"Tony Vaccaro, 100, Dies; Photographed War From a Soldier’s Perspective," at the World's Best Photography magazine (the New York Times. You get ten free articles, but you should subscribe, because they publish a broad range of meaningful photographic content, from articles like this to original commissioned photojournalism and many other things besides). I had never heard of Tony Vaccaro before, but I like his work and I enjoyed this article. I especially liked reading the descriptions of his shooting technique. As an idle aside, if you had to choose between Karsh's photograph of Georgia O'Keefe and Vaccaro's picture of her looking through the piece of Swiss cheese, which would you choose? Those are two very different modes of what we call "photography."
# # #
An interesting picture of Dr. King from 1959. What's interesting about it is that it was taken by a Black photographer, Calvin Littlejohn, the chronicler of Fort Worth, Texas, who lived from 1909 t0 1993. A trope of modern criticism is the idea of the "gaze"—in other words, that the view cannot be separated from whomever is doing the viewing. To me it seems clear from the evidence that this was how Dr. King looked when he felt comfortable with the person who was taking his picture. Compare this with the more serious look we're used to seeing from Dr. King in his public role, when the ones doing the viewing were mostly representing the white-dominated media and, beyond them, the white world they worked for. For more about Calvin Littlejohn, see his bio at blackpast.org.
# # #
As long as I am on old pictures, readers of, er, a certain age will remember a famous picture from LIFE magazine of Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm returning from a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp and being greeted by his family on an airport runway. The picture is known by the title "Burst of Joy." A print, signed by the photographer, Slava "Sal" Veder, brought in by Stirm's daughter, known as "the leaping girl" or "the jumping girl," was appraised on the most recent episode of Antiques Roadshow. This link should take you to the segment, but, if it doesn't, the segment starts at 36:26. Sal Veder won the Pulitzer for his shot.
# # #
Mystery Man: Who is this? Hints: his arrest was for possession of more than 650 grams of cocaine, and he served two and a third years in prison following the bust. And the guy was really a Dick. (I'll post the answer tomorrow.)
UPDATE Thursday afternoon: A lot of you guessed this. It's "Tim 'The Tool Man' Taylor," a.k.a. actor/comedian Tim Allen, who was born Timothy Allen Dick. He was also the voice of Buzz Lightyear in the Toy Story movies, and now has a net worth that Fox Business reports to be $100 million. Allen was the only comedian I ever saw in concert, and his language was so blue and his subject matter so filthy that I vowed to stick with clean comedians thenceforward. (Current favorite: Nate Bargatze.)
I guess this was an easier "Mystery Man" than I thought. I didn't recognize him from this picture and couldn't make it look like him even after knowing who it was!
# # #
"'Art is dead Dude'—the rise of the AI artists stirs debate," from the BBC. The quotation is from one Jason M. Allen, who went on to say, "It's over. A.I. won. Humans lost." Not sure if this really has anything to do with photography. But I'll just point out the famous quotation attributed to the French painter Paul Delaroche, who, upon first seeing a Daguerreotype in 1839, said, "From today, painting is dead." (Although one would suppose he said it in French, and I haven't been able to find that.) Curiously, Paul Delaroche's historical paintings looked a bit like A.I., don't you agree?
# # #
Photographers we lost in 2022: photojournalist Dirck Halstead, 85; fashion photographer Patrick Demarchelier, 87; art photographer Jerry Uelsmann, 87; war photographer Tim Page, 78; Letizia Battaglia, who bravely documented the Sicilian Mafia, 87; paparazzo Ron Galella, 91; editorial and advertising photographer Kurt Markus, 75; Fred Lyon, photographer of San Francisco, 97; advertising photographer Melvin Sokolsky, 88; art photographer and filmmaker William Klein, 96; celebrity photographer Douglas Kirkland, 88; and editorial portraitist Eamonn McCabe, 74—among many others. Consolations: everyone gets their favorite camera in heaven, the photo opportunities are limitless, and you never, ever miss a shot. R.I.P.
Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page
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Featured Comments from:
Gordon Lewis: "It might be that Dr. King was more relaxed around black photographers. It might also be that this image was taken in 1959, before all the major stressors in his life happened, such as the Freedom Rides, March on Washington, FBI harassment, violence in Selma, etc. To put it another way, as the years wore on he had a lot less to be relaxed about. He was assassinated nine years later, in 1968, at age 39."
Chris Kern: "Re 'As an idle aside, if you had to choose between Karsh's photograph of Georgia O'Keefe and Vaccaro's picture of her looking through the piece of Swiss cheese, which would you choose? Those are two very different modes of what we call "photography."'
"A better comparison, it seems to me, would be with Vaccaro’s 1960 photograph [here's a link —Ed.] of O’Keefe holding one of her paintings in a field in New Mexico, with its unorthodox, arresting composition: the subject in perfect profile, revealing the characteristic contours of her face; her hands cradling the painting to signify that she is its creator; the painted canvas bleeding into the left side of the frame; and the mountain in the background conveying a distinct sense of place. The image is also technically outstanding—well-illuminated, with wide tonality and excellent color, and with the figure and canvas in sharp focus and just enough bokeh in the background to keep the viewer’s attention on the subject. Offhand, I can’t recall seeing a superior posed photographic portrait."
ASW: "I'm sure others have already answered, but that's Tim 'The Tool Man' Taylor (aka the actor/comedian Tim Allen) in the mugshot. I hope he didn't drag his friendly neighbor Wilson into the drug world with him."
Winfried Heyland: "I can only recommend Tony Vaccaro's work. i.e. Entering Germany."
hugh crawford: "Re: Leap of joy There’s a whole lot of misery in that photo. [That's worth reading. Thanks. —Mike]
"Dick? I thought the guy was a tool.
"I’ve been playing around with AI art and I find it sort of like street photography crossed with surrealist art practices. You have a vague expectation of what you might get, but no control, and the outcome is something of a surprise. I don’t think that AI software like Stable Diffusion, which I am working with, is as much a threat to photography as Photoshop and the current generation of photo editing software."
Ed Hawco: "No shade on Karsh, but I’ll take the Swiss cheese shot any day of the week."
Steve Jackson: "Mike, I was kind of stunned that you didn't know about Tony Vaccaro. Although his B&W photos are better known, some of his color portraits are amazing. This is a link to one that I think really shows how to use environment and depth of field in a way that rivets you to the subject: Picasso. Compositionally and technically it is a lesson for all of us. Here is a link to that image (but I would suggest you look at all of them at Monroe Gallery)."
Mike replies: I did look at all of them, and I'm pretty convinced I've never seen any of them before. (I no longer think I can remember every photograph I've ever seen—I used to think so—but I usually get a sort of spidey-sense if I've seen a picture before.) I'm glad to find out about Tony.
Bruno Gonzalez: "Hello Mike, 'À partir d'aujourd'hui la peinture est morte.' The following is an extract copied from the French Wikipedia page about Paul Delaroche; the text says the quotation is probably apocryphal. 'Après avoir vu pour la première fois un daguerréotype il aurait prophétisé, selon Gaston Tissandier: «À partir d'aujourd'hui la peinture est morte.» Cependant, cette citation, sans doute apocryphe, est contestée par Stephen Bann, pour qui il n'existe pas de phrase plus ressassée et plus fallacieuse.'"
Mike replies: Thanks! For others, the French means, "However, this arguably apocryphal quote is disputed by Stephen Bann, for whom there is no more rehashed and fallacious phrase." (Google Translate.)
It's odd, but at some point, does it actually matter if someone said certain things or not? The quotation is so widespread, and so consistently attributed to Delaroche, that I'm not sure it matters if anyone can prove he said it. Also, I've noticed that quotes (and facts) that have a literary rather that oral origin tend to be much more readily accepted. For an example of oral transmission, take the famous "Serenity Prayer." The earliest recorded version is from 1933, by a student of Reinhold Niebuhr, quoting Niebuhr. Niebuhr himself might well have used it before 1933. He didn't publish a version himself until 1951, but he was known to have used it in many sermons and was quoted many times between '33 and '51. For this reason, many different wordings and forms came to be accepted as the "real" Serenity Prayer, and various sources are still modifying its wording. My thought would be, how do we know that Paul Delaroche didn't speak his famous quotation orally and that it spread the same way?
In any event, if he didn't say it, he might as well have.
Rod S.: "I'd already taken your advice to subscribe to the New York Times and had already read that obituary on Tony Vaccaro. Imagine one morning finding and photographing a fallen soldier's body mostly covered by fresh overnight snow, and then realising that it was your friend. Imagine being in a French town so delighted in being liberated from war that its women linked arms and danced in a circle around a little ceremony in which a small girl and a foreign soldier kneel on the ground and kiss. Hard to imagine? Tony Vaccaro photographed it."
darlene (partial comment): " I was once an New York Times subscriber but grew tired of their political undertones. It may go unnoticed if you like their politics, but it isn't very pleasant if you are an independent thinker."
John Camp: "Timothy Dick. Another photographer took a photo that is virtually identical to Sal Veder's. Veder won the Pulitzer for it, the other guy didn't. I think it had to do with which one went out on the AP wire first."
Mike replies: The Turnley twins have a version of that story. They both took the same picture, more or less, and one of them won a prize for it, the other one didn't. I'd have to look up the details. And according to one of my favorite books on photography, there were about 15 photographers present for the crash of the Hindenburg. The famous picture is the one that hit the wire services first; the rest are virtually unknown.
James Kirkpatrick: "The mystery man and I attended Seaholm High School in Birmingham, Michigan. He was year behind me so would have graduated in 1970. I only found this out years later looking in my yearbook. A very funny and talented man in later years."
Franz Amador: "From the article on Tony Vaccaro: 'Private Vaccaro improvised as he moved through Europe, finding his film and his processing chemicals among the ruins of camera shops in towns his unit passed through. He developed the film in Army helmets and hung the negatives on trees to dry when he wasn’t on night duty. He carried them in his backpack.' Dang!"
Mike replies: I was struck by that too. And have you ever photographed with an Argus? Very awkward camera, but Georgia O'Keeffe was impressed with the speed with which Tony Vaccaro used it.
Keith B: "Can I choose the portrait of Georgia Ansel Adams took with her and Orville Cox at Canyon de Chelly?" [Sure. Here's that one. —Ed.]
Dan Gorman: "The 'mystery' man is Tim Dick, otherwise known as Tim Allen. My in-laws knew his family—he grew up in suburban Detroit."
Jerome: "AI can't create art, because AI has nothing to say about anything. It can imitate what humans have said about something, but that's like repeating a poem in a language you don't understand. AI is a pattern-matching machine. It will recognise patterns and re-arrange them, but has no idea what it's doing."
I look forward to an AI that can discern whether or not we're interacting with another AI!
Posted by: PaulW | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 01:43 PM
Got to be Tim Allen.
Posted by: Joe Sankey | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 02:21 PM
Tim Allen Dick
Posted by: Sherwood McLernon | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 02:26 PM
One definition of art. “The conscious use of the imagination in the production of objects intended to be contemplated or appreciated as beautiful, as in the arrangement of forms, sounds, or words.”
AI is not artificial to my thinking. I see it as human intelligence installed onto a chip. AI did not invent itself and at this point conscious imagination would disqualify AI from qualifying as an artist.
Oh! Does it make mistakes and create lemons as do we humans? If not yet another disqualification.
Posted by: Mike Ferron | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 02:33 PM
Tim Allen... I remember when he caught on in the Comedy world doing the "uug, uug..." grunt about "man stuff", which led to his sitcom where he basically personified that on stage machismo into a family guy. After he hit, then the pre-internet detectives found out about his record and put it out in the media. Saw this photo then. It didn't seem to hurt his career as much as his political bend which he says costs him work.
Posted by: Albert Smith | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 03:09 PM
Posted by: Daniel Sheehan | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 03:11 PM
That’s Timothy Dick. Alias Tim Allen.
Posted by: Roger | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 03:20 PM
J’ai trouvé ça : ‘À partir d’aujourd’hui, la peinture est morte !’ (Paul Delaroche, 1839). I saw it quoted in the French digital photographic journal ‘l’Oeil de la photographie’.
Posted by: Hans Muus | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 03:47 PM
Is that Tim Allen?
Posted by: Rob Griffin | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 04:03 PM
About the 'painting is dead' quote, read https://journals.openedition.org/etudesphotographiques/241 §14 (sorry, in french) : let's say that it is debated.
Posted by: Nikojorj | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 04:34 PM
Tim Allen.
Posted by: Gunny | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 04:45 PM
Comedian Tim Allen, born Tim Allen Dick. He doesn’t look too amused (or amusing) in that photo.
Posted by: Ernest Zarate | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 05:13 PM
The "Mystery Man" was/is Tim Allen
Posted by: John Abee | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 05:17 PM
That's too easy. Tim Allen. Only one of many reasons I hold him in disdain.
Posted by: Sal Santamaura | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 05:25 PM
The mystery man is Tim Allen. Years ago, I worked a lot of Kalamazoo flights. I thought it'd be a great joke if there was a life-size cardboard cutout of Tim Allen in the Kalamazoo Airport Terminal, maybe Tim Allen holding a briefcase?
Posted by: David Raboin | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 05:49 PM
Looks like Tim Allen.
Posted by: Steven Willard | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 06:41 PM
Tim Allen (Dick), of course.
Posted by: Jeff | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 06:49 PM
Tim Allen
Posted by: Jeff Kott | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 06:54 PM
Mssr. Tim Allen.
Posted by: Benjamin Marks | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 07:00 PM
Mystery Man IDed, but no spoiler.
Some things now clearer.
Posted by: Moose | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 07:06 PM
Tim Allen
Posted by: Jnny | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 07:26 PM
"You’ve reached your limit of free articles. Already a subscriber? Log in."
Ten free articles total, not ten a month. I was once an N.Y. Times subscriber but grew tired of their political undertones. It may go unnoticed if you like their politics, but it isn't very pleasant if you are an independent thinker. I used to run advertisement copy to them when I worked in N.Y.C., but I no longer have any affiliation with them. They do/did have some nice photography offerings, but I will not financially support them, and my ten free articles blew by years ago. Too bad the New Yorker does not do more photography articles, as I am a subscriber.
The actor is Tim Allen, born Timothy Allen Dick. I knew the face but had to google the rest. It's funny how Allen's face is recognizable (to me), as I have never watched a T.V. show or movie with him in it. Oh, the power of marketing!
Thanks for the news. May all those that have passed, R.I.P.
Posted by: darlene | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 07:41 PM
Tim Allen,of course. I shot unit stills on the 2010 film he directed titled, “Crazy On The Outside”, a comedy about the struggles of a man just out of prison.
Posted by: K4kafka | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 08:21 PM
The Mystery Man looks like Geraldo Rivera. Started on NYC TV when I first saw him in "the way back."
Posted by: Harry B Houchins | Wednesday, 04 January 2023 at 10:46 PM
Tim Allen
Posted by: David Robinson | Thursday, 05 January 2023 at 12:38 AM
Re: photographers we lost in 2022. I guess I'm old and biased, but I think we shall never see the like of their work again. The photography world today is awash in "conceptual," art-school B.S. There are exceptions, of course; I'm thinking of Lynsey Addario among others.
Posted by: Gary | Thursday, 05 January 2023 at 02:56 AM
Kirkland, Galella, Demarchelier, among the greats.
Uelsmann, I dislike his work.
The others I do not really know.
Posted by: Anton Wilhelm Stolzing | Thursday, 05 January 2023 at 07:07 AM
The mystery man is easily identified by Googling the details on the card but I’m none the wiser for having found his Wikipedia page :(
Posted by: Richard Parkin | Thursday, 05 January 2023 at 07:13 AM
The mystery man is Tim Allen.
Posted by: Dan Meyers | Thursday, 05 January 2023 at 08:12 AM
The coke runner is Tim Allen.
Posted by: Dan | Thursday, 05 January 2023 at 09:17 AM
Tim Allen. Not really that funny as they go, at least IHO.
Posted by: J. Lauretig | Thursday, 05 January 2023 at 11:31 AM
For those who might be interested, a documentary called Underfire: The Untold Story of Pfc. Tony Vaccaro is streaming for free (with some commercials) at https://tubitv.com. I found it to be a well made and engaging portrait of the man and his work.
Posted by: Phil S. | Thursday, 05 January 2023 at 12:04 PM
I would prefer Karsh's photograph of O'Keefe, simply because she's instantly recognizable in the photo. Funny how she just looks like any older woman in the photo of her and the slice of cheese. (Well, part of her "appearance" was her usual garb.)
Mr. Littlejohn was certainly successful and an important photographer in his time. According to the website briscoecenter.org, "the Littlejohn collection includes approximately 70,000 film negatives and 55,000 prints." I wasn't able to quickly find any information about the Plantation Printer that he invented. Maybe someone else had better luck. He also was instrumental in starting a black community newspaper in Fort Worth, Texas.
I think the photo and memorabilia for Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm should have been appraised higher than it was, especially with a signed print of a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph.
Rise of AI "art" - As long as money can be made, AI art is ripe for abuse. ("But policy makers, he says, need to get the rules right, "so nobody feels ripped off", and money isn't just siphoned off from artists and into the pockets of big corporations.") Oh, boy. Artists are in trouble!
"Mr Mostaque says that kind of unethical use "breaks the license terms"." And I'm sure he will hire a bunch of people to make sure such license-breaking will be prosecuted. (BTW, I've got a famous bridge for sale.)
". . . and other existing tools can also be abused, for example someone could use "Photoshop's merge tool to stick someone's head on a nude"." That is true. I don't recall many people being sued for making fake "not safe for work" photos though.
Man, I wouldn't have guessed that so many known photographers had passed away in 2022. I like your list of consolations at the end!
Thanks for that jam-packed post! Lots of interesting things to investigate.
Posted by: Dave | Thursday, 05 January 2023 at 02:25 PM
Looks like Tim Allen aka Tim "The Toolman" Taylor.
Posted by: JB | Thursday, 05 January 2023 at 02:45 PM
That's Tim Allen.
Posted by: James Pilcher | Thursday, 05 January 2023 at 04:10 PM
Tim Allen?
Posted by: James Weekes | Thursday, 05 January 2023 at 05:02 PM
Personally, don't care how "blue" or "filthy" a comedian is- just how funny, and insightful they are. Good comedians are incredible observers of human nature, and the best readily admit they are every bit as flawed as those they observe- it's what makes Pryor, Rock and Burr the geniuses they are! They're all too familiar with the human foibles they expose and ridicule. Could never stomach Howard Stern who always played to the lowest common denominator, in comedy and humanity.
Posted by: Stan B. | Thursday, 05 January 2023 at 10:33 PM
I’m surprised to hear you found the Deco setup difficult. I have the much cheaper 3-unit Deco E4 which is limited to 100 Mbps and I just plugged them in following the instructions and it all worked.
You do seem to have a very low upload speed but maybe that’s normal in US.
Posted by: Richard Parkin | Friday, 06 January 2023 at 12:07 PM
I first heard about Tony Vaccaro in the excellent six-part series “Genius of Photography”. Vaccaro is in episode 3. Highly recommended, every single episode. The accompanying book is just as good.
Posted by: Paul | Saturday, 07 January 2023 at 03:19 PM