Category Archives: Photographers

Wall Street – Financial Capital

Book reviews

Book review.


Click the image for Amazon.

Nearly a decade ago I made mention of Gambee’s other Wall Street book, Wall Street Christmas.

The book in this review is every bit as good, replete with magnificent photographs of the grand facades of Wall Street buildings and many of their interiors. The finance industry has long known that if you are to accrue great wealth at the expense of your customer base, you have to present an image of carefully crafted respectability, meaning marble and mahogany. The execution of this belief is abundantly on display in Gambee’s work.

Even if you are no great fan of the banksters who every so often bring the global financial system to its knees, you will enjoy the photography in this splendid book. Mine came from Amazon but took some three months between order and arrival, so be prepared to wait. It’s worth it.

Mark Henley

Photographers

Outstanding vision.

After the Germans had gassed you in one of their ‘shower rooms’ in Auschwitz, your gold filled teeth were extracted and the metal removed and deposited in a Swiss bank vault. It remains there, unclaimed, to this day and aggregates, by some estimates, $1 trillion in free capital which is the underpinning of the Swiss banking industry.

British photographer Mark Henley, who calls Switzerland home, has done a masterful job of portraying the amoral institution which is Swiss private banking, in a (shockingly poorly attributed – see if you can find his name) tremendous documentary piece published in Bloomberg News.

You can see more of Henley’s work by clicking the image below – beware that some of his images are very reluctant to appear on the poorly engineered Panos website. Try dialing up his bio as an example.


Click the image for the website.

Hollywood in Kodachrome

Book reviews

Superb.


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An outstanding book with some 300 gorgeously reproduced images of the stars of the golden age of Hollywood. The care and attention to detail evident in the making of these images are really special.

Personal favorites? Why Lauren Bacall of course (on the cover, aged just 21) and Loretta Young, two of the most sohisticated beauties of the era. Today only one actress remotely has comparable presence – Angelina Jolie. Be sure to catch her in Maleficent, a retelling of the Sleeping Beauty tale by none other than Disney, of all studios. She deserves to be in this splendid book.

Kodachrome of the time came in roll and sheet film, the latter as large as 11″ x 14″ and in ISO speeds of just 8 (daylight) and 10 (tungsten), meaning lots of very bright and very hot lights to make the stars look just so. We have it easier today, but with fewer truly glamorous stars.

Robert Capa: The Paris Years 1933-54

Book reviews, Photographers

Fine photojournalism.

When the effects of America’s Great Depression swept across Europe, the revolutionary fervor of the French manifested itself in strongly held opinions. As the author of this book, Robert Lebrun, puts it “You were either ‘for’ or ‘against’. There was no ‘neutral’ “. Many of the street demonstrations of the time were captured by three of the greatest photojournalists the world has seen – David Seymour, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa. You could not hope for better documentarians and this tome includes many of Capa’s images which ran in the vibrant French press of the time. Later sections deal with the far better known images from the Spanish Civil War, WWII and Viet Nam, but it’s these early Parisian images which really resonate.

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If you love great photojournalism – for goodness knows it no longer exists – this book is for you.

6:30 am

Book reviews, Photographers

53 images.

In 2003 Malibu photographer Robert Weingarten took a picture daily from his oceanside home toward Santa Monica Bay using a long lens and the same composition. The result is magical and if you thought Rothko could paint this is far better. Available very inexpensively – click the image – and exquisitely printed. 53 of his images are reproduced and you will not believe the variety.


Click the image.