Monthly Archives: January 2012

The Abduction

A tragedy.

She remembered the chill running down her spine.

The man was tall. Tall and wide in that Mediterranean way. He blocked the light. The hair a touch too perfect, maybe on the verge of receding, the muscles well defined, the loose fitting black suit jacket sporting a bulge on one side.

But most of all she recalled the man’s smell. It was a strange mix of machismo and Old Spice, both sickening and alluring at the same time. She recalled the scent from her father and remembered how she had sworn to get away from that tedious middle class world of movies and dinner out once a week with her mum. So controlled, so cloying. She wanted so much more.

“Is Roger in?” he asked.

Instantly she knew he had asked that a thousand times. It was not a question he expected to be taken lightly or one to be denied. There was a mix of command, expectation and threat in the voice, lower pitched than she expected.

The eyes ran down her body, starting at her full, rouged lips, pausing at the single strand of pearls, resting that moment too long on her cleavage and then down past her slightly too tall body to her waist and legs, perfectly defined by the black Chanel evening dress. Too tall for Vogue, she had found her niche in the interior decorating line. The clients were men as often as not, frequently accompanying their trophy wives to that little place on Jackson Square that kept her amused during the week. Strictly high end furnishings, neatly extricated from China and England thanks to understanding customs officers, and commanding healthy mark-ups. Instant credibility for the hedge fund manager du jour who had hit it big before the SEC came calling. At least the male clients appreciated her for what she was, unlike the interior decorators who were the order of the day, and seemed to have eyes for one another only.

“Who shall I say is calling?” she asked, surprising herself at the slight quiver in her voice.

“Guido. He knows me.”

Roger visibly started when she announced their visitor. She recalled how his face turned the color of the Aubusson she had so lovingly secreted away on her last visit to Chartres. It was posited as a buying trip to her partner Nigel, but the reality was that she and Roger had devoted much of it to the first throes of new love, lost in one another’s arms most of the time. She recalled his long late night cell calls, all whispers and hidden glances, but made nothing of them. Roger was in money management of some sort, so she supposed that secrecy was part of the game. And that new 911 he had picked up in Zuffenhausen at the factory, a gorgeous antique silver Turbo which made a rude noise, testified to his success. A glance at the speedometer on the Autobahn had told her that this was as fast as she ever wanted to travel on the ground and she had closed her eyes and enjoyed the fragrance of the seven Schwabian bulls it had taken to line the interior.

The meeting took maybe twenty minutes. Even though the library doors were thick oak – she had personally seen to their import from that old castle in Berkshire – she could clearly hear the raised voices through them. When Roger finally came out his color had changed from Aubusson green to something more reminiscent of China white. He had rushed to the living room and poured himself a generous tumblerfull of Aberfeldy 21 – he had it specially shipped from the distillery in the Highlands – downing it in two great gulps. As the color came back to his cheeks, she gently inquired.

“Roger, darling” she knew that he loved the ‘darling’ part, “is anything wrong?”

“No, nothing honey. Nothing for you to worry about”.

She knew better than to ask, but she recalled how Roger had shouted out in his sleep that night “No, no, not that!”

She had always smoked too much, and during periods of stress she only smoked more, castigating herself for the habit. How her mother had upbraided her for that. What was Raleigh thinking of when he brought those early tobacco leaves back to the West? The only calming influence on such occasions was her first love, from her days immersed in English Lit at Vassar. Fyodor Dostoyevsky. So it was ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ that she had taken with her to work that fateful day.

It all happened so quickly. She has been waiting too long outside the store, had smoked too many cigarettes. Nigel had asked if she needed a ride, and she had brushed him off. And when it happened, where she was expecting Roger there was a hulking Guido emerging from the long, black limousine. His scent had a new taint. She recalled it from her chemistry lessons at school. Suddenly, one of her Blahniks had fallen off as she struggled hopelessly against Guido’s powerful biceps, the red Dior wrap ripped off, her Prada eyeglasses hurting her then falling with a sickening crunch to the sidewalk, and as the handkerchief came up to her mouth, all she could recall was a mix of man odor, Old Spice and chloroform. Her book dropped to the ground and she felt herself falling, falling, falling ….

Osgood Place, Jackson Square, SF. Yesterday.

“You have never had it so good”

Harold Mac knew it.

The state of the art around Harold Mac’s time.

A British Prime Minister and the wealthy scion of a famous publishing company once told the British that “they have never had it so good”. That was Harold Macmillan in 1957. This applies equally to photographers today. And while Harold Mac was addressing one of those rare periods of prosperity that England only enjoyed once since (unless you were a bankster), for photographers it continues to get better, and at an accelerating pace.

Sure, we can grumble that full frame DSLRs are behemoths which deny the original full frame concept introduced by the Leica almost a century ago. And why don’t most cameras have proper viewfinders? But if you are prepared to give up a little flexibility, and make a compromise or two, the raft of expected features today is breathtaking. Consider:

  • Collapsible lenses
  • Pocketability
  • A few ounces at most
  • Hundreds or thousands of images stored on a postage stamp-sized card
  • Miniscule batteries
  • Auto focus
  • Auto exposure
  • Face recognition
  • Built in flash
  • Auto red eye elimination
  • Auto White Balance
  • ISO1000 and up
  • Motor drives
  • Movie capability
  • Wifi or 3G transmission of images from the camera
  • Near total silence
  • LCD screens, often swivelling
  • Wireless remotes
  • Automatic dust removal
  • Anti-shake
  • GPS
  • Panorama capability
  • Time lapse
  • Phone calls from cell cameras
  • Vast range zoom lenses
  • Broad processing capabilities at the touch of a keyboard and mouse
  • Projection quality on just about any LCD screen size you can think of
  • High dynamic range
  • Throwaway cheap – compare the fraction of disposable income taken versus 50 years ago
  • Instant results
  • No film
  • No futzing with chemicals
  • Waterproof
  • Available in pink

Of that long list, the 1925 Leica offered but the first three …. and the Leica or Nikon of Harold Mac’s time offered no more, though either now weighed twice as much!

These thoughts ran through my mind after seeing the David Bailey movie I wrote of the other day. Every time he raises that Pentax to his eye I think of the horrendous amount of back-end work needed to realize the artist’s vision. And that assumes he focused and exposed the image correctly in the first place.

Technology obsoletes labor and expertise. For many economies that’s not a good thing but for all photographers it’s a dream come true. So what if “anyone can take a picture”? Kodak said “You take the picture, we do the rest” over a century ago. Kodak is gone but that jingle is finally true. The “we” is largely microprocessors/telcos/computers/cell phones, and the amount YOU have to do has never been less. All you need is a forefinger and an eye. The latter is in as scarce supply today as it has ever been. But the technical obstacles to the realization of vision have never been lower.

The state of the art today. Weight? <5 ounces.

Bailey would have killed for that little Sony in 1962 as much as Cartier-Bresson would have in 1932. And Roger Fenton would have killed for either the Sony or that Leica of yore:

Roger Fenton’s gear wagon, Crimean War, 1855. Weight? 500 pounds + horse to feed and water.

And you thought your kit bag was large?

The Thirsty Bear

Brew pub.

I stopped by the Thirsty Bear the other day for lunch.

Rain threatened, so I drove. Bad Idea. Ever tried to park in San Francisco at lunch time with a big conference playing at the convention center?

The pub is not much to look at from outside, but you come here for the beers, all brewed on site. The crowd is distinctly up market and I found myself chatting at the bar with an attendee at the Moscone Center’s laser technology conference down the road. A Cornell and Stanford grad, some 68 years old and working at Los Alamos in New Mexico where we make weapons of mass destruction, this vital and engaging companion proved a boon to a decent meal and pint, even if my IQ was a mere fraction of his!

The first on the G3 with the Oly 9-18mm at 9mm, the other two on the iPhone 4S.

I enjoyed a Meyer ESB, subtler than is typical of the breed with a creamy head, with my chicken sandwich and fries. The portions of the latter were nice and small, with no resulting bloat.

$17.50 for the lot, and the barman serving me was polite, efficient and personable.

David Bailey’s Pentax

The best movie about the man. Ever.

We’ll Take Manhattan is the best movie ever about the life of David Bailey, the photographer who with Donovan and Duffy changed fashion photography, simultaneously causing an irreversible cultural upheaval. Bailey, who pre-dated the Beatles, was a working class lad who broke the rule that Vogue photographers had to be public school boys – or at least spoke like them – form ruling substance as ever. And, until Bailey, with his rugged masculinity, came along, it didn’t hurt to be somewhat effete, to put it politely. The girls, after all, would be safe. The likes of John French and Cecil Beaton would never rule again.

The acting in the movie is exceptionally good, and Aneurin Barnard as Bailey just nails the in-your-face, don’t-give-a-damn, cheeky Cockney persona of the original. I speak from experience. While a student at UC London in the early seventies, I was also a student member of the Royal Photographic Society which, while it took itself awfully seriously, also had the redeeming factor that it would invite great photographers from across the world to speak every now and then. Amazingly, one such lecturer was Bailey, and to say that his presentation was irreverent is like calling the pyramids labor intensive. By the time he got through with ‘effing this’ and ‘bollocks that’ I was both charmed and exhausted from laughing, not necessarily emotions shared by the many Colonel Blimps in the audience. He just did not give a damn and he changed photography. On a natural high, I walked home from Mayfair to Kensington that night, and I swear I flew. As a matter of fact, crossing Hyde Park, I lay down under the stars on the big lawn, stared at the sky and concluded that not a whole lot was wrong with a world which allowed a Bailey to rise to the top.

Not only does Barnard get the rôle down, but his handling of the TLR Rolleiflex T (the nobs used the 2.8C) and the SLR Pentax S3 (the well heeled hewed to the SV) is picture perfect. He really knows how to use a camera, something missing from just about every picture about photographers. (Hemmings does not do as well with his Nikon F in Blow Up). The filmmakers get the shutter sound of the Rollei wrong and show the S3 as having TTL metering, when it had none, but these are minor gripes. The movie chronicles a trip Bailey and his girlfriend Jean Shrimpton make to Manhattan on assignment for British Vogue and there are wonderful depictions of Clare Rendelsham and the fearsome NY editor, Diana Vreeland who, quite clearly, breakfasted on broken bottles. Vreeland’s successor, Anna Wintour, prefers razor blades.

Karen Gillan gets the naïvete and innocence of the young Shrimpton just so; her only disadvantage is that acting Shrimpton is simply impossible, as acting is the lesser part of the rôle. You have to look like The Shrimp and that, I’m afraid, cannot be done.

The beyond perfect Jean Shrimpton, 1960s.

Many years later Bailey, famous for his use of the Pentax, had his camera featured in what is surely the greatest gear ad ever. ‘David Bailey’s Pentax’ was all the copy said and that’s all anyone needed to know. He subsequently revealed that he had taken sandpaper to the camera to convey the battle scarred look, and in retrospect it’s obvious when you look at where the ‘wear’ occurred on the body. In the real world, the areas on the front near the prism could never be worn from use. And while I never thought about it at the time I first saw the ad, I love the way Bailey fooled one and all. That’s all you need to know about the man.

Sandpaper works wonders.

The movie premiered on the BBC on January 24th, 2012. Because the BBC is run by a bunch of people with umbrellas up their posteriors, the chances we will ever see it here are remote. They have been promising to release their iPlayer on a subscription basis in the US for ages now. What they really need is someone to get a hold of their payroll and a blue pencil, apply the latter to the whole senior layer of management and privatize the bloody thing, because for the last two years this is what I get when dialing up their application in the most powerful consumer market in the world:

The BBC. Arse indistinguishable from elbow.

The profit motive has clearly yet to darken the BBC’s doors and it’s high time it did. Wanna get the movie? Good luck – cultivate your British friendships. It’s worth the effort.

My fantasy about early Bailey? Click here.

Comment from the writer/director: See the Comments for details of a US showing from John McKay, who wrote and directed the movie. He also adds some fascinating details regarding Aneurin Barnard’s photography during the making of the movie. Be sure to watch the short in John’s link where he tells how the original locations were used in his movie.

Here’s the short:

David Bailey Takes Manhattan on Nowness.com.

Midnight in Paris

America’s greatest film maker.

If you don’t already know that Woody Allen is America’s greatest film maker, then it’s high time you took your Spielberg schmaltz-blinkered saccharine brain and aired it out a bit. Allen seems to have moved much of his film making to Europe in recent years (hardly surprising after all those years in a nation which denigrates intellect as ‘elitism’ and puts down our best and brightest as ‘geeks’ and ‘nerds’) with such movies as Everyone Says I Love You, the finest musical (with ‘Chicago’) of recent years, Match Point, (a fine society murder-thriller), Vicki, Christina, Barcelona (the story of a muse, an electric Penélope Cruz) and, most recently, Midnight in Paris, a charming piece of nostalgia and whimsy rivaled only by his own Manhattan.

Allen has long commanded access to the very best actors – who wouldn’t want to act for the American master? – and the cast of Midnight in Paris is as good as it gets. His recreation of Gertrude Stein‘s salon of writers and painters of the 1920s is perfection itself. There is no better way of illustrating this by comparing the photographs of a leading American member of that group, the surrealist photographer Man Ray, with Allen’s realizations in the movie. Man Ray and the great Lee Miller were lovers at the time.

Hemingway by Man Ray and by Woody Allen

Dali by Man Ray and by Woody Allen.

The actors in the Allen movie, shown above, are Corey Stoll and Adrien Brody, respectively.

You don’t have to love Paris to love the movie, but if you are a Francophobe it beats me why you are reading my blog.

It’s not enough to be an original thinker with a fertile mind. Those alone are not prescriptions for success. A solid work ethic is the glue that binds, and you can read all about Allen’s here.

For Allen’s take on Manhattan’s architecture, click here.