Monthly Archives: May 2019

Roy Stryker

Photographers

Bringing the message home.


Roy Emerson Stryker

FDR’s cousin Teddy Roosevelt saw to it that through Jacob Riis’s pictures of the poor of New York the awful poverty of the lower classes was brought into Americans’ homes. FDR did something similar in appointing Roy Stryker, a Columbia trained economist and amateur photographer, to head the Farm Security Administration in 1935. The goal was to document and expose the plight of the poor in ‘fly over country’ to the affluent, coastal masses, and Stryker did so with aplomb.

The photographers he hired to execute this massive task read like a who’s who of the best reportage picture makers of the era: Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, John Vachon, Marion Post Wolcott, Russell Lee, Jack Delano (no relation to FDR), Gordon Parks, John Collier and Carl Mydans. Each went on to fame and fortune and if I was forced to make choices I would have to single out Dorothea Lange and Marion Post Wolcott.

In the same way that a pre-television age saw FDR come into Americans’ living rooms through the medium of his Fireside Chats on the radio, the work of Stryker’s team of photographers brought the images of the Depression into their homes along with the daily paper. FDR never managed to turn the economy around from the Great Depression which arguably started with the Wall Street crash of 1929 but he showed that he was trying mightily hard. The Japanese solved the problem, putting Americans back to work on December 7, 1941. It was called Pearl Harbor and the economy took off on the back of government military spending that the isolationists had prevented for over a decade. Yes, they were Republicans, as cruel and grasping then as now.

The FSA was eventually folded into the War Department and Stryker moved on. But his accomplishment remains one of the most fertile in documentary photography.

The Contarex

Cameras

Wild complexity.

If you want engineering design excellence it’s generally a good idea to keep the accountants away from decision making. These are people who will not give a second thought to trashing design integrity and brand equity in the interest of saving a penny, which is why no accountants run Fortune 500 companies, and thank goodness for that. If accountants ran NASA the moon landing would remain a work in progress.

However, to totally divorce the design process from the real world is not such a great idea, either. An automotive example will suffice. In the 1970s the big Mercedes sedans, the W116 series, set a benchmark for performance, reliability and safety. And while the reliability wasn’t the greatest, for it included such cockamamie ideas like placing red hot catalytic converters under the hood, Lexus and Infinity were yet to appear and redefine what ‘reliability’ should mean. So, as these things go, the W116 was a reliable, big sedan.

Mercedes built from strength in the 1980s, crafting the W126 series of big sedans and coupes, some of the best grosser Mercedes ever made. And while they lacked modern twin cam, variable valve timing motors for power and efficiency – the 5.6 liter single cam V8 motor managed but 238 horse power – they were made like a vault and largely problem free. If there was an Achilles heel it was the daft idea of operating just about everything using vacuum lines and valves. Door locks, seat locks, a/c switches, you name it. The rubber diaphragms in the related circuitry would rot and split after a few years and, while they were $2 parts, accessing and replacing them was a half-day job. Awful. When the Japanese came along with their competing big sedans they saw to it that all these peripherals were actuated using small and reliable electric motors. No vacuum tubing required. And because these small and inexpensive motors were located at the point of operation – in the door for the locks, as an example – replacement was a simple matter should they fail, which they rarely did.

So two decades of success with their most lucrative product lines meant that the engineers were well and truly in charge, the accountants now hiding behind their green eye shades. And this is where it all went disastrously wrong with the successor to the W126 line, the W140. One favored German vacation strategy is to place your car on a railroad flat bed, have the Deutsches Bahnhof diesel it to your favorite spot for reminiscing – you know, Berchtesgaden, the Berghof, the Nuremburg rally site, the location of the Fuhrer bunker – and then drive it around at your destination while reliving German charm and history. So the first thing the engineers did was to make sure that the W140 was too wide to allow it on the railroad’s flatbed. A winner for sales, that one.

Then, because you need total silence while listening to the Ride of the Valkyries on your 12 speaker system, those same engineers saw to it that the windows were double paned, with a vacuum seal which promptly leaked, allowing in condensation. And finally, engineering installed a faulty air conditioning evaporator which failed after a couple of years. So buried was this device in the innards of the W140 that the shop time – which is what Mercedes reckons it should take – was 23 hours to replace the faulty part. 23 hours! Call it $3,000 in labor and $2,000 in parts so you could continue enjoying those Valkyries in air conditioned comfort. Little wonder that most mechanics refuse to even do this job as 23 hours on your back inside the car removing everything from the dashboard to the firewall is not fun. And the resulting behemoth was not only quite especially ugly, it also weighed over 5,000 lbs. And did I mention the $1,000 interior rear view mirror? Sales were poor, used values quickly dropped to 15 cents on the dollar (“$80,000 Mercedes S500, five years young, just $12,000. Drive the best.”)


The W140. Subtlety was not a design dictate. The V12 motor compounds complexity.

But Mercedes’ engineers were not breaking new ground here. Rather they were following an honorable legacy of ridiculous over-engineering which probably peaked with the Zeiss Ikon Contarex of 1958. When they were not making sights, scopes and binoculars for the Wehrmacht the better with which to invade their neighbors, Zeiss had a long and honorable tradition of making fine optics and a range of cameras for most pocketbooks. The folding Ikontas of the 1930s brought compactness to roll film bodies, whether in 6×4.5, 6×6 or 6×9 formats, paired with excellent Zeiss optics. To compete with the Leica, Zeiss came out with the Contax range of 35mm rangefinders, whose integrated view/rangefinder of 1936 pre-dated the magnificent design of the Leica M3 which was first marketed almost two decades later. True, the stirrings of needless complexity were to be found in the brass slatted focal plane shutter, not know for its reliability as the silk (no kidding!) cords guiding its movement were known to break, but that aspect did not bother the likes of Robert Capa who took one to Omaha beach in 1944 to document the D Day landings.

So in the late 1950s, seeing its lead in 35mm cameras threatened by the Nikon F – the AK47 of cameras being crude, bold, robust, reliable – Zeiss decided they would make the ultimate 35mm SLR. It would have everything in the one body, interchangeable film backs with a dark slide to permit change of film stock in broad daylight, a built in coupled exposure meter and a large range of the highest quality Zeiss lenses to fit the bayonet mount. But something went awry while the accountants were at the Oktoberfest getting blasted, for the resulting Zeiss Ikon Contarex came out large, quite specially ugly, massively heavy and unbelievably complex. How about a complex and fragile gear train for the film rewind mechanism, in lieu of a simple slotted post? W140 anyone?


The Contarex Bullseye. The nutty name font portended problems to come.

The ‘Bullseye’ moniker was added by the press and they were probably thinking of the target painted on the foot of the lead designer for this disaster. The lenses were, in the great Zeiss tradition, some of the best made, with exotic designs even in those distant days.


Some of the lenses offered were way ahead of the time.

In addition to the vast complexity of the design – 40 steps alone required to remove the top plate – some of the design decisions were downright befuddling. The lens would remain at its stopped down aperture after the shutter was released, meaning all was dark if you elected a small aperture. Unlike with the Nikon F the prism was fixed, so scientific use was tricky. Confusingly, the frame counter started at 36 and counted down. The interchangeable backs were a solution looking for a problem. And the whole thing was silly expensive. After a period of professional use reliability was found to be poor at best, and the superb chrome plating of the exterior, which was very wear resistant, would hide a shop of horrors inside. And those fine optics did not benefit from production line manufacturing which makes all parts interchangeable. Oh no. They were ‘hand assembled’ which is a euphemism for poor parts consistency owing to the use of outdated machining tools.

Zeiss struggled along with the Contarex in a fruitless effort to recover all those sunken design costs, coming out with the Professional (a meterless body with an interchangeable prism), the Super (a TTL semi-spot metered design like that in the excellent Leicaflex SL) and the Electronic (whose electronics promptly failed with spare parts quickly becoming unavailable). None managed to avoid the wild complexity of the original Bullseye. Indeed, the Electronic managed to compound that complexity, which was quite an achievement.

Some aver that the Contarex was the cause of the demise of Zeiss Ikon but I rather think that the Nikon F and its many excellent Japanese competitors, fair priced and reliable, were the real cause. As a collectible the Contarex is peerless. As a working camera it is next to useless.

Winogrand in color

Photographers

Putting lipstick on a pig.

On of the more frustrating aspects of being a mechanical engineering student in London in the 1970s was that the sobriquet ‘engineer’ was applied equally to those highly educated as to those with a vocabulary of a dozen words or so. The ‘engineer’ who designed turbine blades for Rolls Royce Aircraft was described with the same noun as the moron bashing spikes into railroad ties.

Thus it is today with photography. Anyone who can post an image to Instagram is a ‘photographer’ even if the best thing that could happen for world civilization would be to keep his finger from the button for the benefit of future generations. Irving Penn and Joe Instagram are now one and the same.

But the Instagram generation could have been seen coming 50 years earlier, and was never better foretold than in the truly execrable work of one Gary Winogrand. It’s not just that Winogrand could not make a good image, it’s that he refused to do so. Thousands of times a day.

In this regard his non-existent sense of composition or timing distinguishes him from that other great fake of his generation, Diane Arbus. My sub-caption to that piece – “A cruel, exploitative photographer without a shred of decency.” – cannot be improved on, but what distinguishes Arbus’s work from that of Winogrand is that she had a clear purpose and direction, even if these were evil and corrupted. Needless to add, Winogrand’s output of noise found its apologists and just when you thought his pap was forgotten, new rumblings surface. Yes, I’m afraid Winogrand put lipstick on the pig that was his manic monochrome manglings, using color film.

Adding insult to injury, the Brooklyn Museum has a show running no fewer than nine months devoted to his color carnage. Here’s a random image from the show and in this case random selection is entirely appropriate as the result is always the same. Pure garbage.


Winogrand in color.

Camera prices unchanged in 50 years

Nikon bodies

More capability, same price.

I happen to still have my copies of the Wallace Heaton ‘Blue Book’ gear catalogs from the 1960s. These were published annually by the bespoke supplier of gear to HM QE2, the firm going bankrupt a few years later when they failed to see discounted high street retail coming. They remain an interesting historical artifact, or artefact if you speak the Queen’s English.

Here is the listing for the best 35mm film SLR of the time – I would argue it was the best film SLR of all time – the Nikon F. This is from the 1969 Blue Book, 50 years ago:


Nikon F in 1969

With the clunky Photomic FTN metering head the Nikon F retailed for £270.73 (converted to decimal from pounds, shilling and pence – long live the Empire).

Going to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics web site for the history of the Consumer Price Index and to the Bank of England site for the exchange rate of the pound sterling against the US dollar (yes, it’s been downhill those 50 years) the multiplier for the 1969 price converted to 2019 US dollars comes to 15.4. So that £270.73 of 1969 is $4,170 today.

Looking at the current price for the top of the line Nikon DSLR today, the D5, discloses a retail price of $6,500 for the body and $200 for the 50mm f/1.8G standard lens, a total of $6,700. For the like-equipped D850 the total comes to $3,200 and the Z7 comes to $3,150.

Now capabilities of the 1969 and 2019 gear are not easily compared other than to say that the modern digital body and lens are superior in every way – speed, reliability, ISO range, storage capacity and so on. The 1969 Nikon F falls in the middle of the price range of the (arguably overpriced) D5 and the extremely capable D850. Indeed, common sense probably dictates the choice of two D850s over one D5 at the same price. The overall price change, inflation adjusted, has not changed at all. But the capabilities of the modern hardware are two orders of magnitude removed from that of the 50 year old predecessor.

The genius of Kodak

Photography

Vertical integration at its best.

The rapid demise of Kodak, which filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012, is well known. So much so that it is a Harvard Business School case study. While hindsight tends to be 20/20, it was Kodak, through its scientist Steven Sasson, who invented the very cause of its demise, digital imaging. “There will never be a time where film does not have dominant market share”, a board member opined. Kodak was in such deep denial that months before its demise it was still proclaiming the superiority of film in full page ads in the Wall Street Journal.

But for most of the 125 years leading up to its death, Kodak did almost everything right.


Was there ever a more accurate advertising jingle?

From its earliest days, Kodak’s business model was focused on vertical integration. They wanted to own every step of the process, from camera manufacture to film manufacture to the making of the print. Indeed, those early Kodak ads which proclaimed “You press the button …. we do the rest” could not have been more accurate, as you bought the camera pre-loaded with film then handed in the whole thing at the photo store to get the film developed and printed with the results returned to you with a newly re-loaded camera. Brilliant. Kodak succeeded in demystifying the arcana of chemistry and process in exchange for a one-stop shopping experience, devoid of techno mumbo jumbo.

Kodak always concentrated on keeping things simple. When competitors came up with reloadable film cameras Kodak saw to it that the required roll film came wrapped in a lightproof leader along with a like trailer, allowing the camera to be loaded and unloaded in daylight. Yes, Kodak was there to invent the 35mm film cassette in 1934 making small cameras reloadable in daylight. And Kodak’s focus on simplification was never greater than with the introduction of the Instamatic in 1963.


The first Instamatic.

Cleverly named, there was no film to load. Instead the film came installed in a cartridge, along with an integral pressure plate, which was simply dropped into place, the camera back then snapped shut. It took less time to do than to write about. And while, as a student working photo retail to put myself through college, I witnessed many attempts, even the most cack-handed gave up trying to force the cartridge into the body the wrong way around as there was no way it would fit, though they did try. While the camera had a face only a mother could love it was probably the most sold brand of camera until smartphones came along in 2007 with the iPhone. In seven short years Kodak sold over 50 million Instamatics. Capitalizing on its success Kodak introduced the even smaller Pocket Instamatic in 1972, promptly selling another 25 million. And, as always, you pressed the button and Kodak did the rest. They made the cameras, the film, the chemicals, the lab gear and the printing paper. Total vertical integration.

No big, dominant company survives in the long term. Look at GE. It went bankrupt early in its life being kicked out of the (then) Dow 20, and today is a fraction of its peak size having been kicked out of the Dow 30, lost without direction and a mess of unrelated parts. One day, Apple will follow suit, suffering the same pattern of a brilliant founder followed by a bunch of MBA automaton managers to whom fresh ideas are alien and for whom political correctness trumps innovation. Eastman, Edison and Jobs do not repeat.

So while Kodak as we knew it is no more, it would be churlish indeed to deny its business genius in the era of film.