The Online Photographer

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."

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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.

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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.

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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!

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"'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?

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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. 

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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)

These book links are your portal to Amazon. Please use these links; 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:

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.

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:

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.

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:

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.

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

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.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

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.

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

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!

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

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)

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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.

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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."

Fred Herzog 1930-2019

Fred Herzog. Photo by Ward Perrin.

In an odd coincidence, Fred Herzog died the same day Robert Frank died, far on the opposite side of Canada. Frank was a photographer whose essential work was poorly received and denigrated in its day; its importance was primarily in its outsized influence on other photographers over time. His fame and importance have done nothing but advance and increase. Herzog was a photographer who worked quietly in anonymity because he couldn't afford to print his work when he made it. He had no influence in his time. He was discovered and became known only late in his life, when his Kodachrome slides could be digitized and printed by inkjet and the value of his archive was recognized and published in books. His fame is modest and still in flux, still provisional. He's still understood as only a regional photographer, primarily a documentarian, which I think will change as more people come to appreciate his work. (Is Wright Morris a regional photographer? Is Edward Hopper a regional painter? No.)

For me personally, Herzog was one of the best discoveries of the present century. I love his work. I own a copy of Frank's The Americans (of course, because anyone who cares about and owns books about American photography ought to), and Lines of My Hand (which I like more and have spent more time with). I also own Sarah Greenough's formidable tome Looking In: The Americans, Expanded Edition, which I confess intimidates me and which I've barely cracked. I bought those books out of respect and appreciation.

I sought out Fred Herzog's books out of love, love for the work. This is just my opinion, but I think Herzog's work is more relevant to photographers now, as photography is practiced now. I can get in thrall to particular pictures, get lost in their world. They're as satisfying as good food when I'm hungry. Of course it isn't a contest. It just strikes me as ironic that even Herzog's death will be overshadowed by the same-day death of a far, far more famous photographer, that's all. It seems fitting, cynically speaking, in a sad way.

On a bright note: he did get to live to see his work recognized, in stark contrast to another famous 21st century late discovery with whose story his will probably always be linked, Vivian Maier.

The main obituary is at the Vancouver Sun. (Herzog was German-Canadian). His only book in print is:

Modern Color ($36.10)

And his out-of-print books are:

Fred Herzog: Photographs (Hatje-Cantz)

Fred Herzog: Photographs (Douglas & McIntyre)

and

Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs, which is still cheap enough to buy, and was the book we discussed when we first featured Fred. (Get it while you can—it's well worth having.)

He is represented by Equinox Gallery.

I hope it's not in bad taste to discuss his books in an obituary notice, but he's not very well known and his fame is fragile and I feel a certain urgency in advocating for, even proselytizing, his work. Interest in artists blooms at their deaths. I really want this guy to remain part of the conversation. I want photographers working now to know who he is.

Because for me there's little qualification needed: Fred Herzog is one of the greatest of street photographers, and one of the great color photographers. No asterisks or hyphens needed.

R.I.P.

Mike
(Thanks to Glenn Brown for pointing out that Frank and Herzog died at the opposite ends of Canada.)

Original contents copyright 2019 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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Tommy Brown: "Mike, Agree 100% with your take on Fred Herzog. I've loved his pictures from the moment I saw my first. I saw some of his prints last year at AIPAD and they're beautiful. Weird coincidence his passing on the same day as Robert Frank."

Mike replies: His pictures remind me of some of yours, Tommy....

Steve Jacob: "I agree about Fred. In fact, it was TOP that made me aware of Modern Color, and I have been a huge fan of Fred's work ever since. For those of us that engage in a similar kind of contemplative documentary style, his work is a masterclass in economical composition. He was the Walker Evans of his time, and it was a great shame he was not recognised earlier in his lifetime."

Tom: "I think Modern Color first came to my attention here on TOP. To anyone who might hesitate I can say it is one of the most often visited books in my collection, particularly whenever I need to refresh my eye."

Merle: "Aww. I picked up Modern Color a year or three ago, probably from your recommendation here. I've very much enjoyed it. I think it's helped me understand why I like the photographs I like."

JohnW (partial comment): "Sigh. Sigh. Sigh. Two of my photographic heroes gone on the same day.

"In 2012 I stumbled into an area of Vancouver named Strathcona, a trendy up-and-coming old neighbourhood with some interesting buildings. One afternoon while roaming the streets looking for material worth photographing, a car pulled up to the curb ahead of me, parked, and out stepped this very European-looking elderly gentleman with a jaunty beret.... Is that who I think it is? I hitched up my courage, approached him and asked 'are you Fred Herzog?' 'I am,' he replied. He was on his way to meet some photo buddies for coffee and a photo walk around the neighbourhood and invited me to join them for coffee. What a treat, and such a genial gentleman. I saw two of his exhibitions, one of them at the Equinox Gallery. If you think the books are impressive, imagine the images printed 30x40" on a white gallery wall...jaw-droppingly stunning. Fred belongs in the pantheon with the likes of Ernst Haas for pioneering the art of colour photography. He's a hometown boy and I got to shake his hand and have coffee with him. What a joy! Sleep well Fred."

Henning Wulff: "Fred Herzog was a good friend and photographic companion as we walked around his favourite neighbourhoods in Vancouver.

"We met in the early '70s, at a time when my photographic business grew and I decided I should maybe take some photography courses. Fred was head of Biomedical Communications at the University of British Columbia at the time and taught a mid-level course on photography from there. I endeared myself to the teacher by pointing out some technical errors he'd made in the middle of class. I stayed afterward in part to apologize and we talked a couple of hours and he showed me around his domain; many copy stands and micrographic equipment. The upshot was that he asked me to become co-teacher of the course, and that was the start of our friendship.

"Over the years Fred sometimes presented slideshows of this (mostly) 1950s Vancouver Kodachromes to groups of friends, and all of us knew how great his work was, but, as noted, there was no good way to print the images to his liking, so slideshows were it.

"He retired early, and from the mid '80s explored other photographic interests like shooting butterflies, and travelled worldwide in pursuit. Later, the galleries showed no interest in anything other than his early pictures. In his later years I often went to see him, and we went on walks, for the sake of walking, talking and shooting, usually followed by lunch or supper.

"I haven't seen him in a number of months, but having no contact with his son or daughter and knowing his increasing frailty, I suspected the worst. That moment has come. Many people will miss him."

Jeff: "The best thing about the expanded version Looking In, even if you ignore the rest, is studying the contact sheets in the back. A mini-tutorial of sorts on Frank’s shooting, and editing, approach. Highly recommended."

Rens Horn adds: "Be aware that only the hardbound copy has this goldmine, not the softcover. I used to work in the library of the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam, which unfortunately only had the softcover. I brought my own hardbound copy for students to study."

Nic M: "Jack Simpson of Vancouver was a friend and posted a bit about Fred Herzog. In his thread someone posted a link to a four-minute video about Mr. Herzog by a local TV station."

Robert Frank 1924-2019

Robert Frank, self portrait

As you surely know by now, Robert Frank died this past Monday in Nova Scotia. I'll have a more about this in the coming days (and hopefully a good story to pass along) but just one comment for the moment: people around the Internet are making a to-do over Robert's pronouncement from a 2004 Guardian interview: "The kind of photography I did is gone. It’s old. There’s no point in it any more for me, and I get no satisfaction from trying to do it. There are too many pictures now. It’s overwhelming." They seem to be treating that as a sort of self-indictment, or self-negation.

But look—this is entirely consistent with Frank's iconoclasm. It's blunt. When was he ever one to promote and glorify himself? He's the last person you'd expect to groom his own legacy with corpulent self-satisfaction. He was a true nonconformist, not a poseur nonconformist, not a model photographer for anyone. And of course he's right—photography has moved on, and naturally what was revolutionary in 1959 is commonplace now. That note of resignation is typical of older artists who have lost their powers as they've grown old or have said what they wanted to say and moved on. The only artists who don't feel that way in old age are conductors.

I kinda hate that the Guardian [in its US edition] ended his obituary on that quote. Wrong note to sound.

Mike

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Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf, from the series Real Fake Art

"If you look at all my projects, the umbrella for them is life in cities. Many different aspects of city life. Megacities."

So said the photographer Michael Wolf, who died in his sleep, apparently unexpectedly, two days ago, at the relatively young age of 64.

He was born in Munich, Germany, raised mostly in the USA and Canada, worked early in his career as a photojournalist for Stern magazine in Germany, and lived most of his adult life in Asia—since 1994 in Hong Kong, where he became one of a line of great photographers of that unique "city-state" in Southeastern China. HK is a shipping hub and financial center, mostly urban, highly cosmopolitan in flavor, and among the top handful of the most densely-populated places on Earth.

Michael Wolf, Bastard Chairs (multiple)

Michael Wolf's work included many series based around ideas, mostly having to do with details. He made street portraits but also photographed city dwellers unawares through uncurtained windows. He was greatly concerned with pattern and repetition, and often showed the same pictures as single works and as part of multiples made of anything from two images to many dozens. One of his series concentrated on lost laundry; one of his multiples was of ancient, patched bicycle seats. His exhibits often looked partly like art installations as much as photography shows. He is perhaps best known for "Tokyo Compression," a series of photographs of faces jammed up against the windows or glass doors of subway cars.

His website is still up. Although difficult to experience as tiny JPEGs, you can get a taste of his preoccupations and concerns from the work there. There is a cursory obituary at the New York Times and a more complete one at Petapixel.

Mike
(Thanks to Kenneth Tanaka, Nico Maijer and others)

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(Not) everything must fade away

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David Comdico: There are a couple of videos linked from the Wolf website that are very good. In one of the videos he praises the work of Tim Hetherington (his sleeping soldiers series) and Tim's ability to use his creative talent to say something new about a subject we thought we already understood. The same can be said of Wolf. Wolf had a real talent for visualizing ideas. Some of his strategies have become very common in contemporary photography but few have executed as well as he did."

Michael Matthews: "Wolf’s 'Paris Roof Tops' series remains an all-time favorite. If I had an art budget one of those would top the list."

Edwin: "I read the news in a local paper and didn't realise until then that he lived right there among us! I always thought that he lived in Germany and was amazed at the way he looked at Hong Kong, and now I have the answer.

"It's interesting to see Mike, who lives in the US of A the entire time, write about Hong Kong, my home city. Hong Kong is not a 'city-state,' it's a special administrative region, a far cry from a 'state.' 'Shipping hub,' fast disappearing. 'Entirely urban,' not really! Out of the 1,000 sq. km total area, there's 445 sq. km designated as country parks with no residences of any sort, and then some non-designated rural areas. Maybe that's the reason it's one of the most densely populated area on earth."

Mike replies: Okay, I stand corrected. Thanks. I changed "entirely" to "mostly" and put "city-state" is scare quotes. I often have to research very quickly, and the reference I found said that HK is 79% urban and 21% rural. Given that all the urban land in the USA could fit in the Northeast corner of it, I thought that was relatively a lot.

I've never been anywhere near Hong Kong, and, alas, never will be.

Thomas Rink: "If you have a sweet spot for black and white documentary photography, have a look at his master thesis. According to his biography, he studied with Otto Steinert at the Folkwang university in my hometown, Essen, Germany. For his thesis, he had apparently chosen to document the working-class life in this region of Germany (Ruhrgebiet), and photographed in a coal miner's housing estate in a neighbour town of Essen, Bottrop. His pictures are an interesting account of a bygone era, as all local coal mines have closed shop.

"In 1981, Michael Wolf founded the group 'Antrazit' together with Marc Izikowitz and Wolfgang Staiger. Some of the pictures from Michael Wolf's thesis are featured in the book Maloche—Leben im Revier, published by Antrazit. It is out of print, but still available secondhand at reasonable prices. Unfortunately, the book is in German, so most of the audience here will miss the excellent essay by Max von der Grün—but the pictures are impressive!"

Mark Roberts: "The Guardian's obituary."

William Furniss: "I knew Michael Wolf pretty well. We both arrived in Hong Kong around the same time and worked as photographers, and our paths would cross. I can say 'pretty well' because he was a man with a solid carapace, honest opinions with straightforward Germanic delivery, and he could be a little intimidating. First of all he seemed serious, and so certain were his earlier projects (so many completed projects!)—as a fellow photographer one approached him with a lot of respect. But he was competitive enough to make you feel as if you were somehow possibly in his league and that meant the game was on. It actually turned out he had a splendid sense of humour and was a fun and naughty person to be around. I think recently that whimsical side was coming to the fore in his work as his early successes, particularly with Architecture of Density, and subsequent shows at places like Arles meant his cultural contribution was fully recognised. The old imitation adage applied to him more than anyone else I know—he must have felt extremely 'flattered.' One of his self proclaimed secrets was that he was 'two steps ahead of the curve'— see his body of work here and you will see what I mean.

"Sixty-four in this age is far too young and we have been robbed of who knows how much? The fact that his last project was a series of sunsets taken from his home on Cheung Chau feels too ironic to be anything but masterful."

Karl Lagerfeld 1933–2019

Karl Lagerfeld, Modelka, 1996–97

Karl Lagerfeld, a German obsessed by all things French who was the creative director of Chanel among other accomplishments, has died in Paris at the age of 85.

Despite running several of the world's most successful fashion houses, he never gave up his many personal artistic pursuits, one of which was photography. "Lagerfeld took up photography in 1987," reports Artnet News, "starting off by photographing his own designs and later exhibiting his monochrome landscapes and moody portraits in black and white, the same palette he seized on for his signature look." You can see JPEGs of a few of his photographs here.

He was also a collector of photography. And he was the adoptive parent of one of the world's most famous cats, Choupette Lagerfeld, whose jet-set lifestyle at her "father's" side earned her a 120,000-strong Instagram following.

Anna Wintour, Editor-in-Chief of Vogue, said, "To be his friend was an exceptional gift. Karl was brilliant, he was wicked, he was funny, he was generous beyond measure, and he was deeply kind. I will miss him so very much."

Mike

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Here’s the situation

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Deaths in the Family

...If you accept, as I do, the notion that the far-flung society of Photo-Dawgs (those who love photography and are devoted to it) comprises a sprawling extended family.

Evelyn and Jim Hughes, 1982. Photo by Bill Jay.

I'm extremely sorry to report that our friend Jim Hughes died on the afternoon of the Tuesday before Christmas. Jim was the editor of the original Camera Arts magazine, the best photography magazine I'm familiar with, and he was the biographer of W. Eugene Smith. But those two twin peaks of his accomplishment are only the tip of the iceberg. Jim knew a little bit about everything and a lot about a lot—he was a student and a scholar of photography, and he had a great mind and a great memory. And he was a photographer. He was also my onetime hero, my role model as an editor. I didn't come close to measuring up; he was brilliant at it. We later became friends, and although he could be irascible and I suspect that occasionally he didn't like me very much (I can be difficult too), I loved and admired Jim always. He was principled and insightful and endlessly knowledgeable. His passing creates a void. You can find his many writings for TOP under his name in the Categories in the right-hand sidebar. His wife Evelyn Hughes survives him.

Michael A. Smith

Another huge loss: friend of TOP Michael A. Smith has passed away; I don't know when, but recently. Michael was a force of nature, an independent spirit with a devotion to quality and bounteous energy for following through. When Kodak stopped making his favorite photo paper, he undertook to manufacture a replacement; when he couldn't find anyone to publish his books to the level of quality he demanded, he learned how to do it himself, and started his own publishing house. He called it Lodima, which is the word "amidol," his and Edward Weston's favorite paper developer, spelled backwards. We worked with him several times; we offered the superlative Edward Weston book he published, and we offered contact prints of his work in a husband-and-wife print sale in 2012. Here's another article I wrote about him. He is survived by his wife, the photographer and artist Paula Chamlee.

Neither was a close personal friend, although I met both in person and we emailed and spoke on the phone occasionally for years. But I knew them in that way you know people in your own field—through their work, through our common interest, through my appreciation for them. I have taken both these losses hard, and procrastinated madly over writing this post. It makes me very sad they're gone. Sincere condolences to Evelyn and Paula, and all the friends and loved ones of these fine men. They are deeply and sorely mourned and missed.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Geoff Wittig: "Sad news indeed. Michael A. Smith's beautiful panoramic print of a Tuscan village graces my library wall, as do multiple Lodima books. And Mr. Hughes' crackling intelligence came through bright and clear in his admirably pithy essays."

Bill Bresler: "Jim Hughes and his work shaped how I see photography."

Kenneth Tanaka: "I’m very sorry to read of Jim’s death. I very much enjoyed his occasional articles and comments here. He seemed like the kind of fellow I would have enjoyed spending an afternoon with.

"I was also sad to learn of Michael Smith’s death. He was a fellow who I did spend an afternoon with some years ago (perhaps thanks to a connection you made?). Michael, and Paula Chamlee, visited a tiny bygone photo group of which I was a member, ostensibly to talk about book publishing and production. But as the afternoon progressed through lunch Michael and Paula were extremely engaging and informative on a broad range of photo subjects. It’s always fun to be with people who are so relentlessly enthusiastic on their field...and that’s exactly what they were!

"I have two oddly indelible memories of that day. The first was buying my copy of Edward Weston: Life Work from Michael at a slight discount, as he wanted to lighten his traveling load. (And that book is a load.). The second is my memory of the old white van Michael and Paula were driving cross-country. As veterans of the road they had clearly learned that security takes precedence over style on long-distance photo trips. Opening the back doors of that van was a feat that Brinks would have admired!

"My deepest sympathies to Paula Chamlee and to Evelyn Hughes."

Random Excellence: Beth Moon

Beth Moon, Rilke's Bayon

Longer pieces sap more time and effort out of me—for instance, "The Remarkable Persistence of 24x36" took four days to research and write. It wouldn't be a problem except it leaves the blog kind of quiet while I'm off working on something else. Anyway, I'm going to be working on the Fuji X-H1 review all weekend.

In the meantime, have a look at photographer Beth Moon's lovely extended portrait of the oldest trees in the world, some of which are older than Christianity. The picture above is just one—as a set they're more powerful than each alone, and yet each alone, like its subject, is brooding, majestic, and mysterious. Here's Beth's website, as well as her book of this work, which is called Ancient Trees: Portraits of Time.

Another thing you could check out is an article which many readers (such as Wes Cosand) have been telling me about—many loved it. It's a beautiful remembrance by Nobel literature laureate Orhan Pamuk of his friend Ara Güler, the great Turkish photographer who died this past October 17th. It's at the New York Times, which will be behind a paywall for some people. But you get 10 free articles a month, and remember that we recommend a subscription to the Times for its photography content, which is worth it. This one is particularly lovely, a great sampling of Ara's work, and not to be missed whatever you have to do. The article is called "I Like Your Photographs Because They Are Beautiful." The subhead is "Orhan Pamuk remembers his friend Ara Güler, the great photographer, who lovingly captured Istanbul and its people."

Here's one of Ara's excellent books.

If neither of those appeal, talk amongst yourselves while I'm out of the room! Hopefully I'll post my X-H1 verdict by Sunday night or Monday morning.

Have a nice weekend—

Mike
(Thanks to Wes, David Dyer-Bennet, and others)

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Richard Man: "I love Ms. Moon's images. I have a couple of her small platinum prints and they are lovely. She (used to) photograph with a Pentax 6x7 and makes her own Pt/Pd prints."

John Camp: "I have spent some time in Istanbul and it is a street photographer's dream. The reason, I think, is that it is such a striking combination of the new and the very, very old (the Hagia Sophia, once a mosque and before that an Orthodox cathedral, was built almost 1,500 years ago, and is still a centerpiece of the city). The city also has an amazing physical setting, the Bosporus and the Golden Horn and all that, with Asia looming right across the water. Don't even get me started on the history...."

Bob Johnston: "Some time ago I set out to photograph the oldest trees in Britain but after five or six in the bag I gave up thinking that the travelling was too much. Here is this lady who has travelled all over the world to harvest her great images. Respect."

SteveW: "One of the best books I've ever read is A Strangeness in my Mind by Oran Pamuk. Amazingly, when I read the NY Times article and saw some of Ara's beautiful photos, they were almost exactly how I pictured Istanbul while reading Pamuk's book."

Rod Sainty: "Beth Moon's book was reviewed by Australian large format photographer David Tatnall. The review incorporates a beautiful video by Beth Moon showing her platinum printing process. One moment in the video made me gasp. Check it out."

Peter Wright: "Those pictures of Istanbul by Ara Güler in the NYT article are truly extraordinary. Thanks for bringing them to our attention. One of the things that strike me most about this type of photography (Here Far Away by Pentti Sammallahti—another TOP recommendation—is another example) is how absolutely UN-extraodinary the people pictured would have thought the scenes and themselves to be at the time. If Güler could have shown the people the view from his camera, I'm sure they would have been completely mystified as to why anyone would want to spend money on such a thing. I can just picture the puzzled looks and shaking of heads.

"I'm always blown away by this aspect of photography when it is done so well: to make the utterly mundane utterly magical. I wonder, does the audience have to be of a different time and place for this magic to happen?"