Around the Web on a Friday

Dawoud Bey: "It never occurred to me that this mysterious phone number that kept popping up on my phone was the Foundation."

• Congratulations to photographer Dawoud Bey, who has just been awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, AKA the "genius grant." Dawoud is what some of us might call a "real" photographer rather than an art-world hothouse flower, which is encouraging to others who are "just" photographers. Do note two important things, however—he is tremendously articulate and able to talk a good game, and he works from organizing ideas or concepts. And let that be a lesson to thee.

He's quoted by The Chicago Tribune (he lives in Chicago) saying the award will allow him to use his time to best effect: "I have more ideas than time, and this allows me to focus intently." As a MacArthur Fellow, he will receive $625,000 "as an investment in his potential," paid out over five years with no strings attached. Bey, a professor of art and Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago (encouraging to all you photography teachers, too), is represented in New York City by Mary Boone Gallery, in San Francisco by Rena Bransten Gallery, and in Chicago by Stephen Daiter Gallery. Well deserved.

• Trivia, Dept.: Actor Tom Hanks is obsessed with typewriters, and owns more than 300 of them. But when he wrote a book he didn't write it on a typewriter...even though the book is partly about typewriters.

I understand. If I were rich like Tom, I would collect 1970s and '80s turntables, but I'm sure I would still listen mostly to music files on the computer like I'm doing right now.

• A print of this photograph of Audrey Hepburn from the actress's own personal collection was estimated to sell for between two and three thousand British pounds when it was offered in an online auction at Christies.com recently. The photograph is by Philippe Halsman. The print sold for a whopping £18,750, obviously greatly exceeding its estimate.

It's a beautiful picture. Halsman was a well-known international photographer in his day who also wrote for hobbyists. One thing he was famous for were his lighthearted pictures of famous people jumping—remarkably, his Jump Book from 1959 is still in print, in a facsimile edition by Damiani.

The success of this picture at auction illustrates a key tenet of marketing: you'll have better luck if what you're selling appeals to two distinct audiences. In this case, photography collectors in general and fans of Philippe Halsman in particular are one group, and fans of celebrities in general and Audrey Hepburn in particular are the other. A tenet to keep in mind; there might be some way you could apply it to your own marketing one day.

• Trivia Dept. #2: In the comic strip Dilbert, Dilbert's dad is missing, having abandoned the family during a visit to the mall many years earlier. They went to an all-you-can eat restaurant...where "Dadbert" has stayed ever since, refusing to leave until he's satisfied that he's eaten all he can. Bah-dum-pah.

Oh, and by the way, Scott Adams is crazy*. But mostly in a good way.

Photo by Mark Crabtree

• Congratulations to TOP reader Mark Crabtree, a longtime documentary photographer of life in West Virginia, for having some of his pictures featured on Lenscratch's States Project. Nice going, Mark, and nice work.

• And speaking of TOP readers published around the Web, Mike Plews inherited his father's army footlocker, and in it he discovered a tin box containing 300 Kodachrome slides, most presumably taken by his father, Ronald R. Plews, on duty in Korea during the Korean War. "If properly stored, Kodachrome doesn't fade. These pictures look like they were taken yesterday." Boomer Café has published a number of the pictures. Mike's short notes are very nicely written.

Maybe someday your child or grandchild will find your 60- or 80-year-old hard drives in a tin box in an old footlocker, and just think of the memories**.

A photo by Dina Litovsky from Wired's "Female
Photographers Matter Now More Than Ever"

• A few weeks ago we were talking about you women photographers, and one thing I ran across while scouting the Web on that subject was a short but sweet portfolio at Wired called "Female Photographers Matter Now More Than Ever." A nice sampling that shows women working in all kinds of ways, including as combat photographers. The picture above, rich as a Medieval tapestry or a Grecian frieze, is by Dina Litovsky.

• Another rich (ha!) portfolio at Wired is Lauren Greenfield's "America's Obscene Wealth, In Pictures." Why is wealth less picturesque than poverty? I think it's because in news and information at sufficient remove, as in fiction, stress enhances interest. (In novels, people love reading about situations they wouldn't want to live through.)

• Fellow lens nut—er, wait, photographer—John Lehet continues to love the Voigländer Apo-Lanthar 65mm ƒ/2 Aspherical Macro lens. He says it seldom comes off his Sony A7RII. Meanwhile, my main lens, the Fujifilm XF 23mm ƒ/1.4, which has lately had its thunder stolen by the smaller, snout-nosed ƒ/2 version, has been given a boost by the sensor in the Fujifilm X-T2 that just arrived here at TOP Rural World Headquarters. And a great lens got better.

(If you're wondering why all these links go to Amazon, it's because B&H is still closed for the Succos holiday, which is a veeeeery looooong holiday. I can't wait for them to open again and will alert you as soon as they do. Follow us on Twitter @TheOnlinePhotog for all our updates.)

• Read, weep: Life is going on as if everything is normal, but Americans should be very wary about many recent developments. David Uberti on Splinter reports that a recent legal settlement, widely overlooked, should have set many huge red flags a-waving. ABC paid off a libel lawsuit resulting from its story about "pink slime" in the meat industry, despite having a good chance of winning its case in court. "The rich are leveraging legal means to silence journalism [says Jonathan Peters, a media law professor at the University of Georgia and press freedom correspondent for the Columbia Journalism Review], and ABC's settlement 'sends the message that filing flimsy claims against the press is a worthwhile enterprise.'"

Meanwhile, The New Yorker reported one of the most shocking stories I've read yet stemming from the mortal agonies of the old United States. The story is about predatory "guardians" taking over old peoples' lives and legally stealing all their belongings. Naked greed and immoral predation made personal in the way that murder by knife is more personal than bombs dropped from planes, even if it affects fewer people. Rachel Aviv reports. The account has a putatively happy ending, except that it happened at all. What's that old aphorism about how they came knocking on the door to take you away?*** Very apropos. If you are sixty or older, READ THE ARTICLE this weekend. Seriously.

• In a recent upload on Instagram, his platform of choice, friend o' TOP and former Pentax USA President Ned Bunnell schools snappers on the best way to get the best from smartphone cameras. He recommends the Lightroom Mobile and Pro Camera apps, and his commenters mention additional options.

David Hurn's famous publicity shot of Sean Connery as James Bond
actually shows the actor holding an air pistol.

• Welsh photography luminary David Hurn (also the co-author of one of our favorite books of advice for photographers) has for many years asked new members of Magnum as well as other up-and-coming photographers around the world if they'd like to swap prints. "Everyone always willingly agrees; they select their favorite Hurn image and vice versa." His collection of swapped prints now numbers over 700, and includes pictures from many of the greatest names of 20th-century photojournalism. A show called "Swaps: Photographs from the David Hurn Collection," is at National Museum Cardiff, Wales, and will run until the 11th of March, 2018. Online, there's a fantastic (if somewhat complicated) presentation of the show called "Swapper" that combines excellent text, some of David Hurn's own pictures along with portraits of him and other photographers, and examples of the prints he swapped for over the years. (If you get confused, here's a hint: keep scrolling down.) Take some time with this one. It's a treat.

• Our friends at Rivendell Bicycle Works are clearly becoming a film camera cult. Just the thing for people who like delightful anachronisms like Bosco Bars (quite similar to the albatross bars Grant supplied for Gruesome, my own bike. See this old post for more about Gruesome and how the noble albatross relates to bicycles). If you don't have a bike but want one, start saving now for a Rivendell next Spring. They run a little dear.

• Life in the woodlands: Speaking of running a little dear, last weekend my friend Eric got a rare chance to go deer hunting and sat patiently in a blind for four hours, but didn't even see a deer. Later that evening, driving to town, he had a close call and only narrowly managed to avoid hitting a deer with his car. Such is life Upstate.

Rare find: Paul Laidlaw and the Auguste Bertsch Chambre Automatique

• In Britain, the TV show "Antiques Road Trip" on BBC One sends antiques experts out scouting for bargains, which are then auctioned. The biggest difference in value between the purchase price and the auction sale price wins. A buyer named Paul Laidlaw found what he thought was an early subminiature camera, which he bought for £60. "Photographic experts confirmed Paul’s 19th century find was one of Auguste Bertsch's extremely rare Chambre Automatique cameras—essentially a camera combined with microscope." The auctioneer upped the bids in £1,000 increments, an Antiques Road Show first, and the Chambre Automatique ended up selling to a collector in Switzerland for £20,000, a record for the show.

• This edition of "Around the Web" is long on pictures and short on gear, so, to address that shortcoming, a link to the World's First Phodographer—a dog with a heart rate monitor that triggers a camera around his neck whenever he gets excited. Good thing Butters doesn't have one of those, or I'd be inundated with pictures.

At least we know who owns the copyright to the shots! Wow.

-

A factotum—Latin for "do everything"—was a
type device with a blank space in the center where
various other type ornaments could be inserted.

-

Well, time to bring this one to a close. The dogs are begging to be fed and I have to do my errands before the stores close and the Mennonites stop selling vegetables for the day.

Thanks to the readers and friends (mostly, our readers are friends and our friends are readers, but you know what I mean) who drew our attention to some of the above.

Great big thanks to JC and GW (they know who they are), who made generous donations to TOP this past week to help us stay merrily afloat in this hostile world. Greatly appreciated, as are all of you who donate and subscribe. And thanks to everyone who read anything here this week, for reading. Last but not least, a thank-you to Stephen Scharf for his ongoing Fuji GFX review.

Thus ends week 41 of the year 2017. We will now attempt that trick that wage- and salary-earners take so much for granted (we are using the editorial "we" now, you will perceive)—the one called "taking the weekend off." Wish us luck, because even when we're taking time off we seldom take much time off.

Which is what we get for doing work that doesn't seem like work.

Thanks for being with us this week and please join us again on Monday, as we (you, us, and me, all three) embark on week 42.

Yr. Hmbl. Ed.

*I'm not disparaging mentally ill people. Chapter One of the linked book is titled "The Time I Was Crazy," and discusses the author's brushes with, well, craziness. Using that word.

**Sarcasm alert.

***Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Kommunist.

Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.

Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten,
habe ich nicht protestiert;
ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.

Als sie die Juden holten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Jude.

Als sie mich holten,
gab es keinen mehr,
der protestieren konnte.

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

—Martin Niemöller

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Kusandha: "For any of your reader's in the NYC area, there is a show of Lauren Greenfield's work at ICP right now—I found it quite interesting and educational."

Bill Tyler: "Rachel Aviv's story is strongly reminiscent of what happened to the parents of one of our friends. They bled the victims dry in a form of legalized larceny. These so-called guardians are nothing but bloodsucking monsters."

Stan B. (partial comment): "Kudos to Dawoud Bey—well done!"

Dave Levingston: "I read the New Yorker story about court-appointed supposed 'guardians' last night and it upset me so much I had trouble sleeping, which seldom happens with me. In this one instance it seems I actually still am a target audience. Infuriating."

Kristine Hinrichs: "Speaking of women photographers you might be interested in the recent Milwaukee PBS documentary on Dickey Chapelle, the first female combat photographer to die in action (very early in Vietnam Nam). It is quite a story."

Ade: "The Swaps exhibition is highly recommended to readers anywhere in the vicinity of South Wales or the West of England. The Museum is actually down the road from my workplace, so I've already enjoyed three lunchtime visits, including a curator's talk, and will be back again this Friday for a talk by David Hurn. It's an extremely rare opportunity for those of us outside a major city like London to view prints by the likes of Cartier-Bresson, Martine Franck, Robert Frank, Martin Parr, Dorothea Lange and others, as well as Hurn himself—to say nothing of the works by lesser-known but equally talented photographers, such as Hurn's former student Tish Murtha.

"But, hopefully, this opportunity will become decreasingly rare as not only has Hurn bequeathed his collection to the National Museum, but it's being used as the foundation for their new dedicated photography gallery. While we have some excellent independent spaces in Cardiff, this is an important—and overdue—addition to the city's arts scene. I'm already salivating at the prospect of the Museum's 'Three Miners' print by Eugene Smith eventually going back on display (although not just yet—their next exhibition will have a timely focus on women photographers)."

Mark Jennings: "Thanks, Mike, for presenting Mark Crabtree's fine work. As an old timer here in West Virginia told me, 'There's not too much else to do up here [in mountainous, rural WV]. We hunt, we fish, we make music.'

"The people here follow those wholeheartedly, and living that life right along with them and expressing its spirit are a corps of equally sincere documentarians and fine artists like Mark.

"Here more than most places I have been I've found a lack of self-consciousness in the practice of traditional—and sometimes picturesque—arts. Mountains, distance and attitude still protect some of the old ways from the poisons of doubt and ambition. Twenty-five years ago my first introduction was some friends' dinner at their precociously off-the-grid, pre-Civil-War log home. The guest of honor was a burly, bearded and quiet man of about 35. After the food all trooped to the living room. The quiet guest slid a banjo out of a case under his chair, tuned it briefly, and then without introduction or apology poured out a transfixing 45-minute cornucopia of works. It was stunning. That, I think, was one of the Hammonds, from Pocahontas County, with whom my friends were on good terms.

"This is the world Mark Crabtree has inhabited and worked with for so long. Go, Mark! Go West Virginia!"

Comments

[David Zivic]

One of the best posts I've read at TOP, although I think it is also one of the longest.
It touched on many of Photographs diverse topics and you even snuck in a tidbit mention of turntables.

[Joseph Brunjes]

I don't think anyone has ever taken a bad photo of Audrey Hepburn.

[Eolake]

Wow, I wonder if Scott Adams has read Tibetan Peach Pie by Tom Robbins. In it, Tom tells about how he once “wrote” a self-help book in his head during a sleepless night. A complete book, he says. He did not write it down though, and forgot it after sleeping...
The book was to be called “How To Loose Every Hand, And Still Win Big”.

I recommend Tibetan Peach Pie by the way. Funny and interesting.

[Eolake]

Good one.
Thanks for the Audrey picture, lovely.

I recently confused a friend when I mentioned that “May you have an interesting life” is supposedly an old Chinese *curse*. I asked: ‘what’s an interesting movie, one with a peaceful life, or...?’

[Stan B.]

First, kudos to Dawoud Bey- well done!

The "pink slime" and John Oliver/Murray Energy debacles are scary indeed. So many of us are now so pathetically dumbed down that we are unknowingly eroding, voting against and attacking our remaining freedoms in the name of... freedom.

[Matthew]

Having encounter Scott Adams’ political thoughts, I would disagree with “mostly in a good way” as much as I would dislike the colloquial use of a term that disparages the mentally ill.

[Henry Richardson]

More about the rich and powerful being protected by the rich and powerful in the media and politics for decades. :-(

From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories

Multiple women share harrowing accounts of sexual assault and harassment by the film executive.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-aggressive-overtures-to-sexual-assault-harvey-weinsteins-accusers-tell-their-stories

[Mathew Hargreaves]

I was told that hard drives start to fade after 20 years. Everything might be gone on them 40 to 60 years.

[Yonatan K]

The New Yorker story is one more indictment of the foundational problem of this country - with the best of intentions, the founding fathers replaced culture (and common sense) with a legal system.

Sad.

[Brian Taylor]

I really enjoyed the BBC presentation of David Hurn's 'swaps' exhibition. A treat indeed. Thanks for the link.

[GJM Geradts]

My heart skipped a beat after reading the last line of the german poem.

[scott kirkpatrick]

Quite a week's end outpouring in this column. The David Hurn story was illuminating (I only knew him from his book with Bill Jay). But the appalling New Yorker story points up the vital role that sustained efforts in journalism are playing in this crazy time. The New Yorker's story was actually a rehash of work done by local writers and activists in Nevada over a two year period, leading to an apparent cleanup in that area. The crime is that the practice persists in many other parts of the country. The New Yorker also carried an eye-opening expose of civil forfeiture a year or two back, and participated along with the NYT in the Weinberg story. Curiously, some of these abuses of the legal system seem to involve the set of rights that our Supreme Court does hold dear, and perhaps something can be done...

[Stephen Scharf]

Meanwhile, my main lens, the Fujifilm XF 23mm ƒ/1.4, which has lately had its thunder stolen by the smaller, snout-nosed ƒ/2 version, has been given a boost by the sensor in the Fujifilm X-T2 that just arrived here at TOP Rural World Headquarters. And a great lens got better.--Mike

The nicely compact Fuji 23 f/2 has a steeper contrast curve than the 23/1.4 but it is not as sharp at all apertures. It does have a nice cinematic look to it, though, that can be very appealing. And the compact size, fast AF and silent aperture blades are really nice. The 23mm lens on the Fuji X100F has the "softest" contrast curve of the three, and this does provide a bit more control in editing the contrast curve of the transition from light to shadow. At medium to focal distances and wider apertures, the X100's 23mm out-resolves than the 23 f/2 but the good 'ole 23 f/1.4 is still superior of the three, optically. It's contrast curve sits beween the f/2, and the 23mm of the X100-series.

That X-T2 is pretty nice, eh? ;-)

Fuji hit a grand slam home run with that one.

[John Camp]

The photo story on America's obscene riches didn't contain a single picture that connoted riches...should have been, America's obscene bad taste...the young girls in the first photo seem to be posing in a standard middle-class suburban neighborhood, if you check out the houses in the background...

The pink slime thing -- I'm really discouraged about journalism and the media in general. It should be the felt obligation of big rich media corporations to fight these kinds of lawsuits tooth and nail, and appeal them as far as they can when they lose in the lower courts. Make the attackers pay. They're giving up the first amendment, that they depend on, to save a few bucks that they can easily afford to spend. Gawker was destroyed by a rich guy.

A lot of states simply cave when they are sued, as they frequently are, for all kinds of nonsensical reasons. "There was ice on the highway..." A few years ago, Wisconsin decided to fight every lawsuit, and, not amazingly, they got sued a whole lot less. When they did get sued, the plaintiffs usually won, because they had good and worthwhile cases -- but the nuisance suits tended to go away.

[Henning Wulff]

This post illustrates all that is good about your blog, Mike. Enough photographic tidbits to keep it in the 'photography blogosphere' and enough humanist touches to keep us all interested, reading links and relating to our daily lives to make for a wonderfully rounded post.

This is one of your best, and the poem is more relevant than ever.

[Thanks Henning. --Mike]

[John Willard]

I remember the pink slime story. And then read a more level headed follow up story in defense of pink slime. I realized the ABC story was a horrible hatchet job that played on peoples' ignorance and fears. The company was indeed stripping the last of the meat off of the bones and processing it. Part of the process was spraying it with ammonia. Ammonia!! In our food!! That is where the shock value and ignorance came to play. Ammonia alters the ph level so badly that bacteria die, then the ammonia just dissipates away. In fact our bodies produce ammonia to regulate our own ph and we actually sweat it out. BPI was making a safe inexpensive beef protein product. Unfortunately, someone looked in the factory door. We have all heard the expression about seeing politics or sausage being made. If they wanted to really gross someone out go see Scrapple being made.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/opinion/go-ahead-eat-pink-slime.html

[Bob Curtis]

On Being A Photographer (David Hurn and Bill Jay) is still available from Lenswork for $12.95

http://shop.lenswork.com/On-Being-a-Photographer-by-David-HurnMagnum-and-Bill-Jay_p_10.html

[Bob Cook]

+1 for Rivendell. I've owned an Atlantis since 2004. Usually ridden with a camera in the handlebar bag. Never was able to make friends with Albatross bars, although I tried. Grant has been working on "saving the world one bike at a time" for years.

[cdembrey]

Snark Alert! What is wrong with entrepreneurs monetizing the elderly? Entrepreneurs going after the low-hanging-fruit is an American tradition—nothing new here. These champions of capitalism have co-opted the federal government by doing this. Alert over.

From my POV Asset Forfeiture is a bigger and more prevalent crime. The police have been doing it for more than half a century.

ICE confirmed to The Intercept that the handbook reflects the agency’s most up-to-date guidance on asset forfeiture. Agents under its instruction are asked to weigh the competing priorities of law enforcement versus financial profit and to “not waste instigative time and resources” on assets it calls “liabilities” — which include properties that are not profitable enough for the federal government to justify seizing. https://theintercept.com/2017/10/13/ice-hsi-asset-forfeiture-handbook/

If you, or your parents have enough money, the police may grab the assets before the guardians do. (He)... told The Intercept that the handbook’s discussion of using civil forfeiture when a criminal indictment isn’t possible appears to nod to a problematic practice of seizing assets largely for the sake of financial gain, ...

Think that this doesn't happen? Thing again. About 40 years ago, the Los Angeles County Sheriffs did a drug raid in Ventura County. They killed the very rich owner. The problem was that the guy was straight-arrow, and there were NO drugs to be found. But thats OK because they got a tip-from-an-informant. Ventura County (where this legal crime occured), didn't bring charges against LASD because of this tip.