Putting lipstick on a pig.

On of the more frustrating aspects of being a mechanical engineering student in London in the 1970s was that the sobriquet ‘engineer’ was applied equally to those highly educated as to those with a vocabulary of a dozen words or so. The ‘engineer’ who designed turbine blades for Rolls Royce Aircraft was described with the same noun as the moron bashing spikes into railroad ties.

Thus it is today with photography. Anyone who can post an image to Instagram is a ‘photographer’ even if the best thing that could happen for world civilization would be to keep his finger from the button for the benefit of future generations. Irving Penn and Joe Instagram are now one and the same.

But the Instagram generation could have been seen coming 50 years earlier, and was never better foretold than in the truly execrable work of one Gary Winogrand. It’s not just that Winogrand could not make a good image, it’s that he refused to do so. Thousands of times a day.

In this regard his non-existent sense of composition or timing distinguishes him from that other great fake of his generation, Diane Arbus. My sub-caption to that piece – “A cruel, exploitative photographer without a shred of decency.” – cannot be improved on, but what distinguishes Arbus’s work from that of Winogrand is that she had a clear purpose and direction, even if these were evil and corrupted. Needless to add, Winogrand’s output of noise found its apologists and just when you thought his pap was forgotten, new rumblings surface. Yes, I’m afraid Winogrand put lipstick on the pig that was his manic monochrome manglings, using color film.

Adding insult to injury, the Brooklyn Museum has a show running no fewer than nine months devoted to his color carnage. Here’s a random image from the show and in this case random selection is entirely appropriate as the result is always the same. Pure garbage.

Winogrand in color.

A 1950s photographer from Italy.

The Guardian has an illustrated piece featuring the work of 1950s Italian photographer Paolo di Paolo.

Suffused with lightness and wit, his images show an Italy recovering from the depredations of fascism to become once more the mecca of style and beauty.

Piazza Navona, Rome. 1960.

His biography appears here. Use Google’s Translate feature for an English version.

One of the great documentary photographers.

Andreas Feininger (1906-1999), though born in Paris, was a German Jew whose parents made the wise decision to move to Sweden in 1936. Feininger then immigrated to the United States in 1939. Had these moves not been made he would almost certainly have died in the German killing machine.

And Feininger’s timing could not have been better with regard to his profession of photojournalist, for LIFE magazine was in its heyday and photographs were actually of monetary value. His association with LIFE lasted almost two decades through 1962.

Feininger is noted for his city and industrial scenes as well as close-ups of plants. It’s the former which are illustrated here.

Enjoying a tremendous consumer boom, New York was never more vibrant than in the 1950s. A victorious Eisenhower was soon to be president (1952-60) after a stint fixing what ailed Columbia University as its Dean. All that mighty military production was turned to churning out cars and houses for newly affluent, young Americans and while domestic and foreign conflicts continued, America was mostly at peace with itself and with the world.

The bustle of thriving Manhattan. 1950.

Steam still dominated long distance travel, and while it may have taken a while to get to Chicago or points further west, never was long distance travel more civilized.

Union Station, Chicago. 1948.

Watch the Stanley Donen directed 1949 musical ‘On the Town’ with dancing and singing by Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly and you will see some of the last images of the elevated east side subway, soon to be torn down. New York and nostalgia have never been bedmates. Doubtless, were the movie remade today, the protagonists would be homosexuals with an opioid habit. Feininger shows the EL at its best.

Beneath the EL subway, NYC, 1948.

If steam trains were the way to cross the continent, it was the great Cunard liners, joined by the SS France and the steamship The United States, which saw to it that you would cross the Atlantic safely to the new world. Never was the atmosphere better illustrated than in Stanley Donen’s (again) 1951 Royal Wedding where Fred Astaire crosses the Atlantic (going the wrong way). The movie features the famous ‘dancing on the ceiling’ number, as breathtaking today as it was over a half century ago. Feininger’s image of the west side docks shows a New York before the invasion of ghastly steel and glass buildings. Here all is united in the neo-classical style which dominated architectural high rises.

The Queen Elizabeth docked in Manhattan. 1958.

While Feininger was rarely to be found in the studio, his best known image is of Dennis Stock, one of the early members (1951) of the Magnum photo agency. This collective of photographers, whose founders (1947) include Henri Cartier-Bresson, was the gold standard in reportage.

Dennis Stock of Magnum with a Leica IIIC.

We live in a world of Instagram and Pinterest. The value of a photograph is zero unless it shows the Oval Office pig cavorting with a whore. So it’s a pleasure to share these images from a time when photography ruled reportage.

By the master.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1955.

To donate to the restoration of Notre Dame, click here.

One of the past century’s greatest images.

No humanist and historian can deny a sense of schadenfreude at the rapid demise of the British economy, compounded by the idiocy of Brexit. Nationalism cloaking racism, all merrily helped along by the Kremlin’s poisoned hand. When you have access to a tariff-free trade zone and are the sole EC member which can devalue its currency, what do you do? Why, quit the trade zone and zap both your economy and currency at one go.

No one should feel sorry for the British, for their empire was built on three heinous schemes, monstrous to behold even in the aftermath of WW2 Germany, Stalin and Pol Pot. Those schemes were the export of opium to China, the slave trade and colonialism. Jointly they made England the wealthiest nation on earth, controlling one quarter of the global economy and land mass. The crimes spanned nigh on three centuries.

The opium trade saw Britain wage not one but two successful wars with China to protect its franchise. The slave trade, exporting blacks from west Africa to America’s south, killed more than Auschwitz. And colonialism, a miserable euphemism for unprovoked armed invasion and theft, was the icing on the cake. Trace the provenance of the hundreds of magnificent English country homes and palaces and you will likely find funding from all three. And even Joseph Goebbels must have cast an envious eye on the propaganda which saw Britain market its empire as one conferring fair play, decency and the rule of law on conquered nations.

No. Any sense of pity for the plight of the British and their economy is misplaced. They deserve everything they are getting.

The opium trade collapsed when the Chinese realized it was cheaper to grow their own than import British.

The slave trade was abolished in 1833 by Act of Parliament which, scandalously, saw the slave owners compensated by what remains the largest UK government bond issue. Superb research by University College, London confirms that the slave owners included not just the land barons but also the local vicar and that nice little old lady on the corner.

But colonialism, with its crown jewel India, was to take far longer to defeat.

And this is where Margaret Bourke-White comes in. A Cornell graduate fascinated by documentary photography, she cut her teeth at Fortune and in 1936 was the first woman photographer at LIFE magazine. In 1941 she became the first female war correspondent on assignment in Russia during the German invasion and documented German morality at Buchenwald in 1945. This was one very resilient reporter.

Hindus and Muslims having been at one another’s throats for millennia she went on to document the violence occasioned by partition and the creation of Pakistan, but it was her image of Mahatma Gandhi at his spinning wheel in 1948 which will forever speak to her genius. She made the photograph in Gandhi’s hut just hours before his assassination.

Gandhi had set himself two seemingly impossible tasks. Breaking the armed occupation by King and Country and resolving the issues between the warring Hindu and Muslim tribes. A graduate of my alma mater University College, London, where he read law, Gandhi early on set himself the task of evicting the British from India. The catalyst which sparked his desire was the denial of a First Class seat to a brown skinned man and eviction from the train when he refused to move to Third Class. Yes, this was appropriately on the predecessor of British Rail. The British were unceremoniously kicked out of India in 1947.

Gandhi’s second goal, religious peace, was the cause of his death, one of his own Hindu caste shooting him at point blank range in protest. The Muslim-Hindu fight continues to this day over a worthless piece of land in Kashmir.

One of the greatest political images of the twentieth century.

A day later she was making her way to the Mahatma’s funeral when her bulky Crown Graphic plate camera was snatched from her hands. Mercifully, one Henri Cartier-Bresson was also on that assignment, his Leica in his pocket. He relayed back to LIFE the iconic images of the funeral though it’s amusing to relate that he did not take them. Finding himself with too low a perch amongst the vast assembly, he handed his camera up the crowd for an unknown mourner to take the snaps.

Bourke-White’s superb image lives on, a testimony to the power of the pen (and the loincloth) over the sword.