The Online Photographer

Books of Interest: Color Correction

I don't mindlessly copy publisher boilerplate into book notices, but in this case Steidl's sales writeup is both incisive and interesting, so I repeat it here in full:

Ernst Haas is unquestionably one of the best-known, most prolific and most published photographers of the twentieth century. He is most associated with a vibrant colour photography which, for decades, was much in demand by the illustrated press. This colour work, published in the most influential magazines in Europe and America, also fed a constant stream of books, and these too enjoyed great popularity. But although his colour work earned him fame around the world, in recent decades it has often been derided by critics and curators as 'overly commercial,' and too easily accessible—or in the language of curators, not sufficiently 'serious.' As a result, his reputation has suffered in comparison with a younger generation of colour photographers, notably Eggleston, Shore and Meyerowitz.

Paradoxically, however, there was also a side of his work that was almost entirely hidden from view. Parallel to his commissioned work Haas constantly made images for his own interest, and these pictures show an entirely different aspect of Haas’s sensibility: they are far more edgy, loose, complex and ambiguous—in short, far more radical than the work which earned him fame. Haas never printed these pictures in his lifetime, nor did he exhibit them, probably believing that they would not be understood or appreciated. Nonetheless, these works are of great complexity, and rival (and sometimes surpass) anything done at the time by his fellow photographers. This book is intended to correct the record.

Ernst Haas has long fascinated me for just these reasons. My critical thesis about him was that he was an innovator who "became invisible" because he was so widely and so thoroughly copied. If you do things no one has ever done before, but then everybody else does them too, what's left to distinguish your original work from that of the later imitators?

I doubt this book will succeed in rehabilitating Haas, especially as there can be no case for authorship—a book not directed or approved by the photographer can't entirely be a true reflection of the photographer's work even if he took all the pictures. But it's fascinating to see the attempt made so forthrightly. I'll be looking forward to seeing this.

Here are the links: Amazon, Amazon U.K., Book Depository.

Ernst Haas, Greenwich Village, New York, 1950s

Read a little more about Haas in context here. Presumably many of the images included in this book can be seen at the Ernst Haas Estate website under the heading "Collection of Newly Discovered Photographs."

Mike

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Featured Comment by Maarten B.: "I don't comment often but this one is really a must-have book. Wonderful."

Featured Comment by M: "Thanks for posting this. Haas' work has inspired me almost my entire photographic career. I don't think he has ever gotten the acclaim he deserves. First the art world considered only black-and-white photography to be art. Then, after Haas opened everyone's eyes to what color could do, he was dismissed again in favor of color photographers of the '70s and '80s. No one did so many breathtakingly beautiful photographs as he did, in my opinion. Can't wait to get this book."

Featured Comment by Jim Richardson: "Not taking Ernst Haas seriously is a bunch of hooey. This is the guy that made my generations say 'You can do that with color? Wow!' And then lots of us went out and tried to do it. But he was also a great teacher. I once met him in the early '70s and saw him working with students. And his message was 'You can do that with color!' Amazingly enabling. Much of the look of our world in the later third of the twentieth century came straight out of his camera. You gotta take that seriously. (Let the revisionist snobs mull that over.) I owe him."

Featured Comment by Rob Atkins: "I've been spending a lot of time with Color Correction since it arrived a week ago. Steidl has done justice to a master of color photography, making up for some of the shortcomings, in my mind, of the 1989 Abrams book Ernst Haas Color Photography. The reproduction is superb in the new book, and it goes a long way to establishing Ernst in his rightful place as an innovator and artist of unique distinction. Color correction indeed.

Not every photograph in the book is a masterpiece, honestly. But all are the work of a master, and as such, I want to see everything. We can learn from Ernst's seconds and thirds, as we can from his select images; they all come from the eye and mind of a master photographer. To quote Edward Steichen: 'He is a free spirit, untrammeled by tradition and theory, who has gone out and found beauty unparalleled in photography.'"

Featured Comment by Koen Lageveen: "I'm no Haas connoisseur, but while looking to buy one of his books I ran into this one and bought it outright. It is wonderful in every way, also as a book about Haas I guess, but perhaps not the book of his work to own because as you say he didn't edit or even see it. Perhaps someone can advise, which is? In the meantime I will say that I thoroughly enjoy this book and find it is full of very inspirational color photography."

Mike replies: There are good Haas books but no great ones (unless this one is). His great popular hit was The Creation, and I also have Color Photography which I like better. But honestly I see more interesting things from him just surfing the web, and I don't turn to either of those books very often just for pleasure.

Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "Addendum: I just received this book and have only had time to fly over it once. But it's certainly a gotta-have for early color junkies like me. All this talk of color lately, and my natural proclivity toward good color, are prompting me to see if we can put together a good 'early color' show at the museum (Art Institute of Chicago). We have a pretty good permanent collection but we also know where to get some terrific loans. And we have new photo galleries opening shortly and in the next few years. Hmmm...stay tuned."

Open Mike: All-Time Best-Looking Roadsters

I'm a nut about roadsters. And what's a roadster? Automotive style designations are notoriously shifty (witness the witless recent fad for the name "four-door coupe," which is like saying "Nikon EOS"). But if you ask me, I'd say a roadster is any small, two-seater, open-topped car where some degree of sportiness is either implied or achieved.

Like the perfect camera, the perfect roadster doesn't exist. As with the perfect camera, people keep trying.

What follows is a rather extemporaneous list of my favorite-looking roadsters. Not all of them have high performance, or are (or were) popular, or are even the best variant of their model or line. But they all look muy fabuloso. (As with aesthetics in every sphere, disagreement on that score is expected and assumed.)

Because some people don't like car posts on their photo blog, I've continued this after a break. (If you click through, though, you're no longer allowed to complain.)

Random Excellence: James Mollison

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

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

Mike

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Thanks! (Was: Last Chance!)

Our latest Print Offer closed at noon CST today.

A big thanks to everyone who participated. Don't forget that your prints are both guaranteed and insured, meaning you can return them for any reason if you don't like them, and any prints lost or damaged in shipment will be promptly replaced. 

The prints will begin shipping on Tuesday (Monday's a holiday in the U.S.) and all prints will be shipped by the end of September.

With any luck, I should have some news about our upcoming print sale plans soon, too.

Thanks again!

Mike

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Sony's Big Risks with the A77

Sony might be taking a bigger risk than it realizes with the new A77. Not with the product, but rather from a marketing perspective.

In fact, there might be some wise old heads at Canon slowly shaking and showing wry smiles. Maybe not quite tsk-tsking but almost.

The A77 might well be a brilliant camera. But as every marketer knows, that's not actually enough. Classical economics, with its "rational consumer" model (lately under siege—"irrational consumer" research seems to be a very popular topic right now), predicts that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. Actually, products that look like they'll be better before they're purchased are the ones that sell.

Post-point-of-purchase matters too, in that past purchasers influence prospective ones. If you market a product that looks great, but performs poorly, word will get around. Just ask movie producers. Marketing can help a bad film have a great first weekend, but if the movie actually sucks, that word will get around, and attendance will fall off fast.

Where that kind of word-of-mouth from actual consumers doesn't help so much is when you have a good product that doesn't appeal from a sales standpoint, such that nobody buys it. Ask all the moviemakers who create superior films but don't have the marketing muscle to get them noticed. That's more likely to be what might happen to the A77.

Two suspect technologies
Why? The reason is simple: the A77 uses two technologies that might have a negative appeal to the buying public. The first is the EVF. So far, EVFs have been mostly confined to low-end, lower-prestige products, where its limitations (limited resolution, variable brightness, poor refresh at slow shutter speeds) are easier to forgive. The A77 will be the highest-level SLR-style camera (that I know about, anyway) to use an EVF. Will camera buyers take to that, or will they be put off by it and continue to prefer optical VFs? Remains to be seen.

But the one that Sony might really discover to be a booby-trap is the pellicle mirror.

First of all, as a writer and editor, I have to say that "translucent" is just entirely—egregiously, blatantly—the wrong word. Translucent materials pass some of the light that falls on them and diffuse the rest. Muslin curtains, tracing paper, or frosted glass windowpanes in a bathroom are all translucent. An indistinct, fuzzy, or veiled image that's hard to see is actually part of the definition* of "translucent." A pellicle mirror is a beam-splitter. That is, it passes some of the light transparently and reflects the remaining amount. There's no translucency involved anywhere. Wrong word—and a bad connotation. Marketing fail? Heck, English language fail.

The mirror in the A77 better not be "translucent"!
Illustration from imaging-resource.

But the real problem is that consumers have been proven to shy away from pellicle mirrors in cameras...even though they work brilliantly. The story of the Canon EOS RT has been told many times, but I'll tell it again. Briefly, Canon made the pellicle-mirror RT in 1989 as a high-end, limited-edition variant of the 630 family, targeted at what Kodak called AdAms, advanced amateurs. The run was 10,000. Canon priced the camera high—around $800, which was quite expensive at the time—and expected the run to sell out within a calendar year.

It didn't. Photographers were put off by two things. First, the idea that the pellicle mirror cut down the amount of light that could reach the film. Second, even more off-putting, was the idea that because the image-forming light passed through a barrier it just had to be less sharp than if it hadn't.

That idea was wrong (I did the tests—if anything, RT images were sharper than those from its otherwise near-identical sibling with a reflex mirror, probably due to reduced system vibration), but it just "seemed reasonable" to people—so much so that they stayed away. In droves. It took Canon forever to sell out that "one year" run of the RT, despite progressively steeper discounts that had the camera selling from NOS at the end of its model life at prices close to half of the price at which it was originally offered.

Canon never had to learn that lesson again. The pellicle mirror was thereafter relegated to high-speed cameras where it could contribute to cutting-edge frame-rates.

Will the pellicle (a.k.a. "translucent") mirror in the A77 have any actual disadvantages? Doubtful, in my view. First, I'll bet it diverts extremely little light, because the VF is electronic, and the reflected light is just for the AF. Second, I'll bet it won't have any effect at all on sharpness—unless it's to allow for slightly better sharpness because of reduced vibration.

But I'll bet the Common Wisdom will hold otherwise. And the presence or absence of actual disadvantages is not as important as the presence or absence of perceived disadvantages.

You watch—there are probably already people out there expressing misgivings about the "translucent" mirror in such a high-end camera. If they aren't now, my guess is that they will be once the camera comes out. People who buy it will be saying, no, really, take our word for it, this thing works great. And the people who are just thinking about it will be saying, I don't know, I just can't see how the light from the lens could be passing through an additional angled sheet of material and not be less sharp.

You watch.

Not complacent, but...
Sony is certainly doing some interesting things in the camera market. They're not stick-in-the-mud, like Canon and Nikon certainly look to be by dragging their feet over mirrorless for so long. But maybe the downside of that admirable adventuresomeness is that Sony also has some things yet to learn that Canon and Nikon already know.

Anyway, I wish the A77 well. It looks like a splendid camera and will probably work a treat. (The EOS RT was one of my half-dozen all-time favorite cameras, despite its unpopularity.) But it is definitely treading on quicksand just from a consumer marketing standpoint, with not just a bad but a wrong name for its signature technology and two integrated technologies central to its identity that camera buyers are known to be wary of. We'll see.

Mike

*Dictionary.com says, "1. permitting light to pass through but diffusing it so that persons, objects, etc., on the opposite side are not clearly visible...."

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Featured Comment by Shawn Barnett of Imaging-Resource: "DPReview showed the ghosting that I was sure would occur at some point when we first discussed these products. It happens with specular highlights, and shows more dramatically against a dark background. Sony made the film as thin as they could to minimize this kind of light splitting, but it still happens to some extent. I couldn't find the example we saw originally, that of a bridge at night, but their crop shows it well enough. What it also shows is that the effect is minimal.

"And you are absolutely right: 'Translucent: Adjective: (of a substance) Allowing light, but not detailed images, to pass through; semitransparent.' (Dictionary.com)

"That definition is why I always have to change my reviews after I correctly write, 'Transparent Mirror Technology.'"

Featured Comment by Wayne Fox: "All I can say is the A55's have been flying off my shelf; wedding shooters seem to really like them as well as many other pretty serious photographers. Most people buying them have no clue about pellicle mirrors from previous SLRs and of course those are an entirely different beast, sucking way too much light out of the light path compared to these. Personally I don't care for EVF's much, but I can make do with them. My personal preference is the NEX5 and can't wait to get my hands on the new NEX7. You might be right, the A77 is too high a price point and target market for a camera like this, but if the A55 is any indication (and I"m sure that's why they built the A77) it will do just fine."

For Spanish-Speaking TOP Readers

Just thought you might want to know that "The Leica as Teacher" has been translated into Spanish for the Spanish website Sales de plata. My thanks to Cristobal Benavente Sosa.

Mike

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New! Fuji X10

Well, that was fast. It appears that the x100 that's been making such an extended splash has already sprung an offshoot—or a "design-language" sibling, at least.

This one is a sort of Canon G12-killer, with a zoom lens and a 2/3" (6.6x8.8mm, one of what we'd call "fingernail-sized" or digicam sensors). But it's a state-of-the-art EXR (except it's a "Super CMOS" this time, apparently, not a Super CCD). And it's got another premium lens (lensmaking being one of the fields of expertise where Fuji has it all over other electronics giants such as, say, Sony).

Sure is handsome. I like to see the X100 gestalt becoming a trend at Fuji.

See more about it at the special Fuji X10 website.

Mike
(Thanks to Vlatko—pictures courtesy Fujifilm)

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'Chez Mondrian' and Other Small Pleasures

By Jim Hughes

Some years ago, a photo dealer and good friend from San Francisco was staying as our houseguest in Brooklyn for a week. One evening he returned from Manhattan carrying a large brown paper bag under one arm and a bottle of my favorite red wine under the other. After dinner, when the dishes were cleared, he retrieved the bag from his room and placed it, with a flourish, in the center of our dining room table. "I have something I think you’re going to appreciate," he announced. Ah, dessert, I thought—maybe Junior's famous cheesecake, a Brooklyn legend.

My friend pulled two old shoeboxes from the bag and dumped their contents on the seven-foot table, creating a small mountain of what looked like playing cards. Except they appeared to be photographs. Like the deft dealer that he was, my friend, palms down, in what seemed like a single motion, spread the cards out in front of us. "Pick a card, any card," he said in his best dealer's voice. I reached down and picked one of the larger ones, about the size of a 3x5-inch file card, but thicker. Only when I pulled the card toward me did I realize that it was familiar. There, depicted on a small hall table in the foreground, was the glowing vase with its artificial tulip, and through a doorway, only partly seen, a staircase rising like the very spirit of art. Rectangles and curves were layered in a composition of formal perfection. "Chez Mondrian," I exclaimed in a burst of recognition. At that point, Alley, our irrepressible calico, perhaps sensing my excitement, hopped onto the table to bat at an exquisite, golden-hued miniature of a fork on a plate. I shooed her off (a moment repeated as the evening wore on). Not until I began to examine the other prints—sliding the pictures around as if they were kings and queens in a giant game of solitaire—did it dawn on me that the miniature images, many familiar, as in from books and exhibits I’d seen, seemed to exhibit a particularly distinctive style.

"Are these vintage prints from André Kertész?" I asked. Our guest nodded. Some of the pictures seemed to be variously cropped contact prints from André's folding 4.5x6-cm and 9x12-cm plate cameras, others small-scale enlargements from the 35mm Leica the photographer was said to have begun using as early as 1925, about the time he arrived in Paris from his native Hungary. All were little gems, lovingly rendered by Kertész himself before an allergic reaction to photographic chemicals drove him from the darkroom.

Where could this treasure possibly have come from, I wanted to know. From the back of a closet in André's Greenwich Village apartment, I was informed. The shoeboxes had evidently lain untouched for many years. The legendary photographer, to his way of thinking never fully appreciated in his adopted country—and still bitter about it, as he might tell anybody within earshot—was in need of money. My friend indicated that he was going to try to sell some of these small prints. How much? I remember numbers ranging from $1,200 to maybe $3,500. I passed on the implied offer. Indeed, I rationalized, I could be just as happy purchasing a beautifully rendered and enlarged 8x10 or 11x14 silver print, signed by Kertész and printed under his supervision, for a few hundred (and a few years later, I did just that, buying at auction an 8x10 "Chez Mondrian" for $700—it hangs in our living room today, directly facing my favorite arts and crafts Morris chair).

André Kertész, Chez Mondrian, Paris, 1926

Years later, I happened to attend the 1996 round of auctions in New York. Astonishingly, the little print I have since called "Alley's Fork," after my rambunctious cat, sold at Christie's for $90,500, at the time a record for the photographer. A month later, "Mondrian's Pipe and Glasses, Paris" auctioned at Sotheby's London for $98,000—and it wasn't even signed. But that was only the beginning. The following spring, Christie’s held an auction within an auction, with its own special catalogue. All Kertész. Its original 21-print core had been discovered, like the shoeboxes in a closet, three years after the photographer's death in 1985 at age 91, in a folio tucked away between books on a library shelf. These prints had been made on creamy color postcard stock, presumably because it was more affordable back then, and had been presented at André's first exhibit in Paris. The poet Paul Dermée wrote for the occasion: "No rearranging, no posing, no gimmicks, nor fakery. Your technique is as honest, as incorruptible, as your vision. In our home for the blind, Kertész is 'Brother Seeing-Eye.'"

My sentiments exactly.

Christie's Lot 176, "Chez Mondrian," the cover illustration for the catalogue, brought $300,000. All told, the 37-print collection netted $1.36 million. Of course, bear in mind that an early Mondrian painting had previously sold for $1.8 million, by itself surpassing the entire Kertész collection auctioned that day. Indeed, an example of Mondrian's mature work would soon sell for $5.5 million. And those were 1997 dollars!

Memento mori
And here's a final postscript about André Kertész, the man I consider to be the most graceful photographer who ever lived. In 1985, I was shown a just-processed 35mm black-and-white contact sheet from a roll of film shot by a photographer from another country. This photographer, a great admirer who made a point to visit his hero whenever he was in New York, had gone to André's Washington Square apartment building and was let in by the doorman, who recognized him. He found the apartment door open. Not surprised, he knocked. Receiving no response, he entered, and discovered his friend stretched out on a couch. The visitor tried gently to wake him. Again, no response. During a nap, evidently, André had died peacefully in his sleep.

Rather than contacting authorities immediately, this man, being a foreigner, called a close friend of Kertész's, also a photographer of note, who happened to live nearby. The contact sheet I saw clearly showed the two younger photographers, while still alone with André's body and in what was no doubt intended to be a final photographic homage, taking turns posing for the camera, each evidently wanting to be recorded with an arm embracing the earthly remains of a giant, hoping perhaps that a little of his amazing spirit would rub off before it disappeared forever into the ether.

As subsequent events have shown, as long as the wonderfully lyrical photographs of André Kertész remain for us to admire, there is little chance of that.

Jim

Jim Hughes is an occasional contributor to TOP—for more of his work, click on his name under the Categories header in the right-hand sidebar. He now lives in Maine.

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Featured Comment by Jeff: "Touching end to this article; thanks for sharing it.

"I believe another vintage print of 'Chez Mondrian' sold in 2005 at Sotheby's for $464,000; I don't recall the size.

"I can't remember the year, but some time ago (perhaps in 1996 as Jim recounts), some of the carte postales by Kertesz went to auction. Kertesz prices hadn't yet hit the stratosphere, so I thought I might get lucky bidding on a far lesser known picture. Fat chance...it soared past my price point in no time.

"I should have learned my lesson. On a visit years earlier with a dealer friend in New York, I was shown and passed on a small contact print...about 1.5x2.5 inches...of a simple but lovely landscape by Kertesz. Not signed, but priced extremely high, or so I thought....$15,000. Plus, I wasn't sure how I'd frame such a precious little thing. Live and learn."