The Online Photographer

'Norm!' and his Photo-history Connection

You may have heard that George Wendt died on Tuesday. Of mainly Irish descent despite his German name, Wendt played the everyman character "Norm Peterson" on Cheers, the long-running sitcom of the 1980s and early '90s. At some point along the way, the Boston bar used for the exterior establishing shots, the Bull & Finch Pub, on Beacon Hill, changed its name to "Cheers Boston" for tourists. Actually, it's a franchise now—Paramount licensed the name to Host International, a Marriott subsidiary, for a series of airport bars. Some of the airport bars reportedly feature animatronic robot "customers" based on the "Norm" and "Cliff Clavin" characters (although the robots have different names to provide plausible deniability). George Wendt, with John Ratzenberger, who played Cliff, filed suit based on their right of publicity. The case limped along for a number of years. I haven't quite been able to find out how it ended up. My interest flagged.

Tom and Ruth
So what's the tie-in between George Wendt and photography? Well, Wendt is the grandson of Tom Howard, who was George's mother's father. You probably don't know the name. Howard, who ended his career at the Chicago Sun-Times, was the creator of what was at one time one of the most famous pictures in American photojournalism. In 1928, cameras were strictly verboten at executions, but pictures were what the ravenous public wanted. Howard got the assignment to strap a miniature camera to his ankle and smuggle it into the execution chamber at Sing-Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, where he secretly photographed a murderer named Ruth Snyder at the moment of her death in the electric chair. The blurred shot is usually presented heavily cropped, like this copy at the Met (which for some reason I am prevented from showing here; why and on what legal basis? No clue, but I don't like to give giants bee stings, lest they swat my little black-and-yellow-striped hiney and send me and all my buzzy enterprises to perdition). Some of the blur was caused by Snyder's body convulsing at her moment of reckoning. Shown that way, blurred and retouched, it creates an oddly soft and artistic impression, standing out from other famous news pictures of the 'twenties. The picture caused an immense public sensation in 1928, running on the front page of the New York Daily News two days in a row. Here's what we think is the full frame, making the vantage point—Tom's ankle—more clear.

Howard was brought in from Chicago so the wardens, who knew all the New York guys on sight, would not peg him for a photographer. The camera on his ankle had a single plate, so he was limited to one shot. A cable release ran up his pants leg to a shutter release in his pocket. The picture has understandably been called the tabloid picture of the decade of the Roaring Twenties in America. The camera is in the Smithsonian.

Ruth Snyder herself would probably not otherwise be remembered but for being the object of Tom Howard's (and the newspaper's) resourcefulness. She had been perhaps understandably provoked by her husband, who apparently idolized his late fiancée rather extravagantly, without consideration for the feelings of his wife. Ruth and her lover, a married corset salesman named Judd Gray, connived, first, to take out a double-indemnity insurance policy on him, and then to un-alive him in a manner that sounds redundant, not to mention laborious—they strangled him with a piece of picture wire, stuffed chloroform-soaked rags up his nose, and beat him with a sash weight (the lump of metal used to counterbalance heavy double-hung windows). That he died must have been a relief to Ruth, since, according to Judd Gray, Ruth had already tried to kill him as many as seven times before that, failing on each occasion. As you might expect, given the seven failures, the scheming couple did not carry out their plan totally competently—forgetting, for one thing, to leave behind any signs of forced entry, and hiding some objects in the apartment they later told the police were stolen by the fictitious burglars. Ruth unwittingly implicated Gray before the police knew who he was; he sung like a canary, and the two implicated each other. As we know from the picture, Ruth Snyder paid the price for their crime. Unphotographed, Judd Gray followed her ten minutes later.

I think I first encountered the once-famous, still gruesome image in one of my favorite books, American Photojournalism Comes of Age by Michael L. Carlebach. I've probably recommended that book three times for every one person who bought one. But it's good. I always liked Michael Carlebach's books. By the way, the Bull & Finch Pub was voted Boston's best bar by Boston magazine in 1982, the first year of the television series. Which influenced which, though, I don't know. You can still visit the place today. It's at 84 Beacon Street, Boston.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 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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A Great Movie Villain (OT)

Saul Zaentz [producer], Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher and Michael Douglas [producer] posing with their Oscars at the 1976 Academy Awards on March 30, 1976. [Photo and caption courtesy Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection at the UCLA Library.]

Anne Bancroft turned the role down. So did Ellen Burstyn, famous from movies like The Last Picture Show, The Exorcist, and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. So did Angela Lansbury. None of them wanted audiences to see them on screen embodying someone so evil. The role went instead to Louise Fletcher, a talented actress who had put a promising early career on hold for more than a decade to raise her sons. Some people are born to play a part, and Louise Fletcher at 40 was perfect for the role of Mildred Ratched, the dreaded "Nurse Ratched" in Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, adapted from Ken Kesey's novel—the self-controlled, rigidly controlling, and ultimately monstrous driver of the plot's action. When she won the Academy Award for Best Actress, she thanked the audience for hating her. And thanked her parents, who were both deaf, in sign language.

Nurse Ratched might actually be the greatest female movie villain, if you count only naturalistic portrayals of plausibly real people. Fletcher's Mildred, as written by Ken Kesey and screenwriters Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman, is wholly believable, a fully rounded character. True, Nurse Ratched did once come in only second on a list of the greatest female movie villains—but she lost to the Wicked Witch of the West.

Louise Fletcher in a still from One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest and in later life

One of the great fundamental human dramas that affects us all is also the subject of Sigmund Freud's best book—the never-ending tension between the freewheeling id of individual impulses and the degree to which we must all conform to society's requirements of orderliness and rule-following in order to get along and get by. Cuckoo's Nest the movie is the best work of art on that theme ever put on celluloid. At least as far as I've seen. Even Fletcher herself said, "I envied the other actors tremendously. They were so free, and I had to be so controlled."

The film was Jack Nicholson's breakout role—his arrival, at least, as the familiar, inimitable, first-name-only perennial A-lister of top actors and celebrity personalities. Many of the supporting players went on to fame and accomplishment later in their careers. The movie was one of only three—one from the '30s, one from the '70s, and one from the '90s—to win all five major categories at the Oscars. I'm not much of a movie reviewer, but man, do I have opinions about that one. We could really get into it.

I watched the movie for the third time just the other night. I've been catching up on movie watching since I discovered all the free movies on YouTube Premium, watching many I missed when they came out alongside a few old favorites. This one gets better with age. Truly a masterpiece. As with A Beautiful Mind, which I'm watching for the first time now, the book is also excellent. (There are a lot of books I've read that were made into movies I never saw.) I particularly like tragicomedies, because life is a tragicomedy.

Louise Fletcher died on September 23, 2022, of natural causes, with her family near, at her home in Southern France. She was 88. She had many other accomplishments, not all of them professional, although Mildred Ratched overshadowed the rest of her career in one way or another. Her first credits date from 1958, and she worked until 2020. Director Forman discovered her from her role as Mattie in Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us. If a career can have only one peak, though, what a soaring, frosty peak Louise Fletcher gave us at her best. R.I.P.

Mike

CORRECTION: Well, I'll be damned...this site needs a better Editor. I watch two videos last night, both saying she had just died, as if it were news, and I wrote this post this morning as if her death were recent without ever questioning it...or noticing. Joseph Reid caught my error. (Thanks, Joseph.) Very sorry to be spreading misinformation! I'll leave the post up anyway, corrected. Sorry for getting it wrong at first. —Mike, Yr. Fallible Ed.

Original contents copyright 2025 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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John Holland: "Yes, RIP Louise. An amazing talent in a difficult role. She seemed to live a long full life. Ave atque vale as they say. [A Latin phrase meaning 'hail and farewell' or 'I salute you, and goodbye.' —Ed.] A friend of mine once wrote a comment to some long-gone blog post about this movie, explaining why Nurse Ratched was her hero. Not a popular take to be sure, and I don't remember the exact wording, but her argument was based on the fact that she had a Randall McMurphy in her own family: a volatile narcissist, a destructive sociopath who was charming in a manipulative way, but swept an F5 tornado of obliteration through every life he touched. And then smiled and sweet-talked his way into the next disaster. To her, the planet breathed a sigh of relief when Nurse Ratched ordered McMurphy's pre-frontal lobotomy. Now, Ratched was still a flawed, nasty piece of work, but by my friend's reckoning McMurphy was probably far worse. Ratched had the thankless job of being the white blood cell in society's immune system. Something to think about, anyway."

Mike replies: That's an interpretation I had never even thought about. I guess that's one of the amazing things about works of fiction: they can be interpreted in many ways, including ways that the author or authors don't necessarily intend.

Deaths in the 'Family'

I've been procrastinating badly over this, but I suppose I must face it. I don't do obituaries very often, despite the fact that the recently deceased all richly deserve remembrance, because there are too many to cover without becoming "the death channel," so to speak. Losses are...depressing, and sad. The older I get, especially, the more it seems that those who pass away simply belong in the world. You just want them to...remain. Even if we didn't know them personally, they were, in many cases, people we felt we knew, people we looked up to, people whose work we admired, people who were important in our world.

Paul Caponigro [d. November 10th, 2024, aged 91] has, and always will have, a special place. He was widely known as a master photographer when I was young, a spiritual seeker, a pure artist, even if his reputation seemed (inexplicably, to me) to settle more toward oblivion in recent years, probably because he was not a self-promoter. This video was produced by Epson, hence, perhaps, the opening quote, "Without the print, what the hell have you got?" But it's a gem, and well worth watching twice.

Here's an obituary from the Portland [Maine] Press Herald.

We were honored to have Paul's participation in two print sales, pairing a photograph of his with one by his son John Paul, the latter an important artist from the cradle years of digital who remains a leading voice. Here's the first of those—a scan from a 5x7 B&W negative of Paul's next to an exquisite color photograph by John Paul taken with a phone! It captured the changing times in 2013.

———

Photojournalist Paul Lowe [d. October 10th, 2024, aged 60] was stabbed to death on a hiking trip in the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles. Paul had gone to Los Angeles to help his 19-year-old son Emir, after Emir had been gone for months on a trip that was scheduled to last only a few days. Emir, who has been charged with his father's murder, has a history of mental illness.

Paul Lowe, who was born in London and grew up in Liverpool, was a member of VII Photo Agency, and is best known for his extensive coverage of the Siege of Sarajevo and the Bosnian War during the breakup of the old Yugoslavia. However, he was an accomplished and seasoned photojournalist who worked in more than 80 countries from the 1980s to the 2000s. He considered himself a photographer of conflict; he was Professor of Conflict, Peace and the Image at London College of Communication. His wife Amra is native to Sarajevo and the city was the family's home base.

There is a full article about Paul Lowe's tragic and untimely death, with more information, at PetaPixel.

———

Constantine (Costa) Manos [d. Jan. 3, 2025, aged 90], born in South Carolina of Greek immigrant parents, joined his local camera club at age 13 in 1947, the same year the Magnum Photo Agency was founded. He said it "began a lifelong search for beautiful and poetic images." His parents, Dimitri and Aphrodite, ran the Washington Street Café, where they served "soul food" to an exclusively Black clientele. Encouraged by Cartier-Bresson, he became a member of Magnum in 1965, and was identified with the agency all his life. An early project was a documentary book made from three years of shooting in his parents' native Greece. There is an excellent obituary at Magnum, with a selection of pictures, and one at The Provincetown Independent. Although he lived a long life, he died after suffering for a long time from the scourge of Alzheimer's disease. If you don't know Costa Manos's work, it rewards looking into.

———

Heinz Kluetmeier [d. January 14th, 2025, aged 82] was one of the three superstar Sports Illustrated photographers during the magazine's heyday. The other two were Walter Iooss Jr. (84) and Neil Leifer (82). In 1980, in what is known as the "Miracle on Ice," an amateur USA team composed of college hockey players beat the formerly unbeatable Soviet team, seasoned and mature professionals in all but name, in one of the great David-and-Goliath stories in recent sports history. SI famously ran Heinz Kluetmeier's cover photo with no cover blurb at all. He also took what must be the best picture ever made of a tackle in (American) football. I first learned of his death from a testament on Andy Roddick's tennis podcast, Served, in which he spoke movingly about how much, and how universally, Heinz was liked as well as admired. You can see his best known shots and read about his career in the obituary at The New York Times.

———

George Tice, [d. Jan. 16th, 2025, aged 86], the poet photographer of New Jersey, had his roots in amateur clubs and contests but became a major artistic photographer with many books to his credit. Writer Vivian Raynor said that "Mr. Tice has done so much of his greatest work in New Jersey that he has become a metaphor for the state—a photographic equivalent of William Carlos Williams." One thing I recall hearing is how he methodically saved up for all his darkroom and camera equipment, one piece at a time, and that he created a window between his darkroom and his living room, which was his children's playroom, using a big sheet of Rubylith (a transparent red masking film that is safe for orthochromatic films and papers) so he could work while keeping an eye on the kids. A few brief excursions excepted, he lived in New Jersey all his life, and did many projects there, although he is best known for his almost musically composed urban landscapes in large format. His most famous picture is probably "Petit's Mobil Station and Watertower, Cherry Hill, New Jersey (1974)," a time exposure he took by covering the lens of his camera every time a car went by, because he didn't want the headlight trails in the picture. A perfectionist, he was a virtuoso printer. It looks like his limited edition retrospective book Lifework might still be available from Veritas Editions. There is an obituary here, but possibly the best tributes to him and his story are John Paul Caponigro's interview with him and especially Bruce Wodder's film about him and his work, Seeing Beyond the Moment.

———

Our condolences to the families and friends of these photographers, and again, I apologize to those who deserve being remembered whose deaths we fail to mention here.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 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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Howard Bond 1931-2024

There's been no published obituary yet for Howard Bond, late of Ann Arbor, Michigan, which surprises me—Howard was prosperous, orderly, and lived with dignity—but I have heard from several people who knew him. They confirm that he passed away of heart failure in the night five days ago or so, at the approximate age of 93. [UPDATE: A nice obituary has now been published, although it doesn't confirm date of birth or date of death.]

Howard was a Contributing Editor of Darkroom Techniques magazine when I arrived there, and remained so. I edited a number of his articles, and we were always on cordial terms, but the only time I met him in person was when we asked him to come to Niles from his home in Michigan to judge a reader contest with two other guest judges. A handful of us spent a long afternoon and part of the next day studying submissions and arguing the merits of various works. Even after I left the magazine we continued to have long telephone conversations occasionally, almost always discussing the world of photography (and sometimes specific controversies) exclusively.

He was a gifted and devoted large-format photographer with a strong grasp of technique. He photographed in what Mark L. Power once called the "West Coast" tradition, the tradition of Ansel Adams (whom he studied with), Edward and Brett Weston, and Imogen Cunningham, but of course putting his own distinctive spin on things. I wouldn't say you could tell a Bond at a glance, but looking at a broader selection of his work you wouldn't mistake it for anyone else's. He never had much of a presence online, which was probably intentional, and has not been especially well served by books; lacking an official c.v. I can't confirm this impression, but my sense is that he exhibited at a high level, enjoyed strong print sales, and was collected by top museums as well as by an enthusiastic following of private collectors.

Working on one of my usual lists (which were, I suppose, a primitive version of what we now call "clickbait"), I asked him who he thought were the best living photographic printmakers. He viewed the very concept askance, although we both agreed on Ray McSavaney. I asked him if I thought he himself belonged on the list. With the sort of clear-eyed modesty of intelligent and gifted people who know exactly what they are about—I'll have to paraphrase here—he said that he didn't think of his work in that way; he simply liked to work hard on his craft, and that sometimes the prints sing and sometimes they don't. I never did compile that list, but if I had, Howard would have been on it. In spite of his possible protests.

Speaking of singing, I believe Howard himself was a singer. He had a great love of classical music; his wife of many years, who predeceased him, was a pianist, and one source mentions that they attended as many as 40 concerts a year.

He was also a generous teacher, as was reflected in his many articles. The articles I remember most clearly were his brilliant articles on unsharp masking, which he did manually using 8x10-inch negatives, well before it was a Photoshop action. He remarked ruefully that what Photoshop did digitally with a few clicks of the mouse took him a whole weekend of work. But then right away he mentioned that he would keep doing it the old-fashioned way.

His books are Light Motifs, White Motif: The Cyclades Islands of Greece, and Luminous Construction, a 70-page catalog.

I'm sorry I can't write a more personal appreciation of his life. I did not know him well. When we judged that contest, we often found ourselves arguing against each other—without rancor, but with conviction—although because of his experience and status we deferred to his views in the judging process as I recall. I think he should be better known that he is. Although I don't think he would appreciate the analogy due to the instrument and the musical genre, I always thought of him as being somewhat like those master guitarists who other guitarists appreciate but who aren't as well known to the wider public, such as, say, Guthrie Govan or Terry Kath. I'm sure he would have found a classical music analogy much more suitable!

There are a number of links to his work in an LFF thread, but I caution you that, more than in most cases, you don't see Howard's work as it ought to be seen in tiny little JPEGs, a form that robs his pictures of the presence and impact he worked so hard to put into them. It's one of the ironies of the current online culture that the photographs with the strongest presence as objects are diminished the most.

The impression in my memory of Howard Bond is of a man of dignity and integrity—of strong opinions (many artists are like that), but fair-minded, and generous with his time and knowledge. He's on another list that I carry in my head: photographers who deserve a comprehensive retrospective accompanied by a book. It's not too late for that.

Mike
(If you know who took the picture above please let me know. It might have been a self-portrait.)

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Bob Zeichner: "Howard often commented that he was very fortunate to have had several careers. He was a band director and a cornet player. Margaret was his accompanist on piano. She too, was a music educator. Howard also worked as a computer programmer (from the days of punch cards). That career took him to Southeast Asia among other places, where he also made some very interesting people pictures. His final career was as a fine art photographer and photography educator, conducting many workshops around the world and contributing many technical articles to Photo Techniques magazine. He never lost his passion for music and regularly attended concerts in Detroit and Ann Arbor.

"I hope that adds a bit more."

Rob Spring: "I have been a fan of Howard Bond since I came across his book, White Motif, which I immediately bought. His high-key photos of the Cyclades Islands of Greece is one of my treasured photo books. He went back to these islands most every summer from 1984 to 1988, which resulted in a most amazing array of whites and shadows in the local architecture. Not to be missed."

Steve Rosenblum: "Thank you for writing this, Mike. For those of us 'Townies' who have lived in Ann Arbor for most of our lives, it still feels like a bit of a small town. Over the years we repeatedly run into each other at restaurants, concerts, art fairs, classes, parks, and other places. I did not know Howard Bond personally, but met him occasionally through the years in this way. He was quietly impactful to our community. In the '90s when I re-engaged in photography, I joined the Ann Arbor Camera Club for a couple of years (as opposed to the 'Ann Arbor Crappy Camera Club' that I now occasionally attend which is a much more informal group). As I recall, Howard was very generous with his time and talents when it came to teaching techniques and judging competitions in that club, which had, and still has, a formal and useful approach.

"Howard and his wife also very generously supported the Ann Arbor cultural scene, especially in classical music. My wife and I have season tickets to the concerts put on by the University Musical Society which sponsors concerts by world renowned orchestras and artist in many genres, but especially classical music, usually at Hill Auditorium, a nearly acoustically perfect venue. During intermission at a concert there this year I was mindlessly reading through the program when I looked at the listings on the donors’ page, and saw Howard listed under the major donors category for gifts greater than $100,000. I was pleased and grateful to see him listed there, not least because it meant he was still alive as I hadn’t heard about or seen him in many years. Fortunately for us Ann Arborites, it is not that difficult to attend 40 concerts per year.

"I also think that he would be a great subject for a retrospective exhibition and book. By the way, I don’t think it is entirely a coincidence that both Howard Bond and Thomas and John Knoll were from Ann Arbor—you see a bit of Howard every time you click the Unsharp Mask tool in PhotoShop."

Herman Joyner: "I've always had a deep appreciation for Howard Bond and his photography. I have two of his books: Light Motifs and White Motifs. His first, Light Motifs, features images of English cathedrals and it is still first-place in my ranking of black-and-white book reproductions. Those reproductions are as good as many silver gelatin prints and better than most. Astonishingly beautiful book. Several years ago, I had the opportunity to write a high school level photo textbook for Davis Publications called Focus on Photography. Most of the chapters were divided into subject matter and in each chapter was a profile of a photographer working in that genre. Howard Bond was my choice for landscape photography. I interviewed him and Davis Publications arranged to use several of his photos in the textbook. I found him to be somewhat reserved, very polite, and extremely generous with his time. His talent was immense and he should have been better known. I feel grateful to have had the chance to work with him at all. He is one of my personal heroes in photography."

John Krumm: "The Amazon copy of Luminous Construction sells for $300 for some reason. It's still available from Syracuse University Press for $14.95, and I just ordered it."

John Sparks: "I attended a Howard Bond workshop back in the '90s. Seeing his prints from enlarged 8x10 negatives made me get an 8x10 camera and enlarger (although I kind of wanted one before that). It was a step too far for me; 8x10 cameras are hard to master and I got very few photographs with it that I liked. Too hard to carry to the places I wanted to photograph. Howard was a master of the 8x10 camera. He even used an 11x14 camera for a while, but I think he said it was partly a gimmick to get more recognition by galleries. In any event, I liked the 11x14 prints from his 8x10 negatives better than the 11x14 contact prints he showed us (and liked my own 8x10 negatives through an enlarger better than my own 8x10 contact prints, even when they were 8x10 prints). The workshop was right after he started working with unsharp masking. The first prints he showed us were phenomenal! The next day he showed some more where he had figured out the maximal unsharp mask he could make, and I though they went too far. I never tried it in the darkroom, and tend to turn off sharpening in Photoshop and Lightroom to this day. The workshop was a great experience that had a large impact on my photography for many years."

A Most Honorable Photographer

Photo by Jeff Morgan/06 Alamy

Peter Magubane, 1932–2024

If you read about only one article about a photographer this week, the obituary in the New York Times for Peter Magubane (pronounced mah-goo-BAHN-eh, according to the newspaper) should be it. Peter died at age 91 yesterday. I hadn't thought of him in years, to be honest. Some of us pursue photography as a hobby, some as a passion, some for money, some for satisfaction. But there's a tiny minority for whom it is a calling. Do you think you suffer for your art or struggle to do your work? Consider just the opening sentence of the article: "Peter Magubane, a Black South African photographer whose images documenting the cruelties and violence of apartheid drew global acclaim but punishment at home, including beatings, imprisonment and 586 consecutive days of solitary confinement, died on Monday." (Italics mine.) I confess I sometimes I think I've suffered to have stuck with photography all these years. But it's only because I think I gave up the security of an ordinary career and now pine for the steady paycheck I never had and that nonexistent retirement account. Peter lost his son. Would I endanger myself for my work? Would I hide my camera in a loaf of bread? "We are not worthy" is a phrase that's usually half a joke, part tongue-in-cheek, but that's how I feel when I consider the real heroes.

Photojournalism isn't the prettiest photography. It's not art. But it makes up in meaning what it lacks in the fastidious polish and personality we like to argue about. Photographers like Peter Magubane are blessed with an overarching mission that makes all kinds of little decisions for them. I like his quote: "Mr. Magubane never staged pictures, or asked for permission to photograph people. 'I apologize afterwards, if someone feels insulted,” he said, “but I want the picture.'" I like the bluntness of that last clause. There are so many times I want the picture too...but not quite enough to do what is necessary to get it.

His most haunting photo that I recall appears on the surface to be nondescript. It's a view through a dirty car windshield of another car with some people visible at the side of the road and a narrow view of parts of the road and the landscape. On first impression it's blurry, plain, ill-seen, charmless. Only when you look twice or three times do you notice an arm hanging out of the window of the other car, the hand holding a pistol: the picture captures an episode in which two white policemen drove around Soweto firing on civilians from their car, wounding and killing innocent people randomly. Suddenly what at first glance looked like a wasted frame is flooded with meaning. Then you envision Peter, a black man, close enough to that car with those murderous officers in it to get that shot, surely at least risking their revenge. That realization came as a jolt. I had a physical reaction to it. (The photograph is included in the Times obituary.)

At this late date in my life I know I'm not Peter's peer and never will be. People who photograph for a cause and sacrifice greatly for it are way up at the pinnacle in my opinion. They set a standard which can only inspire the rest of us through humility. Considering their example might help us work harder and be more focused. "Do your work," said David Vestal. Find work to do, first.

I recommend that you set aside a little time to read and meditate on the account of Peter's life today. It will make you think. Peter Magubane leaves behind 17 books, a long list of acclamations, great honor, and a real contribution to the life of the world. He photographed sunsets at the end of his life, because he finally got tired of strife and stress and death. Rest in peace; I bow my head.

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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Jeff: "Very compelling story. I’m reminded, on a lesser scale of sacrifice, but still involving continual pain for one’s life work, tales from documentary photographer Sebastiao Salgado, as he briefly recounts in this interview. Many are enthusiastic about their photography, but surely few are passionate enough about their subject matter to stay true to a project after 48 exhausting trips, two broken knees, two broken shoulders, cervical pain, and constant disease! Sure, Salgado now has guides and assistants, but it’s noteworthy that he funded it all, without sponsors, with proceeds from his photographic output. All this puts my 'enthusiasm' and 'passion' for photography in a humbling perspective."

Elliott Has Left the Building

Elliott Erwitt 1928–2023

Ah, well. Yesterday a sad event took place. You knew Elliott Erwitt. We all did.

Although, how can you be sad for a guy who lived to be 95, accomplished much, is known the world over, leaves a legacy, worked hard all his life, loved women and had children, and lived life as his authentic unfettered wholehearted self? I'll go ahead and be sad anyway. Even though I never met him in person.

It's probably not appropriate to call Elliott Erwitt "great," or to puff him up with highflown language. He might not approve. His stance his whole life was as an anti-artiste. Not modest or humble or self-effacing, he nevertheless dismissed pretense, excess seriousness, and ponderousness, and kept both feet firmly planted on the ground. He had an impish and unfailing sense of humor. It would be better to dub him the Grand Vizier of Shutterbuggery, the Master of Film Processing in the Bathtub, the World's Best Collector of Winks and Glimpses, or some other gently mocking title he would appreciate. The Emperor of Snaps. Snaps was what he called his huge compendium of leftovers, a treasured photobook for me since I first had my breath taken away by its cascading cornucopia of ideas, its endless fount of acute observation. He was what we all once wanted to be.

He was a hobbyist first, and practiced just like an artist—his pictures are in collections at the highest level worldwide. He is less well known as a top photojournalist, although he was that—his picture of Jacquelyn Kennedy at the funeral of JFK is one of a handful of the most famous images of the end of Camelot—and virtually unknown as an advertising photographer (never breaking style), although he was that too—did you know the famous photo of the big and little dogs' legs was taken for a shoe ad? True. It is seamlessly of a piece with all his other work, but all three of the beings in that picture were hired models! He did well enough with print sales and commercial work to be able to migrate between two homes. Most of all, though, he will be remembered for pictures that were like sweet little chuckles, affirmations, celebrations, appreciations—full of life and love, as if he were the apotheosis of an inquisitive teenager in a Photo 101 class, exploring the world like it was new. He was a man who never didn't have time for another picture of a pretty girl or a happy dog.

There have been encomiums. The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, CNN. All over everywhere. The one to read first would be the one by Jonas Cuénin at Blind Magazine. They were prepared for the event and first on the scene with the news and an appraisal. There will be lots more to read if you go looking. (Ken Tanaka first tipped me to this, and then many others did too. Thanks to you all.)

Looking at Snaps
The best way to mark this passing might be to dance a little jig, tell a generous joke, pat a dog. Another good way would be to go look at some pictures. Spend some time with one of your books of his; there were many—the current one is called Found Not Lost (2021), a book that resulted from Erwitt re-examining his contact sheets in old age. If you have no books by Erwitt...well, first of all, you need some, but try:

Works at the Peter Fetterman Gallery

Works and a written appreciation at Magnum Photos

Works at elliotterwitt.com

Works at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin

Erwitt is a well that never runs dry.

Goodbye, Elio (if I may). Well, goodbye, okay, but farewell, never!

Mike
Photo: USA. Kilgore, Texas. 1971. courtesy Elliott Erwitt / @magnumphotos

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.)

Featured Comments from:

Albert Smith: "Back in the '70s, there was a series of books put out called 'Masters of Contemporary Photography,' of which I bought every volume. Without a doubt, the one that effected me the most was the one on Elliott Erwitt. It was a treasure trove of biography, technical info, and best of all, 'war stories' from this shooter who was in the right place at the right time for many of the pivotal events in history. The story of his capturing then-Veep Nixon and Khrushchev in Moscow in an animated debate inches apart at an event to promote industry in Russia, and in a room full of camera-wielding journalists, being the only one to anticipate what was going to happen and be exactly in the right spot to get the photo, was worth the price of the book. Nixon used the photo without permission in his 1960 Presidential race to show he was tough on Russia, which made Erwitt mad enough to send a $500 invoice to the campaign, which was paid. I've subsequently bought every book that Erwitt put out including his last, which he personally curated from decades of long forgotten contact sheets, which he said was a revelation (we should all revisit our old work), titled, Found Not Lost.

"Another master gone."

Mike replies: Thanks for that detail about Found Not Lost, Albert. I added it to the post.

Kenneth Tanaka: "What a rich, rewarding life Elliott Erwitt lived! I first began admiring his press work the same year I returned to photography and bought my first Leica. So quick, so reflexive. Wherever he went there he was, so to speak. I especially admired his eye for capturing casual humor and irony. Reviewing each book of his work felt like completing another semester of photo school.

"Sadly, I never had an opportunity to meet him personally. (Maybe that’s for the better. What would I have said? Ask me what I talked about at dinner with Susan Meiselas in 2019 sometime.) Among all the many prominent photographers of the 20th century, Elliott Erwitt’s work and words were among the greatest influences on my own approach and outlook. (Albeit with very different results.)

"There's an excellent 2020 documentary film on Elliott's late life, titled Silence Sounds Good, available on Amazon Prime [not for me, but maybe for others —Ed.] and perhaps elsewhere. The trailer is available on YouTube. I think nearly all TOPpers will enjoy it.

"Goodbye, Elliott. Ya done good, man. Real good."

David Elesh: "Perhaps my favorite photographer because of his ability to capture the humor in what makes us human."

Dillan: "This has been a bad week for famous nonagenarians! Erwitt, Kissinger and Rosalynn Carter all in one week. As for Erwitt, I would say he is certainly a photography great. His famous photos generally showed the best side of humanity. If that lessens the gravitas of his work, I think he's being appraised using wrong measure."

Robert Roaldi: "This post an example of how useful and interesting the interweb can be. It's easy to forget."

V.I. Voltz: "I met him a few times. He was very charming, in an old fashioned way that made someone like me, young enough to be his grandson, wonder if all that charm was an affectation; but I don’t think it was. His best book is his first: Eastern Europe: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland. Life Press, 1965, but it’s very hard to find now. [I think some of the pictures are included in Personal Best. —Ed.] Found Not Lost has stunning tonal reproduction, and would be one of his best collections, but a large proportion of the best photos are reproduced across the gutter. Incredibly frustrating."

Readings and Viewings

"Tony Vaccaro, 100, Dies; Photographed War From a Soldier’s Perspective," at the World's Best Photography magazine (the New York Times. You get ten free articles, but you should subscribe, because they publish a broad range of meaningful photographic content, from articles like this to original commissioned photojournalism and many other things besides). I had never heard of Tony Vaccaro before, but I like his work and I enjoyed this article. I especially liked reading the descriptions of his shooting technique. As an idle aside, if you had to choose between Karsh's photograph of Georgia O'Keefe and Vaccaro's picture of her looking through the piece of Swiss cheese, which would you choose? Those are two very different modes of what we call "photography."

# # #

An interesting picture of Dr. King from 1959. What's interesting about it is that it was taken by a Black photographer, Calvin Littlejohn, the chronicler of Fort Worth, Texas, who lived from 1909 t0 1993. A trope of modern criticism is the idea of the "gaze"—in other words, that the view cannot be separated from whomever is doing the viewing. To me it seems clear from the evidence that this was how Dr. King looked when he felt comfortable with the person who was taking his picture. Compare this with the more serious look we're used to seeing from Dr. King in his public role, when the ones doing the viewing were mostly representing the white-dominated media and, beyond them, the white world they worked for. For more about Calvin Littlejohn, see his bio at blackpast.org.

# # #

As long as I am on old pictures, readers of, er, a certain age will remember a famous picture from LIFE magazine of Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm returning from a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp and being greeted by his family on an airport runway. The picture is known by the title "Burst of Joy." A print, signed by the photographer, Slava "Sal" Veder, brought in by Stirm's daughter, known as "the leaping girl" or "the jumping girl," was appraised on the most recent episode of Antiques Roadshow. This link should take you to the segment, but, if it doesn't, the segment starts at 36:26. Sal Veder won the Pulitzer for his shot.

# # #

Mystery Man: Who is this? Hints: his arrest was for possession of more than 650 grams of cocaine, and he served two and a third years in prison following the bust. And the guy was really a Dick. (I'll post the answer tomorrow.)

UPDATE Thursday afternoon: A lot of you guessed this. It's "Tim 'The Tool Man' Taylor," a.k.a. actor/comedian Tim Allen, who was born Timothy Allen Dick. He was also the voice of Buzz Lightyear in the Toy Story movies, and now has a net worth that Fox Business reports to be $100 million. Allen was the only comedian I ever saw in concert, and his language was so blue and his subject matter so filthy that I vowed to stick with clean comedians thenceforward. (Current favorite: Nate Bargatze.)

I guess this was an easier "Mystery Man" than I thought. I didn't recognize him from this picture and couldn't make it look like him even after knowing who it was!

# # #

"'Art is dead Dude'—the rise of the AI artists stirs debate," from the BBC. The quotation is from one Jason M. Allen, who went on to say, "It's over. A.I. won. Humans lost." Not sure if this really has anything to do with photography. But I'll just point out the famous quotation attributed to the French painter Paul Delaroche, who, upon first seeing a Daguerreotype in 1839, said, "From today, painting is dead." (Although one would suppose he said it in French, and I haven't been able to find that.) Curiously, Paul Delaroche's historical paintings looked a bit like A.I., don't you agree?

# # #

Photographers we lost in 2022: photojournalist Dirck Halstead, 85; fashion photographer Patrick Demarchelier, 87; art photographer Jerry Uelsmann, 87; war photographer Tim Page, 78; Letizia Battaglia, who bravely documented the Sicilian Mafia, 87; paparazzo Ron Galella, 91; editorial and advertising photographer Kurt Markus, 75; Fred Lyon, photographer of San Francisco, 97; advertising photographer Melvin Sokolsky, 88; art photographer and filmmaker William Klein, 96; celebrity photographer Douglas Kirkland, 88; and editorial portraitist Eamonn McCabe, 74—among many others. Consolations: everyone gets their favorite camera in heaven, the photo opportunities are limitless, and you never, ever miss a shot. R.I.P.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

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.)

Featured Comments from:

Gordon Lewis: "It might be that Dr. King was more relaxed around black photographers. It might also be that this image was taken in 1959, before all the major stressors in his life happened, such as the Freedom Rides, March on Washington, FBI harassment, violence in Selma, etc. To put it another way, as the years wore on he had a lot less to be relaxed about. He was assassinated nine years later, in 1968, at age 39."

Chris Kern: "Re 'As an idle aside, if you had to choose between Karsh's photograph of Georgia O'Keefe and Vaccaro's picture of her looking through the piece of Swiss cheese, which would you choose? Those are two very different modes of what we call "photography."'

"A better comparison, it seems to me, would be with Vaccaro’s 1960 photograph [here's a link —Ed.] of O’Keefe holding one of her paintings in a field in New Mexico, with its unorthodox, arresting composition: the subject in perfect profile, revealing the characteristic contours of her face; her hands cradling the painting to signify that she is its creator; the painted canvas bleeding into the left side of the frame; and the mountain in the background conveying a distinct sense of place. The image is also technically outstanding—well-illuminated, with wide tonality and excellent color, and with the figure and canvas in sharp focus and just enough bokeh in the background to keep the viewer’s attention on the subject. Offhand, I can’t recall seeing a superior posed photographic portrait."

ASW: "I'm sure others have already answered, but that's Tim 'The Tool Man' Taylor (aka the actor/comedian Tim Allen) in the mugshot. I hope he didn't drag his friendly neighbor Wilson into the drug world with him."

Winfried Heyland: "I can only recommend Tony Vaccaro's work. i.e. Entering Germany."

hugh crawford: "Re: Leap of joy There’s a whole lot of misery in that photo. [That's worth reading. Thanks. —Mike]

"Dick? I thought the guy was a tool.

"I’ve been playing around with AI art and I find it sort of like street photography crossed with surrealist art practices. You have a vague expectation of what you might get, but no control, and the outcome is something of a surprise. I don’t think that AI software like Stable Diffusion, which I am working with, is as much a threat to photography as Photoshop and the current generation of photo editing software."

Ed Hawco: "No shade on Karsh, but I’ll take the Swiss cheese shot any day of the week."

Steve Jackson: "Mike, I was kind of stunned that you didn't know about Tony Vaccaro. Although his B&W photos are better known, some of his color portraits are amazing. This is a link to one that I think really shows how to use environment and depth of field in a way that rivets you to the subject: Picasso. Compositionally and technically it is a lesson for all of us. Here is a link to that image (but I would suggest you look at all of them at Monroe Gallery)."

Mike replies: I did look at all of them, and I'm pretty convinced I've never seen any of them before. (I no longer think I can remember every photograph I've ever seen—I used to think so—but I usually get a sort of spidey-sense if I've seen a picture before.) I'm glad to find out about Tony.

Bruno Gonzalez: "Hello Mike, 'À partir d'aujourd'hui la peinture est morte.' The following is an extract copied from the French Wikipedia page about Paul Delaroche; the text says the quotation is probably apocryphal. 'Après avoir vu pour la première fois un daguerréotype il aurait prophétisé, selon Gaston Tissandier: «À partir d'aujourd'hui la peinture est morte.» Cependant, cette citation, sans doute apocryphe, est contestée par Stephen Bann, pour qui il n'existe pas de phrase plus ressassée et plus fallacieuse.'"

Mike replies: Thanks! For others, the French means, "However, this arguably apocryphal quote is disputed by Stephen Bann, for whom there is no more rehashed and fallacious phrase." (Google Translate.)

It's odd, but at some point, does it actually matter if someone said certain things or not? The quotation is so widespread, and so consistently attributed to Delaroche, that I'm not sure it matters if anyone can prove he said it. Also, I've noticed that quotes (and facts) that have a literary rather that oral origin tend to be much more readily accepted. For an example of oral transmission, take the famous "Serenity Prayer." The earliest recorded version is from 1933, by a student of Reinhold Niebuhr, quoting Niebuhr. Niebuhr himself might well have used it before 1933. He didn't publish a version himself until 1951, but he was known to have used it in many sermons and was quoted many times between '33 and '51. For this reason, many different wordings and forms came to be accepted as the "real" Serenity Prayer, and various sources are still modifying its wording. My thought would be, how do we know that Paul Delaroche didn't speak his famous quotation orally and that it spread the same way?

In any event, if he didn't say it, he might as well have.

Rod S.: "I'd already taken your advice to subscribe to the New York Times and had already read that obituary on Tony Vaccaro. Imagine one morning finding and photographing a fallen soldier's body mostly covered by fresh overnight snow, and then realising that it was your friend. Imagine being in a French town so delighted in being liberated from war that its women linked arms and danced in a circle around a little ceremony in which a small girl and a foreign soldier kneel on the ground and kiss. Hard to imagine? Tony Vaccaro photographed it."

darlene (partial comment): " I was once an New York Times subscriber but grew tired of their political undertones. It may go unnoticed if you like their politics, but it isn't very pleasant if you are an independent thinker."

John Camp: "Timothy Dick. Another photographer took a photo that is virtually identical to Sal Veder's. Veder won the Pulitzer for it, the other guy didn't. I think it had to do with which one went out on the AP wire first."

Mike replies: The Turnley twins have a version of that story. They both took the same picture, more or less, and one of them won a prize for it, the other one didn't. I'd have to look up the details. And according to one of my favorite books on photography, there were about 15 photographers present for the crash of the Hindenburg. The famous picture is the one that hit the wire services first; the rest are virtually unknown.

James Kirkpatrick: "The mystery man and I attended Seaholm High School in Birmingham, Michigan. He was year behind me so would have graduated in 1970. I only found this out years later looking in my yearbook. A very funny and talented man in later years."

Franz Amador: "From the article on Tony Vaccaro: 'Private Vaccaro improvised as he moved through Europe, finding his film and his processing chemicals among the ruins of camera shops in towns his unit passed through. He developed the film in Army helmets and hung the negatives on trees to dry when he wasn’t on night duty. He carried them in his backpack.' Dang!"

Mike replies: I was struck by that too. And have you ever photographed with an Argus? Very awkward camera, but Georgia O'Keeffe was impressed with the speed with which Tony Vaccaro used it.

Keith B: "Can I choose the portrait of Georgia Ansel Adams took with her and Orville Cox at Canyon de Chelly?" [Sure. Here's that one. —Ed.]

Dan Gorman: "The 'mystery' man is Tim Dick, otherwise known as Tim Allen. My in-laws knew his family—he grew up in suburban Detroit."

Jerome: "AI can't create art, because AI has nothing to say about anything. It can imitate what humans have said about something, but that's like repeating a poem in a language you don't understand. AI is a pattern-matching machine. It will recognise patterns and re-arrange them, but has no idea what it's doing."

William Klein 1926-2022

Self portrait by William Klein

The title of his seminal book (you can't currently get it) was one of the great ones: "Life Is Good & Good for You in New York," although unfortunately it was then diluted with a three-word subtitle, after a colon, that now seems period-bound and anachro-hip, like the word "groovy," or happenings. I do love that he said that a limitation of the first book was always running out of film. I'll say. The book is resentment transformed into the visual (Klein hated New York), and, as Klein reports, American editors at the time thought the photos were "anti-American, and shitty." 

And tomorrow is the last day of his retrospective at the ICP in New York, which is ironic. Held over, but really too bad it couldn't continue for longer under the circumstances. The show is called "William Klein: YES: Photographs, Paintings, Films, 1948–2013." Curated by David Campany. Get over there and see it if you possibly can.

You can at least get that book.

His obituary made the AP, so that version is all over the place. The ones to read however are Andy Grundberg's workmanlike piece at the WaPo and Sarah Moroz's interview-based piece at The Guardian. A number of judiciously chosen quotations and pictures give a thumbnail portrait for those who don't know him. (I did think it a little sad that Mr. Grundberg felt obliged to define "Dada.") I've never read a great piece about WK. But perhaps fragments here and there is the proper way to go.

I was entering photography when he returned to it: he devised a signature strategy of presenting enlarged contacts with faux editing and cropping marks painted on in bright colors that was distinctively his but seemed just a touch precious and deliberately art-commercial. Admirable but nothing there to emulate. He called a contact sheet a madeleine.

A Frenchman born and raised in New York, he was the quintessential iconoclast, the quintessential outsider. He called his marriage "the love affair of the century." His style and his energetic rule-breaking underpin not only visual tropes that have long since wormed their way into the mainstream but also the popularity of rebellious rule-breaking attitudes. He foreshadowed Warhol, modern street photography, bad photography as good art, and the hybridized artist/professional (I actually never knew he did fashion during the same years he was working on New York, yet another discovery of Alexander Liberman's). If there was no William Klein, there would have to be. We really do need a new reprint of Life Is Good & Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels. (The DAP reprint, which did away with that wonderful title, was called New York 1954.55.) Internationally respected, never ignored, his fame was not matched by popular acceptance. But he did what he wanted. Klein was 96.

Mike

Book o' the Week

Migrant Mother, by Sarah Meister. "Each volume in the One on One series is a sustained meditation on a single work from the collection of MoMA." Forty-two pages with many illustrations. An engaging guided tour of the history and lore of "American photography's Mona Lisa."

This book link is a portal to 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:

Kenneth Tanaka: "I was saddened, although certainly not surprised, to learn of William Klein’s death this week. He’s one of the few photographers, especially B&W photographers, who could inspire me to write many pages and wax poetically. By most accounts he was insecure, brash, and generally unpleasant around many people. It seemed to be his schtick. Ten years ago I had an opportunity to meet him in London but was ultimately unable to make the date. I lamented that miss for quite some time...but then realized that I would not really have been meeting the 'William Klein' I admired so highly.

"I have long enjoyed my collection of William Klein’s books, which live in a special ready-access location in my library. My personal favorite is actually a republication of the landmark book Mike cited. It’s New York 1954-55, published in 1995 by Dewi Lewis. In addition to more images than the original publication, it also features Klein’s comments on most of the images. One of that book’s most notable features is that it’s the only book I own whose traditional binding presents a full lay-flat design. This is such a critical success factor to making the book’s wall-to-wall full-bleed design so immersive! (You can watch a flip-thru of the book here.) Honestly, it’s one of the few books that have genuinely made me feel changed after viewing, and that I cannot seem to spend less than two hours viewing. Creepy.

"Many photographers’ obits claim they were 'influential' or pathfinders. It’s often more polite respect than fact. But in William Klein’s case it’s an understatement. His brash f-u attitude enabled him to plow genuinely new visual narrative grounds in both still photography and filmmaking. He was a big 'un!"

Nico: "Once saw a documentary about William Klein on the BBC. Sadly not available on their website and it’s blocked on YouTube. But I found it here. Mind: the original is one hour and five minutes. Enjoy."

Elizabeth II 1926-2022

Max Mumby, Queen Elizabeth II attends an Armed Forces Act of Loyalty Parade in the gardens of the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, Scotland, 2022

Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, Her Majesty Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and her other realms and territories, has died at Balmoral Castle, in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, at the age of 96. She reigned as Queen of the United Kingdom for 70 years and 214 days, the longest-serving monarch in British history, exceeded in world history only by Louis XIV of France, the longest-ruling sovereign monarch whose reign is verifiable by exact date. She is succeeded by her son King Charles III. She has reigned as Queen for longer than 90% of the world's population have been alive.

Here's a presentation of her life in pictures posted by the BBC.

Mike

David Saxe: "I grew up in Montreal a long time ago. In 1951 Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip visited. It was a year before she became Queen. I was in grade three at the time at Lord Willingdon School, in the neighborhood of Notre Dame de Grace, and I remember the whole school being let out early that day to 'see the Princess.' We all lined up outside the school, buses were waiting, and the whole class got on one of them and we were driven to somewhere. When we arrived (wherever it was), we were assembled along the side of the street and we were all given little paper Union Jacks glued to wooden sticks and told to wave them when the procession passed. The procession arrived. The Princess and Philip were seated in the back of a black Cadillac convertible and they waved to us as they sped past. We waved back with our Union Jacks on wooden sticks. It was all over in seven seconds. The funny thing is that after all those years, I still have the image of them speeding past—etched in my memory. It only lasts for a brief moment or so but it's always there whenever I think of it. It's my first photograph."

Scott Paris: "I am so old that I actually remember watching her coronation in 1953, on a wooden TV almost the size of a refrigerator, with a mostly round screen about eight inches across. Grainy, scratchy black-and-white, of course. I was six, and I think I only remember it because my WWII-generation parents thought it was magical that we could see events in London as they happened. I think I thought it was pretty normal."

Sean: "Even as an anti-monarchist, I have always respected the dignity and grace demonstrated by Elizabeth in her role as Monarch. Not an easy role for a shy young woman to play, but she played it well to the very end. RIP."

Tom Burke: "Her Majesty has been a presence in my life as far back as I can remember. In my early 70s, I am a member of the oldest group of British people who, although born in the previous reign (George VI) have no memories of it; for us, there has always 'The Queen.'

"Of course, when I say 'a presence in my life' I don't mean personally. Like almost all British people I've never met her. No, what I mean is that she was constantly being mentioned. There were formal occasions such as the State Opening of Parliament which includes the Queen's (or King's) Speech, in which the monarch appears to give Parliament their instructions (in fact, the Speech is written by the Prime Minister); solemn occasions such as Remembrance Day—'Her Majesty will lead the nation in a ceremony of remembrance'; more relaxed occasions such as attendance at sporting and other public events; and wherever I went, in cities, towns and villages all over the country, I might find a plaque or notice saying that this particular school/hospital/public building had been officially opened/inaugurated/dedicated by Her Majesty. She put herself about over the years; in her own phrase 'I have to be seen to be believed.'

"There's a deeper importance to her long reign. The UK is a fairly conservative (small 'c') nation, but we are prepared to give new things a go and if we like them, carry on with them. The result has been that we have changed almost beyond recognition since the end of the Second World War. Against those changes we have also sought stability by trying to create a synthesis of change and tradition. Her Majesty's long reign has been a huge factor in that, and goes a long way to explaining how we have accepted so much social change (especially) while remaining, I think, true to our traditions."

Thomas Mc Cann: "I'm from Northern Ireland. Before the coronation came along home televisions we rare. The protestant population invested heavily in them to be able to watch the ceremony. Six years late the Catholics got their chance with the inauguration of a new Pope. Those were the days."

Jayanand Govindaraj: "Let me give you an Indian's view on the queen. Why eulogize a woman who did nothing particular but live in luxury for a long time, funded liberally by her subjects? In her public life, throughout her reign, her country has been on one long constant decline—socially, politically and economically within, and in the matter of global influence without. In her private life, she had a husband who was probably a closet racist, whom, nevertheless, she seems to have adored, and together they raised one of the most dysfunctional families on earth, hounding a daughter-in-law to death, and pushing a grandson to run away, probably on racist grounds. What is there to glorify? Nevertheless the myth-making machine is in overdrive right now!"

Rob Campbell (partial comment): "Yes, a sad but inevitable day. I was sailing back to Britain from India, and I guess I was sixteen years of age as she was being crowned. Many years later, I photographed her and the Duke of Edinburgh on behalf of the then Scottish Design Centre, in Glasgow. Officialdom almost frustrated the gig: as I moved from shooting their arrival inside the building, onwards to the next 'station' of that shoot, which was her signing of the visitors book, the police barred me from entry to the room, so I just returned to the PR office and sat down to see what next. In moments, another official came rushing in to usher me through security, and I got my shots, a couple of which are somewhere on my website. I say somewhere, because the other pro work gallery there is pretty much all calendar pix, and it always felt it would be disrespectful to place those royals shots amongst the girls. As Jay Maisel says, who the hell knows where anything is anymore?"

Albert Smith: "Maybe of interest among photo enthusiasts: Popular Photography, 'A closer look at some of Queen Elizabeth II’s favorite cameras.'"

Pi Manson: "I’m British. I find it incredibly depressing how sycophantic, weepy coverage has sprawled across the entire BBC. The monarchy seems to nothing but infantilise us: The Guardian had a headlining article about rainbows spotted at Balmoral!

"The Queen avoided tax while claiming millions of pounds of public money. She had the privilege to see laws that affected her 'interests,' and amend them as necessary, allowing her to avoid environmental, employment and tax regulations. The monarchy are not even allowed to be mentioned in the House of Commons (except in gushing terms), so our elected representatives may never bring up constitutional ideas that would make our country more egalitarian, democratic and, frankly, less medieval.

"It’s sad in that a human has died. But in all honesty, this Brit would see her family yanked from their palaces by thorough constitutional reform."

Mike replies: I'm not British of course, and am only observing from an armchair far away, and my opinion is worth exactly zero, but...it will be interesting to see what William will do when he becomes King. I think he is of a mind to de-emphasize the monarchy somewhat, along Scandinavian lines, although less thoroughly. Ironically that might be the best way to preserve the institution. I suspect Charles III is bound to be somewhat of a challenge for the institution, never mind his spotted past which I personally cannot blame him for, at least in its "broad brushstrokes" version. Married the wrong partner, eventually wised up and married the right one—that's hardly an uncommon course for a human being of either sex. I don't know much of the details of how he behaved in the particulars. However: he's an old man, lacking the vitality of youth and relevance to younger people; unlike his mother he's opinionated and meddlesome, mildly so perhaps, but not likely to take to the high road with gravitas and discipline like his mother did; he's a thoroughly known quantity to the British people, lacking any sort of mystery; and he doesn't seem to have the inspirational qualities of a natural figurehead—seems only a workmanlike public speaker for one thing. Is it certain Charles even really desires his new job? He seems a thoroughly decent fellow to me and I've always rather liked him. But on the other hand my pie-in-the-sky take on the situation is that the best thing he could do would be to save the cost of an extra coronation and step aside in favor of his son. I know that's not going to happen, because it doesn't fit traditions, but might not a young man in the prime of life with a beautiful wife and little kids might make for a better King in uncertain times?

Tim Page 1944-2022, Fred Lyon 1924-2022

The inspiration for the Dennis Hopper photojournalist character in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, British combat photographer Tim Page, has died. Page led a very adventurous life. Among many other things, he was declared dead in Vietnam until a mortuary attendant(!) realized he wasn't; his best friend was Errol Flynn's son Sean, who disappeared while on assignment and has never been seen since; and he was at the infamous Doors concert in New Haven when Jim Morrison was arrested for obscenity. If you'd like to read about the whole Vietnam scene, check out Dispatches by Mike Herr—that is, if you can't find Page's own out-of-print memoir, Page After Page. (Page is first mentioned on p. 7 of Dispatches.)

There is a good and thorough obituary of Tim Page at The Guardian, which reports that he was open about his struggles with PTSD and was an activist against the use of landmines, which would make perfect sense even if one of them didn't nearly kill him. He spent his later life in Australia. Tim Page was 78. 

+=+=+=+=+

San Francisco photographer Fred Lyon, whose book San Francisco Noir has been our Book o' the Week for a bit now, also died recently. For many years he was a "first call" photographer when one was needed in San Francisco, and he energetically documented the city as an art photographer in addition to his fashion and professional work. There is a fine obituary of Fred at SFGate. He was 97.

Mike
(Thanks to Andy Wilkes, Kenneth Tanaka, and Robert Edelman)

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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Richard Alton: "Fred Lyon? Never heard of him. What a revelation though—thanks for bringing him to my notice."

Dan Khong: "I met Tim when he visited Singapore at the invitation of Leica Asia Pacific. He showed a series of his 'Nam pictures. He was living in Australia. Quite sad to see such an illustrious war photographer slowing drifting into the sunset."

Martin Pallett: "Nottingham, April 1995. Tim Page was promoting his new book Derailed in Uncle Ho's Victory Garden at Waterstones book shop. My mate, Nige, worked there, and I attended Tim Page's talk; Nige said to stick around so that we could have drinks with him after the shop closed, so I tagged along with the shop folk. Not long after sitting down, Mr. Page lit up a 'cigarette' (it was still OK to smoke in pubs back then) and it was a moment later that the odour of burning rope permeated the back room and we noticed the oily smoke rising: he had a licence to smoke marijuana due to the injuries sustained over the years: it was an 'interesting' pub session to say the least! If there is afterlife, I hope he meets up with Flynn, Stone, and the rest of his folk: peace be upon him."

Kurt Markus 1947-2022

Kurt Markus in 2019. Portrait by Christopher Keels.

Kurt Markus has died, on June 12th, of Parkinson's disease and Lewy body disease. He was best known for his portraits of cowboys and the American West. He also did commercial work, mainly fashion, and is known for his photography of boxing. He was also one of a once common but now dying breed, a photographer who printed his own work in the darkroom and considered that side of the craft to be integral to his art.

Hampton Sides has written a beautiful essay about Kurt at Staley-Wise:

Markus, who lived much of his adult life in Kalispell, Montana, was a devoted husband and father, and a loyal friend known for his calm demeanor, his dry sense of humor, and his deep sense of personal honor. "When I think of Kurt," recalled one of his closest friends, Buzz Shiely, "I see a thoughtful, honest man, smiling at me from beneath a black Stetson." Suzy Moore, a longtime family friend who served as Markus’s studio manager, described him as "such a perfect human—kind, modest, a warm spirit. Wherever he went, he was always just Kurt: A regular guy happy with simple things."

The essay is excellent, a fine window into the life.

An example of Markus's fashion work

He went after a quality of "raw authenticity," of "unslickness," Sides tells us. You can see more of his work at the gallery, and in his books, including his three best-known, Cowpuncher, Buckaroo, and  After Barbed Wire, all of which are out of print. He was 75.

Mike
(Thanks to Chris Keels and Oren Grad)

Book o' the Week:

Inspiration Leica Akademie (English and German Edition). A "group show" of 76 Leica Akademie photographers from 16 countries worldwide, curated by Heidi and Robert Mertens. It looks to me like this is going out of print soon, so act soon if you want one.

The book link is your portal to Amazon from TOP, should you choose to support the site.

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Great Expectations

Matt O'Brien wrote in response to yesterday's post:

"All of these reasons are why I am waiting for the [Leica] CL2."

The late Leica CL. It was Leica's me-too X100[x],
but failed to slay the dragon.

Alas, Fuji excepted, these are woeful times for people who like smaller-than-24x36mm sensors, and the Leica CL is one more reason. On May 17th, Leica Rumors published an internal document from Leica advising its dealers how to handle any questions they might get about the CL and TL from "distributors, customers, and the media." Essentially, the document says that sales of cameras with smaller sensors are in die Toilette (again, Fuji excepted, I would guess) but that the FF segment is still a bright spot, and that this state of affairs "has prompted Leica Camera AG to discontinue its CL-/TL2-system cameras." The company adds that it'll be concentrating on FF cameras going forward.

On the good side, the rumor filters through that Leica is surprised at the success of the Q series. (See Peter Wright's comment.)

Leica did affirm that it'll service any CL or TL2 for six years from date of purchase. B&H lists the CL as discontinued, but, in what is no doubt a glitch, lists the TL2 as being both available and discontinued. I have a feeling if you were to try ordering a TL2 with lens (same price as the TL2 without lens), your order would be cancelled.

Six years might be a good prediction for the extent of survival for "legacy" smaller-sensor ILCs. (The legacy is from the days when "chips," as they were called then, were exponentially more expensive the larger they were.) If I were to wax acerbic as is my wont betimes, I would fire off a snarky comment about how we'll soon all have to drive giant pickups like the GMC Deniali [sic] and take pictures with proper bricks and bags of giant lenses if we can't be satisfied, like good sheeple, with the phones Apple gives us. But I won't go there, and thou art welcome. You might think Fuji is also excepted from this six-year dire prediction, but they're only one decision away from it. Remember that Nikon was "committed" to APS-C in the early days of DSLRs, until it wasn't any more.

But, as Matt knows by now from other commenters, he's unlikely to get a CL2. But hey, Matt, join my club—I'm waiting for the Panasonic GX8 Mark II. Comma, dammit. Miss Havisham is still waiting for her bridegroom, too—we all have our great expectations!

Mike

P.S. Note the categories for this post. :-)

Book o' the Week:

Inspiration Leica Akademie (English and German Edition). A "group show" of 76 Leica Akademie photographers from 16 countries worldwide, curated by Heidi and Robert Mertens. It looks to me like this is going out of print soon, so act soon if you want one.

The book link is your portal to Amazon from TOP, should you choose to support the site.

Link to 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:

xf mj: "I just upgraded to a used 'big dragoon' Olympus to pair with a new-to-me 80–300mm-e lens, but these last posts had me really thinking I should replace my ol' 2011 E-M5 + 20mm combo with a Fuji X100v. I still very much enjoy the digital equivalent of a walk-around, almost pocketable RF with a wide-normal, and those posts were a good reminder of that love. For a few years every other comment I made on TOP expressed my allegiance to that E-M5 combo.

"So I do a deep looking back at the image quality etc of all these guys. It's all good. Quite good. What the industry achieved with that Fuji, probably with this CL, with the E-M5 Mark III, etc., is more than good enough. They are all great. They are all capable cameras, some with IS, some with good weather sealing. All I ask of everyone who owns these cameras now is to treat them nice and sell 'em cheap to me someday on eBay!

"The market has briefly forgotten this segment for the time being. Hopefully it will twist back around. Some possible evidence in the vehicle realm: I live in a rural coast area, and all the big truck bros are now into buying used Minis to drive around these days. They want stick shifts, good gas mileage, and some fun handling. Gives me a weird kind of hope. Heck, maybe a fun-to-drive, compact, reliable, light-duty truck will be back in vogue soon too!"

Mike: Strange, I just noticed the other day that I'm seeing more Minis on the road around here. There's a Mini parked in a driveway that used to serve as parking for one of those 700-HP Dodge Challengers.

A mini point-counterpoint:

Kirk (partial comment): "As to the Leica CL, which I own. The images out of that small and agile system are extremely good. It's a product that required a better educated market, and the interchangeable lens capability makes it head and shoulders better than the Fuji X100V. I owned that camera as well—until I shot with the CL. Then it was 'Adios X100V.'"

Kenneth Tanaka (partial comment): "Re: the Leica CL, alas, 'tis fading to history. No surprise to me. I owned one for a couple of years. Yes it was kinda kute. Yes, it loved M lenses via an adapter. Yes its native lenses were nice. But the package, as a whole, was, typically for Leica, overpriced, outdated, quirky, and under-featured. I felt no sentimental pangs when UPS took mine away."

stmpjmpr: "Re 'Leica is surprised at the success of the Q series': I'm surprised that they're surprised: The Q gives a lot of the Leica feel and quality, but for those of us whose eyes aren't up to the manual focusing of the M. Its simplicity, quality, and M-inspired styling are alluring. To Yuan's point in the comments, it is EVF-based, but it's quite nice in manual focus mode."

darlene: "In 2010 I purchased my last DSLR, the D700 for an Iceland trip. My favorite Iceland photos were actually made with the smaller Canon G7 because it stayed in my pocket and was easily accessible, although the D700 images are 'prettier.' Not long after, I acquired my first mirrorless camera, an APS-C Sony NEX-7. The D700 was sold off after it slept for a year in my gear closet. I shoot tech cameras with digital backs in the studio, and Fuji APS-C cameras for all my other needs. No longer do I have a need for the 24x36 sensor. If I did not shoot medium format, that might be a different story, but medium format and tech cameras make me happy. The 4/3 system never interested me because I found APS-C good enough for my smaller format needs."

Eolake Stobblehouse

Eolake Stobblehouse

Long-long-longtime friend o' TOP Eolake Stobblehouse has died. A Dane who was born Frants Nielsen—"a character I vaguely remember," he said of that name—he died at his home in Manchester, England, of natural causes and apparently without pain or discomfort. "He was dead on the way to the bathroom," his sisters wrote, "no drama, but quietly they said." He had mentioned ongoing health problems but seldom complained or explained.

Eolake was an original. He had wide-ranging interests and a great devotion to spirituality and arts of all kinds. Adam at TidBITS wrote that Eolake was "a genuinely thoughtful and inquisitive soul who was always involved in some sort of personal creative expression." Can't say it better. He always struck me as a person of kindness, compassion, and a humane outlook who nevertheless had a core of sadness in his life; but that last is only my impression. He was an early internet entrepreneur and among the first to make his fortune in this then-new medium. He also was a loyal supporter of other internet endeavors he liked, which fortunately included The Online Photographer. He helped keep us alive for a while.

He also helped in many other ways. I'll tell you one little Eolake story.

Very early on, when I first started accepting ads, I had my ad spaces priced very cheaply, yet they had attracted almost zero interest. It seemed pretty obvious that my 'umble blog, like many of my endeavors, was going to fizzle. Hearing of this, Eolake sent me a little paperback book with an amateurish-looking cover—it was called The Trick to Money Is Having Some. To give you an idea of the kind of book it was, consider this from the blurb: "...money is merely a form of energy, and...the difference between having it and not having it is merely a small but subtle shift in consciousness." Pure Eolake; he loved that sort of soft new-agey talk. I emailed him to thank him, but noted that, first of all, the book had about the dumbest title of any book I had ever heard of in my life, so, "thanks but no thanks," because I knew he liked that kind of stuff but it was just not my cuppa.

He replied in gentle good humor; I don't think I ever once riled or tweaked Eolake, much less angered him. He calmly explained that if I would just read it and open up my heart to the Universe (or some such, I wouldn't know how to quote him exactly just from memory), good things would happen. Well, I was about to lose my house at the time, and the electric company was cutting off our power on a regular basis, and I thought, well, he's done this successfully, and I haven't, so why do I think I know so much more than he does? So I took his advice and read the book. And it was at least in parts as offbeat as I imagined it would be. But at the end I thought, I'm not so smart, so I'll just take the suggestions and do what it says. One of which was that I threw caution, not to mention rationality, to the winds, and increased the price of my ad spaces tenfold. This seemed crazy to me, but I figured I had little to lose, since I was only earning a pittance from them anyway.

To my complete amazement, there was an immediate clamoring for ads on the site. Within an astonishingly short time—on the order of a few weeks—I had sold more than I ever hoped for and was earning enough just from ads every month for me and my son to live on, if barely.

Eolake said, See?

Makes me laugh even now. Probably just coincidence, and yet....

Ads kept me going for a few years, and from then on, each source of income on the site tended to be replaced by a better one. Within a few years I went from having to check the dribs and drabs in my bank account carefully before charging anything at the grocery store, lest my card be declined, to having tens of thousands in my checking account and never having to give a thought to what any particular food item cost.

Perhaps Eolake merely died. But perhaps his soul is streaking along somewhere out in the Universe in a sparkling ball of light and warmth, and he's laughing, joyful to have shed this Earth and its troubles and embarked on the next phase of his spirit's journey. It's almost hard to see how it could be otherwise.

I'm still sad. I wish I had met him. I see that I did not even answer his last two emails, which makes me feel like a sh*t. His sites are still up. He is survived by his sisters Maj-Britt and Karin, who are in my thoughts. (If you know how to contact them, please send them a link to this post.) Farewell, Eolake, and thanks.

Mike
(Thanks to Christian Dönges, Bahi Para, Adam Engst, and several others)

Book of Interest:

Hank O'Neal, Ed., A Vision Shared: A Portrait of America 1935–1943 (Steidl, 2019). The reissue of the best overall survey of the work of the FSA photographers of the 1930s. Every public and school library should have a copy, for one thing. Thanks to Andy Moursund for turning me on to this book many years ago. Originally published in 1976 by St. Martin's Press.

The book link above is a portal to Amazon.

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Steve Rosenblum: "What very sad news."

darlene: "May peace be with his loved ones. My heart is heavy for you and his friends."

Kenneth Tanaka: "Very sorry to learn of the loss of someone quite familiar here. My condolences to his family and close friends. It is a unique phenomenon of our age that we feel rather close loss for people we’ve come to know but have never met in-person."

Jerry Uelsmann 1934–2022

Jerry Uelsmann (I always heard it pronounced beginning with "you'll," as "YOU'LLs-mun"), who was famous, especially in the last third of the 20th century, for his endlessly creative surrealist combination printing, died in Gainesville, Florida, on April 4th, at the age of 87. He made photomontages entirely in the darkroom from multiple negatives, some of which were known to appear in more than one of his works. He was the ex-husband of Maggie Taylor, an early proponent of surreal montages made in Photoshop, although, as a master printer who was able to do things in the darkroom that many others who tried could not, Uelsmann himself chose not to make the transition to digital imaging.

He studied as an undergraduate at RIT with Minor White and Ralph Hattersley, graduating in 1957, then did graduate work at Indiana University, earning his MFA under his mentor and influence Henry Holmes Smith in 1960. In that year, during a period when photography was entering into university curricula around the nation, he was recruited by Van Deren Coke to teach at the University of Florida, where he spent his career.

Jerry Uelsmann, Self-Portrait

That career can be said to have been somewhat charmed; he came along at just the right time. He is widely credited with bringing the then-current sensibilities of Pop Art into photography (and/or vice versa), in kinship with artists such as Joseph Cornell and Robert Rauschenberg. His career reached an early peak in 1967 with a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art and a Guggenheim Fellowship beginning that same year; in that period, an entire issue of the influential journal Aperture was devoted to his work. He was a founding member of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE) among many other accomplishments and honors.

Although the work itself may be something of an acquired taste, he was celebrated as the leading proponent of his style throughout the 1970s especially, and of course thereafter, although my own impression is that he gradually became less and less well known after the advent of digital imaging, when artists such as Julie Blackmon, Dominic Rouse, Maggie Taylor, Gregory Crewdson, Erik Johansson, John Paul Caponigro, Loretta Lux and many others began to expand the aesthetic territory he had once inhabited more or less alone. Uelsmann constructed his pictures by moving the same sheet of paper from enlarger to enlarger—"most photographers carry many cameras with multiple attachments," he said, whereas he carried only one, but "most photographers have one enlarger. I have half a dozen."

Combination printing has been a constant thread in photography from early on: Oscar Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson are fixtures in most histories of photography, never mind such tricks as the Cottingley Fairies or gag postcards showing a single giant potato on a horse-drawn wagon. More modern artists such as Duane Michals have used some of the techniques as well. But Jerry Uelsmann was sui generis. No one did what he did quite the same way, with quite the same range of inventiveness or at his level of darkroom prestidigitation and skill, and most of his creations are easily recognizable as his. He leaves behind a plentiful legacy, both as a teacher of generations of students and as a distinctively unusual photographer/artist.

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."

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.

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Bob Rosinsky: "I had the opportunity to see him present his work and give a talk at the Polk County Museum in Lakeland, Florida ten or fifteen years ago. He impressed me as being approachable and somewhat modest, truly a nice guy. Back in the '70s, when I was just getting into processing and printing black and white, I was in awe of his work. With digital photography entering its third decade, it's understandable why people today may find it quaint."

John Camp: "And he published a book in 1992 called Photo Synthesis with a foreword by A.D. Coleman. Still available on Amazon."

ASW: "I'm not sure if I should admit to having never heard of Mr. Uelsmann before this post, but 'Self-Portrait' definitely brought out my first LOL (as the kids say) in a good long while. I think I would have liked him."

Mike replies: I always wondered if he meant he had his head in the clouds.  :-)

Erwin Puts is Gone

The world of enthusiast photography lost a friend and a unique individual when Erwin Puts passed away in March after a short illness.

Erwin was perhaps the greatest paragon of his type: the independent superfan of a camera brand or system. A great aficionado of the Leica marque, he worked tirelessly and performed truly Protean feats both to learn about the focus of his passion and to generously share what he knew with others.

A precursor of this type of passionate enthusiast was Ernst Wildi, who for many years was an independent expert and booster of Hasselblad. On the modern Internet our friend Thom Hogan has similar expertise with Nikon, although he is as much a gadfly critic as a fan of that company. The late Herbert (Burt) Keppler of Modern Photography and Popular Photography perhaps started out on a similar path as the author of The Pentax Way, but necessarily became more brand-agnostic as his editorial career progressed.

Personally Erwin and I had a regrettable reputation for a short while as what might now be called "frenemies," due to some overenthusiastic public arguments we indulged in many moons ago on the LUG. We had a fundamental difference of outlook: to put it overly crudely, but simply, Erwin venerated Leica optics and I considered Leica just another lensmaker. Those viewpoints could never truly be reconciled. But neither of us were happy with the relationship that resulted, so, in private correspondence, we "buried the hatchet." That was many years ago now. Since then we had a cordial, though not close, relationship. Erwin sent me several kind gifts of his work, including an inscribed copy of his magnum opus The Leica Compendium (Ken Rockwell wrote a review). He wrote innumerable other articles, books, and web and forum posts as well.

Leica, and Leitz before it, has inspired a great deal of supporting literature over the years, more than any other marque, and many of the books have been impressive and deluxe productions. Almost all are to some extent labors of love. Even for a brand that inspires such strong passions, and even with such vigorous competition, it seems safe to say that no one ever loved a camera marque more than Erwin Puts loved Leica in the film years. The Leica Compendium and Jim Lager's monumental three-volume Leica: An Illustrated History must be counted the twin peaks of Leica literature, and thus, perhaps, by logical extension, of all independent writings devoted to the creations of specific camera companies.

Don Morley has written a tribute to Erwin at Macfilos, which nicely hints at Erwin's warmth, enthusiasm, and generosity.

There will never be anyone quite like Erwin; he can never be replaced. His work will survive him and continue to speak for him.

Mike

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

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Kenneth Tanaka: "I was very sad to see this news. Mr. Puts was unquestionably the ultimate 'superfan' of Leica. But he was more than that. He was a tremendous educator and documenter of not just Leica products but also of lens and camera design. Puts's Leica Compedium is truly a magnificent reference volume for anyone who wants to study the science of photography as well as a bit of brand lore. During the past year I've dived deeper into Leica and, having spent more time with the Compendium, I've come to admire Puts even more. (I just randomly flipped my copy open to a page in the 'Lens Optical Design' section, showing a discussion of '5.9.14. Vignetting and the cosine-to-the-fourth-effect.' Nerd-max! I never met him, but understand from personal accounts that he could be a bit touchy and cantankerous. OK, me too. Still, I thank him for his tremendous work and offer my deepest condolences to his family and close friends."

Joseph Reid: "This is such sad news. Twenty years ago as I first considered buying a Leica, the Google led me to Puts' site. It was a trove of useful information as well as entertaining on an arcane level. How much, I wondered, could one person know about a brand? With Puts and Leica, the answer seemed to be, everything. His Compendium, which eventually became available as a PDF, remains incredibly helpful to anyone shopping the used lens market and faced with sorting through the overwhelming number of lens variants. I bought a hard copy of the Compendium at some point and when the PDF became available I could have sold the hard copy at an obscene profit, were it not for a dog with an itch to eat book bindings."

Thelma Pepper 1920-2020

Thelma Pepper receiving the Saskatchewan Order of Merit in Regina in May 2018. Photo courtesy Gordon Pepper.

I guess if you are going to write about 98-year-old photographers, you're going to have to swallow some hard news sooner rather than later. I'm sorry to report that Thelma Pepper died.

She had a reasonably long 40-year career as an active photographer...which only began when she was 60. "Life really begins for a lot of people at 60," she said.

She had a sharp interest in politics and especially in people. She was a photographer of Saskatchewan, the Canadian province smack dab in the middle of the country, due north of Montana and the Dakotas—the middle of the three "prairie provinces" and the only Canadian province without any natural boundary (the Canadian Rockies provide the Southwestern border of Alberta). Born in Nova Scotia, she arrived in Saskatchewan in 1947, and later took up her Rolleiflex TLR with the intention of documenting the stories of "forgotten" women of Saskatchewan's vast plains. She also had a secondary interest in the province's landscapes, making multiples created by patching together different frames—panoramas with the "bones showing," you might say. You can see a few of those here.

It's gratifying that she received so much recognition from her province. She received the lifetime achievement award for her photography at the Lieutenant Governor's Arts Awards in 2018, and was awarded the Saskatchewan Order of Merit in 2018.

A new biography of her is called Thelma: A Life in Pictures. Another book comes up on Amazon called PROOF: Did You Like That Photograph? How Passion and Creativity Can Lead To A New Life After 60—The Life and Times of Thelma Pepper, but I'm not sure that one exists; it's not available on Amazon and it doesn't come up in searches on Abebooks or eBay, which puts it pretty far out on the edges.

A book called Human Touch, containing "50 portrait images selected from Thelma Pepper’s entire body of work of 2,350 printed photographs," is apparently mainly sold locally in Saskatoon. You can also find it online here.

Anyway, I've liked what I could see of her. "She touched and inspired everyone she met. She loved talking to people, learning about them, and ultimately, in her own quiet and confident way, making all she met feel better about themselves and their own lives," her son Gordon told the CBC.

It might be that her great age helped her work rise above the waves, but in another sense you could say she died young.

Mike
(Thanks to Phil Hall)

From Gordon Pepper: "Thank you very much for the wonderful article on my mother Thelma Pepper. My mother loved meeting and learning about the people she met, and expressed this though her photography. One of her last things she said to me, about a month ago, was her wish that some day Canada would have a national portrait gallery. She believed that portrait photography was one of the meaningful ways of (artistically) understanding a certain place and time—through its people. Thank you again."

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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Lesley T: "Thank you. What a lovely story, and what wonderful photographs. Older people are sometimes discouraged from starting something new, but sometimes the new experience gives purpose to one's life and produces something marvelous."

Michel Hardy-Vallée: "There are so many Canadian photographers that don't get much exposure outside of the country. I'm glad to discover Thelma Pepper; I didn't know her. Yousuf Karsh 'of Ottawa' has stolen the thunder, but here's a few, taken randomly: Sam Tata, Gabor Szilasi, Margaret Watkins, John Max, Alex Henderson, Guy Borremans, Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, Michel Campeau, Jeff Wall (yes), William Notman, Donigan Cumming, Michael Flomen, Antoine Desilets, Evergon, Evariste Desparois, Michel Campeau, Sylvain P. Cousineau, Normand Rajotte, Jean Lauzon, Dave Heath, Serge Jongué, Nina Raginsky, Judith Eglington, Benoit Aquin, John Vanderpant, Julie Doiron, Raymonde April, Roloff Beny, Geneviève Cadieux, Fred Herzog, Shin Sugino, and I could go on...."

Gary Nylander: "So sorry to hear of Thelma Pepper's passing. I was first introduced to her photography from the CBC article from a couple of years ago. A fine photographer she was and an even finer human being."

Richard Parkin: "David Hockney used 'joiners' to describe composites 'with the bones showing.' Seems a useful word to me."

Terry Burnes: "I'm a descendant of prairie people. They're resilient. The prairie and its people are a fascinating subject to me. The great North American landscape, in my opinion, is hard to capture well. And the stories there are are about stalwart people in a difficult land. This reminds of another female photographer whose story I find compelling, Evelyn Cameron, who documented early prairie life in eastern Montana, no simple undertaking."

Evelyn Cameron, photographer (MHS Photograph Archives, Helena, Montana)

Mike replies: "Cameron covered a lot of ground on horseback to take her photographs. In order to find subjects, she often rode 20 to 30 miles round-trip carrying her 9-pound camera tied to her waist and her wooden tripod in a gun scabbard. Virtually all her work was done in the field because she did not operate a portrait studio. She was tough, dedicated, and loved her work."

That's from Evelyn Cameron, Montana's Frontier Photographer by Kristi Hager. The picture above was taken the year after Thelma Pepper was born.

Four Distractions for You

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Killip 1946–2020. Photo by Kent Rodzwicz.

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Thanks to all our Patreon contributors!

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

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

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

Covid Killed Lee Konitz (Music Notes)

Little Richard, 1932–2020: Richard Wayne Penniman, much better known as Little Richard, died yesterday of stomach cancer.

Little Richard was an inaugural inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. At the ceremony he was called a "living embodiment of the music's roots in the 'fifties." Paul McCartney patterned his rock vocal style after Little Richard's. Mick Jagger said, "when we were on tour with him I would watch his moves every night and learn from him how to entertain and involve the audience, and he was always so generous with advice to me." Jimi Hendrix, who played in Little Richard's band The Upsetters when he was young, once said, "I want to do with my guitar what Little Richard does with his voice."

The photo Mick Jagger posted on his Twitter feed yesterday

Terence McArdle, writing in The Washington Post, said, "He had an incalculable influence on the frenetic attitude of rock music, long after his heyday and his extended forays into religious music. He saw his sound and its feeling of howling abandon as rock incarnate. As he often said, 'My music made your liver quiver, your bladder splatter, your knees freeze—and your big toe shoot right up in your boot!'"

Lee Konitz

Lee Konitz 1927–2020: Alto saxophonist and jazz great Lee Konitz won't see Summer. He died in the middle of April from pneumonia as a complication of COVID-19.

He was important from the 1950s on and has a huge discography, but if you'd like a taste, try the live trio records he did with the young Brad Meldau and Charlie Haden in '96 and '97, such as Another Shade of Blue and, especially, Alone Together, his first album for the famous Blue Note label, recorded live at the Jazz Bakery in Los Angeles in 1996. Stephen Thomas Erlewine at AllMusic wrote, "Alone Together, Lee Konitz's first recording for Blue Note, is a special event. The saxophonist teamed up with legendary bassist Charlie Haden and young lion pianist Brad Mehldau, and the trio's interaction on this set of relaxed bop is astonishing. On paper, the music on Alone Together—a collection of standards—should just be straightahead cool bop, but all three musicians are restless and inventive, making even the simplest numbers on the disc vibrant, lively and adventurous.

"It's a wonderful record, one that makes a convincing argument that Konitz remains a vital force even as he reached his seventieth year."

Here's the first cut from that record. R.I.P. Lee.

Mike

P.S. If you've ever wondered why jazz sounds the way it does, and why some of it might be hard for you to listen to, I recommend "The 7 Levels of Jazz Harmony" from Adam Neely. And I'll just point out that it can be hard to hear above your level. —Mike, mainly a poblano pepper dude

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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James: "Whilst living in England in the '70s, I saw Little Richard at the Odeon Lewisham. He was absolutely fantastic! After the opening song ended and he started talking to the audience, guys were shouting out...'we can't hear the piano, we can't hear the piano.' He stopped the show, made all the backing musicians turn down their egos (sorry, I mean amplifiers), and played up a storm for the rest of the evening."

Kenny Rogers was One of Us

Kenny Rogers, Lincoln Memorial. Kenny Rogers died last Friday.
This was one of his five favorite shots. The figure to the left
almost feels like a symbolic cameo by the photographer,
doesn't it?

I never knew much about the singer Kenny Rogers, credited with bringing a pop sensibility to country—or a country sensibility to pop, whichever you choose ("I've always been too pop for country and too country for pop," he said in 2001). All I can recall is a song called "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town" that I didn't like when I heard it on my transistor radio walking home from school in 1969. The song turns out to be a cover—it was written by Mel Tillis, the country music star. It didn't seem to go well with the British Invasion and Motown stuff that made up a lot of the rest of what the station played. I confess that 12-year-old me didn't know what the lyrics meant.

What I never knew is that he was a devoted and passionate photographer who was just as talented at photography as he was at his chosen kind of music. He studied under John Sexton and the Canadian photographers George Hurrell and Yousuf Karsh, and made medium- and large-format landscapes and scenic pictures as well as portraits of his famous friends and other celebrity musicians. You can see his five personal favorite photographs (one of which is the posed shot at the Lincoln Memorial above) in an article at Sports & Entertainment Nashville. The article by Bill Hobbs is nice too.

"I am an impulsive obsessive," Rogers said. "I impulsively get involved with something, and then I get obsessed with it. So that’s what happened with photography." Know the feeling?

Another good article about his photography is at The Guardian. All the articles seem to repeat that he started out with "a 35mm Brownie Hawkeye." Repetitions like that are markers of the news getting the news from the news—the Hawkeye was a 620 rollfilm camera. Camera geekery aside, the Guardian author, Thomas Hobbs (any relation to the Sports & Entertainment Nashville author?), said his photographs have "real depth...it's as if he was suggesting that America, even at its most beautiful, had something sinister lurking in the darkness." He adds of one portrait that "arguably, Rogers captured the unnerving bombast of [Michael] Jackson’s eccentric celebrity more clearly than just about any other photographer." Jackson sang backup on one song from Rogers' 11th studio album, Share Your Love, produced by Lionel Ritchie in 1981.

There's a great portrait of Rogers in his prime by the proto-paparazzo Ron Galella at this link. I dare not reproduce it here.

He published a number of books of his work, including Kenny Rogers: This Is My Country (58 Stunning Portraits of Country Music's Heart & Soul), Kenny Rogers' America, and his book of landscapes, American Beauty. None are still in print as far as I can tell; American Beauty might have sold out just since his death, and might be available again.

In his later years, he regularly posted his photos on Instagram. Including "Lincoln Memorial."

We're always diminished when one of our number succumbs, whether they're famous for photography or for something else or not. Kenny Rogers was 81. Godspeed, fellow photo obsessive.

Mike
(Thanks to many tipsters)

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.

TOP—too arty for the geeks and too geeky for the art world

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Dogman: "I met him many years ago during an interview for the paper where I was working. He was a very articulate man who seemed highly intelligent and not at all 'star-like.' I recall him saying something about considering his singing to be a business as much as an art. Later I found out about his interest in photography. I also recall seeing a fellow in the distance who looked remarkably like him photographing in Yellowstone National Park about twenty years ago. But I've been told I used to look like Kenny Rogers myself—tall, grey hair and beard—so who knows. Maybe just another lookalike."

Mike Ferron: "Extra points if you remember Kenny as a psychadelic rocker...."

John Sexton: "Anne and I were deeply saddened when we woke last Saturday morning to the news that our friend Kenny Rogers had passed away. My friendship with Kenny spanned more than thirty-five years. We met in 1984 when I conducted a private printing workshop in his darkroom. The workshop was his Christmas gift from his wife. Our mentoring relationship instantly became a friendship. His passion for photography, and his unstoppable attitude were inspiring.

"We shared many photographic adventures together over the years. Our first photographic trip together was when Kenny was doing a major concert tour with Dolly Parton. We would photograph during the day, and Kenny would perform with Dolly each evening. Early on during that trip I was teaching Kenny the basics of view camera tilts and swings under the seats at the sold out Tacoma Dome as Dolly was performing. Kenny was a moment late getting on stage for the start of his part of the show because he didn’t want to stop the view camera session!

"On more than a few occasions we would work in the darkroom together beyond 3:00 a.m.! He was a legendary entertainer, but most importantly he was a caring, generous, and thoughtful human being who loved his family...and a great and loyal friend. Anne and I will miss him a lot! R.I.P., Kenny."

William Schneider: "Back in the '80s, I recall seeing a magazine story about Kenny's photography. Part of the story showed how he enlisted the police to shut down traffic on a busy bridge so that he could set up a shot. Celebrity has its advantages."

Luigi Colani 1928–2019

Luigi Colani

-

Written by Adam Richardson

The man who made SLRs look and feel the way the do, Luigi Colani, died yesterday at 91.

Until the recent turn toward more angular and retro cameras, a lot of SLRs/DSLRs looked much the same, as you know, and all can trace their lineage back to the work the German industrial designer Luigi Colani did for Canon, specifically the Canon T90. Colani was a flamboyant designer who pushed a concept of biomorphism, and his vehicles in particular were pretty crazy-looking.

Here’s an article about him.

And here’s my own humble write-up/photo essay on the T90, which pioneered not just the shape of SLRs for the next 30 years (seriously, compare the grip and shutter button area of it to the EOS 1D of the last couple years—they're almost identical), and also the button/thumbwheel control combination that we take for granted today, which had never, to my knowledge, been used on any product of any kind up till that point in 1986.

Just to give a sense of how big of a leap the T90 was, compare it to its predecessor, the famous AE-1, which stuck to the classic aluminum/leather sandwich look. Then the EOS 1D, some 30 years later, looks hardly changed from the T90 despite bearing almost no resemblance to it "under the hood."

He designed many products in a wide variety of categories. The T90 was one of his more tame designs. He did some other really wild concepts for Canon, shown lower down on this page.

Luigi Colani died after a severe illness in the town of Karlsruhe, on the Rhine river west of Stuttgart.

Adam

Adam Richardson's Instagram is @massmadesoul

Original contents copyright 2019 by Adam Richardson. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Amazon.com • Amazon UK • Amazon Canada
Amazon Germany • B&H Photo • Adorama

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J Williams: "The modern camera world owes Luigi a big debt. A Canon T-90 was my first 'serious' camera. Nothing remotely like it at the time. The grip felt like Luigi had taken a lump of clay, grasped it in his hands and then said 'make the grip like this.' At the time I could not imagine why anybody would buy any other SLR. That's how far ahead it was compared every other SLR in existence at the time."

JohnW: "The T90 was definitely a seminal design and the culmination of the A series manual cameras. The F1 was around in its native form till 1994. But there's a big evolutionary gap between the T90 and the EOS 1D series. The first 'enthusiast' EOS film camera to followed the T90 design pattern was the EOS 650 in 1987; the family resemblance is unmistakable.

"The 650 was the first of five similar bodies with varying feature sets between March '87 and September '89 when the EOS 1 arrived. The EOS 1 was clearly a modernized T90 with AF and the new EOS lens mount and immediately endeared itself to the pro shooters and the upper-end amateurs. I had bought a 620 the year before and seriously coveted one but never could quite justify the plunge. The film series EOS 1's all had detachable battery grips and the early L series lenses were limited to a 28–70mm ƒ/2.8 and a 80–200mm ƒ/2.8. They were both excellent lenses for their time, but the 80–200mm had a flush rear element so was not tele-converter adaptable.

"With the combination of the T90 derived design and the EOS technology, Canon dominated the SLR market for the next 20 years and ate Nikon for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It wasn't till the arrival of the Nikon D2 that Nikon retook its appropriate place in the market. Canon still has the largest market share even today due in no small part to the lead they leveraged from combining the lessons of the T90 with the EOS system. And yes, Canon set the pace and the market followed in both general design/layout and technology.

"Thank You Mr. Colani. RIP."

GrantC: "I was running a camera store when the T90 was introduced. They were extremely difficult to sell, partly because of the then-extreme styling, but also because the earlier T-series had set the expectation for dubious construction quality. Most customers associated the T90 with the unrelated T50 and T70, and the much higher price tag caused them to look at the more 'traditional' bodies. For years the AE-1 was the most popular SLR sold, and those users who wanted a 'better' camera and wanted to stay in the Canon line bought the A-1. Those customers didn't see the T90 as a viable successor. Some went to the New F1, and others traded in their FD-mount equipment to buy into the EOS system when the 650 and 620 were introduced the following year. Once the EOS cameras were out, T90 sales—at least in our stores—came to a crashing halt. I've always thought that if Canon had made the nameplate more professional looking, rather than using the cheap cartoonish screen-printed logo it used on the lesser models, they'd have sold far better."

Paulo Bizarro: "To this day, the EOS 1V remains the camera I most enjoyed shooting with. A large part of that is due to the ergonomic design of the EOS family, coming from the T90."