Grace

May 19, 2013 by Thomas Pindelski

An honest memoir.

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In the sciences and technology, success is highly correlated with raw brainpower and a good education. There are thousands of STEM graduates, unknown to the public at large, cleaning up economically, as they should be. That seems largely fair to me. Effort and intellectual acumen are rewarded.

But cross the divide to the world of sales and marketing, where there is no obvious educational correlation with success, and you are in the land of the flim-flam man (and woman). Examples of occupations where reward is unrelated to education, but highly correlated with an ability to lie (‘spin’) and cheat your customer include real estate, stock brokerage, popular broadcasting and car sales. I have yet to understand why an individual’s ability to enter a home into a database to show a prospect the bathroom merits a 6% commission.

And it’s that world which Grace Coddington has been a large part of for 50 years. Coddington is a fine example of the exception that proves the rule in the world of fashion, peopled as it is with mediocre talents and lax scruples which mostly sees the ill educated opportunist succeed to the detriment of true talent.

Long the Creative Director at US Vogue magazine, Coddington is a heart warming reminder that even in this most back-biting of industries – the purveying of clothing and scent – talent does occasionally rise to the top.

In an honest exposition of her life, and without any sense of self-aggrandisement, Coddington relates her life from a start as a beautiful model with a pre-Raphaelite face, to the top of her industry. Her many failed marriages – she definitely needs to avoid the altar – are related with no trace of self-pity as this young woman from a remote Welsh village makes her way from what we now call a ‘supermodel’ to the creative management of the industry’s bible. Along the way she works with the creme de la creme of the world’s greatest photographers many of whom, as I have written time and again here, work in the world of fashion. And what distinguishes photographers from the bunch of talent-deprived hangers-on in this industry is that if you are a quack you will not remain employed for very long.

They are all here, from the early masters like Penn, Beaton and Parkinson, to today’s best, the likes of Testino, Leibovitz and Elgort, via original geniuses like Bailey, Donovan and Bourdin.

There’s no ‘kiss and tell’ here, just a straightforward exposition of Coddington’s experiences with more photographers than most could ever name.

If nothing else, there’s a skilled explanation of why any ambitious person needs to come to the United States, enshrined in an insightful comparison of European and American work ethics. It’s a strong confirmation of the wisdom of my decision to leave England some 35 years ago, making America my home.

Highly recommended, not least for her charming sketches which copiously illustrate this wonderful memoir. When I finished I found I could even forgive her a life long love of cats, those most odious and self-serving of creatures, much as are the mediocrities Coddington has had to suffer during a long and successful career.

The Mexican Suitcase

April 22, 2013 by Thomas Pindelski

An incredible story.

The Mexican Suitcase refers to three boxes of negatives taken by Gerda Caro, Robert Capa and Chim Seymour (the last two, along with HC-B and George Rodger the founders of Magnum) during the Spanish Civil War which were long thought lost. When they surfaced a few years back and ended up donated by the owner to ICP in New York, still run by Capa’s brother Cornell, the content created an international photographic sensation.

Mercifully Capa’s darkroom technician had an obsessive personality which saw him create three neat boxes with dividers and exquisite inscriptions. Today, were he alive, he would doubtless be writing tedious articles arguing the relative merits of one overpriced MF digital back over another; he would no more be taking pictures now than then. But we should all be grateful for this darkroom jockey’s attention to detail.

The documentary, available on Netflix and Amazon VOD, is a tad idiosyncratic, struggling to keep a well defined story line, but the story is none the less thrilling for all that. Just how the negatives ended up in Mexico and the story of that nation’s special hospitality to many who would otherwise have been chewed up by Franco’s killing machine, is gripping.

The inside cover of one of the three boxes in the Mexican Suitcase.

Taro was killed in the Spanish Civil War, Capa and Chim were both killed in later war zones.

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Taro and Capa.

What truly distinguishes the images in this documentary is their startling immediacy. War photography had never been done like this before, the photographer indistinguishable from the soldier save that he had a camera in lieu of a gun.

If you want to see an excellent recreation of what Capa’s style must have been like, I recommend Hemingway and Gellhorn about the time the title characters spent in the Civil War.

Here’s a typical image from the documentary – I’m uncertain which of the three took it:

Timothy O’Sullivan

March 25, 2013 by Thomas Pindelski

The first photographer of the American West.

Timothy O’Sullivan (1840-1882) was the official photographer of the US Geological Exploration of the newly explored American West in the 1870s, having been a journeyman on Matthew Brady’s staff photographing the killing fields of the American Civil War.

Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, 1873.

Unlike the later images of Ansel Adams, these are mercifully not crassly over processed. Just straight prints which do the land due justice.

White House ruins, Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, 1873.

O’Sullivan used the wet collodion process which necessitates the taking of the picture with a freshly coated, wet glass plate in the camera. Once dry it loses its light sensitivity. It’s not clear how sensitive the film was but judging from O’Sullivan’s images of posed groups he was probably using exposures of no more than 1-2 seconds. So I’m guessing maybe 1-2 ISO.

His images of Utah and Arizona remind us just how special the landscapes of the American West really are. If I have a favorite location it has to be Monument Valley on the Utah-Arizona border.

These were probably the first ever photographs made of the American West. You can see much more here.

I took the picture below in beautiful Utah a couple of decades ago, using a Rollei 6003 MF film camera. While heavy, it was without a doubt the best handling chest-level camera I have used, with state-of-the-art ergonomics and optional exposure automation. The Zeiss lenses weren’t half bad, either, and no wet collodion was involved. The film was scanned on a Nikon Coolscan 8000 MF scanner. Both camera and scanner are long sold, with superior quality easily obtainable from modern DSLR hardware at a fraction of the cost with far less weight.

Utah, Rollei 6003 Professional, 40mm Distagon, Kodak Portra.

John Szarkowski

March 21, 2013 by Thomas Pindelski

A mid-West photographer.

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John Szarkowski (1925-2007) is best known as the Director of Photography at New York’s MOMA (1962-1991), where he succeeded Edward Steichen in the rôle, curating some 160 exhibitions of photography during his tenure.

What is less well known is that he was also a fine photographer with what I can only describe as a mid-West sensibility. A love of the land and of the architecture of that most wonderful city where it is generously on show, Chicago, pervades his work. As an early adherent of Walker Evans, he took Evans’s style and made it into something subter and gentler. Much of his best work was done in the 1950s, coinciding with one of the peaks of America’s prosperity. His architectural work of that period is replete with images of the buildings of Louis Sullivan (1856-1924), the man who brought the skyscraper to the mid-West.

The book above is copiously illustrated with his photographs, aptly interspersed with extracts from his always elegant letters, written in an era of attention spans and no Twitter. Szarkowski, thorugh his curatorial work at MOMA together with his love of photography, probably had more to do with bringing photography into the artistic mainstream than anyone before him. The book is highly recommended.