A great woman photographer in a man’s world.

She was beautiful, well educated and had a strong sense of design. That Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) photographed the first cover of Fortune magazine in 1930 is well known. It is no less surprising a fact today, when one considers the extent to which men dominated journalistic photography at the time. Indeed, just three years earlier, Bourke-White had to lobby for weeks to be allowed into the Otis Steel Mill in Cleveland, for her gender was a ‘do not enter’ sign writ loud and clear in a man’s world. Fitting, then, that the resulting pictures, taken in 1927, made her famous.

This book chronicles her Machine Age photographs, taken through 1936, before she grew into a great humanist photographer, one adopting the candid style that the Leica had made possible. You will not find Leica pictures here. No, large format was the order of the day and Bourke-White embraced it enthusiastically, reveling in the fine level of detail the medium afforded.

Perusing my collection of photography books the other day I realized with some dismay that there was not a single one dedicated to the photography of Margaret Bourke-White. That omission was quickly corrected. This volume, published by Rizzoli in 2005, remains available from Amazon. You will not find a photography book with better quality reproductions, the pictures being printed with great tonal range and depth.

Bourke-White was not loved by the dominant working class male photographers of the day, a fact well illustrated in the excellent text by Stephen Bennett Phillips, which is quite devoid, mercifully, of dry academic drivel, and a fascinating read. As Phillips points out, where a Walker Evans would record his subjects in dry, unemotional, square on detail, Bourke-White could never resist the soaring diagonals which render her photography of man made objects so exciting. Further, she committed the cardinal sin of working for Big Business, becoming one of the highest paid women of the day, rather than choosing to starve nobly in some unheated garret. In these, her early works, people are mere design elements in pictures which glorify machines. Only later would her style change and adapt, and people would become the subject.

This book is not for everyone. Certainly it will stir the socialist souls of those convinced that industry exists to dehumanize and control. But for those who see the Machine Age, that time during which America simultaneously became the most powerful and most generous nation that the world has ever seen, as a true reading of America’s greatness, will revel in the magnificent photographs on display here.

A moving book of pictures chronicles Tibet.

Pilgrim. Photographs by Richard Gere

I have long enjoyed Richard Gere as a film actor, not least for his light touch and excellent timing. For whatever reason, he seems to have fallen out of favor with US audiences, yet finds himself more popular than ever in Japan, where his movies are invariably huge box office hits.

But I’m not writing about Gere the actor here. Rather, this piece is about Gere the photographer, a man who has been a long time devotee of Tibetan Buddhism and documents his faith here. His love for the country and its gentle, cruelly oppressed people, shows well in this large book. Gere spared no expense in production, for the book is beautifully clothbound with the sixty-four pictures reproduced in warm monochrome tones on Mohawk Superfine acid free paper (I quote from the Appendix). Suffice it to say that the look and feel of the whole project is of something of the finest quality.

Gere’s photography is noteworthy. He does not hesitate to publish pictures which are blurred because of camera shake, where the effect justifies it (indeed, the cover picture is blurred) nor to use slow shutter speeds to blur moving people in otherwise sharp surroundings. This is no mere affectation for leafing through this book shows that the effect is used well and never detracts from the emotion of the pictures.

And emotional they are, none finer than that of His Holiness the Dalai Lama on page 63 or the simply gorgeous, there’s no other word for it, picture of the hands and prayer beads on page 48.

It doesn’t hurt to read that Gere donated all his profits to Tibetan charities.

Perhaps the biggest challenge with a book like this is the celebrity status of the photographer, but this is miles away from another tome of lousy snaps by yet another underemployed spouse franchising her marriage to a rock star. Gere, clearly, is not only the real thing in his beliefs, the photography is simply beautiful to behold and very moving.

The book appears to be out of print; my used copy came from Powell’s Books for the not inconsiderable sum of $35. Money well spent.

A flashback.

An email from a friend had me rushing to my bookshelves – sadly now dispersed over three rooms owing to their seemingly organic growth – in search of my Victor Skrebneski picture book. “You have to look at these” was the general thrust and, in fairness, I had probably not looked at ‘Victor Skrebneski – Portraits, A Matter of Record’, for ten years. Used copies can be had for a trivial sum on the web.

The only snag was that I couldn’t find the book. Whereas my own pictures are ordered in studied manner, my workshop tools each have an allocated space, DVDs reflect a near manic filing method replete with bar codes and scanners, when it comes to picture books my approach is one of sheer chaos. By design.

The goal is simple. By adopting a random approach to arranging these, the sole determinant of position being whether the height of the book will fit the shelf, the experience of looking, of searching, of surprise, is enormously heightened. The trade off is that if you tell me to find a book by, say, Minor White or Cecil Beaton, well, prepare yourself for a wait as the chances are that I will not have the faintest idea of its location.

Not that I mind being asked. Not at all. Because you can bet that in the frenzied search I will come across several other long lost friends that deserve an airing.

Victor, Victor, Victor, where on earth are you?

My first pass was a goose egg. No Skrebneski to be found in the ancestral manse.

Tried again the next day. Now I remember. The book was huge. Not huge in the sense of the modern novel or biography, whose quality is invariably in inverse proportion to the quality of its content. No, huge in the sense of big. Not thick. Big.

So I reset the grey matter to search for Big, which helped not one whit. There are lots of Big photography books. Lots of tall shelves to accommodate them. But persistence won the day and there it was, Skrebneski’s book of portraits of famous people.

To this day the photographer makes his home in Chicago, that haven of civilization in the culturally arid desert that is the mid-west. True, the climate is abominable, but all these famous people must have made the pilgrimage to Skrebneski’s studio for a reason, and it was clearly not for the weather.

Now if you usually think of fashion photographers as purveyors of candy and fantasy, I agree. However, Skrebneski’s portraits are on a higher level.

The reason is, of course, self evident once you peruse his work. ‘Portraits’ is a collection of his ‘black-turtle-neck-dark-lighting-period’, for lack of a better cliché, and one of the most amazing aspects of the pictures is that in many you can see the subjects’ eyes …. but you cannot see their eyes. Meaning they are lost in unlit sockets. Somehow this conspires to make them more dramatic, conferring a sense of ‘Guess Who I Am?” on the portrait.

The strong sense of déjà vu is fomented by the fact that I was a young man growing up as a photographer when these were taken. I can recognize fully half of the subjects today, the book having been published in 1978. It’s no accident that the index is not referenced, so you have to follow along diligently, flipping back and forth, if you want to put a name to a strange face. Skrebneski is playing along with his style which is, once again, “Who Am I?”

Let’s see. An Audrey Hepburn, her face in such extreme close-up that you cannot recognize her.

That iconic image of Miss Blow Up, V. Redgrave. Every red blooded male recognizes that one.

Orson Welles, haughty, threatening, mischievous.

Diana Ross at the top of her game. Gorgeous, powerful.

Karen Graham. The Estee Lauder Woman. So used to the lens she seems almost bored. Wow!

Brooks McCormick Jr. and his threatening German Shepherd. (Have you noticed that nearly all the killer dogs have German names – Rottweiler, Doberman, German Shepherd, Weimaraner?)

Georg Solti. A wonderfully warm man whose orchestral rehearsals I used to attend frequently when a student. The price of concert tickets was beyond me back then.

The ageless Patrick Lichfield, society photographer with great hair.

An ice cold Hubert de Givenchy followed by the radiant warmth of Oscar de la Renta. Personalities displayed in their couture.

Cliff Robertson looking for all the world like Francis Bacon. Probably those unlit eyes remind me of Bill Brandt‘s work.

Irving and Mary Lazar. The cold eyes of the one and the almost equally cold eyes of the other. Not people to mess with.

Truman Capote looking …. well, like Truman Capote.

And finally, Fernando Bujones. When I saw Bujones dance Giselle the ‘Bujonistas’, as the press dubbed his followers, were whooping and hollering. So naturally I joined in, and what are you going to do Lincoln Center? Arrest us?

I have named but a few. It’s a book worth tracking down.

A master of lyrical monochrome.

There is so much to like in the Aperture book ‘Josef Sudek – Poet of Prague’ that it’s hard to know where to begin. Sudek (1896-1976) spent nearly his whole life in Czechoslovakia. From 1940, inspired by contact prints from large negatives he devoted himself to this way of working, using a cumbersome large format camera and tripod.

None of this was made easier by the fact that he had lost his right arm as an army soldier in WWI, yet no allowances need be made in looking at his wonderful pictures. What a life. Surviving the first war only to see his country dismembered by the greedy Germans, Poles and Hungarians while cowardly French and English politicians stood by and watched. Surviving twice more, this time WWII and the Cold War, and finally enjoying the fame that was deservedly his late in life.

The reproductions are superb, none finer than those of his series of St. Vitus Cathedral taken in the late 1920s. The narrative is outstanding, written by people who both knew and worked with him.

My favorite quote of his, on page 44, goes as follows:

“It would have bored me extremely to have restricted myself to one specific direction for my whole life, for example, landscape photography. A photographer should never impose such restrictions upon himself.”

The book can be bought for 50% of its original hardcover price, which was $40, from Powell’s Books and should be in every photographer’s library.

Rich beats the alternatives any day

One of the best things to be said about Slim Aarons’s book Once Upon a Time is that there is not a cat in sight. Lots of dogs and a few horses, but no felines. For that hooray! The rich like their pets obsequious and subservient. Plus they like loyalty. That must explain it.

And it’s the rich this book is about. Having got tired of being shot at in WWII, Aarons rightly decided to enjoy the rest of his life and ended up taking pictures of rich people. Not first generation Gates-rich, you understand. We are talking old money here. The kind your forbears made and you got to enjoy, if you had chosen your parents well. Cabots, Phippses, Agnellis, Fords, Marlboroughs (no dear, not the cigarettes), Windsors and so on.

Frankly, what makes the pictures in this book interesting is the voyeuristic frisson they generate, for the photography is, for the most part, unexceptional to downright mediocre. Aarons’s subjects save the day as often as not. A blurred picture of Prince Charles will always be more interesting than your blurred picture of your sister. Unless, that is, she just happens to be Paris Hilton in the buff.

And while it may take ten generations in Italy to make your money Old Money, five in Britain and one in America, what is very much on display here is Old Money. Lots of Old Money.

The most appealing picture in the book? Page 23 where Mrs. Henry B. Cabot, Jr. (probably named Muriel Finkelstein in real life, for all I know, she cottoned on to the Cabot thing fast), her pert little jeans-clad tushie resting on the fender of the Alfa runabout, the obligatory poodle in the car, proudly displays her magnificent estate home, not so accidentally in the background. You see, being rich means showing that you have money. Don’t bore me with tales of quiet wealth. No such thing. No, what makes this picture special is the Cabot arriviste’s three gorgeous kids variously disposed all over the car. The picture is dated 1960 and the eldest child is probably seven. You see, these kids have yet to learn they are rich. One little boy grins stupidly while holding a football, while the other makes a silly face at his sister, because little boys are like that. A charming and very special photograph.

And while you or I could have done much better with most of the content given the chance – even the cover picture is poorly timed – let’s face it. It’s a lot more fun to look at these than yet another book of war photographs. Aarons got that right.