The Online Photographer

MIKE EATS CROW (Several Off-Topic Updates and Commentaries)

An undated picture of Katharine White. Photographer unknown.

Mess and sludge: It's fantastic to be back to normal. After a couple of weeks of sleeping well again, I'm feeling hugely better. My heart issues, which I guess were pretty serious, or potentially so, have all but gone away. I'm sleeping through the night most nights, and I've bounced back amazingly: normal energy is something you don't know you've lost until you get it back. Over the months (years?) that I was being affected by these issues, I was chronically sleep- and oxygen-deprived, which made me run-down and lethargic, and it was affecting everything in my life. I not only feel much better suddenly, I even look healthier in the mirror. Day by day, I'm back to chipping away at the mess and sludge created by neglect when I was "down." It's going to take me a while to get everything set right again, but I'm on the way and making progress.

Dropping in on a whim: The great open secret of all spiritual programs and systems that is that trying to help someone other than ourselves is actually a sure path to our own happiness. It's always been right there out in the open, but it always has also been, and  still is, widely ignored—so strenously ignored it seems like the advice itself must be invisible. As a friend put it once, "I'm really not all that important, but I think about myself all day long." In this time when we're seeing untreated narcissism all around us, when bad actors of every sort are elbowing themselves forward through the crowd to claim undeserved attention and unearned reward, the more moral path is simply to turn our focus away from ourselves and offer it gently to others. Anyway I've been looking for a way to contribute to my local community; and yesterday I signed up to be a literacy volunteer. I don't know what I'm getting myself into. I guess we'll see.

It all happened sidewise: I got an email outlining the stern penalties that would result if I didn't get my car inspected; so I took the car to get inspected; and the inspection station told me my tires would not pass; so I took the car in to have the snow tires put on, because they're newer. Not that we're getting any snow. Anyway, I had an hour and a half to kill, and Literacy Volunteers of Ontario and Yates (local county names) was four or five doors down from the tire shop. I dropped in on a whim, and talked away the whole hour and a half with a guy my age named Phil, who lost three fingers in a lawnmower accident when he was three. He lives in this area with his wife because they find that "people take care of each other here." Before I knew it I had volunteered. By such small sideways steps do our lives follow their winding paths.

Serendipity: I meant to go to a local restaurant alone the other day and found I had left my phone at home, which meant I would have nothing to read as I ate. There is a rather mysterious organization across the street that gives away bread, and I think clothes too, and I had a vague idea that they sometimes put used books out on the sidewalk that you can take for free. So I went in, and they indeed had two bookshelves full of books to give away. One was Onward and Upward in the Garden by Katharine S. White. It collects twenty articles Katharine wrote about gardening for The New Yorker. Gardening as a topic is foreign to me—I can't keep a plant alive when I try—but, as I well knew, Katharine Sergeant Angell White was the legendary Fiction Editor of The New Yorker from 1925 to 1960, about whom William Shawn said, "More than any other editor except [founding Editor-in-Chief] Harold Ross himself, Katharine White gave The New Yorker its shape, and set it on its course." She was married to E.B. ("Andy") White, the author of Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web, who is one of my writer-heroes. I figured the book would have an introduction by Andy White. And sure enough.

I can't resist sharing a sample:

Writing, for her, was an agonizing ordeal. Writing is hard work for almost everyone: for Katharine it was particularly hard, because she was by temperament and profession an editor, not a writer. (The exception was when she wrote letters. Her letters—to friends, relatives, contributors—flowed naturally from her in a clear and steady stream, a warm current of affection, concern, and eagerness to get through to the mind of the recipient. Letters were easy. How I envied her!) But when she sat down to compose a magazine piece on gardening, faced with all the strictures and disciplines of formal composition and suffering the uneasiness that goes with critical expression in the public print—this was something else again. Gone was the clear and steady stream. Katharine's act of composition often achieved the turbulence of a shoot-out. The editor in her fought the writer every inch of the way; the struggle was felt all through the house. She would write eight or ten words, then draw her gun and shoot them down. This made for slow and torturous going. It was simple warfare—the editor ready to nip the writer before she committed all the sins and errors the editor clearly foresaw. Occasionally, I ribbed her about the pain she inflicted on herself. "Just go ahead and write," I said. "Edit it afterwards—there's plenty of time." My advice never had an effect on her; she fought herself with vigor and conviction from the first sentence to the last, drawing blood the whole way.

A tiny nugget of gold, of the sort which often pass by when reading E.B. White. The woman in the storefront said of the book, "that one has been here quite a long time." The book was free, so I donated five dollars to their cause.

Readings: As long as we are so far off topic, here are a few more essays I've come across recently. If you like movies, Molly Ringwald wrote a personal history called "Shooting Shakespeare with Jean-Luc Godard" that is vivid and charming. And if you've ever had an intimate but non-romantic relationship with someone of the sex you're attracted to at your workplace, you'll enjoy "The Bizarre Relationship of a 'Work-Wife' and a 'Work-Husband'" by Stephanie H. Murray. The former from The New Yorker, the latter from The Atlantic.

Eating crow: According to Wikipedia, "eating crow" means being humiliated by being proven wrong after having taken a strong position. Evidently crows don't make good eating, something rural Americans of a century and a half ago might have known firsthand but that we don't know any more, in the same way most of us don't know which plants in the local forest are edible. Supposedly the idiom "eating crow" comes from an 1850 short story, but I haven't been able to find the story. On the matter of compression socks—there's the alternative term I didn't know—I could not have been more wrong. I bought some Wellow socks at the suggestion of James Weekes. And they're great. They've already solved or helped with several long-term problems. Swelling, varicose veins, and my persistent problem with cold feet have all gotten markedly better in just this short amount of time. Plus, they're very comfortable. My only problem with compression socks now is that I didn't try them years ago.

Very little could be further from the topic of photography than this, but, still, I'm glad when I bring these subjects up: I always learn things I profit from. I hope you do, too.

Cheers,

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 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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Terry Letton: "The story about Katherine’s writing reminded me of my own struggles with writing. In my day it seems like English teachers were not interested in teaching us a useful skill like writing but imparting some supposedly god-given rules about alphabet manipulation. Of course thes 'rules' are nothing but social conventions subject to arbitrary change as society changes. I finally learned to write when I realized that writing is simply talking with a pencil. Clarity of thought is what’s important, not obscure parts of speech."

High Plains Farm

I have some interesting news to pass along—the deluxe signed and numbered slipcased edition of one of my favorite books is suddenly available, in limited supply. It's not a reprint—it's part of the first edition. The book is High Plains Farm by Paula Chamlee. The project is simple to explain: it's a selection of a large project Paula did to document the prairie farm where she grew up. She used an 8x10 view camera and made contact prints on silver chloride contact-printing paper. The entire project comprises 299 photographs and a full set is housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the gift of a collector when Roy Flukinger was Department Head and Senior Curator of Photography and Film there. Eighty-one of the pictures are featured in the book. The pictures are quiet, loving, nostalgic, and elegiac. I think it's fair to say that it's one of the best books of authentic Americana; of the West; of Texas; of large format; of documentary photography; and on the subject of home. I also love the essays in it. I'd personally rank it among the best books of American documentary photography of the second half of the 20th century. To me the pictures made me feel like I actually know the place in person. The farm is way out on the vast Texas plains, high up in the panhandle, in territory once controlled by the Comanche and the Kiowa. It goes without saying that the work is deeply personal. When the photographs were made, Paula's parents, then in their 80s, were still farming the 1,100 acres by themselves. Paula's parents, who are pictured in the book, are gone now, the old family farm sold. (Her mother lived to be 101.) Paula herself is in her 70s now, I believe. She's a lovely person and a lovely soul, and an accomplished artist.

The show and the book got a tremendous amount of press and attention when it was published in 1996. The exhibition was shown in many major museums, and it traveled for years. It was featured on PBS. Of course I own the standard hardcover, purchased around the time it came out. The deluxe edition, which I didn't know existed until a few days ago, was originally meant for collectors who bought a set of 12 original prints of their own selection; it was included as a complimentary addition to their purchase. Later, the deluxe edition and a print were available for something like $750. I don't think the signed and numbered deluxe edition copies have ever been available alone.

Now they are. I spoke to Paula this afternoon, and she has right around 100 copies left, sitting in storage at the Pennsylvania arts compound and home she and Michael built together. The price is $95 for the remaining standard hardcovers like I have, and $250 for the last copies of the deluxe edition. Both contain the same printed matter, so the pictures are identical in both, and the paper is the same. Paula and her late husband Michael A. Smith were and are book publishers who never made, or make, compromises with excellence; all their books are extremely, some might say fanatically, well printed. The pictures were printed by Gardner Lithograph in California. I also enjoyed Paula's discussions in the book about making the pictures.

This is not a TOP sale and I'm not receiving anything for sales. I've had to lash myself to the mast—I would really love to have one of the deluxe editions. But I already own the standard edition and my bookcases are full and then some. It's just one of my longtime favorite books and I wanted to pass the tip on to you. Here's the order page for both editions.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 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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The Life and Work of Sid Grossman

If you like 20th century B&W photography: Oren recommended a recent remainder to me—friend o' TOP Keith F. Davis's The Life and Work of Sid Grossman, co-published in 2016 by Steidl in Germany and Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York. I'm sorry I didn't know about it early enough that Keith and the publishers could benefit from sales, but you can get it for fifteen bucks from Hamilton Books.

Sid Grossman was an interesting character. In essence a teacher, he was one of the founders of New York's Photo League. (I believe the last surviving member of the old Photo League just died, but I've lost the reference.) Sid died young—he was only 42. His friend N. Jay Jaffee said his attitude was "arrogant and aggressive." He was a social activist who was denounced as a communist in the '40s—which also eventually spelled the end of the Photo League. His widow, Miriam Grossman Cohen, said that his inclusion in the show "The Radical Camera" at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, in 2013, "has pleased my bruised heart. At last he was vindicated. He was not a Communist spy. He was not anything but a brilliant photographer, a beautiful teacher and a good guy to those who loved him."

Sid Grossman, Aguadulce, Panama, c. 1945, from the back cover of the book

His tonal palette is grimy, darkish, and blurry, and his compositions are claustrophobic—in many of the pictures in the book he crowds the edges till you get a feeling like you're getting jostled on the subway. When the book arrived I made a conscious effort to put away my old categorizing prejudices and look at the work with "new eyes." I found pictures that have a lot of life and movement and care for people in them, and a faith in the odd moments that flash past; they feel like glances, which was in fact his stated aim.

A few resources: The Steidl page is still up; Sid's artist page at Howard Greenberg; and there's a brief bio at The National Gallery, now archived. Perhaps his best-known picture is his portrait of Woody Guthrie.

Surprisingly, this is the first book ever published on Sid Grossman. Oren points out that a bonus in the book is several portraits of Sid by none other than our (his and my) old friend David Vestal. More on the book, which is of fine physical quality, after I read the essay, perhaps.

Mike
(Thanks to Oren Grad)

Original contents copyright 2023 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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Shelley Stallings: "Mike, one of the many reasons I read TOP every morning while drinking my coffee is your dedication to sharing the work of other, often unknown to me, photographers. Sid Grossman is one of those previously 'unknowns' for me. Now he is not, and when Keith F. Davis's book, The Life and Work of Sid Grossman, shows up on my doorstep in a few days (from Amazon, as it seems to be sold out at Hamilton Books), I will get a chance to become much more acquainted with the life and photography of Sid Grossman. Thank you again for all you do to promote the love and knowledge of our chosen expression of art. Written from a rainforest island off the coast of Southeast Alaska, where light is elusive this time of year."

Kenneth Tanaka: "This is an excellent book, well worth getting if you're at all interested in that period of mid-century New York street/social photography. The Radical Camera, the catalog associated with the show Mike mentioned, is also worth reading for a good contextual overview of Grossman's world in those years. Grossman's rep as a 'teacher' was perhaps not terribly well anchored in actual performance practice. He charged worshippers a few bucks to listen to him aimlessly rant sometimes for hours. He had some real issues. Better with a camera, at least for a few years, than with people.

"As an aside, may I recommend the late Helen Gee's book Limelight for a rich depiction of Grossman and so many other New York photo characters of the mid-century. Gee established the first gallery / coffee house devoted solely to photography in New York, and the book is her account of those years. I recently finished my second reading of Limelight. I think many TOP readers might enjoy it, too."

Matt Haber: "Almost on topic...my mother's cousin Sonia Handelman Meyer was a member of the Photo League, and died this past September, at 102. Maybe she was the last surviving member?"

Mike replies: I was aware of Sonia (and sorry for your family's loss), but I think there was another who died even more recently. A reader sent me a link to the obituary. I just can't find it now.

Scott Kirkpatrick: "All of the folk singer portraits that turn up at your Woody Guthrie link are worth a look. It's practically the Great American Songbook, right there. The names are familiar (if you like that music), but pictures are not easy to find, and these are clear and not over-dramatized."

Steve Wilcox: "I just picked up the Sid Grossman book at a used book shop in London. Great book of an otherwise lesser known mid-century photographer. But, Sid was listed in the seminal The New York School book by Jane Livingston and Sid is listed and covered as one of the leading personalities of that movement. Saul Leiter was also covered in this book which was way ahead of it's time. It was printed in 1992. It is the one photo book I would likely keep above all others."

Mike replies: That is a pretty fabulous book if you like that sort of thing. But John Gossage made up the idea of the "New York School"—David Vestal, who is one of the photographers included, said none of them ever called themselves that or thought of themselves that way. Still, it's defensible to group artists together like that even when they didn't think of themselves as a group. The book is beautiful.

NINE: The Twelve Links of Christmas 2022*: A Biography of the Pixel

A Biography of the Pixel, by Alvy Ray Smith

Are you perhaps of the opinion that a pixel is a little square of color abutting other squares? And that digital pictures are comprised of millions of these? I once thought so. But no, silicon breath, are we ever wrong about that—and Alvy Ray Smith III, the cofounder of Pixar, is here to explain it to us. A pixel is actually not a little square, and never was. (It's a point, with a spreader function applied to it, spoiler alert.)

If you want a brief explanation, go to Alvy Ray's talk at Town Hall Seattle, start the video at 25:15, and follow it for ten minutes or so to 35:44. 

The pixel as the organizing principle of all pictures, from cave paintings to Toy Story
The Great Digital Convergence of all media types into one universal digital medium occurred, with little fanfare, at the recent turn of the millennium. The bit became the universal medium, and the pixel—a particular packaging of bits—conquered the world. Henceforward, nearly every picture in the world would be composed of pixels—cell phone pictures, app interfaces, Mars Rover transmissions, book illustrations, videogames. In A Biography of the Pixel, Pixar cofounder Alvy Ray Smith argues that the pixel is the organizing principle of most modern media, and he presents a few simple but profound ideas that unify the dazzling varieties of digital image making.

Smith's story of the pixel's development begins with Fourier waves, proceeds through Turing machines, and ends with the first digital movies from Pixar, DreamWorks, and Blue Sky. Today, almost all the pictures we encounter are digital—mediated by the pixel and irretrievably separated from their media; museums and kindergartens are two of the last outposts of the analog. Smith explains, engagingly and accessibly, how pictures composed of invisible stuff become visible—that is, how digital pixels convert to analog display elements. Taking the special case of digital movies to represent all of Digital Light (his term for pictures constructed of pixels), and drawing on his decades of work in the field, Smith approaches his subject from multiple angles—art, technology, entertainment, business, and history. A Biography of the Pixel is essential reading for anyone who has watched a video on a cell phone, played a videogame, or seen a movie. 400 pages of annotations, prepared by the author and available online, provide an invaluable resource for readers. (Publisher's description.)

One interesting fact I came upon early: he points out that almost all pictures are digital now, and that analog pictures have all but vanished, their number no more than a rounding error now compared to the great avalanche of digital pictures. And as they say above, he names museums and kindergartens as about the only places left where you can reliably encounter analog pictures on a regular basis.

It also tells the story of CGI; why the denizens of the Computer Division at Lucasfilm all got fired (because George Lucas got divorced and had to raise money for the divorce settlement); and the founding of Pixar. By the way, the first fully computer-generated movie sequence in a major motion picture happened in 1982, "with our one-minute 'Genesis' sequence in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It showed a bare planet catching on fire, melting, and then forming mountains and seas and green forests." They were working on the software in advance of Moore's Law, knowing that at some point in the future they'd have the computing power they would need to use it.

You should be able to tell from all this if you need to read this book or not! It's very engagingly written, something I can discern despite the fact that I am somewhat underwater as I read it. In school I was the arty guy, not the sciency guy. The paperback is 560 pages. It looks fascinating, and if I were younger I'd be game, but when I contemplate it at my age I'm sorta like a hiker looking across at the distant far side of a swamp...prior to setting off, I just can't picture myself not getting bogged down. We'll see, though. It's on my list.

And it could be perfect for someone on your gift list. Check it out.

Mike

*A list of a dozen beautiful gifty things in the spirit of the season.

Original contents copyright 2022 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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Annie Leibovitz's Little Big Book

The SUMO version weighs 57 pounds

I didn't check yesterday to see if it arrived early, but the Annie Leibovitz book—the trade version of the $7,500 Taschen SUMO of 2014 I think it was—was scheduled to be released today, and already it's out of stock at Amazon. That probably means that the pre-orders were heavy enough that they sucked up the whole first shipment.

That probably requires a whole lot of pre-orders. You've got to assume that Amazon gets a pretty big first shipment.

The SUMO was so big that it came with its own...well, book. It was a book that needed an extra book. You also got a Marc Newson designed tripod stand (remember him? He designed this Pentax) and your choice of four covers—Whoopi Goldberg (shown), Patti Smith, Keith Haring, or David Byrne. It was signed and limited to 10,000 copies (there are a few left). Need even more book? Copies 1–1,000 were a "fine art edition," that included all four of the covers and a signed original print (that one's sold out). The trade version, just out, is much smaller but still pretty big (see the stats in Book o' the Week, below).

Both versions—big and littl(er)—start, I believe, with the black-and-white photograph of Richard Nixon’s helicopter lifting off from the White House lawn after he resigned as president in 1974, and end with the formal color portrait of Queen Elizabeth II taken in a drawing room of Buckingham Palace in 2007.

This trade version is unlimited, so there will be more copies to come. I assume. See below for the link.

Mike

P.S. And if you prefer grittier pictures that are more like reportage (although already showing her interest in rock stars, top politicians, and celebrities), try Annie Leibovitz: The Early Years, 1970–83. A German edition of what was originally the catalog of a show in France. Annie famously began photographing for Rolling Stone when she was still in school.

Book o' the Week

Annie Leibovitz. At long last, the unlimited trade edition of the humongous, limited Sumo edition by Taschen. Mind you, it's still a huge book—15.4 inches high, 556 pages, and almost 13 pounds. And the price! (But that's nothing—the Sumo weighed 57 pounds and cost $7,500.) This is the closest ordinary folks (with ordinary shelves) will get to the ultimate Annie. UPDATE: Well, that was fast—Amazon's supply didn't even last one whole day! "Temporarily out of stock." But you can order and get in line for when they get more.

The book link above is a portal to any purchase at Amazon. You're very kind use our links, as they help support the site.

B&H Photo

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.

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

Mani Sitaraman: "A minor footnote. It's worth remembering that the original "SUMO" edition by the German publisher Taschen was Helmut Newton's massive tome of the late 1990s [1999  —Ed.], which was a publishing masterstroke. It was priced at $1,500 and Helmut Newton signed every single one of the 10,000 copies of the sold-out single print run. The stand for the 66 lb. book [I can't confirm that either, although I remember it set a record as the heaviest book  —Ed.] was designed by the eminent French architect Phillippe Starck. The publishing of the book was an art world event and the book and stand were spoken of as an art object in itself. The photographs were pretty good, too. Taschen, which realized it was on to a good thing, businesswise, went on to do a few other "SUMO" books in the following two decades, including Annie Leibowitz's, but none of those made quite the same splash."

Mike replies: And copy #1, signed by a large number of the people pictured in the book, was, at least at one time, the most expensive 20th century book ever sold at auction. I don't know if that record still stands. Taschen has diluted the "brand" somewhat—for a while, the word "sumo," applied to books, meant only the Newton title. No longer.

Also, you can still get the "small" trade version of the Helmut Newton Sumo, the 20th Anniversary Edition published in 2019.

Mani replies: "Mike, my citation for the original list price of Helmut Newton's 1999 book was this web page. But the price I cited was incorrect. It incorrectly states a fifteen thousand dollar price per volume. The New York Times story from 23 years ago about the book event reported that it was priced at $1,500, fifteen hundred dollars, still a sensational price for that era, for a book that was mass printed rather than hand-made, albeit to a very high standard. [I made the correction in your earlier comment  —Ed.] Used volumes do seem to go for five figures, though, nowadays. Here's a listing at the Taschen site, where you can reserve a used copy at $25,000 (if it becomes available.) And the Taschen page does confirm that that first, and only, print run of Newton's book in that size was 10,000 copies."

Mike: $1,500 was my memory of it, although I was reluctant to correct you without evidence because I tend to have a poor memory for numbers. Thanks for following up on this!

It's worth noting that 10,000 is a pretty large run for a photo book. It used to be that 3–5k was ordinary, although now that most printing is done overseas it seems to be more like 1.5–3k. My information is out of date about this; I should look into it again. The sumo got a lot of free press 'n' promo, though, and it was genuinely unusual, so the chosen press run was justified.

By the way, just as an aside, I was never a fan of Newton—in my hothead younger years I was wont to refer to his taste as "Nazi nudes," and I don't find them titillating, pardon the implied double entendre. That's not just a lazy slander—Newton frankly admitted that he was influenced by the Nazi imagery he absorbed as a child in Germany. However I did very much like the book of portraits by his wife June, published under the pseudonym "Alice Springs" by Jack Woody at Twelvetrees Press. It's one of my favorite books. And incidentally, it's also a Leicaphile book—she used a Leica and a 90mm lens to shoot those portraits. June Newton died just last year at the age of 97, in Monte Carlo. That one might be more scarce than the sumo, now.

Jeff: " haven’t weighed it, but the biggest and heaviest book I own is Photographs From The Collection of the Gilman Paper Company from White Oak Press. It’s not only massive (including slipcase), but a tour de force by Richard Benson, who took four years to create faithful reproductions of 200 historical works using a combination of offset lithography, halftone screening and other techniques, which he describes in the afterword. Each photo is nicely tipped in on a single page. One needs a strong back to lift the book. I keep mine on top of one of my waist-level custom wood bookcases designed to store my first edition photo book collection. Recent auction prices are in the $3–5k range."

Mike replies: That book is in my imaginary photobook collection. In reality I've never seen it, but I've wanted to ever since it was published.

Kristine Hinrichs [Saturday Oct. 8]: "It is now available on Amazon—I just ordered (via your link 😀)."

Mike replies: Thank you Kristine! (for that last part.)

The Material World Is a River of Change

The great departure starts today—soon, the Labor Day crowds will depart, and people will begin closing up their lake houses for the year. The people at the camp* across the street have two more months before their water is cut off for the Winter, and most of them will be gone by then.

But my, were there a lot of people in these parts over the weekend. Even people who barely ever use their lake houses must've been here. I got caught in a traffic jam in Penn Yan—so many cars lined up in front of a traffic light that I thought it better to detour around it. I could count on one hand the number of times that happens in a year.

There have been lots of changes around here since I moved here seven years and 17 days ago. The neighborhood is coming up in the world—many new houses have been built and a number of older ones remodeled and restored.

And here's another interesting change. Do you remember this picture?

It's a picture I took with my iPhone that we included in the "Mike's Miniatures" print sale, which consisted of prints from iPhone files, for those who were curious about that. At the time I encountered it, I wished I'd had a bigger camera and a tripod with me, but all I had was my iPhone, so I made do. (And by the way, as you're seeing it here is how it's best.)

This year I've been planning to look for the full moon nearest to Thanksgiving and be back at the same spot around moonrise, hoping to take a similar picture. But look what's just happened:

 Not only is there no cornfield there at the corner on the right, but they cut down the woods! The older woman who owned those woods sold them to the farmer next to her (he's letting her stay in the house for the rest of her life), and the new owner's judgment was that the land should be restored to its "original" state—original meaning the 1940s—namely, it should go back to being cornfield. There won't be cornstalks there till 2023, of course. But in November most of the trees will be gone.

Mulligans
The older I get, the more I think that It's Not About the F-Stop by Jay Maisel is the most important instructional book for photographers published in English. (Followed by On Being a Photographer, by Bill Jay and David Hurn.) It's all about how to be a shooter, and it covers pretty much everything important. "Shoot It Now" is something Jay thought was so important it's the second thing he says in the book. "Never come back," Jay says. "Shoot it now. When you come back, it will always be different."

Sometimes, though, you want it to be different. There are times when you know there's a picture there but you can't get it for some reason. The light is wrong, it's the wrong season, something needs to move out of the way—lots of times, photographers have "spots" where they sense a photograph is lurking, and they go back from time to time to see what things look like. And sometimes that does work. I've also gone back to try again when I blew it the first time—I messed up and didn't get the picture. For example, I took a photograph with the monochrome camera the other day of what has got to be one of the prettiest houses in Ontario County. And as a nice added touch, the owner was out front on a riding lawnmower. Well, the picture I took features a blown-out sky—very little recoverable detail—and there's motion blur in the lawnmower. So, a failure. It's okay; I have a feeling that one's a color picture anyway. I'll go back there again, though. To take a mulligan.

It's when you see the exact photograph you want and want the exact photograph you see that Jay's advice applies.

The farmer clearing the land did tell me that he intends to let that old oak at the corner of the field stand. There might still be a picture there when the full Beaver Moon rises at the end of the road this year; it won't be much like last year's picture, is all. I'll try to be there when that day comes, if I can, just so I can give you a report.

Mike

*"Camps" around here are neat little collections of well-kept mobile homes, stacked up in rows. It's a sweet deal—my neighbors pay ~$2k dues a year for a comfy 7-month abode with shared lake access. Many of them bought their places years ago for what are now great bargain prices, in the $50–100k range. You can't do this on many lakes in the Midwest, which have lake frontage requirements and limitations on building houses in back of other houses on lakes.

Book o' the Week

Fred Lyon, San Francisco Noir. "The version [of San Francisco] that Fred Lyon celebrates in his new book is a classic San Francisco full of smoky jazz clubs, neon lights in the fog and sharply dressed men and women stepping on and off of trolley cars. Made mostly during the 1950s and '60s, Lyon's images are big on atmosphere and style, and hit many parts of the city that visitors love." (PDN)

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Geoff Wittig: "Change is the only constant.

"I've been doing a deep dive into the landscape where I live, and in particular the area around the Genesee River that includes Letchworth State Park. I've hiked the park and surroundings for more than 40 years, and despite the 'preserved in amber' nature of a park, the forests and fields are constantly evolving. This year they took a big hit from very dry weather and a massive infestation of spongy moth (previously known as gypsy moth) caterpillars, so the woods are looking a little threadbare.

"A geography professor at SUNY Geneseo just self-published a book on the park with numerous maps and aerial survey photos dating back to the 1930s. It's astonishing how rapidly new forests overtook the previously cleared agricultural land making up much of the park acreage. And how quickly bustling small farm villages disappeared without a trace."

Albert Smith: "I really like It's Not About The F-Stop. I pick it up often for the little micro lessons that are easily digested.

"Regarding 'Shoot It Now' I was able to attend a lecture at a local College by Henry Diltz, a photographer that was in the epicenter of the Laurel Canyon scene in the late '60s and beyond, documenting the music scene and shooting many famous album covers from that era.

"He went out in his car with Crosby, Stills and Nash driving around to find a location for a shoot. They saw a well-worn house with a front porch. They ran onto the porch, the three musicians formed up and Diltz fired of a few frames. When the film was developed the photo was fine except that the three guys were not in the order that corresponded to the name of the group (CSN) which would be on the cover over the picture. They decided that since it was their first album and they might not be known, they should be in the correct sequence so people could identify the band members.

Nash, Stills and Crosby

"A couple days later, they got back in the car, went to the house to find... it had been completely razed. Everything was gone and they were gearing up to construct a shopping center. The first CSN album has the 'wrong' photo and people were mixing up the band members because of that inability to redo the error.

"Shoot it now, absolutely."

GAS Explained

Found this as part of a larger discussion about the anticipation of rewards ("wanting") as opposed to achieving the actual reward itself ("liking"):

"Your brain has far more neural circuitry allocated for wanting rewards than for liking them. The wanting centers in the brain are large: the brain stem, the nucleus accumbens, the ventral tegmental area, the dorsal striatum, the amygdala, and portions of the prefrontal cortex. By comparison, the liking centers of the brain are much smaller. They are often referred to as 'hedonic hot spots' and are distributed like tiny islands throughout the brain. For instance, researchers have found that 100 percent of the nucleus accumbens is activated during wanting. Meanwhile, only 10 percent of the structure is activated during liking.

"The fact that the brain allocates so much precious space to the regions responsible for craving and desire provides further evidence of the crucial role these processes play. Desire is the engine that drives behavior. Every action is taken because of the anticipation that precedes it. It is the craving that leads to the response."

—Atomic Habits by James Clear, "p. 108" in the digital file

So there's that settled.

I think I wrote once about undergoing an intense period of shopping (strangely, I can't remember what for now), finally buying the camera I wanted, and then suffering the very peculiar feeling of missing shopping—I had the real camera right there, sitting on the desk, but I still wanted to look at it online and read reviews about it. At the time I thought that was just a little bit crazy. And yet, maybe you can relate.

Mike

Book o' the Week

Grit and Grace: Women at Work in the Emerging World. Unfortunately, this will be the posthumous swan song of the indefatigable documentarian Alison Wright, whose untimely death at 60 in the Azores this year meant she never got to see it published. Wright's photography was inextricably entwined with her life's dedication to social justice, a sense of acceptance of humanity, and a roving search for beauty and color.

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David Brown: "The way you described buying the camera and then still wanting to 'shop' is the experience I've had with my last new car!"

Timothy Auger: "‘GAS explained’ also accounts for the sex lives of a few people I know. The chase is more fun than the actuality. That doesn’t apply to me, of course. Of course."

Stan Makes the Big Time

Longtime TOP reader and frequent commenter Stan Banos, who comments here as Stan B., is the subject of a new article on A Photo Editor. Impressive.

You might recognize Stan's "Red" photo from our "It Must Be Color" Baker's dozen.

And, you can see/buy the book here.

Congratulations Stan!

Mike

Book o' the Week

 All About Saul Leiter. The Amazon writeup for this book says "Photography lovers the world over are now embracing Saul Leiter"—and is that ever true of me—"who has enjoyed a remarkable revival since fading into relative obscurity in the 1980s." One of my favorite photographers. Beautiful photopoems. Saul's Early Color (which you can still get for around $300) was one of our all-time bestselling book links. (I bought two, one to thumb and one to not touch!)

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Open Mike: Mr. Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln is the quintessential and arguably the greatest American. You might think it would be possible to read everything that's been written about him if you set your mind to it, but one lifetime might not be long enough: Paul R. Tetreault, director of Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., says that more books have been written about Lincoln than any other person in world history except Jesus. He should know: in the lobby of the Ford's Theater Center for Education and Leadership (across the street from historic Ford's Theater) stands the Lincoln Book Tower, intended to contain all or most of the books ever written about the 16th President. The tower is eight feet in diameter and three and half stories tall!

The Lincoln Book Tower seen from above

With all those books out there, why recommend just one? The title should tell. Lincoln: A Photobiography by Russell Freedman is a "carefully curated" collection of images of Lincoln, in both photographs and other kinds of art. Lincoln, who was known as the most photographed man of his time, was arguably the first politician to understand the importance of what we now call "image" to both publicity and leadership.

And you can read it in a couple of hours: the text is a brief introduction to Lincoln's life intended for grade schoolers. Call me weird, but I don't necessarily scorn books for children. They give me the facts quickly and clearly and in overview, and I like that. It's always frustrated me that biographies in particular are by custom so long and detailed. The assumption is that we will want to know every detail that is known. Some such biographies can't even be contained in single volumes. William Manchester gave us 3,008 pages about Winston Churchill in three volumes, which is more than I want to know about Winston, and Dumas Malone had to go one better, giving us 3,329 pages about Thomas Jefferson, in six volumes. I sat down to rest midway through volume two and then let Tom Jefferson go on his way without me. At that rate you'd better be a pretty dedicated reader to acquaint yourself with more than a small handful of the interesting people of history by means of such books. I'd rather get the Cliff Notes. I collected a series for a while called "The Penguin Lives," in which a variety of writers were chosen to write short biographies of notable figures, but the series didn't last very long, unfortunately. There is one about Lincoln, however: Abraham Lincoln by Australian author Thomas Keneally, who also wrote Schindler's Ark, which was made into the movie Schindler's List. Because Thomas Keneally felt enough had been written about Lincoln during the war years, though, his biography covers only Lincoln's life before the war, which is leaving a lot out. Of course, poet Carl Sandburg famously gave the 3,300-page treatment to Mr. Lincoln, leaving not much out at all.

I can't speak to the reproduction quality in Lincoln: A Photobiography, originally published in 1986, because I only have the Kindle edition. But it's a good primer about Lincoln both biographically and photographically, and would make a nice brief introduction for any newcomer to Lincoln's story, whether a young person, or someone from another country, or just an American who wants the basic story laid out in summary, in plain English.

I've written about Lincoln before, for example in this post from 2006.

So what is the best full, adult biography? My vote would go to Benjamin P. Thomas (581 pages) as being the best written. It's graceful, restrained, moves along smartly, and is enjoyable to read. It seems shorter than it is.

I'm sure it's in the Tower. And by the way, the titles of the 6,800 or so books in the Lincoln Book Tower are real—they represent actual books—but the ones in the Tower are replicas made of aluminum, hollow, and all securely fastened together.

Mike

Book o' the Week

The Essential Calvin and Hobbes: a Calvin and Hobbes Treasury by Bill Watterson. I just read a dire, apocalyptic article about mental health during the pandemic, so I decided on trying an "off topic" book rec that is slightly lighter than our usual fare. If you don't appreciate it, don't worry, it's a blog. Something else will be along soon.

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Featured Comments from:

Earl Dunbar: "I grew up deeply admiring Lincoln and devouring a lot of his story. That included a couple of trips to New Salem (Ilinois), one trip to the (newish) Lincoln museum in Springfield, Illinois, at least two to the gravesite(s) and numerous visits to his Springfield home at 8th and Jackson.

Lincoln Home National Historic Site, Springfield,
Illinois. Photo by George Longenecker.

"The home is, to me, the 'holy grail' of all the Lincoln sites. It is both sombre and inspiring at the same time. I have always gotten some chills when I’ve visited. It’s so well done that, even despite the presence of rope barriers, invariably I get the sense that Lincoln, Mary, Tad and all the family might casually just appear, going about their normal, pre-Presidential lives."

One Advantage of Making a 'Desert Island' List

It's a form of foolishness to compile little lists of "bests." (Why limit yourself? Could you really look at ten movies over and over again? Eat only ten meals?) But here's one practical advantage of a "Desert Island" (DI) book list: it will probably reveal what's most important to you personally.

Most of my DI book list is small format B&W film photography. And as I was mulling over the list, more great books kept coming to mind. Where is James Ravilious? Elliott Erwitt? Eisenstadt? Salgado? Minor masters like Dan Weiner and Charles Harbutt? Larry Towell and Eugene Richards? Leonard Freed? The names kept coming. But they were all, or mostly, small format B&W film photographers. That's what I did; it's what I liked. I did it because I liked it and I liked it because I did it.

Ken Tanaka just told us that he is "thoroughly devoted to color photography" and color in photography, and that he has a "special shelf" where the most frequently viewed selections of his 750+ volume photo book library live. So what do you think the chances are that his special shelf does not contain mostly great examples of color photography? Whereas color was mostly missing from my list.

I have a friend who is devoted to esoteric fine art and avant-guarde photography. He has (or had, I don't know) a famous collection of 5,500 photobooks—and not a single volume of Ansel Adams or Joel Meyerowitz. Many of his books are extremely scarce and rare. And he likes books that are authored, as cohesive, self-contained artistic creations in themselves, as opposed to collections and compilations. I don't know which books he would save first in a house fire, but I'd bet heavily that the best-selling and quite common trade book Henri Cartier-Bresson Photographer, a greatest-hits collection, which was on my list, wouldn't be in his arms as he exited.

John-Paul Caponigro was an early convert to digital imaging and is a master of Photoshop. Wouldn't you think his DI list would reflect his passion for those things?

My friend Andy Moursund, book dealer par excellence, has a photobook collection extracted from the many thousands of books that filtered through his bookshops over many years. He's always had a special feeling for books about New York City. When I asked him what he specialized in, he listed a number of things, then added, "...and books about New York City, of course." That "of course" seemed to imply that it was just natural that anyone would be interested in those. We could ask him, but I'll bet his DI list would contain several NYC books.

Geoff Wittig is a hardworking family doctor in nearby Dansville who has a passionate, longtime interest in landscape. He both paints and photographs, in color as far as I know. I've only heard stories of his book collection, which exceeds the space he has to contain it (it's definitely on my list to rectify that as soon as this COVID thing leaves us alone), but I'll bet money his personal DI list would contain mostly, or all, books of color landscape photography, and maybe painting too. And that he'd be left thinking of the landscape-in-color books he had to leave off.

Reveal
So such a list is only a reflection in a mirror. But, of course, our reflection in a mirror can reveal ourselves to ourselves. Because with only ten or twelve to choose, the things that really "get us where we live," the things that are really most important to us, the things we love best, will tend to crowd out the things were merely approve of, or admire because we think we ought to, or that we think others would enjoy.

So think about a DI list, if only because you'll see yourself reflected in it. Don't be shy—go for the gut. Include only the things you love the most. Maybe it will help clarify what you're actually most interested in, when push comes to shove.

Mike

Book o' the Week:

Ernst Haas: New York in Color 1952–1962. "When Haas moved from Vienna to New York City in 1951, he left behind a war-torn continent and a career producing black-and-white images. For Haas, the new medium of color photography was the only way to capture a city pulsing with energy and humanity. These images demonstrate Haas's tremendous virtuosity and confidence with Kodachrome film and the technical challenges of color printing."

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Featured Comments from:

James Weekes: "I am glad that you made it clear that these were your favorite books for a desert island and not the 'best' books. Best varies from person to person, favorite remains."

Geoff Wittig: "Thanks for the shout-out, Mike! I do indeed have a fairly extensive collection of color landscape photography monographs, including 'greatest hits' like Art Wolfe, Galen Rowell, and Christopher Burkett. But I also have lots of black and white landscape volumes. Ansel Adams, of course, but also Michael Kenna, Don Kirby and other contemporary masters. I just added a summary volume of Robert Adams' work, though now monographs on paintings are my main obsession. If the house was on fire, though...I'd be grabbing the Chris Burkett books and the exquisite Arion Press letterpress version of Ansel Adams' Sierra Nevada."

robert e: "Mike, you're also making a great case for the value of other peoples' 'desert island' lists, as a kind of specialist curation. I may not know much about niche 'X,' but that list by somebody who has been deep into it for decades is going to be a great place for me to start. All the better if said connoisseur is known to us."

Animesh Ray: "This necessarily will be a rather personal choice, which must be colored, subconsciously or otherwise, by personal experiences. I grew up by the banks of the Ganges. My connection with the big brown big-hearted river of my childhood must impose heavily on my choice if I am to be stranded on a desert island. I will take with me Raghubir Singh's The Ganges, if only to dream of those lost days."

Dave_lumb: "Strictly speaking a Desert Island list should number eight if you follow the format of the BBC radio programme.  ;-)  I compiled my list a while back, and it does reflect my interest in British, primarily rural, life."

Patrick Medd: "The definitive treatise on the male need to make lists is perhaps High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, which should certainly be in the list of top ten books about lists."

Favorites (Take With a Grain of Salt!)

Thomas Walsh asked:

I always enjoy the 'Book o' the Week' as well as the links to books by the photographers that you write about. I had no knowledge of Jerry Uelsmann and found his work interesting. I also enjoyed the blog on Ernst Haas. My question is, of your personal collection of books dealing with photography or photographers, which ten would you want if you were on that proverbial desert island? Thank you.

Hmm, interesting. I have a friend who hates lists, because he feels they promote a mindset that's antithetical to openness to new things. Ranking things, in his view, trivializes and reduces them. But I have a weakness for lists—they're fun for me, in an indulgent, sort of squirrelly way. So I'll attempt it. These are just my personal favorites, though. And only "as books"—this isn't a list of either my favorite photographers, or the top photographers I would necessarily recommend other people get to know. The list is all B&W and all social documentary, for one thing, albeit often with artistic and expressive flair.

It's not very up to the present. My "active period" as a photographer lasted at best 23 years, from 1980 to 2003. I lost my darkroom in 2000, and bought my first digital camera in 2003. Of course I started photographing at age seven and was out shooting a few days ago, but that 23 year figure is accurate. I had more success writing about it than doing it, and we tend to migrate into doing what we are rewarded for.

Most of the books here are ones I learned something from—work I engaged with because it related to my work, or at least my aspirations for my work. So there's no attempt here to create a survey or to be inclusive or anything else of that sort. Also, I can only recommend editions I've seen. Sometimes reprints can be as good as or better than the original, sometimes much worse. You have to check. In no particular order:

Lee Friedlander, Like a One-Eyed Cat. Readily available used.

Hank O'Neal at al., Eds., A Vision Shared: A Classic Portrait of America and Its People, 1935–1943. Whoa, it's been reprinted! I didn't know that. The best collection of the work of the Farm Security Administration photographers of the Great Depression. I haven't seen the reprint; I have the 1976 edition. If anyone has seen the reprint I'd be very interested in your estimation of its qualities. This should be a Book o' the Week assuming it's well done. But you can't assume.

Aperture magazine issue 111: Swimmers, available in hardcover. I believe this was edited by Nan Richardson; my copy's in the barn so I can't look. An obscure choice, but you asked.

Josef Koudelka, Exiles. I'm not currently up on the various editions; the one I have is from Aperture, 1988, the American version of the one published in Europe by Robert Delpire.

Helen Levitt, Crosstown (PowerHouse, 2001). Note that Ms. Levitt didn't like this book—she didn't want to sign my copy!

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Photographer (in print for many years and through several editions from Bulfinch). Looks like this has been reprinted too, by Prestel, in 2020. Haven't seen the reprint. The ideal collection, the ideal introduction to him.

Keith F. Davis, Ed., Multitude, Solitude: The Photographs of Dave Heath (Nelson Atkins, 2015). I love this book so much I'm kind of afraid to look at it too much. Lots of my favorite books show too much wear. I should have bought two. Masterful work, masterful book. I'm a great admirer of Keith's books in general, but this is his masterpiece I should think.

Peter Galassi, Ed., Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective (MoMA, 1996). Roy's original prints are actually so extreme in his chosen style (he deliberately printed dark and murky—combine that with the current fashion for tepid, wan lighting in museums and you get disaster) that this book is a rare case of reproductions being better than originals IMO. These reproductions look like originals under strong light, something possibly no one will see ever again. Hyperbole? Perhaps. Get the book. Forced to pick one all-time favorite photobook, this would be the one.

Vanessa Winship, Schwarzes Meer (Mare, 2007). Never available in the U.S.A. Text in German. A portrait from peacetime of the region of the world currently being torn apart by war. Pure shooting of great genius.

Jeffrey Fraenkel, Ed., Seeing Things (DAP, 1995). I like all of Jeffrey Fraenkel's collections, but this one remains a favorite.

Be cautious reading too much into all this. To be taken with a grain of salt as they say. The full list of books I treasure for various reasons would easily be over 100, and a "ten most recommended" list would be completely different from this one. Also, I could easily put together a ten best of color photography, a ten best of photo history, a ten best of readings, a ten best of surveys (only two on this list), a ten best of snapshots and "found" photography, and off we go, merrily.

A friend—actually I forget who, maybe Mark L. Power or Frank DiPerna, both gone now, both among my teachers—bruited the concept of a "sponge period," that time of life when we're soaking stuff up, curious, questing, intense, intent. I'm older now, and know what I know. I still love new work and I still love photobooks, but I have to admit that I seldom engage with books now like I did when I was armed with Tri-X and a 35mm camera and could make prints; for years now I've been thinking of others more than of myself. But that's as it should be, so it's all all right.

Mike

Book o' the Week:

Ernst Haas: New York in Color 1952–1962. "When Haas moved from Vienna to New York City in 1951, he left behind a war-torn continent and a career producing black-and-white images. For Haas, the new medium of color photography was the only way to capture a city pulsing with energy and humanity. These images demonstrate Haas's tremendous virtuosity and confidence with Kodachrome film and the technical challenges of color printing."

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David Mackenzie: "I have the 2019 edition of A Vision Shared. The quality of the book is excellent from the binding to the text to the quality of the image reproduction. I haven’t seen an earlier version so I can’t do a comparison, but this edition is excellent."

Book Review: 'Ernst Haas: New York in Color 1952–1962'

Continuing our little tour of recent "Books o' Interest" that I have actually seen, we move up the ladder from yesterday with a more recommendable book: the wonderful Ernst Haas: New York in Color, 1952–62. The Austrian immigrant was the first color photographer ever to receive a solo exhibition at MoMA, and his New York pictures were featured in LIFE magazine in 1953 in two successive issues, the first time that had been done.

Disclaimer: Yr. Hmbl. Reviewer has a distinct attraction to the culture of what used to be called "Midcentury" America and will very soon need to start being called "Mid-20th-century" America. Also, I love Kodachrome, which was to Haas like oil paints were to Claude Monet. So there's those things to take into account.

Ernst Haas, Untitled, 1952, page 87 in the book

I'm guessing this is going to be a very enjoyable little book for a lot of people. Haas himself said, "I want to be remembered more by a total vision than a few single pictures." In '52–'62 you get an ideal tour through that total vision as it relates to NYC. The reproductions are excellent; there is not a single picture that is violated by the gutter; the color is neither exaggerated nor subdued; there is little chance of any clandestine Photoshoppery; the book is big enough, but not too big to comfortably handle; there is a generous number of pictures (I count 173) without imparting the sense that they threw in everything they can find; the editing, both spread by spread (broken every now and then by a single picture with a blank page opposite) and in terms of the flow from start to finish, is astute and sensitive, very well done; and Phillip Prodger's essay is informative and nicely written. He doesn't even shy away from technical points that will be of interest to some of us (many academics think that's slumming, somehow): for example, Phillip Prodger says Haas shot most of these pictures with a particular kind of Kodachrome Professional daylight film that had a speed of ASA (now ISO) 8(!). Rather than be defeated by this, Haas embraced blur, "...making what others might have seen as shortcomings an integral part of his work." A good example of a specific stage of technical development becoming an indivisible element of the aesthetic vision of its era.

Note the just-right amount of white space, titles and page numbers on the same pages instead of listed in the back of the book. This is how photographers like to see photographs presented in books. Speaking for myself anyway.

I'd even venture to say that this is very close to an ideal photobook by my standards. Maybe the public wants more flash and splash, but what we get is a direct and respectfully presented view of one talented and sensitive photographer and what he did with a camera. Ernst's son Alex Haas (who wrote the Foreword) and Phillip Prodger (who is Senior Research Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art, and used to be Head of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, London), have done a splendid and fault-free job here. Every photobook should be so no-nonsense. I'd love to hear what Gordon Lewis, Ken Tanaka [check], Joe Holmes, Mike Chisholm [check], Mike Plews [check], and Rodger Kingston (among others) think of it and whether they agree, but personally I'd put this on the short list of titles that dedicated color photographers might want to have on their shelves.

The book is a good introduction to Ernst Haas, who I've always thought of as a "photographer's photographer." Literally, in that photo enthusiasts are the ones most likely to appreciate him fully. Although he was famous and celebrated in his day, he was too popular for some. You gotta be a shooter, baby, to get how good a shooter this guy was. Haas, I think we will all agree, had chops to burn. For us, that doesn't grow old.

Faced with the task of finding something to criticize, I guess I'll say that I don't really cotton to the cover picture much. (You can see it up top.) For one thing, it has only two little incidental patches of warm color in it, and is otherwise almost entirely composed of blacks and whites—a tad odd for a book with "color" in the title. But it's fine, actually. I don't mind it.

In short, this is a treat. When I started writing this post I had to go retrieve the book from a place right next to my armchair. It's been there because I've paged through it numerous times purely for the joy of it, when I put aside reading and want to relax a bit. Another Haas quote: "Color is joy. One does not think joy. One is carried by it."

Of course, you'll already know Ernst Haas and whether you like him or not; and you'll take into account my prejudices that I disclosed at the top of the post. If those things or the vintage and subject of the pictures don't put you off for any reason, then this is warmly recommended. I've already gotten my money's worth out of my copy. Oh, and speaking of which: Ernst Haas: New York in Color, 1952–62 is affordably priced, too. It's not one of those $40 books priced at $80. It's a $40 book priced less than that. (Note the current cost of the earlier 2011 Color Correction. Whew. Glad I bought that when I could.)

Fine book all around. Quintessential. This one stays.

Mike

P.S. Elliott Erwitt has a nice picture of his friend Ernst looking through a viewfinding device that looks like the cylinder of a revolver. You can see it at this link. Just a classic Erwitt picture that sticks in my head is all.

Book o' the Week

Larry Clark, Tulsa. A classic of 20th century photography. Teenage Lust (NSFW) was always the hard title to get—$500+ for the paperback right now—but it wears its voyeurism too much on its sleeve. I have them both, and Tulsa, IMHO, is the better book. Available at a good price right now, but not always. Get it while it's cheap.

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Patrick: "For those of us who don't know anything, what is 'the gutter'?"

Mike replies: Good question. The inner edges of the two facing pages of an opened book.

Here's a photograph "run across the gutter" (this is the McCurry book I reviewed a few days ago). Visually, the gutter creates a false graphic element; portions of the picture become difficult to see; and the gutter destroys the graphic integrity of the view as a unified whole. Here's something closer to what the above photograph looks like. You can see how the gutter interferes with your ability to "look into" a scene, as if through a "window," which is one of the baseline ways a photograph functions.

Crossing the gutter was a design trick originally used primarily in magazines, which at least tend to lie more flat. In most layout programs, the gutter is represented by a single vertical line dividing in half the rectangle of the double-page spread. Designers should know better than to cross the gutter, especially in books (because they don't lie as flat as magazines), especially in books of photographs, especially in books where the photographs are the main point, but they're often seduced into thinking that larger = greater impact. (Quote by Paul Rand, who taught design at Yale: "If you can't make it good, make it big.")

In some cases, running a picture across the gutter also means that the two split parts of the same picture can be printed on two different sheets through the press, which sometimes results in the color or density not being consistent across the same photograph.

In certain examples the visual damage of crossing the gutter is relatively trivial, for instance a magazine advertisement where all the information is on one side of the picture and there's nothing but more background across the gutter, but I've seen some hilarious fails, such as a gutter running right through a face, such that the each eye is on a different side, the nose disappears, and it seems as though the head is unnaturally skinny.

(The rest of the Paul Rand quote is, "And if you can't make it big, make it RED!", but that part doesn't pertain here.)

Kenneth Tanaka: "There’s little I can add to your comments, Mike. I pre-ordered this book from Prestel months before it was published…and it was absolutely worth the wait.

"As most regular TOP readers probably know I’m thoroughly devoted to color photography. Actually I should state that as 'color in photography.' [Ken was one of the sponsors who made the show and book Color Rush possible in 2013. —Ed.] The historic artistry of monochrome photography is undeniable. But color is the medium’s third dimension, with its ability to add powerful inflective gestures impossible with grayscale. Ernst Haas and a handful of other mid-century photographers genuinely grasped the use of color's inflective powers at a time when the color photo medium was still costly, inflexible, and failure-prone. (Which is why nearly all the early color masters were also trained commercial photographers). Yes, some of the characteristics of that color (mainly the palettes) were resultants of the Kodachrome medium of the day. But Haas knew exactly where he was laying-in the color to make his paintings. If you want to test this thesis try converting any one of Haas’s color images to B&W. It’s like looking at a zombie. The form and composition remain apparent but it’s like listening to a high schooler read Shakespeare.

"I can offer no higher praise for Ernst Haas: New York in Color 1952–1962 than to report that it lives on my 'special' shelf where the most frequently viewed selections of my 750+ volume photo book library live. And rare has been the week that I’ve not looked at this book since it arrived.

"For anyone wanting another affordable book with a wider view of other masterful (mostly) mid-century color work try New York in Color by photo historian / curator Bob Shamis (Abrams, 2011). It’s an excellent survey of color imagery of New York made by Haas and many other very renowned photographers. And it’s also designed simply with one large plate per page! New York in Color also lives on my 'special' shelf, by the way."

JTK: "I love this book! I also have it out next to my chair."

Lawrence Plummer: "Thanks for this reference, Mike! I took your advice 11 years ago, getting Color Correction (the current used price!!!) and quickly picked up this one. Thanks again!"

Robert Stahl: "Mike, wonderful review of Ernst Haas: New York in Color, 1952–1962. He was, indeed, a 'poet' with a camera. Had the opportunity to take in one of his photo lectures many years ago in the Pacific NW. After his talk he played three audio/visual programs on flowers, abstracts, and Venice, Italy that were totally captivating! This coming July, Steidl is publishing a new book on him titled Ernst Haas: Abstrakt. Cartier-Bresson in his book The Mind's Eye paid tribute to him with the following words: "For me Ernst was sensitivity itself; he had an irresistible charm and wit, a knowledge of the world, its color...He disappeared swiftly like a comet leaving behind a long trail of human understanding and with such finesse.'"

Book Review: 'In Search of Elsewhere'

When I put a "Book of Interest" or "Book o' the Week" at the end of posts, they're often books I haven't seen—just something that looks like it might be good, or that other people have recommended to me. I used to go up to the bookstore at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester to at least look at books firsthand, but a store remodeling and, shortly afterward, the advent of the pandemic put a stop to that. I need to look into whether that's now possible again.

Secondarily, the book links are meant to be a portal for you to Amazon from TOP. As you know, we content providers get a little kickback from Amazon for products sold when buyers come to them from our sites. It doesn't come out of your pocket—the price to you is the same either way. Same when you buy something from B&H Photo by first going there from here. These spiffs aren't much, but they add up, and they've been an important reason TOP has kept on cranking for so long now. I've always tried to be a good Amazon citizen, and have never tried to game the system in any way. Some time back, however, Amazon insisted that I stop providing a general link to them, telling me that I'm only allowed to link specific products. So that's what I do now.

Mini-reviews
Anyway, several of the books that I've pointed to at the ends of posts have recently come into my hot little hands, either because I bought them or they were sent to me. So I thought I'd review them. The first one is Steve McCurry's In Search of Elsewhere. I recommended it mainly because it was on sale at the time for a very low price. I lived below the poverty line for a while, during which time I bought mainly remainders, and the "bargain hunter gene" still pokes its way through from time to time. It's still inexpensive (Amazon also told me not to advertise prices), although not as inexpensive as it was when I recommended it, and it currently has 97% four- and five-star ratings on the site.

Steve McCurry is both a National Geographic and a Magnum photographer, and is either the most popular or among the most popular photographers at either organization. Which is really saying something. I'm told that he's been very generous with Magnum in particular, helping to keep the famous agency prosperous. He has released a great many books. I haven't seen them all.

Mr. McCurry's reputation has however taken some hits in recent years, first in 2016 when it was revealed that he heavily Photoshops some of his pictures to make them more picturesque, removing not just visual distractions but—well, whole people among other things. When confronted with this, he initially passed off the blame to his staff and implied that he didn't know what they were doing, which, if true, is almost worse than if it isn't true. Then, in 2019, Tony Northrup reported on some details of McCurry's most famous photograph, "Afghan Girl" (Sharbat Gula, when she was a schoolgirl) and McCurry's studio disputed some of them. You can do a deeper dive on that if you want to, by going to YouTube and searching "Tony Northrup Steve McCurry." I'd prefer not to get into it. Tony Northrup seems to have been conscientious in his reporting and in correcting his mistakes, and I have no criticism of him; on the other hand, photographers do mildly exploit their subjects sometimes to get photographs, and that's not inherently wrong. I hope to comment (on this general issue, not this specific controversy) in a future article.

Verdict
Despite its ratings on Amazon, I doubt In Search of Elsewhere is among the best of Steve McCurry's books. Objectively, the reproductions aren't bad, but they're not wonderful either. The surfaces are quite matte and the blacks don't seem well supported. (Disambiguation: Matt, capital M, is a name, short for Matthew or Mathew; matte, also correctly spelled matt, means having a non-glossy surface; and a mat is a pad for the floor or a table or a cardboard sandwich with an opening for displaying artwork.) This makes the colors seem a little hyped and just a touch too pure or pastel. Brightening colors is the fashion these days, but to me it emphasizes one of color's weaknesses* rather than one of its strengths. Honestly, the color here isn't bad. It just doesn't quite look integrated to me, and that's a liability considering that some of his other books are good to great in this respect. The other problem with the pictures is that many of them cross the gutter, an all too familiar strategy beloved of designers who work on flat computer screens but much despised by photographers who are interested in seeing the visual impression of the whole frame unobstructed. Designers are always going to ignore the integrity of the page, and most of us are always going to prefer they wouldn't.

So this book isn't going to earn a spot at TOP World Headquarters, where the shortage of shelf space is well past the critical stage. To be clear, crystal: thumbs down, although not emphatically. It was said of J.J. Cale that whichever of his albums you came across first would always be your favorite, and that might be true of Steve McCurry books as well. So if you come to this one first, well, good. The book of Steve's that I continue to recommend (having been impecunious at times, I'm big on the strategy of finding "the book you should have if you can have only one") is Looking East, a compilation of portraits of many kinds of people from many different near- and far-Eastern countries. I love that book, and have paged through it slowly many times for pleasure. The hardcover is now very inexpensive—more inexpensive than In Search of Elsewhere was when I mentioned it. Looking East is a rich mix; none of the pictures cross the gutter; the large reproductions are close to ideal and most have the coveted palette of Kodachrome; and the book contains the best representation of "Afghan Girl" I've seen, assuming you can bear to sully your tender sensibilities with a picture of a person who's not 100% happy having her picture taken (in which case, don't look at "Migrant Mother," either, or Karsh's portrait of Churchill or...well, you're just going to take the average and stop looking at photography). I don't think I've ever seen a print in a museum, but I have the original National Geographic cover...somewhere, unshelved.

Thinking out loud here, but you know what? A book of pictures of people who aren't happy having their picture taken could be great. Someone with exquisite taste like Jeffrey Fraenkel would have to do it, though. A dozen great examples have come to my mind just since writing the last paragraph. Robert Frank's picture of the Black man in the park glaring at him; Jim Marshall's picture of an angry Johnny Cash giving him the finger (although it's unclear if Johnny was really angry or just posing); Ron Galella's picture of Jackie Onassis crossing a Manhattan street (no ambiguity there); Jill Greenberg's "End Times" pictures, of small children in distress. The list is potentially very long.

Anyway Looking East is the McCurry book to have, in my humble and only partially-educated opinion, unless you either want a lot more of them than just one, or don't want any.

Mike

*Namely, that color is distracting, one of the two major traditional dismissals of color photographs. I'm not sure whether that was supposed to mean it's distracting to viewers, or to photographers themselves when they know they're recording color.

Book o' the Week

Larry Clark, Tulsa. A classic of 20th century photography. Teenage Lust (NSFW) was always the hard title to get—$500+ for the paperback right now—but it wears its voyeurism too much on its sleeve. I have them both, and Tulsa, IMHO, is the better book. Available at a good price right now, but not always.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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.

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

Geoff Wittig: "Many successful artists (in any field or format) follow a kind of arc to their career; initial experimental striving, trying out a range of styles or subjects, some hits and a lot of misses. Then a gradual distillation or focus, finding their voice, producing progressively better work that finally starts to sing. Some get even better with time, hitting a stride and creating real masterpieces. A few can maintain that peak creative output for years. Even the best artists tend to find a groove, mine it, and eventually settle down to crank out gradually less adventurous, more derivative and repetitive stuff. Some end up as parodies of themselves. To my eye Steve McCurry has followed this arc. His journeys through Afghanistan at the time of the Soviet occupation are the stuff of legend, his Kodachrome work pitch-perfect. His body of work from Central Asia is astonishing. But how do you top that? Having thumbed through some of his (multiple) recent books, it's hard to avoid the impression that he's strip-mining his own legacy and becoming a consumer brand."

Mark Rouleau: "I was at the library about a year ago and saw a book of Steve McCurry's portraits. That might even have been the title of the book. At any rate, I flipped through it, page after page of people from around the world glaring and scowling at the camera like the Afghan girl. 'A book of pictures of people who aren't happy having their picture taken' indeed."

Stan B.: "If it’s anything that spoils a portrait for me, it’s a smiling face. Automatically reduces it to a snapshot. Doesn’t mean you have to look like a badass—just anything other than...a smiley face! Sometimes, I’ll swallow the happy shot of a stranger just to get them relaxed and get it outta the way—before I ask them, 'How 'bout a serious one now?' Or, I’ll just futz around with the camera controls until the subject starts losing patience (and their smile) with the incompetent before them...."

Mike replies: I used to get through it by taking two rolls and then slowing way down and taking an almost-break. Then they seemed to be ready to be themselves. I should do an article about missing portraiture. I can't even give portraits away for free now.

Albert Smith: "I was fortunate to have met McCurry when he came to the College in town to donate a print of the Afghan Girl to the photography department for display. While there they had an exhibit of many of his other works (many in this book), and for all the hype about being able to pull up anything in seconds on the web, nothing beats a real print with gallery lighting. I just kept looking at the photos impressed by the quality. He was personable and answered any questions.

"I took the opportunity to verify and settle debate that raged on the various Nikon-centric sites that I was on in the early 2000s...what lens was used to photograph the Afghan Girl? It was the classic 105mm ƒ/2.5 which settled many an argument on those sites."

Tom Burke: "Interesting how information changes perception...I've got a McCurry book, Untold, which (I think) explains how he came to take some of his best-known pictures, and I liked it. Then I read some of the online articles about the edits to pictures he'd taken, and Tony Northrup's articles about Afghan Girl, and my view changed. I don't think I've looked at that book since.

"I think you're wrong to put Afghan Girl, Migrant Mother, and Karsh's Churchill in the same category. Sharbat Gula was a child, and had no agency in the events of that day. The migrant mother had some, even if only to say 'No' to Lange (but she didn't); and I think we can assume that even if he was annoyed, Churchill remained entirely in control of the proceedings. No comparison there at all, IMHO, even without Tony Northrup's points."

Mike replies: Yes, of course, but, Tom, he's not hurting her. Taking a picture of someone neither hurts them nor "steals their soul" or anything else in the way of damage. If a photographer forces a child to become naked, or do something repellent, then of course it's wrong. But to pose a schoolgirl for a while, unless you have some sort of proof of bullying or berating or of the photographer overriding her protestations, it's just not harm. No harm no foul, as they say.

I've photographed lots of kids I simply encountered. Strangers to me. Usually I asked their parents, if they were nearby and it seemed polite. Many times the kids didn't even know they were in a picture. Sometimes I asked them to cooperate, and they did. One of my favorites is of a kid at a playground doing a flip off a swing. I'd been talking to him and complimenting him on his athleticism. He was old enough to be at the park without his parents. I asked him if he'd do it a few more times so I could take a picture. He did it a few more times. How is that harm? He was about 12 and he was perfectly friendly, as was I. I was there with Xander who was about four at the time. I thought of this because page 97 in the book I'll review tomorrow, Ernst Hass: New York in Color 1952–1962, shows a picture of a girl on a swing. Seems highly unlikely Haas got her consent before taking that picture.

In the U.S., people don't own legally-taken images of themselves, nor do they have to consent to it being taken. (See Nussenzweig v. DiCorcia.) From a socio-political standpoint, if we stand by while the idea gets going that just being photographed constitutes harm done, and the idea becomes widespread and bigotry gets calcified (as I think it has already started to do), then the whole project of deliberately documenting life on the fly with a camera is pretty much done....

Alex G.: "I had occasion to think about Steve McCurry recently and I realized that I don't have much use for him any more. I appreciate his visual language: the use of color and the grace of his compositions (though he slipped a lot in my estimation when we learned that many of these shots were less than truthful). But the whole project of being Steve McCurry feels completely out of date in a world where people living in India, S.E. Asia, and elsewhere are perfectly capable of capturing their own lives. I'd rather see people as they see themselves. Perhaps I've been reading too much Ibram X. Kendi, but I've come to think that McCurry's work and similar reflects a colonialist and racist mindset. I don't mean that McCurry is a white nationalist or consciously racist. But the status quo—the way we, in the 'West' frame our relationship with these cultures and nations—needs to evolve. At this point, I'd much rather support the work of Asian photographers. Maybe you can highlight a few of these."

Ben Marks: "Re 'Mike replies: I used to get through it by taking two rolls and then slowing way down and taking an almost-break. Then they seemed to be ready to be themselves. I should do an article about missing portraiture. I can't even give portraits away for free now.' When I was in college in the 1980s, a friend of mine and I asked mutual friends to come sit/stand/cavort for portraits. We were trying to learn how to make portraits with the equipment we had...it was amateurs posing amateurs, if you know what I mean. We were each using our own cameras, and each of us quickly discovered that the first three rolls of film rarely contained the 'keeper' from the session. It was almost as if it took roughly 100 pictures for even our friends to stop being as self-conscious as they appeared in those initial shots (and they say boredom is a bad thing). Being impecunious college students, we stopped loading film in our cameras for the first 100 clicks or so under the theory that the images were wasted anyway and film was our biggest expense. And the experiment turned out well. I still treasure those portraits, the best of which I printed on Ilford Galerie matte paper. The goal was to present each sitter with a portrait that they thought of as an authentic representation...not easy, given the disconnect between how we see, or hope to see, ourselves and what a camera actually records."

Mike replies: My father, who was an amateur but had publication credits, used to call them "B-clicks." He would set the camera on B and shoot away for a while. Then when the subjects loosened up he'd put film in.

Jayanand Govindaraj: "This consent business is a rich-nation fad. What I would say is that it is probably not prudent to apply one's own cultural bias onto other cultures that we do not readily understand. In Chennai, India, where I do my street photography, hardly any parent or child is unhappy at having their photographs taken, knowingly or unknowingly, or will react with anything other than delight when they see their images on the rear LCD panel—and you will see this across religions, be it Hindu, Muslim or Christian.

"Of course, when I am photographing in Europe or USA, I am careful to have local friends with me, or join a street photography group on a photo walk!"

There Are Always Mysteries with Vivian Maier

[UPDATE Sunday: I did send alerts to both the publisher and Amazon about this, and of course I have no idea if that was of any help or not, but at any rate the sham books have been removed from Amazon and Amazon U.K. It's interesting to become aware of this kind of scam; something to be on the lookout for. —Ed.]

Check this out:

What the...? The top one is the real book. It is by ANN MARKS, is published by ATRIA PUBLISHING GROUP (DBA "Atria Books"), and it is listed as having 368 pages.

The bottom one uses the same title (because titles can't be copyrighted), and the same cover (probably the photograph is not copyrightable, being as it's Vivian Maier, although I believe the graphic design is a copyrightable element). A different author's name is displayed, the book is listed as "Independently published" (no publisher's name given) and the number of pages is a paltry 29.

Innocent confusion? I doubt it.

Check out the review of the one from author Ann Marks at The World's Best Photography Magazine.

And don't be fooled into paying for the wrong one.

Mike
(Thanks to Tom Burke, who first alerted me to this, and several others)

Book o' the Week:
Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny, by Ann Marks, is the most complete picture of the mysterious governess-photographer yet—and the picture is more surprising than we thought. NOTE: There is a similar-looking book that appears to be an attempt to confuse buyers. Beware!

the link can be a portal to Amazon for your holiday shopping. Thank you kindly for helping support The Online Photographer!

The following logo is also a link if you click on it:

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.

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

Dan Khong: "I am reading the real book by Ann Marks. I think the street photography skills and eye and timing of this unknown nanny photographer beat even the likes of the great HCB. And 140,000 images shot during her lifetime? Wow."

Book Review: 'Our National Monuments' by Q.T. Luong

[Comments have been added.]

Our National Monuments: America's Hidden Gems by Q.T. Luong. Terra Galleria Press, 308 pages.

Forward by Sally Jewell; Marine National Monuments text and photographs by Ian Shive; with contributions from 27 citizen organizations protecting our public lands and waters at risk.

Published November 9, 2021. 5.2 lbs., 12.25 x 10 x 1.3 inches. Available at Amazon and The Book Depository.

Guest post by Geoff Wittig

Landscape photography is in my humble opinion the ideal avocation. It provides a legitimate excuse to seek solitude, and to get away from the virtual existence of computer screen or tablet in favor of the real thing. There’s a deep literature supporting the mental and physical health benefits of spending time outdoors immersed in nature. (Check out Florence Williams’ charming recent book The Nature Fix. You’ll thank me later.) Coming away with some beautiful photographs is almost a fringe benefit.

However, landscape photography is one of those pursuits that is simultaneously quite easy to do, and exceptionally difficult to do well. The headlong advance of digital capture over the past two decades has reduced some of the technical barriers. But the determination to hike repeatedly to a remote location until the light is perfect, and the ability to craft a beautiful composition, can’t be bought. They still reside a few inches behind the viewfinder. For more than thirty years I have lived near the gorge of the Genesee River and Letchworth State Park. After countless attempts, I have managed perhaps 35 good photographs, and five or six I’m genuinely proud of. Ansel Adams famously said that "Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop." Evidently I need to get out more.

This meandering digression is intended to express my admiration for the herculean achievement Our National Monuments represents. As photographer and author Q.T. Luong explains in his introduction, the National Monuments resulted from a 1906 law permitting Presidential protection of lands of "natural or cultural significance" without the prolonged legislative process required to create a National Park. This facilitated protecting lands one step ahead of loggers, miners and rapacious collectors of Native American petroglyphs. Such protection remains incomplete and subject to revocation; in 2017 a wide-ranging Federal review threatened to greatly reduce the size of several Monuments and open others to resource extraction.

Unlike the National Parks, most of the Monuments have few if any tourist amenities. Consequently, exploring them is not for the faint of heart. Cellphone service is frequently non-existent, and visitors are well advised to have adequate wilderness skills and provisions. These challenges make the quality of Luong’s images all the more impressive.

Physically the book is lovely, with very nice matte paper and high quality varnished photo-reproductions. As with the photographer's previous book Treasured Lands, text is again typeset in a modest sized but very readable digital version of the neoclassical Baskerville font. Each section is introduced by a representative of a conservation group devoted to preserving the Monument in question. The photographs are consistently beautiful, running the gamut from stunning vistas in perfect evening light, to dramatic storm-scapes, to telling details. Without exception they are technically immaculate, stunningly detailed, with a beautiful yet restrained color palette. There are a handful of aerial photographs which blend unobtrusively with more conventional photographs. The sections on marine Monuments in the Pacific Ocean, including lovely underwater images, were provided by Ian Schive, who has published several books on the National Parks himself.

As with Treasured Lands, each section is followed by very welcome thumbnails describing the photographs’ settings and a map showing the locations of the images. Adventuresome readers are offered access to more extensive PDF guides and maps to assist with visits to these sites for a nominal $15. Those interested can check the book out at its companion website, www.ournationalmonuments.com, which includes access to sample page spreads and thumbnails.

Readers can appreciate this book from several perspectives. The photographs are beautiful, and they provide a look at remarkable landscapes quite literally far from the beaten track. They’re an introduction to another vast range of public lands wilder and more remote than the more familiar National Parks. The solace of nature and wild places remains every bit as relevant as when Thoreau penned Walden.

Geoff Wittig

Available from Amazon, The Book Depository, and the book's website. NOTE that it's better for the photographer if you order through the website; also, you can get signed books and collector's editions with original prints there.  —Ed.

Book o' the Week

This is the book that sold 1,100 copies through our links, back when it first came out in 2007. It's essentially a catalogue raisonné of the work of the iconic American landscapist. I suppose it won't sell any more, since everyone already has a copy, but the link can be a portal to Amazon for your holiday shopping. Thank you kindly for helping support The Online Photographer!

The following logo is also a link if you click on it:

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.

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

Jeff: "One wouldn’t expect that a computer science wiz, living in France, would ultimately turn a small photo hobby into such ambitious and admirable photographic and book projects covering the U.S. at its best. Plus he seems like a very nice fellow, as his interview with Kevin Raber shows…."

Ugo Bessi: "By the way, it's worth mentioning that, in a previous life, Q. T. Luong made important contributions to computer vision; if I'm not wrong, he studied how to reconstruct a three-dimensional scene from a couple of stereo photographs."

Michel Hardy-Vallée: "It's worth pointing that QT Luong is also at the Internet epicentre of large format photography. His 1995 info page has been perused by many an aspiring LFer, and their further questions have been answered and debated in the Large Format Photography Forum. Anybody who ever thought about view cameras in English has laid their eyes on QT Luong's contribution at least once."

Luke: "Geoff W. should contribute to all your book reviews."

Rick Denney: "As the most minor of the moderators on the Large Format Photography Forum, I've long known QT (who owns the LFPF) and deeply respect everything he does and has done for large-format photography in particular. I was pleased to see this new work, and it has just arrived, still wrapped in plastic, waiting for me to have the time to give it the correct consideration. I need to refresh my supply of Scotch first, because I expect to be humbled and will need solace.

"What amazes me is how good photo books are these days for such small prices. The market is not kind to such efforts, but then we all benefit even if QT is likely required to live with only the satisfaction of work well done. People pay the least for what other people are willing to do for free, and that doom sweeps up most of the arts, leaving much of it for those who can fund their own projects. Thankfully, QT has stepped up."

David Pye and the Workmanship of Risk

For some while now I've been meaning to write a post about books in pairs. I have a quirky tendency to shelve books next to other books that I sense they fit with. Sontag sits next to Barthes, Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word is shelved next to John Berger's Ways of Seeing. Why? I guess sometimes the pairings are obvious—Catherine Drinker Bowen's Francis Bacon: The Temper of a Man next to The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral, of Frances Ld. Verulam by Francis Bacon Reprinted from the De Luxe Artists' Editions of the Peter Pauper Press; sometimes it's because the two books nurture or amplify each other, sometimes it's because I feel they balance each other out or contradict. I like it when books contradict; I want to see each one's view from that differing angle. I guess it has no real meaning...it's just a personal idiosyncrasy. I'm still not sure I'm ever going to inflict that particular essay on you.

But as I was thinking about it again I was poking around on Amazon seeing what's in print and what's not, and I came across David Pye's lovely little book The Nature and Art of Workmanship again. This rare little gem hasn't always been easy to get in the 53 years since it was published, so I thought I'd just throw out another recommendation for it for whatever it's worth. Pye was Professor of Furniture Design at The Royal College of Art in London from 1948 to 1974, and this book pertains mostly to furniture...on the surface. The book is really about the philosophy of craftsmanship, however. Read it with a flexible and open mind, and you can apply many of his ideas to many other fields, to many arts and most crafts. It can be easily seen as pertaining to the "crafting" of photographs (fine art prints, at the very least) and in some ways, I think, even cameras(!). I know that ever since I first read it I've found it helpful to think of his concepts of "the workmanship of risk" and "the workmanship of certainty" with regard to photographing—in a way it's what Garry Winogrand is talking about in this marvelous and thought-provoking little video.

Right now, here, today, I'm not going to jump into the deep sea of talking about photography's relationship to craft, either historically or the way it's been changing again lately. It's a big subject. In any event, this is not a book that's directly about photography. But it's one of those rare books in which someone who's been thinking for a lifetime about a subject he knows deeply makes an attempt to share his hard-gained wisdom with others. In that way it's the opposite of much of the cookie-cutter, research-and-regurgitate, processed, pasteurized book product that passes for being publishable all too often these days. I certainly enjoyed it when I read it, and I treasure it on my shelves now, and I recommend it to you with feeling if it sounds like it might appeal.

Mike

[Yr. Hmbl. Ed. is taking a break this week. Originally published in 2009.]

Bill's Wonderful Portraits

I'm reluctant to talk about a book until I've finished it, and I haven't finished reading this one.

It's not long, but it's dense. And rewards thought.

However, this is definitely my "Book of the Year" for 2020–21. It's never going to be a mainstream book, because there are only 250 copies in existence. Although there could possibly be a reprint someday.

By way of a disclaimer I'll remind you that I used to be a portrait photographer and have always liked portraits. And I mean always—I got in trouble at age six for clipping portraits of the Presidents out of my parents' back issues of National Geographic to make a "collection."

The premise is very simple: a doctor collected old portraits to hang in his office. As a labor of love, he has self-published a book in which he presents 111 of them. On the page facing each, he tells you everything he could find out about each portrait. Some of what he found out is remarkable. The essays are sometimes no more than a description of the photograph, because nothing is known about it. But Bill is an excellent writer, and his words draw you not just into the photograph, but into the life of the person depicted. Many of the subjects are anonymous (some are not). Same for the photographers. But all are informed by the same collector's eye and each one is lovely and fascinating (to various proportions) in its way.

"With a whimsical look at lives known, cultural and historical circumstances, and the ever-changing aesthetics of portraiture, the lives and characters of the sitters and photographers are imagined, and the question of the revelation of their characters explored."

The book is Eleventyone Portraits 1841 to 1950, by William Cowan, who I'm pleased to say appears to be a TOP reader.

A labor of love...but what labor! Everything about the book is beautiful. It's been professionally edited and professionally designed, so it fooled me at first into thinking it was the product of an established publishing house. It's not; but it doesn't have any of the awkward telltales typical of many self-published books.

Now I've finally decided it's not actually a book to "read." It's a book for delectation. I'm going to continue to engage with it as I have over this past year: taking it to hand, leafing through a handful of portraits at a time, reading or re-reading an essay or two, and putting it aside again. The copy Bill sent me last year is so much the worse for wear (I've dropped it, and crushed a corner, and marred the cover) that I had to ask him for a second one! But now I want to send the second one to a museum curator I know while it's still pristine, so I'm going to need a third.

Bill and I will be working together on an interview to publish here. And I guess sooner or later I might have the temerity to attempt a review. I thought you might like a heads up, in case you want to have your own copy in hand. Check the website; if it looks like you might enjoy it, I think you will.

Mike

[UPDATE: As of mid-day Monday, Bill had sold about 70 books, approximately a third of all he had. —MJ]

Book o' the Week:

Andy Warhol: Polaroids 1958–1987. "Carrying a Polaroid camera from the late 1950s until his death in 1987, [Andy Warhol] amassed a huge collection of instant pictures of friends, lovers, patrons, the famous, the obscure, the scenic, the fashionable, and himself...this book features hundreds of these instant photos." Any book with Grace Jones on the cover has to be cool.

The above is a link to Amazon from TOP. Here's Andy Warhol: Polaroids 1958–1987 at The Book Depository. The following logo is also a link:

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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Maris Rusis: "I have Bill Cowan's book and it is glorious in style and scholarship. And yes, it is both dense and moving. A few pages at a time is all I can traverse. All those beautiful and interesting people are now gone. I find this poignancy and sense of loss passes into sadness very quickly. Bill quoted me on page 21 and sent me his book by way of compliment. Much thanks to Bill Cowan."

Hand-Coloring Photographs

The hand-coloring of photographs, an anachronism when I was younger, was a tiny niche. And it's probably one to two orders of magnitude tinier now than it was back then. Ctein used to say you could fit all the dye transfer printers in the world into one large living room. Might the same be said of hand-colorists today? Maybe not, but you could fit them all in the same movie theater, I would bet, and they wouldn't come close to filling up a football stadium—even socially distanced. Those are purely guesses. What I'm saying is that I would doubt one Photo-Dawg in a thousand regularly does hand coloring in 2021. Maybe one in ten thousand.

I never liked hand-colored photographs much. Younger-Me/Snarky-Me called it something like "a lot of labor to ruin perfectly good B&W prints with bad color," but that's way too harsh—my particular taste isn't a virtue, and, anyway, Older-Me has far more tolerance for things people think are fun to do. After all, my old "Photo 101 technique" that I thought was so stripped-down and straight-ahead back when it was current is now completely anachronistic itself. It's a niche too, and a very small one as well. Heck, I don't even practice it any more.

In any event, the people I knew who were into hand-coloring enjoyed it first and foremost. Partly or mostly, they did it because it was fun. If you're curious about it, B&H Explora has a nice article by Allan Weitz called "The Basics of Hand-Coloring Black-and-White Prints." He did a subtle job of hand-coloring that great shot of the man with the model boat, didn't he? Although I would have left the details on the walls alone. But let me ask you two questions: 1.) Do you really prefer the hand-colored version to one or other of the B&W versions? and 2.) Might it be six-to-one/half-a-dozen-the-other just to take the picture in digital color and desaturate the colors?

Still a great shot.

Japan
If you like the look of old-timey color, I notice Taschen has just released the third in its 1900 series:

Japan 1900: A Portrait in Color. It's a BAB—big-ass book—but if you're into what it offers it'll be like a wallow in a vat of chocolate. Even if it's not hand-coloring per se, it's got the look.

Mike

Book of Interest:

Photographs Not Taken: a collection of photographers' essays, edited by Will Steacy (Daylight Books; Second Revised ed. edition, 2012). Recommended by Mike Chisholm, who has good taste. This is a link to Amazon from TOP.

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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Yonatan Katznelson: "I prefer the warm-toned B&W, but the painted one is nice too. It reminds me of a Norman Rockwell painting."

Lothar Adler: "I think Jan Saudek very much deserves to be mentioned in the context of colorized B&W photography, especially since this technique had a very large part in his artistic work, even if his often 'very special' nudes are not to everyone's taste. After all, we are talking about photography and a particular technique, and Jan Saudek used both intensively."

Frank Gorga: "Hand-coloring certainly has a place in the spectrum of this art we call photography. It most definitely provides a unique look in a photograph. Over the past winter, using some pandemic-induced free time, I experimented with hand-coloring inkjet prints using Prismacolor pencils blended with a mixture of turpentine and vegetable oil. The details of the method (including the book from which I learned the technique) and some examples can be found on my website (see: http://gorga.org/blog/?p=4921 and http://gorga.org/blog/?p=4943 ). I have since learned that Marshalls sold (and probably still sells) the materials for this method of hand coloring, as well as their more commonly known oils and dyes."

Bob Johnston [no relation to Ed.  —Ed.]: "The 'colour not having to fill the boundaries' is what made colour broadcast TV possible. There was very little bandwidth available for the chroma information. If you saw just the chroma part of the signal it looked like crude splodges of colour, but put in the luminance and you wouldn't see how bad the colour was."

Mike replies: One example of an exception is something I watch: pool. Check out this '90s TV broadcast. Start this at about 22:30 and look at the warm-colored balls. The orange especially is a "crude splodge." Poor-quality broadcasts can make it almost impossible to know what ball you're looking at.

Leicas Are Forever? (The Bohemians)

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

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

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

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

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

Scott

Product of Interest this week:

As Porsche does with the 911, Fujifilm just keeps refining its perfect pocket camera and making it better and better. Also available from Amazon.

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

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

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

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

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

The Picture on the Penny

(I know. It's a cent, not a penny. The U.S. does not have any currency called a penny. But cent does not alliterate with picture.)

(Only I would start out a post with a parenthetical, right?)

On Fridays I usually try to leave you with something fun to see or visit for the weekend, but I just couldn't get to work yesterday. It's been a heckuva week. And I'm fried.

Summer reading
So here you go—two things. First of all, the Times* published a nice list of Summer Reading books. Of course they recommended as "Summer" reading more books than I read in an entire year, but never mind. The authors of the article did a nice thing—instead of putting each book under its own subhead, they wove the discussion of one book into the next, which caused me to read far more of them than I would have if I were scanning subtitles.

So in the Historical Fiction segment of the list I discovered a novel called The Bohemians by Jasmin Darznik. It's fiction, but is narrated in the first person by Dorothea Lange! I'm way too conservative about, you know, reality to be comfortable with this as a literary strategy, but apparently it's a thing that's now done. (I did read Grendel by John Gardner after reading Beowulf, but as "the real" Grendel was mythical, that's a bit different. Although Dorothea is a "monster" in the sense of being huge as a celebrity among Photo-Dawgs.) Anyway the author imagines what Dorothea is saying and thinking and that's the basis of the book. Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham, among other luminaries of Old San Francisco, put in cameo appearances.

Interesting. If you read the book, I'd love to know what you think.

The picture in your pocket
Second thing: "Pawn Stars" is not the place I'd expect to encounter a drop-dead great photograph, but the picture in this little video segment is just way, way cool—the photographer, the subject, the signature, the format (first time I've ever heard the term "parlor card," by the way—all such things were always cartes de visite in my reading) and what the picture was the basis for. The appraiser says it's "the top of the pyramid," and I can sure see why. I wouldn't want the responsibility of owning this, but it really does have it all as they say. Wow.

Enjoy.

Mike

*I live in New York. I know "The Times" = "...of London" in the UK, but to a New Yorker "the Times" is The New York Times. As a New Yorker I also read The New Yorker, come to that. Have a nice weekend!

Book of Interest this week:

Ralph Eugene Meatyard: American Mystic (Fraenkel Gallery, 2017). An excellent introduction to Meatyard's quirky, spooky worlds. "Photography is a dream of awaking to a world still dewed in sleep." And Fraenkel Gallery's productions are always a cut above. The link is a doorway to Amazon.

Also sponsored by...

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