Much unpublished work included.

Click the image for Amazon US.

The best reason to buy this 400+ page book is that there are simply dozens upon dozens of images I have not seen before – which probably means you have not either – and many are worth seeing.

The cover image of HC-B with the Leica II and the flat nosed black nickel (later ‘Vidom’) finder (barely better than the awful one built into the body) is by George Hoyningen-Heune. The lens is the 35mm f/3.5 Elmar (a really tiny optic, and no great shakes optically, in addition to being uncoated) and likely the reason that HC-B is using an external finder, as the one in the body was for the 50mm lens only. Incidentally, this body had no rangefinder – focusing was by guesstimation. Leitz finally got the optics down in this focal legth with the post-war six element f/3.5 (later f/2.8) Summaron, and I happily used both for decades on my M2 and M3. The 8-element Summicron was every bit as good but a stop faster at f/2 and gestated into newer versions with fewer elements and aspherical glasses later on, all very compact. But the Summaron is really all you needed for street snaps.

The book is highly recommended.

Landscapes of the West.

There’s a fine biography of Morley Baer (1916-1995) in Wikipedia. Baer was a WW2 Navy combat photographer who turned to architectural and landscape photography. His architectural work is more severe than that of the California master, Julius Shulman and his fine landscape work shows none of the tasteless over processing beloved by Ansel Adams and his three billion copyists. I can promise you there are no images of White Birches in this book.

I purchased Light Years, a large format (12″ x 12.5″) book of his images, well printed, for $50 from the publisher, Photography West Graphics in their retail store in Carmel – the price listed on their web site is incorrect.

An honest memoir.

Click the image for the Amazon US site.
I get no payment if you do that.

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.

A mid-West photographer.

Click the image to go to Amazon. I am not paid if you do that.

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.