Photographs, Photographers and Photography

A fascinating chronicle

When it comes to fashion – the great years of fashion through 1960, that is – the interested student can indulge in one stop shopping with no fear of missing anything of importance. And that one stop is Paris. Throughout the first sixty years of the twentieth century the domination of this creative center of the world was all you needed to know about, a natural magnet for the best and the most innovative in the world of women’s clothing and accessories. Poiret, Vionnet, Chanel, Gres, Balenciaga, Dior – the list is a Who’s Who of the nucleus of clothing design.

Naturally, the greatest photographers of the age gravitated to this force of nature, and it certainly didn’t hurt that their city of choice was the most beautiful the western world had to offer. It remains so to this day. While the British were busy trying to hold on to a fading empire and the Germans were busy killing everyone, the French devoted their efforts to what the French do best. Great clothes, great design …. and great food! A casual visitor to the City of Light need only glance at the delicious filigree cast iron entrance to any Metro station and he will know that there’s something special in the air.

So the best photographers either ended up in Paris or were to be found photographing Parisian fashion for Vogue and Harper’s. If you liked high-end kitsch Baron de Meyer and Beaton were your first port of call. High style romantics gravitated to Hoyningen-Heune. Ascetics to Penn. And the cubist set settled on Horst P. Horst. That was the top end. But Vogue needed to fill its burgeoning page count with more than any one of these exemplars of taste and quality could produce so they went to the journeymen of the fashion photography world, the Seeberger brothers. Unlike the Penns et al of the photo world the Seebergers never made it into society or the salons. They were tradesmen photographers and traded quantity, in the guise of snaps of the latest fashions, for quality. And the magazines bought their work throughout the period.

This book is a fascinating look not only at the fashions of the era but also at the gargantuan output of the three brothers – you cannot distinguish the work of one from that of the others. It’s production line quality. Invariably taken at the racecourses of Paris, where the smart set liked to show off its finery, the pictures show both the rich and the ‘plants’ (models masquerading as society to better show off Chanel’s latest) in a functional way. The emphasis is totally on the clothes, gowns often photographed from behind to show off the details. If there’s a sea change in photographic style here, it occurs in 1935 when the brothers migrated from 5″ x 7″ glass plate ‘portable cameras’ (the book’s words, not mine – tripods were forbidden at racecourses, so these monsters had to be hand held!) to the Rolleiflex. Depth of field suddenly changes from isolated to contextual, and for the better. You can make out the setting without being distracted by it, whereas in the earlier plate camera pictures, backgrounds are completely blurred, often to distraction. Witness the pre-Rollei cover picture, above.

This is a lovely book, with a compelling, well informed narrative. In 1970 the Seebergers’ collection passed to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France where, mercifully, it safely remains to this day.

Perish the thought

One of the simple, yet sublime, pleasures in life is to stroll past a bookcase and be rewarded with some gem long forgotten. A moment later and you are on a trip to a place unknown, basking in California’s late sun.

The thick art paper invariably used in photography books permits high quality reproduction and the tactile and olfactory pleasures, coupled with the user’s choice of sequential or random access …. well, there’s a lot to love about Gutenberg’s invention.

As machines go, the printing press has had a decently long life of 570 years and counting, though it’s a piker compared to, say, the catapult (an elegant, simple tool) or the wheel. Compare those to the lives of sound reproducing media – wax cylinders, shellac 78s, LPs, stereo LPs, Cassettes, 8 Track, CD, iPod – none has lived more than a couple of decades.

Yet while I am committed to getting clutter out of my life (my ideal being Woody Allen’s place in Sleeper), I still cannot get worked up about looking at photography books on a screen. I recognize that some media – black and white comes to mind – benefit greatly from transillumination – but the magic of a book compares favorably to the netbook warming my lap as I type this. I would have said ‘frying’ but I got rid of my MacBook in the interest of my testicles.

The transition to reading news, analysis and fiction from paper to screen is accelerating, so you can bet that we will have full color Kindles, or whatever, before long. Maybe the screen will become a flexible pellicle with pictures sent wirelessly for it to display; that might work, I suppose, but I think this is still a bit sci-fi.

Meanwhile, I am going to stroll past my bookcases.

Really, really Big.

‘Really, really Big’. Thus starts the introduction to this book of photographs by Lynn Davis, authored by Witold Rybczynski. Rybczynski’s 4 page introduction is alone worth the price of admission to this book, which features pictures of American Monuments – be they gas stations or the Lincoln Memorial – all in gently printed monochrome. The whole production reeks of class and presents the viewer with subtle images which let you do the thinking. Not that common in photo books where the images frequently scream for attention.

If your interests include architecture and fine photography then there is every reason to own this beautifully made book.

A fine collection by a master photographer.

Few artificial creations can equal the joy of a beautiful garden. And while Americans, as a whole, care little for lovely gardens – witness the bare minimum handkerchief of grass and a few tired drought resistant plants so common here – Sam Abell shows that beauty is to be found if you look, and Abell has been doing that with an expert’s eye for decades. And you don’t get published regularly in National Geographic for nothing.

I find the Japanese approach, which sees the garden as a thing of spiritual beauty, much preferable to the America minimum cost/dress-it-for-sale version. Or, for that matter, brown lawns decorated with beer cans in all those tract homes and subdivisions bought and lost by fraudsters, whom we will all be bailing out these next few years.

At last count my garden of some two acres had four lawns, three olive trees and some fifty other trees, both fruit bearing and decorative, and while I work mightily to keep it looking just so, it cannot compare to even the worst picture in this fine book.

If you like lovely gardens and landscapes beautifully rendered, with a serious hint of Eliot Porter thrown in, you will like this book. At $5.95 mine is a Depression Era special, rivaling the cost of a Big Mac and fries with none of the health implications. (Disclosure: I am long MacDonald’s stock – they may serve poisonous garbage but health and morality have nothing to do with stock selection).

Funny and in color!

So many photography books take themselves so seriously that it’s always a pleasure to come across one that is not only very funny, but is also in glorious, over-processed, high contrast color. All of which works well in this droll piece of work by Jeff Mermelstein.

Many of the candid pictures in ‘No Title Here’ are taken at places where people gather – shopping malls, beach parties, receptions – and Mermelstein’s eye is both incredibly fast and ever sardonic, with nary a hint of nastiness (the sort of thing that is constantly ‘in your face’ in the work of Robert Frank, for example).

$10 from your usual remaindered books place or even less from eBay’s Half.com – thanks to a reader for the tip. Much as I detest eBay’s questionable sales and business practices, a book is a book is a book, and a cheap book is always better.

Pure joy.

The undistilled, unalloyed pleasure of a new book is one that remains a perennial source of excitement. But until now I confess I have never opened a book with such an immense grin on my face as this one.

You see, the whole thing looks like a giant carton of cigarettes and you have to find the peel strip on the cellophane to get into the book – just like opening a pack. Then when you finally get the wrapper off, the book emerges from the box in much the same way a cigarette would. Brilliant!

Let’s get the moralizing out of the way, first. In no way is this piece remotely adulatory of one of the more dangerous drugs around. However, it’s a free country and if you want to smoke go ahead. I own cigarette stocks now and then so have at it. Your lungs are my dividend. Just don’t blow the smoke in my direction or exhale in my home.

This book is all about how cigarettes were the glamor accessory over much of the twentieth century in Western culture, especially in the movies. It also shows pictures of how tobacco became increasingly demonized as that century drew to a close and how inept the advertising to curb consumption of the addiction that is nicotine really was.

The photographs span the century as do the many graphic illustrations and there’s something for everyone her – great photography, skilled drawings, exceptional advertising. Too bad that the frisson one gets from peeling the cellophane wrapper can be enjoyed but once!

And when you have had enough, rush out and get Thank you for Smoking with the wonderful Aaron Eckhart as the tobacco industry lobbyist who could sell cigarettes to a terminal lung cancer victim. Wonderfully acted and very on topic for our image obsessed and sound bite fixated society with its negligible attention span.

A fine German fashion photographer.

The words “wit” and “photography” are rare companions when the photographer in question is German, but Regina Relang is an honorable exception to the rule that has it that humor has yet to be discovered in Germany.

The Elegant World of Regina Relang, by Esther Ruelfs

Relang’s career spans the immediately pre- and post-WW2 periods, the latter perhaps the greatest outpouring of great fashion and photography we have yet seen.

Her oeuvre is both light hearted and witty and never less than totally sophisticated. And while many of her German models looks as if someone took a floor brush to them to reveal a new layer of perfect, unblemished epidermis – what else to expect of the Master Race? – that detracts little from the charm and beauty of her photography.

The book is frustratingly written in both German and (stodgy) English, with the English version in very light print on a light background (conspiracy theorists can have at it here) but as it’s the only monograph out there on Relang, I’m going to button my lip. No book on photography should have a ‘must read’ text and this one certainly more than espouses that dictum. The writing, or maybe it’s the translation, is beyond pedantic.

Wit, class and sophistication. Suzy Parker photographed by Regina Relang, Berlin, 1954.

Relang was also a fine photographer in the more general sense and a selection of her non-fashion work is also on display here. Some of her later work is in color and she has as fine a sense for a simple color palette as she does for monochrome.

A few points of technical interest. Reading between the lines I conclude that Relang was mostly a Rollei twin lens reflex user. What makes this remarkable is that while the small size and low weight of the Rollei liberated the camera from the studio, nothing could suit a waist level Rollei less well than Relang’s style. Relang, you see, was all about motion and action, movement blur and so on. If you have ever tried using a TLR Rollei to follow action (in her time the eye level frame finder was only available on later models) you will know why I say this. It’s near impossible as the image in the viewfinder is reversed.

Unlike her contemporaries Avedon and Penn, who typically adopt an “everything must be sharp” style, it is rare to find a Relang picture which does not use selective focus. The varied use of this technique in the many pictures in this book speaks to a very high level of technical skill on the part of the photographer. With the depth of field equivalent to a 75 or 80mm lens on a 35mm camera, (but with the field of view of a standard lens), selective focus is easily available at larger apertures, of course.

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in beautiful photography, gorgeous women, haute couture or great technique.

In my case that’s all of the above.

Don’t waste your money at Amazon – get a remaindered copy. Mine ran $20 from Edward G. Hamilton.

Yes, dear, NYC does have five boroughs.

To the average Manhattan dweller who, like the cartoonist Steinberg, believes civilization is bounded by 96th Street, Water Street, the Hudson and East rivers, it will come as a shock if I write that some of the most charming architecture and open spaces in New York City are to be found in the Borough of Brooklyn. And, of course, the best views of downtown from the Promenade on the East River.

I was fortunate to live there for a while when I first moved to New York in 1980 and liked much of what I saw – vibrant cultural diversity, a burgeoning progressive arts scene and all those great parks and churches. And it’s closer to Wall Street by subway than much of Manhattan.

These thoughts came flooding back upon opening the pages of this quite splendid book:

On opposing pages we see pictures of identical sites in Brooklyn with the old ones typically taken fifty to a hundred years ago. What is so striking is that, almost without exception, the old Brooklyn looks a whole lot better than the new, the latter invaded with ugly mass housing and devoid of the welcoming warmth of trolleys and trams.

It is only appropriate that the Brooklyn Bridge adorns the covers for there is no finer architecture to be found in America.

It’s a great way to wile away a couple of hours for very little – my remaindered copy ran a few dollars.

In a class of one.

The cover says it all

If you love severe sculptural form – whether in your women, buildings or clothes – then there’s a strong argument to be made that fashion starts and ends with the Basque designer Balenciaga.

If you love great photography of the most beautiful women and clothes ever seen, then there’s every reason to get this very large and very expensive book about the designer.

The core of the book addresses Balenciaga’s output through 1968 when he closed his eponymous couture store in Paris. The last third deals with the resuscitated Balenciaga name from 1999 on and it is rubbish – ugly people in T shirts and poor make-up. The book is still worth it for the first two thirds.

The 1950s saw the nascent flowering of the supermodel who would henceforth have a name and with it fame and fortune. The only snag is that Balenciaga’s designs demanded a perfect figure. Size 8 and up need not apply. And in the likes of Lisa Fonssagrives (Mrs. Irving Penn), Suzy Parker and the impossibly perfect Dovima (she of Avedon’s ‘Dovima with Elephants’) Balenciaga had all he needed to best show his creations. The Basque with French and Spanish in his blood and the sureness of line last seen in Matisse tolerated nothing less than perfection.

There was another significant change in the 1950s – the rise of the supermodel coincided with like ascendancy of star photographers, and their work is on show in a big way here – Cartier-Bresson (some priceless dressing room snaps which are new to me), Avedon, Penn, Clarke. The best of the best.

Here’s my favorite of Dovima in a stunning Balenciaga creation, appropriately taken by Richard Avedon.

Balenciaga and Dovima, 1950

And you thought you had long fingers?

And if the following raises a question it is a simple one – Where have all the lovely women gone?

Balenciaga and Georgia Hamilton by Avedon, 1953

A superb book.

The most beautiful women.

The world’s greatest art.

The finest fashions.

The most beautiful cars.

The magic of opera.

The best wines.

The most sublime architecture.

The deepest possible contempt for government and taxes.

The realization that you work to live, not vice versa.

And if that wasn’t enough, why not throw in the most gorgeous landscapes?

That is Italy and to say that the photography in this large book is spectacular is to do the photographers – Antonio Attini and Marcello Bertinetti (names to conjur with!) – an injustice.

No fewer than 423 pages grace this book which comes with a DVD of the Alps. Aptly enough, the foreword is by Franco Zeffirelli, and if you haven’t seen a Zeffirelli staging of an Italian opera, well, you haven’t lived.

Mine came from Edward R Hamilton, a tad shopworn, for $19.95, DVD included. Sure, they don’t take web orders but at that price, what’s your hurry? Get an envelope and a stamp. And don’t ask. Just go out right now and get this fabulous book.

As an adjunct, if you want to learn how Brunneleschi worked his magic on the dome in Florence, add this while you are at it.

Book review.

One of the reasons I so like Chicago is that I have never had to visit it in the winter. Add the fact that is is the quintessential American city, has mid-west standards and values, not to mention America’s finest architecture, and you have a place well worth visiting. No one who has lived there could remotely think of New York, by contrast, as anything but a European city.

The title of this book says it all. Divided into decade chapters from the forties to the nineties, it comes as no surprise that the best work here is in the first two chapters. When you realize that five frames per second is discounted as slow in the world of modern DSLRs, think about the working stiff with his Crown Graphic and a couple of film holders. He generally had but one chance to capture the decisive moment, and you see lots of that in this book. Something about these old pictures speaks differently, too. Maybe its their dignity, grace and composition. They move you in the way modern photojournalism seldom does.

My remaindered copy cost all of $15 and I recommend you add this book to your photo library.

And if you think I have glossed over the decades of machine politics and corruption in America’s second city well, I learned everything I ever needed about Chicago’s law enforcement from the succinct words of the humorist P. G. Wodehouse. “At least when you buy a Chicago cop, they stay bought”. Honor and integrity. Got to love that in your local police force.

You can see my library of photography books by clicking here.

For a fabulous evocation of what the city must have been like in the early post war years, click here.

An under-appreciated field.

While I cannot remember a time when I did not think about photography on a daily basis, an interest in architecture did not seriously take seed until the age of 29. That was the year I moved to New York City. While its inherent bias on the editorial pages sadly infects the news reporting in the New York Times, no such favoritism was evident in the writings of Paul Goldberger and Ada Louise Huxtable. Their topic was architecture.

Before I knew it I was attending lectures by prominent architects, fascinated by the melding of big business, art and massive budgets with all the related logistical complexity which is what results when you try to build in New York. I mean, look at the realities. Those seeking to do you harm include the Mob (concrete to this day costs 20% more in NYC than anywhere else), the City of New York (relatively cheap to buy, after the Mob is accounted for), Albany, Washington and just about every other government apparatchik you can think of. The only difference between the Mob and the government is that the latter wrote the laws. If you can make a tall building in Manhattan you can make one with impunity anywhere.

Absorbing Huxtable’s and Goldberger’s teaching I cemented my relationship with architecture by visiting Chicago for the first time. Simply stated, Chicago’s finest buildings are to Manhattan what Ferrari is to GM. But New York’s winters were tough enough, thank you, so it wasn’t as if I was about to move there, much as I love the people of the mid-west. And those writers’ teachings made an indelible expression. Give me those charming moments of partial consciousness that define falling asleep and, likely as not, you will find my mind straying to New York City architecture.

You can say an awful lot about a building by measuring your desire to touch it. Not metaphysically. Walk up to it and touch it. And for me there were always three which made that distinguished cadre. The Flatiron Building. Philip Johnson’s AT&T. And Seagram. Johnson again.

So bad did this habit become that I made a point of walking past the last two on the way home just to be able to brush them with my fingertips. Maybe some of the magic would rub off?

No secret that I would make special efforts to entertain clients at lunch in the Four Seasons at the plaza level of Johnson’s Seagram masterpiece. From there I could gaze at the no less wonderful Lever House, airily perched on stilts on the west side of Park Avenue. It was my privilege to watch AT&T grow from my 40th floor office in the so-high-tech Citicorp Center, sloping roof for solar panels and all. Still not installed last I checked. Like the corporation, the architecture was crass, vulgar and ethically challenged. AT&T was so beautifully made that you just had to touch it. And they had that Apollo chap in the lobby, all gilded, with massive transatlantic cables draped about him.

As for the Flatiron, forget about all those schoolboy statistics about it being the tallest, the first with a steel frame, the first with elevators, etc. All you had to know was that Stieglitz had photographed it in 1903.

I was lucky to be reminded of all of this by the loan of a book on architectural photography from my dear mother-in-law. There, on page 113, Stieglitz’s masterpiece of the Flatiron is annotated thus:

Stieglitz’s ethereal view of the Flatiron, taken with a hand-held camera, typifies the Pictorialist approach to architecture.

That got my attention. I am of that school, after all. And here is that snap:

The book is Building with Light by Robert Elwall. American architecture is remarkably well represented (the author is the Curator of the British Architectural Library) with not a trace of condescension, and the whole 240 page tome is a breathtaking survey of architectural photography from the early nineteenth century through today. (Note: Architectural photography has not improved in the last 150 years).

Some of my favorite images are, unsurprisingly, from California residential architecture. Shulman and Neutra are amply represented as they adapt the new international style to a smaller scale. The photography changes too. What was once formal documentation is now pure pictorialism. It’s the effect of the building, not its technical detail, that fascinates.

Sieglitz would be proud.

All of which gives me two suggestions. First, get the book if buildings speak to you. Second, stay tuned for some of my architectural pictures ….

Another fine lesson in macro.

A few years back I developed tendonitis, meaning that if I stress my wrists too much everything from elbow to wrist hurts like hell. One likely cause is that many years of woodworking as a hobby did a number on my tendons and, as I understand it, these are not things that readily mend.

In the event, it was probably a timely warning. I still had all ten fingers attached where they should be and, let’s face it, I wasn’t giving Chippendale any competition, so the woodworking tools were sold and the proceeds applied to converting the workshop to a home theater. Suffice it to say that all those newly white walls made for a fine photography exhibition space in addition to a great place to watch movies, play pool, throw the occasional dart and …. well, you get the idea. American leisure at home.

From those woodworking days, I recall that easily the best magazine addressing amateur woodworking is ‘Fine Woodworking’ published by Taunton Press, a specialty publisher with a very high end focus on content, presentation and photography. One of their editors, a superb woodworker, published this labor of love a few years ago:

Not only are the tools depicted beautiful art works, the photography is stunning. Great care has been taken with settings, backgrounds and lighting and the whole thing is a masterpiece of table-top photography. Best as I can tell, Nagyszalanczy is both writer and photographer.

It remains available at Amazon for very little money.

An unlikely source of inspiration.

You know your home library is a good one when you come across books you never knew you had.

Which is exactly what happened to me the other day when in search of inspiration and education about good macro photography. I have no earthly idea how I came to own this book, but I am most certainly glad to have discovered it.

While the subject may be unusual the photography contained in the pages of this book is some of the best macro work I have seen.

Atlantic salmon flies are tied as much for their looks and display appeal as they are for real fishing. This book covers the gamut from fly tyers interested solely in emulating pre-WWI techniques (!) to those interested in the very latest designs using synthetic materials. The interviews with these artisans are almost as good as the photography.

As the book was published in 1991, before large frame digital existed, all the work here is on film and, while it’s hard to make out from the picture of photographer John Clayton on the jacket cover, was probably done on large format. The lighting, posing and choices of backgrounds all speak to a work of love and exceptional effort.

No longer on Amazon, look for this book in the remaindered catalogs. The excellent Alibris has it. Highly recommended for the beauty of the subjects and the photographic execution.

Sampling books is much like drinking wine.

I make it a habit, as summer approaches, to pick a photography book from the bookcase for relaxation on the patio in the afternoon. What struck me as rather funny the other day is that I found myself perusing the shelves much as a wine drinker might select a wine for dinner. Now it’s true that I grow Zinfandel grapes, but I rarely drink wine. Just not my thing, even if the grapes make for prize winning wines. So I really cannot pontificate how a wine drinker makes his choices as I have little idea, but I found that I was consciously thinking what genre and emotional pallette I wanted when it came to book selection.

With the perfume of jasmine in the home, thanks to the lovely plants on the patio, I migrated to a book of flower pictures. Plus I’m getting into the whole macro thing.

And a fine choice it was, with no hangover.

If you would like to see my complete library of photo books, click here.

By the way, I never buy new photo books, only remaindered ones. No idea where they got the pricing data but I seem to recall paying well under $20 for this one.

Star jasmine on the patio. 5D, 100mm Canon macro, ring flash, 1/45, f/19, ISO 200