The Online Photographer

Diane Arbus Centennial

Diane Arbus by Allan Arbus

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Diane Arbus, one of the most popular art photographers in history.

Her 1972 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art is to this day the most popular such exhibition ever at that museum. Her monograph is one of the medium's all-time best sellers. Since it appeared in 1972 it has never been out of print.

(The picture above was taken in 1949 as a film test by her husband Allan Arbus, who later played the part of Dr. Sidney Freedman on the 1970s television show "M*A*S*H.")

There are many books about her, including biographies by Patricia Bosworth (1984) and Arthur Lubow (2016).

Diane Arbus (by the way, the name is pronounced "dee-ANN") died by suicide on July 26, 1971, at the age of 48.

Mike
(Thanks to Anton Wilhelm Stolzing)

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:

Kenneth Tanaka: "Diane Arbus's work leaves few on the fence; you're either strangely attracted to it or you find it repulsive and exploitative. And that, plus a rich and brief personal history, is precisely what's helped to keep her work in the public eye for so long. Arbus's 1972 retrospective show at MoMA was indeed extremely popular. (Although I think that Steichen's 'Family of Man' might have been the most popular show, at least worldwide, with over 9 million visitors. [Diane's was the most popular single-artist retrospective.—Ed.]) But many of those who I know attended recall it as more of an attraction to the bizarre rather than to the art, per se. Last fall (2022) David Zwirner and Jeffrey Fraenkel, two of the most influential art/photo dealers in the world and representatives of Arbus's works, staged a re-creation of Arbus's 1972 MoMA retrospective. Quite a rare recreation of a photo show."

The Story of 'Grace'

A 1918 photograph goes viral in a big way. The story is interesting—even if the truth behind the picture might be a little disillusioning. But then, we all know that things are not always what they seem in photographs, right?

Interestingly, I'm not aware of ever seeing this image before Jay Townshend sent me this video a few days ago. (Thanks to Jay.)

Another link people have been sending me: "You're Pointing Your Camera the Wrong Way," by Margaret Renkl. A quotation: "My son and daughter-in-law, who are frequent campers, have seen people queued up at least 50 deep to take phone selfies at popular national park waterfalls and rock formations."

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:

Jon Peterson: "We had it in our home. As a young lad just getting interested in photography (1970s), I used to joke with my mom that I wanted to steal the frame and put my own photo in it. Decades later, that same water-stained print in the same cheap, chipped frame hangs on my wall. Makes me think of my mom."

Readings and Viewings

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

# # #

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

# # #

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

# # #

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

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

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

# # #

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

# # #

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

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Dick? I thought the guy was a tool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William Klein 1926-2022

Self portrait by William Klein

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

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

You can at least get that book.

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

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

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

Mike

Book o' the Week

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

This book link is a portal to Amazon. You're very kind use our links, as they help support the site.

B&H Photo

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Page 1944-2022, Fred Lyon 1924-2022

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

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

+=+=+=+=+

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

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

Book o' the Week

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

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."

Some Pictures Have to Be in Color

There are many photographs that have to be in color. They make no sense otherwise.

Actually, this was the argument made by one of the early pioneers of art photography in color in the U.S., Eliot Porter, who was given his first show in 1939 by Alfred Stieglitz, no less. Porter was a naturalist and also an avid bird photographer, and he argued that the colors of animals and many natural details were integral to their depiction. It's not hard to understand the argument that a black-and-white photograph of a Baltimore Oriole, for instance (I've seen only one of them in my years here, and was mighty impressed), makes no more sense than a black-and-white picture of this yellow melon.

Dat Bones*
Two tidbits about Porter: he had a longtime assistant with the colorful name of Jim Bones; and he threw a party to celebrate when his income from photography finally equaled the proceeds of his trust fund. Here's a tip: if you can find an original printing of Eliot's Porter's In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World—Sierra Club, 1962, hardcover only (I can't vouch for the softcover)—snap it up. The color reproductions, made by an arcane method that isn't even legal any more, are uniquely gorgeous. Stay away from the AMMO reprint of 2012; its repro is as bad as the original's are good in my opinion.

I know I'm always going on about how local produce is one of the best reasons to live here in Western New York State. It's an open secret in these parts that the guy who grows the best melons is a Mennonite farmer named Raymond, and I'm certainly not going to broadcast how to find him. But I will say that this very yellow watermelon was one of the best things I've ever put in my mouth. Amazing.

T.S. Eliot said April is the cruelest month, but August is the saddest month. The earliness of sunset begins to accelerate, and produce is in full glory but won't be for long. At this time of year Raymond's melons of one kind or another are for breakfast every day, and it's a mournful rite of Fall once they go away again for another year.

Mike

*Here's the reference I'm playing off of there. If you've never heard it. I hear the word of the Lord.

Book o' the Fortnight

Chromes is an edit of more than 5,000 Kodachromes and Ektachromes taken from 10 chronologically ordered binders found in a safe in the Eggleston Artistic Trust. This archive was once used by John Szarkowski, who selected the 48 images printed in Eggleston’s seminal book William Eggleston’s Guide, while the rest of the archive has remained almost entirely unpublished. Three volumes, slipcased.

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Go 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:

Mark Sampson: "Eliot Porter was a master of color photography, at a time when the art world (where reputations are made) disdained it. Didn't stop him though, which is a very good thing. I saw some of his dye-transfer prints up close and personal, back in 1989, and they still rank as the most beautiful color prints I've ever seen. Paradoxically, I like the color in the 1960s Sierra Club books, his and others'. It tends to be quite effective while not being very accurate, although it is a color palette no one would use today. But I didn't realize that they used an arcane and illegal printing method; explain please?"

Mike replies: Sorry, I looked but I can't find it. (Fact checker fail.) Maybe Geoff knows. Something about the chemicals used in the process being environmentally harmful and no longer used now. It was quite an important book in its time; lavishly made, very expensive but sold well anyway, and helped establish both Porter and also the tradition and popularity of the coffee-table nature photography book.

A Remembrance of Jerry Uelsmann

Guest post by Keith F. Davis

Jerry Uelsmann (right) was a dear friend. I had him give a talk in a symposium I put together in 1995 and he was just great—funny, insightful, and inspiring. We were friends from that point on, and I visited him numerous times in Gainesville.

It was a particular treat to be with him in the darkroom as he worked. His skills there were truly astonishing. My sense was that he hardly had to make test exposures at all—that he could gauge everything so precisely simply from his vast experience and feeling for the materials. That may not literally be true, but it is probably pretty close to the reality. And the simple tools he used to blend images into one another were both remarkable and wonderfully simple. It took some time to get each of his three or four or five enlargers set up properly, with the individual images properly masked, but once that was done, he simply moved his sheet of paper from one easel to the next, making exposures and doing simple dodging and burning as he went. And then the print went into the developer...to emerge under the red light as its own kind of magic.

He understood analogue photography in his own unique and amazing way—unlike anyone else I have ever known. Jerry loved the process dearly. He talked of the darkroom as a laboratory—a place for experimentation and discovery, and that was exactly how he worked.

He was a witty, fascinating person who loved life and loved making pictures. And, of course, ultimately, the two were pretty much one and the same. I will miss him enormously.

Keith

Keith F. Davis, one of the leading American photography museum curators of the last 40 years, retired as the Senior Curator of Photographs at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. He is the author of numerous publications over many years, including The Origins of American Photography: from Daguerreotype to Dry-Plate and An American Century of Photography: from Dry-Plate to Digital, both of which we were privileged to offer here at special prices in 2016. Here's his Amazon author page.

Book of Interest:

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

The book link above is a portal to Amazon.

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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:

J D Ramsey: "I always considered Uelsmann special. Before Photoshop he created images that no one else had. Mystical, sometimes humorous, and entirely different. Unique images that mesmerized. Even now, as it is explained that he used multiple enlargers, it still seems magical. Since Photoshop others have created somewhat similar images (e.g. J.P. Caponigro), but Uelsmann was there first, by decades."

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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fine book all around. Quintessential. This one stays.

Mike

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

Book o' the Week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Box from the Junk Store

Guest Post written by Ernest Zarate

The musings Mike and others had about documenting one’s life brought something to mind for me. I attended eight different elementary schools, one junior high, and three high schools, in a variety of California towns, mostly along the Central Coast, from San Luis Obispo to Santa Barbara. My mom, who raised five kids on her own, was always one step ahead of bill collectors and landlords.

In 1973, as I entered college, I was given a copy of Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary. For some reason, I started writing down every address I lived at on the inside cover, from 1973 to the present: 24 addresses, 12 cities or towns, in three states, all in the USA.

Also in 1973, I met another photography student, Leigh, at Santa Barbara City College (still my dear friend). He suggested we go out on photo excursions, which I happily agreed to. Leigh enjoyed going to small towns and finding the local junk store. We’d go in and he’d rifle through their old 78 RPM records and old postcards. Then we’d go out shooting.

On one such trip, I was occupying myself by digging around in some boxes haphazardly stacked in the back of a store in Santa Paula, when I came across a box that contained a collection of exposed and processed 4x5 glass plates, along with printing frames, unopened boxes of dry plates, and some film holders. There were easily a hundred glass plate negatives, though a number were broken. Fifteen dollars, and the whole thing was mine.

Looking at them, it became quite apparent that this was the work of one dedicated amateur photographer. One ongoing subject reoccurred in many of the plates: exterior shots of a two story home, with its occupants sitting front and center. And the photographer returned time and again to recording this family in front of their homestead for many years. In the early photos, the people were young, strong, and proud, the men with defiant mustaches, the women holding infants and toddlers. The home, standing alone with no visible neighbors, was surrounded by empty space, save a few saplings, thin and spindly.

Early

Later

As the series goes on, the people grow older, the saplings get taller, and new young 'uns join in the picture. Vines start to overtake the wrap-around porch. Eventually, the trees are tall and stately, much of the home covered in ivy, those men become hunched over, with canes, seated, though still sporting their mustaches, the women looking just as worn, with a new generation around them.

If I was a gun enthusiast, I could maybe date that rifle our friend is so proudly displaying. Love the way that dog has its chest puffed out for the photo, too.

There are only horse drawn carriages, never any cars or other indications of modern conveniences. This photographer really wanted to document what must have been his family (I say 'his' because a couple of photographs include the shadow of the tripod, camera, and photographer, dressed in pants with a hat).

POP print

Dry plate photography got started in the 1880s and dropped off in the late 1920s, which would cover a span of time equal to what these photos show. When I was an undergrad at San Francisco Art Institute, I had an apartment with a tiny back porch. It only got an hour or two of direct sunlight. I purchased some Kodak POP [printing-out paper —Ed.], put a glass neg and a sheet of POP in the printing frame, and sat out on the porch keeping the frame in direct sunlight. (The photographer’s processing technique was haphazard, to say the least.) I’d crack open one side of the frame to monitor progress, and when the print looked good, I’d take it in and fix and wash it. Whiled away many sunny SF afternoons doing that!

I had to dig these plates out of The Shed. I've not looked at them in a very long time. At some point, around the mid 1990s, I tried to get some info on the photos. The Oakland Museum of California tried to help, but they came up empty-handed. I did get some RC prints out of the attempt.

I still have the glass negatives. Not as many as I used to—moving around is hard on these old negs.

It was such a serendipitous event to find these at a young age. I’m honored to be the trustee of this family’s history, though I’d gladly return the photographs to them if I could.

—Ernest

Book of Interest this Week

Gregory Crewdson: Alone Street. "Filmic" seems the best single adjective to describe Gregory Crewdson's work; his directed and carefully managed tableau are the still photography version of scenes in movies. As such they are hyper-real; more beautiful than life and more poetic, and more concerted. They're also very easy to enjoy and a pleasure to look at.

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Four Photographers You Might Not Know

Here are a few photographers readers sent me links to that I thought you might enjoy—

Alessandra Manzotti

Longtime reader John Hansen-Flaschen sent this link. It's a video with stills serving as a "virtual exhibit" of the work of Alessandra Manzotti, who was invited to join six other photographers on an expedition to Mongolia in 2018, where she documented the burkitshi, the eagle hunters of central Asia.  I admired the phrase "trading easy drama for resonant simplicity" quoted near the end. We should all be able to say as much. I like the work; it skirts around the pictorial and the picturesque with just enough specificity. John writes, "I spent three weeks in Mongolia years ago. The eagle hunters are among the most remarkable humans alive today." If you want to know more about them, there's a good article by Andrea DenHoad at The New Yorker.

Anne de Henning

Regular reader Animesh Ray sent a link to Anne de Henning, who I didn't know. Which makes some sense, as she appears to have been most active in France and the Middle East, and her books are published in French. As often happens, my loss—she's a highly accomplished photojournalist with a long list of credits, not to mention a life full of adventures. Take a scroll down through her brief illustrated bio—quite a life! (It might help to understand that when I was comin' up, the globetrotting photojournalist was the model for aspiring hobbyists and amateurs. They were who everyone wanted to be. Later, the model shifted to the moneymaking pros, and now I don't even know what the model is—social-media influencers? That's a post for another day.)

Raghubir Singh

Although obviously an accomplished photographer in her own right, I learned from Anne de Henning's website that she was married to the late Raghubir Singh, a photographer whose work I greatly admired when he was active. Although he lived largely as an ex-pat, his subject was his native India. Unfortunately he died young of a heart attack at 59 and he and his influence left the scene. I admit I hadn't thought of him in some years, although I have several of his books, including Kerala, River of Color, and The Grand Trunk Road. His website is moribund, but you can see a small sampling of small JPEGs at MetCollects. Raghubir Singh is ripe for a revival one day; he was the real deal. His is a name you should know.

Dina Litovsky

This video by the young New York City based photographer Dina Litovsky points up an important principle in photography—it's that, consciously or unconsciously, we tend to have stock or standard ways we like to picture things. The quintessential study of the Amish "the way we like to see them" is probably the lyrical, pastoral work of George Tice, as in the book Fields of Peace. That's the romanticized vision. But getting too stuck in tropes can mean we blind ourselves to people and things as they really are. As you'll see in the BBC Reel video Where the Amish go on holiday, that's what interested Dina Litovsky about the Amish on the beaches of Florida.

=    +    =    +    =    +    =    +    =  

Hope you enjoy checking out a few of these four. Big thanks to John Hansen-Flaschen, Animesh Ray, and my friend Steve Rosenblum, who sent along the Litovsky video link. (Thanks also to everyone who sends me tips, whether I use them or not. One of my Resolutions for 2022 is to follow up on more of them.)

The Print Sale starts at 2:00 U.S. Eastern Time today.

Mike

Book o' the Week:
Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny, by Ann Marks, is the most complete picture of the mysterious governess-photographer yet—and the picture is more surprising than we thought.

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The Basketball G.O.A.T.

Ever know a person who seems to want to be your friend but actually doesn't know you all that well? Even though they think they do? That's what YouTube reminds me of.

I recently watched a bunch of videos about the GOAT (greatest of all time) debate in basketball. A lot of which centers on: Team Michael or Team LeBron? I find disputes about meaningless things sort of soothing somehow—as if to say, yeah, we're gonna fight, but we don't really mean it. "Happy disputation" you might call it. Similar to that old joke about academe: the arguments are so heated because the stakes are so low.

Anyway, YouTube, which knows I'm an old white guy, decided on its own that I must want to watch Larry Bird stories. Because apparently Larry Bird is the GOAT candidate favored by old white guys. When they were first presented to me, I did watch a few, and that was it—YouTube was convinced I needed to be offered Larry Bird content at every turn. Couldn't get rid of it.

Not only do I not particularly care about Larry Bird, but I'm not even that interested in basketball. I just liked the way some of the videos educated me about the history of a sport I don't know all that much about.

Courtesy U.S. Department of State

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 2012

It did get me mulling over the whole "Greatest of All Time" concept, though. What's so appealing to people about that idea? It's a sort of lazy "competitiveness porn," if you will. The conclusion I came to is that it's really only useful for purposes of hero worship. What seems more pertinent to me is the idea of what might be called a "pantheon," although I'm not really convinced that term is appropriate. Pan = all plus theos = gods, a shrine to all the gods. In other words, my top o' the tops would be a group, not an individual. Because in any conversation about greatness, it's much more interesting to consider all the great players—what they accomplished, how they stood out, how they differed, what was amazing about them. The drama of their stories and career arcs.  I'd put 16, 20, or 24 players in the GOATheon. More fun, more meaningful, more respectful. At any rate, I'm just not comfortable leaving people like Hakeem Olajuwon or Stephen Curry out of the conversation.

21st century only
Where photography is concerned, I sometimes say that IMHO Ansel Adams was the greatest American photographer of the first half of the 20th century and Lee Friedlander was the greatest American photographer of the second half of the 20th century. That's the best I can do: Americans only, and 50-year periods, not "of all time." ("Of all time" = "since 1839" where photography is concerned anyway.)

But why even make such a statement? What, do I need heroes?

The trouble with it is the same problem: it leaves so many people out. Never mind that you could choose Weston and Erwitt as alternatives (at a college program where I taught long ago, the faculty had collectively agreed that Weston was the GOAT, in the same too-willful way that Ken Burns decided Ellington and Armstrong were the GOATs of jazz). If you came up with fifty great American photographers of the 20th century, you'd still be impoverishing your list, because even that would leave out people you should know. Or who dovetail with your own tastes and concerns. I wouldn't be comfortable excluding Dorothea Lange or Roy DeCarava, for example.

The best thing I can come up with to explain why I like the Adams/Friedlander idea is that the choices are representative and didactic. The coolest thing about pairing them that way is that they're so radically different than each other, and yet each expresses something essential about their era. It's interesting to think of what they had in common—huge talent and voracious appetites for work, to name two—but I love thinking about all the ways their work differs.

Here's a book I'd like to write: fifty great photographers of the 21st century so far. That would be a challenge. But wouldn't you love to set aside everything that came before Y2k and look at contemporary photographers in isolation? That would be really interesting I think. It wouldn't mean much but it would be a tremendous way to engage with new work and compare, contrast, and sort. Of course, it would take two years and when you were done you'd be utterly exhausted and virtually no one would care about your conclusions. In other words, just quixotic enough to tempt me.

OldNorm YoungNorm
Now my haywire YouTube algorithm sort-of friend thinks I'm mad about Norm Macdonald. Apparently also much beloved of old white guys—although that doesn't speak very well of old white guys. In truth, until his recent demise I barely remembered him from "Saturday Night Live," and get this—although he was a perfectly decent-looking fellow in his older age, I actually didn't connect the old Norm Macdonald to his young self because he looked so different after he gained weight. On the rare occasions I encountered random clips from his radio show or whatever it was, I just got that sort of vague celebrity-I-should-know-but-don't feeling. (I get that a lot.) I'm only mentioning that to indicate how little I knew about Norm Macdonald. He had barely entered my radar field in any phase of his career.

But now he seems to be all that YouTube wants to talk about. The more it offers Norm videos, the more I click on them, and pretty soon I'm lost in a ghetto of nothing but Norm. And I actually don't click with the guy's humor all that much.

I'm currently not clicking on anything having to do with him because I don't want to encourage my clueless clingy friend. I mean, I just recently managed to get rid of Larry Bird. Sigh. I gotta get algorithms that know me better....

Mike

P.S. Team Kareem.

Book o' the Week

  Friedlander First Fifty. A very fun little book that gives a tour of the first fifty of Lee Friedlander's books—extra copies of which are apparently stashed all over every floor of his house. By his grandson, who is trying to sell full, signed sets on eBay. This is very enjoyable, but also might be the most unique book about photobooks ever. Who else has published fifty photobooks?

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'Burning Monk' by Malcolm Browne

Malcolm Browne, Burning Monk

Today is the anniversary of one of the most well-known pictures ever taken, known as "Burning Monk," taken on this day 58 years ago.

It's a picture of the death by suicide of Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, as a staged protest against government repression of the majority Buddhist religion in South Vietnam. The picture was taken by Malcolm Wilde Browne, who had become the AP's first permanent correspondent in Saigon when he was stationed there in November of 1961. He might have been the only Western journalist there on that day in 1963.

President Ngo Dinh Diem had "won" a rigged referendum and proclaimed himself President of the new Republic of Vietnam in 1955. A Catholic, he repressed Buddhists with escalating brutality, which in turn inspired escalating protest. At the time of Thich Quang Duc's death by immolation, Diem himself had only a few months to live. He fled a U.S.-backed military coup in November of 1963, initially embarrassing his pursuers by eluding them through subterfuge. After believing he had negotiated safe passage to exile for himself and his brother, Diem was executed in the back of an armored personnel carrier by ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) officers.

The AP has an informative page about the famous photograph as part of its "Explore" series. "In a pre-digital world," the AP relates, "it took a remarkable 15 hours over 9,000 miles of AP WirePhoto cable for Malcolm Browne's Burning Monk to become breaking news." And the picture the papers broke on June 12th was not this one—initially, a different frame, now mostly forgotten, was the most widely published image. It was that picture, not this one, which had such a visceral impact on then-U.S. President John F. Kennedy.

Malcolm Browne was an accomplished photojournalist and a skilled photographer who filed many stories and would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1964. Talking about his most famous photograph, Browne remembered that "the monks were telephoning the foreign correspondents in Saigon to warn them that something big was going to happen. Most of the correspondents were kind of bored with that threat after a while and tended to ignore it. I felt that they were certainly going to do something, that they were not just bluffing, so it came to be that I was really the only Western correspondent that covered the fatal day." After a long and distinguished career—and a memoir, called Muddy Boots and Red Socks: A Reporter's Life—Malcolm Browne died in New Hampshire in 2012, at the age of 81.

Malcolm Browne in 1964. Photographer unknown.

Greg Myre of NPR's All Things Considered wrote, "In a war that would produce many shocks to the American public, Browne's photo was one of the first and remains an iconic image of the war a half-century later." You can see a larger version of the image here.

Mike

Product of Interest this week:

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

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Featured Comments from:

Cliff McMann: "This picture is four years older than me, it wasn’t until years later at history of photography course at NOVA Community College that I saw it for the first time. I remember the visceral reaction, mine and the class’s. Beyond the power of images, some images possess power."

Mike replies: Hey, I used to teach at NOVA!

Tex Andrews (partial comment): "This ranks as one of the most horrifying images I have ever seen. There are many, many horrifying images—which in itself is a horror, compounded by the fact that with so may you'd think we would have had enough and learned to be better humans, but no, we have instead become inured to horror it seems—but what so unnerves me even so many decades later is that in this image this man is still alive. It's unbearable to me."

John Krill: "I'm going to suggest two books on the Vietnam War. The first is The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam and the other is Once Upon a Distant War by William Prochnau. Both have excellent description of the crisis with the Buddhists. All Buddhists were still badly mistreated even when I was in Vietnam in 1969."

Thanks, MR

It was five years ago today that Michael Reichmann died. He was known across the internet simply as "MR"—everyone knew who you were talking about. His website The Luminous-Landscape was a regular go-to for most people with an interest in digital photography.

He was mentioned here a few weeks ago and the mention of his name inspired a number of comments, but they were buried in an unrelated post. Knowing this anniversary was coming I thought it might be an appropriate time for sharing our appreciation.

I miss Michael. He had a large personality. His voice, his opinions, and especially his enthusiasm were intimately entwined with the era of the digital transition for me. It was an interesting and exciting time and he was a big presence in it. His interest was sharp and you were always curious to know what he thought about things.

When he was first diagnosed I set up a call for him with a relative who had dealt with the same kind of cancer. We were at the family cottage in Michigan at the time. He was so positive and forthright about seeking treatment that it didn't occur to me then that the disease might win. He would have been seventy-six today; hardly old enough for aging to have slowed him down more than a half-step. If he had lived I'm sure we'd be reading his articles today about his latest workshop jaunts to far corners of Earth and his opinions about the latest cameras and printers.

For those few of you who might not know who he was, these were my words at the time of his passing. I'd be pleased to host your thoughts if you'd care to share them in the comments.

I'm sorry he's no longer here, but—good memories. I'm glad he was around and I'm grateful I got to be his friend for a while. Rest in peace, MR.

Mike

P.S. No 'Featured' comments today. To see everyone's comments, simply go to the link at the very bottom of this post.

Madonna and Helmut (Jeff Markus)

I didn't want anyone to miss this great comment, about print size.

Jeff Markus writes: "When I was assisting and printing for Norman Seeff his standard print was 16x20, from 35mm Panatomic-X negs. Image size came in at about 13x19. This had been his standard procedure for many years by the time I started working for him. He originally came up in the business by designing and shooting record album covers, 12x12 inches, so this sizing gave him anywhere from a slight to a large reduction for repro, thus maximizing quality.

"Another consequence of this sizing is that a person's face in a tight shot becomes life-size, or even a bit larger. The impact of this can be surprisingly powerful. And if the shot is a group of maybe half a dozen band members, each of their faces is large enough to be easily read.

"The common practice at that time was for portfolio prints to be no larger than 11x14, the theory being that you didn't want to piss off art directors by making your book too unwieldy. Norman's was 16x20, with about three dozen prints in it, and was a real handful. I do remember at shoots seeing some AD's struggle with that monster, but its visual strength was undeniable.

"When I was printing for Helmut Newton his usual print was 11x14; negs were Tri-X Pro out of a Hasselblad. This worked well for magazine repro and he said he just liked the size. His older 35mm negs worked well at that scale too. He was still putting out Newton's Illustrated at that time, which was larger than the usual magazine format. 11x14 reproduced with a slight upsize for full-page photos gave Helmut the look that he wanted.

"One magazine job varied from this a bit, and the result was quite unexpected, to me, at least. He shot Madonna for a spread in Vanity Fair, as a tough leather-girl with a knife, and she had final approval for any images of her that would be published. It was rare at the time (late '80s) for celebrities to have this as a contracted right...Helmut would have to send her a set of prints of his choices for her to okay. We couldn't send his set because they had to go to the magazine; we were on deadline and they might be damaged or delayed. Helmut asked me do another set, but as 8x10's.

"To my surprise, the smaller prints transformed the images into something completely different. They became delicate and gem-like, precious, very unlike any other Helmut Newton prints I have ever seen, or made.

"I sent them out to Madonna late in the afternoon and they were returned the next morning, all approved. The tough girl had rated them by preference, with one to four little red hearts on the lower right margins."

As a former pro custom B&H exhibition printer, I can tell you that if Jeff printed for Helmut Newton and Norman Seeff he's a heck of a printer. Both those photographers were noted for their superb prints and high standards. (If you don't know the name Norman Seeff, he shot the cover photo of Joni Mitchell's masterpiece "Hejira," the famous shot of the young Steve Jobs sitting cross-legged with the original Macintosh in his lap, and the well-known photo of a laughing Ray Charles with the piano keys reflected in his sunglasses. And many more. By the way, younger readers can mock, but I truly miss album covers. They were a brightly-lit shop window for the work of so many photographers).

Thanks much for the tales, Jeff.

Mike

Book o' the Week:

ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History by Jennifer Dasal (Penguin, 2020. Adapted from the popular podcast.)

This link is a portal to Amazon, through which most anything you purchase will be credited to TOP. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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:

Helcio J. Tagliolatto: "Among TOP readers there are great stories of life and profession, waiting to be revealed."

David Saxe: "In the early '60s, Bluenote and Prestige jazz record albums were some of my first photographic influences. There is even a great book, The Blue Note Years: The Jazz Photography of Francis Wolff which includes some of their best covers."

Leo Kawczinski: "I love these sorts of posts. They remind me of the depth and breadth of TOP's audience and the experience that informs the comments."

Tom Dills: "Not only do I miss album covers, but I also miss the liner notes."

A Photographer's Home

I hope you don't think this is the online equivalent of being a peeping Tom, but I thought this was interesting...and note that this link might not last for long.

The other day, for obscure reasons, I was searching "Île-de-France," the north-central region of France in which Paris lies—searching, as I often do, visually, through the images tab—and I happened across an unusual real estate listing. It caught my eye because the house seemed to be pictured as it was lived in, as opposed to having been sanitized and leached of personality for the listing photos. Then I saw this—

The large prints on the wall (which I have to admit I didn't recognize—I should have recognized the lower one, because I've seen it before) were the first indication that this was a photographer's home, but the light on its stand, the copy of Klein Retrospective on the bookshelf, and, especially, the proof-prints taped to the back of the door, were the confirmation. As I clicked through to other pictures, it dawned: Whoa, this is Peter Lindbergh's house.

I didn't know he had died, or if I did I didn't remember (I can't keep everybody in my head any more like I used to). But a quick side-trip to Google revealed he left us on September 3rd, 2019.

If you don't know the name, Peter, who was born in Germany and lived in France, was a major fashion photographer, one who had a strong affinity for black-and-white and who is credited with ushering in the era, and the concept, of the supermodel. Here's his Foundation, and here's a link to a book that's a good introduction.

Photographer Peter Lindbergh in 2015

I hope you don't think it's creepy of me to clue you to virtually peek into the home he left behind. I thought it more like a unique opportunity to celebrate who he was—a creative powerhouse with distinctive taste and strong feelings. Rest in peace.

Here's the listing from Sotheby's Realty.

Mike
(Portrait from fanzineredwiki, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Book of interest this week:

PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice, Edited by Sasha Wolf
(clicking on the link above takes you to Amazon)

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

Dogman: "My favorite of the fashion photographers. I discovered his work late but made up for it by diving in deep and coming out feeling fulfilled. Beautiful B&W."

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "This is such an amazing find. He is my favorite of the fashion photographers and it is such a treat to see how he chose to display his work in his house. And TOP has me on a photography book path that is leading to my house being filled with large books like his! Thanks for this post!"

Urs Willi: "For me, Lindberg's masterpiece are his 'portraits' of some of Alberto Giacometti's bronze figures. They were on display in a Giacometti exhibition some years ago here in Zurich (Switzerland). Truly marvelous. There is a print volume, but I haven't seen it."

Rob Campbell: "The not knowing of Lindbergh's demise is not of itself surprising.

"Lindbergh and many other people of his ilk are famous within their universe as well as within the wannabe one too. However, there has always been a wide gap between the genres and they don't always overlap very much. For example: I've been in the business all my working life up to retirement, and I was in it before Peter became what he became. I watched some of his early stuff in the fashion bibles and liked some and disliked some. He was, to me, a mixed bag of great and horrible. Yet, I know and care even less about some of the apparently wonderful so-called art photographers some revere; you see the point?

"Later on, much later on, I began really to like what he was doing, though not always the women he chose to carry his dreams. For anyone not familiar with his work, the best way is to watch some of the 'making of' vids that abound on the Internet; a major one is of the shooting of his Pirelli Calendar (another case of a thing famous amongst some photographic groups but almost unknown to others), where he uses older actresses as well as some younger women. The videos, often, strike me as being better than the published photographic stills, but that could be because of motion and the build-up of a sequence to a climax that model photographers understand very well, but which can't be experienced from a single shot, however great that one may be.

"The best video interview that I can remember with him is on Nick Knight's Showstudio channel. I'm writing this on an iPad which is always a race with losing contact with TOP due to timing out, whatever that may be, so I won't risk losing this connection in order to provide a link!"

Electric Trains and the Electric Flash Lamp

Right now is the time to be buying Christmas presents to put around the tree for kids. Toys tend to come and go in popularity, but electric trains continue to have "traditional" associations with Christmas in the U.S. I was at a Christmas celebration just a few years ago where there was an operating electric train circling the base of the Christmas tree.

Turns out there was a photographic connection, way back.

In 1899, a man named Joshua Cohen invented a product for photographers called the Electric Flash Lamp. The Flash Lamp used electric current to ignite flammable magnesium powder used as flash for lighting photographs. Prior to that, flash powder, invented by Adolph Miethe and Johannes Gaedicke in Germany in 1887, had to be ignited manually, which was known to be perilous to the photographer. Magnesium flash powder itself was risky to bystanders, pets, small children, and structures! (It would be interesting if we could have had pictures taken just after the explosion of the "flash"—they no doubt would have showed surprise and alarm on subjects' faces. Alas, there were no motor drives on the old glass-plate box cameras of the day.) Cohen's invention later had other applications, notably being used to ignite underwater mines for the U.S. Navy.

A year later, Cohen, who later spelled his name Cowen, used the profits from his invention to start another company, one that made toy trains. He named that company using his middle name: Lionel. Lionel Corporation went on to dominate the market for electric trains, becoming the largest toy manufacturer in the world in 1953.

Lionel trains have been through many changes of ownership since then, and it's a long story, but at one point it was purchased by an investor group that included rock star Neil Young, who took an active hand in creating products and who to this day continues to be a consultant for Lionel's high-end products. Another former owner whose association might be less a point of pride was the malignant Roy Cohn, who has cast a long, dark shadow across American politics and about whom the less said the better. Cohn was Cowen's grand-nephew, and bought the company from him when Cowen retired in 1959.

The generation that treasured toy trains is aging out now. According to Kalmbach Publications, which publishes Toy Trains and many other train-themed magazines, the center of the train-loving generation in America is males who were 10 in 1950, when electric trains were the number-one Christmas wish for boys. That boy, who might have gotten up on Christmas morning to find a train set up around the tree, would be 80 now, and might have spent his whole life having a soft spot for toy and model trains.

As for the Flash Lamp, although many obsolete products and processes continue to be used in photography by enthusiasts and antiquarians, I've never heard of anyone still using magnesium powder flash! Much less Joshua Lionel Cowen's Electric Flash Lamp. But it served its purpose at the time...several purposes, it turns out.

Pirie MacDonald, Jacob Riis, 1906

If you'd like to read a little more about very early flash photography, there's a well-written, succinct article about the pioneering, Danish-born, progressive-era photographer Jacob A. Riis (who I think looked a little like the character "Cliff Clavin" on the old TV show "Cheers") by Miriam Bader at a site called Khan Academy that I thought was good. Flash powder was the newest thing when Riis started using it. Here's a quote: "Initially, Riis used a revolver to shoot cartridges containing the explosive magnesium flash-powder, but he soon discovered that showing up waving pistols set the wrong tone and substituted a frying pan for the gun, flashing the light on that instead. The process certainly terrified those in the vicinity and also proved dangerous. Riis reported setting two fires in places he visited and nearly blinding himself on one occasion." Ah, the good old days.

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.

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Carleton Watkins Treasure

Check out this find from an "Antiques Roadshow" in Charlotte, North Carolina. An old 1860 album in a morocco binding that a man found in his mother-in-law's mother's attic. Much fun, and a beauteous thing:

And if you look a little farther into the same show you get to see the world's creepiest doll! What a bonus.  :-)

Mike

UPDATE: Had some trouble with the first embedded video...as far as I can tell this is the official PBS Antiques Roadshow video. If you can't see it, here's a link to the video on YouTube—start at about 8:35. —Ed.

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

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Featured Comments from:

Richard Man: "We saw a 80 original prints of Mr. Watkins at the Stanford Cantor Museum special exhibit in 2014. They were spectacular!"

Mike replies: They really are magnificent aren't they? Especially his large ones. The little JPEGs at the linked site are about as close to the real prints as the "heads" side of a quarter would be to the real George Washington!

Rod Sainty: "As you once suggested, Mike, someone thought the handsome portfolio too nice to throw out. Gorgeous photographs. The kind that can never be improved upon."

Mike replies: Wow, good memory you have, Rod! I did make that argument, long ago.

Predictions from the Past

I was going through some old papers today, and I happened across a loose page, crumpled, from GRUMP, a newsletter "published informally and occasionally by David Vestal," the late photo-writer (he preferred "photographer") who died in 2013 after a long and productive life. I'm going to venture the liberty of reproducing this in toto, because I was David's editor for years and I'm virtually certain he wouldn't have minded. This is from GRUMP 34, dated June, 1994:

it's gaining on us

This is based on too little evidence to trust, but enough to provoke.

In 1984, according to to a study published in a magazine devoted to electronic imaging, high-resolution 35mm color-slide film could hold information equivalent to 18 or 20 million pixels (digital units of electronic visual recording). Average this and you get 19,000,000 pixelishes per 35mm slide.

A 1984 Sony still video camera delivered 250,000 pixels per picture, or 1/76th as much information as 35mm film.

In 1991, a Sony still video picture had 720,000 pixels, a big improvement, about 1/26th as much information as 35mm film. The rate of increase was 2.88x in seven years.

If we assume, ridiculously, that this rate will stay constant, then future still video pixels at seven-year intervals will be:

1998: 2,073,600 (leaving film with a 9.16x advantage);
2005: 5,971,968 (leaving film with a 3.18x advantage);
2012: 17,199,268 (leaving film with a 1.1x advantage);
2019: 49,533,891 (leaving film behind).

This far-too-simple projection puts the catchup year at 2013, but technology does not change evenly, and I think it will probably happen sooner. Or it may never happen: predictions are iffy.

Photographers have always resisted change, so in the 1880s we cursed those damned dry plates because, we said, they lacked the "bloom" of wet collodion. And so on. In our reluctance to change we are mistaken. Don't worry: if and when this change comes it won't kill us: to the extent that we use it well, it may help.

Pretty fair for 1994! Using DPReview's historically important public records, in 1998 most consumer cameras had one megapixel, but the Kodak DCS520/Canon 2000 and the Kodak DCS315 had two. In 2005, the Nikon D200 and Sony Cyber-shot DSC-R1 had 10 megapixels, but most consumer digital cameras had six or eight. In 2012, sensors ranged from 12 MP to 24 MP, but 16-megapixel cameras like the Pentax K-5II, Olympus OMD E-M5, and Sony SLT-A37 were common, while the Canon EOS Rebel 4Ti and EOS M had 18. Finally, in 2019, the Leica SL2 had 47 MP, and the Hasselblad X1D II 50C had 50.

Of course, things did happen a little more quickly than David's model predicted...just as he predicted (ha!). After all, 2012 was the year of the 36-megapixel Nikon D800, and 2019 the year of the Fuji GFX 100 with its 100,000,000 "pixelishes." And there was a 6-MP Kodak in 1998. Was that the one that cost something like $30,000 and was only purchased by news organizations?

In the same stack of old papers, though, I found a private letter from David (actually it was a fax...he loved the fax machine, and kept using it far after it was outdated. When it first came along it relieved him of having to climb the basement stairs to answer the phone). Dated just before the turn of 1999, in it he writes, "Prediction: in 2009 digital phot is the norm and silver-halide phot lives on as art and as commercial quaint (like handcoloring now)." He lived to see that one come true. 

(Does anyone have a picture of David we could post? I don't think I do.)

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.

Please help support TOP through Patreon

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Featured Comments from:

psu: "This is a great story. Here is...maybe?...a different angle: I think the real impetus for the shift from film to digital capture was not on the capture side, it was on the consumption side. It turns out that if most people are suddenly using computers and a computer network to look at pictures, most people will want the pictures to be captured in a format and on a device that makes that as easy as possible. So I think the Internet accelerated the general switch to digital cameras by some amount. Because really, no one likes scanning film. It also turned out that most people ended up not missing whatever the theoretical loss in image quality was when going from 35mm film to 'low resolution' digital. I think in practice 6 MP turned out to be on par with most uses of 35mm film even though you might estimate it to be a lot worse. But, that whole discussion is fairly academic now."

David Dyer-Bennet (partial comment): "[Something] David Vestal overlooked, probably because the information wasn't widely known when he projected his catch-up year for digital imaging, was that it takes fewer directly captured pixels to make an image that looks good than it does scanned-from-film pixels. The direct-digital pixels are much cleaner than the second-generation scanned pixels."

Ted Davis: "I saved all of David's articles in your magazine in a thick binder. Brilliant and straightforward, I love re-reading them and I keep it by my bedside. I learned the finer points of printing/subject matter/timing/attitude from him which has followed through to my digital work today."

Dave Levingston: "Re 'Photographers have always resisted change...' I started out with a Nikon F (no meter) and a Luna Pro. People said, 'No professional photographer would use a 35mm "miniature" camera.' Then I got a Nikkormat Ftn. People said, 'No professional photographer would ever use a built-in meter.' Then I got a Nikon FE and people said, 'No professional photographer would use automatic exposure.' And on and on, so forth and so forth. Today I advise everybody that 'P' is for 'Professional.'

"When I went digital in the late 1990s I had a 3-megapixel camera. I was shooting beauty stuff for some national magazines. I wanted to shoot a job with the digital camera. They reluctantly agreed, but insisted I also shoot film. They were chea...ah, concerned about expenses. I sent them the results and they suddenly discovered that with the digital files they didn't have to pay to have separations made. That saved them more than my fee. They never let me shoot film again. They ran one of those 3-MP digital photos double truck, across two pages in the magazine. It looked just fine, no observable difference from the film photos in the same magazine."

Taos Water Girls

Edward S. Curtis, Taos Water Girls, 1905

Whenever I get an email about some auction or other, I usually find something being advertised that charms me.

I know Edward S. Curtis's work and I seldom see one of his that I've never seen before. Correction, a good one of his, because every photographer has second- and third-rate pictures that haven't been widely published or seen.

Edward Sheriff Curtis, of course, was the protean but problematic documentarian of Native Americans at the end of the frontier period. Few photographers ever worked harder, but his pictorialist style and ethnographic assumptions don't fit well with modern ideas or tastes. My favorite book of his is Native Nations, the Calloway title with stunningly great reproductions. To my surprise, this book is still easily available for very reasonable prices—it's a beautifully produced book and I highly recommend it, to photographers, fans of fine printing, photobook lovers, Curtis fans, people interested in the Wild West or American Indians, or any combination of the above. There's a copy on Amazon for $24.91, and that's a steal for a book of this quality—new, it cost $60, and that was in 1993 dollars ($107 today).

...And there it is: "Taos Water Girls" is on page 65. Thought so. But it's one of the pictures the book's reproduction—dark and rich—doesn't suit. (There are so many that it does suit.) I was more charmed by this higher-keyed JPEG at the auction site. The writeup says that only about one in 500 of Curtis's prints are platinum prints. I'd love to see this someday as he printed it. Visualizing this JPEG in my mind as a platinum print makes me suspect it might be something special.

Unconscious style permeates eras
Curious, isn't it, how the style of 1905 comes through so strongly? "Taos Water Girls" puts me in mind of things like Gertrude Käsebier or something by one of the Brandywine School illustrators, maybe Howard Pyle's "Two Lovers in the Garden" (I couldn't find a date for the illustration—although you can buy it framed from Wal-Mart! What a fate—but Pyle died in 1911).

Gertrude Käsebier, Blessed Art Thou Among Women (1899)

Howard Pyle, Two Lovers in a Garden

Here's the writeup for "Taos Water Girls" at the auction site:

About This Lot
Taos is the northernmost of all the Native American Pueblos. It is located in present day New Mexico and was first visited by outsiders in 1540. The Pueblo had already been occupied for centuries at that time. The young women in the photograph are carrying water back to their pueblo in beautiful traditional jars. The trees on either side of them are cottonwoods, which are often found near mountain streams in the southwest. The sky is contrasted with the deep, rich foreground makes this image unusually compelling and three-dimensional. It is estimated that as few as 1 in 500 Curtis prints are platinum, making this vintage platinum print all the more desirable and rare. This print was created by hand in Curtis’ [sic] Seattle studio.

Bids start at $5,000 for the print.

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.

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Featured Comments from:

Geoff Wittig: "When Curtis was active, platinum printing was popular among fine art photographers and pre-coated platinum papers were commercially available. But his images were mostly experienced as photogravure reproductions, both in his magnum opus The North American Indian and as separate prints. Photogravures are pretty sympathetic to the tonality and 'feel' of platinum prints. I got to see the large collection of Curtis prints on display at the Crazy Horse monument in South Dakota some years back. They're amazing. It was worth the trip just to see them. Which made me pull out my copy of the late Richard Benson's wonderful The Printed Image (2008), a compendium of all then available methods of photo reproduction. Benson's explanation of how a photogravure works is a model of clarity. And unfortunately the book is now a collectible going for >$250."

Mike replies: Hopefully everyone who was reading TOP in 2008 bought Richard Benson's book, as it was our "Book of the Year" that year. And Native Nations was printed under Richard Benson's direction (and that of Nicholas Calloway) using a near-continuous-tone process Richard developed especially for printing these images.

LanceSaintPaul: "I did buy the Benson book back then as a direct result of your featuring it. Thanks again."

Kenneth Tanaka: "That's an interesting auction of Curtis’s work. I don’t recall seeing one of his platinum prints. The Art Institute of Chicago here has a small collection of Curtis’s prints, all photogravures, acquired from a collector in 1975. Given that the provenance of the Artnet pieces was specified as coming from a private collection in Minnesota I suspect (but don’t know) they’re from one of the most prominent collectors of Curtis works in America, Christopher Cardozo. I wish him luck with this sale. Like so many things these days, Curtis’s work has become culturally radioactive among top collectors and especially among major institutions. I admire the relentless dedication and sheer sweat that this work represents. But it was always a bit sentimental and schmaltzy for my taste. But for an excellent read try Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan. It’s available on Amazon in book or Kindle form.

Mike replies: Christopher Cardozo also had a hand in the making of the Native Nations book. The publisher was Bulfinch, by the way.

David Myers: "You might be interested in the 'Curtis' prints made by Jon Cone and his team using photogravure. Reasonable prices, I believe, around $800."