Book review.

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This book profiles four famous National Geographic photographers spanning the transition from large format glass plates to 35mm Leica Kodachromes. The sense of arduous discovery, the difficulty and danger of the expeditions these men undertook and the unstinting commitment of the National Geographic Society to exposing its readership to the unknown is hard to convey.

The men profiled – Maynard Owen Williams, Luis Marden, Volkmar Wentzel and Thomas Abercrombie – are all exceptional. Whether polyglots, great writers (true photjournalists), technologists (Marden was an expert pilot and scuba diver) or humanitarians (Abercrombie became a Muslim, so committed was he to the Arabic way of life from his travels), all were superb photographers.

There are many fascinating tidbits here, such as NG’s reluctance to take Marden’s Leica negatives seriously. Then Kodachrome came along and all that changed.

But the prevailing memory from reading this beautifully printed book is of the photographs, never less than special, often breathtaking.

You can pay up at Amazon for this $40 tome or get one from Edward R Hamilton, as I did, for all of $3.95. I order books there by the dozen and whether you buy one or a hundred, shipping is $3.95. That’s quite a bargain had you tried to lift the last delivery into your home as I did. I’m going to need the money saved on shipping to pay the chiropractor.

The economics of art books continue to leave me befuddled. Why would anyone want to lose so much money? Thank goodness they do, though, as it makes for an inexpensive library.

A fine street photographer.

The Swiss photographer Rudy Burckhardt (1914-1999) wisely chose New York as his home, well away from the stolid burghers of his place of birth. There he found the excitement of the streets as can only be found in a few of the great metropolises of the world – New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Paris, London – where else is there? His street snaps take three guises – candids, vernacular works (contemporary advertisements and the like) and architecture.

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All are done with a lovely gentle touch, with none of the occasional brutality of fellow traveler Walker Evans.

Recommended for all enamored of the street photography genre. This generously illustrated book is some $32 from Amazon, but I found mine for all of $11.95 at Edward R. Hamilton – they may have a few left, so hurry. The book includes an interesting essay on Burckhardt by Phillip Lopate.

Book review.

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This slim book of some ninety photographs presents a current documentary on the cruel, decaying prison on Alcatraz Island in the bay of San Francisco. Cruel in so many ways, from the views of both the Golden Gate and Oakland Bay bridges, from the sounds of freedom wafting from the mainland on the prevailing wind, for the views of America’s most beautiful city so close yet out of reach. It’s as if it was located to enhance the suffering of the inmates for some sadistic purpose, purportedly in the service of man. The Constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment and while there’s no excusing the actions of those who ended up in Alcatraz, there’s even less excuse for the sheer brutality of the concept.

Clint Eastwood starred in a fine movie Escape from Alcatraz which speaks to the only successful escape, by three inmates, which shows well the inhumanity of the place. Short, sharp and well acted by all, it’s an excellent companion piece to this book, whose Foreword by Peter Coyote is startlingly well written. What sort of person has it in him to become a prison guard, let alone a governor of such an institution?

This book has current pictures, many of which show the merciful decay of this horror story, and contains many memorable images. Perhaps the most poignant is also the simplest. It’s by Peikwen Cheng, appropriately enough a resident of a prison to over one billion souls, and appears on page 40. Titled ‘Days Go By’ it shows the scratches made on a cell wall by an inmate, counting the days of his incarceration. Nothing could be simpler or more powerful.

A mix of well reproduced color and monochrome images, the book is recommended if you like atmospheric photography with a message.

Book review

This collection of photographs from 1939 -1944 London is simply riveting.

If you look at the severity of Germany’s unprovoked aerial bombardment of London in WWII, using deaths as a yardstick, then the worst year was 1940 when the might of the Luftwaffe poured death and destruction from the skies. The combined efforts of I G Farben (now Bayer, BASF and Hoechst) for chemicals, Daimler Benz, BMW, AEG and Siemens for hardware and Deutsche Bank and Commerz Bank for finance, aided in no small part by massive conscription of slave labor, made all that insanity possible. Needless to add, all those firms survive and prosper to this day, along with the vermin offspring of their parents.

So it is impossible to write objectively about what this book of war time photographs from the Daily Mirror’s reporter George Greenwell portrays, other than to wonder at the miracle which gave England the English Channel, the greatest of all defenses, and a half-American named Winston Churchill. Our son Winston – a simple act of gratitude – will never know how close he came to not seeing this world.

While some of the pictures here are undoubtedly propagandistic in nature, the reality is that people did get married in bombed out churches, kids did play in the ruins and life went on as best as it could. ‘Muddling through’ may be a trait ascribed to the English but realistically what else were they going to do? I bow in admiration to their wonderful grace and stoicism in these hardest of times.

What many forget, and this book makes clear, is that death from the skies was not confined to 1940. Almost as many died in London in 1944. This time, with the Luftwaffe finished, it took the form of the V1 pulse jet and V2 rocket flying bombs, the first effective guided, pilotless missiles. The V1 could be put out of action by the faster Spitfires who would daringly tip it over with a delicate nudge from a wing tip and a 100 mph speed advantage. The V2 was altogether a different proposition. At 1,800 mph it flew at more than twice the speed of sound and no 400 mph piston-engined, propeller aircraft was about to catch it. That little number was created by a brilliant rocketeer who became a more than willing member of the SS in 1937 and managed to look resolutely the other way while Jews and Poles died on his production lines creating his evil weapon.

What became of him?

A few short years later he was to be seen in one of the last ticker tape parades down Manhattan’s Broadway, proudly waving a Stars and Stripes, testimony to his new citizenship and to the fact that his Saturn V rocket had just made it possible for Neil Armstrong to make his ‘Giant Leap for Mankind’.

That rocketeer was named Wernher von Braun.