Book review

Harry Callahan (1912-1999) left a substantial body of work, yet I cannot help thinking he rues the fact that what he is remembered for most is the many pictures, frequently nudes, of his wife Eleanor.

And while he was an enthusiastic experimenter, be it with double exposures or light traces, these wonderful early pictures set a standard and style imitated, but seldom equaled, by many since.

It’s not that Eleanor is some sort of model ideal of a woman, whose modern image in men’s eyes dictates exaggerated breasts and miniscule hips. Quite the opposite. She is powerfully built, a woman of the mid-West, with solid bones and generous hips. A Real Woman. And does he do her justice. Whether it’s the powerful, face-on image showing a determined chin and direct gaze, or the many nude-in-landscape studies which define the genre, his photographs of his wife are never less than special and deservedly define his oeuvre.

The Chronology of his life in this book, published by Bulfinch, goes a long way to illustrating his restless mind and thirst for experiment. I quote:

1938 – Purchases first camera, a Rolleicord 120.

1941 – Begins to work with a 9 x 12 Linhof Technica (sic) camera.

1941 – Moved by the sharpness of Adams’ (sic) prints, trades enlarger for an 8 x 10 camera and begins to make contact prints.

1943 – Buys 35mm Contax single-lens reflex camera (sic – can’t they get anything right?) and begins two-year series of photographs of pedestrians.

The latter rival, by the way, anything done by Walker Evans in this genre, adopting a far grittier approach.

This is curiosity at its best and not mere fascination with equipment as Callahan takes lots and lots of pictures along the way.

He starts exhibiting in 1941 and thereafter it seems there is scarcely a month when a show or publication does not come to market.

Rightly so, for there is much to be learned from the mind of this true original, whether from the early monochrome or later color work.

Highly recommended.

Chorus of Light – Photographs from the Sir Elton John Collection – book review

Elton John (sorry, ‘Sir Elton’ just sounds too silly) has a lot of talent. He also has a lot of money which allows him to feed his manic collector’s streak. The collection on view here is of his photographs.

The only reason to buy this book is that it can be picked up for just a few dollars, having been remaindered no sooner than it was published. What you get is a 13” x 9.5” collection of some 150 photographs, nicely reproduced, representing many of the classic images of the twentieth century. Why anyone would want to pay huge sums of money for ‘original’ photographs – a contradiction in terms if there ever was one – beats me, but you get to peek, almost free, at a fine collection here.

The interview with John, who is predictably egotistical, is actually quite interesting.

If you like classic photography this is a cheap entrée.

Book review

It’s hard to know what to make of Walker Evans’s photography.

On the one hand he is justly famous for his depression era photographs of American sharecroppers and the misery of their existence, photographic work commissioned by the Roosevelt administration.

On the other hand, much of his work can be dismissed as a twentieth century variation on Atget’s nineteenth century pictures of a seemingly deserted Paris.

In Atget’s case, the lack of people can be attributed to the slow films of the era, where a passer by would render a ghostly image, if he recorded one at all. By contrast, for Evans the stillness of the cities he photographed is solely due to careful planning and composition. And frankly, the architectural photographs are, for the most part, unexceptional and boring, despite having been set up with infinite attention to lighting and timing.

To make matters more difficult, this book comes from the ‘sell it by the pound’ philosophy of American biography, one of the saddest developments in modern writing. Weighing in at some six hundred and fifty pages, it closes in 1956 with the death of the author, James Mellow, who died in 1997. Evans died in 1975 aged 72, leaving the last eighteen years of his life sketched by Mellow in a few paragraphs. So even allowing for the fact that those years were not amongst the most productive in Evans’s life, they would have conceivably added another 200 pages to an already ominously thick tome

These were some of the thoughts going through my head as I approached the daunting task of reading about one of America’s most respected photographers. It has to be said, then, that this biography is really quite gripping. Mellow writes beautiful, idiosyncratic English and displays a genuine love for his subject. His exhaustive research never makes the text lugubrious or boring. Best of all, the many reproductions of Evans’s work are interspersed with the text, thus placing them in context with the writing. It is well worth trading some loss in reproduced quality for this optimal presentation of the work.

Evans was a curious mixture. Well versed in literature and painting, he more or less stumbled on photography. Maybe his most telling comment about his contemporaries was to the effect that he denigrated the obsession with technique shared by Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Paul Strand “….none of whom I admire”, while admitting that technique interested him more than it did Cartier-Bresson “….though I admire his work very much.” A telling statement when you consider that Evans’s second exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1934 was with Manuel Alvarez Bravo and….Henri Cartier-Bresson. So one can read an element of envy into the comment on technique, and it brings one in a roundabout fashion to the realization that his best work by far was very much in the style of Cartier-Bresson.

Sharecropper’s wife.

Memorable photography is just that. Memorable. One remembers the pictures without having to look at them and those of Evans’s pictures I recall are all from the great street and subway images he took in the late-1920s and throughout the 1930s. The aggressive girl snapped on Fulton Street in 1929, the incongruously fur-attired black woman on 42nd Street in the same year and those incredible subway pictures taken in the late 1930s. Amazingly, Evans had challenged himself to take the subway pictures but then had to be pushed by mightily impressed friends to complete the project. He was nothing if not self-effacing. This seems very much a character trait – he was no self starter and needed the prodding of colleagues and business associates time and again to get on with the job. A self-starter would have left a broader body of work albeit maybe one of lower quality.

Girl on Fulton Street.

So Evans’s work can be enjoyed on many levels, from straight reportage and historical documentary to some of the finest street photography of his time. No prizes for guessing which impresses as great photography, though. Don’t be put off by the weightiness of this tome. It is an excellent study of a great photographer.

Damaged.

Book review

The old dictum has it that “If you having nothing good to say, say nothing”, so I will earnestly struggle to say something good about Garry Winogrand’s street photography. I purchased my copy of this book in June, 1992 and, amazingly it remains in print. I return to it earnestly every year or two trying to see what the famed critics who all gush over Winogrand’s work are going on about.

True, some of the early work here is not bad, capturing the feel of 1950s and ‘60s America. Where a set piece is involved, such as a night club or an event or a zoo, in other words somewhere where Winogrand could actually be bothered to make the slightest effort at framing the picture, then indeed there is some good photography. The many pictures from the night club El Morocco are exemplars of their kind and the zoo pictures are poignant and thoughtful.

But the overall feeling I always come away with from my repeated occasional marathons through this book, is that, well, the photographs are, for the most part, surpassingly ugly. In his gushing essay on the photographer’s work John Szarkowski nonetheless pulls no punches between the lines. Take a look at the contact sheet of Winogrand’s street shots in 1961 (vital, involved, he actually bothered to raise his camera to eye level in a few) with the one from 1982. Sorry, the latter is pure garbage. The other way in which Szarkowski takes a side swipe at Winogrand’s work is in reciting some mind numbing statistics about Winogrand’s prodigious use of film during his Los Angeles period, 1979-1981. In that time, Winogrand processed 8,522 rolls of 35mm film with another 5,000 or so rolls taken but not proofed. Half a million pictures in 2 years. That’s 20 rolls a day. Can you wonder his contact sheet from this period is rubbish? Judging from the 1982 contacts he just walked the streets frantically pressing the button all the time without looking for or at a subject. Well, I suppose Kodak loved him.

By all means get the book to see the work of an American icon. Just don’t expect too much.

Update May, 2019: Sad to report but Winogrand also wasted money on color film stock.

Blood and Champagne – book review

I recall approaching this book with the thought that Capa was not really a very good photographer. I came away thinking otherwise, realizing that what makes a war photograph ‘good’ is not beautiful composition or perfect lighting or wonderful technique. No, the act of being there and recording the moment is what makes a war photograph good and no one bested Capa at that.

This book does not include any of Capa’s pictures, being an unauthorized biography. No problem. Just go to the Magnum Photos web site to see hundreds of examples of his work. Alex Kershaw does a fine job of writing a gripping narrative which at the same time is well researched. While the book could do with fewer asterisked footnotes, the quality of research is never in doubt and the writing never dry or academic.

Capa, the man, clearly suffered from what we would now call an addictive personality. His determination to be at the latest war front speaks to his addiction to adrenaline. In between, there was the incessant gambling, the boozing and the women. The gambling nearly bankrupted the agency he founded with Cartier-Bresson, Chim Seymour and George Rodger, Magnum Photos. The boozing was tediously incessant. The women ranged from Ingrid Bergman to Parisian streetwalkers.

Yet what a life the man lead. From the Spanish revolution, where he was in the thick of the action on the Republican side, to the D-Day landings on murderous Omaha Beach, to Viet Nam which took his life, he swallowed his fear and waded into the front lines of action. Kershaw forthrightly addresses the question of whether the famous picture of the Spanish Republican soldier at the moment of death was faked, coming away uncertain. I think it was, having seen some purported contacts of the film roll years ago in a reputable British photography magazine which showed the soldier ‘dying’ half a dozen times in succession, but it’s hardly likely that Magnum, or whoever owns the negatives, is going to release them if that is the case. No matter. One or two fakes in a life as prolific as Capa’s can be forgiven.

He also recounts at considerable length the D-Day story, where Capa went in with the first wave on June 6, 1944, carrying two Contax cameras and a Rolleiflex, taking but 79 pictures. Not surprising he took so few. Capa was a studied photographer who knew not to waste film and knew even better that the goriest images would never pass muster with the censor at Life, whose audience was Middle Americans who wanted their war sanitized. Kershaw relates how a darkroom technician fried the films when drying them, leaving but 11 frames useable, 9 of which were published. To Life’s eternal discredit, the magazine blamed Capa in print, saying the majority of pictures were too blurred to reproduce.

Later, having taken the required five training jumps, Capa parachuted in, yes parachuted in, with the 17th Airborne over Wesel on the Dutch border, in March 1945. Stunning courage. He was armed with his cameras and a spare pair of underpants into which he admitted having to change upon landing!

That his life ended in 1954 at the age of 41 is hardly surprising. First, he was feeling pressure from up-and-comers David Douglas Duncan and Larry Burrows. That meant just one more war. Second, he was, as ever, broke and in need of money. Third, his unwavering dedication to being in the front lines meant that sooner or later the inevitable would happen. So Capa, his best work done, trod on that fatal land mine.

“It’s not enough to have talent”, Kershaw quotes Capa as saying, “You also have to be Hungarian”.

This is a gripping story. The book is available from Amazon.