Category Archives: Photographers

Tracking Charnier

Movies, Photographs

The French Connection.

This post contains spoilers regarding the conclusion of the movie The French Connection II so if you have not seen the movie and it’s on your list, quit now.

The original The French Connection was released in 1971 and was directed by William Friedkin. Famous for its car chase under the elevated subway, it’s a far lighter movie than its 1975 successor, directed by John Frankenheimer. Both movies address the smuggling of heroin through the French port of Marseille and the sequel has some truly horrifying footage of a heroin addicted Gene Hackman nearly dying from his captors’ ministrations.

Suffice it to say that the last ten seconds of the second movie are some of the most dramatic on film, culminating in the death of the drug kingpin Alain Charnier, splendidly acted in both movies by the distinguished Spanish actor Fernando Rey.


Montpellier to Marseille.

My son Winston spent an extended sojourn in France during the first half of the year, extending his French studies with a tour of Europe, centered in the beautiful ancient town of Montpellier, some 70 miles west of Marseille on the Mediterranean Sea, and he came up with the idea of finding the exact location from which Hackman fires the deadly shots at the evil Charnier. He did this using his memory of the documentary style ending, no GPS involved, but his image of the shooter’s location comes with GPS data courtesy of the iPhone he used. This is from the shooter’s viewpoint, though Charnier’s luxury yacht is missing:


Winston’s image of Charnier’s location.

And here are the exact coordinates:


The site of the climactic closing seconds of the movie.

Tremendous fun and encomiums to Winston for his diligent tracing of a great movie location.


Hackman, as ‘Popeye Doyle’, fires the killing shots.

The Fight to Save Googie

Photographers

American optimism under threat.

A splendid article in the New York Times relates how preservationists are fighting to save Googie architecture, the whimsical style of the sixties largely found in Los Angeles.

While nothing quite beats the Union 76 gas station in Beverly Hills, which is not mentioned in that article, the splendid photography is worth visiting.


The Googie Union 76 in Beverly Hills.
Click the image for the article.

Degas revisited

Photographers

A fine early photographer.

Some two decades ago I wrote about Degas not just as one of the greatest painters of the 19th century but also as a fine photographer.

His ‘L’Absinthe’ painting of two denizens of the late night crowd zonked out on the poisonous drink had a significant effect on my seeing:


L’Absinthe, 1876.

When photographing North Beach in 2013 I very much had this painting in mind when I snapped a modern version in The Saloon, one of the oldest buildings in San Francisco and a rare survivor of the 1906 earthquake and fires:


North Beach Absinthe, 1913. Nikon D3x,
35mm f/1.4 Nikkor AF-S.

To learn more of Degas’s photography you can download the catalog of the Met’s 1998 show by clicking the image below, as intensely a photographic painting as you will find:


Degas. Place de la Concorde. Click the image for the catalog.

Eliot Porter – Intimate Landscapes

Photographers

Free, from New York’s Met.

The Metropolitan Museum of New York has a substantial volume of free downloads addressing the work of significant photographers. One of the finest is the catalog of the 1979 show of 55 of Eliot Porter’s landscape studies, the first show of color photographs ever at the Met.

Porter tends to focus more on intimate details than broad panoramas, the images frequently printed on the dark side, and the gentle appeal of his beautiful abstraction is a joy.


New Mexico. Click the image for the download link.