Category Archives: Photographers

HCB – The early years

Bio, Photographers

The master of surrealism.

There is no rule, when it comes to painters and photographers, as to when you do your best work.

One school of thought has it that you peak in your twenties, all sturm und drang, ready to fight the world and its evils. Another has it that you age like fine wine, the greatest work done before the Grim Reaper drops by.

There are no rules. No generalizations.

Take Raphael (dead at 37, too much partying). In that short span he never created anything less than perfect. Or Caravaggio (39 – whoring, boozing, fighting), each of whose handful of canvases was perfection itself. And Modigliani (36, general excess and illness), every work just so.

Then, at the GR end of the spectrum, you have Monet (86) who only every got better as a visit to L’Orangerie in the Tuileries Gardens of Paris confirms, your head spinning, those ephemeral water lilies all around. Or Leonardo (67), his head bursting with ideas and creating great art to the very end. Or Picasso, whose frenetic output ceased on his death at 92.

There are no rules. No generalizations.

Henri Cartier-Bresson was the man who made me a follower of photography, at an age when I could not even afford a camera. This master lived a very long life yet gave up photography in late middle age. As the remainder of this piece shows, there’s an argument to be made that he in fact had said most of what he wanted by 1939, aged just 31.

The Kensington Public Library, not far from my parents’ London home, had a fine collection of photography books – meaning books of pictures, not of gear usage – and the Dewey system being what it is one book in the 770 section was the first to catch my eye. That book contained HC-B’s early work, and by ‘early’ I mean images made before June 1940 when the Germans captured him and locked him up. I must have been about 11 at the time and was reasonably well schooled in the Impressionists with a smattering of the High Renaissance thrown in for classicism’s sake. And I had never seen anything like it before. The work was astonishing and I knew then and there that I wanted to take pictures like that.

HC-B had studied painting under André Lhote and the cubism touted by his teacher immediately translated into surrealism in his photographic work, started in 1929.

HC-B was 21 years old and he emerged fully formed. His images from the next decade redefined photography as we know it.

All images are © Magnum Photos.



Marseille, 1932.


The Quai St. Bernard, Paris, 1932.


Plasterers, Paris, 1932. How on earth do you improve on this?


Behind the Gare St. Lazare, 1932. A symphony in monochrome.


Brussels, 1932. The acme of surrealism.


Hyères, France, 1932. The Decisive Moment defined.


Tuscany, 1933.


Valencia, 1933.


Madrid, 1933. An image of unforgettable power.


Barcelona, 1933. Rare wit in a man seemingly devoid of humor.


Spain, 1933


Trieste, 1933. An image which, for me, always fortells Germany’s concentration camps.


Valencia, 1933. Maybe the greatest cubist/surrealist image ever created on film.


The Shoe Fetishist, Natcho Aguirre, Mexico, 1934. Reportorial and utterly surreal.


Hyde Park, 1937, as the Gathering Storm beckons.


By the Seine, 1938. The image of France that started my photographic odyssey.


The last days of the Kuomintang, Shanghai, 1948. A rare post war image
that recaptures the dynamism of ‘The Plasterers’, above.


While sparks of his austere pre-war vision were to recur through the remainder of his long life – HC-B died in 2004 aged 96, though he gave up photography in 1975 – the fecundity of the pre-war years was never recaptured. The post-war images trend, for the most part, to the purely reportorial, the pre-war surrealism largely forgotten. Some aver it’s because HC-B was wealthy, the heir to the Bresson thread works which had made his parents rich. He did not have to try hard. I do not subscribe to that belief. He worked like a dog all his life, traveling the globe for the big picture magazines, always at the center of the action. The death of Gandhi? Mao Tse Tung’s overthrow of Chiang Kai Shek? The Paris riots? HC-B was there. Maybe the relative ‘prettiness’ of the images demanded by Life and the like diluted his vision? But if you want to see that vision in full flower, look no further than his images of the 1930s.

Perhaps the worst advice HC-B ever got was from fellow Magnum snapper Robert Capa:

I’m not interested in documenting. Documenting is extremely dull and I’m a very bad reporter. When I had an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, my friend, Robert Capa, told me, “Henri, be very careful. You must not have a label of a surrealist photographer. If you do, you won’t have an assignment and you’ll be like a hothouse plant. Do whatever you like, but the label should be ‘photojournalist’ “.

He should have stuck to surrealism.

David Douglas Duncan

Photographers

A great photographer passes.

The New York Times published a fine obituary of David Douglas Duncan who died yesterday at the great age of 102.


Click the image to go to the obituary.

Duncan was famous for two things. His coverage of the Korean War (still unresolved after almost 70 years of American bungling) and his documentation of Picasso. Duncan chose culture over commerce, moving to the south France in 1962. Every day makes me increasingly think I should emulate his decision.

Duncan was renowned as a Leica photographer. In the image above he has a 400mm f/6.8 Telyt mounted on a Leicaflex SL. Leitz honored his Korean work with four special Leica M3 bodies, numbered M3D-1 through -4, fitting each with a custom adapted baseplate rapid winder which subsequently became a standard part which would fit any later Leica M2 without modification, becoming the Leicavit. Duncan’s M3D bodies sell at auction for over $1 million and you can bet they are confined to rotting in some jerk collector’s china cabinet.


One of Duncan’s M3D cameras.

Interestingly, while Leica dominated the reportage marketplace in the 1960s, Duncan unwittingly sealed their fate by adapting early Nikkors from Nikon to his M3 bodies, they were that good. These were made in a rangefinder mount for Nikon’s S series of excellent rangefinder cameras (the Leica M’s finder was far better, however) and once Nikon grafted on a prism and added a flapping mirror the Nikon F was born in 1962 and the Leica was toast, now sold to hedge fund managers and anti-talents like the Kardashians.

The Nikon F was tougher, there was no complex rangefinder to go out of alignment, you did not need viewfinders for anything shorter than 35mm or longer than 135mm and the lenses were as good or better than the contemporary Summicrons, Elmarits and Super Angulons from Wetzlar. I mostly use Nikkors of that vintage on modern Nikon Dx bodies and can attest to their wonderful optical and mechanical qualities. David Duncan had a great deal to do with Nikon’s (and Canon’s, for he also grafted their lenses onto his Leicas) success. The ensuing competition between the two great Japanese marques continues to this day, and all photographers benefit from it and from Duncan’s experimentation.

The University of Texas houses his archive and you can see more here.


Duncan with HC-B at the Picasso
Museum in Paris, May 25, 2000.

Paris 1976

Bio, Photographs

With the grain master.

This journal seems to have hit a bit of a film streak recently, so here’s more of the same.

In the 1970s, the height of the 35mm film era, Ansco made a film named GAF500 which was a color slide film rated at a nominal 500 ASA. Given that most slide snappers were using Kodachrome II (25 ASA) or Kodachrome X (64 ASA) at the time, this was quite a statement.

The film’s fame owes much to the work of French photographer Sarah Moon who jumped on its creative possibilities which perfectly matched her impressionist – nay, pointillist – photography style. Pointillisme was originated by that most special of French painters George Seurat in the 1880s. Dots of color replaced continuous tones and the results were electric. Maybe his finest work is ‘A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte’ from 1884 and you have zero excuses for not seeing it for it resides in all its magnificence in The Art Institute of Chicago.


La Grande Jatte in Chicago. The canvas is huge at 7′ x 10′.

At this time in my life I had already long decided to abandon dreary, failed England, where I had grown up and graduated in 1973 from University College, London, and had my eyes firmly set on the New World and America, a reality that came to closure in late 1977. But having been an ardent Francophile for the past 15 of my 26 years on earth, a visit to Paris was first called for. I had already devoured Proust’s magnum opus ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ not once but twice, had enjoyed a passionate affair with Impressionist painting, based on my readings of John Rewald’s magnificent books, and had maybe two hundred of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s images committed to memory.

What causes this flashback is not any great love of tea or madeleines (I dislike the first and rarely eat the second) but rather my son’s trip tomorrow to Paris with his school as part of his French studies. He will stay ’embedded’ with a French family – no English allowed! – for two weeks, half in Strasbourg, Alsace on the German border, the other half in Paris. Strasbourg with its overweening Germanic culture leaves me cold, but Paris ….

Returning to the Divine Sarah, I packed one roll of GAF500 on my trip in 1976, much inspired by her work. The rest was all TriX which is about all I used back then. Why mess with perfection? The greatest monochrome emulsion ever made. I doubt I had taken more than a handful of color snaps in my life a that point, but I did find GAF500 in my Leica on the obligatory trip up the Eiffel Tower and one of the snaps made there came out rather nicely, the essence of all that is French, looking into the fine restaurant atop the Tower.


Atop the Eiffel Tower. Leica M3, 35mm Summaron, GAF500.

So the next three weeks I will be living vicariously through my boy, Winston, whose namesake WSC was once asked how he managed to tolerate DeGaulle’s endless grandstanding in London during WW2. “He is my cross of Lorraine to bear”, WSC replied. Expounding on his theme, he added that a world without French culture, cuisine, couture and women would be a far worse place. Churchill wisely chose the south of France for his retirement, abandoning drafty, cold, rainy Chartwell to the tourist hordes. Here’s more of the same:

That week I spent in Paris was magical and I do not recall taking one bad image. This trio from the Tuileries Gardens about sums it up:


Tuileries Triptych. Leica M3, 35mm Summaron, TriX.

May Winston have as good a time.

Vive La France!

The New Hudson

Book reviews, Photographs

1950s American automobile advertising.

As a kid growing up in London I learned two important things when visiting my dentist, whom I always thought of as the Kensington Butcher:

  • Avoid British dentistry at all costs. Just look at their teeth.
  • Americans bought a new car annually.

The first realization was brought home forcefully as immigration to the States brought with it access to proper dental care. It is unusual to hear American dental professionals excoriate a predecessor’s efforts, yet I heard that in abundance about the Kensington Butcher’s work.

The second came from the National Geographic magazines on display in the KB’s waiting room, waiting time in which made my many hours in US Immigration Offices pleasurable by comparison. Those Geographic magazines, despite their small format, featured beautiful advertisements for American cars and the clear sense was that an annual upgrade to the latest model was quite the thing for the aspiring economic climber.

That thought saw acquisition, many years later, of an amusing book of 1950s US automobile advertising named Cruise-O-Matic, which shows Detroit’s many creations of that wonderfully prosperous Eisenhower era. Photography was still a nascent force in car ads, meaning that most of the illustrations were beautiful air brushed paintings, the better to show off the special appeal of that year’s model.

Here’s one of my favorites, for a 1950 Hudson:

If the exotically elongated lines of this magnificent sedan seem too much to believe, they are. The artist has taken considerable liberties with the vehicle’s proportions as this contemporary photograph shows:

Cruise-O-Matic remains available in a reprinted version and you can buy it here.

Niko J. Kallianiotis

Photographers

Fine images of urban decay.

WaPo just featured this photographer in a piece titled ‘Portraits of the fading American dream’ where he documents urban areas of Pennsylvania which have fallen into decay. That’s the great thing about the American Way. As industries and regions fade, Americans move to a better place, leaving behind those too old, too shortsighted or too unambitious to improve their lot in life. Natural selection, if you like. Americans have little sense of history or spirit of place.


Click the image for the article.

You can see more of Kallianotis’s work at his Instagram feed.