A fine early photographer.

Some two decades ago I wrote about Degas not just as one of the greatest painters of the 19th century but also as a fine photographer.

His ‘L’Absinthe’ painting of two denizens of the late night crowd zonked out on the poisonous drink had a significant effect on my seeing:

L’Absinthe, 1876.

When photographing North Beach in 2013 I very much had this painting in mind when I snapped a modern version in The Saloon, one of the oldest buildings in San Francisco and a rare survivor of the 1906 earthquake and fires:

North Beach Absinthe, 1913. Nikon D3x,
35mm f/1.4 Nikkor AF-S.

To learn more of Degas’s photography you can download the catalog of the Met’s 1998 show by clicking the image below, as intensely a photographic painting as you will find:

Degas. Place de la Concorde. Click the image for the catalog.

Free, from New York’s Met.

The Metropolitan Museum of New York has a substantial volume of free downloads addressing the work of significant photographers. One of the finest is the catalog of the 1979 show of 55 of Eliot Porter’s landscape studies, the first show of color photographs ever at the Met.

Porter tends to focus more on intimate details than broad panoramas, the images frequently printed on the dark side, and the gentle appeal of his beautiful abstraction is a joy.

New Mexico. Click the image for the download link.

Still going strong at 84.

When the word ‘class’ pops up in my mind in the context of photography it’s generally the fashion work of Arthur Elgort which features high on my list.

Elgort. Pure class.

And that one word is all that’s needed to describe this beautiful study from 1992.

More about the man can be found here.

Stunning work by a Hollywood great.

Louise Brooks by Eugene Robert Richee, 1930s

Adapting the style of illustrator Cole Phillips, the prominent Hollywood Golden Era photographer Eugene Robert Richee captured this stunning image of Louise Brooks at Paramount in the 1930s where his career spanned over twenty years. The Fadeaway technique emphasizes her striking profile, further accentuated by the bobbed hair style. The image was made on a monster 8″x10″ sheet film camera and the retouching was done on the original negative. There was no Photoshop back then!