Leicas Are Forever? (The Bohemians)

Followup from Scott Kirkpatrick: "I had some spare time yesterday and downloaded the Kindle edition of The Bohemians [the book I mentioned on Saturday —Ed.]

"Imogen and Ansel put in much more than cameo appearances. And I learned more backstory about Consuelo Kanaga than I had seen before. The story-telling is engaging and straightforward. It might be hard to disentangle actual history from plausible filling-in of the gaps.

"Of course, one technical failing helps to keep me from believing it all—'Dorrie' has put her Graflex in hock to survive, but is able to produce some portraits for the Camera Club, where she meets Imogen, Ansel, some wealthy future clients, and a business partner, by taking pictures with 'an old Leica,' in what seems to be about 1918. (The Leica I hit the market in 1925, but I guess Leicas are forever.)

"The book seems to be stimulated by the incongruous vision of the Transamerica Pyramid sitting on the site of the old Monkey Block, where numerous SF literary and arts figures once figured (e.g. Kenneth Rexroth, whose stuff I used to read in the '60s). And recent anti-immigrant incitement rooted back into the West Coast anti-Chinese hostility which became law in the 1920s. Senator Pharrel and his son, with a slight name change to satisfy the lawyers, are probably where the plot construction started. Finally, the mysterious Ah Yi, Lange's Chinese assistant, about whom almost nothing seems to be known, provides the link to what I agree are pretty much 'cameo' appearances. Kanaga provides a stock tough activist PJ character; Imogen Cunningham and Ansel Adams don't do much, although I'm surprised that the affinities that eventually led to Lange and Cunningham having an essentially merged family didn't show up during the time of this story. And I hadn't known how badly Adams suffered during the Spanish Flu pandemic. The book works hard to set up and tie up all of its plot wrinkles, but I found it affecting, except for the coda in Paris.

"If you care about Group f/64 and all that, and if you are as disgusted by current political themes as I am, it is worth reading. But not to learn about photography—more to imagine that these known photographers absorbed and lived through all that. It formed them. What are today's equivalents doing to us?"

Scott

Product of Interest this week:

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

Joel F Bartlett: "I was not impressed by The Bohemians. Its description of her on her arrival to San Francisco, I would describe as 'ditzy.' She was not. She did not arrive in San Francisco by herself, nor was she robbed on the Ferry and saved by society ladies. She arrived with her friend Fronsie, they were robbed, but they quickly got back on their feet by their own wits. If you want a novel that is much truer to the historical record, may I suggest Learning to See by Elise Hooper. And even better, the biography Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, by Linda Gordon. She was a fascinating woman and I hope your introduction to her is not The Bohemians."

Mark Sampson: "I'm currently reading Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, written by Linda Gordon...a highly-praised biography published in 2009. It's well-researched, thorough, and quite readable. So I can't imagine being interested in any author's fantasia about what it was like back then...sorry. Lange, Adams, Cunningham, et al. were clear-eyed realists, dealing directly with the subjects in front of their lenses, and they (and their contributions) deserve the same respect that they showed their subjects. There's a quote from someone to the effect of 'The contemplation of things as they are is a far nobler pursuit than a whole harvest of invention.' I've butchered that quote but I think the meaning comes through...."

[Ed. note: The quote appears to be from the English philosopher Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, 1561–1626, a leading figure in early scientific methodology: "The contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention." (Source: NYT)

Links to books mentioned in the above comments: Learning to See by Elise Hooper (fiction); Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits by Linda Gordon (biography).

A weakness of the web is that there isn't an authoritative database of quotations that have been sourced and fact-checked. We are at the mercy of what amounts to casual hearsay, wherein a quotation and its source might be repeated uncritically until it's difficult to untangle good sources from bad. Snopes does verify some common quotation memes, such as this one, but only in their course of its regular work, which is fact-checking rumors and widespread claims.] [UPDATE: Quote Investigator is a good  and useful site as well. Thanks to Mike S. for the reminder.]

Comments

[Crabby Umbo]

Love the Leica "catch"...I actually see this all the time in TV shows! The recent PBS show "Atlantic Crossing", about Norway in the run-up and era of WWII, kept having a news guy showing up in a group photographing with a Super Graphic (1958)! Caught it right away, might as well have been digital!

[That happens a lot on TV and in movies, doesn't it? It's almost as if the camera props are only symbols, and just need to telegraph "here we have a photographer taking pictures" to the audience. It's a convention, like bloodless bullet wounds in the 1950s. The affected character just clutched his body in the location of the wound, froze as if stricken, then slowly sank to the ground. Looks odd today. Of course they go to the opposite extreme now!

One example I remember was a digital point-and-shoot that had the sound of a mechanical film SLR and a motor drive grafted on to it. The motor drive sound after the shutter sound made me laugh. One of the crime-investigation shows used to constantly change the make and model of the cameras the technician characters used to document evidence; my guess was that the producers didn't want to inadvertently create a de facto "product placement" for a single brand of camera, although that's just a guess. Even within single episodes the same technician might use different cameras from scene to scene. Maybe the technicians were all camera collectors. --Mike]

[Mike Ferron]

Disgusted by political themes? Damn aren’t we all?

[Mike S]

On the secondary topic of quotes and the lack of an authoritative database, have you ever tried QuoteInvestigator.com? Or you have and found it lacking in scholarship?

[Sean]

This is one of my favourite Bacon quotes: “If a man look sharp and attentively, he shall see fortune; for though she be blind, she is not invisible”

I’ve walked so many streets looking for her, without success, that I’m starting to suspect that I’m the one who’s blind

[Sharon]

The biography of Lange is great as is the documentary of her - Grab a Hunk of Lightening where she actually talks about her life and work. I recommend those.

[Lee Rust]

It seems to me that the era of the 'famous photographer' has passed. Everyone's a photographer now and so many pictures are circulated every day that most contemporary images are quickly forgotten and nobody cares who took them in the first place.

If Ansel, Dorothea and Imogen had emerged in the early decades of the 21st century rather than the 20th, how would they be remembered in the early 22nd century? Blogger, Twitterer, internet influencer, YouTuber, radical activist, talk show host?

[Mike Chisholm]

On the subject of sourcing quotations, in one of my earliest attempts at a book-length sequence of photographs, I made extensive use of what seemed like suitable quotations to break it up a bit. I liked the idea of texts being used in a visual book in the way illustrations are used in regular, text-heavy books. One of these was a quotation from Goethe I had come across in John Berger's essay on the photographer August Sander: "There is a tender empiricism that makes itself so inwardly identical with the object that it thereby becomes true theory".

In fact, Berger is actually citing the Frankfurt School writer and critic Walter Benjamin who is also writing about Sander, and only incidentally quoting Goethe. But Berger doesn't identify his source, so I first had to identify the Benjamin essay: after a bit of hunting, it turned out to be his "Kleine Geschichte der Photographie". OK! But Benjamin in turn fails to identify the source of his Goethe quotation. Doh!

After much burrowing around in Goethe's work, it eventually turned out to be one of his collected "Maximen und Reflexionen", which itself had apparently been extracted from his own novel "Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre":

Es gibt eine zarte Empirie, die sich mit dem Gegenstand innigst identisch macht, und dadurch zur eigentlichen Theorie wird.(Maximen und Reflexionen 509)

Phew. I suppose a more thorough scholar might have (may already have) gone on to trace Goethe's source, and so on, receding into classical antiquity, but that was good enough for me; at least I knew who and what I was really quoting, where it came from, and what its context was.

Mike

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Well, for old quotations Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is still out there. In fact, they've just released an updated 18th edition, so some of the new quotes will be there as well.

Of course, with vastly more people having access to the old texts than used to, a lot of gems are being ferreted out that weren't previously "familiar"; not finding a quote in Bartlett's doesn't make it false, but finding it there does strongly suggest it's right.

[HaJe]

Does Wikiquote qualify?

HaJe

[Carson Harding]

Re Mark Sampson's quote: it's from Bacon's Novum Organum, section CXXIX, second from last paragraph.