The Online Photographer

The Girl in the Kent State Photo

"Last May, when Mary Ann Vecchio watched the video of George Floyd’s dying moments, she felt herself plummet through time and space—to a day almost exactly 50 years earlier. On that afternoon in 1970, the world was just as riveted by an image that showed the life draining out of a young man on the ground, this one a black-and-white still photo. Mary Ann was at the center of that photo, her arms raised in anguish, begging for help.

"That photo, of her kneeling over the body of Kent State University student Jeffrey Miller, is one of the most important images of the 20th century. Taken by student photographer John Filo, it captures Mary Ann’s raw grief and disbelief at the realization that the nation’s soldiers had just fired at its own children. The Kent State Pietà, as it’s sometimes called, is one of those rare photos that fundamentally changed the way we see ourselves and the world around us...."

Keep reading at WashingtonPost.com

I don't know if you'll be able to see this or if it will be behind a paywall for you. I hope the former. It's a fascinating article. By Patricia McCormick in the Washington Post Magazine, April 19th, 2021.

Articles like this take us back to first principles, by reminding us of the power and depth single images can have in the culture—and, in this case, of the sometimes sinister influence they might have in the lives of those photographed. "That picture hijacked my life," Mary Ann Vecchio said. She blames an Indianapolis Star reporter who turned her in to authorities.

A telling comment: "I'm a living person, and I'm in a history book!" Mary Ann says at one point. And, but for that picture, "I might have stayed anonymous forever."

If you can't see the article, you can see the picture here. (Again, I hope you can. I don't have a subscription to TIME.com and I can see it.)

The student photographer who took the picture, John Filo, is now head of photography for CBS. The article also describes the effect the photo had on him and his life. For example, he felt very guilty when he realized Mary Ann was not a student protester at all but merely a 14-year-old runaway who happened to be passing through the area. She had met the dead boy, Jeffrey Miller, only 25 minutes earlier. The article recounts John and Mary Ann's emotional eventual meeting.

Thanks to Scott Kirkpatrick for alerting me to this. You might remember Scott from this post.

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

Rene: "This murder and those of the other victims at Kent State and Jackson State in Mississippi on May 15th had a profound effect on my life. I was a 25-year-old graduate student at a state university in a conservative state. As the only graduate who went out on strike at my university as part of the national student strike, I tended to stand out. Within days I was purged from the university and 'strongly advised' by the State Police who came to my home to leave the state. Discretion being the better part of valor as they say, I left within a day or two; my decrepit old Volkswagen bug just making it out to a more liberal city in another state before collapsing.

"It all turned out well in the long run (I'm now 75) but it changed the course of my life and took it in directions and to places I never would have imagined. It's part of the journey that led me to photography."

Douglas Howk: "Being a Kent State alumni (class of '68), I was invited to a fundraiser at Ted Kennedy's home in McLean, VA. Most of us were still in shock at what happened, but we remembered the animosity of the Kent townsfolk toward us students. Being both anti-war and a veteran (Army, '65), I could sense the hatred of a polarized nation. Sounds familiar."

Phil: "Thanks Mike. That's an incisive lesson: to contemplate the effects of a photo on both the person who took it and especially the people in the photo. It's something that all us street photographers should stop and think about, once in a while since, by definition, we're snapping pictures of people who didn't choose to be in our photos.

"I was 10 years old when the Kent State massacre took place. I don't really remember it at the time. But I do remember that summer, during our family trailer trip across Canada, somewhere in the prairies the CSN&Y song 'Ohio' came on the radio from some local radio station and my older brother and I stopped and listened raptly. I've always remembered that moment. My parents weren't keen on that 'hippy music' but my brother pointed out that this was protesting when the students were shot and my parents both stopped and listened with somber attention. That moment certainly was one of those inflection-points one has as a kid."

albert erickson: "I am a Kent graduate class of 1970. Yes I was on campus that day. It was my last day of undergraduate school. I was not directly apart of the demonstrations but nonetheless it affected my life more than I would ever realize at the time. I was commissioned a second lieutenant a month later as a result of completion of Army ROTC and faced with a decision about Viet Nam. Fortunately I never had to make that choice but was assigned stateside. I hold a place in my heart for Kent and those who were a part of that demonstration and following events. To this day I sit on a board at the University and make several trips a year back to the school. That day and those events were a large part of who I am today. Thanks for mentioning this today."

What Does Cindy Sherman Look Like?

Cindy Sherman as Cindy Sherman

When a reader left a tip asking the question in the headline, I laughed. The very question seems preposterous. Cindy Sherman, look like someone? Cindy Sherman can't look like anyone. Or rather, she looks like everyone.

Cindy has been around for most of my whole life in photography. I never quite "got" her work—even when I have it explained it to me in a way I grasp intellectually, I still don't quite get it. If I'm honest.

One thing that taught me, though, is that maybe it's not for me. It's a peculiar kind of egocentrism to think all art should be for us. Of course it isn't. Maybe Cindy reaches just the audience she ought to and that she seeks to, and I'm just not in it. That's no crime on her part or mine. The older I get, the less egotistically demanding of others I get, and, also, the more I forgive myself for all the potentially interesting things I don't engage with.

So much art, so little time.

I'll tell you one thing, though, she's the real deal. When I first became aware of her, which must have been in art school—she's only a few years older than I am—my knee-jerk reaction was to suspect that her schtick of being just another attention-grabbing gimmick. Wrong-O, Dektol-breath. No one can sustain such a rich career, varied yet consistent—not to mention remarkably unique—without being sincere and authentically motivated. My initial bratty wet-behind-the-ears insolence was gradually displaced by admiration and respect.

But one question for sure never occurred to me to ask...what does Cindy look like? The question itself must be existential art-world doublespeak! Heh.

Anyway, as you know I take Saturdays off, so on Fridays I try to leave you with something good to occupy your Saturday, in case it might be, for you, a lazy day in which you have some free time. Today it's Art:21's "Cindy Sherman in 'Transformation,'" from Season 5 of that wonderful series.

I enjoyed it so much I watched it twice. Hope you enjoy it too.

Mike

Book o' this Week:
Black in White America 1963–1965 by Leonard Freed, a new reprint of this classic from the Civil Rights era. I got to meet Leonard Freed once. <—This is a portal to Amazon; also available at the Book Depository for global delivery with free shipping.

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
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James Bullard (partial comment): "I don't 'get' her either but then I belong to the 'witness' tradition of photography and she's a conceptual artist. Her photographs are not about the subjects in the photographs. Her subjects are just a medium, a proprietary visual vocabulary to express her ideas. I don't get her work because I don't share or understand that visual vocabulary."

Rickard Grangården: "Surely that question has been answered ages ago.... :-) "

Mike replies: Great find, thank you! I love it. Never saw that before.

Daniel Speyer: "I don’t look for artist’s interviews or reading usually what they say about their art, but having said this it was interesting to see what my three favorites had to say—they being Hockney, Arbus, and Sherman.

—Sherman is talking about the mechanics (your link was the first time I heard/saw the [real?] Sherman).
—Hockney being interviewed in a (what do they call it: a coffee table book?) book is very intellectual.
—Arbus—well she committed suicide.

"I guess those are three extremes for talking about one's art. In no case, at the level of viewer, do they tell you about their art."

Kenneth Tanaka replies to Daniel: " Right on, Dan! Whenever you have a chance to hear an artist, or photographer, speak directly about their own work, grab it! Even if you don't like the work. Actually, especially when you don't like their work [I second that —MJ]. I have been very fortunate to have had such opportunities many times and it always enriches my understanding of the work. I may still not engage with their stuff but I feel I have a better understanding of why. The case of this Art:21 doc of Cindy Sherman is a good example. This was my first time hearing directly from her about her work. (My earlier encounter with her was largely social.) I still feel the work it kitschy but I understand its genesis much better.

"There are so few artists and photographers still living who affect our aesthetic trajectories or sensibilities. Even fewer can coherently discuss their work. Make time to see or meet with them if possible. If the Internet is the only way to do so, fine! But do it if you have any interest in maturing your appreciation and sensibilities."

Angela Weil: "How Cindy Sherman looks like? I always enjoyed her work as she presented quite a spectrum of the female experience. Now, a few years ago, a person very dear to me did a project as homage to Cindy Sherman—in B&W. I had the pleasure to assist in some of the setups and the costumes."

Mike replies: She did a great job. I really like that.

David Brown: "I only wish I could do something at the level of her work! Not 'her' work, mine, but at that level. Genius."

Stephen Cowdery: "I saw her 2012 retrospective (MoMA, Walker Art Center) and I wasn't expecting much but I was stunned and I am not usually impressed by staged photography. Nearly every image spoke to me, sometimes apparently in a foreign language, but I felt challenged. As David P. Goldman said: 'We may judge what is merely beautiful, but sublime art judges us, or better said, it challenges us to judge ourselves.'"

Dogman: "I've liked her work since 'Untitled Film Stills.' It's not the kind of photography I do but it's engaging and well done. I also like Crewdson's vignettes. Both make little mysteries without resolution."

hugh crawford: "When my friend Jamie Livingston lived in a loft on Fulton street in the early '80s I kept seeing this woman in the elevator who seemed really familiar but I couldn’t quit remember her from anywhere. Turned out that Cindy Sherman was the upstairs neighbor. I thought she sort of looked like Shirley MacLaine."

Ernest Zarate: "For me, what you describe is what I call letting go of expectations. As humans, we seem particularly determined to lay our expectations at the feet of others, and then get mightily offended when they fail to live up to those expectations. Expectations cover so many aspects of life: what we do, what we wear, what we eat, what we drive, religion, politics, sex... and so on. And those expectations, in my book, pave the long, torturous, and soul-sucking road to disappointment.

"A few decades ago, I realized that no one was put on Earth to live up to my expectations. Every person is free to make up their own life, without having to consult me first. I found this revelation to be quite liberating. For me, life is like going to a restaurant with your friends: each person orders what they like from the menu, without regard to what anyone else is ordering. If I order the salmon, and someone else orders a salad, and someone else wants to dive into a bowl of fresh strawberries, it matters not one whit—except to the person ordering it. We all sit down at the table, enjoy our unique meals, and the company we each bring. In truth, the only person Cindy Sherman’s work needs to satisfy is herself. That others (though not everyone) find value in her work is no doubt icing on her cake."

Zyni Moë: "Pretty sure people who do not ever have to obfuscate or hide their identity would find it hard to understand what Cindy Sherman has done. If you are American man (especially white American man), well you never really have to conceal who you are unless you are a criminal or something. We all sneer at you (not you specifically, at all Americans), but you come to us bearing money, nuclear weapons and sometimes even you pretend to high principles, so we accept you as you are. Unless you enjoy playing identity games, you do not need to play them.

"If you are, perhaps, female of Roma (Gipsy) background from Eastern Europe then things are very different. If you say you are romani, people will think you live in a vardo and ride coloured horses and that you are dirty and stupid. Perhaps they will try to help you escape from this imagined squalor, perhaps they will spit on you: certainly they will not accept that you just want to do maths which (despite being smelly and stupid) you are good at. If you tell people on the internet you are female and dare to be more clever than them you will get rape threats (yes, you will: I can show you them). And there is worse I will not say. So, if you will not give up, you hide. You wear masks, you invent characters and play at being them because being what you really are is somehow asking to be ignored or attacked. And that is how you make your way. And Cindy Sherman is interesting to people who must do these things, and what she does is a little more interesting than yet another macho photographer sticking his camera in people's faces."

Mike replies: Thank you for that. It really helps me see Cindy Sherman's work differently. (Your first paragraph reminded me of something my black freshman roommate told me in college: "the difference between you and me is that you think about race whenever you want to. I have to think about race all the time whether I want to or not." I've never forgotten that.)

Crabby Umbo: "I have to respond to Kenneth Tanaka and say I've made some of my biggest mistakes going to hear artists talk about work I admired, only to lose interest because the artist was less than expected. I now make it a policy to never go and listen to artists talk about their work, under that old art director's adage that '...if your work doesn't speak for itself, I don't need to hear you talk about it.' I remember going to a lecture by a photographer (who shall remain nameless), in the '90s, whose work was very out of the ordinary and dark, I thought one of the freshest things I'd seen in years! When I went to the lecture, I realized this person wasn't a weird troubled soul, but his work was all an MFA degree calculation; like he had a marketing crew planning the look to be 'different' (he didn't, but...). I came home and sold my books by him. I've never been to an artist lecture since then...."

Street Photography: Andrew Kochanowski and Don Hudson

Photo by Andrew Kochanowski

Andrew Kochanowski left a late comment to the "New Pentax" post yesterday, which reminded me that it had been a long time and I should catch up a little with his recent work. I turned to Burn My Eye, the collective of which he's a member. There, you can see his Featured Gallery. I particularly like the one with the gun. And that last one, very subtle.

A street photograph is easy to love, if you love it. If a particular example happens to work for your eye/mind and your taste, it can seem like it's somewhere on the spectrum between lucky and miraculous. On the other hand, if a particular street photo doesn't grab you, it can seem haphazard, lame, even puzzling—it can be difficult to see what the photographer saw in it. It would be my guess that most street photographers have to shoot an awful lot to unearth that occasional gem that works for them. And it can be the same way for viewers, too—you have to look through a lot of what seems to you to be dross to find the ones that (again, to you) are golden.

I spent some quality time at Burn My Eye and looked at a lot of the Featured Photos. Check out Don Hudson's picture of the fans all reaching for the fly ball, the Photo of the Month for last January. That's one, for my taste, that has got it all goin' on—love it love it love it. Truly deserves the overused compliment "nice capture" (or as he says, a nice catch). At Instagram he is @Don Hudson. Doesn't hurt (yet again, just for me—you're getting that, right?) that it's historical and also B&W....

Photo by Don Hudson

Andrew has photos in a lot of places around the web. Fortunately, he also has a pretty good "Internet name"—he's pretty searchable. Try "Andrew Kochanowski photographer" and it will lead you to a number of street sites. Here's his website.

Mike
(Thanks to Andy and Don for permission to use their photos)

Book o' this Week:
Accidentally Wes Anderson, the group-sourced book of the Instagram trend, endorsed by the director. <—This is a portal to Amazon; also available at the Book Depository for global delivery with free shipping.

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

Gordon Lewis: "Thank you for pointing me to Andrew Kochanowski's work. It was delightful. The number of people who call themselves 'street photographers' is countless these days. Andrew is one of the few who has a distinctive enough style and eye to reward those who take the time to explore his photographs, collectively as well as individually. Anyone who thinks what he has accomplished is trivial or easy has clearly never tried it themselves. It takes not just luck, but extraordinary vision, skill and timing."

[Ed. note: Gordon wrote the book on street photography.]

Kenneth Tanaka: "Bravo Andrew! I have admired his work, and that of the Burn My Eye group, for years. Skilled, patient, insightful, often ironic. Browsing their work induces more DIWITT spasms from me than nearly anything outside of a browse through a book of Haas, Leiter, Herzog, et al. A touchstone to remind us all that the pinnacle of photography is vision and capture reflex.

"DIWITT = Damn, I wish I took that."

Andrew Kochanowski: "Thank you Mike for a nice surprise! In case you want a brief note on my thinking about street photography, and even if you don't, let me add one: There is too much of it that doesn't grab my interest because in my view, the genre is too focused on the single, grabby shot. The easy, cheap snap, and the instant Instagram gratification, are addictive. If you make it dramatic, if you make it complicated, if you play with reality, yes, there are a lot of likes out there. Thousands of photographers (several Instagram street photo aggregators have followings of over 100,000 people) essentially copy each other over a few tropes to get that shot before a big aggregator and get 5,000 likes. It's a very different world from Joel and Gerry and Helen and, you know.

"I prefer the essay form to show street photography. I find that I unconsciously look for a few things and when I think I have enough, a photo essay springs to mind. I've put up a number on my site, www.akochanowski.net. While you're right, I can be found all over, I prefer that the viewer look at my work in the context that I present. Thanks again, and thanks for featuring Don Hudson as well. We're both Michiganders, disproportionately represented in our international group Burn My Eye. —Andy."

Blake: "Street photographers are a funny breed. A lot of chest-pumping and declarations, and arguing over what is or isn't street or which ones are good or bad or this or that.... Maybe this happens in other types of photography too, I'm not sure. But street photography seems especially prone.

"Anyway, for contemporary street most of the action is now on IG. I would recommend browsing there to get the lay of the land. Websites are OK too but more static and less relevant in my opinion. Wherever you browse, caveat emptor. It's a minefield of mixed quality, age, style, and promotion. But if one is patient there is much to see. Andy and Don's photos are among the best."

J.B. Forbes Has Retired

[Ed. Note: The primary purpose of this post is a link to a portfolio by an American newspaper photographer, and the link appears to be inaccessible from other areas of the world. The video however is available on Facebook at this link: https://www.facebook.com/STLPD/videos/234414541362864 (thanks to Dave_lumb and Sean for this). —Mike the Ed.]

-

Photojournalism isn't art. Or rather art photography. It doesn't have the unity of vision of art photography, the subtlety and individuality of purpose or consistency of style. As far as feeling-tone is concerned, sometimes photojournalism clubs you over the head with sentiment. But at its best, there's a vigor to photojournalism that's tough to beat—there's always meaning, and usually, significance. You come away from it with your feathers flustered, feeling like you've been jostled by human contact and touched by the energy of that. You've had an encounter with the world.

It's really nice to be writing this and linking to this when it isn't an obituary, by the way. Too often we only grant a flurry of notice and attentiveness to someone when they die. By which time they are, under most belief systems anyway, unable to appreciate it. Ever notice how death notices are sometimes the first you ever hear of a person? Sad when that happens.

But in this case it's only a retirement—Missouri Photojournalism Hall of Fame member J.B. Forbes has retired after 45 years as a photojournalist at four newspapers, most recently as Chief Photographer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Upside-down Ozzie
As you know, TOP takes (that is to say, I take) the day off on Saturday. It's the day of the week we get the least visits. So I sometimes make an effort to leave you with something to chew on that'll hold you for the weekend.

Perhaps never more so than this. Check out this portfolio and video of some of the highlights of J.B. Forbes' career:

"The stories behind the images: The photos of J.B. Forbes"

Although I never knew his name, I'm amazed by how many of these photographs I know. I have a good visual memory (not so good with names, numbers, or the exact wording of quotes—my editor friend Jim Schley has great retention for exact quotes). I do remember pictures, though. Often for a long time. I'm almost sure I haven't seen upside-down Ozzie Smith since around the time it was taken, but I've always remembered it. I know I've seen many of the photos in this portfolio before. The fireman and the little boy who wouldn't let go of him, with its particularly poignant caption; Spinks landing one on Ali; the prisoners playing dominoes; the girl with the tears in her eyes; that distinctive pose of an energetic candidate Barack Obama; the child holding the AK-47; the young boy watching the couple kiss on the statue; Harry Carey and Jack Buck. I'll bet I haven't seen a lot of these since they were taken, but they're still old friends.

And some new ones, too. I especially like the one of the deer in the graveyard. That scene has a graceful gentleness about it, doesn't it? And the one of the two soldiers on the snowy road with "Santa" in red beside them.

Anyway, this weekend, if you have a spare hour, take a leisurely look through this portfolio and watch the video (I watched in installments). I bet you'll find something to appreciate.

I'm sure we all wish J.B. Forbes a long and productive retirement! Maybe photojournalism isn't art—but hey, art isn't photojournalism, either.  :-)

Have a nice weekend! See you on Sunday.

Mike
(Thanks to Ray Hunter)

Product o' the Week:

A fantastically comfortable ergonomic mouse for PC users. Should be considered incompatible with Mac unless you want to use only default settings. Available in regular and small sizes, right and left hand, and wired and wireless. WARNING to Mac users: Do NOT download USBOverdrive! It broke my computer. But really, for you PC users, you won't believe how easy on your hand this mouse is.

The link above is a portal to Amazon, through which most anything you purchase will be credited to TOP. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

And here is a portal to...

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

John Robison: "What a treat. Thanks for that link. My favorite was the night shot of the St.Lewis arch with the snow falling. But really, what a great body of work."

Larry Wilkins: "I think the photo of the coffin of the Franciscan friar, Rev. Valerian Schott, in the grave is just about perfect. Thanks for the link."

DB: "A spectacular portfolio and career. Thanks for posting, Mike."

Hugh Lovell: "A stunning collection of images by J.B. Forbes, many overruning with emotion. Thank you for the link."

Quote o' the Day: Amy Frearson on Simone Bossi

"At a time when digital photography makes it easy to take hundreds of photos on each shoot and correct mistakes in the edit, he prefers to spend more time thinking than shooting, to ensure that every picture is carefully considered."

—Amy Frearson, writing about Simone Bossi in Dezeen

Italian photographer Simone Bossi has done something weird and different enough that it merits an article on Dezeen, an online architecture and design magazine: he shoots architecture with a large-format film camera.

Seems to me that's been done before...but okay. It's all good, as the kids say. I liked the article and what it tells us about his approach.

He believes the use of digital cameras leads architectural photography to become too contrived; he claims it's better to appreciate the beauty of imperfections than it is to make images feel too polished.

Digital 'was too much to digest and too many pictures to control,' he said.

I think you can follow his principles and aesthetics with either digital or film cameras, but you know what he means. And it makes sense.

Jane Bown, one of my heroes, said that when she took lots of pictures of her subjects she noticed that the first and last ones were usually the best, so she just cut out all the ones in the middle. (I always liked that. You can't quite tell how serious she is versus how much she's, well, winking.)

In the '80s, I learned the lesson with a roll and a half of film I shot of some mud-wrestlers on the Mall in D.C. The pictures were all broadly the same but subtly different, and I had the devil of a time editing them. I reached a point almost of paralysis. I resolved not to shoot so much, but to pay more attention to trying to anticipate the peak moment.

(I have to admit that when I was in art school I would sometimes find myself taking almost a whole roll of the exact same thing, only because it was such a pleasure to see it through the viewfinder and such a pleasure to photograph it. It was like a form of meditation or of reverie. Or like a lab rat pressing a button for more sugar-water, take your pick.) It was wasted motion either way, though, because three rolls of film took an hour and 45 minutes to develop, from setup to cleanup.

At around the same time I learned that you could shoot away at something with a motor drive (well, I had a motor winder, 2 FPS, which might have been lucky in that it imparted the lesson more clearly) and still miss the actual peak moment. I decided then that I would work on trying to concentrate hard on pressing the shutter button at the exact right moment but not take a lot of pictures of anything. (On static subjects, I continued to take two frames just in case something went wrong with one negative.) The Leica M6 I had in the early '90s was the one camera I ever owned that seemed completely on board with this plan. In fact that sense of instantaneous, unquestioning response might have been the best thing about a Leica rangefinder.

What I do now when I shoot people is to still concentrate on trying to shoot at just the critical moment, but I put the camera on "H" (high) so it takes a quick sequence. That saves me from momentary oddities such as blinks or an awkward momentary arrangement of blowing hair or an awkward juxtaposition of a passing automobile in the background. It's like one picture but with extras.

(By the way, lately I've been noticing that I don't shoot enough. I've taken minimalist shooting maybe just a little too far. If the guiding principle would be "shoot as few pictures as you can, but no fewer," maybe I've strayed across that line a bit where it comes to the "but no fewer" clause. Pixels are free.)

I don't know how many people follow my article links any more, but if you do, I hope you enjoy Amy Frearson's article about Simone Bossi. I did.

Mike

Product o' the Week:

A fantastically comfortable ergonomic mouse for PC users. Should be considered incompatible with Mac unless you want to use only default settings. Available in regular and small sizes, right and left hand, and wired and wireless. WARNING to Mac users: Do NOT download USBOverdrive! It broke my computer. But really, for you PC users, you won't believe how easy on your hand this mouse is.

The link above is a portal to Amazon, through which most anything you purchase will be credited to TOP. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

And here is a portal to...

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

Merle Hall: "I enjoyed that. Reminded me of the story by John Weller in William Neill Photographer—A Retrospective, where John was out shooting with Mr. Neill. They had been shooting for about an hour and John looked up and realized Mr. Neill had been standing in one place the whole time. He finally said, 'Found one.' and then took out his camera. The comment about color as a filter or trend is interesting, too."

Moose: "Re missing the actual peak moment, Olympus introduced the answer to this problem. They call it ProCapture. I suppose someone else may do something similar, but it's not common. Press the shutter button halfway. It starts recording files, at up to 18 FPS with focus for each one, higher without. When the queue hits the number you have selected, the oldest fall off the end, into the bit-bucket. Finish pressing, and the queue is all saved. You can also set it to take a few frames after. Let off the button without full press and the queue is emptied. Go through the results in LR, or whatever you use, select the best, dump the rest. Perfect solution to eye/brain/finger/camera lag. It's for exactly the sort of thing you write about, as well as sports, wildlife, and so on."

Mike replies: Which cameras have that, do you know? And thanks for that very clear explanation of how it works—best I've read.

Richard John Tugwell: "Re 'The pictures were all broadly the same but subtly different, and I had the devil of a time editing them. I reached a point almost of paralysis.' This resonated with me. I shoot a few stock images, mainly landmark / buildings. Because of digital I tend to shoot many slightly different ones with the idea that "I'll edit/select later". Big Mistake. Especially when the differences are minimal. Paralysis indeed - do the selection before pressing the shutter button!"

James Weekes: "Neil Leifer recounted the time he took his new Nikon motor drive out on a shoot. He was filming a figure skater, I believe Peggy Fleming, and shot a whole roll of her spinning. He ended up with 36 slides of her back."

Edwin Land Predicts the Smartphone Camera

...In 1970. For context, start the video at about 10:44...

...And he pretty much nails it at about 12:30. Cool. The video was a presentation for a stockholders' meeting. Thanks to the reader who suggested this.

Land, as younger readers might not know, was the genius inventor behind the Polaroid camera and the genius marketer/businessman behind Polaroid Corporation, which is essentially gone now but was a great success story of its era.

Mike

Product o' the Week:

A fantastically comfortable ergonomic mouse for PC users. Should be considered incompatible with Mac unless you want to use only default settings. Available in regular and small sizes, right and left hand, and wired and wireless. WARNING to Mac users: Do NOT download USBOverdrive! It broke my computer. But really, for you PC users, you won't believe how easy on your hand this mouse is.

The link above is a portal to Amazon, through which most anything you purchase will be credited to TOP. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

And here is a portal to...

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

scott kirkpatrick: "Fascinating video, in many ways. The whole clip, not just starting at 10:44. His accent is incredibly Boston. I hadn't appreciated the size and complexity of Polaroid at its peak but he describes it all, down to the I.M. Pei factory that is probably still down on a hilltop in Norwood. I wonder what it does today. He sounds in some ways like a high-tech founder of today, but in other ways couldn't be more mid-century, post-WWII management."

Marshall Arbitman: "The Steve Jobs of his time. And, in many ways, twice the wizard. These days, the pretenders to the SX-70 throne, and inheritors of the title, cannot even manage a film that develops in daylight. Land invented it 50 years ago. As a kid, I'd ride past the factory at least twice a week, like Charlie Bucket gawking at Wonka's place."

Frank Gorga: "I enjoyed Victor McElheny's biography of Edwin Land titled Insisting On the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land."

Kenneth Tanaka: "Edwin Land sure did land awfully close to today’s world in that talk! (I’d never seen it, so thank you for sharing it!)

"Edwin Land is unquestionably one of the true heroes and great minds behind photography’s history. Years ago when someone asked me who I most admired in photography I immediately named Land. ('Who?' was the response.) Unlike most of my contemporaries who started with B&W film, the Polaroid Land camera was my first camera as an early teen. I loved it. I would scrimp to buy film packs to feed it. Many years later I began reading of Land’s accomplishments not just as an engineer but also as a promoter. He was a remarkable person.

"If you want to see just how good of an engineer and visionary Land really was try to get your hands on the three-volume (two-book) set, Edwin H. Land's Essays. It’s long out of print, but still buyable on the used market. Much of it is deep technical presentations aimed mainly at helping to attract capital for developing various photographic technologies, including instant photography film. The volumes are titled, 'Polarizers and Instant Photography,' 'Science, Education and Industry,' and 'Color Vision.' That third volume features extensive detailed treatises on Land’s 'Retinex Theory of Color Vision.' It’s a remarkable series of papers for the technically-minded reader. There is a more human biography of Land’s life (which I can’t seem to find at the moment) but his essays are the best way to know what a real genius and oracle he was to photography.

"Thank you, again, for posting that video link. What a character, eh?"

hugh crawford: "When I was a child I would see advertisements for the Polaroid Land camera and always wondered what happened to people who tried to take a picture on a boat. I figured it must be pretty dangerous if they felt compelled to put the word 'Land' in the name."

Mike replies: Ha! I had that very same thought as a kid.

Around the Web on a Friday*

*First posted on Thursday, but I'll add more to it as the day wends on and then more on Friday.

Eight Grandicron: It's always been a matter of happy argument whether the 50mm or 35mm is the quintessential, the indispensable M lens, but it's certainly one or the other. Leica just announced a new Apo-ASPH 35mm Summicron to replace the now-venerable original 35mm Summicron ASPH (although I remember when that one was new). The new lens has 10 elements in five groups, four aspherical surfaces, a floating group for close focusing correction (it focuses to 30cm), plus six elements of partial anomalous dispersion glass. Leica's description asserts that the lens is a true apochromat and diffraction limited. It's also a wee tiny thing barely more than an inch and a half long (40.9mm), although it's solid for its size at 11.3 ounces (320g). The downside (or upside, depending on whether you value exclusivity more than...er, value) is the price: $8,200.

The Skin Deep Project:

"Ex-gang/gang members who have facial tattoos are photographed by Steven Burton. Then Steven digitally removes the tattoos, creating 'before and after images.' Interviews are then held with the subjects while presenting the before and after images. Many of the subjects have not seen themselves without tattoos for decades!" (I was taken aback by the young woman with "F---" and "You" tattooed on her cheeks under each eye. To old me they might as well say "I never want to be hired for a real job.")

Paul McCartney is still underrated: "64 Reasons to Celebrate Paul McCartney" by Ian Leslie. (A very well-written article, mention the other day in the Comments. Thanks to the reader who mentioned it.)

[to be continued...]

UPDATE Thursday evening: Right after I posted the above my work computer went down. After spending hours on the phone with Applecare we weren't able to make any progress with it. I have an appointment at the Apple Store tomorrow. I'll try to write a post tomorrow on my iPad but this one is now a postponed post! I can moderate comments on my phone but I can only pass them through, not add Featured Comments or add replies to comments.

All I did was try to download a small program called USBOverdrive which was supposed to allow me to configure my new Evoluent ergonomic mouse. After installing USBOverdrive it asked me to restart, and now the computer won't even start in recovery mode. Can't get into it at all. Fortunately everything is backed up twice, once on the Time Machine and once in the Cloud using a service. I've never done a restore from the Cloud. I'm hoping my Time Machine backup has me covered. 

I guess this is just life with computers, right? As the baby's bib said, spit happens.

—Mike 

The Catastrophic Crash of the Camera Market

The excellent site Lensvid, which has been analyzing and presenting CIPA data for the camera and lens industry for ten years (CIPA is the Camera & Imaging Products Association, which succeeds the Japan Camera Industry Association), has presented its information in simpler form this year, analyzing the years 2010–2020.

Summary first: there's that little box that says, "The entire camera market in 2020 saw 97% drop compared to 2010."

(That's looking at numbers of units, not profit or gross, but wow, still....)

2020 was obviously the pandemic year, and COVID-19 did no favors for camera and lens sales: year-on-year there was a 58% drop in shipped cameras from 2019 to 2020 and a 63% drop in the number of lenses shipped. Respectively, that's 8.7 million down from 14.8 million, and 8.7 million down from 13.8 million. Pretty bad, but there's no way of telling how much the "coronavirus economy" is to blame for that. Would we see a bounce-back if/when COVID-19 largely goes away?

Mirrorless has gone down from its high in 2018 but in 2020 made up a greater share of the market than it ever had before. Unfortunately, Micro 4/3 took a one-two punch as Olympus sold its camera and lens division and exited the camera business, and Panasonic turned its attention away from the smaller format and toward the vigorous development of full-frame mirrorless product lines.

Should you care?
I'm not sure if I was ever overly concerned with the industry and its fortunes. Medium-format photography in particular was a saturated, moribund market when I came along, with tiny profit margins, mainly held afloat by the smallish number of professionals and wannabe-pros who would invest heavily, but infrequently, in expensive equipment. I was a darkroom specialist early on, and the darkroom market was really a backwater. The biggest business development in the camera industry when I was young was the onset of the so-called point-and-shoot, all-in-one compacts the public loved for their simplicity. Those just didn't have all that much to do with me or people like me. The closest I ever got to a point-and-shoot that was important to me was the Konica Hexar, a fixed-lens, autofocus interpretation of the Leica M6. (I did review the Contax T2. Contax to me in those days was like Fuji is now). The Hexar wasn't even really a point-and-shoot unless your definition was pretty encompassing.

Enthusiast interest in cameras as business commodities is really a post-internet-era thing. I went to art school, and identified, then and since, as an art photographer. And although some art photographers have fetishized cameras, few of them felt strong fealty to the business as such. In a park in Georgetown one day I ran into David Hume Kennerly, then the unofficial White House photographer, and during our short conversation (I was a student), asked him what camera he shot with. "It doesn't matter," he repeated emphatically, "it doesn't matter." That's the way the majority of photographers in those day felt about it. I'd say it was actually actively uncool to care too much about gear. What mattered was what you did with it.

In 2021, yes, of course I'm concerned about photography as a pastime and a pursuit—I'm interested in its culture, and cultures don't survive in vacuums. But there is more interest in cameras now than ever before—it's just that most people are buying cameras as one feature of their smartphones, rather than as separate dedicated single-purpose devices. That's market shift, is all. It labels the traditional manufacturers' troubles as an instance of "creative destruction" rather than implosion or catastrophe for the medium itself. It certainly doesn't signal a shift of public interest away from taking pictures (or capturing images as the same thing is expressed now).

As far as "our end of the market" goes, I'm concerned, yes, but not panicked. We had a lot of good choices back in the '80s when I went to art school, and we have a lot of good choices now. There were 5.2 million DSLR and mirrorless ILCs sold in 2020. If you compare that to the top end of the market in 1985 when I graduated from the Corcoran School of Art with a degree in photography—setting aside all those point-and-shoots—well, I don't know for sure, but I'll bet the players at that time would be plenty impressed with that figure. Yes, I was sad we lost Olympus; but consider that, thanks to Andreas Kaufmann, Leica survived to thrive in the digital era, which looked pretty darned unlikely at times during the transition. I would have bet against it. And Panasonic was definitely not a player when I came up. Fuji was mainly a film manufacturer. Lose some, win some.

Consider, too, that in the late '90s and early 2000s, plenty of people were predicting that photographers wouldn't be able to buy film at all in five or ten years. And yet here we are, still with a lot of choices in films and papers.

So: the numbers are dramatically bad, but maybe really only in contrast to the transitory high point of an expanding market in 2010–13.

The numbers wouldn't look so bad if you counted smartphones. CIPA, and photo enthusiasts, might not count those as cameras, but the people who buy them do.

Mike

Book o' This Week:

Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The definitive 4th edition of this perennial bestseller, in print since 1979!

The above link is a portal from TOP to Amazon. The book is also available at Amazon Canada.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Here's a handy portal to B&H Photo:

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

Brian Small: "I'm 57. All the cameras I will ever need have already been made."

John Camp: "Cell phones are the point and shoot cameras of the 21st century, so we don't need point and shoots as a distinct segment anymore. And while there may have been (I'm sure there were) some art photographers who used point-and-shoot camera in the '80s and '90s, just as David Hockney famously used consumer Polaroid cameras, most serious art, pro and news photographers did not, because they were too limited. So, I think we're going back to the pre-2000-like photo environment where serious photographers use professional cameras, and people taking family snapshots (and a few odd professionals and art photographers) use cell phones.

"The big bump that camera companies enjoyed in the first part of this century was mostly a sales illusion caused by enormous jumps in the quality of digital cameras in that time period. I don't know how many cameras I bought between 2004 (Nikon D2 for me) and 2015, but I bet it was ten or twelve, at least. Probably a new camera every year, or more than one. So many I can't even remember them all. Since 2015, for me, the number is three (two GX8s and a Nikon Z6) and I still have and use all three with nothing on the horizon that will cause me to seriously upgrade, unless I back up the Nikon. I believe that there will always be enough enthusiasts to support three or four camera manufacturers, but the companies will be smaller and tighter, and the new releases will be fewer. And that's fine."

robert e: "It occurs to me that these numbers also follow a half-dozen or so years of technological sufficiency for general photography. There was a time when most of us, up- and down-market, anticipated steady progress in noise suppression, or low-light sensitivity, or responsiveness, or dynamic range, etc. These days, there seem to be more and more of us who feel that our cameras are not what's limiting what we can achieve (not even the camera in our phone, often)."

Bernard: "I see a huge upside: 97% of fixed-lens camera sales are gone, but they've been replaced with a much larger number of smartphone cameras. Should we pine for the days of near-disposable digicams that would stop working after 18 months? How about the demise of the 110 blister-pack camera sold at the supermarket checkout? I'm not. I certainly don't miss having to save-up my allowance for weeks to get a cartridge if 110 or 126 film processed. Kids growing-up today have access to great photography equipment, and you can bet that this will lead to a generation of great photographers, all over the world. That can't be a bad thing."

David Raboin: "Photography is doomed. That's why I bought a copy of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain."

Dillan: "I do worry a little. It seems much more difficult for companies to shrink than it is for them to grow. If they get the timing wrong, companies are left paying for unsold product and unneeded production lines. I fear that there may be more casualties than Olympus.

"As for my own position in the market, your essay gave me some comfort. You are right. We did have decent choices before digital. I worry that photography will become too expensive for the likes of me, but again, you are right: where there is a market, there will be a supplier. The remaining market is likely to be larger than it was pre-digital, so my worries are likely unfounded. Thanks for tackling this subject, Mike."

David Dyer-Bennet: "Pocket computers were in SF well before they were real; Niven and Pournelle had them in The Mote in God's Eye in 1974.

"But then Edward E. Smith had portable radio phones in 1928 (not with cameras though).

"Robert A. Heinlein had portable phones at least as early as Space Cadet (1948)—with the remarkable insight of a character finding his phone a cumbersome leash, and finding ways to avoid that.

"Both those 'phone' examples, unlike Dick Tracy's '2-way wrist radio,' connected to the phone system, and could call or be called by ordinary phones."

s.wolters: "In 2011 we celebrated my aunt’s 95th birthday. At that occasion I was the only one who brought a camera and I took many pictures of the family. Everybody wanted to pose. The next day I made made them happy by digitally distributing the pictures.

"In 2016 at my aunt’s 100th birthday I wanted to repeat my act. But nobody was interested in me taking pictures. They all had their own smartphone. They took the pictures themselves, mainly of themselves. And of course they shared a countless number of images of babies. The role of photography has changed a lot in the last decade. It already changed our lives drastically in the last one and a half century or so, in how it plays an important role in supporting our memory. But now it also got a dominant role in our relationships and how we communicate."

Sroyon Mukherjee

I was pleased to learn that one of my favorite (and oldest) articles got mentioned and discussed in a new article elsewhere on the Web today. The new article is called "An Experiment in Looking at Photographs," and it was written by Sroyan Mukherjee, at 35mmc.

I actually carried out his 5X two-minute exercise (well I oughta!), and I also very much appreciated what he had to say about the exercise and, especially, why it works. He rightly mentions that it's difficult for many people to do...and, in fact, I haven't "read" a photo book by egg-timer for a long time now. (They say "three moves is as good as a fire," and in 2014–15 I moved twice, which was enough to lose a lot of things, including my old mini-hourglass egg timer.)

I read a study a while back that concluded that almost no one finishes news articles they encounter online. They read the first few lines or paragraphs then let their attention flit away like a butterfly. As soon as I read that, I determined that when I come across an article that seems to be worthy, I should read it carefully all the way to the end and maybe even read it twice. I can't read everything, naturally, but the idea is that I'll get more from reading one article carefully than I'll get from glancing superficially at more of them. I get The New Yorker magazine—one of very few magazines for readers left in the world—and I do that with The New Yorker too. I don't read every article, but the ones that engage me I'm careful to read all the way to the end and sometimes a second time. I just don't want the cacaphony of the attention economy to dictate the quality of my attention. Not to everything.

The quality of our attention is a big, big topic. I'm very tempted to amplify my thoughts on the matter further, but, here, I'd rather refer you to what Sroyon has to say about it in the context of photography, relative to the five photographs he chose—his comments are perceptive and engaging.

Suffice it to say: anyone who gets a stranger to look at one of his or her photographs for two minutes straight is lucky indeed.

Mike
(Thanks to Richard Parkin)

Book o' This Week:

Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The definitive 4th edition of this perennial bestseller, in print since 1979!

The above link is a portal from TOP to Amazon. The book is also available at Amazon Canada.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Here's a handy portal to B&H Photo:

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

Sroyon: "Thank you Mike, for linking to my article and for your words of appreciation! And thanks also for your egg-timer post. I don't do the exercise as often as I would like, but when I do, I invariably get a lot out of it (come to think of it, this sentence applies to a depressingly long list of things). I was going to send you a link to the article myself, but funny story: after spending a good deal of time thinking about what photographs to include, speaking to different photographers, explaining about the project and so on, I remembered at the last minute that in keeping with the 35mmc post template, I also needed to pick a header image, so I hastily picked one of my own (the man looking at a painting in a gallery). 'Hastily' being the key word. When the post went live I was appalled to see the amount of dust on the negative, which I would have noticed if I spent two minutes (or even 10 seconds) looking at the picture—my own picture! (I'm generally not too fussed by dust and stuff, but this is pretty egregious.) So I thought I would re-scan the negative and fix the header image before I send you the link. I should have known someone would do it before me.... Now I think I will keep it as it is—a salutary lesson."

Joe Kashi: "This exercise is very similar to one of Minor White's very useful training exercises, 'reading photographs.' On the flip side, some years ago I was helping run a regional fine arts centered and we had a juried show that encompassed 45 good quality original pieces in various media. I remember timing one couple that toured the entire 45 piece show in 177 seconds from the time that they entered the door until they exited. That's under four seconds per piece, including walking from piece to piece in the fairly large gallery. Then consider that the average person's reaction time is two to two and a half seconds to recognize a new situation and begin reacting to it."

Richard Tugwell: "I print articles that I think will be worth reading. Generally I will finish them. Plus, you can scribble on them while you're on the bus/train. I always find the act of making a few notes helps cement things in your memory."

Geoff Wittig: "One of the current motivating ideas behind advertising is the notion of the 'attention economy,' wherein the resource being mined is eyes on the screen. Hence marketers and advertisers are becoming ever more creative (if that's the right term) in finding ways to grab onto our limited capacity to pay attention to things and to make sure we're paying attention to their goals, rather than ours. So I quite like the book How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. It discusses the issue in straightforward language and reasserts the truth that our time is ours, to spend as we see fit for our benefit, rather than the benefit of a corporate goliath."

Collin J Örthner "Back when my desk looked a lot neater and wasn't quite so loaded with things to do, I would take a book with me to work and open it to the first image. It would stay on that page for the duration of the day to be glanced at numerous times and gazed at for longer periods whenever I had a chance. Then, the following morning, I would turn the page. It would take quite some time to make my way through some books, but it certainly allowed me to absorb each image and come to a nice understanding of a book as a whole."

Mike replies: That's great. I could get into that.

Two New: Adger Cowans and Meshell Ndegeocello

I love it that there are so many artists out there who are completely unknown to me. Always somebody new to discover. And you never know when or how you'll do so. Ultimately, I have Black History Month to thank for these two, one a photographer, the other a musician, both new to me.

The first is photographer Adger Cowans, who is now 84. I found out about him through our friend Carl Weese, who sent me a link to a review of a photography show that appeared in The Nation. The show, at the Whitney, features a little-known group of Black photographers from the 1960s and '70s called the Kamoinge Workshop. Kamoinge is a word that in Gikuyu, the language of the Kikuyu people, means "a group of people acting together." The group when it was new was mentored by Roy De Carava, who was a half a generation older than most of the group's members.

Then Oren emailed to mention that some of the exhibit seems to be online—go to this link and then go to "Artworks" and click on each of the photographer portraits. The first one I investigated, Adger Cowans, is represented by only nine pictures, but the first two especially just blew me away—"Egg Nude" can stand alongside work in the same category by Edward Weston, and I love "Footsteps"—wonderful. He has a website, and there's more work there. He reminds me a little of David Douglas Duncan in the range of his visual interests. No little niches for those guys.

A few photographs are always just a clue, a lead so to speak. So how do I get to see more of this photographer's work? There is hope! There's a book. (Where there's a book there is hope.)

It will take me a little time to explore the rest of the Kamoinge Workshop members. Adger Cowans seems like a great start, though.

Songs like prayers
The second new discovery is a musician, and comes from my brother Scott—he's a big fan of NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts, and he sent me this link to a Tiny Desk (Home) Concert by Meshell Ndegeocello. She's had a whole career with me not even noticing, which always makes me feel like I've been living on a desert island somewhere. (This year, maybe I have been.)

I think you shouldn't enter into this unless you're in a reflective, contemplative mood, and willing to be openhearted. It starts off with a recitation of lyrics-as-poetry and continues with several songs that feel more like prayers. Scott said, "this is so peaceful." It is.

Mike
(Thanks to Carl, Oren, and Scott)

Book Product o' This Week:

Is it too late for this? 2021 is still young. There are two reasons to value these Michael Kenna calendars from Nazraeli Press: one is that his originals are 8x8", so these pictures are meant to work at wall-calendar sizes. The other is that Michael's calendars can actually increase in value! Dan Smith suggested this, and he reports that some older ones sell in the hundreds of dollars. "The printing is excellent," Dan wrote, "and the calendar is beautiful."

The above link takes you from TOP to Amazon. This week's pick is not available at Amazon Canada, but 2019 is. Hey, the pictures are still good. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

 

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

Colin: "Glad to hear you've discovered Me'Shell and thanks for the heads-up about this concert! We've seen her twice in London, both times were wonderful. If you're a Pat Metheny fan, he guested briefly on a track on her 2007 album, The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams, and she returned the favour by singing on his comeback album, From This Place. Her back catalogue is really varied—she made a jazz-adjacent album, The Spirit Music Jamia: Dance of The Infidel, Pour Une Âme Souveraine is dedicated to Nina Simone, but my favourite is the wonderfully heavy Comfort Woman."

Gary: "Sombitch, Cowans is a painter too. (See his website.) The paintings are not exactly to my taste, but still, a rare combination of talents. Thanks for the tip."

Photos for the People

Here's a nice story. A guy who works at a recycling center in the Shetland Islands, Paul Moar, discovered two bags of old slides turned in to be discarded. They documented local life on the Islands 30 and 40 years ago. A local history buff, Paul realized they were "a little bit of treasure."

The Shetlands, which are part of Scotland, are the northernmost outpost of the British Isles—about as far north as Anchorage, Alaska—and have a population of just 23,000 people, half of whom live within reach of the capital and the largest town, Lerwick, where the recycling center is.

The photographer turned out to be Nick Dymond, who used to run birding and wildlife tours on the Islands and was "just doing a clear-out." He has photographed around the world and his pictures of home didn't seem so special to him. He doesn't even own a slide projector to look at his old slides any more.

They've turned out to be a "sensation" to local residents, who feel like they've been given a window into their own pasts. Many are avidly identifying the people and places in the photos. For Shetlanders it's been a bright spot in troubled times.

Nick gave his permission for the photos to be digitized and put online, and for the 300-odd slides eventually to be donated to the Shetland Museum and Archives.

A fine feel-good photo-related story. The short article is called "A Glimpse of a Bygone Life on Scottish Islands, Plucked From the Trash," and it's at the world's greatest photography magazine, AKA the New York Times. Many readers tipped me about it. Thanks to all.

Mike

Paul Moar: "Hi Mike, thanks for your kind words and your little blog about it is actually much better than some of the newspaper articles I've seen! As someone commented to me, 'the right person was in the right place at the right time.' It's been nice to see it give a little uplift in theses trying times.  :-)  "

Book o' This Week:

In honor of Black History Month, an eloquent Black voice on the issue of race. Pulitzer-prizewinner Isabel Wilkerson's much-lauded book Caste: The origins of our discontents is a good book for our historical moment.

The above link takes you from TOP to Amazon. Here's the book at Amazon Canada. "As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases."

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

Dillan: "This is what photography is all about. These photos have meaning. May they serve as a lasting record of the inhabitants and way of life of the people of the Shetland Islands. By the way, with so many of your articles, you keep reminding me to take more photos of people. It's hard to do at the moment, but when all this is over, I've got to try harder."

Mike replies: I agree, but with a caveat, which is that these photos are of people still well within living memory. Once people are outside of living memory, interest in most of them goes down quite a bit. It's because these photographs remind so many Shetlanders of their own history, and people they themselves remember, that they resonate so much. Another half century and most of the interest might be academic rather than emotional.

This is one reason I think stories are so helpful and that stories with pictures go together so well. Take for instance the mini-story of the person feeding the lamb. Doesn't it enrich the picture? It does for me. Helps me "see" his personality, almost literally, in that it "changes" the look on his face by reinforcing the meaning of his expression. A story can be as simple as a caption.

Thomas Mc Cann: "John Hinde was a famous postcard photographer and publisher in Ireland. Every tourist shop had his postcards for sale on display in racks. The advent of the internet killed the business. We were tasked with removing the contents of the company's premises. We had to dispose a very large number of filing cabinets filled with his original slides. Perhaps they had been digitised. Who knows."

Mike replies: I absolutely hate stories like that...much better when something like the Nick Dymond/Paul Moar story happens. Remember my post "The Trough of No Value"? That wall of glass plate negatives haunts me. There were masterpieces in there.

Sunday Support Group: The Elusive Owen Edwards

Egotism is annoying, but excessive modesty can be problematic too.

I like essays, and their less prestigious cousins, columns, as literary forms. (Blog posts are a still more junior relative.) One of my early heroes and models was a fellow named Owen Edwards, who wrote a regular column for American Photographer magazine (he was its exhibition critic. The magazine's name was later changed to American Photo). Unlike bat bombs, the smell of rain, and the color of the Universe, however, American Photographer magazine does not have a Wikipedia page.

Neither does Owen Edwards, so I really know very little about him...including whether the "Owen Edwards" bylines I keep running across here and there all belong to the same person. Here's one, for instance, from Smithsonian, about the way Norman Rockwell tells stories in a single frame*. Same writer? Seems so, on the textual evidence. (Consider this playful little sentence: "Serious art critics often dismiss Rockwell as a cautious and calculating master of the middle way, a kind of mild moderator of lives too sweet and too narrow." Sounds familiar, although I haven't read those old AP columns for years and years.) Or this little article about the best management memo ever, dispensed by a tough-as-nails Marine Corps General. That one, from Design Observer, has an author photo, the only one I've ever seen for O.E. (if it's he), but as usual the bio says nothing except "the writer of this has written other things."

Owen Edwards, I think. Maybe.

If only the guy had a little more ego, if he would spend more time and effort on self-promotion—you know, toot his own horn a little more loudly—reveal more—disclose!—he might be easier to track. You can't go anywhere to get away from some types of celebrities these days, but each of us has a different definitions of what a celebrity is, based on what we ourselves value. It seems like the people who are celebrities to me always go hiding their light under a bushel.

So my question is, how long am I going to have to wait for Selected Essays and Articles of Owen Edwards? Or, more selfishly still, The Photography Writings of Owen Edwards? Because I don't mean to sound impatient, but I don't have forever. I'm beginning to get up there a bit. According to this Life Expectancy Calculator, the most realistic projection, statistically, is that I'll die at 83, which is 20 years from now. Considering how little I have to show for my other twenty-year periods on this globe, the thought that I might have only one more is a sobering thought. I recall that my most inevitable regret in life was crystallized when I saw it on a needlepoint pillow in a boutique in Harbor Springs, Michigan: "So Many Books, So Little Time."

Anyway, I've been waiting to re-read all of those American Photographer columns for many years now, and the window of opportunity for me to see such a book has now narrowed to 20 years give or take. Whoever "Owen Edwards" is (given that all I know about him is that he's a writer who has written things), I wish he'd get on the stick. I'd really like to buy that Best of... book.

While I'm on the subject, we need a Collected Writings of John Szarkowski and a Best of Richard B. Woodward, too.

I should live so long!

Mike
(Thanks to Becky Barnicoat and
Maximilian Zender for those Wikipedia pages.)

*It reminded me of this video, "Why THE FAR SIDE is a masterclass in storytelling" from The Gaze.

Book o' Last Week (new one coming up):

Peter Lindbergh On Fashion Photography, with text in English, French, and German. Original coffee table version or small 40th Anniversary version, take your pick. Both are hardcovers. The links above will whisk you away to Amazon.

Original contents copyright 2020 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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Kenneth Tanaka: "Re 'If only the guy had a little more ego, if he would spend more time and effort on self-promotion—you know, toot his own horn a little more loudly—reveal more—disclose!—he might be easier to track': Owens seems to be one of the great many legions of wandering tinkerer wordsmiths who make a living caroming between odd jobs of disposable work. And he’s probably been quite happy at it, too. Little of this, little of that, just like someone else we all know. There does seem to be a book of some of his essays available.

"Back to photography: I’m actually in the middle of whittling a short piece on two photographers, both now deceased, who made their way in the world of mid-century imaging essentially as wandering tinkerers. But unlike their countless peers, these snappers’ works easily rivaled, and indeed surpassed, much of the most renowned works by their much better known (more 'egotistical' self-promoting) contemporaries. Fortunately they each have a couple of books currently available as mementos of their works. More soon."

Michael: "Thanks for the link to The Gaze. Excellent piece."

Mike replies: It's really as good as a very fine magazine article or essay, isn't it? But told—effectively—in the medium of video.

David Aiken: "At the side of the article about General Shoup, there is the following note about Owen Edwards: 'Owen Edwards is the co-author of the design book Quintessence, and the author of its sequel Elegant Solutions. His latest book, Caught in the Act, a collaboration with Howard Schatz and Beverly Ornstein, was published in October of 2013.' I think you already have a couple of books you can chase down.  :-) "

Mike replies: Not really. Those don't fulfill the brief of collecting of his writings on photography...even though Caught in the Act is a book of Howard Schatz's photographs.

Celebrating Close-Up Photography

The Atlantic (the no. 1 "must-read" magazine in the United States, in my opinion, just by the way) has published a selected portfolio from the second Close-Up Photographer of the Year Contest. "The contest 'celebrates close-up, macro, and micro photography,' among seven separate categories. More than 6,500 entries were received from 52 countries this year."

Be sure to look at the portfolio in full screen. You can link back to all the winners from the link. If you've ever tried serious macro photography you'll know how difficult some of these were to do. Especially gob-smacking subject: "The most invisible animal I've ever seen." See if you can spot it on your first pass through....

Mike
(Thanks to Jim Hayes)

Original contents copyright 2020 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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Rob de Loe: "For fans of close-up photography, I want to offer a shout-out to Robert O'Toole and his terrific website. So often we limit ourselves to the lens options that manufacturers say we should use. In reality, there's a cornucopia of amazing lenses out there for close-up photography in surprising places. Robert is busily trying them all and providing a wealth of information."

Meta-Analysis of the iPhone 12 Pro

As you might know if you're in the Apple ecosystem, the iPhone 12 Mini and Pro Max drop this Friday.

My favorite diet doctor, the esteemed Michael Greger, likes meta-analyses. A meta-analysis is "a statistical analysis that combines the results of multiple scientific studies" (Wikipedia). Well, Amazon's Digital Photography Review, known as DPReview, because it was "unable to get ahold of review units," recently published a meta-review—a roundup of multiple iPhone 12 Pro camera reviews from across the Web, in longform (that's what we're calling text now) and video formats. It summarizes five advance reviews: from MKBHD, The Verge, Engadget, CNET and Andy To.

Andy's is just a video, but what a video. That guy is talented. I couldn't do that if I got to start all over with a fresh lifetime to practice. That said, there seems to be something mildly wonky with it technically—it's all a little greyed out or something. At least on my monitor.

One-line executive summary meta-meta review of the iPhone 12 Pro's cameras? Might go like this: Best ever, but maybe not enough difference to justify upgrading.

(There's the modern device product cycle in a nutshell, just sayin'.)

More reviews, surely, to come. (Just on a lark, I requested a 12 Pro Max to review. Haven't heard back.)

Mike
(Thanks to Mike Scott)

Original contents copyright 2020 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Thank you to all our Patreon contributors

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

robert e: "Yep, at least some of Andy To's footage has somewhat subdued contrast and/or saturation, and possibly a slight bias toward sepia/grey. I can't speak to Andy's intentions, but I see this a lot these days in ambitious work, and in some cases at least I suspect an attempt to reproduce, or at least evoke, the look of projected film. It may be an in-camera filter, but I'm curious in general about the amount of in-camera vs post-production processing involved here. Overall, it's an excellent demo reel, and a great example of the centrality of editing—and more generally: rhythm—to the art of cinema."

Gordon R. Brown: "Here's another take on the iPhones from John Gruber of Daring Fireball."

Tim Fitzwater: "It's a style of color grading. A lot of modern YouTube was originally influenced by the teal/orange look (think Transformers). Now a lot of channels have tweaked it to have their own style. I think it will all look very dated down the road, but that is how everything goes right? Also—it is all in post-production—they are shooting in 'log' which used to be the closest video had to RAW—but now a lot of good cameras have RAW video so...."

 

Toot! (Thanks, Robin Wong)

As you might have noticed, I don't toot my own horn on this site much. Lord knows it's enough about me, me, me as it is, just because I'm the "I" who writes it. I figure it doesn't need any extra added ego—it's got enough already. So I tend to not feature comments that praise me, don't tend to push my own work forward (to the point that readers complain), and try not to make inflated claims of my importance or expertise (the more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know). I also try not to contend with self-appointed experts—the whole "dueling egos" thing bores me. (I had to referee several such tempest-in-a-teacup battles when I was a magazine editor.) There's room for everyone. The way I look at it, I might know more about photography—certain aspects of photography, anyway—than some of my readers, but the likelihood is very high that you know a lot more than I do about your field(s) of expertise. That thought keeps me from getting a big head, and I keep it front and center.

Robin Wong

Still, it's nice when somebody else says nice things about me. Robin Wong is a video reviewer who is already familiar to many in the photographic world. Born in the City of Kuching, Sarawak, on the island of Borneo in Malaysia, and an alum of the University of Western Australia in Perth, he was a civil engineer by training who started out writing mostly about Micro 4/3 and eventually joined Olympus Malaysia as a product specialist. Later he was a contributor to Ming Thein's popular website (a list of his articles for Ming can be found here). He originally conceived of his own photography as a creative counterbalance to his highly technical career, and he's the originator of the phrase "shutter therapy"—the notion that getting out and going photographing is a nice way to counteract the blues, engage with the world, and experience and communicate the joy of seeing. I know, and know of, many photographers who have felt that way about it. Too seldom do we stop to consider that it's a lovely hobby and a great pastime, whatever our level of engagement with it.

Anyway, I want to thank Robin for the too-kind things he said about me in one of his videos from a few days ago (starting at about 8:45). Of course I feel he overstates the case, but at the same time for some reason I'm disinclined to argue.  :-)  Very nice of him—and thank you kindly, Robin.

Mike
(Thanks to many readers)

Original contents copyright 2020 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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Anton Wilhelm Stolzing: "Wow, Mike, you are the one who brought us the term bokeh??? You are a genius!"

Mike replies: Brought you? Sort of. Carl Weese explained the concept to me, and John Kennerdell, Oren Grad, and Harold Merklinger wrote the articles. The original term is Japanese. I changed the spelling, and publishing the articles kicked off the popularization of it in the West, is all. Or perhaps, rather than "popularization," we should say the awareness of it, since of course it always existed.

Here's the lowdown.

Four Distractions for You

Well, it looks like I'm taking a small unscheduled break, without, at first, intending it.

On Wednesday, purely as an indulgence and as a way of distracting myself from what has become The Great Wait (for the incompetent States, I want to add, but don't be snarky, Mike, don't be snarky), I started writing a post called "How to Buy a Pool Table." That would have been for "Open Mike," the "often-off-topic Editorial page of TOP," which I try to post on Wednesdays.

At the same time, the weather turned nice. We have had almost nothing but rain here for three weeks, although there was one sunny warm day and one snowfall, our first wintry day of this year. (The light was wonderful that day.) Tuesday was another warm sunny day, so I also distracted myself by working a lot. I have a balcony porch in the back of the house that was actively decaying and sorely needed attention, and I used the nice weather to finish all the repairs on that and to get two coats of stain on it. Then I mulched leaves till dark. Mulching leaves is a good enough way to clean them up—I have a riding mower and a push-mower, and the push-mower is the one that has the mulching blade on it—but I need dry weather to do it! Can't mow leaves in the rain.

And the good weather, like the Great Wait, has continued. Despite two days of working on it (in between bouts with the paintbrush and the lawnmower), I have not been able to finish the pool table post—in fact, I'm not even half done with it, such that I could post it as a "Part I." Today the weather report is for 68°F (20°C) and sun all day, so I'm going to get ambitious—I'm going to try to get a coat of stain or two on my back deck. Which is pretty extensive, as it includes the wooden walkway to the barn and pool shed (I need a name for the pool shed. Maybe I can mull over that as I work).

In case you're looking to me for your distraction, I'll pass along these links sent to me by various readers:

Chris Killip 1946–2020. Photo by Kent Rodzwicz.

—Chris Killip, the British documentary photographer best known for his work among the lower classes in the north and later a Harvard professor, died of lung cancer on October 13th. Here's an obituary from Harvard that includes examples of his work.

—Darin Boville, a TOP reader, has written an extensive two-part review of Rebecca Senf's Making a Photographer: The Early Work of Ansel Adams (here's the book on Amazon—I only provide a purchase link to it because Darin doesn't. By the way after an abrupt break I am apparently an affiliate again, to my great relief). Darin is a new blogger and could use some eyes. Becky Senf is Chief Curator at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson, one of the premier institutions in the U.S. in the field of photography. CCP holds Ansel's extensive archives.

—I still haven't gotten around to watching "Bokeh is overrated," a video on YouTube, though several readers thought I should. You're on your own with this one. I suspect I might agree with some of what the makers have to say. I will try to get around to watching this someday.

—New Lumix S 85mm—I suspect I'm like a Pavlov's dog with regard to 35mm and 85mm lenses. They just trigger the endorphins. A recent article I read about going to chef school said that some real chefs have only one large and one small kitchen knife (plus perhaps a bread knife), and if that's true then the 35mm and 85mm focal lengths (or equivalents) are my large and small knives. I've been shooting with those two forever. (All of the post about Andrew S. the spice-rack maker was shot with those two lenses, to name just one very typical fer-instance.) Anyway Panasonic has announced a new 85mm prime which, at only 12.5 ounces / 355 grams, seems to go against the recent trend toward larger, heavier lenses.

Now off to work! Miles to go before the sun sets. Hope you find some comfort in distraction yourself, too.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Thanks to all our Patreon contributors!

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scott kirkpatrick: "On Killip. I have always liked his photos but knew little of his course in life. Reading up, it turns out that after a few years in the 'big show' in London, he discovered that photography could be pursued for its own sake, and spent the next 10–20 years working out of his caravan with a field camera in dicey places around England. When he concluded that his approach had become dated (in the light of Martin Parr's and Lee Friedlander's hand cameras with attached flash), he accepted a lectureship at Harvard. He stayed for the next 10–20 years, becoming Harvard's Carpenter Center's equivalent to Richard Benson, a craftsman/artist administering a visual arts program. How's that for a high degree of self-awareness and a soft landing?"

Nigel Voak: "I was sad to see the passing of Chris Killip. Killip was on of that great crop of UK 'documentary' photographers that came out of the UK in the eighties and who now seem to have been forgotten as photographic fashion has shifted to 'conceptual' photography."

Dan Jansenson: "Regarding Chris Killip, a very nice article, with several links, was published in the Guardian."

Open Mike: Readings, Movies, and Music

[My apologies! I finished this this morning and thought I published it around 11:00 a.m. But apparently I just forgot to click the "Publish Now" button. That's only happened rarely in years of blogging. Anyway..."Open Mike" is the off-again on-again Editorial Page of TOP. Today's is a grab-bag. When Yr. Hmbl. Ed. is caught up with himself, it appears on Wednesdays. Even if only barely.]

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Strange & curious: Been feeling like a hermit lately? You've got nothing on Christopher Knight:

For decades, the residents of Maine’s Kennebec Valley believed that the North Pond hermit was a myth. According to local lore, a hermit had been living undetected in the woods since the 1980s; every so often, he would break into seasonal cabins to steal food and other resources. But no one could prove the hermit’s existence—if he was out there, he had taken great pains to guarantee his isolation.

Then, in April 2013, a man was arrested in the deep woods of Maine. His name was Christopher Thomas Knight. According to societal records, he didn’t exist. For 27 years, he had camped out in the forest, surviving on meager supplies that he’d burglarized from houses in the area. He endured winter temperatures of 20 degrees below zero. Every morning, he watched the sun rise over the foggy valley that he called home. He hadn’t had a single conversation with another person for nearly three decades.

His greatest challenge was surviving the Winters. He would deliberately fatten himself up at the end of the Summer and into the Fall. A night camping in the throes of a Maine Winter is not for the faint of heart; a week of it qualifies an outdoorsman as a tough guy. In twenty-seven years at his encampment in the woods, Knight never slept in anything but a tent. The cold was so intense it drove him close to suicide. He would wake himself at 2:30 in the morning in the dead of Winter because he knew he stood a better chance if he faced the worst of the cold awake. "It's dangerous to sleep too long in Winter," he told the reporter who visited him in jail.

But apart from finding an intellectual who loved to read (and loved Lynyrd Skynyrd!), who knew who the Kardashians were, and was so averse to human connection that he seldom made eye contact, the reporter could get little out of him about the central mystery, "why":

Anyone who reveals what he’s learned, Chris told me, is not by his definition a true hermit. Chris had come around on the idea of himself as a hermit, and eventually embraced it. When I mentioned Thoreau, who spent two years at Walden, Chris dismissed him with a single word: "dilettante."

The first quote is by Emily Buder. The second is from a long article in GQ from 2014 by Michael Finkel called "The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit." Fascinating article; recommended if you think you're "isolating"!

Snob about fiber-base: When I was young I was a snob about fiber-base black-and-white papers. They were the traditional material, made the old way. RC paper was "plastic," and was tainted by its early reputation for self-destructing. Good for intermediate prints and prints for repro only. Don't extrapolate this any further than it goes, but I will say this: I have plenty of workprints made on Ilford RC papers from thirty and thirty-five years ago, and they look  as fresh and clean as the day I made them. I can't say if they'll last 70 years, or 200. But I like their chances.

Opinions about Bogart: I'm mildly a fan of movies made before I was born, especially the genre called "Noir," and if you like Noir you'll have opinions about Bogart. In his top three for me (the other two are The Caine Mutiny and of course Casablanca) is a little-remembered suspense thriller about a writer. To enjoy In a Lonely Place you can't focus on the murder mystery, which is nothing but a sub-plot—you have to get into its psychological portrayal of the doomed love affair. Movies that take this tack have to resonate with you in some way or they might not appeal much. But they can be deep and meaningful if they do touch you.

In a Lonely Place was directed by Nicholas Ray, who directed Rebel Without a Cause and influenced Godard and the French New Wave. It co-stars his now little-known wife, Gloria Grahame. Their marriage broke up during the filming but the two kept the breakup secret so as not to jeopardize the project. The script departed greatly from the book, and the director and actors departed greatly from the script—Ray cleared the set and crafted a new, more subtle ending with the two leads when the planned finale, which had already been shot, rang false. The movie creates characters who might now be understood as having what's called an avoidant/dismissive adult attachment style, but with sympathy for the tragedy inherent in being trapped in such a state. Glenn Erickson of DVD Savant put it beautifully:

Relationships are delicate animals—they can be killed by the wrong words, the wrong actions. Dix and Laurel are madly in love with one another, but that trust is destroyed when her terror and his rage go over the edge. It doesn't matter that he's innocent, or that they are both in intense remorse over what happened. It can't be taken back, and the romance is finished. Both will have to go back to their personal 'lonely places.'

Brilliant lines of criticism—so very much on the mark.

Of course another reason I love old Noir films is for the black-and-white. In a Lonely Place was shot by the cinematographer Burnett Guffey, who also did Bonnie and Clyde, a movie whose cinematography is naturalistic and plainspoken. Cinematographers have trouble being artists because they seldom get to pick their projects; the best they can hope for is to become the go-to of a great director. Guffey was a get-it-done pro whose life's list of accomplishments is a motley of good and bad, television and film, the trivial and the profound. But In a Lonely Place is as outstanding in 1950 B&W as Bonnie and Clyde is in 1967 color. A treat. I'd like to see more of his work.

Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place

Carrie Rickey of The Moviegoer considers the performances the best of of both Grahame's and Bogart's careers. The most disturbing thing I've read about the film? Louise "Brooksie" Brooks said that of all his roles, the role of Dixon Steele in In a Lonely Place came closest to the real-life Humphrey Bogart she knew.

As with all old Noirs there are numerous versions floating about. The print on Amazon Prime Video is great, and it's available on DVD and Blu-Ray from the Criterion Collection.  

Young Girl Blues: Like guitar? My good old friend Kim's latest is a lilting and wistful mix of guitars across genres—indie, Brit-folk, blues, alt, folk-rock. It's been raining here for a week, and it's a great hour's listen on a rainy day. I loved the Band of Horses song, which I had never heard before. And yes, the "cover" art of Young Girl Blues is in beautiful black-and-white.

Something I happened to hear on XM Radio in the car: it's a version of Led Zeppelin's "Going to California" with the vocals removed. It's one of those songs I've always loved and never tire of, but I found it fascinating how much the vocal serves as another instrument and another line, and how different the music sounds as an acoustic instrumental. Just a curiosity. Lend an ear if you're so inclined.

Aromatically yours: One final reading. Another of my old friends you've met in these pages before, Jim Schley, just published a review of a new book of poetry, Elizabeth A.I. Powell's Atomizer (Amazon).

Vermont poet Elizabeth A.I. Powell's way with words is daring, sardonic and ingenious. She enjoys mixing registers and realms—pop and literary culture, consumerism and religion, self-help and sacrament.

That just makes it sound like something I would enjoy.

The structure (or "scent and architecture," as Powell puts it) of Atomizer is fascinating. Along with its zany variety of forms, the book has a powerful through line, investigating the ancient, arcane and insidious role of perfume, tangled in seduction and deceit. The three sections of the book are named for terms used to categorize layered qualities in synthesized scents. "Top Notes" are "that which evaporates most quickly"; "Heart Notes" are "the distinctive aspects, most...charming, most intelligent"; and "Base Notes," the poet avers, "stay the longest...heavy and deep."

I liked the little tastes and teasers so much I had to order the book. Jim's reviews do that to me every so often. Here's Jim Schley's review of Atomizer, at Seven Days.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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Featured Comments from:

HR: "With regards to your comment about RC papers I am reminded of this.  :-)  'We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.' —Mark Twain"

Mike replies: Thanks! Yes, that. In this case I can only personally recommend Ilford RC papers. I used several others too, decades ago, but they're gone now.

David Evans: "I'm really loving Young Girl blues. I'm not familiar with Mixcloud—is it possible to see individual track information?"

Mike replies: Only if you sign up for a Premium account, which is $8 a month. But there's another way for most cuts. Download the Shazam app from the App Store. It allows your phone to listen to music, compare it to a database, and identify it. Kim will fool it sometimes because his mixes sometimes include extremely esoteric and rare music, but most of the cuts it will identify. I'll ask Kim if he can provide a set list for Young Girl Blues.

Kim was a legendary disk jockey at WHFS in Washington DC back in the station's heyday.

Bob Curtis: "Michael Finkel expanded the article into a book, The Stranger in the Woods [Amazon]."

scott kirkpatrick: "My favorite Bogart has always been Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which captures the bottled anger in 'Nobody puts one over on Fred C. Dobbs!' But I wasn't aware of In a Lonely Place, which leaves out the humorous touches and the sentimental ending, and thus is truly terrifying."

David Comdico: "In a Lonely Place is my favorite Bogart film. It peels beneath the surface of the Bogart character. On the other hand, Johnny Guitar [Amazon Prime Video] is my favorite film by Nicholas Ray. He was a real American original."

Keith B.: "Burnett Guffey's outstanding lighting in Bonnie and Clyde may feel naturalistic, but is actually fairly romantic in style. Naturalistic cinematography (no theatrical lighting, existing light taken as found) was then, and is still, considered too ugly to be employed for commercial narrative motion picture storytelling. There are exceptions, but not many."

Andrew Bearman: "Thank you for turning me on to Mixcloud and to your friend Kim's sets. I am now willingly lost in the woods of great music! And that Bogey still captures a look that only an experienced, weary cat like he could give. A look not too far from how many of us have felt at least a few times during this pandemic. Off to watch In a Lonely Place."

johnbabineau: "Hunch re KK’s Mixcloud: Handstanding athlete on diving board is the actress Doris Day. KK’s comedic gifts endure...."

Animesh Ray: "Your post made me remember a funny experience. I used to do extensive black-and-white printing for work when I was a grad student in the late 1970s–early 1980s. This was related mostly to printing of black-and-white photomicrographs and autoradiograms, for which we were supposed to print on multigrade silver gelatin papers. After that period I did not do any darkroom work, because most of those tasks was taken over by Polaroid for B&W or Kodachrome slides for color.

"Some 30 years later, in 2003, I wanted to do B&W printing as a hobby, so I went to the local city recreations department, which had a darkroom for the photo enthusiasts. The deal was that the use of the darkroom was free if you passed a test; otherwise you would need need to take a two-week course on printing. So I thought I would take that test. As it so happened, I had never heard of RC papers until that time, as I had only used fiber papers in the past—in fact we never called it that! We just called it a printing paper of a certain grade. All the test questions had to do with how to print and process RC papers, so to my utter disbelief I ended up failing the test. In science, we often feel like hermits stuck in lonely towers."

Wiki Loves Monuments 2020 Contest

Photo by MichaelDPhotos (CC BY-SA 4.0)

There must be a lot of historic sites near anyone that they don't know about.

Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons are having a contest to encourage contributions. You can provide fresh photographs of historic sites in the U.S. to help them in their mission. There are a few modest prizes, but I suspect the prize money is not why anyone would do this—it's more that it's a fun way to get out and look around, a way to provide a purpose for photographic jaunts. Sort of a general assignment to give shape to your activities. I have a friend who does this, and it's been motivating and involving for him. He's in an area of the country that's new to him and his wife and they've found it's a nice way to explore their adopted community and the surrounding regions.

Here's the contest page. You can read about it there, but basically you're tasked with finding recognized historic sites local to you and photographing them for the database.

Sounds like it could be fun. A new way, perhaps, to get out and explore your area. The contest lasts through the end of the month but if you enjoy doing this, there's no time limit on contributing to Wikimedia projects.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Thanks to all our Patreon contributors!

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

Richard Tugwell (partial comment): "For folks in the UK (or England anyway) Historic England has a feature allowing users to contribute images and other things to the Listed Buildings archive. No prizes though, but quite rewarding."

Geoff Wittig: "I got excited by this idea since I know there are quite a few historic rural buildings near me. I got more excited when I saw one of the sites was an impressive and unusual barn quite close to my home. Surely I could photograph it in perfect light looking its best.... Then I remembered. This barn was photographed by David Plowden, as part of an entire book of beautiful barn photographs. Plowden gave a presentation about the project at George Eastman Museum about 15 years back, and I got to talk to him about it. He was exceptionally polite. Pretty unlikely I'll take a better photograph than David Plowden did."

Mike replies: But do they have a good photograph of the barn on the existing Wikipedia page? If not, then yours might still be needed.

MikeR: "Following their proffered link, I found a list of historic sites in Pennsylvania's Montgomery County, and was surprised to find that I live near, or near enough, to at least a dozen of them. In some cases, I already have the images."

tuco and STEPHANE

[Ed. note: This is an extra post written on my day off, because I know I'm writing too much about large format. There are a few more to come, too. If you don't like these discussions, don't worry; the weather always changes on a blog, eventually.]

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First a quotation. I've been doing a lot of roving about the internet (now, is it supposed to be capitalized, or not? I've lost track of the arguments) looking into large format stuff. I wanted to share two small things I ran across. One comes from a thread on flickr (I believe that's not supposed to be capitalized), and was written by one STEPHANE GUILLAUME, who wrote his name using all caps. STEPHANE wrote (I've edited his punctuation here, including changing "sinar f" to "Sinar F"):

Film does have a learning curve. I use a Sinar F and a 135mm lens. Scanning is done on a V700. I develop and scan all of my shots. Best advice I can give, start with one camera, one lens, one film type. Film is all about finding just the right light. You can't just shoot anywhere and have amazing shots. You have to find good light to shoot in.

As they say in Baltimore, true dat. He puts it nicely, in fewer words than I could have. (I evidently have too many words—I've been getting them out for years, yet there are always more.)

The second comes from someone named tuco, and we're back to no caps again. tuco (oww—how painful it is to an editor to begin a sentence with a lowercase letter!) found a model who would work for peanuts. But there was a downside. Models are so demanding, aren't they? Have a look and read about it.

That model's furious expression makes me smile. Cute little guy.

I like tuco's technique, too. Here's a picture of an old camera like the one he uses. These are not folding field cameras; they are called self-casing cameras, like my Rochester Optical Pony Premo. The difference is subtle; it has to do with the word "folding." You don't have to fold up a self-casing camera. It just retracts directly back into its box. Note too that both tuco and STEPHANE use lenses of the same focal length—135mm, which is about like 40mm on a FF camera*.

Reversible back, on my new old Wista. Left, portrait/vertical
orientation, right, landscape/horizontal orientation**

The difference between a Speed Graphic and a Crown Graphic—both were made by Graflex, Inc.—was that the Speed had a focal-plane shutter and the Crown didn't. Hence, the Crown was a little lighter and simpler. To get a cheap view camera (Graphics are press cameras), people used to "hot rod" Crowns by removing the rangefinder and some of the less useful appurtenances. Their real limitation as tripod view cameras is that the back isn't "reversible," meaning you can't switch it from horizontal, also called landscape, orientation to vertical, or portrait, orientation. The reason for that is that Graphic shooters would simply crop if they wanted a vertical. They were newsies—photojournalists—and their work was cropped ruthlessly all the time anyway, by editors showing only what was relevant and by compositors fitting the pictures to the column.

Cropping to a vertical is what Martin Munkácsi did with "Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika," which we saw here the other day. Martin liked to talk as if he were a 35mm shooter—the coming thing in his time—but mostly he preferred to shoot with larger formats and then crop, sometimes radically, to pluck out of his frame some part of it that he considered a strong composition. Sometimes he made pictures of surprisingly small bits of his originally much larger negatives.

My now 16-year-old niece, Hadley, does this instantaneously and reflexively with the pictures she takes on her iPhone and iPad. Her fingers fly so fast you can hardly see them as she works the screen of her iPad. She'll look at a picture and, zoom zoom, crop it the way she wants it with a few finger-flicks. She probably doesn't even realize it, but her cropping skills are practiced and fluent.

If I were a photography teacher now, I'd send students out to do this on purpose. Find a smaller composition within a larger one, take it with the wide or normal view of the phone camera module, then crop it down to what they visualized, to see what it looks like. Exercises like this help our seeing. Once you've got the knack (or so I believe), you've got it.

Mike

*The correspondences aren't exact, but, to convert 35mm (FF) focal lengths to those for 4x5 (5x4) inch or vice-versa, multiply or divide by 3.3. That gets you about as close are you're going to usefully get. Remember that the image on a 4x5 negative isn't exactly 4x5 inches, it's a bit smaller (and you don't know by how much, because film holders aren't standardized), and that the aspect ratios are different—meaning that precision is impossible. (Let's not argue that, okay? It's supposed to be my day off.)

**There are two ways you can tell these were shot with an iPhone. Can you spot both?

Original contents copyright 2020 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:

Scott: "1.) We can see you taking the picture in the reflection 2.) You seem to have used Portrait mode, as things in the same plane show different degrees of in-focus. Did I win?"

Mike replies: Yes! You win.

Crabby Umbo: "Tuco? Like Eli Wallach in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly? 'When you have to shoot, shoot, don't talk.' Now that's advice for a photographer!"

AlanH: "Yep, good light is certainly wonderful, but I prefer to follow something Brooks Jensen said, 'Find a subject that fits well with the light you have.' That's probably not a correct direct quote, but you get the idea."

Mike replies: That's good advice too. It came to me one day during the time I was wandering around DC every day with my Exakta 66. I was bemoaning the overcast skies and the lead-colored landscapes one day when it came to me that the light was perfect for portraits! Nice and soft, no hard shadows.

Taos Water Girls

Edward S. Curtis, Taos Water Girls, 1905

Whenever I get an email about some auction or other, I usually find something being advertised that charms me.

I know Edward S. Curtis's work and I seldom see one of his that I've never seen before. Correction, a good one of his, because every photographer has second- and third-rate pictures that haven't been widely published or seen.

Edward Sheriff Curtis, of course, was the protean but problematic documentarian of Native Americans at the end of the frontier period. Few photographers ever worked harder, but his pictorialist style and ethnographic assumptions don't fit well with modern ideas or tastes. My favorite book of his is Native Nations, the Calloway title with stunningly great reproductions. To my surprise, this book is still easily available for very reasonable prices—it's a beautifully produced book and I highly recommend it, to photographers, fans of fine printing, photobook lovers, Curtis fans, people interested in the Wild West or American Indians, or any combination of the above. There's a copy on Amazon for $24.91, and that's a steal for a book of this quality—new, it cost $60, and that was in 1993 dollars ($107 today).

...And there it is: "Taos Water Girls" is on page 65. Thought so. But it's one of the pictures the book's reproduction—dark and rich—doesn't suit. (There are so many that it does suit.) I was more charmed by this higher-keyed JPEG at the auction site. The writeup says that only about one in 500 of Curtis's prints are platinum prints. I'd love to see this someday as he printed it. Visualizing this JPEG in my mind as a platinum print makes me suspect it might be something special.

Unconscious style permeates eras
Curious, isn't it, how the style of 1905 comes through so strongly? "Taos Water Girls" puts me in mind of things like Gertrude Käsebier or something by one of the Brandywine School illustrators, maybe Howard Pyle's "Two Lovers in the Garden" (I couldn't find a date for the illustration—although you can buy it framed from Wal-Mart! What a fate—but Pyle died in 1911).

Gertrude Käsebier, Blessed Art Thou Among Women (1899)

Howard Pyle, Two Lovers in a Garden

Here's the writeup for "Taos Water Girls" at the auction site:

About This Lot
Taos is the northernmost of all the Native American Pueblos. It is located in present day New Mexico and was first visited by outsiders in 1540. The Pueblo had already been occupied for centuries at that time. The young women in the photograph are carrying water back to their pueblo in beautiful traditional jars. The trees on either side of them are cottonwoods, which are often found near mountain streams in the southwest. The sky is contrasted with the deep, rich foreground makes this image unusually compelling and three-dimensional. It is estimated that as few as 1 in 500 Curtis prints are platinum, making this vintage platinum print all the more desirable and rare. This print was created by hand in Curtis’ [sic] Seattle studio.

Bids start at $5,000 for the print.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 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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Featured Comments from:

Geoff Wittig: "When Curtis was active, platinum printing was popular among fine art photographers and pre-coated platinum papers were commercially available. But his images were mostly experienced as photogravure reproductions, both in his magnum opus The North American Indian and as separate prints. Photogravures are pretty sympathetic to the tonality and 'feel' of platinum prints. I got to see the large collection of Curtis prints on display at the Crazy Horse monument in South Dakota some years back. They're amazing. It was worth the trip just to see them. Which made me pull out my copy of the late Richard Benson's wonderful The Printed Image (2008), a compendium of all then available methods of photo reproduction. Benson's explanation of how a photogravure works is a model of clarity. And unfortunately the book is now a collectible going for >$250."

Mike replies: Hopefully everyone who was reading TOP in 2008 bought Richard Benson's book, as it was our "Book of the Year" that year. And Native Nations was printed under Richard Benson's direction (and that of Nicholas Calloway) using a near-continuous-tone process Richard developed especially for printing these images.

LanceSaintPaul: "I did buy the Benson book back then as a direct result of your featuring it. Thanks again."

Kenneth Tanaka: "That's an interesting auction of Curtis’s work. I don’t recall seeing one of his platinum prints. The Art Institute of Chicago here has a small collection of Curtis’s prints, all photogravures, acquired from a collector in 1975. Given that the provenance of the Artnet pieces was specified as coming from a private collection in Minnesota I suspect (but don’t know) they’re from one of the most prominent collectors of Curtis works in America, Christopher Cardozo. I wish him luck with this sale. Like so many things these days, Curtis’s work has become culturally radioactive among top collectors and especially among major institutions. I admire the relentless dedication and sheer sweat that this work represents. But it was always a bit sentimental and schmaltzy for my taste. But for an excellent read try Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan. It’s available on Amazon in book or Kindle form.

Mike replies: Christopher Cardozo also had a hand in the making of the Native Nations book. The publisher was Bulfinch, by the way.

David Myers: "You might be interested in the 'Curtis' prints made by Jon Cone and his team using photogravure. Reasonable prices, I believe, around $800."