George Martin 1926–2016
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The health and popularity of any human endeavor rises and falls in waves—nothing's static—and photography caught a huge swell in the 1960s to the early '80s. Many of photography's great names are from that era...it's our "Greatest Generation," to cop a term used of the WWII age cohort. Many of the greats from an earlier wave were still alive then, and many names came to the forefront that we still recognize. A few, we venerate.
If it seems like there have been a lot of obituaries lately, that might be why. We're losing that generation.
We lost Charles Harbutt on June 29th. A former President of Magnum, he was one of those names who flew low and didn't break into many photographers' radar fields. But he was an accomplished shooter and a longtime teacher. I have a signed copy of his iconic book Travelog
Charles Harbutt in the mid-'80s by his friend and colleague Joan Liftin
There are good articles at PDNonline and The New York Times.
And to catch you up on another exceptional photographer of that generation, there's this link, from The Washington Post, about the sad decline into dementia of the fine gentleman and very accomplished artist William Christenberry. Bill taught at the Corcoran while I was there, but I never took a course from him, because he taught art, not photography. A photographer whose work was all about remembering should have had a less ironic ending.
Curiously, I don't feel quite so sad about Harold Feinstein, who died on June 20th. The reason is because it seems that certain "friends of Harold"—I don't know the backstory at all—had been assisting him in a late-life Renaissance. There was a very successful Kickstarter campaign (the we helped publicize) which resulted in the publication of his retrospective book
Mike
(Thanks to Oren Grad and many other readers)
P.S. If you're tempted to prompt me about the wonderful Robert Frank link, I'll be posting that one later.
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Richard Rodgers: "Sad times. First Mary Ellen Mark and now Charles Harbutt. While at Apeiron in the late 1960s, Mary Ellen enabled my photography skills to grow and Charles, through his teaching skills, enabled me to become a college photography teacher."
David Christensen: "Rondal Partridge also passed away recently. He wasn't well known (by his own designs), but what a link to the past—the son of Imogen Cunningham, apprenticed himself to Ansel Adams, and assisted Dorothea Lange in California during the depression. He was 97 when he died—and according to the SFGate, 'he spent his last 15 years mastering the art of hand-coated platinum printing with a focus on botanical subjects, dead animals and antique tools.' Here's the link to the very interesting SF Gate obituary."
Mike replies: Thanks David. I didn't know that. He's a photographer whose work I know better; I very much enjoy his book Quizzical Eye
Rodger Kingston: "I've known Bill Christenberry for nearly 40 years. I met him in the late '70s through a couple of photographic friends, Gus Kayafas and Gerd Sander, and over the years I visited him and his wife Sandy when I was in Washington, or saw him occasionally when he came North.
"Bill could always be counted upon for a good story—after all, his art is a story, a visual narrative of the world centered around his native Hale County, Alabama. He is one of those people who never stops talking—except with Bill, you don't want him to stop talking.
"Bill is undoubtedly a great artist. However, the key to appreciating both Bill and his art is to understand that he is a great Southern artist, steeped in the black Alabama soil, and soft spoken, with a light Southern accent tempered by his many years living in Washington, D.C.
"His studio is a veritable museum of his paintings, drawings, and photographs; his sculptures of the buildings appearing in his two-dimensional works; and the signs he rescued from the towns and countryside around his beloved Hale County.
"I'll never forget the time he showed me his legendary Klan Room, not long before it was mysteriously stolen.
"I have about a dozen of his books, many of them signed, all of them carefully handled and well read. The most recent one I have is, ironically, fittingly, William Christenberry: Working from Memory: Collected Stories. Reading the stories, I can hear him talking, speaking of his friendship with Walker Evans, or describing the circumstances surrounding one of his works.
"The last time I saw Bill, several years ago, before the onset of his Alzheimer's, he and Sandy were in Boston for a lecture, and a group of us went to dinner afterward. Bill sat at the head of the table, and, with his soft Southern accent and courtly manner, entertained and edified us all."
This simple tribute appeared on Mary Ellen Mark's website four days ago.
The portrait is by Ralph Gibson.
Mary Ellen Mark, one of the great American social documentary photographers of the second half of the 20th century, passed away last Monday of myelodysplastic syndrome at the age of 75.
Although she ranged as far afield as fashion and advertising photography on occasion, her most famous photographs were intimate extended documentary projects of people at the fringes of society, such as Erin "Tiny" Blackwell, the Seattle street kid whose life Mark documented for more than 30 years.
Since her death the Internet has exploded with articles, announcements, obituaries and tributes. The New York Times obituary quoted Mary Ellen herself (originally printed in Communication Arts in 1997): "I remember the first time I went out on the street to shoot pictures. I was in downtown Philadelphia and I just took a walk and started making contact with people and photographing them, and I thought: 'I love this. This is what I want to do forever.' There was never another question."
In a short personal reminiscence at The New Yorker, Adrian Nicole Leblanc wrote, "I thought professional distance in documenting hardship meant not showing the joy in doing the work that I loved. The ego in that assumption would take years to unpack, but Mary Ellen opened a door for me. She was a master photographer and an actualized human being. I am very lucky to have witnessed her at work."
One nice short slideshow is at cnn.money. You can see her seminal photo essay from LIFE magazine, "Streets of the Lost," in its entirety at Time Lightbox.
Her work was published in innumerable magazines and she published nineteen books, including a title in the Photography Workshop series
Her natural form was the photo essay, and a friend of mine who encountered her on the street in New York a few years ago reported that she complained bitterly about the lack of work and the dearth of serious venues for photo essays.
Her original book about Tiny Blackwell, Streetwise, is unobtainable to mortals, but the follow-up, Tiny, Streetwise Revisited, is scheduled to be released by Aperture in the Fall.
Hank Burchard, writing in The Washington Post in 1994, said, "One picture by Mary Ellen Mark is almost too many, yet a hundred of her photographs is not enough. Few photographers have ever had both the visceral impact and the intellectual depth of Mark."
Mike
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Robert Hudyma: "I met her briefly twice: once in New York City in 1992 for a slide-show presentation of her circus images, and again in 2007 when she came to Ryerson University in Toronto to give one of the final Kodak Canada sponsored lecture series. Unfortunately her lecture was cut short since there was a fire alarm and that is the last time I saw her. You can watch her lecture here. I especially enjoy her Christmas dog images."
Richard Rodgers: "Had the opportunity to study and learn from the young Mary Ellen in late 1960s while staying at Apeiron in upstate New York. Among the many joys was a day spent with her while we photographed a country fair. Still retain and use many of the skills learned from that time. She was and still is a very important person in my life."
JK: "The day after Mary Ellen Mark died I spent a couple hours watching video interviews she had done. I especially liked this one. Her famous shot of Fellini comes at the end but there are couple other nice ones along the way."
Stan B.: "No matter her subject matter, you always knew she would create strong, compelling compositions full of empathy and passion. The epitome of the dedicated documentary photographer, she was the antithesis of today's fly-by, sound-bite journalists. And every one of her essays serve as a 'how to' for photographers who want to know how it's done—technically, aesthetically, humanely."
Jim Hughes: "The photograph of Mary Ellen that you use to lead off your tribute was made by her long-time friend Ralph Gibson, according to the credit below the picture in the Washington Post obituary. [Jim's comment was written before the correction appeared; Steve Rosenblum mentioned it earlier today. —Ed.] I hadn't previously seen this image, but I have seen others Ralph made with Mary Ellen, including this famous one of his left hand touching hers, their fingers entangled at the moment of exposure:
Photograph by Ralph Gibson
I published this picture in Camera 35 as part of the first large magazine portfolio from his then upcoming book The Somnambulist.
"I met Mary Ellen in 1967. I remember a beautiful woman passing in the hallway outside my open office door, carrying a large portfolio. Turns out she had just returned from six months photographing in Turkey on a Fulbright. The office next to mine was occupied by Mary P. R. Thomas, whose job it was to select photographs for the U. S. Camera Annual. Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me, and I went next door to look in. There were deeply printed photographs of people, most of them looking directly at the photographer as if they were lifelong friends, spread out to cover every surface of Mary Thomas's office. In the text to accompany Mary Ellen's portfolio in the 1968 edition of the Annual, Mary Thomas wrote: 'Mary Ellen Mark is a torrid combination of youthful energy and curiosity plus an innate sense of perception that enables her to see and "frame" the scene or subject before her almost immediately....All these photographs portray great beauty and strength. Look at them carefully.'
"Mary Ellen and I remained friends over the subsequent many years, and I had the privilege to publish her wonderful pictures in various of my magazines. I will miss her. And I will continue to look carefully at her pictures, which live on."
Kathy Li: "Just want to also point folks to Kyle Cassidy's LJ post on what he learned from Mary Ellen Mark."
Jane Bown at home, surrounded by some of her photographs.
We are reached this morning with news of the death of the great Jane Bown. The quintessential photojournalistic portraitist, she worked for the world's oldest Sunday newspaper, the UK's The Observer, for more than half a century, beginning 65 years ago.
Renowned for modest reticence and for the simplicty of her style, she worked quietly and quickly, without calling attention to herself, using natural light.
An earlier photograph of Jane from her home.
Both photos are screen grabs from the Channel 4 profile below.
The picture above is this one, by Madame Yevonde, 1967. This is from a bromide print in the Yevonde Portrait Archive of
Britain's National Portrait Gallery.
Just this year a film documentary of her life was released, called Looking for Light. It's not available online that I know of. [UPDATE: The DVD is available
Here's a brief recent profile of her from British television:
She published many books, most out of print now, including Exposures (UK link) from 2009, Unknown Bown (2007) (UK link), Faces (2002) (UK link), and The Gentle Eye (1982) (UK link).
The book Faces is subtitled "The creative process behind great portraits," but Jane sums it up in a jot: "What people say to me is how do I do this. And I say, just look."
Observer Editor John Mulholland, quoted in the Guardian obituary, said "her contribution to the paper’s history, as well to Britain’s artistic legacy, is immense, and will long survive her. She was loved by her colleagues and adored by our readers. We will miss her hugely."
She was 89.
Mike
(Thanks to Guy Batey and Leslie Ashe)
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Elaine: "Oh, I loved Jane Bown's work! I still have her book Faces. She used Olympus film cameras. Her work really inspired me. She used natural lighting, which is what I love. She was such an inspiration to me. R.I.P., Jane. :-( "
David Paterson: "In the '70s and early '80s I worked quite regularly for the Observer's Sunday magazine and was fortunate to meet Jane Bown a couple of times. She was friendly but brisk and there was a strong impression of an acute intelligence in spite of her quiet manner. She was a legend even then—cameras in a shopping bag—and will be greatly mourned and missed even though she retired quite some time ago. A true great."
Alan Hill: "Ars est celare artem (art is about concealing art)—has there ever been a better example of the truth of this old saying?"
René Burri died on October 20th. (Magnum Collection/Magnum Photos)
I'm not the right person to write an appreciation of Magnum photographer René Burri, who died last Monday. He was just the sort of photographer I should like, and I always thought of him sympathetically, but in trying to engage with his work I never caught enough friction to make contact. I still don't quite get him, although I've always thought I should. Along with the rest of the world I admire his most famous pictures.
I heard of him as a younger gadfly of Henri Cartier-Bresson's, who measured himself against his older and more distinguished colleague, provoking and inspiring and perhaps sometimes irritating Henri, through a shared affection. And over the years I heard intriguing stories of how Burri refused to take certain pictures because they were too obvious or too exploitative—and how could I not like that? "One of these days I'm going to publish a book of all the pictures I did not take. It is going to be a huge hit," he said.
But with artists I don't know yet, "meeting" them is always a possibility for the future. René Burri is well served by in-print books—one a "how I worked" memoir called Impossible Reminiscences [now back-ordered —Ed.], another a major retrospective book of photographs. I haven't seen either one (have you? Tell us what you think if you have). There are numerous obituaries on the web. I'm sorry I don't have more to add, but I would welcome comments from others who do.
Mike
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Bill Pierce: "this is a comment I made earlier on another website that had a thread on René Burri. René Burri died on Monday. A lot of you know he was an exceptional photographer. He was also an exceptional human. He had a few years on me and still outran me. When my airplane flight got rescheduled and I had no place to stay when we were covering Tiananmen Square, he shared his hotel room. As an extra bonus I got a guided tour through his book The Germans. I spotted one picture that was actually a print comprised of two adjacent frames. He laughed and said I was one of the few people who realized what it was, that Cartier-Bresson hadn’t spotted it. I finally got my plane out. René stayed to rewalk the mountainous part of Mao’s Long March. As I said, he could outrun me.
"Every time we crossed paths, it was an exceptional pleasure. I suppose there are a lot of good photographers in the world. There are few that had his kindness, his generosity and his genuine love for the people around him. The cliché 'he will be missed' is an understatement."
Clive Evans: "Met René at Les Rencontres d'Arles in 2010—a really warm generous nice guy."
Ray K. Metzker, 1931–2014
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Written by Keith F. Davis
Photographs by Rachael Jane
After a long illness, the great photographer Ray K. Metzker died on October 9th, 2014. He will be dearly missed by his family, friends, and many others in the world of photography.
I treasure the time I was able to spend with Ray over the years. I first met him in the early 1980s, after Harry Callahan encouraged me to contact him. I had already been a fan of Ray’s work for at least a decade, and had begun adding his prints to the Hallmark Photographic Collection. At this time he was living in a wonderful space: a renovated nineteenth-century firehouse in an old area of Philadelphia.
Our visit that afternoon was relatively brief, but fascinating. Ray was not excessively outgoing; he always had a good deal of Midwestern reserve. He spoke quietly and carefully: everything he said—and did—was deeply considered and deliberate. And of course, his working space was beautifully organized. As we climbed the stairs of the old firehouse, I remember passing one level with a well-equipped wood shop. When I asked what use that served, Ray told me that he made his own frames. As simple as that idea might have been, I remember being surprised—and impressed. I had never heard a photographer say that before, and it made me realize that Ray put far more than "average" thought and effort into what he did. I got the unmistakable idea that everything about his photography mattered to him: there were no shortcuts.
It was clear that everything in Ray’s meticulously organized space served his process of art making. He was completely devoted to an artistic life. This was not a matter of any superficial “lifestyle”—it was an all-encompassing commitment. This, in turn, stemmed from an unwavering enthusiasm for the process of photography and a deep faith in the validity of his effort. As quiet as he typically was, Ray had an iron will and a profound belief in the significance of what he was doing. As a result, he had arranged his life in order to pare away all but the bare minimum of real-world distractions.
After seeing him several times in subsequent years, my contact became more regular after about 2007 as I began exploring the possibility of a major acquisition and show. As a result, I made four or five in-depth studio visits to look at work and to talk. Usually, I was accompanied by his dealer, Laurence Miller, who knew the work only slightly less well than Ray himself. Larry had shown Ray’s pictures during their mutual years at Light Gallery in the late 1970s, and became his primary dealer in the early 1980s. It was a partnership of enormous mutual respect and support.
On the first of these extended visits, I realized that I had only presumed to know Metzker’s work. The quality and range of what I saw was genuinely amazing. Organized in boxes by date and project, the prints were a revelation. Ray was definitely “old school” in his printing, and he was a true master. His prints had an amazing life and presence. He could use the extremes of the tonal scale—from deep black to gleaming white—like no one else. The prints tended to be small in size—many of them were on 8x10 or 11x14-inch paper—but they had more visual impact than vastly larger prints by most other photographers. They exuded intentionality, care, and integrity. Metzker never released prints that were mere approximations of what he wanted to say. The placement of tones, the overall quality of light, and the formal structure of the image were all precisely determined. Metzker wanted his viewers to look long and seriously at his prints—and so he worked hard to make every one worthy of that attention.
In addition to their physical quality, the sheer range of what I saw was stunning. For every picture I knew, there were dozens that were completely new. There was some difference, of course, between the best-known images and some of the unknown ones—famous pictures do not become famous for entirely arbitrary reasons. That said, the overall level of quality was staggering—one box after another was full of fascinating and exquisite photographs. Some of these were variants of better-known images, revealing Metzker’s process of working up to and around a given subject. In other cases, entire boxes of pictures were new—complete projects or thematic pursuits that had gone unmentioned in any of his several monographs.
The sheer variety of work made me consider the relationship between Ray’s “place” in photo-history and the reality of his working method. It is probably safe to say that he is best known for his Composites of the mid-1960s, with his early Chicago and Philadelphia pictures, his double-frame works, his Sand Creatures series, his 1980s City Whispers, his landscapes, and his Pictus Interruptus works bringing progressively less recognition.
While understandable, this limited familiarity obscures the true genius of Metzker’s process: his endless curiosity, his willingness to take risks and to change, and the sheer breadth of his creative interests. From his boldly graphic city pictures, to the geometric tapestry of the Composites, to the delicacy of his landscapes, to the optical abstraction of the Pictus work, Metzker was engaged in a relentless quest to see how the photograph worked, and to challenge himself over and over to discover new ways of seeing. While the means of photography mattered a great deal to him, he was also deeply attentive to subject matter—he cared, in some real way, about the people and places he photographed. They were special because they were his: they were part of his world, and thus of his identity.
Metzker was a humanist, but not a sentimentalist. He had a real feeling for the lonely figures he photographed on the streets of Philadelphia and Chicago. But he did not pity them—he gave them a fundamental human respect, and he saw something of himself in all of them. In a slightly different way, he also loved the cars and buildings he recorded—as well as the basic beauty of light and shadow. That is, he accepted the reality of the world around him, recognizing that it held all kinds of treasures and revelations. The transformative power of his images is a product of his surgically precise vision—his ability to find, to isolate, and to magnify very particular facets of experience. He is the great visual poet of Philadelphia. That is not a subject that most photographers would instinctively think to claim, and yet consider what Metzker was able to do with it! He created an amazing visual world that was entirely his—because his dedication to seeing it was like no one else’s.
While Ray was a “formal” master, the emotion of his work has been less widely acknowledged. In a broad way, the tenor of his pictures was a reflection of his inner, emotional state. His shadowy “City Whispers” work of the early 1980s, for example, was produced in a period of unusual moodiness and emotional darkness—a time pervaded by a sense of melancholy and mortality. It is also significant that the open, light, and vibrant landscapes of the mid-1980s were made when he was falling in love with his soulmate and future wife, Ruth Thorne-Thomsen. All of Metzker’s pictures have this duality: they record some facet of real perceptual experience, while suggesting the photographer’s state of mind.
It is important to note that, for all of his seriousness, Ray had a great sense of humor. He loved to laugh, and even to be silly. In this regard, the wonderful names he gave to some of his images or series—“Spring Tingle,” “Glo Man Glo,” “Flickety Oops”, “Hula Cola,” “Pictus Interruptus,” and “The Whimsies”—reveal an important side of the man. Just as he loved music, he loved the playful sound of particular words and phrases.
My visits resulted in my museum’s project, “The Photographs of Ray K. Metzker.” We presented our exhibition in 2011 (and a book of the same title came out in 2012). At the time of our show, we had Ray and Ruth out to Kansas City. Ray and I did a public conversation in front of a near standing-room-only crowd in our main auditorium. Ray’s energy had been somewhat up-and-down in the preceding months, but he was totally “on” that day. He was thoughtful, witty, clear, and inspiring. It was an honor to be with him on stage for that hour. We could never have guessed it, of course, but this turned out to be his last major public appearance.
Ray is one of the giants of modern photography. He was never a critical “flavor of the month,” but that is fine. What he leaves is a true artistic monument: a body of work of genuinely lasting importance. I got the sense over the years that Ray never wanted to waste a minute: he knew what his life was about and he got on with it with a passion that was renewed every day, day after day. He certainly appreciated the attention he received, when curators and writers like William Ewing, Anne W. Tucker, Richard Woodward, or Evan Turner undertook important projects. However, in the end, the motivation for what he did was self-generated. The work expressed—and satisfied—an internal sense of curiosity and intellectual adventure. Until very near the end, he was always looking forward—always on the hunt for the next good picture, the next visual discovery.
In truth, Ray was always ahead of his audience. To everyone other than him, every body of work was a surprise and, to be honest, a bit of a puzzlement—until, with the passing of a few years, the beauty and the logic of each project would become clear.
With his passing, Ray is giving us all a chance to catch up.
Keith
Keith F. Davis is Senior Curator of Photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. He is the author/editor of The Photographs of Ray K. Metzker (2012, no longer in print).
Rachael Jane is an editorial, portrait, and wedding photographer in Kansas City.
TOP extends grateful thanks to Keith and Rachael for this post.
Text © 2014 by Keith F. Davis, photographs © 2014 by Rachael Jane, all rights reserved
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Manuel: "I saved this article for the weekend, in order to read it with enough time and the attention its subject deserved. Now that I finally read it, I want to congratulate both the author, Keith F. Davis, and Michael C. Johnston, for one of the best and most interesting articles I have read on TOP. There are many, of course, but some stand out. This is one of them."
I am desperately sorry to report that Ray K. Metzker has died at the age of 83, following a long decline. The news struck at me deeply, because nothing makes an artist I don't know personally more alive to me than engaging fully and deeply with his or her work, and I spent several months this past year finally fully engaging wholeheartedly with Ray's art through the medium of the excellent book by Keith Davis, The Photographs of Ray K. Metzker, published by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, one of the best books of 2012 for me (although very unfortunately no longer in print now).
Ray was an experimentalist with a brilliant sense of graphic composition using deep shadow as bold black shapes, and he was especially sensitive to repetition, minimalism and subtle variation. He was the kind of photographer who is rare in any era but is growing rarer now in that he was fully an artist and also fully and completely a photographer—his work is rooted in straight photography but he was also always alive to how it worked as form and implication. His work seems mid-20th-century to me, his closest compatriots being people like Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan (with whom he studied), although he wasn't like either one very precisely; I think of him as being just as close to Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline and several other artists.
I highly recommend a good soak in Keith's book if you can get your hands on it, perhaps at the library. Keith Davis makes his usual skilled and humane case for the artist with his selections and sequencing, somehow evincing a fuller picture and implying greater breadth rather than exposing weaknesses. It's a lovely book and a fine way to encounter Metzker. There are of course many books.
There's an obituary by David Walker at PDNonline.com.
UPDATE: The New York Times obituary, by Douglas Martin, is now posted too.
Mike
(Thanks to Oren Grad)
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David Simonton: "I had a wonderful wide-ranging telephone phone conversation with Ray back in 2003. I was about to turn 50, and, for one thing, concerned about what my responsibility was going forward to the decades-worth of work I had accumulated. His advice was simply to 'keep making the work, and get it out there'; which is pretty much what I'd been doing, and absolutely what I've been doing ever since then. Ray helped me to stop questioning the process (which had always come naturally before the half-century mark) and get on with it! He was—he is—an enduring inspiration."
Dalton: "I'm very sorry to hear this, he was one of my favorites. For anyone in the New York area, there's a comprehensive show of his work currently on view at Laurence Miller Gallery."
Kenneth Tanaka: "I, too, am very saddened by this news although I did know his health was in decline. Ray's work has been among the most influential in my my own eye and tastes. I had the opportunity to spend a delightful evening with him years ago when he visited the Art Institute of Chicago to talk with a small group of enthusiasts. I did not know his work well before that event. He was so relaxed, so utterly unpretentious, so utterly...un-artist-like!
"Wearing gray slacks, a plaid shirt and a old comfy brown sweater Ray spoke about his work in calm tones but with unrehearsed enthusiasm. Coming back to the AIC was like coming home for him, as he had been part of that famous group from the Institute of Design.
"My strongest memory of Ray came later that evening. I was seated at a somewhat undersized round table with him and three other people, juggling our dishes and glasses. It was a classic scene of everyone trying to be polite and he was so graceful at it. Last year I sent Ray a short handwritten note thanking him for his work and the vision that he had imparted to me. I'm certain that he would not have remembered me from that evening but I like to think that he read that note."
Just one more note before leaving yesterday's topics—if you soccer fans are not too miffed at me! :-)
There's an old saying—"You can pick your friends, but you can't pick your family." It's like that with cultural choices too, isn't it? We have the ones we're born into, and we have the ones we adopt by choice.
I have a good friend, Kim K., who has become a football/soccer fan. He's American, grew up watching American football and baseball. International football has really been for him. He's adopted it enthusiastically, and follows mainly the British league, whatever that's called (Premier League? Sorry, I'm way out of my element here and won't know many particulars). He's almost annoyed that I won't see the light and become a fan too. Well, "annoyed" is putting it too strongly. But he loves the game.
For him, though, it's adopted culture. He loves it because it happens to fit him, not because he grew up with it.
"Taking to it like a duck takes to water" is another expression that pertains to this subject. Somebody famous—I'm forgetting who (was it one of the Bauhaus artists?)—said that when he discovered Buddhism he realized he'd been a Buddhist all his life. He just took to it. It fit. Another example: a high school classmate of mine now lives in France and writes literary criticism—in French. Long way from home. (I admire people who can relocate like that. I don't know how they do it.)
I think I'm kinda big on adopted cultures. I find what I like and then make it mine. I grew up on rock 'n' roll, for instance, but it never really truly "took," at least in hindsight. I thought the Beatles were my touchstone band when I was a kid (age seven on), but I never even heard Revolver until I was in my 20s and I've never owned a copy of The White Album, not to this day. Some fan, huh?
It wasn't till my brother Scott introduced me to jazz that I found my own real musical culture. The core of the music I love is American jazz from about 1955 to 1960 and spreading out in either direction from there. That was the era of my birth, and it wasn't part of my family's culture. I've listened to far more of it, know it much more deeply, and love it more than I ever did with the rock music that was supposed to be my "native culture."
Too early to tell if pool is my sport. Might just be a fad, who knows. Personal fads—I do go through those. (As for people who say Americans should follow soccer, though, it's just as difficult as Europeans or South Americans following American football. It's not in the papers, not on TV [usually], not in the discussions at work on Monday. Not in the social fabric or the cultural bloodstream.)
You can relate this to photographic cultures if you try, too. I hear from people all the time who are devoted to particular practices or methods—to name just a very few: night photography; view cameras; toy cameras; underwater photography; architectural photography; "critter photography" (my term—wildlife photography using very long lenses); street photography. I both admire and kinda envy people who have the freedom and the desire to just pursue one thing—doing it because they love it, because it's "home" to them.
I think it's nice to have adopted cultures. Lucky, even. Identity by volition instead of by simply following the herd (not that there's anything wrong with that). They're things you consciously choose rather than what you've born into or what everyone around you is doing.
Charlie Haden 1937–2014
Take Charlie Haden, the great jazz bassist who died on Friday at the age of 76. I'm listening to the audio obituary by Tom Cole right now (go to WPFW > Available Shows > G-Strings > July 13th—thanks to Bob Burnett for this). He was the only chordal player in Ornette Coleman's groundbreaking quartet, and played with many different people and as a leader.
Oddly enough, though, Charlie Haden grew up on a farm in Iowa in a country & western performing family! As a very small child he sang (with a yodel) and was called Cowboy Charlie. From there to Ornette Coleman is more than a hop skip and a jump.
He came a long way from his native culture to find his adopted one.
If you don't know Charlie and would like a sample, try one of his two lovely records with Hank Jones, Steal Away or Come Sunday.
And think for a minute if you have a particular photographic culture you're really into—if you do, you're one of the lucky ones.
Mike
(Thanks to Bob)
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John: "Interesting observations. I'm one confused puppy in that case: in photography, I can't specialize. It's just not in me, although there are areas that don't interest me. In life and cultures, I'm all over the board. At heart, I'm Dutch, but turned away from that country 25 years ago. I have since lived in America (three times, including now), Switzerland, Cyprus and Austria and plan to move to Europe at some point again, though not Holland. On top of that, I'm married to a woman who's half Japanese and half Arabic. As I said, one confused puppy...."
Chris Kurmann: "I think the cultural background may run stronger in some places than in others. I'm Swiss and we have a small but lively folkloric singing tradition which includes what we consider to be real yodeling. Now I'm not really into this at all and spend a lot of my time and energy on music from all over the planet but when I hear traditional Swiss singing I feel my chest tighten and the tear ducts moisten ever so slightly. I simply can't help it. Strangely enough this seems to be common. There is a story that during Napoleonic times the French military banned yodeling as it got the Swiss mercenaries so homesick that they would desert or even die."
Dennis Dunkerson: "Sometimes reading TOP makes me really sad. I had not heard of Haden's passing. I also had not realized than he was a fellow Iowa farm boy. My first encounter with him was in a record store in New York City, a long way from the farm, where I picked up a copy of 'Ballad of the Fallen,' which had just come out. Like Emily Dickinson, it has been part of my culture from first hearing. Time to dig it out again."
John McMillin: "Charlie's well worth mentioning here, and everywhere that American music is enjoyed. Out of his many achievements, I'd recommend a recent album that knits together Haden's folksy past and his experimental side. 'Rambling Boy' unites the whole Haden family, including his triplets who have strong musical careers of their own. Every other song is a traditional number, done faithfully and family-style, while an alternating set of songs offer more eclectic sounds. Pat Metheny plays a jaw-dropping lead on 'Wildwod Flower,' Bruce Hornsby sings an eerie, haunted '20-20 Vision,' and master dobroist Jerry Douglas adds a steely twang throughout. All three guest stars come together for 'The Hills of Athenry,' a tragic ballad of the Irish famine that builds and soars right up where birds fly. There's an old clip of young Charlie singing on the radio, before old Charlie sings 'Shenandoah' in his shaky, damaged voice. It's the story of a hard life, well lived. 'Rambling Boy' is the one Haden album I would never be without."
©Wake Forest University/Ken Bennett
Maya Angelou, 1928–2014
Photograph by TOP reader Ken Bennett, used with permission
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"If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be."
—Poet and author Maya Angelou, who died this morning at the age of 86 at her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina
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Only one of Ms. Angelou's many accomplishments is I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
I hope it is not disrespectful to torque this short post around to more direct relevance to us by noting that the above quote is very apropos for photographers. I always use the word "generic" to express what she means by "normal." But to be as non-normal as possible, in the way that is closest and dearest and most sensible to each of us specifically, is really the best way to aim at being "amazing" as a photographer.
Here are 18 more great Maya Angelou quotes for inspiration and reflection.
Mike
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Ken Bennett: "Maya Angelou was a professor at the university where I work, and so I was able to watch and photograph her many times over the years. She had an amazing presence and power. It's a very sad day here."
I was very saddened to be reached by news of the death of David Alan Jay, who succumbed to his longtime disease at the age of 61 last October. David Jay (he was often called by both names together) was the Editor of Photo Techniques (itself recently deceased) from 1985 to 1994, when he handed the reins to me. (The magazine was called Darkroom Techniques and then, after it merged with Creative Camera magazine, Darkroom & Creative Camera Techniques [D&CCT] while under his stewardship. More recently it has been called Photo Technique [singular instead of plural].)
David's magazine was a true reflection of the man himself: courtly and courteous, unsensational, rigorous, and highly ethical. David had a "dread disease" (Flannery O'Conner's phrase)—a hereditary degenerative condition that had killed his mother in her 40s. I apologize that I cannot specify what it was—medical nouns do not stick in my head. (Each time we talked of it, I had to ask him again.) At any rate he told me in no uncertain terms that he always felt himself doomed to live half a lifespan: when he was 46 or 48 he said to me that he felt he was already living on borrowed time.
David loved to talk on the phone, and I talked to him regularly throughout my tenure at PT and for a number of years afterward. Unfortunately his disease gradually made it harder and harder for him to speak and to be understood, and our phone friendship gradually tapered out in the early-to-mid 2000s. I had not spoken to him in probably seven or eight years at the time of his death.
David Alan Jay
My favorite David Jay story, just one of many:
Like so many wordsmiths, David was an introvert, and the Photo East show in New York City (now called Photo Plus Expo) frequently overburdened his circuits (as it did mine—the constant stream of demands on one's attention would be enough to test a politician or a movie star, and it could sap the socializing resources of an introvert dry as a desert gulch within hours).
Fred Newman of Darkroom Innovations (now called The View Camera Store) had commissioned Ron Wisner of Wisner Classic Manufacturing Co. to build him a 20x24-inch view camera, and Fred shared space in Ron's booth at Photo East, where his huge view camera was put on display.
So when the "demanders" got to be too much for him, David Jay would go to the Wisner booth and get under the dark cloth behind Fred's giant camera—and stay there. He'd just stand there, quietly, motionless, for an hour or more, alone in the midst of the crowds, recharging his introvert's batteries and escaping from all the insistent demands, watching the steady stream of showgoers pass the booth upside-down on the groundglass. Makes me laugh even now.
David Jay told me when I took over that any reader who wanted to participate fully in the life of the magazine had to own three things: a view camera, a spot meter, and a densitometer. After he left D&CCT, David and his wife moved to an old farmhouse in central Illinois, where they made an agreement: his wife got the house, and David got a finished and insulated 40x25' outbuilding on the property. There he had his laundry machines (laundry, which he apparently enjoyed, being one of his household responsibilities), his darkroom, his library, and his workshop. Apart from his space-age custom-designed and -built enlarger and many other cunning computerized darkroom gizmos of his own invention, I'm sure he was never without the three essentials. He was way too unsentimental to be buried with them (there were no funeral services, at the request of the deceased), but there would have been a touch of poetry in it if he had been. I can only imagine the many happy hours he must have spent in his domain at that remote farmstead way out on the Illinois prairie, "forty-five minutes from anything" as David put it.
61 is young in absolute terms, but I know it's much longer than David Jay himself expected his life to last. I hope the last years were not too hard. Farewell, friend.
Mike
(Thanks to Wendy Erickson)
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Geoff Wittig: "The passing of David Alan Jay, David Vestal, and Photo Technique magazine within a short span seem to punctuate the end of an era. Reliable and thoughtful information on visualizing, creating and refining the optimum print as a physical artifact seems to be fading into the sunset. Certainly in print form this is true; even stalwart sources such as Lenswork magazine are relentlessly shifting their emphasis to online access.
"Ctein's recent comments got me thinking. Physical prints obviously comprise a small and ever-shrinking percentage of photographs going forward. But I dearly hope the vast and expanding sea of digital images can sustain enough of this shrinking sliver to maintain it as a living, breathing artform rather than yet another 'alternative process' performed on occasion as a parlor trick. Because for me, at least, the beauty of a perfectly crafted print trumps the gaudy appeal of that glowing image on the LCD."
Richard Kelley: "I was shocked to hear of David's passing. I was lucky enough to have been one of David's friends while we were going through Journalism School at Indiana University. He was just an outstanding guy, always ready to offer an idea and always positive about life. He was a pleasure to be around at a time when the competition was so fierce it kept many of us in our own little silos. He never spoke about the disease, but knowing David, that's not surprising. At the end, he went his technical direction and I took my documentary path and I just lost track of him with the passing of the years and work. When I saw his face in the announcement, I was just stunned. Those who never met David really missed knowing a true gentleman and a very decent man. Thanks for crossing paths, David. It was a pleasure learning from you."
Written by Jim Hughes
For years, every Christmas season after David Vestal moved from New York City to the Connecticut countryside, my wife and I would receive a small envelope postmarked Bethlehem, CT. Inside, neatly wrapped in archival tissue, would be a meticulously printed 2 1/2 x 3 3/4-inch black-bordered silver image of one of David's photographs on a piece of 3 1/2 x 5-inch black-and-white paper. Sometimes it would be signed on the back in David's unmistakable script, other times it would bear a cryptic "DV MCHNY," his version of "Happy Holidays." I never asked, but I wouldn't have put it past this brilliant, humorous, quirky and understated man to have moved to Bethlehem just so he could send those exquisitely crafted gems to his friends around the world with that postmark. In any event, we always regarded the prints as little treasures.
Christmas Print received from David Vestal.
The photograph was dated 1987.
I met David Vestal on the pages of Popular Photography, where I learned much of what I knew about photography as I was growing up in the 1950s (it was a good magazine back then). In 1966, three years after I'd moved to New York to get married (50 years and counting!) and just as I'd accepted my dream job as editor of a photography magazine, Camera 35, I read a long piece by David in Pop Photo entitled "'...a great unknown photographer' — W. Eugene Smith." Unlike the usual technical fare in the magazine, it was more like one of those classic New Yorker profiles, full of quotations and contrasting opinions from friends and enemies. Vestal presented a fractured, stream-of-consciousness view of one of photography's heroes. One of my heroes. The story left an indelible impression.
As David later told me, the idea for the story originated on the Amazing Randi's late night radio show, where a panel consisting of Popular Photography's Charlie Reynolds, John Durniak, and Vestal had sat down with Smith to discuss the world's problems. Smith, having famously resigned from LIFE and subsequently failed, to his way of thinking, with his impossibly ambitious Pittsburgh project, had been feeling much maligned of late. On the air, he said, "I wish someone would do an honest story on me." Later, David sent Gene a note offering to do one, and in return received a note from Gene penciled on a torn piece of paper: "No Spray Gun Job."
In the resultant article, Vestal began: "W. Eugene Smith is an unknown photographer hidden behind a reputation. Like other legends, his has a core of truth and a thick coating of fantasy. While the whole business is much too tangled to sort out, I don't doubt that he is partly responsible for his myth.
"...It seems to be true that Gene can't work with some people because of his llimitations: and that others can't work with him because of theirs. And at the end of some of his successful jobs, the feeling on both sides—his and the editors'—has been one of pain and defeat.... I don't much understand Gene; most of the people I've talked to seem to understand him still less: and it's a fair guess his own self-understanding is full of holes. Certainly, he spends energy and passion on defense and justification he doesn't need.... He feels he is on trial with every undertaking, and the feeling somehow is converted into fact. But how all this happens is not understood."
Young buck that I was, I felt I needed to meet Smith, and eventually did, a year or so later, when I worked up the nerve to call the number under his name in the phone book. I went to his legendary loft. Published a portfolio. Became a friend. As some may know, I managed to help him get back to the U.S. after he was brutally beaten while taking photographs for his Minamata essay about mercury poisoning in Japan. In fact, I published that essay in Camera 35 in 1974, and ultimately, after his untimely death, spent a dozen years researching (with my wife) and writing the biography, W. Eugene Smith: Shadow & Substance, published in 1989.
Much of this was due in no small measure to David Vestal, with whom I've had a long history. In the middle of 1969, about when I met Smith for the first time, I hired David to join the staff as associate editor of both Camera 35 and Travel & Camera (the magazine that the venerable U.S. Camera had turned into when Tom Maloney sold his publishing company to American Express, which magazine two years later would once more metamorphose, this time into Travel & Leisure, leaving me to again concentrate on Camera 35). I seem to remember something about a change of editors at Pop that didn't sit well with David at the time.
David lent us his usual cerebral self, and did great work. In 1971, David even served as editor, with Regina Benedict as his picture editor, of the U.S. Camera Annual. But he soon seemed to tire of the constraints of the staffer's life. I think he was uncomfortable with corporate cubicles, assigned stories, and regular paychecks. David Vestal was nothing if not a free spirit. So back he went to writing and photographing what he wanted, when he wanted—and, of course, the teaching of small classes for photographers that had always been his lifeline.
David's own teacher had been the legendary Sid Grossman of the Photo League in the late 1940s (before that, David told me, he had been a student of dance, a fact that didn't surprise me, considering the lyric grace of his own photography). A list of David's students, who stayed with him as fast friends well past any sort of "graduation," is impressive: Charlie Pratt, Lilo Raymond, Helen Buttfield, Larry Siegel, Maggie Sherwood (how many old Villagers remember her Purple Houseboat gallery?), Shalmon Bernstein. I'm sure there are many others I can't think of at the moment. David once worked as Ralph Steiner's assistant, but Ralph would often call himself David's student as well. They had a lot in common, including no-nonsense writing styles.
In 1972, having personally benefited from so much of David Vestal's writing, I asked him why he hadn't put all that wisdom and knowledge between the covers of a book. He shrugged, and said something like he'd probably never get it done. "And how would I support us?" he wondered. I knew it was an issue. I doubted if his wife Agatha, a former student who photographed under the name Ann Treer and also designed jewelry, made enough to support both of them during what could turn out to be a long project. So I told David what I knew about writers from the past (I mentioned Henry James and Ernest Hemingway) who early on survived by serializing their work in magazines like Harper's Weekly and Scribner's, respectively.
I proposed a similar scenario to David. He could write, and illustrate, a chapter every month or so for Camera 35. We would pay him regular page rates as stories were published, or in advance if he needed. We would ask one-time only rights; he would not have to sign any sort of contract, and he would be free to sell the finished product to the book publisher of his choice and keep that money as well. I never mentioned the arrangement to my own publisher, and I was never asked. "It's a win-win for you," I said. "And we get a great series."
David agreed. The headline on our March 1972 cover announced "Exclusive: David Vestal's Book of Craft—An Advanced Course in B&W Photography for Beginners and Others." On the table of contents, I noted, "Beginning in this issue, David's Vestal's long-awaited first book: a complete education in 'straight' black-and-white photography...in serial form."
The opening page for David Vestal's "Book of Craft"
as it appeared in Camera 35
He was committed, and I was confident he would deliver. Here are some random excerpts from that first chapter:
"Look through the viewfinder at anything you want to photograph, then move around until you like the way your picture fits in the finder's rectangle."
"Get close enough to fill up the picture with what's most important. Get far enough away to include everything you need in the picture. What's important? You decide. It's your picture; you're the photographer. No one else can say what's important to you."
"If your seeing is good, your pictures should be good, even if they are slightly overexposed or out of focus. If they are lively or pertinent, and worth seeing, that is what matters. Only weak pictures need perfection. Strong ones can survive considerable faults."
—From "David Vestal's Book of Craft," Chapter 1: How the Tools of Photography Evolved, Camera 35, March 1972
Over two and a half years, Camera 35 published 21 chapters of David's "Book of Craft." The resultant book was published at the end of 1974 by Harper & Row as The Craft of Photography, By David Vestal, but I have to say I preferred our title. It was just a bit loftier, a little more befitting of the author. From our final chapter:
"The Zen people say that a novice sees mountains as mountains and water as water; later, he sees that mountains are not mountains and water isn't water; and finally (if and when enlightenment turns up), he once again sees mountains as mountains and water as water. This time he knows the score. Photographers go through the same process.
"...Technique is a means, not a goal. This is the beginning, not the end."
—From "David Vestal's Book of Craft," Chapter 21: What to Do With Your Pictures, Camera 35, August/September 1974
Over the course of the next several months, David, for reasons he termed "feelings of loyalty" to his original editor, who evidently was back on the job, struggled with a decision to return to the fold at Pop. Finally, he did. I understood. In any event, in those heady days the photo magazine business was something of a "moveable feast," as Hemingway might say. In July of 1975, Camera 35 itself was sold out from under me (that's how I felt, at any rate) and I too moved, accepting the editorship of the so-called "Annuals" division of Popular Photography, eventually leading, several years on, to my editing the then-new Camera Arts magazine. Along the way, David continued writing for me. Here are some more excerpts:
"Everything in a photograph comes from light and is seen as light. I don't just mean that, technically, light makes the picture exist. I mean that light conveys all the feelings and all the information that makes the picture work. Light carries both data and expression.
"Any photographer who is not alive to light is in trouble."
—From "The Language of Light," by David Vestal, Invitation to Photography, Summer 1976
"People often forget that the zone system is descriptive, not prescriptive: so remember that it is something to use, not something to obey."
—From "The Minimal Zone System," by David Vestal, 35-mm Photography, Winter 1977
"Claptrap trouble. [Edward] Steichen's most ambitious opus, the 'Family of Man' show [at MoMA], was widely promoted as the greatest thing since firmament. It was enormously popular and drew record crowds. It was lousy.
"'The Family of Man' included many strong and beautiful photographs, but they were murdered in front of your eyes by a showmanship that did not suit them. Most of the commercial-lab prints were too big, many were poor in quality, and all of them were jammed into too little space in ways that were too complicatedly clever. The good pictures were diluted by the inclusion of more mediocre ones. This wasn't communication, it was an assault. The show was also too popular to see well—rush hour in the subway.
"Those were the minor problems. The big mistake was to treat the photographs as raw material to illustrate a sentimental and essentially verbal (script by Carl Sandburg) idealization of our species. There is much to be said for mankind, but this was syrup pretending to have muscles. It was colossally mediocre; a still-photo counterpart of Cecil B. DeMille's Bible epic movies, and as convincing.
"Moral: Show good pictures only, and hang them so they can be seen well; don't try to show ideas. Intelligent or not, ideas are not visible."
—From "Getting the Hang of It," by David Vestal, 35-mm Photography, Summer 1978
"Ridiculous...is the word for all formulas, rules, and prescriptions that try to tell you how big to print any picture that the prescriber has not seen. There are no exceptions. The cleverer and more plausible they are, the more important it is to remember that they are nonsense: pernicious twaddle.
"When Abraham Lincoln's straight man asked, 'How long should a man's legs be?', Abe came right back with: 'Long enough to reach the ground.'
"Print size offers no punch line as good as that. However, when asked 'What size should be print be?', we can say: 'Big enough to fit the picture.'
"If you ask right, the picture will show you."
—From "How Big is Big Enough," By David Vestal, 35-mm Photography, Summer 1979
In September of 1982, two years into its brief but brilliant life, David joined the staff of my last magazine, Camera Arts, again as associate editor. His profile of Roy DeCarava ("In The Key of Life," Camera Arts, May 1983) proved to be one of the most finely wrought pieces I'd ever had the honor of publishing. In the next issue, addressing the allegedly technical topic of enlarging, David wrote:
"I should add that both originality and spontaneity are vastly overrated qualities. You can be both spontaneous and original, yet do nothing worth doing. And you can't be either thing on purpose by trying. Both are purely by-products of being yourself and not following the herd, and they have little or nothing to do with intentions. Like scarcity, they add no value, though they can be used to raise the price. Leave them alone. If you have them, fine. If not, don't worry—other qualities matter more."
—From "Enlarging Your Vision," by David Vestal, Camera Arts, June 1983
The quotation above came from the penultimate issue of Camera Arts. The July, 1983, edition marked its sad death. And now, my old friend David Vestal is gone as well.
While at Ziff-Davis (publisher of Popular Photography, et al), I had been able to perform a similar service for David's The Art of Black-and-White Enlarging (also Harper & Row, in 1984) as I had with his The Craft of Photography, by initiating the serialization of its contents in advance, this time in various of our magazines.
It was my pleasure.
One day in 1970, Charlie Reynolds, picture editor of Popular Photography, came crosstown to have lunch with his friend David Vestal, then associate editor of Camera 35. They returned to our office, then conveniently located on 32nd Street a few floors above the Spiratone store, with a rumpled restaurant placemat in hand—on the back of which was scribbled an almost indecipherable maze of names of people in photography, all connected by a bunch of lines and arrows. I took a long look and turned the mess over to our art director, Leo McCarthy, who produced what we decided to call "The Whole Photography Chart No. 1," which the authors, Reynolds and Vestal, laughingly claimed traced the entire history of photography and its various influences and confluences from its very beginning to the summer of 1970. Needless to say, Chart No. 2 was never produced. I must apologize for the condition of this spread from my only surviving copy of the September 1970 issue. Somewhere along the line, I obviously dumped a cup of coffee on it!
One of David Vestal's memorable mantras was, "Don't ask why. Ask why not."
As I understood his quiet words, everything is possible for those able to turn negatives into positives.
Jim
©2013 by Jim Hughes, all rights reserved
For many years, Jim Hughes was the editor of Camera 35. Later, he was the founding editor of Mike J.'s all-time favorite photo magazine, the original Camera Arts. His books include the superb biography W. Eugene Smith: Shadow and Substance—The Life and Work of an American Photographer
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Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013, seen here on his release from Victor Verster Prison in 1990, with then wife and fellow activist Winnie Mandela.
Photo by Peter Turnley.
The world is taking appropriate note of the passing of Nelson Mandela, one of the incandescent leaders of the age. Celebrated the world over, Mandela was perhaps the world's greatest natural leader since Gandhi.
It's curious that human beings are so much more impressed with violence than peace, with cruelty rather than kindness, with aggressiveness rather than gentleness, with competition rather than cooperation. For instance, here in the U.S. we have a hand gesture used by drivers, univerally understood, that means "f--- you." (It's actually illegal in most states—you can be ticketed for using it.) But we don't have a corresponding hand gesture which would mean "sorry / excuse me / please forgive me / I meant no offense." Yet wouldn't such a gesture be at least as useful?
Similarly, the world has a name for leaders who are narcissistic, sadistic, and ruthless—we call them "dictators." But we have no distinct, vivid, universally understood name for leaders such as Mandela, who change the world for the better through benevolence, spiritual steadfastness, kindliness, and wisdom.
Too bad.
Our friend Peter Turnley was present with his camera when Mandela was released from prison. You can see a short video of Peter's reminiscences here.
David Vestal 1924-2013
The world will take much less note of the passing of another éminence grise, one from the far smaller field of American photography. Master teacher, colleague, author, and friend and mentor to a whole generation of photographers, David Vestal died last week at his home in Connecticut. He was 89.
A career educator, he taught photography at the Parsons School of Design, the School of Visual Arts, and the Pratt Institute. More modestly, I learned photography from David, from a Dektol-stained copy of The Craft of Photography open on the tiny counter of my makeshift first darkroom underneath the basement stairs.
When I became Editor of the recently deceased Photo Techniques magazine in 1994, one of the first things I did was to contact David and ask him if he'd like to write a column. He readily assented. The previous Editor was incredulous—he'd been trying for years to get David to write more than just an occasional article for the magazine. Turned out my timing was lucky—David had just retired from teaching, or rather, gone very part-time, and he suddenly had more time to write. His column far outlived my tenure at the magazine.
For many years he published Grump, a private photo newsletter. Every Christmas, Grump subscribers would get a tiny signed original print in a folded rectangle of interleaving tissue. On the tissue would be written in pencil, "MC HNY."
He was the author of both Craft and The Art of Black-and-White Enlarging, both wonderful books about how to print in the darkroom. He wrote many columns for Photo Techniques. He and I always intended to collect and publish them; no telling what will become of those plans now.
David loved the fax machine; he hated the telephone, which would call him out of his basement darkroom where he was immersed in work and then stop ringing before his bad knees could get him up the stairs. The fax machine let him reply at his leisure.
I have a quote from David taped to my computer, a principle which he believed was the cure for what ailed many a student, and possibly a lot of the rest of the world as well. It's characteristically pithy (David loved pith):
"Do your work." —DV
R.I.P.
Mike
(Thanks to Oren Grad)
Original contents copyright 2013 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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Les Myers (partial comment): "I am very sorry to learn of David Vestal's death...I still have many back issues of PT because of Mr. Vestal's columns. His writing style—short sentences, active verbs, etc.—inspired and helped me fine-tune my photographic philosophy and darkroom techniques. Thank you for alerting us to his passing."
jean-louis salvignol: "Peter speaks of that major historical event exactly as he lived and photographed it: with a tremendous intensity and without any trace of pathos."
Dennis Mook: "David Vestal couldn't compete with Mr. Mandela in changing the world. But David changed my world. Over many years, I hung on his every word, learning from him in whatever media he taught. I read and reread his words to ensure they sunk in. I didn't know he passed last week. Thank you. Both men give me reasons to pause for some thought and introspection."
John Garrity: "A couple of days ago I posted a promised book and a few connected prints to David Vestal only to hear in the afternoon, from a mutual friend, of his death.
"Well back in the last century, when first seriously attempting to make photographs, like many at that time, I looked to the writings of Ansel Adams for practical advice. Unfortunately, to me, Adams's books (first editions in black covers) at initial and all subsequent readings, were essentially incomprehensible.
"A frustrating while later, on a visit to the USA, I discovered David's writings—articles in Popular Photography magazine, which, along with those of Bill Pierce [a current TOP reader —Ed.], were models of clear, problem-solving practicality. I also obtained a copy of The Craft of Photography. Subsequently came the even better book, The Art of Black-and-White Enlarging, with its combination of demonstrative and exemplar photographs, clearly structured writing and a number of valuable test techniques. Sadly, its publication coincided with a hiatus in the publishing industry and it was poorly distributed, with limited sales. (If you wish to learn how to print black-and-white negatives well in the darkroom, it clearly and logically answers virtually every question you are likely to have about making effective, stable prints on silver halide papers. It also answers the equally important questions you didn't even know needed asking.)
"However, before then, while still grappling unsuccessfully with the practical mechanics of the medium, I'd stumbled across an annual collection of international photographs—probably a Popular Photography item. Among the portfolios by Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, etc., etc., was a single small image centred on a page surrounded by editorial text. It showed not much more than a nondescript door, neither old nor new. So quiet that you could flip the page without really registering it. Yet that picture was the one that stuck in my mind. Not those of the chest-thumping heavy hitters.
"David repeatedly made quiet photographs that at first sight could be dismissed as dull. However, the truth of their quiet ordinariness mask their power. A day or so later you realise they have contrived, burr-like, to lodge in the mind. They also force you to look anew.
"Despite being included in books such as The New York School (by Jane Livingston, 1992) (the thesis of which David disagreed with), his reputation as a photographer seems sadly limited. Living in the UK it is impossible for me to be entirely sure why, though I suspect a number of combining factors.
"As Mike has said, he focussed on doing the work. He photographed the ordinary quietly. He didn't spend time or energy promoting himself. He wasn't pompous. He was a sceptic who cheerfully pointed out the absence of the emperor's clothes. He wasn't unkind—he acknowledged others, though in private he could occasionally skewer someone who deserved it with a telling phrase. He didn't make big prints, or woolly statements. He characterised the Zone System as descriptive rather than prescriptive, after getting a complete understanding of it directly from Ansel Adams himself.
"He generally worked in single images, rather than projects or themes. (Though two trips to Brazil, first with his late wife Ann Treer in the '60s, then revisiting in the '90s, resulted in a few self-produced books made from inkjet prints. Similarly, I suspect an excellent small show or publication of pictures of his back yard in Bethelem, Connecticut, could be easily assembled.) He didn’t believe in limited-edition prints.
"He honoured and would try to support the work and reputation of others. He focussed much of his energy on writing. Writing clearly as possible in the mass media. (He blogged before blogging was invented. Firstly his newsletter GRUMP, then after a short pause 'FINITY, which continued almost to his end.)
"I hope someone can make a good book of his work—with no pictures running across the gutter [something David particularly disliked —Ed.]
"A good man, whom I, and many, will sorely miss."
Saul Leiter
Saul Leiter, a color photographer's color photographer, died a week ago today.
I suspect he'll be one of those photographers we learn more about as time passes, rather than less; he strikes me as a figure who will be known a century from now, once all the claims and pretenses and strivings of more effortful reputations have had a chance to fall away.
He photographed like everyone imagines a painter would: with an intense focus not on what was in front of the camera but on what the camera made of it.
He wasn't particularly famous in the 1950s when he did his most innovative work—or rather he was, briefly, but the moment soon faded. He reportedly didn't particularly seek fame and was sanguine about its ups and downs. But he was very lucky to enjoy a golden sunset to his life, thanks to the protean German publisher Gerhard Steidl, who published Early Color in 2008, a book that was in intense demand at the time and that revitalized attention and regard for Leiter. (We played a small part in helping publicize the book: TOP readers bought many hundreds of copies.)
Saul Leiter's only magazine cover?
Our friend Jim Hughes, who writes occasionally for TOP now, thinks that maybe the November/December 1981 issue of his magazine Camera Arts might be Saul's only magazine cover—at least featuring his artistic work. Saul was one of Jim's sources for Shadow and Substance, his biography of W. Eugene Smith. And a little-known fact, in Jim's words: "Gene Smith set Saul on his quest for personally meaningful visual images by giving him his first real camera, a 35mm Contax, in the late 1940s." Of Saul himself, Jim says, "Saul was wise, amusing and self-deprecating, to say the least. His perspective on life seemed to me to be very interior, with everything seen at oblique angles."
There are many nice things on the Internet about him from this past week: primarily the New York Times obituary. There is a film about Saul Leiter out there, one of many that I evidently don't get to see*.
News of his death has sucked dry the available supply of the recent books, but stocks of Early Color
The piece you really should not miss is Teju Cole's beautifully written little piece for the New Yorker's Page-Turner. Called "Postscript: Saul Leiter (1923-2013)," it is an epitaph for a fortunate artistic life.
Mike
(Thanks to Stephan Miller, John Bax, and Jim Hughes.
If anyone knows who took the photo of Leiter at the top, please let me know.)
*Being at the letter-to-the-editor-writing stage of my continuing emergence as a curmudgeon, I actually wrote an email to the manager of the local multiplex. With 16 screens and two three-story-high "UIltrascreens," I pleaded, couldn't at least one screen be devoted to small films for serious thinking adults? Much to my surprise, I received a long response. He said they were sympathic, and they were trying to do that, but the films for the local market are chosen by the "main office" or whatever he called it, and the faceless corporate managers there make all the decisions. Those entities do not appear to have a very high opinion of sophistication of the citizens of Waukesha, unfortunately.
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Larry Watson: "I had a nice email exchange with Tomas Leach, the film-maker of In No Great Hurry, the documentary on Saul Leiter. I, too, had not seen it and I am a big Saul Leiter fan. One can subscribe to their mailing list for updates about seeing the film. Mr. Leach said they are hoping for a week in NYC in January. He also said that hopefully, Netflix and iTunes may carry the film, but that 'for a small movie like this, they are very slow....' I was also able to watch an interview on YouTube with Saul conducted in Amsterdam, I believe it was in 2011.
"As far as magazine covers, I thought I saw covers he did for Bazaar and Vogue when he was doing fashion photography. I only have a little book by Thames & Hudson. Look forward to seeing Early Color when it is reprinted."
Ailsa: "Thank you for the New Yorker link—it's always good to read such a warm, appreciative piece of writing. As for the cinema issue, I am lucky enough to live just a five-minute walk from one of the south's best cinemas—the Duke of York's, in Brighton (famous for the pair of can-can legs on its roof). Every now and then, my husband and I discuss moving out of Brighton, but when I think of living more than a mile or so from some of the best films you could hope to see, I become slightly panic-stricken. And if anything demonstrates that the public has an appetite for 'arthouse' films, it's this: the Duke of York's recently opened its second cinema in Brighton—a city with a population of only 270,000."
Mike replies: Still, that's about four times the population of Waukesha. And, I really must visit Brighton some day!
This picture (by Gijsbert Hanekroot) should go in the blank white space*
He was known to the public at large as the writer of Eric Clapton's hits "After Midnight" and "Cocaine." But then, he never wanted to be known to the public at large.
Oddly, people cover "Call Me the Breeze" on Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute albums...even though Lynyrd Skynyrd's version was a cover of J.J. Cale.
He was called J.J. rather than the name he used in the first half of his life, John, to avoid confusion with the Velvet Underground's John Cale.
Neil Young once said, "Of all the players I ever heard, it's gotta be Hendrix and J.J. Cale who are the best electric guitar players." Eric Clapton said simply that J.J. Cale was the person he most admired.
If you're unfamiliar with him, download "Naturally" from iTunes, his 1971 debut effort for Denny Cordell and Leon Russell's Shelter Records. You'll either be hooked or you won't be—Cale was laid-back to a fault, and sounded just like an old black man even when he was a young white man. The modality is country blues, the riff on it unique.
I adore the song "Magnolia." But "Clyde" no less, really.
My favorite of his albums is probably Shades, with its cover reminiscent of a pack of Gitanes. Most people have a favorite album, one or another, often the one they got to know first.
Late in life he said, "If it weren't for Eric Clapton, I'd be selling shoes now."
He died of a heart attack on Friday, age 74. On jjcale.com it says, "Donations are not needed but he was a great lover of animals so, if you like, you can remember him with a donation to your favorite local animal shelter."
You know what's playin' Chez TOP today on the downstairs system. J.J. Cale on scratchy old vinyl. Perfect art.
Mike
(Thanks to Steve Rosenblum)
"Open Mike" is a series of off-topic essays by Yr. Hmbl. Ed. that appear here on Sundays.
*But I don't want G*tty climbing up my a**.
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Andrew Molitor: "Cale's a perfect metaphor for a lot of what I think about photography. Some of his best recordings are just some session players he grabbed from someplace and a drum machine. You don't need a bunch of gear to make great music. You don't even need good gear. You didn't even need gear capable of making particularly high fidelity recordings. What you need, what you can't escape from, is some great music. Extending this to photography is left as an exercise for the student!"
Hans Muus: "Don't know where to begin—there are so many Cale songs that I love. 'Crazy mama,' on the first album (Naturally), will always be one of my favourites (note the beautiful, archetypical wah-wah slide guiter by Mac Hayden that fits in so well with the groove that J.J. Cale is laying down). And I was there at the (single) concert Cale gave in 1974 in Amsterdam where the backstage picture by Gijsbert Hanekroot was taken that TOP is linking to! J.J. Cale, sitting on a chair, half of the time with his back to the auditorium, seemed a little shy. The show lasted exactly sixty minutes—we were actually surprised it was over so fast. To my (young) mind, there were quite a few old blokes in his band—but they all played marvelously, including the almost invisible master himself. (In the Europe of that time, rock music was pretty much a youth-only thing.)
"In later years, my musical friends and I have practiced hours and hours on end trying to emulate the typical Cale sound. It is all about laying down the right groove, in which each single instrument involved does very little individually, but what it does has to be just right. A true joy when it happens (not very often...) and a thing of beauty when you hear it practiced by J.J. Cale and his friends.
"I hope he has not suffered much and may rest in peace. Been listening to his music (LPs and CDs) for the past two days to no end."
Dave Brubeck just died. I grew up on rock and came to jazz late, like a longtime Catholic converting to Buddhism, so Brubeck is still relatively new to me. If you don't know him, try this
Or if you'd rather not, try this—a quick taste, suggested by Steve Gilbert. The laugh at the end is the drummer, Joe Morello, reportedly relieved that he got through it.
Mike
(Thanks to Steve, Michel, and others)
Original contents copyright 2012 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.
A book of interest today:
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Featured Comments from:
Paul De Zan: "I have very little in common with my father, except for the LP collection he assembled in the '50s and early '60s, before he started to lose interest in absolutely everything around age 35; an unhappy marriage and innate overcautiousness will do that to you. When I was small, the music in our house came from tinny AM radio, which I ignored, and from dad's kit-assembled Harman-Kardon Citation V tube-fired amplifier. And the music was Dave Brubeck's music, a bit of Ellington, later Stan Getz, never Miles, but a lot of Dave Brubeck. Brubeck wasn't jazz to me, he was music to me for the first 10–12 years I was on this rock. Paul Desmond was the first musician whose death I grieved. Dave's is just the latest. Sic transit gloria mundi."
Sal Santamaura (partial comment): "To get a sense of the man's true greatness, watch this short video segment."
Steve Biro: "I am 55 years old now, which means I was about five when Time Out featuring 'Take Five' was issued by Columbia. Perhaps it was exposure since (and probably before) birth to my parents' swing records that prepared me (I really enjoyed Benny Goodman as a child). But even at that young age, I was hooked instantly. I honestly cannot remember a time when I did not love both the album and song. It kicked off a lifelong love affair with jazz and the broader world of music. Sure, like most people my age I loved the Beatles and all that came after them. But jazz was and remains my musical center. And I owe it to Dave Brubeck. We are all very fortunate to have had him with us for so long. God speed, Dave. And thank you."
-
Mike
Original contents copyright 2012 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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David Ralph: "A search of the Rochester newspaper, the Democrat and Chronicle, reveals that Bryce Bayer's passing eluded their attention. Not that much different than Kodak's own appreciation for the import of the invention."
Photo by Malcolm Browne for the Associated Press, 1963
It's one of the very few photographs that anyone can visualize instantly from a verbal description. "The burning monk." You know the picture.
Malcolm Browne was the photographer; he died yesterday after a long and full life.
I knew little about the photo and nothing about him. I was fascinated to learn from the obituary that many foreign journalists and photographers were alerted a day in advance to show up for the event—but only Malcolm Browne did.
Good call.
I decided yesterday that I should mentally replace the word "iconic" whenever it appears with the word "famous," which is more often what people mean. But is this photograph ever...famous. An image check on the web reveals tattoos, T-shirts, macabre spoofs, a rendering in Lego, colorized versions, posters, art prints, on and on.
Malcolm Browne worked for the Associated Press when he took the picture, which was voted the World's Best News Picture of 1963 at the seventh World Press Photo contest in The Hague. He joined the New York Times in 1968.
As for Thich Quang Duc, who had acquired such mind control that he meditated peacefully as he perished, his death was not in vain. His protest actually did influence international policy.
...With a little help from the only foreign photographer who showed up to witness it.
Mike
(Thanks to Pierre Munson)
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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.
Featured Comment by Photoelectric: "The Austin [the car —Ed.] in the photo, in which Thich Quang Duc arrived that day, is still parked in a garage at the Thien Mu temple in Hue. It's rusty and neglected and would be totally unmemorable except for that photo, which gives it a strange sort of power when you see it."
Featured Comment by Rob Atkins: "Unfortunately, self-immolation of Buddhist monks has been in the papers with disturbing frequency lately, as the Chinese government continues its repression of Tibet."
Featured Comment by PWL: "Remember seeing this photo as a kid, when it first came out. Shocking. It was photos like this, plus the stuff that photographers like Larry Burrows did (I particularly remember 'One Ride With Yankee Papa 13') which made me realize that war was very different—and a lot uglier—than what we were presented with in TV shows like 'Combat.'"
Featured Comment by peter: "Interesting Malcolm Browne's commentary on the event...."
