The Online Photographer

The Basketball G.O.A.T.

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

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

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

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

Courtesy U.S. Department of State

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

P.S. Team Kareem.

Book o' the Week

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

This is a link to Amazon from TOP. The following logo is also a link:

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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'Burning Monk' by Malcolm Browne

Malcolm Browne, Burning Monk

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

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

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

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

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

Malcolm Browne in 1964. Photographer unknown.

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

Mike

Product of Interest this week:

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

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks, MR

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

Madonna and Helmut (Jeff Markus)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks much for the tales, Jeff.

Mike

Book o' the Week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Photographer's Home

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

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

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

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

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

Photographer Peter Lindbergh in 2015

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

Here's the listing from Sotheby's Realty.

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

Book of interest this week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Electric Trains and the Electric Flash Lamp

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

Turns out there was a photographic connection, way back.

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

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

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

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

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

Pirie MacDonald, Jacob Riis, 1906

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

Mike

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

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Carleton Watkins Treasure

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

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

Mike

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

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

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Featured Comments from:

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

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

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

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

Predictions from the Past

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

it's gaining on us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

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Featured Comments from:

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

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

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

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

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

Taos Water Girls

Edward S. Curtis, Taos Water Girls, 1905

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

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

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

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

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

Gertrude Käsebier, Blessed Art Thou Among Women (1899)

Howard Pyle, Two Lovers in a Garden

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

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

Bids start at $5,000 for the print.

Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reminder!

If you have some time this weekend, you might want to treat yourself to Bill Jay's famous essay "The Thing Itself." We mentioned it the other day.

The phrase was Edward Weston's. Edward, behind the formidable veil of his artistry and mastery, was essentially a still-life photographer. Few kinds of photographers care more about things themselves.

Bill was an iconoclast, always a little outside the art-world mainstream despite his numerous publications and academic positions. He thought for himself, followed his path, went his own way. He was also a photographer. His primary subject was other photographers. He made a great many fine portraits. I've seen very few less than good.

I think it's probably unlikely that you'll agree with everything he claims and says in this essay. But I also think it's likely that you'll find it thoughtful and thought-provoking—and a constructive, rewarding way to pass time on a lazy Summer weekend.

And if you don't want to read it now, put it on your virtual bedstand for some future day.

Mike

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Ricardo Hernandez: "Thank you so much for linking this Mike. I was not aware of it and it sure is making me think about my photographic journey, what I want to do, and though a big part of me already knew it - how petty are all these tribal sports like fights in forums about camera brands. I really like in particular the example he gave of the violinist on the TV interview, the very pragmatic "if you have filtered subjects of interest and you remain with equal subjects, pick the one people are interested the most at that point (but only at that point)" (I am paraphrasing) - the pick a subject that you are passionate about because it's how you will carry on examining it over and over again. Great, great read. Thank you so much!"

Animesh Ray: "Written with unusual clarity...what a difference from Sontag's On Photography. While trying to read the latter I couldn't go beyond what it is not to get to what it is. Here Bill Jay gets to the heart in a few short strokes of his pen. He writes like the best of the journalists, which he was for a long time. I agree with him on the primacy of the subject in photography. The surprise was his opinion on a personal style, that one cannot make it consciously, that it is an unconscious by-product of passion and work (and, may I add, of talent)."

Here's Your Illustration!

Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, B655-23B

A. Aubrey Bodine working under his enlarger 

This was supposed to be the illustration for the enlarger article. 

This happens more often than you'd think. I don't write articles in advance, and I generally search for illustration images while I'm writing. This was fine in the freewheeling early years of blogs, when everything on the Web was, by convention, free for the taking. Now, because still images have been used for a longer time (early broadband couldn't support video streaming—you can thank the porn and gaming industries for your YouTube and Vimeo and your other video content, by the way) and are more easily searchable, there are more "chilling effect" restrictions in place for still images than for video and musical streaming content. Which seems unfair, but oh well.

Anyway, I now have to secure the rights for most images I present. Usually that just means getting permission. Most rights holders freely give permission, as the Maryland Historical Society has done for me here (and thanks to them for that!), but it doesn't suit my way of working very well—instead of finding an image to post and including it inline with the post, I sometimes have to wait days or weeks for permission. Effectively that means I either have to publish the post without the image I wanted for it, or I have to set the post aside and wait for the image and then publish the whole shebang after a delay. You'd think this would be easy, but often one post leads to another and there's a sort of flow to what goes up when—or I hope there is, anyway—and anyway I'm not very organized, so I personally don't work well that way. For this post, for instance, I had to correspond with the four photographers, and it took about a month before I heard from them all.

At any rate, here is the illustration that I wanted to use for that enlarger post. Published by kind permission of the owner of the JPEG image; the print, I'm sure, is in the public domain by now. A. Aubrey Bodine was a Baltimore (Maryland) photographer who was sort of an amalgam of commercial photographer, journalist, documentarian, tech geek and photohobbyist, and Pictorialist, all rather uneasily (by modern standards) wrapped up into one. He was later championed by Kathleen Ewing, a longtime Washington D.C. gallerist (and acquaintance, and sometime mentor) who was one of the founders of AIPAD. He was popular; here's Kathleen's book about him. He published many books, some of which were award-winners in their time. Many of his photographs are quite beautiful, in a lyrical, lovely, camera-clubby, conventional-composition sort of way. (No slur intended.) This picture is a self portrait, I believe. My guess is he's holding the shutter bulb in his right hand. And the image on the easel is faked—he was a great multi-negative printer, quite a master of darkroom techniques.

Apropos my point: at the "Kathleen Ewing" link above, note the "Buy Photo" hotlink below the illustration photo of her. And the link is dead! It would probably take a lot of work and possibly some expense for me to publish that picture of Kathleen here in this post.

"And so it goes." (Credit Linda Ellerbee and Kurt Vonnegut for the phrase.)

Mike
(Thanks to Dan Goodrich and the Maryland Historical Society)

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Speed Graphic: "Anyone who wears a bow tie and cufflinks is probably a pretty interesting fellow."

Michael Perini: "That’s a Saltzman 8x10 enlarger. Saltzman made the most robust studio camera and lighting gear ever. With the possible exception of the Deardorff 12' bi-post camera stand for their 11x14 commercial view camera (60" of bellows)."

Dig It: Robert Frank by Louis Faurer

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (Estate of Louis Faurer)

Louis Faurer, Robert Frank in Pin Striped Suit, 1947

Leslie Ureña, an associate curator of photographs at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. has written a slight but engaging article about Robert Frank as his fellow photographers saw him, featuring two portraits of Frank from the National Portrait Gallery's collection.

You know how some photographers just don't grab you? They're famous and all that, they get attention, inclusion in books, shows, etc., but you just don't get the work—they leave you cold? First of all there's nothing wrong with that—it's natural, just as you find some members of the sex that appeals to you to be attractive and others not, just as you "click" with some songs or pieces of music and others not. Just a matter of chemistry. 

Well, for some reason I have the opposite thing with Louis Faurer. It's not like his pictures blow me away, and I can't point to anything in particular I think they have to offer that's unique or unusual. I just like his stuff, is all. Chemistry, I guess. Granted, I like that "Midcentury modern" B&W style of photography to start with, but still, there's something about Louis Faurer that I just dig.

Mike
(Thanks to Mike Potter)

[Ed. note: TOP is off on Saturdays. Back on Sunday!]

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Fred Herzog 1930-2019

Fred Herzog. Photo by Ward Perrin.

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

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

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

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

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

Modern Color ($36.10)

And his out-of-print books are:

Fred Herzog: Photographs (Hatje-Cantz)

Fred Herzog: Photographs (Douglas & McIntyre)

and

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

He is represented by Equinox Gallery.

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

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

R.I.P.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Chance Encounter

Walker Evans, A Graveyard and Steel Mill in
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, November, 1935

Words and portrait by James Sherwood

Six years ago, my wife Shirley True and I were photographing in Eastern Pennsylvania. Upon deciding to check out Bethlehem, I suggested we look for the cemetery where Walker Evans made his iconic 1930s image [above]. Found it, but the large white cross was gone. After we surveyed the place for about an hour, we came upon this older couple sitting on a low stone wall up high on the hill.

As I approached them, perhaps fifteen feet away, I said, "are you Robert Frank?" He nodded and said, "yes" in a soft voice. His wife, artist June Leaf, was sitting beside him. They were on a road trip to North Carolina and decided to stop for a picnic lunch in this special place. We chatted briefly and snapped some pictures.

James Sherwood, Robert Frank and June Leaf, Bethlehem Cemetery

As lifelong photographers, neither Shirley nor I had ever experienced such a powerful, miraculous event. As our colleague Mark Power put it, "Searching for one great photographer and finding another." Needless to say, the relationship between Evans and Frank was significant in the course of history. They are certainly two of the most influential photographers in our lives.

Still gives me chills.

Jim

Old friend Jim Sherwood was once my boss at a photo studio, and his wife Shirley was one of my teachers at the Corcoran School of Art. Here's Jim's Facebook page. —Ed.

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Robert Frank 1924-2019

Robert Frank, photo by Barry Kornbluh

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

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

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

Mike

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Dream Team

If you were going to pick five photographers you think everyone interested in photography should be familiar with, who would they be?

I thought of this question the other night because the DJ on the jazz station on XM Radio asked his listeners who their Dream Team of jazz players might be. You could pick any players from any era and put them together. And I made myself laugh by immediately saying "Hank Jones, Ron Carter and Tony Williams."

You have to know jazz to know why that's funny.

My five would be Dorothea Lange, André Kertész, Josef Koudelka, Helen Levitt, and Elliott Erwitt. I guess that reflects my taste in photographs.

There's a book idea for me, though—I should pick "100 Photographers You Should Know" and write mini-essays about each of them.

One of the few photography jokes I've ever come up with—"I have no idea what Cindy Sherman looks like." I can't take too much credit. It just came out of my mouth.

So if you were going to pick five photographers you think everyone interested in photography should be familiar with, who would they be?

Mike

P.S. later in the day: Of course my list above leaves out Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dave Heath, Roy DeCarava, Jane Bown, and Lee Friedlander. (I think I'm just listing my heroes here....)

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hugh crawford: "My funny Cindy Sherman story is that she used to live upstairs from my friend Jamie Livingston’s loft on Fulton street. I used to run into her in the elevator from time to time and I always thought she looked really familiar but I couldn’t figure out why."

Paul Richardson: "Here goes: Kertész, Robert Frank, Ernst Haas, Saul Leiter, and—don’t laugh—Edward Hopper. I’m dead serious about Hopper. I’ve learned more about photography by looking at his evocative paintings than I have from studying the work of a hundred middling photographers. I truly think he was a photographer at heart."

Geoff Wittig: "I find it very difficult to recommend five photographers that 'everyone interested in photography should be familiar with.' The world of photography is just too broad and varied to boil it down like that. But I can name five photographers for particular subject areas. Christopher Burkett, Charles Cramer, Robert Glenn Ketchum, Elizabeth Carmel and Marc Adamus would be the five living artists I would cite providing a nice survey of what's possible in expressive color landscape photography. Black and white? David Plowden, Clyde Butcher, Don Kirby, Alan Ross and John Sexton."

Chester Williams: "Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Galen Rowell, and Sam Abell. Growing up on a tiny island, the only photography books available to me were outdated ones in our public library featuring the first three photographers. Sam Abell, who told stories in his images, which I studied in my Dad's National Geographic magazines. I was lucky to have met Galen Rowell much later on while living in California and became an immediate fan of his lifestyle and work."

Gil Maker: "Here are my five: Michael Kenna, Shoji Ueda, Masahisa Fukase, Jungjin Lee, and Wei Bi. As you can see I am really into the Asian photographers."

Steve: "August Sander, Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, William Eggleston. Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Bill Evans, Dave Holland, Elvin Jones."

Paul Parkinson: "My top five would be: Platon, Bailey/Duffy/Donovan (picking one of these is too hard), McCullin, Nick Knight, Mike King."

Stan B.: "OK, I'll bite—but I'll try and stray a tad from the oft repeated and anointed: Les Krims, Boris Mikhailov, John Davies, Seydou Keita, and Andrew Boroweic."

Marc Lankhorst: "This is so difficult...H.C.-B., Ansel Adams, the Bechers (they count as one, right?), James Nachtwey, and Martin Parr, because they all represent an entirely different approach to photography, an ethos even. But can I have another list of five? And another? And another?"

RKWallen: "My Dream team: Jacques-Henri Lartigue—seeing with a camera and having fun. Alfred Steiglitz—photography as art. Henri Cartier-Bresson—time flows but can be stopped. Ansel Adams—technical mastery as art. Fred Herzog—the sense of place."

Sharon: "Edward Weston is top on my list. He had a confidence in his work—an assurance that I admire. I have read his Daybooks many times. Gordon Parks. Margaret Bourke-White. Dorothea Lange. Minor White. I think I could name a lot more. 😃 "

John: "There are four that I think of immediately. Jeanloup Sieff—I like his 'vertical landscapes' and the way he used a 21mm lens. I've also seen a lot of his images online that were obviously scanned from prints. You can see the dodging and burning artifacts and that reminds me of how hard it was for me to find a (darkroom) printer I liked. Saul Leiter—because of the range of his work. Paolo Roversi—I love his long exposures that are not sharp at all. I think there's a lesson there that sharpness is overrated. Daido Moriyama—because I identify with the concept of being like a stray dog while doing street photography."

David Comdico: "It's impossible to only pick five so I'll start from the premise that most people know the famous heavy hitters. 1. Jason Eskenazi, Koudelka version 2.2. 2. Trish Murtha—her daughter is keeping her legacy alive. 3. Paul Graham, critical darling. Decide for yourself. 4. Mark Steinmetz, quietude that grows heavier the more you look. 5. Jeff Mermelstein. traditional street photographer who runs one of the most innovative Instagram accounts."

Ronnie A Nilsen: "Guy Tal, Bruce Barnbaum, Morten Krogvold, John Sexton, Joe Cornish."

David Lee: "I can’t believe only Carlos and me choose Ralph Gibson."

Mike replies: I can't believe no one has said Carleton Watkins.

Russell Young: "This was an essay question I used in exams in my photohistory course—I have thought about it for nearly 40 years now, so the answer comes easily. Carl Christian Heinrich Kühn, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Josef Sudek, Léon-Robert Demachy, Éduard Jean Steichen. Oh, to have been able to meet any of them...."

Peter Conway: "Quite a few mentions of Edward Weston, and certainly well deserved, but I didn’t see any for Brett Weston, his son. The breadth and depth of Brett’s vision from the age of 12 until his eighties is simply remarkable. Most people probably assume that the father was the one influencing his son, and that undoubtedly occurred. But a point was reached fairly early on where the son was at least as much of an influence on his father. Edward might make my top five—Brett absolutely."

David Boyce: "Hiroshi Sugimoto, just because. Laurence Aberhart (a New Zealand photographer who should be world famous). Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. Alhazen [Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham —Ed.], the Arab scientist who in the 11th Century developed the principles which underpin photography as we know it."

Mark W: "Rennie Ellis, David Moore, Roger Scott, Harold Cazneaux, Frank Hurley."

Mike replies: Go Aussies!

s.wolters: "Diane Arbus, Sally Mann, Dorothea Lange, Dana Lixenberg, Rinko Kawauchi."

Mike replies: Go females!

I'm Back

Xander disobeying a sign. Or was he? We were not kicked out.

The news about my eye yesterday was as good as it could be. The glamorous young surgeon, her assistant, and her "shadow" (a young doctor new to the practice who was observing) all smiled at me happily. "I cheated," was the first thing Dr. Hindman said to me, beaming, as I passed her at a desk on the way from the eye test to the exam room. "I peeked at your chart. You're doing really well." Evidently the period of doubt is over and all signs are positive.

I told Dr. Hindman that I had learned something about myself throughout this process—that I'm a pessimist. I had been prepared for the worst. In reply she said that one thing she's learned about herself from doing eye surgery is that she's not in control. "We put everything in place, and then it's up to God or nature or whatever controls these things to do the rest," she said. Mostly it works and sometimes it doesn't, and "...you need a little luck."

I've been lucky. "The graft adheres," meaning that the donor tissue, the Descemet's membrane and the vital single layer of squamous epithelial cells that compose the endothelial layer, has attached itself firmly to my cornea in the proper place. I will wear glasses for the rest of my life—the intra-ocular implant doesn't have the perfect prescription, because "sometimes the shape of the cornea changes in ways we can't foresee"—but she said my uncorrected vision will likely be 20/40, legal to drive with uncorrected. My eyesight is still not great at this moment, but, according to the good doctor, my right eye will get better and better from now on, as my left eye continues to get worse. I'll have to have the same operation on the left eye eventually. 

I'm still curious about how it will affect my photography, and I still have more pondering to do over the remarkable fact that I'm now using part of another person's body in mine.

Both of those things are subjects for later, though, not for now.

Fred
After my appointment Xander and I went to a house museum officially called Sonnenberg Gardens and Mansion State Historic Park, which is also in Canandaigua, the pleasant resort town where the Eye Care Center is located. Thursday was a beautiful, hot Summer day. Sonnenberg means "Sunny Hill" in German, and the estate is known more simply around here as Sonnenberg Gardens. It attracts 35,000 visitors a year, which is a lot in these parts—it's more than the year-round population of the county where I live. Sonnenberg Gardens consists of a 40-room, 21,000-square-foot Queen Anne style house on what used to be 200 acres of highly landscaped grounds, of which 50 remain. It was one of the five (count 'em) residences of a fellow named Frederick Ferris Thompson and his wife, Mary Clark Thompson, who also endowed the original F.F. Thompson Hospital in Canandaigua in his memory. Frederick was one of the founders of a bank that is now part of Citibank, and his original partners, his father and brother, departed to form their own bank, Chase National Bank, named for their friend, Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase. Their bank is now part of JP Morgan Chase. F.F. Thompson's house, with Mary in charge, was built at a frantic pace by more than 200 workers, some of them craftsmen from Italy, in 1885–87. The grounds and gardens, which were Mary's passion and are now the main attraction, evolved more slowly, from 1902 to 1919.

Fred

Evidently Mrs. Thompson was in charge of spending the couple's copious supply of money, and most of the tourist information in the home and gardens is about her. But, in addition to being ungodly rich, the man of the house (I'd call him Fred if we were out photographing and probably wouldn't even be allowed into his presence at the bank!) was one of us. A wall plaque described him as "an avid amateur photographer," and, in the only picture of him I noticed in the house, he is standing with an air of recognizably geeky pride behind an imposing view camera. A row of his cameras—decidedly modest compared to the rest of his life (maybe he was the frugal one of the pair?)—is presented atop a bookcase at the top of the stairs.

Fred's Century Grand Studio No. 7 8x10 portrait camera,
missing its included "cabinet holder" and "Semi-Centennial Stand."
It cost $72 in 1902 (~$2,144 today).

There were photographs on the walls here and there, but no notation as to whether they were his or not. This visitor would like to have known.

I'm half back
Anyway, I still have to be on half speed for a while, but I'm back. The comments to this post are open! Hallelujah. Yesterday was a good day all around.

Mike

P.S. I have no idea if Frederick F. Thompson was known as "Fred" or not. It's just that all us Photo-Dawgs are on a first-name basis here in the friendly club environs of TOP, no matter what our walk of life.

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Dennis: "Welcome back ! A few years back, my family stopped at an ice cream shop. When we walked in, there was nobody at the counter, just a couple of teens in the back, but there was a box with a note on it that said 'Do Not Open.' My wife—the nosier, more curious of us—really wanted to open it. When we walked out with our ice creams, the teens followed us out—turns out they were students doing an experiment for a psychology class. They asked whether we wanted to open it and why we didn't. I replied that I just generally obey signs, but later realized that I respect signs/rules on private property much more than signs/rules on public property. Then you have the paper tickets you get when you enter raffles that say 'Keep This Coupon.' I kept one of those for over 20 years and nothing ever came of it. Good luck on the rest of your recovery!"

Joe Holmes: "Whew! Congratulations! Welcome back. Your pessimism isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you don't believe me, I highly recommend The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman. Makes a very good case for pessimism as a path to happiness. I also recommend Jim Holt's really wonderful book Why Does the World Exist, one of my favorite pop-philosophy books, which at points touches on similar topics. Anyway, as I said, welcome back! I missed you."

Steve Jacob: (partial comment): "I found cataract surgery affected my photography quite a lot. I stopped oversharpening and oversaturating images for one thing and I could calibrate my screen properly again. ;-) We don't really give much thought to the range of vision issues people have when they express preferences for one image, or camera, over another."

Mike replies: So true. We will really need to talk about this!

Michael Wolf: Peeping

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(Not) everything must fade away

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

Mike Potter: "Sorry, and I admit I may be in the minority of TOP readers, but I just don't find that taking a photo of a monitor image of a Google street view as being art. Mr. Wolf may well be a renowned photographer, but, to me, this is pretty dreadful."

Bob Johnston: "Fascinating. I don't see why his approach cannot be some form of art. After all art, and especially photography, has always had a dimension of chance in it. Taking pictures of a pixilated screen with a Mamiya and Phase One back! Now that is funny."

Garry Winogrand on PBS

I'm sorry I had to take the past few days off...needed some mental health time (or maybe just plain health time...I slept 12 hours Thursday night! I didn't know I could still do that). But the comments are now all posted for the Ricoh GR III and the "Proper Attitude Toward Tech" posts.

I'm also desperately apologetic that I forgot to mention this in advance of Friday evening when it was broadcast...there's a new "American Masters" documentary about Garry Winogrand on PBS (Public Broadcasting Service). A kind reader even reminded me and I still forgot.  :-(

It's not great to look at his pictures within a video—not rich enough, tonally kind of leached out, a bit mushy—like coarse simulacra of the real thing. And although the makers of the show didn't zoom in and move around in the frames, which is a plus, it also wasn't so great that they felt they had to add soundtracks to several sequences. I don't need Dylan in order to look at Winogrand, thanks anyway. And I'm not too sure about those YouTubey infographic titling segments or whatever you'd call 'em. Overall I got the feeling they were casting about desperately to juice up the presentation so that it wasn't just plain old black and white still photographs and people speaking thoughtfully. You know what they say: oh well.

But still, there are some good interviews and insights, and the show pulled together relevant information from a lot of sources and different time periods. I do love hearing Winogrand talk about what he does. It reminds me of the American CIA agents in Steven Spielberg's Munich, all brash and business and no-BS. And it's interesting to see visuals of people like Geoff Dyer and Todd Papageorge. I've never known what either of those gentlemen look like. Kind of spooked me to hear Szarkowski's gravelly voice make some cryptic pronouncement from out of nowhere and then fall silent. I used to talk to him on the phone from time to time.

It's available to watch for free online until May 17th, though it might not be accessible from outside the USA. (For which I'm sorry, but please don't shoot the messenger, please. That goes both ways—US Americans can't watch the BBC's "The Genius of Photography" because it's not available here and even the DVDs are Europe-only).

Personally I admit that Winogrand is not a favorite photographer. I do acknowledge and appreciate his importance (PBS says, "his 'snapshot aesthetic' is now the universal language of contemporary image making"), and I love to hear his thoughts on photography—he's like a street-photography philosopher, is what he is. I've engaged with his work for what feels like my whole life. But he's never moved me. I do respect him, though.

By the way, if you're one of those who are skeptical of Winogrand, and I know you're out there, try this: look at his work carefully, really look at it, and try to mimic his style with just one shot. You'll probably fail, but it might change your life. It did for me when I did the same thing with Lee Friedlander. Who, by the way, would be my pick for "the central photographer of his generation*." That was Szarkowski's famous epigrammatic pronouncement about Lee's good friend Garry.

People treat it as a great mystery that Winogrand left 300,000 exposures incompletely dealt with when he died. The real reason isn't far to seek—he got struck down by gallbladder cancer at the age of 56, which, for a guy like him, was the prime of life. He had a span of barely seven weeks from diagnosis to death. Not much wonder he got caught mid-stride and still in the midst of life.

Oh and one more thing: Now that Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment was finally reissued after decades out of print, the one photographic book most in need of of a reissue might be the chronicle of what is acknowledged to be the photographer's peak year, a stretch of sustained seminal brilliance and mastery that was radical in its time—Winogrand 1964. Until then, if you want a copy, you'd better have deep pockets, or great luck.

It's always good to revisit Garry. It could have been better, but I'm glad he has his first documentary now.

Mike
(Thanks to Zack Schindler and Jim Loudon.
Inset photo of Garry by Jonathon Brand. Thanks to Judi Lamb for the ID.)

*And what generation would that be? Well, Friedlander is 84 today, and Winogrand would have been 91 if he were still alive.

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(Not) everything must fade away

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

Zack Schindler: "Actually you can watch the BBC's 'The Genius of Photography' on YouTube."

John Krumm: "The YouTtube versions of 'The Genius of Photography' have messed up sound, but it's on Vimeo and the sound is fine."

Dogman: "Winogrand's type of photography is not my favorite. But Winogrand did this type of photography better than anyone else. I have the Winogrand 1964 book. It went out of print before I could buy it, but I eventually found a brand-new copy still in plastic wrap and unremaindered for the original list price. One of the few lucky finds I've ever had in photography. Looking back on the 'New Documents' photographers from the standpoint of the early 21st Century, many of the photos seem dated. But that may be due to years of familiarity. And maybe it's because Friedlander has outlived them and produced more work but I have always enjoyed his pictures more than those of both Winogrand and Diane Arbus."

John Krill (partial comment): "Re 'And although the makers of the show didn't zoom in and move around in the frames, which is a plus'—Back in '69 or '70, David Douglas Duncan went on the Michael Douglas show and was showing prints he had done from the '68 political conventions. On the very first picture the camera started to zoom in and pan around the photo when Duncan flatly refused to let them do that. He stated that the photos had been edited by him the way he wanted to show them and by zooming and panning they were changing his edit. They stopped doing it for the remainder of the show. I really never liked what TV always did with still photos, and to hear Duncan tell them NO was very refreshing.

"During the '68 conventions Duncan was working for one of the networks. He would take photos, process them, print them, and then have them put together with his narration for the evening news. I have no idea how he managed it. Also, I could never get any info from the networks and so I don't even know if these still photo videos still exists."

Judi Lamb: "Thanks for your posting, Mike. Well worth checking out! I noticed you used a rare photo of Garry photographed by his ‘side-click’ Jonathon Brand. They worked together at J. Walter Thompson ad agency in NYC. This photo was taken of him on their typical lunch time excursion on 5th Avenue. It’s Garry checking his answering machine in 1965. Very few photos were actually taken of Garry. This one’s a treasure."

Mike replies: Thanks for your help Judi! I couldn't discover the photographer's name. I added the credit below the byline.

There are also some great photos of Garry by Arnold Crane, the divorce lawyer who made an avocation of photographing other photographers. There's one of Garry jokingly shooting his Leica between his legs, one of Garry and Lee F. in Lee's garden, and others. They're not online and never will be, but some of them are in Arnold's book The Other Side of the Camera, published in Germany.

JOHN GILLOOLY: "Finally finished the two-night project of watching the Winogrand film. What I found myself most intrigued by was the arc of life as a photographer. How his path as a photographer was impacted by marriages, divorces, children, health, sickness and then an untimely death that left so much unfinished—unprocessed, uncontacted, unprinted, unedited.

"We have discussed the growing burden and importance of editing and redacting one's work. This film, and the story of Winogrand, really exemplifies the importance of that process. He was big enough that, while his later work might not be edited and presented as he might have wished, it at least has seen an audience. Most of us don't have that luxury.

"For the critics in the comments that sort of lessen his work by making the claim that 'if any decent photographer went out and shot that often, with that volume, they are bound to get some great stuff.' Well, I don't necessarily disagree, but having the love, will and tenacity to get out there and shoot on a daily basis is part of the skill. It's very easy for folks to say, 'well, if I shot that much on those streets, I'd have some great images too!' That actually may be true. But that is a huge if. To shoot so consistently even today, with the ease of digital capture, is very difficult. To do it in that era was much more laborious, time-consuming, and expensive.

"He is not my favorite photographer. Not even my favorite of that era of New York street photographers. But I love his total absorption in the process. I love that he just needed it even if he didn't really know why.

"I loved the video sequences with Jay Maisel and Garry conversing. Having spent some time with Jay in NY at his bank a few years back, I really would have loved if he were one of the people featured in the interviews.

"I love this genre of photography and TOP. I'm eager to pursue some of the links provided by the commenters."

Something Else

There aren't (m)any: Well, I feel a little better this morning...after doing some digging last night, it appears that there are no "histories of the digital transition," at least that I could find. So that makes me feel a little better about not having read one.

By "digital transition" I mean what I've defined before as the main period of the transition to digital imaging, from 1994 to 2011, with antecedents going back to the earliest glimmers of digital in the 1970s, and the extension of it (still dynamic, certainly) from 2011 to today. At best what we seem to have gotten so far are specialized chunks of that history, and updates in the form of afterthought-type chapters tacked on to earlier histories. But no author has really attempted the synthesis yet. Granted, it's a vast subject, and generally so ill-understood that even museums with trained curators haven't much more than the faintest idea how to cope with the cultural changes yet. (Some do try. For one thing, however, museums, like art dealers, deal in objects.)

Something Else: Speaking of recent dyspeptic meanderings and the state of photo history, here, in Spanish, is a brief article, which I'm told is controversial, in which none other than Sebastiao Salgado himself (surely among the top two or three dozen most eminent photographers alive) predicts the demise of photography in 20 to 30 years. I was only able to read the auto-translate version, so I can't go a lot farther into the subject. In auto-translate form (never dependable) the second paragraph supposedly reads, "...despite using a digital camera for a long time, the Brazilian photographer does not seem very convinced that the changes of recent years have been for the better. 'I do not believe that photography lives more than 20 or 30 years. We will move on to something else,' he assured during the delivery of the 'Personality Award' in Rio de Janeiro."

I know what he means. We at first (dully, perhaps?) believed that digital would just a further technological step forward, helping us do with greater freedom the things that were already established practice when it came along. By now, it's become quite clear that the changes are going to be much deeper than that. Truly, photography is in the process of becoming "something else" than it was in its first 155 years.

Dense irony: Reader robert e wrote: "Oh the irony! As we debate how easy photography has become, the most publicized photo of the day is one of the most difficult ever attempted."

Clarence H. White, about 1920

First photo teacher: I've mentioned Clarence Hudson White, founder of the first photo school in the USA, several times in recent weeks, and it turns out there's an excellent recent book out about him—it's called Clarence H. White and His World: The Art and Craft of Photography, 1895-1925. It came out only a year and a half ago, in 2017. Its author, Anne McCauley, is David Hunter McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art at Princeton University. The photo of White above is by White's student Doris Ulmann, who was a most interesting photographer in her own right. She had a high-flying career as a society portraitist, but also went into Appalachia in a time when it was generally inaccessible to outsiders (cf. Catherine Marshall's congenial 1967 book Christy) to make portraits of what were then called "hillbillies"—in the same soft-focus, platinum-print style she used for the swells.

A companion book for Clarence White would be the 1996 Pictorialism into Modernism: The Clarence H. White School of Photography by the award-winning curator, museum manager, lecturer, writer, historian of photography and coordinator of publications Marianne Fulton, who has numerous outstanding books to her credit. The two little one-paragraph editorial reviews at the Amazon page, from Publisher's Weekly and Library Journal, give a nice little thumbnail synopsis.

That's all I got for today...

Mike
(Thanks to Inaki Arbelaiz)

P.S. ...Well, maybe a little something else:

Somethin' Else by Cannonball Adderly, 1958

Something Else!!!! by Ornette Coleman, 1958

Something Else by the Kinks, 1967

Something Else by Tech N9ne, 2013

Something Else by the Cranberries, 2017

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(Not) everything must fade away

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

Mike Connealy: "Biographies of photographers can be a useful way to explore the history of photography. I have read a couple recently about photographers working in the '20s and '30s, which is the period of most interest to me. Larisa Dryansky's bio of Ilse Bing is particularly good in the way it places the photographer's work in the context of the time. Brassai's autobiographical Letters to My Parents is enormously entertaining."

John Custodio: "Check out this history of the digital transition—From Darkroom to Daylight by Harvey Wang."

psu: "Re Salgado's interview, as a Spanish speaker it seems to me that his main point is in the third paragraph, where he says that 'photography is coming to an end because what we see in the cell phone is not photography. A photograph has to materialize, you have to print it, you have to be able to touch it.' Sure. I guess. At some level I think this is nonsense though. But even if you believe it...it's not like you can't print phone pictures. It's just that the majority of people don't, just like the majority of people in the past did not make prints past the little 4x6 automatic color prints from the mini-lab. So what's different?"

Joseph Reid: "My Spanish is by no means perfect (or even especially good) but I agree with Luis Aribe's comment. The third paragraph spells out Salgado's point, which, I think, Mike has made on TOP, that a photograph is an object. A digital image is something else. I don't agree that photography will be dead in 20 or 30 years (barring the perfection and ubiquity of holographic imagery). When I first read about digital photography, circa 1991, I thought photography would be dead in 20 or 30 years. I figured that, because digital would make manipulation so easy, the culture would lose faith in the veracity of the image and the image would become obsolete as as a representation of reality. Now, clearly I was wrong and I no longer see that happening. I think there will still be a need far into the future to record events and objects faithfully for many different purposes. As an art form, photography may evolve as painting began to evolve while photography was young—to increasing levels of abstraction. That didn't kill representational painting but it probably made it a much smaller field.

"Which way photojournalism goes (and I classify Salgado as a photojournalist) is another matter. The personalization of all forms of journalism is trendy, and the democratization of journalism—crowdsourcing, 'citizen journalists' who happen to be in the wrong place at the right time with a smartphone—is having an effect on how news is presented (or may be a consequence of it, chicken vs. egg, I don't know). Examples are gonzo print journalism and the U.S. TV news industry's insistence on inserting presenters into the narrative. This affectation has spread to photojournalism and art (see D'Agata's work) and is what just about all individuals' social media accounts are about. So, I don't see photography dying in a few decades, but Salgado may certainly be correct about the aspect of photography that we call the print. Not that this makes me happy."