Category Archives: Photographers

Norman Parkinson

Book reviews, Photographers

A very British glamour.


Click the image for Amazon. I do not get paid if you do that.

It’s fitting that this book of Norman Parkinson’s images for Vogue and Queen has his wife Wenda on the cover. As he relates:

“Whatever style and elegance might be attributed to my work, most of it was Wenda Rogerson’s influence”.

And style and elegance are abundantly present in Parkinson’s work. What distinguishes this book from other Parkinson tomes I have featured here is that finally a real and successful effort has been made to reproduce his colour work properly. In 1981 he said:

“I’ve been slowly slipping out of black and white and now I only take it under sufferance as a sort of back-up to my color snaps”. Thank goodness for that because his color work is a standout.

It’s a splendid book and shows well how he transitioned from the more formal monochrome work of the ’40s to his great color images in the ’70s. Recommended, regardless of your interest in fashion. My copy ran under $20 from a remaindered bookseller but even at Amazon it’s a bargain.

Steve McCurry and Pirelli

Photographers

A new look.

Steve McCurry is best known for his third world photography for National Geographic. His work is exceptionally good and he is a seemingly tireless and much travelled photographer.

So to learn that McCurry is photographing the 2013 Pirelli calendar comes as a surprise. The models are all photographed in Rio de Janeiro and the overall look is dark and sombre. Quite a break with Pirelli’s tradition, and how McCurry did not get mugged and robbed in this most dangerous of cities is a mystery, especially as much of the photography was done in the scandalous slums overlooking the city where gangs and guns rule. The recent movie Fast Five does an excellent job of showing the favelas up close, and is also immensely entertaining.

McCurry’s style of working is the antithesis of the motor driven yob who generally typifies fashion snappers in the public’s imagination. No long hair, two-day beard, bad language, torn jeans or reversed baseball cap, he works quietly and methodically, mostly using a tripod, and is most charming, self effacing and gentlemanly. There is obvious rapport with his models who presumably have seen it all by now, and I found it especially touching that he makes the time to show his subjects their images on the LCD screen of his camera. In many ways, McCurry’s fame exceeds that of his models, yet he makes no issue of it.

The video is well worth watching, with McCurry using a digital Hasselblad and a loudly advertised Nikon D3x – gotta repay all that free gear! No photographer in his right mind would use the garish stock straps which come with Canon and Nikon gear, but I suppose if sponsorship money is involved, that’s a different matter. And inept as the straps are, if your free camera falls to the ground who cares? It’s the only jarring note in an otherwise interesting documentary piece.


Click the picture for the video.

While the final images shown in the video seem over processed to my eye – too much action on the Vibrance and Saturation sliders if you ask me – they are striking, especially those of Karlie Kloss toward the end. It’s also pretty special to see that all of these affluent women are doing so much to help the poor and sick. What a fine way to leverage fame to bring attention to third world issues.

McCurry blogs two to three times a month with very generous helpings of his wonderful photographs. You can see his blog and sign up for the RSS feed here. His work is no stranger to poverty and you will see many images of the poor of India, Pakistan, northern Africa, Russia and so on. Sadly there is no shortage of similar subjects for his fine eye.

The Old Man – 1951-1966

Bio

Family album snaps.

These biographical columns run annually and you can see the lot by clicking here.

The Polish word for the verb ‘had’ is miaÅ‚, pronounced like a cat’s meow, and gives rise to that old joke that every Pole is like a cat. He ‘had’ but no longer ‘has’. It’s one familiar to my generation whose parents saw WWII take the lives of loved ones and material possessions, never to be recovered. The lucky ones amongst us had Christians for forbears, which improved the odds of birth, our parents enjoying a better chance of being saved from the German killing machine. At the same time, Polish Catholics need to be deeply ashamed of our forbears whose country was by a considerable margin the most anti-Semitic on earth. Why do you think most of the gas ovens were in Poland?

A while back I had taken the precaution of scanning all those fading photo albums – the subject of the very first column here in 2005 – to preserve them for the future, and came across a couple of interesting snaps of my Old Man and I. Now he would shudder at the appellation ‘Old Man’ but it has just the right tinge of disrespect from one who rues his parents’ abject stupidity. Here’s the Old Man, married to my mum the Countess (every Pole has royalty for parents, and you can call me Count), knee-deep in horses, acreage, homes and servants – that was the order of importance then – with an aggressive foe on his border. Not only does that putative enemy announce his intent to rape, pillage, steal and destroy, he writes it all down, broadcasts it loudly and continues to do so for six years before finally invading on September 1, 1939. And my parents do what exactly? Why, they keep all their coin and securities in a couple of banks in Warsaw and Krakow and all their capital assets – the acreage, the homes, the coal mines – in Poland. Not exactly the cutting edge in risk diversification.

Now when the snaps below were taken I was 3 and 9, respectively, so it’s not like my image of my parents was exactly fully formed and well thought out. Heck, I just wanted to read a book and, later, take pictures. But they are interesting.

The first, and I have no idea who took it, is at Lyons’ Corner House in Marble Arch, London, where the OM would take me for a treat now and then. London? Because in a rare burst of intelligence, even my folks had twigged that living under Russian occupation in Poland might not be a good thing, and five years of speaking German had not exactly been fun, so they had high tailed it in 1947, with the proverbial clothes on their backs. Fast forward to 1955 and the chocolate cake which I seem to be anticipating in the snap. It’s such a Proustian moment of remembrance that it gives me the intensest pleasure today to do a like favor for Winston, my son, though our choice of restaurant has a few more stars. Winston looks forward to the treat and I enjoy his emotions as much as the Old Man likely enjoyed mine. Mercifully, Winnie’s dad had the foresight his parents lacked in their choice of destination, exiting stage right from losing Britain to a vibrant United States 35 years ago. Maybe one of the waitresses snapped the picture? Her timing is impeccable because it says so much about childhood and the sense of wonder and amazement which pervades it.

The second is no less extraordinary for its juxtaposition of emotions. This was done in one of those photo booths, invariably placed in railway stations, where you inserted your half-crown (about $1 then), rushed in, were blinded four times by the flash after drawing the little privacy curtain, then waited for ages outside for your black and white passport sized pictures to emerge, damp. The Old Man was generally on a bit of an authority trip – too bad he hadn’t taken like authority over the family’s capital in the spring of 1939 – so I rather fancy he told me to smile and I, ever a dork, did my best. As you can see, the pictures are all about him, and I am appropriately out of focus. Still, he was clearly not a man to be messed with.

Anyway, he died in 1966 when I was 15, so I barely really knew him. Destroyed by the stress of fighting in the Resistance and greasy Polish cooking he succumbed at 60 to coronary thrombosis before Christian Barnard and his successors invented transplants and the coronary bypass.

Given that I was never allowed to think of him as my ‘dad’, but was always reminded that he was ‘Father’, I can’t say I miss him. What a way to bring up a child. Authoritarian, cold, distant, domineering, severe, strict. Where I was interested in art, architecture and science, his talk was solely of chivalry and war. How he expected this to make an impression on a kid with a severe squint, flat feet and scoliosis, beats me. I was closer physically to a young Richard III than to Richard the Lionheart, and that vicious squint from youth leaves me without three dimensional vision to this day, meaning you really do not want me pouring the red wine at dinner where a white tablecloth is involved. I have missed more times than I care to relate. So if I tell you that when my son Winston calls me ‘dad’ it evokes the biggest possible frisson of pleasure, you will understand. Heavens forbid that I would have addressed the OM in that casual manner, and as a result the last thing on this earth I expect from my son is any of that hierarchical respect.

But the Old Man did leave a couple of fine mementos in the guise of these snaps. As for the lost fortune, I got over it and made my way, though I still rue the idle life of a dissolute, spendthrift wastrel that was rightfully mine. And, unlike for the Old Man and his wife the Countess, I made my own bed to lie in, rather than through the more traditional route of choosing my parents well.

The Old Man, left, 1932, with his manservant, preparing for a spot of hunting.
Nothing like a bit of slaughter to regale the lads over a few pops in the evening.

These pictures provoke so many mixed emotions, but parental love is most certainly not one of them.

* * * * *

Click here for an index of all the Biographical pieces.

Instant: The Story of Polaroid

Book reviews

Book review.

From Chapter 5:

This is a gripping read, not least for nuggets like the above where Edwin Land, the creator of the Polaroid camera, forsees the cell phone as we know it today.

Inventors like Land come along once a century. In the 19th it was Thomas Edison. In the 20th, Edwin Land.


Click the book for Amazon US. I do not get paid if you do that.

I got the Kindle edition and the pictures are both poorly reproduced and wrongly formatted. Get the hard copy version.

I have experienced the thrill of seeing a black & white print appear in a tray of developer under a red safety light. I enjoy the immediacy of digital almost daily. But nothing compares with the sheer magic of watching a Polaroid SX-70 color image appear in your hand some sixty seconds after the print has emerged from the camera.

This book is a must read for anyone interested in photography and awed by a genius who made the last great photographic invention of the analog era.

Bob Gorman

Photographers

An old friend passes.

Few simple things in life afford me as much pleasure as taking the pup for his evening ramble two blocks down the road to drop in on Bob Gorman at Weimax.


Bob Gorman, RIP.

To Peninsula regulars, Weimax is as good a wine shop as it gets. None of the mass merchandising of the big chains or the soullessness of the supermarket. The people here know you (and your dog) by name, are always happy to make time and chat, and no one minds waiting while locals shoot the breeze.

For me a trip to Weimax with Bert the Border Terrier always meant one thing. A chat with Bob on the latest happenings in the world of photography. We would share exhibitions we had seen and strongly felt opinions, and often exchange books from our burgeoning photography libraries. Recently he loaned me a monograph on Lee Miller and I replied with one from my collection. Bob loved photography and he had a rare eye for beauty.

I last saw him just before Thanksgiving when he explained he was off camping in the redwoods of the Santa Cruz forest off Highway 35, close to the Pacific, with the obligatory few bottles of favorite red, with food to match. Bob lived well. Today I dropped by with a recommendation for a new book only to be told by his assistant:

“Bob does not read any more.”

“Aw, c’mon, everyone reads. And Bob reads more than most.”

“Bob had a stroke at Thanksgiving and passed away.”

Bang. A brutal message, no punches pulled. But how else to put it? I was floored.

Just like that. No warning, no alert, no tell-tale hints.

Bob had moved on.

There’s nothing I can say.

Bob’s Flickr page survives him. It’s a repository of the many, many things he saw, loved and felt he had to share. Bob was a great enthusiast, and he knew all that is good and right, be it Paris, Italy or his beloved Bay Area. To get a sense of his eye, take a look at his pictures from Le Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris. His Flickr pages – where he posted under the pseudonym ‘Romaneye’ – are wonderful resources for those looking for subjects. (Yahoo account needed to login).

Here’s the last snap Bob posted to his Flickr pages which contain thousands of his images – it’s a study of the Olsen Residence designed by architect Donald Olsen in 1952. Bob and I both loved the work of Julius Shulman and the modern International Style architecture school, so ably portrayed here. I cannot think of a better way of saying ‘Goodbye’ to a dear friend.

Wherever he may be, you can be sure of one thing. Bob is still busy snapping the many things of beauty his eye could never resist.