print?! $85,000 for a Richard Avedon print?! $2,500 for a Helen Levitt miniature 'print' that was (apparently) cut from a contact sheet?! $7,500–20,000 for non-vintage HCB prints?!—and watching a man whip out his black AMEX card and in two minutes time, buy ~$3,000 worth of limited-edition and autographed photo books based upon the man with him pointing at each of them and saying 'You should get this one, that one, two of those, this one, this one, and that one.' It sure must be nice to have that kind of money, eh?

"The fourth most memorable thing was listening to some of the exhibitors as they sold their wares. The crap that came out of their mouths sometimes, especially concerning various technical aspects of photography, was just amazing.

"Beyond this point, everything sort of blurs together, but other highlights that come to mind were meeting an internet acquiantance for the first time and seeing his ex-Chinese Air Force Nanchang CJ-6 warbird trainer (no time for a flight, alas); watching a film crew shoot a scene in a residential part of Santa Monica at 2 a.m., while I was out photographing in the area myself; and getting my car stuck on the shoulder of Hwy. 62 after I foolishly ignored the 'soft shoulder' signs and stopped to photograph some rock formations near the Joshua Tree National Park....

"Overall, while I can't say that I'll ever go back again, I certainly am glad that I went to the event this year. It was an education for me in many respects."

A Few Followups...

Once removed: A few days ago, just for a smile, I posted a link to a picture Pete Tsai took of his girlfriend through Vivian Maier's camera at the Chicago Cultural Center exhibition. First of all, it turns out there's a whole sub-sub-genre of such pictures, called "TTV," or through-the-viewfinder, where people shoot pictures with digital cameras of images on film camera viewfinders. That was a new one on me. Matthew Miller told me about it. But the update: it turns out that TOP reader Dan Fogel was at the exhibition too, and took a picture at of a guy who was taking a picture the way Pete did. I wonder, is this Pete? Or another guy who had the same idea?

Most expensive in 1970: For a followup question to his last column, Ctein is trying to find the answer to this question: what was the most expensive camera you could buy in 1970? This currently has the brain trust stumped. Anybody know?

Polling: The poll about when you bought your digital camera came about because a commenter to an earlier post claimed that there are people out there shooting with cameras that are a decade old. My subjective impression is the opposite—my sense is that the half-life of a digital camera is about three years, and that very few people are shooting with digital cameras more than six years old. But I had no objective data to back that up. So I thought I'd ask. I was right, as it turned out...at least where our readers are concerned. How many people are still using pre-2005 digital cameras? The answer, with 3,568 responses to the poll as I write this, is: very, very few. Of course that's only a snapshot of now, as the camera market, and camera technology, is constantly changing. 

It does strike me that the long-term reliability of digital cameras (even high-end ones) does not seem to be very good. The fact that people tend to frequently update to newer and better technology might have served to mask that fact up till now. With the pace of advancement slowing, though, the pace of updating will slow, too. Sooner or later, people really are going to start wanting to use their digital cameras for a decade and longer. Will the cameras be up to that challenge? I wonder.

Pulling: Despite TOP topping Reddit with yesterday's post (thanks to Lynne Anderson for telling me about that), the biggest draw on TOP in recent weeks was the Remuddling post! Traffic spiked way up for that one, hitting a several-month high. I guess it pulled in a lot of people who are interested in home remodeling and residential architecture. In this business, ya never know what's gonna spike.

Parallel poll: And finally, by popular demand, a parallel poll for those on the other side:

[UPDATE 11/19/12: Vizu Polls closed down, so I've taken a screen shot of the poll results and substituted it for the live poll. Best I could do to preserve the post. —Ed.]

Mike

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Getting Past Technique

The discussion under the "Center vs. Fringe" post yesterday made me think that I should mention this again: technique, to me, is something mature photographers simply get past.

That is, you pick the technique you like best, that works best for you, that gives you what you need to see; and then you master it; then you're done with technique.

And that's when the real work begins.

It doesn't really matter what the technique is. Whether you want to make 7x17" platinum prints or hipstamatic iPhone JPEGs, black-and-white conversions from digicam files or color neg in a TLR, 5-foot-wide prints from a medium-format digital back or blurb books of your Canon CMOS sensor files...whatever turns you on, lights your fire, floats your boat, whatever fulfills or gratifies you—fine.

Which picture's by Martin Schoeller and which by Jill Greenberg? Exactly.

Most people pick their techniques because they love them. Whatever it is, something about it does something for them. It's how they want their work to look. It's what they want to look at.

And then, whatever technique they've chosen, all their pictures are made with that technique. So technique ceases to be an issue. They've gotten past it.

Consistency is memorable, variety is not
Sure, you can think of exceptions, photographers for whom this is not true. Some people engage sequentially with many techniques. Some people make "sea changes" at some point in their careers and change their technique from one to a different one (the advent of digital has forced/inspired such a change in a lot of people, including, for example, Charles Cramer, and Ctein). And it takes some people a while to "settle down"—their early technique is tentative, exploratory, and only later morphs into a stable final form. We tinker, God knows: new lens here, new RAW converter there. Some take detours (Ralph Gibson made a couple of books of color photography, that I know of—and who can forget Kertesz's funhouse mirror pictures?) only to return again to their main way of working.

Maybe it's just an old art-dawg* prejudice, but when I was coming up we thought that the people who had to master lots of techniques were pros, because pros have to provide what clients want—and that's why pro work is supremely competent but seldom memorable. (And when pro work is memorable, it's usually because the professional has dedicated a portion of his or her activity to working like an artist. For example, Avedon's 8x10 portraits.)

No rules
But a consistent or "signature" technique can be a strong component of public identity for an artist, and most of the great photographers just had the one technique they liked best, and with which they are most closely identified. All of Edward Curtis's mature pictures were done using the same technique. If I asked you to describe what a characteristic Helmut Newton photograph looks like from a technical standpoint, you could do it. All of Edward Weston's mature work looks similar technically. You can't miss a John Gossage and you can't mistake a Martin Paar for a Martin Schoeller, or a Bruce Barnbaum for a Mark Klett.

I don't want to make too much of this. It's just one way of thinking about technique and you, of course, are free to go down any path of your choosing. I'm speaking descriptively, not prescriptively. But I will say that when most amateurs assume they have to master all techniques to be a master of technique, they're imitating professionals, not art photographers. Art photographers are more often deep masters of the particular technique they've chosen, and they let the rest go.

To be a good photographer technically, you don't need to be a jack of every random ratty way of working with every kind of equipment under the sun. You don't need but one—one good one you like and that suits your taste and what you're doing. And from there, it's on to the real work of hunting down the pictures and saying what you want to say.

Mike

*I.e., art student.

P.S. If you're not familiar with the photographers, the book cover on the left is by Martin Schoeller.

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Player: "I haven't plunged deep enough into photography to fully appreciate your wisdom on technique, but from my perspective it definitely applies to music, and I'm sure, since you brought it to our attention, photography too. The first five or six years I was trying to get a handle on my instrument, the six-string acoustic guitar, and I believed that I needed to learn and master all these different styles of music and technique, but it really isn't necessary unless you aspire to be a professional studio musician who can step into any situation and be competent, just like a professional photographer (as you mentioned).

"The first time I listened to Nick Drake I knew that I had found my niche, so I immediately went to work trying to become proficient at fingerstyle playing incorporating basslines, melodies, and chords basically played simultaneously, to become a self-contained one-man band. And what rings absolutely true for me is your assertion that once technique is in place that's when the hard work begins, so to speak. That's when the time to begin creating music begins, writing songs, creating albums. There's no more agonizing whether I should work on my scales so I can shred an electric guitar, or improving my proficiency playing with a pick. When the technique becomes second nature and completely embraced you put your effort into creating art (hopefully), expressing yourself musically, and not really searching out technique."

Featured [partial] Comment by Luc N.: "Having such a strong recognizable 'signature' may be a double-edged sword in the magazine world. It surely can make your work memorable, but it can also make it too memorable when it comes to style. Which means that a particular technique translated into a style/signature will have a shelf life that may be shortened by ADs and other art buyers when they get tired of recognizing from 15 feet away who shot the picture gracing the cover of a magazine."

Mike replies: That's true enough. Wasn't it Skunk Baxter (a studio guitarist who played on many Steely Dan albums among other things) who outlined the four stages of a studio musician's career? 1. "Who's Skunk Baxter?" 2. "Get me Skunk Baxter!" 3. "Get me a young Skunk Baxter!" 4. "Who's Skunk Baxter?"

But bear in mind when I say "consistency is memorable, variety is not" I'm only talking about technique. Photographers as disparate as Eugene Atget and Elliott Erwitt used the same technique for most of their working lives, but their work is diverse and creative.

By the way, apropos those names: This post got top ranking on Reddit's photo section this morning...

...And several commenters there accused me of "name dropping." False ack! Name dropping is when you inject names into discussions or conversations to brag about who you know. I don't know Elliott Erwitt (or Eugene Atget), or Martin Schoeller or anyone else I mentioned. I'm merely using those photographers as examples to help get my point across. That's not name dropping.

Although mentioning Reddit might be!

Featured Comment by Jonathan Castner: "Photographic technique is merely the ability to do something, be it produce perfect star trails, black line light a piece of glassware or photograph a seared scallop with almost no depth of field. Style is how an artist takes the various techniques that they have learned and puts them together into a distinct representation of their personal vision of the subject, project or their world.

"I think that a lot of people confuse technique with style. There are a lot of known photographers these days who are known for their use of technique as style. The much ballyhooed Dave Hill comes to mind with his hard-lit, undersaturated, highpass filtered composites. Mr. Hill does not do anything that resembles 'straight' photography where the image that comes from the camera is what he presents to the client. Much of what makes Dave Hill, uh, Dave Hill is what he does with the elements that comes from his camera—he is far more illustrator than photographer which is fine.

"Richard Avedon had loads of technique but didn't make his physical ability to manipulate his tools very obvious. What you had at the end of his life was a huge variety of work that still had his way of seeing be it fashion shot with a Hasselblad or highly composed portraits done on an 8x10. For a master like him technique was just a method of getting what he wanted and was never obviously present. What was obvious was the artist.

"As for Helmut Newton yes you can describe his black and white, hard light—often to the side, stark but romantic look but that doesn’t describe his style and way of producing the characteristic kinkyness of his work. His approach was not technique dependent as much of his work was done with ambient and even soft light but retained the vision of the man.

"I could tell the Jill Greenberg shot from the Martin Scheoller image easily as both of them are part of the new technique-based photography where they find not a technique but a singular look and the only thing that really changes is the face the lens is pointing at. Martin shoots most of his stuff on 8x10 or larger with two strip lights at 45 degrees to the front of the subject as key lights with minimal to no post production. Jill Greenberg shoots on digital medium format with hard edge lights and a beauty dish as a main and then does extensive post production. What they have in common is that all their shots look the same as their last shoot. They produce photos without almost any variety to how they look.  It is as if this look that they have produced is all that they know how to do and my oh my am I bored of their work. As artist they show no personal growth. Heck even Joey L. realized that he can’t just be a younger Dave Hill clone and had to get away from all the illustrative stuff and bravo for him.

"But still this all reminds me of a song by Paul Simon, 'One Trick Pony':

He's a one trick pony
One trick is all that horse can do
He does one trick only
It's the principal source of his revenue...."

Featured Comment by Rob Atkins: "Reminds me of a comment made by the composer Philip Glass. He said when you are young, you spend so much time and effort to find your own voice, then once you acquire it, you work hard to free yourself from it. —With a sore lower back from shoveling snow in Vancouver, Canada."

Featured Comment by Jill Greenberg (the photographer featured in the second illustration —Ed.): "Yes, but meanwhile people think that look is all I do... ;). I have reinvented myself many a time and will do so again. What sux is when the generalists get much of the work and are often hired to do my look."

Mike replies: Jill, you'll laugh (or groan) at this: years ago, mainly for fun, I was doing "senior portraits" of my high school students, charging only $100 for a portrait just to cover my expenses. My style was very distinctive, owing in part to the wonderful light from huge, deep skylights in the art room. The kids liked my portraits and my services were much in demand.

One girl, the daughter of a famous and rich national celebrity, wanted me to do her portrait too, because I was doing portraits for all her friends, but her mother, who only bought the best of the best of everything, absolutely refused to have her daughter's senior portrait done by a guy who only charged $100! The mother insisted on hiring the most fashionable portrait photographer in Gerogetown at the time.

Before the girl's sitting, she came by my office asking to borrow a bunch of my portraits so she could ask her photographer to duplicate my style! I gave them to her. A week later, she brought in her finished portrait, which successfully mimicked the kind of work I did. The cost: $1200, or twelve times what I would have charged. (In the mid-'80s, that was at the high end of the local D.C. market for a portrait.) When I asked her if she liked it, she said, "I do. It's almost as good as one of yours!"

Time for a Poll: When Did You Buy Your Camera?

[UPDATE 11/19/12: Vizu Polls closed down, so I've taken a screen shot of the poll results and substituted it for the live poll. Best I could do to preserve the post. —Ed.]

Mike

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Winter

Jeez, I'm jealous. Everybody else is getting all the good winter. The East Coast got a nice snowstorm yesterday. All day long yesterday my friends out there were sending me pictures. Taunting me. I think there's a snowstorm down south of us, even.

At least we have snow on the ground here. And it's cold enough—but we've gone a record amount of time without a day below zero. North Carolina has better snow right now than we've gotten so far all winter. North Carolina. It's not fair. Although I don't envy them the shoveling.

(There's a TV commercial on in Wisconsin right now that shows a city street buried in snow, with cars struggling to move and bundled-up citizens trudging against the wind. The voice-over says, "In Miami, it's 85 degrees and sunny right now." Then a pause. Then: "I pity the poor souls.")

Speaking of shoveling, I might have told you about my mental index of how lazy we Americans can be. Previously I had a little game of watching people waiting for parking spaces in the parking lot at the grocery store—I was always interested to see how many spaces people would "save themselves" by hunkering down waiting while a closer parking space opened up. For years the record was four cars, which I saw several times. It was a record I imagined would never be beaten. Then I actually saw a woman—thirtysomething, fat but able-bodied—sitting and waiting for a spot that was two cars in from the next available free spot. She was literally idling her car next to an empty parking space while she waited for the closer space to open up. By waiting, she saved herself maybe 16 or 20 feet of walking. It wasn't even cold or raining.

How lazy can you be? No longer a rhetorical question. Not much lazier than that. Kinda made the game no fun.

So then I started noticing how little snow it took for some people to get out their snow-blowers. That quickly became no fun too, as I'd see people here and there firing up their snow-blowers for, say, three inches of dry snow. Snow you could almost clear with a broom, never mind a shovel.

Well, that one got beaten all to crap the other day too. We had basically a dusting of maybe half an inch of fluffy powder—you could almost see the color of the asphalt through it—and I actually saw a woman cleaning the snow off her driveway with a leaf blower.

If you're snowed in, stay warm. And don't feel sorry for yourself. Well, you can a little, if you were inconvenienced. But don't forget to enjoy it, too. I'm jealous.

Mike

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by politovski: "Greetings from NC! We are currently ~12 degrees here in Waynesville. As for snow, check this out:

"Nothing like nine inches of fresh powder just outside your house."

Featured Comment by Steve Rosenblum: "My favorite is the person who does the 'waiting for the closest parking space' thing when they have arrived at the fitness center where they (presumably) have come to exercise. Even better are my patients who after successful coronary bypass surgery are completely without symptoms and attend cardiac rehab classes faithfully three times per week to get the beneficial effects of exercise, but then ask me to sign the DMV form to get a handicap parking sticker so they don't have to walk more than a few feet into a store. When I point out the contradiction to them  they say 'But, Doctor, I have a heart condition!!' "

Featured Comment by DF: "When I was in college, my girlfriend would always work to convice me to find the closest parking space, and it drove me batty. After dating for several months, things came to a head. Upon entering a very busy mall parking lot around Christmastime, I began the impossible task of finding a 'close' parking space with her comments getting more and more frustrating. After 20 minutes of torture, I drove to the very farthest parking spot that I could find from the mall, and I staked my claim. There were plenty of spots closer, but none were 'close enough' for her, so I decided to make a point and choose the farthest. That was a long 10 minute walk to the mall, and, needless to say, that was the last Christmas we spent together!"

Mike comments: On such small foundation stones is compatibility built. I trust if you and she were compatible in other ways, you would have taken to dropping her off at the entrance and parking the car alone!

'Center' vs. 'Fringe' and a Day at the Beach

Regarding the "iPhone fashion shoot" (see "It Won't Be Long," below), I think David Dyer-Bennet hit the nail on the head when he wrote, "Many of the problems with the camera in my phone...are precisely the problems that mostly don't come up working with a professional model in the studio." With almost any camera or imaging system, you can optimize its performance by hitting the "center"—the sweet spot—of its various parameters, and minimizing potential sources of image degradation. And, indeed, that's easiest to do in the controlled conditions of the studio.

In the studio, you can use a tripod to control camera shake; use the optimum aperture of the lens; use the ISO that yields the best quality, and so forth. As old-time studio photographers know but some readers might not, you can also tailor the contrast ratio of the lighting to match the latitude (or "dynamic range") of the camera. Even using a transparency film of limited latitude, a studio pro would simply adjust the lighting accordingly so that the film could capture the whole subject brightness range effortlessly.

I wrote an article a while back (for a photography magazine, not this site) about how you could get very similar image quality from a decent digicam as from a good DSLR. All you had to do was shoot the digicam under optimal conditions.

It's only when you get to the "fringes," so to speak—the performance limits—that better, more capable cameras and lenses begin to show their superiority to worse ones. I've referred to this in the past (in writing about lenses) as "stressing" the system. Stressing a cameraphone is easy: just ask it to record too great a range of brightnesses, under mixed lighting, at a high ISO, with its lens wide open, at too slow a shutter speed. The result: failure. In situations where a better camera might still succeed.

In olden times, "not stressing" an amateur camera meant asking your
subjects to come outside and stand in the sun.

It's even true of non-imaging properties like durability. For example, an average consumer camera will probably do fine shooting at the beach on a warm, bright, calm day. If you paid extra for a camera with weather sealing, you wouldn't be getting any added utility for your extra expense under those conditions. But add blowing sand and salt spray, and suddenly you're stressing a cheap camera and risking failure or damage—and you're also suddenly getting your money's worth out of a weatherproof one.

Or consider autofocus speed. Two cameras might do indistinguishably well under bright light with high-contrast subjects. But what about under low light with low-contrast subject matter? One camera might still be able to grab focus while the other one can't. You've stressed the systems, and reached the performance fringe with one.

Getting to know a camera consists of a number of skills and capabilities. Learning its settings and practicing until you're able to handle it quickly, to name two. But an important one is the gradual process of exploring the boundaries of its capabilities, so you eventually learn what it can do and what it can't. Every camera and lens imaging system has limits. It's knowing where they are that's the key.

The better the camera, the broader the center, and the further you can "stress" it before you reach the fringes where degradation starts to show.

Mike

Illustration from Square America

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Edie Howe: "Then there's the Holga—a camera so neurotic that picking it up stresses it out."

Random Snaps: Pete Tsai

Worth a smile: Pete Tsai took a picture of his friend Bea through Vivian Maier's camera. Clever idea.

Mike
(Thanks to Jeff Goggin)

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Looking to the Past for the Future of Camera Prices

By Ctein

Mike's recent article "The End of Cameras" engendered some pretty strong reactions, so I thought I'd make some points about the greater context of the history of cameras. As I said in my comment there, 99% of the camera business has produced what we Serious Photographers^tm call "cheap crap" or "CC" (that's a technical term of art*), since George Eastman was alive. The overwhelming majority of photography has been for socialization, memory-saving, and personal record-keeping. That will continue to be true. We SP elite live on the fringes, always have and always will.

For much, even most, of that period, the SP business was distinct from the CC business. A truly minuscule percentage of photographers owned what we would consider Serious Cameras. Notably, that changed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the major camera manufacturers, led by Minolta and Canon, realized that they could apply mass production manufacturing techniques and economies of scale to produce serious cameras that non-serious photographers could afford.

We have all reaped the benefits of that in a grand and glorious thirty-year ride. We've gotten accustomed to getting rather good cameras dirt cheap.

So, what's going to happen to the business if, as some fear and some hope, the digicam market pretty much disappears, with cell phones and multifunction electronic devices taking over that role? Simplistically, it returns us to the traditional situation where the Serious Camera business was largely disconnected from how 99% of the population made photographs. It's a very weak similarity; corporate structures, multinational conglomerates, and entirely different business/profit models define the landscape in a way that was not true in 1970. This might be good for SP's; it might be bad for SP's; it will most assuredly be different.

But let's imagine, for the sake of amusement, that it won't be different. In that case, return with me to the thrilling days of yesteryear! It's entertaining to take a look at camera prices from 40 years ago, a time before the aforementioned mass production/economy of scale era, and compare them to today's.

At this point a bit of arm waving is necessary. Doing "constant dollar" calculations over a 40-year period is a dicey business. There is broad agreement that the Consumer Price Index underestimates real inflation, but different analysts and different models have different estimates by how much. I've read numbers as low as 1/2% per year and as high as 2% per year, on average. Well, I have to pick a number, so I'm picking 1%. Understand that this means that my constant-dollar prices have an uncertainty of easily +\– 25%. Eh, more than close enough for utter speculation.

All the following prices are given in my calculated current dollars. One I think I know by heart; 1970 was when I bought my Pentax 6x7 kit in college. The camera body plus metering prism cost $10,000 (yes, just about the price of the Pentax 645D). The standard normal lens was another $2,000; the 300mm ƒ/4 telephoto I bought was another $4,000. Interestingly, the entry price for comparable configurations of the Pentax, Rollei SL66, and the Hasselblad (the three high-end medium format cameras of the era) was about the same.

For other cameras, I turned to ads in old issues of Modern Photography for street prices from reputable vendors. A Pentax Spotmatic ran between $1300 and $1700 depending on which prime lens you bought; the Konica Autoreflex T and Minolta SRT 101 ran about the same. Some cameras, like Mamiyas, sold for modestly less. You could get some really cheap-ass medium format cameras like the Pentacon or the Kowa for around $2500 (optically it was unlikely they performed much better than 35mm cameras, but bigger frames cut way down on film grain).

Feel like spending a bit more for your 35mm? The much-revered Alpa 9D would set you back around $2,500. A Nikon Photomic FTN would set you back $2500–$3000, depending on the prime lens you bought; if that was too rich for your blood, the excellent but not so prestigious Nikkormat could trim that by a third.

What about Leica? It was just like today; if you had to ask, you couldn't afford it.

•     •     •

Next week, I'll throw out some designs for building psu's wished-for "tablet based digital view camera," using current technology. Seriously. No joke.

Ctein

Illustration: Leica ad from 1970 Modern Photography magazine. Scan courtesy Marc Bergman.

Ctein's weekly column on TOP is published on Wednesdays.

*He's kidding. —Ed.

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

The Vivian Maier Show: A Brief Review

By Dave Fultz

I went to the Vivian Maier show at the Chicago Cultural Center this morning. If you’re in the Chicago area, do go; it’s worth it. The show is nicely mounted and this morning there were no more than 10 people there so there was no problem in standing for a long time looking at a print.

I think the jury is going to be out for a quite a while on the judgment of whether she was one of the top street photographers of the 20th century. For one thing, they are a long way away from cataloging the more than one hundred thousand negatives she left. Who knows what images lie in those boxes?

My reaction to the work is more modest than some. I do think she was very talented but the exhibition images overall left me pleased but not stunned save for a couple images. Her portraits of children are wonderful: direct, spontaneous, clear-sighted and sometimes quite humorous. Her portraits of adults on the other hand are curious. There is a peculiar sort of neutrality to many of them that some might say is a discursive style choice but that I find lacks the direct human connection that is so often the mark of truly great street photography. It could be that I'm projecting what I know of her character from the Chicago Magazine story, but I don’t think so. I also wonder about the effect of looking down at the Rolleiflex screen at the moment of exposure.

Photos by Vivian Maier / The Maloof Collection

There are several stunners in the show. The picture of the (probable) vagabond sitting in a doorway (above) is simply magnificent. Deeply sculptural. For some reason I kept thinking of the Pietà even though the subject is not at all the same. Here, although you can sort of see the image in the online JPEG, the presence and power of a real print makes a huge difference. The picture of the two boys (below) is very powerful. At first glance it looks a little "Our Gang"-y but as you continue to look you realize this is very complicated, disturbing, odd. Wonderful. There are a number of other first-class portraits in the show.

I can’t help but wonder if some of the enthusiasm for the work arises from people's sheer pleasure at looking at prints from 2 1/4 B&W film again.

The curators included two display cases with her cameras and some curiosities. The last thing I looked at before leaving the exhibition was a handwritten note, probably from a camera-store counterman to the guys back in the photo lab. It said, "Do Best Job—So NO Redo!! Customer is very particular!!"

Get to this show if you can!

Dave

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

OT: The Worst Remuddling Job in the History of the Universe

-

Remuddle, v. (portmanteau from "remodel" and "muddle"), to remodel a building or room in a way that obscures or destroys key aspects of the original design.

-

A person can approach the world and the experience of life in innumerable ways. Approaching experience from an essentially aesthetic standpoint—and having to share the planet with so many people who don't see or understand the world that way at all—isn't the worst affliction to have. But it's not always easy, either.

If you're basically an aesthete as well, I have to warn you, this might be painful.

Dave Reichert, who is also a photographer, bought this charming, tidy little house in New York State in 1986. It had originally been built by hand—a one-of-a-kind—in 1926.

Dave, a professional restoration contractor, turned the house into a labor of love. He began a gut renovation that involved replacing all the mechanical and electrical systems. All the interior surfaces were replaced or restored. The original clay tile roof was restored, and the half-story attic was converted to a master bedroom and bath. The restoration took seven years. For most of those years, the Reicherts camped out in a dusty, dirty construction site.

Dave says he should have known better—he overbuilt. He couldn't help himself. He did it out of his deep respect for the old building and his pride of workmanship.

In 1996 he sold the house for a substantial loss when he moved to New Mexico, but he had given the original builder's creation new life. He had turned it into a wonderful little house that he hoped would make some family happy for at least a generation to come.

After the break is what Dave found when he returned to his old neighborhood in 2007. Take a second before you click the link, and prepare yourself...

Enigmatic Update Part II

Apropos the ongoing discussion I thought I'd post a first snap of my most recent camera acquisition. First, I have to throw out a caveat: there's nothing significant about a photographer getting a new camera unless he (or she) is going to use it. I've gotten a couple of cameras over the past couple of years that I haven't used much. And this one's just an experiment. So don't read too much in to this acquisition. It's of no significance or consequence yet.

Anyway...

I don't name all my cameras—but this one has a name. I've dubbed it "The Single Use Device."

The view of it above reminds me of a funny story (again, one I've told before). My late mentor, teacher, and friend Steve Szabo lived for a time in a houseboat on the Potomac estuary. Steve was among the early wave of art photographers in the 1970s who, led by George Tice and others, took the 8x10 Deardorffs that had been de-accessioned by the previous generation of architectural and studio photographers and started doing art and alt-process photography with them. In those days Deardorff 8x10s were little in demand and not very expensive (by which I mean roughly $350–$700), and Steve had two of them.

That was also the era of the Diana camera craze—a time when it briefly became fashionable for art photographers to do serious work with $5 plastic toy cameras with single-element plastic lenses. (The now-better-known Holga is essentially the same camera.) Curiously—and contrary to the original gestalt—authentic original Dianas now command relatively premium prices. In those days you could get one for as little as $4.95, so Steve had a couple of those, too.

The final thing you need to know is that cameras were relatively more expensive in the broad swath of the middle of the twentieth century than they are now. Before point-and-shoots came along in the '80s, having a camera pretty much meant having a 35mm SLR, and 35mm SLRs could always be fenced—er, pawned—for at least a dime bag. They were magnets for thieves.

What happened was that a thief broke into Steve's houseboat when he was away and cleaned him out. When Steve got home and took stock of his losses, he was relieved to find that his two Deardorffs—which were folded up, of course—were still there. But both of the worthless Dianas were gone. Steve concluded, much to his amusement, that the thief recongized the "camera-ness" of the camera-shaped Dianas, and assumed they were valuable, but had no idea what the Deardorffs were.

Looking at the picture at the top of the post, you can almost sympathize with that thief. If you weren't a photographer, you might not recognize that strange thing as a camera either.

I'll post more about the singular and radical single-use-ness of The Single Use Device later this week, or next. The story is surprisingly deeper than you might suppose.

Mike

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Rob: "This summer, in Minneapolis, a thief smashed out my passenger-side window, rifled through the glove compartment, and stole my GPS (probably a dime-bag right there). He/she took my Tachihara 4x5 (attached to a carbon fiber tripod), that had been craftily camouflaged under a beach towel on the front seat, examined it, found nothing of value, and left it unharmed in the adjacent shrubbery. Here's a crime scene photo:

It Won't Be Long

Olivia Price by Lee Morris...shot with an iPhone.

And speaking of the possible disappearance of the camera as a single-use still-picturetaking device, check out "The iPhone Fashion Shoot" at FStoppers. Photographer Lee Morris shot model Olivia Price in the studio with the whole fashion protocol, from hair stylists to retouchers—but using an iPhone and a pair of $50 floods from Lowe's.

Of course he was interrupted by a call from a telemarketer mid-shoot, but there's a price for everything.

Mike
(Thanks to Richard Skoonberg)

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Edward Taylor: "This may not spell the end for better cameras just yet. And these portraits from an iPhone do not surprise me at all. When I first started reviewing cameras, I used to test them out in the studio. That was a mistake. It turns out that the results of those tests were not reflective of the relative strength of the test camera. In the studio, with controlled lighting, and particularly when photographing a human, almost all cameras look pretty good. (Believe it or not, portraits have far less detail than most things). Take the same camera out into the real world, and the picture is much different. I love my iPhone, but in most circumstances it cannot compete even marginally with better cameras."

'The Variegated Town of Montreal'

Speaking of "then and now" views, check out the nice (if somewhat slow-loading—you have been warned) William Notman / Andrzej Maciejewski pairings at the McCord Museum of Canadian History website. Andrzej Maciejewski did a really nice job of matching the historical Notman photographs. Includes interiors as well as exteriors, and check under the "Photographer" tab for Andrzej's comments (there's even audio, if you mouse over the pictures). Ed Hawco told me about this.

It struck me as I looked that it's not an entirely fair way to appraise the progress of the city, for the simple reason that the early photographer—Notman, in this case—has a free hand to present the most comely views, whereas the modern photographer is constrained in what he can present by what the historical photograph shows. As is clear from one view (#3) that is now almost completely blocked by buildings, this in some cases leads to modern photographs that one wouldn't necessarily take or frame the same way if one had a free hand.

As I've no doubt said before (TOP will probably end when I've told all my stories at least twice), I've always wondered why cities don't have official photographers—just someone to wander around on a permanent basis capturing records of the way the city looked as it evolved. I suppose the politicians would find it an easy expense to cut, but if it were permitted it would be valuable for the historical record and for civic pride, identity, and interest.

Mike
(Thanks to Ed and several other readers)

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by John McMillin: "Years ago, I was briefly an 'official' photographer in Golden, Colorado. The local historical society hired and (barely) paid me to photograph each facade in a historical district. There's probably a little of this documentation going on at any moment, but not enough. When I came to Denver in the late '70s, it had a wealth of dilapidated post-industrial buildings downtown, and a busy railyard, that were far more colorful than today's designer-styled instant urbanist paradise. I documented those old relics a bit, but not enough. When they're gone, the photography stops but my memories remain, fading.

"Gotta put in a good word for Montreal here. I visited for the first time in October, and it was a visual delight. I was especially drawn to scenes of rooftops. There must be a law, or at least a custom, against leaving any roof flat or unadorned. Instead, they're steepled, ornamented, castellated in a most elevating style. Montrealers like to view their city from commanding locations, like the Olympic Tower, or the old church belfry by the Old Port. When an historic government building was being renovated, the whole structure and scaffolding was wrapped in plastic sheeting neatly printed with the building's windows and details. That's pride showing!"

Featured Comment by Jeff: "My favorite is the audio from #8, Notre Dame Church. Very 'TOPical.'"

Mike replies: I hadn't heard that yet when I read your comment. Made me laugh. Good catch.

Featured Comment by Andrzej Maciejewski: "Thanks for posting this. I agree that each city large or small should have a photographer who would document streets, buildings, parks, etc. It would not be such a huge expense to the city, but there would be something left in the archives. I was looking through the archives of a few cities in Canada and the state of them is rather less than poor (except for the Notman archives in Montreal but this is only because he was a successful commercial photographer who sold these city views at the time)."

The End of Cameras?

I haven't mentioned CES yet this year—the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which ended yesterday. I guess it's because I found the whole thing to be pretty much a giant yawn this year. Basically, a bunch of new digicams were announced. That's got to be exciting to people who just didn't have enough digital point-and-shoots to choose from before.

The new digicams included a waterproof one from Kodak (the EasyShare Sport), a "ruggedized" (waterproof, shockproof, freezeproof) one with GPS from Fujifilm (the FinePix XP30), and a Casio with a BSI sensor (the catchily named Exilim EX-ZR100). Probably the two most significant camera introductions at the show were the Olympus E-PL2, an improved uptick of the E-PL1, and the Samsung NX-11, both mirrorless cameras based on earlier models.

The Olympus E-PL2 sure is a sleek and handsome little box.

It's safe to say that cameras weren't creating the biggest splash at CES. In fact, I can't escape this nagging sense of foreboding in the back of my brain that the camera functionality of multi-use devices is beginning to fatally contaminate the concept of the "camera" altogether. Well, maybe that "fatally" is hyperbolic. But first you have the increasingly ubiquitous cross-contamination of video and still-picture functionality, and then there's the continued improvement of the cameras in phones; and given the astonishing number of tablets introduced at CES—I think I heard the number was 80—how long can it be before tablets replace laptops and include built-in cameras up in one corner? Seems like the still-picture single-use device category is starting to take a beating. I hope the photography area of CES 2021 won't be a forlorn little corner with a few cheap, basic remnant products in it, like the darkroom supply area of my local camera store is now.

I don't know, maybe this is just general curmudgeonliness, or something I ate. I had a bad weekend, despite the Packers win and the generally fantastic football (see the video at the link if you haven't already). Let me rephrase that: I didn't have a bad weekend so much as America had a bad weekend*. Whatever the cause, and whether or not this sense of foreboding I'm describing has any merit, this CES still seemed rather forgettable in my book.

Mike

*Despite this mention, I'd rather not have to ride herd on a discussion about the event in Arizona. Too far off topic, and I'm far too preoccupied with it as it is. Thanks for your co-operation.

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Ouch

Talk about yer "remuddling." The New York Times says the Black, Starr & Frost building is probably the earliest surviving apartment building in Manhattan, although it isn't used as such any more.

In the 1880s. Photo courtesy PictureHistory.com

And today. Photo by Chester Higgins Jr./NYT

Reminds me of a plastic surgery disaster. Poor old building.

The building went up in 1874 and is located on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 28th.

I've always had a mild fascination for "then and now" pictures, although I also find them persistently unsatisfying somehow. I guess it's because they don't tell enough of the stories that they imply.

An exception is the great book Second view: The Rephotographic Survey Project by Mark Klett et al. (OoP), probably because of the scrupulousness of the way the modern photographs were done: they're exactly triangulated, not approximate. What's amazing to me about that book is how much the land itself changed in a century or so.

I've never owned the book, though.

Similarly, I'm always fascinated/unsatisfied by baby pictures. It would be very interesting to see more sets of photographs of people at many ages, but it would be best to have one to two dozen pictures rather than just two. That might make a nice idea for a picture book, if it were well done.

Mike

UPDATE: Several commenters have mentioned what is probably the most famous "people through time" project, Nick Nixon's yearly portraits across more than three decades of his wife and her three sisters. It is indeed a quietly wonderful project. (I've seen the original prints—some of them, anyway!—back when the project was short of two decades old.) And the most recent book, published by MoMA in 2008, is still available.

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by DerekL: "You should check out How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built by Stewart Brand. It's a fascinating book about how the built environment changes over time in response to the demands placed on it and changes in the social/economic environment around it. Second and Third View merely document the changes; Brand explores the how and why of the changes. (There's a fascinating series of photographs of the interior of his wife's business as it changes from a design firm, to short run production, to retail, to mail order.)

"As ugly as the surviving building is, it tells a far more interesting tale than a building frozen in time."

Featured Comment by Bob Blakley: "Oh my God—that's awful! Reminds me of Prince Charles' comment that at least when the Luftwaffe knocked down British buildings it didn't replace them with anything more offensive than rubble...."

Featured Comment by jkiel: "My Masters degree thesis was a rephotography project. My great-grandfather was an early Utah photographer, very prolific, so I constrained myself to using some of his Salt Lake City views. If you look at the site, once you get to the side-by-side image page, my 'third view' is linked below those image pairs. Just FYI."

Featured Comment by John Holland: "Here's a Toronto-based 'then and now,' based on some snapshots a Japanese tourist took when visiting the city in 1977. A Toronto photographer found the 1977 photos on the web, and decided to rephotograph the whole sequence."

Mike replies: Thanks John. I'd actually seen that before, but had forgotten all about it.

Featured Comment by David Stone: "Thought I would point out that there is a Nicholas Nixon exhibit at the MFA in Boston running through May 1, and the Sisters are a big part of the exhibit. Here's a link."

Vivian M. at The Lens Blog

Photo by Vivian Maier

There's a brand new Vivian Maier slide show at the New York Times' Lens Blog. Don't forget to click "Full Screen."

Nota bene: #9 (shown above), in my opinion, is a much better photograph than the controversial contest winner we were arguing about a few months back. And check out #18 in light of The Sartorialist.

Mike
(Thanks to Rob Atkins)

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Tom K.: "One of the great photography stories of my lifetime. Her work is remarkable."

Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka:"The questions of whether or not Vivian Maier is one of the 'great' photographers is a slippery issue that is perhaps best resolved through a different lens.

"I have seen enough of Ms. Maier's work, since John Maloof began making it public, to know that her skills and determination at candid street photography most certainly earns her a place among those of the most celebrated street photographers of the last century. I am more than familiar enough with that group's work to declare that as indisputable.

"But the other fact is that Vivian Maier can never be granted the recognition of Winogrand, Frank, Davidson, et al. for one simple reason; she was not influential in her day. She was a loner and not part of the game. She will always be, at best, a lovely asterisk. To use a rather meat-headed common sports analogy, you can only become a great football player by being in the game when it was played. Being able to kick 60 yard field goals in a public park is meaningless. The discovery of old, posthumous films of you kicking those filed goals 40 years ago is interesting but really meaningless.

"During the past year or so there has been anger and resentment expressed against several museum curators who have seemed rather indifferent towards Vivian Maier's work. Clearly many people do not understand the mission of museums or curators. Public museum's main mission is that of art history education. The curators I know who have seen Maier's work have all acknowledged that it's wonderful stuff. I am sure that eventually some of her prints will land in permanent collections of several museums. But Vivian Maier was kicking 60 yard field goals by herself in the park while the actual football games were played elsewhere. As simply wonderful as her work was it does not represent an inflection point on photography's time line the way that the work of long-celebrated photographers' did, even though hers may be actually better.

"So let's just celebrate Vivian Maier's discovery and applaud John Maloof's tenacity at making it publicly available for us to enjoy."

Mike replies: Ken, I agree that it's way too early to declare Vivian "great" or to appraise her place or status in any way: her work is just beginning to unfold, and has only begun to be seen appropriately. It is essentially at the moment still mostly a promise, still largely unknown.

However, as we all learn in beginning logic class, "argument by analogy does not constitute proof," and I don't agree with your field-goal-kicker analogy. What about late discoveries like Fred Herzog and Robert Bergman, who have both been getting attention very late in their lives, largely for the first time?

The parallel most often drawn in Vivian Maier's case is to Eugene Atget. Atget was little-known in his lifetime and would certainly have remained unknown but for being championed by Berenice Abbot, who was Man Ray's assistant in the 1920s. Abbot literally saved his archive from destruction, and eventually managed to sell it to the Museum of Modern Art more than 40 years after Atget's death. Atget's position in the history of photography is virtually entirely posthumous.

Indeed, I'm very surprised to hear this "not in the game" argument from you, since you have championed—on TOP no less—the Chicago photographer Gary Stochl, the street photographer roughly contemporaneous with Vivian Maier who was "discovered" by Bob Thall of Columbia College in 2004! You certainly didn't imply in your article that Stochl was kicking field goals in a park.

There are certainly other precendents for artists unknown in their lifetimes being celebrated by posterity—William Blake and Emily Dickinson come to mind.

I can't say why photography curators haven't been very interested in Maier's work because I don't know that they aren't. We've heard a few tentative, tepid early appraisals from a few of them, but "curators" aren't monolithic—one doesn't speak for all. If there is indeed a lack of interest from those quarters, I suspect it's because they either don't like her work (the generous conclusion) or because they weren't the ones who discovered and championed her or who control her archive (the cynical conclusion). Further reasons, as I said at the outset, include the fact that "the jury's still out" on the work as a whole.

And another point that as far as I know no one's mentioned yet: Vivian Maier didn't edit or print her own work, or at least not very much of it, and this leaves out a crucial aspect of the creative process in the eyes of professional "artist appraisers" such as curators. John Maloof or one of the other owners of Vivian's work (it's coming to light that there are several, not just John) might print a negative that he thinks is wonderful, but how do we know that Maier herself wouldn't have dismissed or rejected that picture? The opposite might also be possible. A photographer who doesn't select and shape the presentation of her work is missing a piece. It even matters that she didn't make her own prints—how would we know the real vision of, say, Roy DeCarava if all we had were his unedited negatives? That is to say, part of his artistic vision is contained in how he printed*.

Yet another reason, as you imply, is the "historians shouldn't make history." That is, historians report on history, they don't create it. The story of Vivian Maier is unfolding now, organically, in the hands of her archive's adventitious handlers and in the broader culture. In that view, it's simply not time yet for the museums to be meddling in the situation. Vivian Maier might not have been "in the game" in, say, 1970, but she is in the game in 2010, and eventually she'll be appraised that way.

*To put on my teacher's hat again here (and address everyone, not Ken), it can hardly be emphasized enough—you can be a photographer, even a rich and very successful one, without ever being any sort of artist. But if you want to be an art photographer—a photographer who is an artist—you must see your work into its intended final form, whatever that is—or at least indicate very clearly what that form is supposed to be.

Ken responds: "Interesting rebuttal from you! I wonder if you've misinterpreted my remarks.

"I think Maier's work is simply superb. I also think Herzog's and Stochl's work is superb. I want it all shown and published as often and widely as possible. As I write, I have just returned from my first walk-through of Vivian's show at the Chicago Cultural Center. Honestly, for the first time ever, I literally teared up as I walked through. Such a wonderfully talented person walking such a quiet, solitary life keeping all to herself. In addition to many wonderful prints (really good ink jets of equally good scans), there are several cases showing some of her personal notes, some shards of correspondence and even a set of her ever-present hats. (The hat case is what put me over the edge.) It's a tremendously understated but extremely touching show.

"My main point, however, was largely in defense of museum curators I know who have received some really angry, snotty correspondence from amateur enthusiasts who are 'outraged' that their museums are not devoting entire wings to this woman's images. Cruising through the amateur photo forums also reveals an angry undertone. So my earlier remarks were directed mainly toward folks who feel that the 'art world' is ignoring Maier and, as is so common, feel that it's because of some conspiracy to exclude unknown newcomers.

"Maier, Stochl, Herzog, and all of the other late discoveries deserve recognition and publication. There's no question that Maier will get shown (if her current trustees gets some good guidance) at a few galleries and perhaps even a few regional museums. But my point was that Maier can never be recognized (or collected) at the same level as, say, Winogrand, Arbus, or Frank mainly because she worked in utter isolation and influenced nothing in her time. That is, her work is outstanding but not important in the historical narrative of photography."

Mike adds: We might almost call that last "Jack White syndrome"...just sayin'.

How the Sartorialist does his Work

Some people care about how other people dress, a fact which mostly leaves me bemused and, I confess, a bit puzzled. But I understand that others care about it—even though I went through most of the past decade owning just four pairs of pants, all of them identical black jeans.

The field is called "fashion." I know nothing of it, and could not attract the Sartorialist on the streets myself with a sign, flashing lights, and dancing mimes.

Nevertheless, I like photography, and how Scott Schuman works is fascinating. (Those of you who found Bruce Gilden's street-shooting style offensive will find Scott's low-key, deferential way of asking permission a good antidote.) Tyler Manson and Intel Visual Life have produced a short documentary film that follows the Sartorialist on his daily peregrinations. To me, he seems a little too distracted by clothes, but that's just me being a picture geek. The photographic aspects of the short film are worth watching it for. If you like fashion too, presumably that will be a bonus. Running time is 7 minues and 11 seconds.

As you'll see, he gets recognized. The Sartorialist—admired, copied and satirized—is one of the most popular blogs on the planet, drawing ten times as many viewers as TOP.

Now that impresses me.

Mike
(Thanks to Oren-san)

P.S. Garry Winogrand was ahead of his time.

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Christopher Grant: "I must admit, I was very surprised to see this video here. I am very much a lover of fashion, and have been a steady viewer of Scott's website for quite some time now. I even own his book. If you find his take on fashion photography rather refreshing, another website worth looking at is Jak and Jil, which tends to showcase the lifestyle side of the fashion world, while the Sartorialist is more based on the everyday."

Featured Comment by Roger Bradbury: "In Japan, Shoichi Aoki took photos of fashion on the streets and has put them into two books: Fruits and Fresh Fruits. It's very, very, different from The Sartorialist. You can get the books from Amazon, but to get an idea, just go to Google Images and type in as search terms: Shoichi Aoki fruits."

Featured Comment by Hugh Crawford: 

"The Sartorialist is a style blog, not a fashion blog. Bill Cunningham does street fashion, which is about things like '20 women wearing green plaid coats with orange trim and gladiator sandals, it must be a trend.' Often to be stylish is to be deliberately un-fashionable. For instance if you are a guy wearing a cape, you are stylish, not fashionable, especially in Wisconsin. Pole climbers and a Mackinaw Cap might be fashionable in Wisconsin, but in Manhattan they would be stylish."

Mike replies: This distinction is right at the outer boundaries of comprehendability for me. But I'll continue pondering on it and see if I can wrap my brain around it.

Comment #2 by Hugh Crawford: "Oh and there is a very nice Sartorialist book out. Someone gave me a copy and it's on the shelf right next to the big box of Sanders' 20th Century. According to the quotes he can get a Vogue editor to cross the street!"

Mike replies: You mean he tries to scat the silly critters away? Which direction across the street, relative to him?

Enigmatic Update

My other new camera arrived not long ago. It weighs six and a half pounds, more or less. That's without the lens, which will add another pound or so. I think I will end up having to reveal my New Year's resolution.

After several false starts, I have also found a very nice new tripod head, which I will also write about in due course.

Mike