Martin Evening, the important early Photoshop expert whose books a lot of us learned from, sadly died at a young(ish) age in 2022. He wrote many technical books as well as numerous articles in magazines and online. There's one problem with being an expert of any fast-changing subject—it's rather difficult to leave a lasting legacy. He was important, though—and well liked, as you can read in his friend Scott Kelby's remembrance of him.
I found a video made at the Art of Photography Conference 2021 that goes into depth about "The Hits and Misses of a Creative Career." In it, Martin talks about his own work and life. Here are just a few of the insights that go by in the first 20 minutes of the 45-minute video:
—You can learn from models who have modeled for more famous photographers.
—Once you establish a coherent visual style with which you can be identified, people will more readily hire you to do do different kinds of jobs as well as similar ones.
—"Is it for the bank or the book?" That is, know why you're doing a job—to make money or to get a picture that will be useful for your portfolio. Both are worth doing.
—Doing portraits of celebrities, where you have only a few minutes with them, are very different from fashion shoots, where you have hours to prepare and shoot.
—A portrait of a jazz musician (Peter Brötzmann) was "photographed in my flat [apartment] by the way; there was no budget for a studio." We all make do!
—It's good for any photographer to have some sort of dedicated interest in a subject area (food, cars, hair, music etc.)—that way you gain experience in that world and clients are more likely to hire you for your knowledge of what they do—and what others in their field do as well.
—If you experiment and find a new or different technique, you're going to need more than one example if you want to sell the idea to new clients.
That only takes us to about the twenty minute mark. Of course there's more, but you can watch the video for yourself.
Martin recognized that he was doing some things in-camera just at the time Photoshop was being invented that Photoshop would be very good at, almost as if he was pre-figuring the technology before it emerged. Of course he did go one to become a worldwide expert on Photoshop and Lightroom, whose many instructional books became central to the way photographers would use the tool. This is the one I most remember, although it's no doubt at least somewhat out of date now, at least in its particulars. (Lightroom had just come out and I was getting up to speed with it. I've never actually used it, though.)
The video is thought-provoking but also down-to-earth and practical. A nice way to spend some time talking shop with an influential teacher.
Mike
Original contents copyright 2024 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. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
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Matt O'Brien: "I have such a high regard for Martin Evening…discovered him as I tried to come to terms with Lightroom and Photoshop. Such a strong and positive influence to so many."
Sunflowers: Took this yesterday to show I've got nothing against sunflowers. :-)
Yesterday was the last day of Summer where I live. It was a glorious day: A cold front with a high-pressure system behind it came through in the morning, and when I went for my walk it was 65°F (18°C) and dry—right now it's below 50% humidity for the first time since I started walking.
There were people everywhere on Labor Day Monday. Bunches of cars clustered around houses where gatherings were being held, downtown buzzing with traffic, all the restaurants that remained open jammed. And then, Tuesday morning: everyone vanishes. Back to school, back to work, back to year-'round homes scattered all over the East or Florida. Things get quiet fast. At the end of October it will get even quieter—the last of the Summer people will have made themselves scarce by then.
The season is always over faster than you can believe.
Carjat: By the way, if you got curious about Étienne Carjat after Sunday's post, you can find some caricatures and some photographs by him on eBay and Abebooks. A guy on Abebooks is selling what were most likely pages from Carjat's book. A few people have asked for a link to a good book of Carjat's work: there isn't one, at least to my knowledge. There might be one in French.
EV downturn? There isn't one of those either, actually. All the brands except Tesla and VW saw gains in Q1 2024. Here are the numbers, from GreenCars:
VW lost because it discontinued the e-Golf in Q1 2023 and hasn't gotten the replacement to market yet. As for Tesla, surely some of those other companies' increases come at Tesla's expense. InsideEVs adds that Tesla is "...navigating some Tesla-specific problems, like its aging vehicle lineup, lack of a sub-$35,000 offering, and [a] loudmouth CEO."
Meanwhile, there's this. The takeaway, if you don't want to follow the link: "...sales of hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and EVs hit new highs in the first quarter of 2024. Hybrid vehicles were the big winner, with sales more than doubling, and owners becoming even more loyal." A worrisome tendency across all automobiles—gas powered too—is a lack of affordable options.
Howard Bond: A memorial exhibit of his work will be at Darkroom Revelations Gallery in Indianapolis, Indiana, this coming weekend.
The exhibit, with 30 of Howard's prints, will be open on Friday, Sept. 6, from 6–9 p.m. and Saturday, Sept. 7, from 1–4 p.m. Viewings can also be arranged by appointment.
Darkroom Revelations is managed by Tom Potter, Gayle Moore and Nancy Frass, who were friends and students of Bond and are themselves accomplished photographers in large format film and digital. The gallery is located in the Circle City Industrial Complex, 1125 Brookside Ave., Indianapolis. (Thanks to Eric Schoch for this.)
Walking: By the way, I'll leave this to you (because why would I presume otherwise), but I've done a little digging, and, as best as I can tell, 6,000–8,000 steps a day is optimum for people 65 and older, which includes moi. It's what I shoot for, anyway. I actually enjoy it, and it definitely does make me feel better the rest of the time.
Now it's time to get out into the weather!*
Mike
*UPDATE: I walked 7,627 steps, minus however many I walked around the house this morning. But I worked up to this very slowly, and if I don't feel good once I'm out, I don't push it.
Original contents copyright 2024 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. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
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Étienne Carjat—I don't know the French pronunciation—started out drawing caricatures, a big fad in France in the late 1800s. It was a sustaining source of income for many freewheeling bohemians; its practitioners included Honoré Daumier and the illustrator Gustave Doré. Once he settled on it, the artistically gifted young Carjat showed he was good at the hustle. Carjat learned photography from Pierre Petit, the photographer who turned the caricatures into cartes de visite for sale to the public. (There is a rather scary self-portrait of Petit here.) Carjat became a magazine publisher, also to capitalize on his caricatures, and published some of the famous French symbolist poets such as Charles Baudelaire, author of Les Fleurs du mal (the Flowers of Evil). Carjat was well connected in artistic circles. He was friends with the painter Gustave Courbet, and he must have been an energetic "people-person," as his portraiture included prominent artists such as Victor Hugo and the Italian opera composer Rossini. It appears Carjat's primary interest became his photographic portraiture, for which he was widely celebrated and earned many awards, but he continued his activities in publishing and drawing. Maybe the money was better.
(Carjat by Carjat—sorry, I don't know if I can reproduce this here.)
And he was a superb portraitist. He worked in the collodion process before it was mainstream, reproducing his pictures at least partially in Woodburytype, the most beautiful, but also the most elusive, of photographic processes. I'm pretty sure that the wall placard of the only Woodburytypes I ever saw in person, at the Smithsonian, stated that no one alive now knows exactly how to make them. I've seen that disputed since, but the few modern attempts I have seen didn't approach the beauty of 19th-century examples. Unlike many alternative processes (and oddly considering that Woodburytypes create a shallow bas-relief on the sheet), the beauty of the originals comes across pretty well in JPEGs, as you can see here. If you ever get the chance to see any original Woodburytypes, do not miss out.
More so than the process, Carjat's direct and honest style was what distinguished him. He worked without assistants, which was unusual at the time, and abstained from the decorative props that most photographers of the time used. His famous portrait of Baudelaire is characteristically piercing, plain, and full of personality.
Charles Baudelaire by Étienne Carjat
History sanitizes and neatens its now forever stilled participants, but when they were alive the symbolist poets and their milieu were a chaotic, unruly bunch. The legendary symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, in particular, has one of the oddest stories of all major writers, which is saying something. The son of a largely absent soldier father and a rigidly strict and controlling mother (Rimbaud called her bouche d'ombre, or "mouth of darkness"), he was an extreme embodiment of the angst-ridden teenager. He published his first poem at 15, and also appeared to have matured as a poet by that age: in that same year of his life he wrote "Ophélie," often anthologized and still considered one of his best. As a teenager he had a notorious two-year homosexual affair with the older poet Paul Verlaine, whose 17-year-old wife was pregnant when they met. Bob Dylan fans will recognize both names from the song "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" from Blood on the Tracks:
A brilliant student, Rimbaud quit school, was at one point thrown into prison for vagrancy, and at some point decided that as part of his identity as a poet he needed to purposefully effect what he called a "long, immense and rational derangement of all the senses," by which he meant a headlong descent into dissipation—rife with what would now be called "un-self-regarding behavior," vulgarity, thievery, indulgence in the favored drugs of the French bohemians such as absinthe, hashish, and opium, and flagrantly poor personal hygiene.
Then, abruptly, at the age of twenty, after finishing Illuminations, his last work, he quit writing literature, completely and forever. He spent the remaining 17 years of his short life, before dying in 1891 of bone cancer, traveling and doing his best to live a sober and steady, though still interesting, life. As an adult he lived mainly in the Middle East, and for his last 20 years slept outdoors. From those years, we have the letters. He has had an outsized influence on all sorts of artists ever since, not only Dylan, but people as diverse as River Phoenix, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Edmund Wilson, and Jack Kerouac among many others. His work, often taking the form of prose-poems, lends itself to translation and is satisfying to read in English.
He's even been cited as an influence on teenage high fashion. There is a famous poem, "Le Dormeur du Val," which lyrically describes a sleeping young soldier, revealing only at the end two bright bloody holes in his torso; he is already dead. In homage, the 21st century fashion designer Hedi Slimane created dress shirts with red wounds embroidered on them, with red sequins for blood.
Sword in a cane
There is a portrait of Rimbaud by Étienne Carjat, but there might have been more. It's one of the most famous of Carjat's works, but, as you can see, maybe not the best. For one thing, Rimbaud's school chum and lifelong best friend, Ernest Delahaye, said Rimbaud's eyes were "pale blue irradiated with dark blue—the loveliest eyes I've seen." Meaning the picture might've been better in color! Anyway, the story goes that Rimbaud and Carjat were both members of a group of artists, poets and painters called "Vilains Bonshommes" (basically, "bad company"), and, at a dinner of the group, one of the members, Albert Mérat, a poet, had brought a sword hidden in a cane. There was some sort of drunken altercation, and Rimbaud took Mérat's cane-sword and attacked Carjat with it. In a sort of symbolic retaliation, Carjat, who had actually been injured, went home and destroyed all the photographs he had taken of Rimbaud, and scraped the glass plates clean of the negative images (early glass-plate photographers often did this to re-use the glass). As a result, the portrait is known only through eight surviving prints.
Arthur Rimbaud at 17 by Étienne Carjat
Not that it would have survived anyway. Like photographers as disparate as Carleton Watkins and Jacques Lowe, Étienne Carjat's work is now known only through the surviving examples that were disseminated during his lifetime, in Carjat's case as cartes de visite and as prints. The great portraitist died in 1906, at the age of 77, in Paris. Years after that, in 1923, his archive of photographic works was sold to a "Mr. Roth," and that was the last of it—none of it was ever seen again.
Mike
Original contents copyright 2024 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. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
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