The Online Photographer

Random Excellence: Jingna Zhang

Photo by Jingna Zhang for ファッション誌 (Vogue Japan)

It's not often I'm bowled over by a fashion photographer, but Jingna Zhang's work is grounded in history yet fresh and distinctive—exploring her extensive website is a treat. She obviously has the artistic touch, but she's also a high-level pro whose clients include Mercedes Benz, Montblanc, and Lancome, and she has multiple covers for top magazines such as Vogue, Elle, and Harper’s Bazaar to her credit.

...And that's not the only kind of shooting she's good at. Most fun biographical fact: before becoming a photographer, the 31-year-old Chinese-born Singaporean was a world-class air rifle shooter who represented Singapore at the Commonwealth Games and World Cup.

Want her as your teacher? In case you do, you're in luck—you can sign up any time for an extensive online course at Learn Squared with five hours of lectures, 14 hours of extra content, a prolific community, and more. The lesson topics are: Photography Basics, Equipment and Lighting, Concepts and Casting, Team Building and Planning, The Photoshoot, Post Production, Retouching, and Marketing Your Work.

Here's Jingna's Self-Portrait on her 30th birthday.

Mike
(Inset: Johnannes Vermeer, Girl with Pearl Earring, 1665 [detail])

"Random Excellence" is a series consisting of things Yr. Hmbl. Ed. stumbled upon randomly and liked.

Original contents copyright 2019 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:

Chris Y.: "Fashion is the Formula One racing of photography. Its advanced technologies and techniques eventually trickle down to us mortals...."

Pierre: "Her work is divine. By the way, she has an excellent article on her blog on making do with what you have. Out of financial necessity, she worked for a long time with one camera, one lens: Canon 350D (Rebel XT for us in the US) and a kit lens. She shows examples of her development as an artist, where one can see she did imaginative work then that most people would be envious of."

Nerd vs. Geeks

[This is the last of the old posts I had loaded and ready to go during my recovery—it's from 2011. But since I can now work again, I've opened the Comments for this one. —Mike the Ed.]

-

I had an LOL moment last night watching Jimmy Fallon [a late-night talk show, for y'all in different countries]. Ex-gangsta-rapper and "Law and Order" detective Ice-T was on TV (it was broadcast here, anyway—I don't watch often enough to know whether it was a rerun or not) with his extravagant wife Coco, and he pointed out that there's a big difference between a nerd and a geek. Given any little area of enthusiasm, a nerd is a guy who knows all about it—and likes to talk about it and argue about it—and a geek is a guy who likes to do it. Whatever "it" is.

So I'm a darkroom geek but a Miata nerd. (Makin' me laugh again*.)

Seems like a useful distinction to me. When I worked at the model railroad magazine, there was reader—famous among the staff—who would write highly detailed, deeply knowledgable 10-page letters about the magazine's layout articles, critiquing the author's ideas and suggesting improvements. They were so good the Editor would post them on the office bulletin board. But despite repeated attempts, the Editor couldn't get the guy to actually write an article for the magazine.

So he was a model-railroading-magazine nerd, then.

I remember back when I occasionally participated in the often contentious forums of a certain high profile British digital camera review site. I got into it once with a guy who was evangelical about a certain brand of high-end professional DSLR and outspokenly critical of the competing brand's flagship model. (I forget whether he loved C and hated N, or loved N and hated C...not that it really matters.) When I dug into it, it turned out that the fellow was a teenager who didn't own a nice DSLR at all.

A goal for him to aspire to: geekhood!

—Time-Traveling Mike, from 2011

*This was back when I was building another darkroom and hadn't yet bought my used 2001 Miata, which I had for three years before selling it to TOP reader Larry G. from New Hampshire, who let me drive it again on his visit to New York! What a pleasure.

Note: Please don't take the above too seriously. Or, god forbid, personally. I know the two terms under discussion are mildly pejorative; I just thought it was funny.

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[Comments from 2011:]

Featured Comment by MHV: "The truth of the Internet Age is that it has essentially enabled ALL of us to become geek/nerds of something in minutes. We spend more time learning about arcane matter than ever simply because we can. The problem is that we end up missing on what made our subjects of obsession obsessive at all: rarity. In the '60s, being a film buff essentially meant 1) living in Paris and 2) going to the Cinémathèque every other day. Here's a classic essay on post-rarity geekhood/nerdiness." [By the comedian Patton Oswalt. And an excellent essay, too. —MJ.]

Featured Comment by John Wilson: "I think he's wrong about the definitions. This is what Geeks believe the definitions to be:

Scott Lamb's Nerd Venn Diagram, from Buzzfeed

Mike replies: Wouldn't it be really nerdy to argue about the competing definitions of "nerd"?

Ctein replies: "Dear Mike, That would be 'nerd geeking.' helpfully yours, Ctein."

John Wilson replies: "Mike, I'm too busy being a nerd to argue about the definition at any length :-) ."

Featured Comment by Dave Burns: "Re your point of debating the definition, there's an alternate Venn diagram from xkcd (make sure to hover over the image for the tooltip comment)."

Featured Comment by Steve Jacob: "Interesting entymologies for some of these terms:

Dweeb: 1980s West Coast slang acronym for Dim-Witted Eastern-Educated Boor (usually with regard to Ivy League grads).

Nerd: Actually started as 'knurd' which is the opposite of drunk, as applied to students who don't know how to party, as supposedly coined in the 1940s at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.

Geek: Originally applied to carnival performers who could do weird things with their bodies—came to apply to those who could do equally weird things with computers.

Dork: A term actually coined by geeks to refer to those of lesser ability, supposedly derived from a breed of chicken (a Dorking) which had an extra toe on each foot."

[Comments from 2019:]

Peggy C.: "I see no women in this conversation so let me chime in. Being the go-to computer and camera tech person for family and friends, I prefer to be called Guru. Example. My brother needed to replace his cellphone. He asked me to do the research. He then took me with him to buy his new phone. We get to the store and the salesman begins to tell us the deals. My brother speaks up and says, 'I brought my sister with me as she knows all the tech details. She's my tech geek.' I looked him straight in the eye and said, 'That's MS. Tech Guru to you.' The saleswoman at the next desk over applauded. So, 'Ms. Guru' is now how I am known."

Mike replies: Perfect.

JohnMFlores: "I hate both of those terms and how they are commonly used since they both perpetuate the derision of knowledge. We need more respect and admiration for intelligence and less for empty celebrity."

I'm Back

Xander disobeying a sign. Or was he? We were not kicked out.

The news about my eye yesterday was as good as it could be. The glamorous young surgeon, her assistant, and her "shadow" (a young doctor new to the practice who was observing) all smiled at me happily. "I cheated," was the first thing Dr. Hindman said to me, beaming, as I passed her at a desk on the way from the eye test to the exam room. "I peeked at your chart. You're doing really well." Evidently the period of doubt is over and all signs are positive.

I told Dr. Hindman that I had learned something about myself throughout this process—that I'm a pessimist. I had been prepared for the worst. In reply she said that one thing she's learned about herself from doing eye surgery is that she's not in control. "We put everything in place, and then it's up to God or nature or whatever controls these things to do the rest," she said. Mostly it works and sometimes it doesn't, and "...you need a little luck."

I've been lucky. "The graft adheres," meaning that the donor tissue, the Descemet's membrane and the vital single layer of squamous epithelial cells that compose the endothelial layer, has attached itself firmly to my cornea in the proper place. I will wear glasses for the rest of my life—the intra-ocular implant doesn't have the perfect prescription, because "sometimes the shape of the cornea changes in ways we can't foresee"—but she said my uncorrected vision will likely be 20/40, legal to drive with uncorrected. My eyesight is still not great at this moment, but, according to the good doctor, my right eye will get better and better from now on, as my left eye continues to get worse. I'll have to have the same operation on the left eye eventually. 

I'm still curious about how it will affect my photography, and I still have more pondering to do over the remarkable fact that I'm now using part of another person's body in mine.

Both of those things are subjects for later, though, not for now.

Fred
After my appointment Xander and I went to a house museum officially called Sonnenberg Gardens and Mansion State Historic Park, which is also in Canandaigua, the pleasant resort town where the Eye Care Center is located. Thursday was a beautiful, hot Summer day. Sonnenberg means "Sunny Hill" in German, and the estate is known more simply around here as Sonnenberg Gardens. It attracts 35,000 visitors a year, which is a lot in these parts—it's more than the year-round population of the county where I live. Sonnenberg Gardens consists of a 40-room, 21,000-square-foot Queen Anne style house on what used to be 200 acres of highly landscaped grounds, of which 50 remain. It was one of the five (count 'em) residences of a fellow named Frederick Ferris Thompson and his wife, Mary Clark Thompson, who also endowed the original F.F. Thompson Hospital in Canandaigua in his memory. Frederick was one of the founders of a bank that is now part of Citibank, and his original partners, his father and brother, departed to form their own bank, Chase National Bank, named for their friend, Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase. Their bank is now part of JP Morgan Chase. F.F. Thompson's house, with Mary in charge, was built at a frantic pace by more than 200 workers, some of them craftsmen from Italy, in 1885–87. The grounds and gardens, which were Mary's passion and are now the main attraction, evolved more slowly, from 1902 to 1919.

Fred

Evidently Mrs. Thompson was in charge of spending the couple's copious supply of money, and most of the tourist information in the home and gardens is about her. But, in addition to being ungodly rich, the man of the house (I'd call him Fred if we were out photographing and probably wouldn't even be allowed into his presence at the bank!) was one of us. A wall plaque described him as "an avid amateur photographer," and, in the only picture of him I noticed in the house, he is standing with an air of recognizably geeky pride behind an imposing view camera. A row of his cameras—decidedly modest compared to the rest of his life (maybe he was the frugal one of the pair?)—is presented atop a bookcase at the top of the stairs.

Fred's Century Grand Studio No. 7 8x10 portrait camera,
missing its included "cabinet holder" and "Semi-Centennial Stand."
It cost $72 in 1902 (~$2,144 today).

There were photographs on the walls here and there, but no notation as to whether they were his or not. This visitor would like to have known.

I'm half back
Anyway, I still have to be on half speed for a while, but I'm back. The comments to this post are open! Hallelujah. Yesterday was a good day all around.

Mike

P.S. I have no idea if Frederick F. Thompson was known as "Fred" or not. It's just that all us Photo-Dawgs are on a first-name basis here in the friendly club environs of TOP, no matter what our walk of life.

Original contents copyright 2019 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:

Dennis: "Welcome back ! A few years back, my family stopped at an ice cream shop. When we walked in, there was nobody at the counter, just a couple of teens in the back, but there was a box with a note on it that said 'Do Not Open.' My wife—the nosier, more curious of us—really wanted to open it. When we walked out with our ice creams, the teens followed us out—turns out they were students doing an experiment for a psychology class. They asked whether we wanted to open it and why we didn't. I replied that I just generally obey signs, but later realized that I respect signs/rules on private property much more than signs/rules on public property. Then you have the paper tickets you get when you enter raffles that say 'Keep This Coupon.' I kept one of those for over 20 years and nothing ever came of it. Good luck on the rest of your recovery!"

Joe Holmes: "Whew! Congratulations! Welcome back. Your pessimism isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you don't believe me, I highly recommend The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman. Makes a very good case for pessimism as a path to happiness. I also recommend Jim Holt's really wonderful book Why Does the World Exist, one of my favorite pop-philosophy books, which at points touches on similar topics. Anyway, as I said, welcome back! I missed you."

Steve Jacob: (partial comment): "I found cataract surgery affected my photography quite a lot. I stopped oversharpening and oversaturating images for one thing and I could calibrate my screen properly again. ;-) We don't really give much thought to the range of vision issues people have when they express preferences for one image, or camera, over another."

Mike replies: So true. We will really need to talk about this!

My Odd Favorite Among Matthew Brady Books

One of the stranger-looking refugees was a short, bearded man with a straw hat and spectacles, and a watch fob dangling from his belt—along with a sword concealed awkwardly under his overcoat. A contemporary said he looked like "a Paris art student." This confused apparition, more comical than belligerent, was Mathew Brady, the most famous photographer in the United States.

From Ted Widmer's "The All-Seeing Eye" at the WBPM*

The linked article is a good short introduction to Mathew Brady, another of history's more interesting photographers. In mid-20th-century America, Brady was considered pre-eminent in the history of American photography. Not so much recently; his star has fallen, as it did over the course of his life.

One of my favorite books about Brady, perhaps oddly, is a book written for young readers by a man named George Sullivan, who specializes in writing books for adolescents (he's written more than a hundred). I spoke to George on the phone at one point and it turns out that Brady has been a special interest of his for much of his life—he even owns Brady memorabilia and collects his photographs.

The book is good on the facts and seems short on the drama—Brady's life lends itself to drama—but that's because so much misinformation exists about Brady's life, and many of the more vivid stories turn out to have been shined a mite too hard. George Sullivan's brief was to create an accurate and sober short portrait that's as reliable as he could make it. It may have been targeted at teenagers, but it's a good and conscientious little book; we'd be lucky to have more like it, frankly.

Called Mathew Brady: His Life and Photographs, George's 1994 book has not been out of print for long and is still findable. [Ed. Note: c. 2019: You'll have to search eBay, your local library, or Abebooks for this one now.]

Mathew Brady in 1875

The longtime standard pop bio is James D. Horan's Mathew Brady: Historian with a Camera, which at one point must have been in every middle- and high-school library in America, and the best of the more recent books is Mathew Brady and the Image of History by Mary Panzer, which came out in 1997 but is still available in paperback. I've had that book since it came out in '97 but have yet to read it, alas. Mary is curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D. C.

—Time-Traveling Mike, from 2011

*The World's Best Photography Magazine, a.k.a. the New York Times

Original contents copyright 2019 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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(Sorry! There are no comments this week—the moderator is on very limited screen time while recovering from an eye operation.)

'A Leica for a Year' Update

Possibly one of my own favorite posts ever published on TOP. It was such great fun to hear from some of the many people who were inspired by the original "Leica As Teacher" post. This is from 2010.

Note that some of the links in this very long repost might be broken. It would have cost me too much screen time to check them all. I'm not allowed to look at the computer for more than an hour a day. —Mike

A year (and a couple of months) ago, I wrote a piece called "The Leica as Teacher" which got a wide response across the web. (There was also a follow-up article, called "Why It Has To Be a Leica," followed finally by a bit of mild backpedaling called "Variations on a Theme." Some months later, we also published a counterpoint, written by John Camp.)

I know a number of people actually followed through and carried out that "Leica for a Year" learning experience, because I've heard from a number of you throughout the year. Some people settled on some variation or other—a Leica with one lens but with color film, or "one camera one lens" but a different kind of camera and lens, or one digital camera with only one prime lens.

I don't know how many of those who tried the exercise will be visiting TOP today or even this week, and would see this, but I thought that today, in honor of Cartier-Bresson's birthday (he was born on this day in 1908), I'd ask to hear from people who actually carried out the "one Leica one year" exercise (or tried to): What did you do? How did it go, and what did you get from it? Are you happy you did it? 

H.C.-B., who would have been 102 today. Photo by Jane Bown

If you'd like to link to one of the pictures you took, please do.

Hope to hear from those of you who were inspired by that article.

Mike

UPDATE: There is a group pool called "A Leica Year" on flickr that has 499 photographs posted to it, that was inspired by my article. I had no idea. Just found out about this today.

I'm looking forward to spending some time with those pictures. Go, guys!

(Thanks to reader David Riedel for telling me about this.)

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Jan Kwarnmark: "Though I've been taking pictures for more than 40 years, I bought a Leica M6 and a 50mm lens. Maybe I was a little fed up with all digital files. But I have not been quite true to your suggestions. I bought a 28mm lens and I kept using my EOS 5D. I thought I did not have to learn from the Leica what it is to photograph. So I did it just for fun and for the delight of squeezing the shutter. It has been with me almost every day and become like a drug. I've taken some 60 films. If I have the Leica in town I never get bored. There are always potential pictures to look for.

"This one I took when I was biking home one day in April. The boys were actually trying to photograph each other jumping with the bikes. They had new DSLRs and hardly knew what buttons to press. As teacher I was very happy to show them a little about their cameras. (Do I hear anyone say: They should have bought Leicas!?) You can see one of them lying on his back.

"Yes, I am happy that I bought the Leica."

Featured Comment by charlie: "I did it...or I am doing it.

"I bought an M6 and Zeiss 35mm ƒ/2.8 lens. Shot a roll of Portra 400 and Ilford XP-2 and then settled on the standard choice and bought a brick of Tri-x.

"Prior to that I had shot a D700 (for 9 months) and couple of primes, and an Olympus DSLR for five years. My first intro was 25 years ago in college and only ever dabbled over the years, even when working in a pro lab.

"It has been a little over two months now and I could not be happier with my decision. It is what I have wanted for 20 years. I take fewer images but I feel more intimately involved in the process, and I got back on the 'street' which I love doing.

"I took this a step further and even asked Mike how long he thought film would be available. I don't plan on this ending in a year's time, or any other arbitrary time frame. At least for B&W street stuff, I think I am set forever.

"Very hard for me to choose photos when asked but here is one I like. [Link removed because it's broken now. —Ed.] This is my friend Ted, who I met one morning for breakfast a couple months ago. It was the first time we had seen each other in a decade. Ted also takes photographs, and upon seeing the M6 he exclaimed, 'Perfect. You will never need another camera, ever.'

"Thanks for the kick in the pants, Mike, and I look forward to hearing from and about other people's journey as well."

Featured Comment by Warren Markert: "I did a year with a variation, the Voigtander Bessa-R and the cheapest 50mm Russian lens I could find. I still have it and am still shooting film (Tri-X). I think the love of film is what I gained most over this time as my digital camera has still not come out of the cupboard. Choosing a picture is tricky but here is one (below)."

Featured Comment by Joel: "I did a variation on your challenge. I pulled out my old K1000 from high school and college and started shooting, at first with the 50mm ƒ/2 and then a 28mm and 135mm I got for a song on craigslist.

"I've had such a great time shooting, mostly T-Max but some Tri-X. I've found it very liberating to be divorced from the LCD. I've built a small darkroom and have been working on developing and printing what I've been shooting. It has been far more rewarding and creatively satisfying then I expected it would be.

"I'm not a professional photographer; it's always been just a hobby. Now though I feel like I really own my creativity, I'm not just skilled in the technical functions of a camera or accompanying software. It feels more mine, I'm threaded more into it from composition to print. Even on the digital stuff I still shoot.

"It wasn't a Leica and it wasn't one lens or even the only camera I shot but I'm really glad I took part in some way. Thank you!"

Featured Comment by Paul McEvoy: "Hi Mike, I have thought about the article much in the meantime. For most of the last year, a Leica M seemed like a dream. But through some events that involved the death of a very distant non-blood relative and a generous graduation present from nursing school, I recently ended up with a Leica M6 and a 35mm ƒ/2.

Paul's restored 5x7

"But that's not the story. I ended up starting something I think you mentioned in passing, the large-format-year. While waiting for the Leica, I bought a basket case of a 5x7 camera on ebay and restored it.  I've been using that along side the Leica and a Mamiya C330 for the last couple of months. But I find myself dreaming about this camera and really enjoying the process of using it for portraits. It's got me totally excited again about photography and really excited about my own photography practice.

"So...my camera: 5x7 Eastman No. 33, my film is HP5 Plus (one of the few available in 5x7, 120 and 35mm) and my lens is a 180mm Schneider-Kreuznach Symmar.

"I do hope to make use of the Leica again, but right now I'm happy to take a picture a day with the big camera.

"Thanks for the inspiration.

"P.S. Here are the pictures I've taken so far, and here's my current favorite."

Mike replies: Fine work, Paul. I also did "a year with a view camera" at one point in my journey, although I've never written about it. Most popular work I ever did—people loved it. I've never gotten so many compliments as I did that year. 

Featured Comment by Richard Howe: "Just spent a couple of hours going through the whole set of 'A Leica Year' on flickr—what fun! And so many, many fabulous pictures. This convinces me, I'm going to have to try it myself!"

Chad Freeman of Seattle is making a blog of his year. (See his comment in the Comments section.)

Featured Comment by Tom: "Hi, I make the experiment since 1.1.2010. I am from Germany and use a Leica MP and a 50mm Summilux. I take pictures with Kodak TMAX and develop all the pictures themselves, it makes me great fun and I always have more fun on photography. Unfortunately, my English is not good and therefore I let Google translate ;) Here I have created a homepage. But it is only in German. Thanks for the inspiration! cu Tom

"German: Hallo, ich mache das Experiment seit dem 1.1.2010. Ich komme aus Deutschland und nutze eine Leica MP und eine Summilux 50mm. Ich fotografiere nur mit Kodak TMAX und entwickle alle Bilder selbst. Es macht mir großen Spaß und ich habe immer mehr Freude am Fotografieren. Leider ist mein Englisch nicht gut und ich lasse daher Google übersetzen ;) Hier habe ich eine Homepage angelegt. Sie ist aber nur in deutsch. Danke für die Inspiration! cu Tom"

Above: Near the train station in Osaka, July 2010, by Semilog (see his comment in the Comments section). M6, 35/2.8 Biogon-C ("favorite 35, ever"), Neopan 1600 @ EI1600, XTOL 1:1.

Aaron Greenman (above and below) has been shooting for a year with an M8 and the 50mm ƒ/1.4 Summilux ASPH. See the "Exhibits" section of his website.

Featured Comment by John Woods: "I am now seventy and have been disabled by polio since 1946. That did not stop an active photographic career with Nikon (starting with the F) and Hasselblad. But nowadays those cameras are proving a little heavy so I decided to buy a baby camera for everyday use. Knowing my interests, the owner of my favourite camera shop in St James's talked me out of a true baby camera and suggested I try a Leica M. I remembered reading your article and thought, let's try one for a year. So I bought a second-hand M8 (which had been factory uograded to 8.2) plus a 35mm ƒ/2 summicron. Joy! Back to the photography of my school days when I was an enthusiastic member of the Brighton & Hove camera club (I still have the mounted copy of the first photo I submitted to the annual Club competition).

"Each time I buy a new camera I decide on a test project. For the Leica this was to record the changing seasons viewed from the second floor window of my home on the Riviera. This project ends with my (first) Year with a Leica. But the pleasure of always having the M8 with me when I go out will not stop. The image quality is, of course, great. And the opportunities have increased greatly because I always have the M8 with me. Your article tipped the balance in favour of the Leica M when I was choosing a 'baby camera.' Thank you."

Featured [partial] Comment by Bernard Scharp: "...What did I learn? First of all, to 'see' with my 'one lens.' Looking around I can frame a 50mm without really trying. This also helps in the second part: Seeing pictures. Even when I'm not actively photographing, for example when cycling, I often look around, and just take 'mind pictures' of things around me. If I see one that catches my eye, I stop, take out the camera and take it. In the same vein, I've started to just take 'photography walks.' Not going to a specific destination, but just a walk around the neighbourhood carrying my camera, just to see what I stumble upon....

Featured Comment by Phil Gyford: "I didn't do it with a Leica but I did dig out the Pentax K1000 I bought used when I went to college twenty years ago and haven't used for years. I bought a 50mm ƒ/1.7 lens on eBay and have been using nothing but this (aside from some casual phone/point-and-shoot shots occasionally), with Tri-X, for over a year now.

"I've really enjoyed it and it's been a real refresher—I was only using a digital point-and-shoot before, not wanting the bulk and expense of a digital SLR. But I didn't like the pictures it took and wasn't sure what to do next. So black-and-white film on my old SLR was just the change I was after.

"I intended to shoot as much as you suggested, but reality took care of that—I just don't have the time and would have to give other things up to really concentrate on photography that much. I've shot 23 films over the past year, although I sometimes went for weeks or even months without shooting. When I realised I was carrying the camera around a lot but never using it, I stopped taking it everywhere. I didn't like being 'on' all the time, and I valued being able to just be, to walk around without looking for potential shots. I guess I'm not a natural, compulsive photographer!

Mary Reading, by Phil Gyford

"But it's been good otherwise. I've thought more about composition. I really love taking my time and valuing each shot, rather than firing off several in one go. It's made me think about what I want from a camera and photography in general. So, many thanks for your idea.

"Here are my 30 favourites from the past year on Flickr."

Featured Comment by JackM: "I know I didn't start this 'a year with a Leica and one lens' on time. I assume you will allow me to start a year late, such as this past June? And you suggested I could do this for free, by selling the equipment a year later for what I paid? I'll let you know how I do, but so far a single lens is all I have needed."

Mike replies: Of course this is just an exercise—never has been anything but—and can be started or finished any time. I hope it's not necessary to point out that there's no moral component to this idea. Nobody "has to" do any particular thing with their photography hobby (note emphasis), and there should be no sense of "I didn't do what Mike said so he probably thinks I'm not a real photographer." Not at all. It's just something that I think could be a valuable learning experience—as my year shooting color film in a 4x5 was a valuable learning experience for me, even though I went right back to shooting 35mm black-and-white afterward.

I wonder if there are still photographers out there who need to do a year with a DSLR!?

Featured Comment by Markus Busch: "No cheating. My Leica Year ended August 18th, 2010. Leica M3, Summicron 50mm, and Tri-X. What a wonderful experience. Thanks for the inspiration, Mike. Here is my Leica year set."

By Markus Busch

Mike replies: And yet, squares! Interesting. That's definitely not cheating, though. Beautiful work.

Joe Henry (above) uses his Leica MP and 50mm Summicron 90% of the time. This shot was taken with a Nikon 1 soft filter using a step-up ring.

Featured Comment by Stig Dahlin: "Your little push was exactly what I needed! My digital photography felt a bit sloppy and 'unfocused.' Too many pictures, too little content. So I dusted off my battered old M2, bought a 35mm Color-Skopar and a 100-foot can of Tri-X and started. After developing a few rolls I was hooked. Completely! I hadn't thought of the nostalgia. Suddenly it was 1967 again! Soon I had a M6 too, with a Nokton 35mm ƒ/1.4, and I had a great time in the winter darkness. I haven't had so much fun photographically for many years. Well, it was really fun with digital when I started in 2002, but now I feel at home again.

"For color it's still digital, mostly with an LX-3. The DSLRs are mainly used for digitizing the negatives. This picture is taken with a red filter. Don't know if the camera is the M2 or the M6. I have taken around 50 rolls so far and have no intention of stopping.

"Thank you so much for your wonderful blog and the much needed push!"

Featured Comment by Chris Skarbon: "Quite by chance, or perhaps by default—it's the only lens I had for it—I've been using a Carl Zeiss 35mm ƒ/2 on a Contax G2 for the past year, so I guess that qualifies me for your Leica for a year exercise, even if I didn't realize it at the time—and even though it's a Contax and not a Leica. I've since acquired the 28mm, 45mm and 90mm and guess what, I never use them. I'm so used to seeing the world through the 35mm that I don't even think about picking up the 28 or 45, even though they're supposed to be two of the best lenses ever produced for 35mm cameras.

"So, in terms of your experiment, I'd advise anyone to try it for a year and save themselves a heap of money by not buying lenses they'll never use.

"This photo was shot last summer on Lido beach, Venice (Italy, not California) with the aforementioned G2 and 35mm ƒ/2."

Featured Comment by Dan P: "I started in October, and have since sold all my DSLRs and digital gear. I may have found my thing with the M6 and 35 Summilux—a lasting love. As soon as I started getting film back from the lab, I realized that the SLRs made me a color and bokeh aesthete and now I'm way more focused on gesture, light and emotion. Nothing has done more for my photography than this."

What Does a Guy Have to Do? (Update)

My son Xander is here visiting, and in this house, he is about the most eminent guest possible. Human and canines are all delighted. Tomorrow he'll drive me to the Eye Center for my checkup (the first in 18 days), upon which a lot is riding. I have no sense of how I'm doing. I'm hoping for good news.

During my convalescence I've been listening to Ron Chernow's Washington, and I thought this little factoid was funny: George Washington's mother never approved of him. She never bragged about or complimented him on his accomplishments, and she complained persistently about his lack of attentiveness and support. As far as Chernow reports, she never offered him the slightest morsel of encouragement, esteem, or respect, even when he was understandably preoccupied with little things like, you know, keeping his ragtag army together at Valley Forge or pounding Cornwallis into submission at Yorktown.

What does a guy have to do to impress Mom, anyway? Apparently being the Father of your Country and the first President of the United States just didn't quite measure up. After the Revolution, Washington was arguably the biggest celebrity in the Western world—truly the man of the age—even British aristocrats pestered Benjamin Franklin for letters of introduction. But Mary Washington still wasn't a fan.

More news when I know it, but in the meantime, I sincerely apologize for the lack of original content and discussion here lately. I guess it's remarkable that I managed to keep the blog going for thirteen and a half years without any long content outages, but that doesn't make this long dry spell any easier to bear. I'm very sorry. I hope to return soon, but I'm at the mercy of necessities beyond my control.

Mike

 

Off-Topic Interlude: Porsches In My Way

[TOP's APES (all-purpose editorial slave), i.e. moi, is notorious for wandering off topic and writing about whatever random topic strikes his fancy. So, amidst all the vintage photo posts, I thought I'd insert one to stand for all the many off-topic posts I've indulged in over the years. This is from 2010, and documents one of my brushes with automotive greatness—when I chanced into the opportunity of driving a few laps on an autocross course with the Head Instructor of the Porsche Driving School. I didn't brag as much as I should have in this post—actually my lap times were among the fastest of all the amateur participants that day (just customers of the dealership), and Mr. Whitehead let me take extra laps and then spent fifteen minutes sitting in the car talking to me. Very nice of him. I don't seek out offbeat life experiences like this one, but I appreciate them when they happen. It's always interesting to dip a toe in unfamiliar waters.

By the way, my friend John subsequently bought a Panamera and didn't like it, so you might want to take my brief test-drive experience with a grain of salt.]

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I had a fun day on my day off yesterday. Our local Mercedes dealer, which also sells Infiniti, Maserati, and Porsche, had a Driving School day. You got to hop into a Boxster or Cayman with a driving instructor and flog it around a tight little course laid out in their stock lot with white lines and cones. After a couple of laps, you switched places with the instructor, who then demonstrated how it's really done.

I drove a Boxster a bit sloppily (never drove one before, never drove their cones before) but, if I do say so myself, quite quickly. At least quite a bit more quickly than most of the other participants were managing. Then Cass Whitehead took the wheel and showed me the difference between real race drivers and guys like me who normally drive like they have their free arm draped across the top of the passenger seat. As Cass said, "It's like go-karts, only with a car." He'd been doing it all day—in fact, in his role as Lead Instructor at the Porsche Sport Driving School at Barber Motorsport Park in Leeds, Alabama, he does it year-in, year-out—but he didn't seem bored. He knocked off a crisp, fast lap that pasted us up against the seat side-bolsters, and put li'l ol' me in my proper, ah, perspective.

Driving school is in a peculiar class of activities at my stage of life: it's in the category of "always wanted to...and still might." (Most "always wanted tos...." are now in the "...but never will" box.)

2010 Porsche Boxster. If I ever bought a Porsche it would be a used Boxster, and mine would have a flat six and would date from before the switch from hydraulic to electric steering.

I'm going to have to revise my opinion of Porsches. When I was first driving on the north shore of Milwaukee in the 1970s, 911s—especially Targas—were the "chick cars" of choice for the hip young housewife, who drove them about the same way their younger doppelgangers now drive the gussied-up trucks called SUVs.  To the amusement of my friends, I worked out alternate lyrics for a song I called "Porsches in My Way," sung to the tune of "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes," which I was wont to croon tunelessly whenever I got trapped behind a Porsche doing an imitation of a tortoise.

The other demo the dealer was offering was an extended test drive in the new Panamera (it's pronounced "pan-uh-MARE-uh."). I had no expectations whatsoever for that exercise. The Panamera struck me from the start as a conceptual monstrosity, like a BMW SUV or a Leica rangefinder with a 28–300mm zoom. But...well, it's not. It's actually a pure delight to drive—it reminded me of that Mozart quote about how the pianoforte should be played in his piano concertos—it should "flow like oil." The Panamera is as close to the experience of a flying in a glider as you can get on the ground. In my experience at least. Lovely.

Fun couple of hours. No Porsches in my way, either, all day.

—Time-Traveling Mike, from 2010

P.S. Why no pictures? Because your idiot host carefully charged the camera battery but then came away from the house with camera in hand but without a card. Sheesh. Keep it together, Mikey, keep it together.

Original contents copyright 2019 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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Ten Iconic Photographs: No. 1

[Note: Writer and editor Mike J. is doing well, making a slow recovery from a cornea transplant. For your amusement and edification in the meantime, brief discussions of ten remarkable photographs, counting down from number 10.]

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The Hubble Ultra Deep Field Photograph

"This picture is the reason the Hubble Space Telescope was built. It has been compared in significance to the Dead Sea Scrolls and the discovery of the structure of DNA. It is the deepest and farthest back in time that humans have ever been able to see, almost back to the beginning of time."

—University of Texas Astronomer Andy Howell,
about the original 1995 Deep Field Photograph

This is not the prettiest picture ever made, but it is certainly one of the most amazing. It is a picture of a tiny, nondescript patch of sky with "nothing in it," in the constellation Fornax, below Orion. To put its angle of view in perspective, science writer Chet Raymo explains, take two pins or sewing needles and, at arm's length, cross them. The small square where the two pins overlap is approximately the visual area represented by the Hubble Ultra Deep Field photograph.

So why is this a great photograph? Well, for one thing, it shows something that is only visible to human beings through photography. It is a million-second exposure created from two separate images, each made with hundreds of exposures, taken by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), installed in the 2002 servicing mission, and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-object Spectrometer (NICMOS), which sees even farther than the ACS.

It uses the world's most expensive lens.

The world's most expensive camera: the Hubble Space Telescope

It is the ultimate in difficulty of access; unlike most photographs, it is not something that was ever witnessed directly by a human being. It essentially exists for us only as a photograph. Certainly, none of us will ever visit the place from which it was made.

The picture contains some 10,000 galaxies, and shows us as far back in time as we have ever seen: a redshift of approximately 7–12 (about 400–800 million years) from the Big Bang.

Each of these galaxies, of course, comprises millions of individual stars. The objects it shows are between 2.5 and 10.5 billion light years away. To put us in context—an absurd concept, since that simply can't be done—consider that Voyager 1 has been traveling at approximately 55,000 miles per hour since 1977 and just recently left the earth's solar system. Assuming it could keep going that long, it would require another 400,000+ years before reaching a second solar system. Just try to extrapolate that kind of scope and scale out to encompass 10,000 galaxies in a patch of sky that can be covered by two crossed needles held at arm's length. The human imagination is far too paltry a thing.

William A. Anders, Earthrise, Apollo 8 mission, Christmas Eve 1968

There are other photographs from space that perhaps move us emotionally to a greater degree; the sentimental favorite is no doubt one of the many "Earthrise" photographs taken from the orbit of, or the surface of, the moon. No wonder, as it shows a portrait of our own little neighborhood: Earth, our only home, almost unbearably lovely. Personally, I consider it a great privilege and great good luck to have lived in an era when I could see such a picture.

But for pure awe, it is dwarfed by the magnificent HUDF. No single tool in human history has revealed as much to us about the Universe as the Hubble Space Telescope. One can argue that it is the ultimate camera, and this astounding photograph its banner achievement. It encapsulates, in photography's specifying, limiting fashion, the mysteries of the Universe.

Hubble Deep Field multi-variate display at the Advanced
Supercomputing Project at NASA Ames, 1995.

—Originally published in 2006

Original contents copyright 2006, 2019 by Michael C. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Ten Iconic Photographs: No. 2

[Note: Writer and editor Mike J. is doing well, making a slow recovery from a cornea transplant. For your amusement and edification in the meantime, brief discussions of ten remarkable photographs, counting down from number 10.]

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W. Eugene Smith, Tomoko Uemura in her Bath, Minamata, 1972

The Concerned Photographer

If Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" is photography's madonna, then the last of the many great photographs of Gene Smith, Tomoko Uemura in her Bath, is our medium's pietà.

That's a properly exalted way of looking at these pictures, but it's a little too pat, too, because there are important differences. A madonna is an archetype, an idealization of mother and infant. The picture of the young mother in the pea pickers' camp and her three children is no idealization. It's a portrait of the hard mantle of responsibility that every parent bears and that every other parent understands, a plain picture of the "grinding" quality of poverty, of worry, and of care—but, crucially, strength and forebearance, too. Despite all its formal perfection and its lovely tones (still stunning after all these years), it would be nothing without that. It is the woman acting as a support and a source of strength for her children—surrounded on three sides by them, literally as well as figuratively their center—that makes the picture universal.

Smith's picture of Tomoko is even more complicated and layered. A pietà (the word is Italian for "pity") is traditionally the obverse of the Madonna, a depiction of Mary mourning her dead son, and that's universal enough and plenty poignant enough: psychologists say that the death of a child is #1 on the list of stressors a human being can experience, and you don't have to be a master of empathy to be able to feel the truth of that. But Smith's Minamata project was an early environmental exposé. Tomoko Uemura was born with massive birth defects caused by environmental poisoning from a chemical plant. She's not dead; and her mother is not grieving. In fact, what's remarkable about the picture—again, in addition to its really breathtaking formal and tonal perfection—is the obvious humanity of Tomoko and, especially, the infinite caring, gentleness, and sympathy in her mother's gaze. Like a great masterpiece of music, you could look at that mother's expression for the rest of your life and never exhaust its human richness and its connection to the elemental selflessness and depth of parental love. But the reason why connecting these pictures to their universal archetypes doesn't quite tell the whole story is that the six people in these two pictures remain real people in real circumstances. That they can access such classic human themes so obviously and directly is impressive, but it's their relationship to real events and immediate circumstances that makes them great photographs.

For at least twenty years, there existed a sort of code among photographers of the highest ambition that went by the label of "concerned photography." I believe it was coined by, and maybe even defined by, Cornell Capa, but I admit I haven't done the research. I don't know, either, whether Gene Smith just embodied it or to what degree he might have inspired it. But it's okay that all the ligatures are a bit of a mush to me; Smith was not a man with good boundaries. He was a profoundly conflicted man, probably a masochist, certainly a tortured soul, and there were no borders to either his passion or his commitment. He ended up being part of the Minamata story himself, not just a reporter of it—his beating at the hands of Chisso's thugs (crippling him for good, although he had certainly not been kind to, or easy on, his body and his nervous system up until that point) helped form public opinion and extended the reach of the story in the broader world.

If you can get a hold of his biography, W. Eugene Smith, Shadow and Substance by Jim Hughes, it is potentially one of those life-changing books for us photographers. But be sure you attend to Smith's pictures, sooner or later. No photographer I know anything about was ever more rawly emotional. His life was chaos, and as a man he was a wreck, a mess. But his art soars.

—Originally published in 2006

Could you please help TOP while Mike's recuperating? Spread the word about our "Iconic Photographs" countdown through social media and to other photo websites you frequent. Grateful thanks.

Original contents copyright 2006, 2019 by Michael C. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Ten Iconic Photographs: No. 3

[Note: Writer and editor Mike J. is doing well, making a slow recovery from a cornea transplant. For your amusement and edification in the meantime, brief discussions of ten remarkable photographs, counting down from number 10.]

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Alexander Gardner, Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 8, 1863
(gravure reproduction)

The Portrait

Given the thousands upon thousands of superb portraits that exist—and the hundreds or thousands that are arguably no worse than this one—it may seem "U.S.A.-centric" of me to choose Alexander Gardner's portrait of Abraham Lincoln to stand for all portraits. Yet there are good reasons for the choice, I think. Lincoln's is surely one of history's most interesting faces. He may not have been the first great American to have his portrait taken, but he was the first President to leave such an extensive photographic record of himself, the earliest "great man" who was known well through the medium. Finally (with George Washington and Franklin Roosevelt) he was one of the three most important Presidents in United States history—and like it or not, portraits of important people have more (and more lasting) interest to viewers than portraits of more forgettable figures.

Mathew Brady, for whom Gardner worked in 1863 when this picture was taken, usually posed Lincoln in 3/4 profile. Gardner's picture, which was one of the main references used by sculptor Daniel Chester French for the Lincoln Memorial statue on the Mall in Washington, D.C., is the only known portrait of Lincoln from straight on, looking at the camera. There's no artifice about it anywhere: it's just a frank, plain picture of a man, forthright and direct.

The wet-collodion glass-plate negative of this picture is now in the collection of the Indiana Historical Society (although the fact is somewhat "outside" of the traditional Lincoln legend, he spent his formative years in Indiana, from age seven to 21). It's a surprisingly modest little object. (See inset.)

There can be little doubt that Lincoln, who was one of the most intelligent men ever to be President, surely was the first U.S. President to grasp the modern idea of "the media" in that he knew the value of his photograph as publicity, and of publicity to his leadership and his reputation. The many portraits made of him helped popularize him and even had a mythologizing effect. But still, there is something I find endearing about all those portraits. Lincoln was a depressive and a supreme realist—yet I can't help but feel, in the plain fact of his willingness to sit to have his portrait made so many times, that he was also more than a bit vain. It's difficult to keep in mind now, but he was human, after all.

—Originally published in 2006

Could you please help TOP while Mike's recuperating? Spread the word about our "Iconic Photographs" countdown through social media and to other photo websites you frequent. Grateful thanks.

Original contents copyright 2006, 2019 by Michael C. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Ten Iconic Photographs: No. 4

[Note: Writer and editor Mike J. is doing well, making a slow recovery from a cornea transplant. For your amusement and edification in the meantime, brief discussions of ten remarkable photographs, counting down from number 10.]

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Robert Capa, Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of
Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936

Access

One of the fundamental problems of photography not necessarily encountered by any other type of artist is the problem of access: to photograph something, you ordinarily have to be in proximity to it, or in a position to see it, or at least at the proper standpoint—and being there is not always easy or safe. The ultimate example of the exclusivity of access is probably pictures taken on the surface of the moon, but Danny Lyons' insider photographs of a motorcycle gang in The Bikeriders and Larry Clark's documentation of a violent drug subculture in Tulsa are good examples as well—and there are others, of course. (One of my own mentors in photography, the late Steve Szabo, once answered a student's question "What should I photograph?" by asking back, "What can you photograph?") Above every other genre of photography, however, war photography is the one which makes the most demands in return for access.

Robert Capa (left, in 1945) was born in Budapest, Hungary, and lived most of his life as a "citizen of the world." He was in a gully with a number of other Spanish militiamen when he took the picture variously known as "Falling Soldier," "Falling Loyalist Soldier," or "The Death of a Loyalist Soldier." (The true title is given above.) Remorselessly specific and yet as symbolic as a flag, surprisingly simple, undyingly powerful, it is an authentic picture of very nearly the exact instant of a man's death. Originally published in LIFE in 1937, it is also in Capa's book about the Spanish Civil War, Heart of Spain. It was not faked as has sometimes been claimed: forensic analysis suggests that the soldier, identified as Federico Borrell García, was already dead as he fell. (The author of the best currently available book on Capa, Richard Whelan, explains the research in depth in an excellent online article about the picture.)

At only 22, Capa was the age of most graduating college seniors when he took this. He lived one of those comet-like lives—bright, and brief, as well as vivid and romantic in the best mid-century movie-star tradition. He was hard-partying, handsome, invariably described as "dashing," a womanizer, a risk-taker—an outsized personality, much loved, eventually much missed. Unlike Henri Cartier-Bresson, with whom he founded the international freelance agency Magnum Photos with their friend Chim (David Seymour), Capa cared little for careful organization or the veneer of art in his photographs. He sought immediacy and authenticity. The novelist John Steinbeck, who knew Capa well from their collaboration in Russia in 1947, said of him, "He could photograph thought...and capture worlds."

Having already photographed four wars, Capa professed to have given up war photography before he was killed, famously saying that war was like "an actress who is getting old—less and less photogenic, and more and more dangerous." He was in Japan for a Magnum exhibition in 1954 when LIFE called needing a photographer in Indochina. Once there, Capa left the column he was with to go up the road so he could photograph the advance. He stepped on a land mine. When he was reached moments later, his leg blown off and a gaping hole in his chest, he was still alive. He died clutching his camera, one of the very first of 135 photographers killed in the Viet Nam war. He was 39.

—Originally published in 2006

Could you please help TOP while Mike's recuperating? Spread the word about our "Iconic Photographs" countdown through social media and to other photo websites you frequent. Grateful thanks.

Original contents copyright 2006, 2019 by Michael C. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Bored Out of My Gourd (Mike Update)

Nothing much to report. My recovery is going well enough as far as I can tell, and I'm comfortable. Yesterday marked one full week to go till my next checkup. I'm already seeing interesting things out of my repaired eye, such as greatly improved color transmission and gorgeous large-structure contrast. Resolution is not yet adequate, but then I'm wearing a protective cover over the surface of the eyeball like a contact lens. My nine daily eyedrops include a beta-blocker, a quinolone antibiotic, and an anti-inflammatory synthetic corticosteriod. I haven't missed a one.

But I can't...do...anything. if you're ever tempted to think that "time flies," just put yourself in a position where you can't do most of the things you normally spend your time doing! On Tuesday I was cleared to make short drives in daylight, so I am able to get to the grocery store, but I'm not allowed to exert myself, exercise, or do much more than light housework, and I can spend only a cumulative total of one hour per day reading and looking at screens of all kinds. (I wrote this post in three ten-minute bursts across three days.) Next Thursday's checkup might—emphasis on might—clear me to return to my usual routines and get us back to normal. Keep your fingers crossed.

It's difficult to hold silverware with your fingers crossed.

I'm very mindful that this is not real suffering—it's certainly very far from the worst thing in the world. It barely rises to the level of an extended inconvenience. All the same, the passing of time has slowed to a crawl, and I am bored out of my gourd*.

It's probably one of those times that seem like a trial when we're in the middle of it but that we can compartmentalize and allow to fade from memory once it's been endured and is over with. But it's a trial even so. I can't wait for it to end.

More anon.

Mike

*Odd expression, isn't it? I don't know where it comes from...it just bubbled out of my brain. I suppose gourd = head.

Ten Iconic Photographs: No. 5

[Note: Writer and editor Mike J. is doing well, making a slow recovery from a cornea transplant. For your amusement and edification in the meantime, brief discussions of ten remarkable photographs, counting down from number 10.]

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Ansel Adams, Tenaya Lake

The Land

When I was young and new to photography, I worshipped Ansel Adams and revered his work. Now that I'm older and jaded, I seldom return to it for pleasure. Thus, Adams has taught me one of the most important lessons to learn about art: tastes change.

Art is volatile. Its meaning changes with context, in time, and depending on the cultural "lens" through which it's viewed. For instance, you could say that Ansel Adams was in the vanguard of 1930s modernism, what with his participation in Willard Van Dyke's Group ƒ/64 and his heroic, forward-looking outlook. Or, you could see him, as I do, as the apotheosis of the 19th-century photographic explorers of the American west, of Watkins and Jackson et al. He has more in common with Albert Bierstadt than he does with the irony of the New Topographers.

Still, he was undeniably at the height of his powers when he made this astonishing landscape at Tenaya Lake, 8,000 feet up in the Sierra Nevada, in the late 1940s. All too often, photographs suggest that "anyone could have taken them" if they had only been there, confronted with what the photographer found himself face-to-face with; and in a backwards way, this is a good proof of just what an original photograph this is: it looks virtually nothing like any other picture of Tenaya Lake that I've ever seen. (Compare it to this more usual snapshot of the place—photographer unknown—at left). Adams's picture is just full to the scuppers, of lake, granite, and of clouds—which Adams treated as a pictorial element as massive and as worthy as mountains. He manages to convey scale, not an easy trick in a photograph, in which a strawberry can be made to seem bigger than Uluru. He even manages to convey the cold, vivid clarity of the mountain air. It's a picture of great balance: notice the way the strip of lake at the bottom is mirrored by the strip of sky at the top, the way the slash of deep shadow at center left is balanced by the patch of sunlit cloud at center right. And the sheer texture of the great granite slabs bring to mind the native American name for the lake, Pie-we-ack, "lake of the shining rocks."

Still, it's a vision that for me contains a fair bit of imagination. Adams's Yosemite was a nearly empty preserve for him and his intrepid fellow hikers in his day compared to the crowded playground it has since become. But it was already a National Park twelve years before Ansel was born. The imagination comes in when we consider it, as Adams no doubt wanted us to, as pristine, unsullied wilderness—the way the Earth might have been if humankind had never been. It is not so much as a record of a real place that the power of this picture resides, but in our happy thrall to this wonderful—and undeniably magnificent—idea of nature.

—Originally published in 2006

Could you please help TOP while Mike's recuperating? Spread the word about our "Iconic Photographs" countdown through social media and to other photo websites you frequent. Grateful thanks.

Original contents copyright 2006, 2019 by Michael C. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Ten Iconic Photographs: No. 6

[Note: Writer and editor Mike J. is doing well, making a slow recovery from a cornea transplant. For your amusement and edification in the meantime, brief discussions of ten remarkable photographs, counting down from number 10.]

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Art Kane, Harlem 1958

Significance

This, for you, might be a stand-in, because I can't guess what might have similar significance for you. It depends what you care about and what has resonance for you. Jazz does it for me. Your mileage may vary, as the saying goes.

And on the surface, this doesn't seem like such a remarkable photograph: a grouping of people posing for a portrait, mostly black men but including women, whites, and children, on the steps of a city brownstone and spilling down onto the sidewalk, in Harlem, on the island of Manhattan. However, a large part of great photographs is their significance. And the significance of this amazing picture, taken in 1958 by photographer Art Kane, is fathomless.

It's a characteristic of any true renaissance period that it seems to overflow with genius. Giants proliferate, and even the second-rank people are legitimate geniuses who might dominate any other age. One such coalescence of all of the conditions of renaissance occurred in America in the latter half of the 1950s. Although jazz was soon to be doomed by the twin juggernauts of American rock and roll and the "British invasion" personified by four young Liverpudlians, in 1956–1959 it was one of those rare cases of an art form becoming fully mature while it still remained popular and while it was still central to mainstream culture. When this picture was taken in 1958, jazz had well over half a century's history as a dominant popular music. It was also the most technically demanding music ever to achieve such popularity. Yet it was smack in the middle of its last great period of innovation.

One could spend almost a lifetime coming to a full appreciation the congress of genius pictured here. There are two websites, harlem.org and the photographer's site, artkane.com, where you can put all these faces together with their names. There's also a documentary movie about the picture, available on DVD, called "A Great Day in Harlem" (right). You can buy it as a poster, too. The picture has old and young, black and white, swing-era big-band to the most modern avant-guard. Count Basie sat down on the curb to rest, and one brave neighborhood kid hesitantly joined him. The ice broken, a bunch of other kids put themselves into the picture. (Can any of you pros out there imagine an A.D. suffering such a thing in a similar shoot today?) On the far right, two of the greatest trumpeters in history, Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie, are joking with each other. Towering over them, pale as a ghost, is red-haired Gerry Mulligan. Front and center is Coleman Hawkins, who was coming off one of his best years ever, at least in terms of music on record; just to his left, our right, both wearing shades, are Sonny Rollins and Thelonious Monk. (Monk arrived late; he wanted to make sure he would be last to arrive, so he'd have to go in front—and he wore a light jacket assuming that everyone else would be dressed in dark suits, so he would stand out.) Pianist Marianne McPartland and the now-neglected Mary Lou Williams stand side by side. Cigarette in mouth, up on the steps, is a young man named Charles Mingus. Both Art Blakey and Gene Krupa were there. So is Milt Hinton. So is Art Farmer. Zutty Singleton is up on the steps. The great stride pianist Luckey Roberts is in the picture...and Willie The Lion Smith was there that day, but for some reason isn't in the final shot! On the right, in back (and wearing his trademark pork-pie hat, even), is Billie Holiday's saxophonist Lester Young; opposite him, seemingly glowering at the camera, is Horace Silver. The list goes on. Both my two favorite musicians, Hawkins and Hank Jones, are present. To appreciate the biographies of all these people is to immerse oneself in the history of jazz.

Just remarkable. It's as if all the German and Austrian classical composers had gathered for a group portrait that included Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, or if somehow we could have a group portrait of all the major Italian Renaissance artists gathered together, old Leonardo next to young Raphael, or all the impressionists. Or all of the Athenian philosophers. All would be as august as this group, but none more so.

Of course, one might wish that Art Kane had used a bigger camera: the limits of the film's and the lens's resolution are pushed hard by the many faces that are so tiny on the negative. But don't be too hard on him. When he took the picture for Esquire magazine, it was his first professional assignment ever.

—Originally published in 2006

[Ed. Note: Related and recommended: Art Kane's retrospective from 2014.]

Could you please help TOP while Mike's recuperating? Spread the word about our "Iconic Photographs" countdown through social media and to other photo websites you frequent. Grateful thanks.

Original contents copyright 2006, 2019 by Michael C. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(Very sorry, but there are no comments this week—I’m not allowed to read or look at screen for more than a very short time.)

Ten Iconic Photographs: No. 7

[Note: Writer and editor Mike J. is doing well, making a slow recovery from a cornea transplant. For your amusement and edification in the meantime, brief discussions of ten remarkable photographs, counting down from number 10.]

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Stuart Franklin, © Magnum Photos

Witness

Fortunately, it is not very natural for one human being to kill another. Normal people don't like it. Some normal people who become killers do so for greed or self-interest or simply for status, but organized sprees of killing are usually led or instigated by a few sociopaths and sadists, who also statistically do far more than their "share" of it; more ordinary people, less equipped psychologically for the task, have to be inured to it by gradual habituation if they are going to do it and keep doing it. They may be driven to it in the first place by real or perceived self-preservation, demonization of some "other," through compulsion of some sort (soldiers are often given little choice), or through a sense of duty or necessity, real or imagined.

Unfortunately, the sadistic psychopaths who do the most killing are numerous enough that history is pockmarked with numberless massacres. Mass graves hidden in forests; buildings full of people burned; regular gunfire that continues throughout a night, with everyone within earshot too frightened to go outside. We hear about only a few of these, and we cannot reasonably dwell on their enormity. Two hundred, six hundred, thousands, more—we must have developed mental mechanisms to keep the pity of such things at bay.

The human tendency is to attach more meaning and emotion to small, vivid, personalized incidents than to far larger ones that are more abstract. I cannot wrap my mind around the losses of Nagasaki, or Dresden. Instead, I remember small details. In the Killing Fields of Pol Pot, an old Thai woman who became permanently hysterically blind after seeing her pregnant daughter machine-gunned to death; a Hutu with a machete asking his victims, "long sleeve or short sleeve?" giving them a preference as to where they would like their arms chopped off; the pitiful photograph of Chief Big Foot, frozen solid where he fell at the massacre of Wounded Knee; Nick Ut's picture of the naked, burned Vietnamese girl fleeing down the road; an old Japanese man standing on a street corner, one of many whose mission it was to educate the children of Hiroshima about the horrors of the bomb. Many people perished at Hiroshima, but they are faceless to me. I can't forget that old man's face.

What the old man was doing on the streets of Hiroshima was giving witness. Photography is particularly suited to giving witness, but seldom to the greater or broader events, only the smaller ones—the ones we tend to latch on to and remember. Occasionally, those small incidents transcend their contexts to stand for something much larger or greater.

At least four still photographers and at least one videographer recorded this incident. It happened on China's Tiananmen Square on the morning June 5th, 1989, during the Chinese government's crackdown on the remnants of more than a million unruly pro-democracy protesters who had occupied the square for many days. The still photographers I know of were NEWSWEEK's Charlie Cole, Stuart Franklin of Magnum, and Jeff Widener of the AP. As if on impulse, a lone figure suddenly appeared out of the crowd and stood before an advancing column of tanks. The lead tank tried to go around him. He sidestepped quickly, a skipping movement, to stay in front of it. The tank went the other way. Again the man blocked it. The tank came to a stop. The tank commander refused to run over or gun down the protester. The standoff lasted for half an hour; finally, the man jumped up on the tank itself and had a brief conversation with the tank commander, then rejoined the crowd.

As with any symbolic event as famous as this one has become, it has been subject to endless hagiography, revisionism, and even satire. The Chinese government later referred to the man in the white shirt with the shopping bags as "a lone scoundrel." Others rank him among the 20th century's greatest heroes.

Charlie Cole, who photographed alongside Stuart Franklin, gives a harrowing description of what it was like to get the shot. He describes being beaten and poked with a cattle prod, having his film torn out of his cameras and then his cameras taken from him. He had to hide the roll of film with his own picture of the incident in the reservoir of a hotel toilet to keep it from being confiscated.

The man, sometimes called "tank man" or "the unknown hero," has never been conclusively identified. It is likely he paid for his brief, transcendent moment with his life, although it is possible he is still alive. And although many demonstrators died in the government's crackdown, it is possible to argue that the Chinese government was being nearly as restrained as the commander of the lead tank.

Many of history's tragic massacres have been secret, or covered up, or have simply been forgotten: no witnesses survive. Even in this case, when Chinese government soldiers killed thousands of demonstrators in broad daylight in the middle of Beijing, the cover-up has been effective, if only in China: most young Chinese today know nothing of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations or its eventual suppression. Photography allowed the whole world to witness to this one man's glory, however, a small truth that stood for much more. It remains one of the most vivid moments I've witnessed in my lifetime, an electrifying act of almost inconceivable bravery. The photographs and video footage will keep the larger occasion alive and memorable forever.

Stuart Franklin, whose picture of the incident I marginally prefer, has not said a great deal about the experience that I can find. As for the more articulate Charlie Cole, he reported this in NEWSWEEK: "Several days after the massacres, [NEWSWEEK Hong Kong Bureau Chief Melinda Liu] argued with hotel workers over a room bill. I asked for a discount because hotel access had been dicey 'due to what happened in Tiananmen Square.' Back came the Orwellian answer: 'Nothing happened in Tiananmen Square.'"

Mike

FEATURED COMMENT from Charlie Cole [2006]: "Mike, I found your thoughts on man's murderous side and the relationship to massacres thought-provoking. The other photographer who shot the Tiananmen Tank shot is Arthur Chang with Reuters. In 1990 I was awarded the World Press Photo of the Year for the photo, which I thought was a mistake, as I have always contended that Stuart Franklin should’ve shared the award with me if they were intent on awarding it for that photo and I told WPP so when they contacted me to announce it. The quality of the shot is not what either Stuart or myself would have liked, but something that all photographers should understand about the situation is that after the initial crackdown, it became almost impossible to be on the streets as a westerner. Martial law had been declared, and on two separate occasions I came under fire while trying to shoot, once no less in a diplomatic compound where David and Peter Turnley and myself had taken up a position over a line of tanks. For me the shot of the young man facing down the tanks isn’t an award winner, or a stand alone, or any of that. Quite simply for me, it's the testament of a man who defined probably most important moment of his life rather than letting the moment define him, and I and the other shooters were very privileged to have witnessed it."

—Originally published on TOP in 2006

[Ed. Note 2019: Related and recommended: Stuart Franklin's fine book The Documentary Impulse which was published in 2016.]

Could you please help TOP while Mike's recuperating? Spread the word about our "Iconic Photographs" countdown through social media and to other photo websites you frequent. Grateful thanks.

Original contents copyright 2006, 2019 by Michael C. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(Very sorry, but there are no comments this week—I’m not allowed to read or look at screen for more than a very short time.)

Ten Iconic Photographs: No. 8

Diane Arbus, Identical Twins, Roselle, NJ, 1967

Self and Other

This might seem an esoteric selection for a top ten list, but one of the many interesting things about it is that it's not: Diane Arbus has always been popular. Her magazine work, done for money, did well; her Aperture monograph is among a tiny, select handful of "evergreen" photo books that just keep on selling, year after year; seven million people saw the posthumous traveling retrospective of her work; and though she might seem the last person who could ever make money doing high-society portraits for pay, she did.

It helps for an artist to know what she's about, and Arbus really knew. Her work from start to finish is an extended investigation into the meaning of self. She was relentless about it: she's described as photographing aggressively, in an almost hungry or predatory way, as if it were some sort of surreal substitute for climbing into the skin of her subjects. She's best known, of course, for her take on "freaks" as "natural aristocrats" because they were born into their life's trial and carry it with them everywhere, but photographs of acknowledged freaks account for only a small portion of her work. All of her pictures, however, in one way or another, vector in on the peculiar trials—the strangeness, even the horror, really—of being a consciousness, a self, trapped inside a particular animal body with its particular compulsions and restrictions and stuck with the strange, sad, or brave ways we have to settle on presenting it to the outer world.

Twins aren't freaks. But that conundrum of a distinct duplicate self has always had a natural fascination for anyone curious about identity. Like almost all of Arbus's pictures, her portrait of Colleen and Cathleen Wade at age seven (taken, coincidentally, the same year that Warhol first mass-produced his Marilyns) seems simple, even straightforward. It is not. That is made most clear by a comment not from any harrumphin' art critic, but from the girls' father: "We thought it was the worst likeness of the twins we'd ever seen. I mean it resembles them, but we've always been baffled that she made them look ghostly. None of the other pictures we have of them looks anything like this."

That quote comes from David Segal's fine May 2005 Washington Post article about the twins, as does Helayne Seidman's picture of the two today (right) with what their father calls their "401(k)"—the print Arbus sent the family as a courtesy, now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Maybe millions, eventually, considering its unique provenance). There are a dozen memorable lines in Segal's down-to-earth article, including the laugh-out-loud funny one that the twins are the "least creepy people" you'd ever want to meet. Not bad for a pair whose picture is said to have inspired the one of the most deceptively scary (and memorable) scenes in Stanley Kubrick's famous horror film The Shining.

Arbus is probably the photographer whose biography (unofficial and provisional though the published one is) is more intriguing than any other's—and that's saying something. At the very least, the web of connections fascinates us. A student of Lisette Model, she was also mentored by Richard Avedon, who then had a long and still somewhat mysterious relationship with Diane's daughter Doon. Her husband, Allan Arbus, whom she met at 14 and married at 18 (and separated from at 36 or so, in 1959), later played Dr. Sidney Friedmann—a psychiatrist—on the TV show M*A*S*H. And one of Arbus's high-society portrait clients was Gloria Vanderbilt, the heiress who popularized boutique blue jeans. "She took a remarkable portrait of Gloria Vanderbilt's sleeping baby son, Anderson Hays Cooper, for a Harper's Bazaar Valentine issue," biographer Patricia Bosworth says. "In this truly astonishing picture, the infant resembles a flat white death's head—eyes sealed shut, mouth pursed and moist with saliva. When Gloria Vanderbilt saw the photograph, she forbade Bazaar to publish it, but eventually she changed her mind and this stunning image opened Diane's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972." The infant—grown, of course—is now an announcer on CNN.

In a medium that is almost perversely amorphous and upon which it is so notoriously difficult to impose a style, virtually every Arbus radiates, distills, vibrates Arbus ("we've always been baffled that she made them look ghostly"). She's the best example and possibly even the origin of the idea that great photographers take every picture of who's behind the camera as well as what's in front of it. In psychological parlance, she may have had "thin borders" between herself and others. Saying that, it's important to remember too what a profound sympathy she had—a rare power of sympathy that gave her an opening into the interior worlds of others, even strangers. What to most of us is an opaque wall was to her a wide window.

Mary Ellen Mark's 1969 portrait of Arbus (left) shows a woman with an undeniable intensity, but also a haunted look that does seem, in retrospect, to fortell her suicide. The same sense haunts her work. It's a truism that certain peoples believe there is life in everything on Earth, every rock and breath of wind. But there is also a faint sinister deadness in everything in the world, which photography seems morbidly adapted to reveal; by not just acknowledging but pursuing the surreality lurking behind reality, Diane Arbus cracked the medium's ribs. Her influence, deathless, haunts us still.

Mary Ellen Mark's homage to Arbus, Heather and Kelsey Dietrick, 2002

—Originally published in 2006

Could you please help TOP while Mike's recuperating? Spread the word about our "Iconic Photographs" countdown through social media and to other photo websites you frequent. Grateful thanks.

Original contents copyright 2006, 2019 by Michael C. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(Very sorry, but there are no comments this week—I’m not allowed to read or look at screen for more than a very short time.)

Ten Iconic Photographs: No. 9

[Note: Writer and editor Mike J. is doing well, making a slow recovery from a cornea transplant. For your amusement and edification in the meantime, a rerun of ten popular posts from the early 2000s—brief discussions of ten great photographs, counting down from number 10.]

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Andy Warhol [from Gene Korman], Marilyn, 1967

The Image of Woman

This is not, properly speaking, "just" a photograph. It only started out as one.

When Eugene Kornman, a.k.a. Gene Korman, took his photograph of Marilyn Monroe in 1953 as a publicity still for the film Niagara (left), he'd been doing stills on movie sets at least since Scarface more than 20 years earlier. Korman seems to have done well in Hollywood as a glamor photographer, if perhaps of the second rank—for one thing, he had created more artistically confident and stylish portraits of Monroe. Korman's daughters were child actors in the famous "Our Gang" and "Little Rascals" silent films. His younger daughter Mildred changed her name, too, just like Marilyn had—as "Ricki Van Dusen," she became of one of the top fashion models of the '50s, modeling for the likes of Irving Penn, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, John Rawlings, and Horst P. Horst (that's Ricki on the Vogue cover.)

After Marilyn's death, the self-styled Pop Art superstar Andy Warhol (who was also a photographer) "used" Korman's image—according to Mildred he never paid Korman or his estate for its use, or even asked for permission—to "mass-produce" (Warhol's term) an ever-changing series of silkscreens. They had numerous different combinations of fauvist-style patches of wild color over a simplified Kodalith of Monroe's face, copied, of course, from Korman's photograph. They are shown and sold as either individual silkscreens (one of which, known as "Orange Marilyn," sold for $17.3 million in 1998, which a Sotheby's spokesman called "a wise buy at the price") or as "paintings" composed of a number of the silkscreens (from two up to at least 50) grouped together.

Is the resulting artwork still at all Korman's? Is it still at all a photograph? Is it a collaboration? An unwitting or unwilling collaboration? A one-way collaboration? Was the photograph just raw material, like unformed clay? I'm a bit prickly about this, and often find myself standing up for the photograph's contribution to hybrid works of art. But I don't think it matters what we think: like it or not, it is undeniably a characteristic of photography that photographs are appropriated, copied, or adapted for an endless array of purposes by all kinds of people in all kinds of ways. At what point they stop being photographs is not a determination we can really come to. The Marilyn image(s) wouldn't be great without Warhol's admittedly larger contribution. It also wouldn't exist without Korman's smaller one.

[Mild nudity beyond the break. Warning provided as a courtesy for schools and workplaces. —Ed.]

Ten Iconic Photographs: No. 10

[Note: Writer and editor Mike J. is doing well, making a slow recovery from a cornea transplant. For your amusement and edification in the meantime, today we inaugurate a rerun of ten popular posts from the early 2000s—brief discussions of ten great photographs, counting down from number 10. Posted at 7 ET every morning. Enjoy!]

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Edward Weston, Pepper No. 30

The Equivalent

The idea was Alfred Stieglitz’s. Although Steiglitz suffered from logorrhea—compulsive soliloquizing, in his case—he gave the concept he derived from Symbolist art an elegant, simple name: an equivalent. In 1922, he claimed that his photographs were “equivalents” of his philosophy of life, and he famously titled a series of cloud photographs Equivalents, firmly setting the idea into the vocabulary of photography. The term is simply the observation (or the assertion) that a picture of some specific thing can evoke other things altogether, in terms of feeling, meaning, associations, or form.

Stieglitz’s cloud pictures don’t measure up to their rap for yr. hmbl. critic. That is, they never much looked like anything but clouds to me, and many photographers—I think of Ralph Steiner first—have done better cloud pictures. But the idea of equivalence became a linchpin of expressive photography’s struggle against the medium’s insistent literalness and its often frustrating specificity.

On the surface, it might seem ironic that photography’s best-known example of Stieglitz’s idea would come from Edward Weston, since one of Weston’s stated allegiances was to “the thing itself.” Weston was one of the bohemian Californians who first mastered and then rejected art photography’s then-longstanding tradition of brooding, atmospheric vagueness. He used a hard-sharp “rectilinear” lens in place of the lovely soft-focus masterpieces so treasured by the pictorialists (revived today in Cooke’s modernization of the Pinkham and Smith), and turned to the workaday bromide papers that artists of the preceding era had considered suitable mainly to newspaper darkrooms. If I recall my long-ago reading of Weston’s Daybooks, he shot Pepper No. 30 inside the open mouth of a metal funnel, and used a smaller aperture even than his little group’s namesake of ƒ/64. He shot it at ƒ/128, using an exposure time of six hours. (I might be wrong about the numbers. It was something like that. And Weston might as well have been imprecise about it too: he was surely well into his slow film’s reciprocity failure by then, and five hours, or seven hours, would have served just as well.)

In the past I’ve described Weston in Ezra Pound’s innovator-to-master progression (from The ABC of Reading, I think) as being most important neither for what he made of those who came before him nor how he influenced those who came after, but as a “great monolith” towering apart and unique in the adventure of photography’s early unfolding—important merely, and most impressively, in and of himself. He could see form in void, universality in specificity, arrangement in chaos, abstraction in hard reality, rarity in the common, beauty in decrepitude, and organic form everywhere, before anyone had shown us the way. But whether he’s photographing deserts or kelp or women’s bodies or random debris, I understand him at the most basic level as a still-life photographer. His sensitivity to form and arrangement was supreme, and it resonates for us in a great many of his pictures—even when we’re not so aware of it as we are with this one.

In that sense it’s really not so much of a surprise after all that we so plainly see writhing motion in his quiet, still pepper, whether it evokes for us a struggle (cf. the Laocoön, right) or the grapple of lovers (cf. Monika Vasquez, The Embrace, bronze, above left). It is form that the still-life photographer brought to life, and that we respond to. It might even evoke things further into the reaches of the unconscious that are just as powerful…and just as far removed from a lone, somewhat deformed vegetable.

...Because that’s one thing, at least, that this picture has never been about. Legend has it that after photographing it, Edward and his sons unceremoniously ate this most famous of all peppers, in a salad.

—Originally published in 2006

Could you please help TOP while Mike's recuperating? Spread the word about our "Iconic Photographs" countdown through social media and to other photo websites you frequent. Grateful thanks.

Original contents copyright 2006, 2019 by Michael C. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(Very sorry, but there are no comments this week—I’m not allowed to read or look at screen for more than a very short time.)

Bon Mots: Why We Forget the Books We Read

"Jared Horvath, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, says that the way people now consume information and entertainment has changed what type of memory we value—and it's not the kind that helps you hold onto the plot of a movie you saw six months ago.

"In the Internet age, recall memory—the ability to spontaneously call information up in your mind—has become less necessary. It’s still good for bar trivia, or remembering your to-do list, but largely, Horvath says, what’s called recognition memory is more important. 'So long as you know where that information is at and how to access it, then you don’t really need to recall it,' he says.

"Research has shown that the Internet functions as a sort of externalized memory. 'When people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself,' as one study puts it. But even before the Internet existed, entertainment products have served as externalized memories for themselves. You don’t need to remember a quote from a book if you can just look it up."

—From "Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read" by Julie Beck. Plato's opinion makes him seem like a bit of an old grump, doesn't it? Those kids with their new technology. Harrumph. And consider the words of the Egyptian king Thamus in light of the way photographs "preserve our memories."  :-)

How to Read a Photographic Book

[Note: Mike J. recently had his eye operated on and is recuperating. Big rule during recovery: no screens, no reading, lie flat and stare at the ceiling. He got an Echo and is listening to Audible books! Meanwhile, for your amusement and reflection, a few blasts from the past. One will be published every day while Mike's away.]

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I fell into a habit many years ago that I think has served me especially well. Like the importance of a print-viewing area where you can comfortably display workprints to look at in a leisurely fashion, it's one of those major secrets that hides in plain sight—something many people might do as a matter of course but very few actually do.

What is it? Simply a method of paying attention to books of photographs. A quality and a level of attention similar to what you might devote to reading a printed book of text.

What problem does it solve? A big one, actually. It's called "closure." Closure is what happens when you're having a conversation with another person and you decide you understand what they're saying, so you stop listening and start thinking about what you're going to say. More generally, closure is what happens when you think you understand something well enough, and don't think you need to understand it any better—so you stop trying. You close down.

Unfortunately, photographs are among the things we reach closure on the fastest of anything. We primates are visually-dominant in terms of the sense we favor, and these days we're utterly bombarded with images—on some television commercials (adverts, for your Brits), the bombardment can come at the rate of five per second. Advertising photographs, which are often designed to be slick but simplistic—the better to be immediately appealing—are designed to be "gotten" quickly and easily. And of course many images don't deserve extended attention. All of this conspires to encourage our habits of early, often instant, closure. Like it or not, we can hardly help approaching pictures that way: scanning, appraising, closing down, moving on. We spend all day dismissing things.

Here's how I reverse that. When you get a monograph (a book primarily of plates—i.e., of pictures) that you want to "read"—that you really want to digest—first, page through it as you normally might. On that run-through, note where the bits to read are located. Then read whatever those things are—the essay, a preface, an afterward, whatever.

Then wait.

Wait a few hours until that evening, or wait a day or two. Set aside some time. Make sure you're feeling relaxed, rested, and that you're in a comfortable chair, in a place with decent lighting. Try to see that you won't be disturbed. Put music on if you want to, or not if you don't. And get an egg timer.

Right, an egg timer. Something that counts off three minutes. (Preferably one that doesn't make any distracting noise, although a low reminder at the end of the three minutes might help.) Five minutes works too. What you do is to use the egg timer to help you spend time looking at each picture (or "spread" of two pages). During that time, let your eyes stay on the picture. Your mind can wander if you want, but keep looking at the picture. After the time is up, turn the page.

Keep at this just as you'd read a novel—for as long as you want to, or until you get tired of it. If you haven't "finished" the book, mark your place and come back to it later, and resume where you left off. After you've "read" a book like this, try coming back to it later, after a few days or a week or two, and either page through it again slowly or "read" it again.

While you're "reading" the book, don't think you need to be formulating language about it, or thinking large, "front-brain" thoughts. The eye and the brain are constantly working together to dismiss images—glancing, gathering in the gist, registering the information, appraising, moving on. Just keep your eyes on the pictures. Let your mind go wherever it wants to. Looking is enough.

And look at all the pictures. Don't be judgmental. Part of what the exercise does is to relieve you of your appraising, judgmental mode of approach—gets you over the idea of "I like this one, I'll linger here—nope, don't care for this, move on, move on!" If the photographer liked the picture well enough to put it in her book, maybe you should just take it in like all the rest of them.

If you'll just try this with one or two books, I think you'll be surprised how well it works. All it does it to enforce a different "pace" with images than the one you're used to all day every day. It just slows you down and lets you notice more. I find it helps me to "get" what photographers are up to in their work.

I'll bet it can open your eyes, too.

—Time-Traveling Mike, from 2007

Original contents copyright 2019 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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(Sorry! There are no comments this week—the moderator is also stuck supine staring at the ceiling.)