The Online Photographer

Deaths in the 'Family'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———

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

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

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

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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The Most Interesting Photographers Pt. 2

I want to thank everybody who came up with nominations for “most interesting photographer.” There was little concordance, though—and most of the names that were mentioned, I could relate to as being genuinely interesting in some way.

I'm not going to say I could ever do this, because I know I have a history of too much ambitiousness and too little follow through. But I’ve always thought it would be a great idea to write a book along the lines of “Lives of the great photographers.”

Compilations of short biographies have a long an honorable history. Suetonius with his The Twelve Caesars and Plutarch with what I have always known as The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, and what I learned just this morning is really called Parallel Lives. (The book pairs short bios of a Roman personage and an earlier Greek counterpart, heightening their similarities. Rome was once the new kid on the block, hoping to associate itself with the older civilization.) There’s Vasari and his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects in the 1500s, and John Aubrey’s Brief Lives in the closing decades of the 1700s, which wasn’t really a book per se but rather a chaotic collection of notes and half finished pieces that had to be whipped into shape by later editors. In more modern times, I once read a collection of short bios of great composers, and Penguin commissioned a series of short biographies from a variety of writers that were published as separate little books. I owned and read many of them, and found the quality was highly variable. My favorite was the bio of Lincoln by Thomas Keneally, the Australian writer who wrote Schindler’s List.

I think the problem writing about photographers would be knowing where to stop. For days now I’ve been thinking of names, or thinking about names you suggested, and invariably I end up at “how could that one be left out?”

I guess photographers just lead interesting lives, that’s all.

Mike

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

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A Short Tour With Martin Evening

Martin Evening, the important early Photoshop expert whose books a lot of us learned from, sadly died at a young(ish) age in 2022. He wrote many technical books as well as numerous articles in magazines and online. There's one problem with being an expert of any fast-changing subject—it's rather difficult to leave a lasting legacy. He was important, though—and well liked, as you can read in his friend Scott Kelby's remembrance of him.

I found a video made at the Art of Photography Conference 2021 that goes into depth about "The Hits and Misses of a Creative Career." In it, Martin talks about his own work and life. Here are just a few of the insights that go by in the first 20 minutes of the 45-minute video:

—You can learn from models who have modeled for more famous photographers.

—Once you establish a coherent visual style with which you can be identified, people will more readily hire you to do do different kinds of jobs as well as similar ones.

—"Is it for the bank or the book?" That is, know why you're doing a job—to make money or to get a picture that will be useful for your portfolio. Both are worth doing.

—Doing portraits of celebrities, where you have only a few minutes with them, are very different from fashion shoots, where you have hours to prepare and shoot.

—A portrait of a jazz musician (Peter Brötzmann) was "photographed in my flat [apartment] by the way; there was no budget for a studio." We all make do!

—It's good for any photographer to have some sort of dedicated interest in a subject area (food, cars, hair, music etc.)—that way you gain experience in that world  and clients are more likely to hire you for your knowledge of what they do—and what others in their field do as well.

—If you experiment and find a new or different technique, you're going to need more than one example if you want to sell the idea to new clients.

That only takes us to about the twenty minute mark. Of course there's more, but you can watch the video for yourself.

Martin recognized that he was doing some things in-camera just at the time Photoshop was being invented that Photoshop would be very good at, almost as if he was pre-figuring the technology before it emerged. Of course he did go one to become a worldwide expert on Photoshop and Lightroom, whose many instructional books became central to the way photographers would use the tool. This is the one I most remember, although it's no doubt at least somewhat out of date now, at least in its particulars. (Lightroom had just come out and I was getting up to speed with it. I've never actually used it, though.)

The video is thought-provoking but also down-to-earth and practical. A nice way to spend some time talking shop with an influential teacher.

Mike

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

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Matt O'Brien: "I have such a high regard for Martin Evening…discovered him as I tried to come to terms with Lightroom and Photoshop. Such a strong and positive influence to so many."

The Erasing of Arthur Rimbaud

Étienne Carjat—I don't know the French pronunciation—started out drawing caricatures, a big fad in France in the late 1800s. It was a sustaining source of income for many freewheeling bohemians; its practitioners included Honoré Daumier and the illustrator Gustave Doré. Once he settled on it, the artistically gifted young Carjat showed he was good at the hustle. Carjat learned photography from Pierre Petit, the photographer who turned the caricatures into cartes de visite for sale to the public. (There is a rather scary self-portrait of Petit here.) Carjat became a magazine publisher, also to capitalize on his caricatures, and published some of the famous French symbolist poets such as Charles Baudelaire, author of Les Fleurs du mal (the Flowers of Evil). Carjat was well connected in artistic circles. He was friends with the painter Gustave Courbet, and he must have been an energetic "people-person," as his portraiture included prominent artists such as Victor Hugo and the Italian opera composer Rossini. It appears Carjat's primary interest became his photographic portraiture, for which he was widely celebrated and earned many awards, but he continued his activities in publishing and drawing. Maybe the money was better.

(Carjat by Carjat—sorry, I don't know if I can reproduce this here.)

And he was a superb portraitist. He worked in the collodion process before it was mainstream, reproducing his pictures at least partially in Woodburytype, the most beautiful, but also the most elusive, of photographic processes. I'm pretty sure that the wall placard of the only Woodburytypes I ever saw in person, at the Smithsonian, stated that no one alive now knows exactly how to make them. I've seen that disputed since, but the few modern attempts I have seen didn't approach the beauty of 19th-century examples. Unlike many alternative processes (and oddly considering that Woodburytypes create a shallow bas-relief on the sheet), the beauty of the originals comes across pretty well in JPEGs, as you can see here. If you ever get the chance to see any original Woodburytypes, do not miss out.

More so than the process, Carjat's direct and honest style was what distinguished him. He worked without assistants, which was unusual at the time, and abstained from the decorative props that most photographers of the time used. His famous portrait of Baudelaire is characteristically piercing, plain, and full of personality.

Charles Baudelaire by Étienne Carjat

History sanitizes and neatens its now forever stilled participants, but when they were alive the symbolist poets and their milieu were a chaotic, unruly bunch. The legendary symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, in particular, has one of the oddest stories of all major writers, which is saying something. The son of a largely absent soldier father and a rigidly strict and controlling mother (Rimbaud called her bouche d'ombre, or "mouth of darkness"), he was an extreme embodiment of the angst-ridden teenager. He published his first poem at 15, and also appeared to have matured as a poet by that age: in that same year of his life he wrote "Ophélie," often anthologized and still considered one of his best. As a teenager he had a notorious two-year homosexual affair with the older poet Paul Verlaine, whose 17-year-old wife was pregnant when they met. Bob Dylan fans will recognize both names from the song "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" from Blood on the Tracks:

Situations have ended sad
Relationships have all been bad
Mine have been like Verlaine's and Rimbaud's
But there's no way I can compare
All them scenes to this affair
You're gonna make me lonesome when you go

A brilliant student, Rimbaud quit school, was at one point thrown into prison for vagrancy, and at some point decided that as part of his identity as a poet he needed to purposefully effect what he called a "long, immense and rational derangement of all the senses," by which he meant a headlong descent into dissipation—rife with what would now be called "un-self-regarding behavior," vulgarity, thievery, indulgence in the favored drugs of the French bohemians such as absinthe, hashish, and opium, and flagrantly poor personal hygiene.

Then, abruptly, at the age of twenty, after finishing Illuminations, his last work, he quit writing literature, completely and forever. He spent the remaining 17 years of his short life, before dying in 1891 of bone cancer, traveling and doing his best to live a sober and steady, though still interesting, life. As an adult he lived mainly in the Middle East, and for his last 20 years slept outdoors. From those years, we have the letters. He has had an outsized influence on all sorts of artists ever since, not only Dylan, but people as diverse as River Phoenix, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Edmund Wilson, and Jack Kerouac among many others. His work, often taking the form of prose-poems, lends itself to translation and is satisfying to read in English.

He's even been cited as an influence on teenage high fashion. There is a famous poem, "Le Dormeur du Val," which lyrically describes a sleeping young soldier, revealing only at the end two bright bloody holes in his torso; he is already dead. In homage, the 21st century fashion designer Hedi Slimane created dress shirts with red wounds embroidered on them, with red sequins for blood.

Sword in a cane
There is a portrait of Rimbaud by Étienne Carjat, but there might have been more. It's one of the most famous of Carjat's works, but, as you can see, maybe not the best. For one thing, Rimbaud's school chum and lifelong best friend, Ernest Delahaye, said Rimbaud's eyes were "pale blue irradiated with dark blue—the loveliest eyes I've seen." Meaning the picture might've been better in color! Anyway, the story goes that Rimbaud and Carjat were both members of a group of artists, poets and painters called "Vilains Bonshommes" (basically, "bad company"), and, at a dinner of the group, one of the members, Albert Mérat, a poet, had brought a sword hidden in a cane. There was some sort of drunken altercation, and Rimbaud took Mérat's cane-sword and attacked Carjat with it. In a sort of symbolic retaliation, Carjat, who had actually been injured, went home and destroyed all the photographs he had taken of Rimbaud, and scraped the glass plates clean of the negative images (early glass-plate photographers often did this to re-use the glass). As a result, the portrait is known only through eight surviving prints.

Arthur Rimbaud at 17 by Étienne Carjat

Not that it would have survived anyway. Like photographers as disparate as Carleton Watkins and Jacques Lowe, Étienne Carjat's work is now known only through the surviving examples that were disseminated during his lifetime, in Carjat's case as cartes de visite and as prints. The great portraitist died in 1906, at the age of 77, in Paris. Years after that, in 1923, his archive of photographic works was sold to a "Mr. Roth," and that was the last of it—none of it was ever seen again.

Mike

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

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Howard Bond 1931-2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I hope that adds a bit more."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'No Animals' Adams

Speaking of Ansel Adams, as we were the other day...isn't it interesting that he was so interested in nature and wilderness, from intimate views of flowers on the forest floor to magisterial vistas encompassing miles of scenery, while at the same time having no detectable interest in wildlife? He wasn't a people photographer, but there are more people in his photographs than there are Western fauna.

Curious.

By contrast, his color counterpart in American nature photography, Eliot Porter, was better known as a bird photographer than as a landscapist and naturalist in the early stages of his career.

I'm just going from memory here, but after half a day of thinking about it I still can't conjure up in my mind's eye an Ansel Adams picture with any sort of wild animal featured. The only one I can think of that contains an animal at all is that cloud-darkened hillside (which I believe was also the one from which he removed the year of a graduating class spelled out in white stones on the hillside)—and that was a grazing horse.

Here's the picture, just found it. (I seem to remember a different but similar one as well.)

We could test this by scouring Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs, the closest thing in print to a catalogue raisonné of his work, to see if we can find any pictures of wild animals. But someone else would have to do it. Despite the fact that that's the all-time bestselling book through TOP's links—we sold more than 1,100 copies of that book—I didn't buy one myself, so I don't have it. (I have plenty of Adams titles, though, don't worry.)

Mike

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

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Jeff: "Chicken Farm, Manzanar."

Mike replies: Thanks. As I'm sure you know, though, that's not an exception. The Manzanar Relocation Center work was documentary work done for purposes of social justice. It wasn't artwork. And anyway the point was that there are seldom wild animals in his landscapes, not that he didn't sometimes take snapshots of chickens or cows or what have you. The telling thing about the Manzanar work is that while he was there he took the opportunity to turn his lens away from the encampment and take one of his "real" photographs, the heroic landscape of Mt. Williamson in a clearing storm (the one with the field of boulders filling the foreground).

I hope you don't think I'm being argumentative; I'm just making a point. I shot two weddings in my life, one for my best friend and the other for my mother and her second husband. That doesn't make me a wedding photographer. We always need to distinguish an artist's real work from the incidental work all of us do of one thing and another, or that are done for other purposes or for pay.

Jeff replies to Mike: "Of course, I’m well aware, and anticipated your viewpoint. See also other links, especially deer pics in winter. Obviously Adams wasn’t a wildlife photographer; we know that. There are still some pics including animals; my only point. Hope I’m also not appearing argumentative. Just keeping in the spirit of your 'no animals' theme."

Patrick Perez: "I wonder if the lack of animal subjects is at least partly due to the fact that his working process was methodical, and animals move around, changing his composition."

Mike replies: That's likely. I'm just speculating, but he might have thought of wildlife photography as a different sub-speciality, one that was better left to others more dedicated to it. I say this on no authority at all; it's purely a guess.

So does anyone have 400 Photographs?

Christoph Geiss: "Some count sheep when they can't sleep, I counted pictures: I found four images with animals in his 400 Photographs:

'Sunrise, Laguna Pueblo, NM,' 1937 – dog

'Moth and Stump, Interglacial Forest, Glacier Bay NP, AK,' 1948 – moth

'Winter sunrise, Sierra Nevada, From Lone Pine, CA,' 1944 – the already mentioned horse

'Pasture, Sonoma County, N. CA,' 1951 – a few sheep

"... and 21 images of people. Of course, there are millions of fish in his images—they just happened to be underwater  :-)  ."

David Raboin: "Was there a method for photographing wildlife in the 1930s–'50s where Ansel could've matched the aesthetics and print quality of his landscapes? There aren't many successful wildlife photographers who used a large format view camera and 50 ISO film. Also, wildlife photography is a very different game than landscape photography. Landscape is all about having having good light at a specific location. Landscape photography is planning and waiting. Wildlife photography is more like a hunt; it relies on persistence and luck. I think Adams would've loved it if a majestic elk had walked into one of his scenes and stood very still in a place that complimented the composition, but he was never that lucky. He got that horse photo because horses are easy. Horses are everywhere and they don't run off at the first sight of humans."

Mike replies: A few people might remember when I told the story of the strangest magazine article I ever wrote. I was assigned to write the "con" side of a pro/con pair of articles about large format. The writer who was supposed to write the "pro" side, Ronald Wisner, never submitted his article—so the Editor, without even telling me first, ran my "con" piece alone!! Which alarmed me, because, quite naturally, it was very one-sided.

Anyway, one of the illustrations in that article was a picture called "Horses standing in a field," and it showed a picture of a field with no horses in it. The caption made the point that in the 90 seconds it took to deploy the tripod and ready the view camera, the horses had wandered off. It was just a jokey way of making the point that view cameras aren't exactly quick and reactive.

Kirk Tuck: "Counterpoint to the folks who've suggested that Ansel's use of the large view camera precluded animal photos: He often used a Hasselblad for some of his work. Not for the majestic landscapes but for lot of other uses. And in later years perhaps the bulk of his commercial work."

Mike replies: He claimed he used the Hasselblad since the 1600F first came out in 1948, but it seems likely he didn't use a Hasselblad as his main camera for all kinds of work until the 500C came out in 1957; the shutters on the earlier models were fragile and unreliable. In Ansel Adams, an Autobiography, written with Mary Street Alinder and published by Little, Brown in 1985, the year after his death, page 375, it says he used the Hasselblad for the last 20 years of his life, which is what I've always gone by. By 1964, 20 years before his death, he was already suffering from gout and arthritis and was only a year away from moving into the Carmel house where he mainly printed archive negatives in the custom darkroom there for the rest of his life. He was famous by that time and was able to "print money" by printing his photographs. His favorite photograph taken with the Hasselblad, "Moon and Half Dome," was made in 1960.

At this article (you have to scroll down a bit) there a picture of him with his Hassie teaching Susan Ford, daughter of President and Mrs. Gerald Ford, at a workshop.

Craig Yuill: "I have owned 35mm, medium format, and large format film cameras as well as crop sensor digital cameras. I have taken many photos of birds and animals over the years. The percent of those taken with the medium and large format film cameras equals 0. The percent taken with 35mm film and crop sensor digital cameras equals 100. Ansel Adams wasn’t really equipped for wildlife and bird photography."

Dennis Mook: "If my memory serves me well, the late radio and television personality, Don Imus, an avid photographer himself, bought Adams’ Hasselblad camera and lenses at an auction for a hefty sum—about $100,000, I believe. They may still be owned by the Imus family."

A Most Honorable Photographer

Photo by Jeff Morgan/06 Alamy

Peter Magubane, 1932–2024

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

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

Elliott Has Left the Building

Elliott Erwitt 1928–2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works at the Peter Fetterman Gallery

Works and a written appreciation at Magnum Photos

Works at elliotterwitt.com

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

Erwitt is a well that never runs dry.

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

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

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

Featured Comments from:

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

"Another master gone."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instant Relatives and the Heritage Box

Seen in a local antiques / old stuff store:

I know this is intended to be dear and funny, and you're supposed to smile, but I can't help but feel sadness in it; these are the shadows of actual people, who lived lives on Earth, and many of those souls have gone out of living memory. Of course, being remembered by posterity isn't a necessary condition for living, or having lived, a good, rich life, and many of the people in these pictures might have done so. But...still.

Making small, durable prints and mounting them on cards or in little folders was a great system for those strange imprints of the past we call photographs, but that system had one fatal flaw: it depended on individuals to notate the pictures with identifications, significances, dates, locations, and stories. For years I would counsel any kind of photographer to take a pencil and write on the back of prints the five W's:

• Who
• What
• When
• Where
• Why

...But of course few ever took such advice, and now there's nothing to write on. We don't even make prints for the most part. My beautiful grandson will be eight months old tomorrow, and I have dozens of lovely pictures of him (his mother is artistic, and a sensitive photographer), and they have a digital picture frame in their apartment where he is on ongoing display. He doesn't want for a photographic record of his first months. But I wonder if there has been even one paper print made of his image yet? It's possible not.

I looked at a few, and none of the pictures in that box that I saw had any writing on them. All those poor lost people were separated from their very names, much less any comment on their significance, their relationships, or any other specifics of their personhood. They go unrecognized now, forever.

The master box
In my wiser years, I've come around to a realization of the obvious, which is that photographs are only randomly durable, and mostly prove perishable. Transient. Consumables. Winking into existence in split-seconds, then later winking out again. I'm a guy who cares much more than the average bloke about pictures, and about the preservation of family pictures, but, when my father died, at the end of 2020, he arranged things such that all of his "archives," meaning, the entire record of my and my brothers' youth, and our family's activities (which he carefully documented, in beautiful little books of 5x7s), as well as all of his own historical family pictures he possessed going back well over a century, and—especially ironically—all of my own best photographs I had taken up until my middle teen years—including my first published photo, and the magazine it was published in—all of that—were lost for good. So if I can't see to it that such an extensive photographic record isn't lost, why would I expect that others would? Or could?

My updated advice (I harp on this): make a "heritage box." In one good-quality (waterproof! Crush-proof!) box, or perhaps two, put all the very best prints of your family pictures and your own prints, arranged, organized, and notated, and label the box "[Name's] Best Photos," or "[Name] Family Photos." Be very selective. These are the ones to store near the door and save in a house fire. If you haven't had time to organize and edit your archives, your children and grandchildren certainly won't. Make it easy on them. They might try to preserve everything, but it isn't likely. The more disorganized your archives, the more likely your heirs will just have to throw everything out, and your precious pictures will perish when you do. You might not mind if this happens, but maybe they will; or maybe their children will; and we should think of them. (Just my opinion.)

On the other hand, no one takes my advice—including, so far, me. So don't feel bad if you don't.

Is this post too much of a bummer? I think it is. I had intended it only to be dear and funny. Let's move on!

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

Speed (partial comment): "Our son has been working since before COVID on digitizing, annotating, organizing and sharing almost 100 years of family photographs and videos. We were and are a family of cameras and occasionally video cameras. It's not unusual for family members to spend an hour or two together on Skype reviewing photos and documents (thank you, Ancestry), bringing back memories and telling stories. One day we visited (by appointment) the archives of a university attended by three generations of us, to view and copy student lists and documentary photographs. It's been a lot of work. Happy work. And, once done, thanks to almost unlimited and nearly free storage and sharing, work that will endure and hopefully won't need to be repeated."

Andreas: "Is it a bummer? No, it isn't. Keep reminding us to sift, sort, tag, edit and back up (!!) our collections. Doing so might be a drag, but later it is a breeze to find just this one picture. And having an album with family pictures is always worth the effort: our kids and grandchildren will love it."

ritchie thomson: "A few years ago I was visiting my parents, and we were drinking tea at the kitchen table, when my Mum said 'your father has thrown away all of his old slides.' I didn't speak for a moment, as I found this hard to take in. Thinking I must have misheard, I asked, 'What, all the photographs he took from the early 1950s to the 1990s?' 'Yes.' I couldn't say anything for a while. I thought about some of the lost photos, all the family history Dad had recorded with Kodachrome and his Pentax Spotmatic F. I had to calm myself down a bit before saying anything. I was taken aback but I didn't want to show just how much, in case it upset Dad, who was in his late eighties. Eventually I said calmly, 'Why did you do that Dad?' He said, 'I haven't got a projector anymore.'"

Stan B.: "If anything, it serves as a realistic reminder. We often photograph for posterity; sadly, it's a short lived one...I often think about the nearly impossible odds that were somehow, almost magically averted to salvage the work of Vivian Maier."

Elsa Louise: "Your father sounds like he was a spiteful man. Why else would he have made certain to destroy what, to many, would be a family heirloom?"

Mike replies: Unfortunately, he was just the type to do it out of spite, or perhaps "lack of regard" would be a better term, but I have consciously decided not to blame him for it, but to believe, instead, that it was a succession of circumstances rather than a conscious decision on his part. The run-up to his death lasted about eight months, and started when he had some sort of medical event and went to the hospital. He never went back to his little apartment as far as I know. He ended up in a rehab center where the staff were under strict instructions not to reveal anything about him to anyone. My brother (a doctor) kept calling the rehab center asking for news for more than a year after our father's death, and they never told us that he had died, or that he was no longer in residence there, or indeed anything at all. In addition, his death certificate listed "dementia" as the cause of death, so I can forgive him on that level as well. On the other hand, in the mid-2010s he tried to ransom the family photos—he approached my mother and demanded $3,000 for them. As we all had learned to do, she chose not to engage. I should have just paid him what he asked at that time. I could have afforded it then. Life is inevitably full of regrets.

Lisa S. Gorrell: "I think it's sad, too. I have friends who purchase these photos if there is identification on them and then try to locate descendants in order to return the photos. There are places like DeadFred.com, where photos could be uploaded and perhaps identified. Often there were more than one copy of the photo sent to family members and someone else might have the same photo identified."

Kenneth Tanaka (partial comment): "Note that there actually is a very lively niche market for anonymous photos! For example, I have an acquaintance who has devoted decades to collecting these photos. His collection is so richly built that he has donated subsets of it to museums (for examples, MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago) and lent them to artists who have used them to curate and create some terrific artistic publications. Yes, the subjects are still unknown…but, hey, so are the subjects of so many of the world’s most beloved paintings! In the end, I am more saddened by the loss of materiality in popular photography. I second your admonition, and encourage everyone to, at the very least, get their family and friends photos printed."

The Sudek Negatives

Guest post by V.I. Voltz

Found things often have good stories. In 1997 I was working in a darkroom in Prague. I was really working: when doing enlargements, I had three minutes per standard print and six minutes for "custom" prints with dodging and burning across a seven-and-a-half-hour work day. When developing, it was not uncommon to have to develop three Nikor ten-roll tanks at a time, all day. In busy periods I would load the rolls of film back-to-back.



Cleaning a dusty forgotten corner (all old darkrooms had these) one day, I found some old negatives, a mixture of 13x18cm and other big sheet film sizes and quite a few glass plates, all in sleeves. They looked beautiful. Out of hours, I got them out for a look. I recognised them instantly: Sudek.



I made two sets of contact prints, the very best I could, on Foma fibre base paper, with my best dodging and burning, printed the highlights a little dark and bleached them back for contrast, hot developer where they needed it, every trick I knew. I dried them slowly, taped to glass with gum packing tape, so they dried totally flat. They were really magnificent, even if I do say so myself.



I then gave the negatives to Sudek's archive. They weren't sure if they were the originals or copy negatives, but they had them. Pleased with myself, I gave one set of the prints I made to my cleaning lady, a native of Prague born during the World War II occupation who should have been able to retire but had been left close to destitute by the Velvet Revolution. I had the prints valued, and explained to my cleaning lady what the prints were worth and how and where she could sell them.



Plaque in Prague in memory of Josef Sudek

A few weeks later, with my departure from Prague imminent, my travel wallet went missing in my flat, with a lot of US dollars in cash in it. No sign of a break in. Worse, my passport and paper plane tickets were missing. I had no idea where they had gone. Just before I was about to go to the embassy to get a new passport, the Czech police (fairly scary) arrived at my work with my tickets and passport, but no cash.



In 2012 I got an email from the daughter of my cleaning lady, telling me my cleaning lady had died and asking if I wanted my photos back. I was busy with work and a young family, and I was not thinking, so I said yes. Some weeks later the second set of prints from the Sudek negatives appeared, beautifully packed, in my post box. In a letter, her daughter said her mother could never bring herself to sell them, but looked at them often. Her mother had also mentioned me occasionally and said what a "big favour" I had done her.



I am still not sure if my cleaning lady stole my cash, but I suspect so. I like the circularity of the story, and that I now have a set of those prints for looking at, and one to keep pristine on the shelf. And the negatives ended up where they should be.

V.I. Voltz

[Ed. note: Josef Sudek, 1896–1976, Czech photographer known as the "Poet of Prague," lost an arm in the First World War, and his army disability payments allowed him to pursue art. His pictures are atmospheric, romantic, frequently lyrical and lovely. Often taken in low light or shrouded with rain and mist, many of them have an undercurrent of mystery and a hint of melancholy. They almost never include people. He was widely celebrated, the subject of major exhibitions at home and abroad. He was personally something of a hoarder, and managed to amass a large classical record collection despite living under communism. He published 16 books in his lifetime. The first in English was Sudek by Sonja Bullaty (1978, reissued 1986). She was an early assistant of Sudek's and later became a lifelong friend; she went on to become an accomplished photographer in her own right. He often wrote letters to her on the backs of photographs.]

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:

Mike Plews: "I have the Bullaty Sudek book. It has been a joy to me for decades. If you love photography you need to own a copy. Enchanting."

Kenneth Tanaka: "What an excellent story! I love these personal connection stories with renowned photographers of old. In addition to Sudek's moody, atmospheric imagery, he's equally known for his commercial illustration work. Wonderful examples of the modernism that was sweeping Europe in the late '20s and into the '30s. The collection at the Art Institute of Chicago has some excellent examples of Sudek's range of notable work. Thank you for sharing that terrific story!"

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

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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."

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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)

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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.

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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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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

This book link 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.

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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.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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

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