A master of the candid photograph.

Before the Leica popularized the candid snap in the hands of the likes of Cartier-Bresson, there was Erich Salomon (1886-1944) and his Ermanox.

With f/1.8 lens and plates.

The lens was very fast for the time and the body took glass plates 6 x 4.5cm (2.4″ x 1.8″). Leicas came with an f/3.5 Elmar as standard, whereas the faster 50mm Leitz f/2 Summar was not introduced until 1933. By contrast, the Ermanox with its f/1.8 lens was first sold by Ernemann, a German maker, in 1924, so it’s not hard to see why Salomon favored it. 2 stops may not seem that much in the day of 6,400 ISO digital, but film was 5-10 ISO at best back then, a full 10 stops slower! In addition to the faster lens, the negative only needed half as much enlargement for the same size print compared to the Leica, reducing apparent movement blur and grain.

Clunky as the camera may be, with the plates meaning only one snap at a time, this German master made the best of what he had, and pulled off great photojournalistic snaps in the 1920s and 1930s before the Nazi killing machine chewed him up at Auschwitz. Salomon was a German Jew, training in engineering and law before devoting himself to photography, something we can all be grateful for.

I was vividly reminded of his work when contemplating the current spectacle of Europe’s evil, corrupt men (and now women) destroying all around them in the interest of self rather than that of their fellow human beings. They call this a Union?

Evil men, wondering how to safeguard their supply of brandy and cigars.

The picture shows various purported diplomats at the 1930 Second Hague Reparation Conference where the assembled victors of 1918 are trying to figure out how to squeeze dry what is left of Germany in the name of war reparations. Brilliant economic concept that – tax the poor into oblivion, drive them to extremism. Among the collected toadies are Louis Loucheur, French Minister of Labor, holding his hands to his eyes, the poor tired dear; French Premier André Tardieu wondering when the cognac would run out. Next is Germany’s Foreign Minister Dr. Julius Curtius, (all Germans are Doctors, it’s a well known fact), yet to realize that he would soon be so much chopped meat. Henri Cheron, French Finance Minister, is on the right, seated in the high-backed chair, hoping his mistress is in town.

What caused this flashback? After all, these were pictures I had first seen when knee high to a grasshopper. Well, just look what is being done to the poor nations of Europe right now by the rich ones. And it’s the same lot, with all their expenses paid by the taxpayer, residing in their fancy palaces, transported in chauffeur driven bulletproof limousines, with legions of servants, wondering how to best screw the taxpayer while preserving their life of comfort and sloth.

Former French Prime Minister Aristide Briand points to
Salomon whom he dubbed ‘The King of Indiscretion”. 1930.
Such a witty, charming rogue, that Aristide.

How sad that Erich Salomon was murdered by the same evil men whom he so ably portrayed. Truly a great photojournalist.

The first color photographer.

As a modern day physicist or mathematician, it’s no longer possible to be famous. Famous in the sense that schoolboys learn about your work and adulate your persona. As a child I was endlessly absorbed reading about the great physicists and mathematicians, and whereas most, when asked, could likely name just two, my ‘favorite’ was always James Clark Maxwell.

Sure, the man in the street had heard that Newton had a Eureka moment observing an apple fall from a tree and Einstein had something quirky to do with space and time and strange hair, but realistically he understood neither.

But photography was always the reason I adulated, and still do, Maxwell. Let’s get the man in perspective first. The American spacecraft Voyager 1 flew by Saturn’s rings in 1990 or so, confirming they were composed of particulate matter. Confirming, because that’s what Maxwell had calculated in 1857. No ordinary man.

Mercifully, for any photographer reading this, one of Maxwell’s enduring curiosities was the nature of color. He would spin his three colored disc and it would appear white once in motion. So it’s no surprise that this curious Scot caused the first ever color picture to be taken, in 1861. Wikipedia has a great description of how he had three snaps taken of a Scots tartan ribbon on monochrome film through red, green and blue filters, respectively. Projecting the three together with like filters over each of the three projection lenses yielded the first know color photograph. Just contemplate, for a moment, the thought process which gave rise to that realization and its method.

The first color photograph.

And is that not a thing of rare beauty?

As one educated as an engineer, I note that popular adulation of engineers is limited, as with physicists, to one or two men known to all. Brunel, Stephenson, Edison, von Braun, Wozniak. But for me the greatest engineer will always be the Englishman Michael Faraday for, had he not ruminated on magnetic induction, we would have a world without the electric motor, the same one that focuses the lens in your digital camera. And one James Clerk Maxwell would not have developed his theories of electromagnetism had not Faraday, perhaps the greatest experimenter ever, and one who made Edison look like a piker, led the way with his work. A rare case of engineering showing mathematics and physics the way. Faraday was, by 40 years, Maxwell’s senior ….

In our society which adulates divas who cannot tell pitch from tar and thinks Beethoven was a dog in those silly movies, give a thought to these titans of intellect.

Update: A reader has kindly pointed me to the work of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, a Russian chemist who did much to further Maxwell’s work.

Depression era masterpieces.

Click the picture for the article.

The New York Times’s splendid ‘Lens’ blog just published a few images from a newly discovered treasure trove from Roy Stryker’s Farm Security Administration documentation of the Great Depression. All the familiar names are there – Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, Russell Lee, Gordon Parks, Ben Shanh, Arthur Rothstein and Dorothea Lange. It seems that Stryker was concerned that his collection of images survive, and had parceled off a substantial subset to New York’s Public Library, just in case. It is this collection of some 41,000 prints, in addition to the 175,000 in Washington DC which the NYT is referring to. Its recent rediscovery provides a treasure trove of rarely seen images.

These are moving pictures but one, above, especially caught my eye as it’s by Marion Post Wolcott, that least known of the FSA’s photographers, yet one of the best. She left the FSA in 1942 after just three years, opting for children, hearth and home, and the photography world was the worse off for her departure. The definitive book on her life and works has been in my library for many years and remains available at Amazon US. You can see it by clicking the picture below. What distinguishes Wolcott’s work from that of her polar opposite, Walker Evans, is its sensitivity and grace. Where Evans is in-your-face, she is all restraint and caring.

Click for Amazon US. I get no click-through payment.

In that book there’s another version of the above picture which includes the man at the right, and it’s every bit as good:

And finally, perhaps her greatest picture. One can only wonder at the bigotry of the American south which had this sort of thing going on 74 years after Lincoln’s assassination:

It would be another 25 years before LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act into law which finally made this dreadful behavior illegal.

Marion Post Wolcott had a great heart to accompany her great eye.

An intense video.

This brief movie shows the dreamy images of Parisian fashion photographer Sarah Moon, and dates from 1993. It’s accompanied by her narrative, an intense, unpunctuated, stream of consciousness piece which works really well.

Moon pioneered the use of very grainy images, both monochrome and color, to convey a unique look in the fashion world.