Category Archives: Photographers

Germaine Krull

Book reviews, Photographers

A photographer of great breadth.


Self portrait, 1925. Click to go to Amazon US. I get no payment if you do that.

I have written before of my distaste for the term ‘Woman photographer’. How gender has anything to do with the quality of the work beats me and, were I a woman, I would feel mightily offended to be included in a show of ‘Women photographers’, for that would suggest I needed gender bias as an excuse for avoiding honest competition with my male peers.

Germaine Krull needs no such gender-specific excuse for her work, much of it in the 1920-1939 period, is as good as it gets. Looking at her images you can see that Cartier-Bresson studied them as a child because he takes over where she left off, many of his early snaps from the 1930s bearing a striking resemblance to Krull’s work. Reportage is a dominant theme, but reportage with a strong eye for composition and drama.

If you click through to the Amazon link, above, be sure to look through the ‘Look Inside’ section where a truly amazing selection of images is reproduced. If you like what you see, buy the book which comes along with a scholarly biography, as you might expect of MIT, the publisher. What MIT is doing publishing a monograph on a great photographer beats me, but we should all be grateful that their massive endowment is being put to good use. It beats export of intellectual property to China, through all those ‘guest’ students from Beijing busy scurrying off with our technologies.


Place de l’Etoile, 1926.


Eiffel Tower, 1926.


Cocteau, 1930.


Woman in a slip, ND

Krull’s natural sensibility was that of a liberal and it shows in her work. Quite how anyone claiming to be ‘conservative’ can ever take good pictures of people mystifies me. In fact I challenge you to name one good conservative worker in the genre. What would they do – go to the mansions of plutocrats to picture them with all their possession in the manner of suck-ups like Slim Aarons?

The Krull book is expensive but Amazon lists any number of used ones for much less, which is how I bought mine.

Gordon Parks and fashion

Photographers

A surprise find.

Gordon Parks (1912-2006) lived a full and productive life, doing much to raise awareness of the poor, not least during his years at FSA with the likes of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Marion Post Wolcott.

What I did not know is that somehow this talented man managed to gain access to the exclusionary 1950s world of fashion photography, well described in the NY Times Lens Blog.

While the monochrome work is rather imitative of the style of Irving Penn, with everything super sleek and ultra defined, the color work is an absolute revelation. Parks graps the essence that sparse color is good color, as seen below. The upcoming book on his work is something to look forward to.

Another London

Book reviews

The book of the show.

For an index of all my book reviews click here.

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

‘Another London’ ran at the Tate in London July 27 – September 6, 2012 and the book will be available in the US March 5, 2013, though you can order it from Amazon UK now.

It is excellent.

This book is especially poignant to me as it roughly ends – 1970, there’s little content after that – with where I started taking London street snaps (1971 – 1977) before immigrating to the US. My point is that every street snapper should be doing this sort of work. Why? Because even my 1977 efforts are now instant history, impossibly dated in the light of the great changes London has seen in the past 35 years. As the rate of change accelerates, a street snap taken in any major city today will be history ten years hence.

You can download a free PDF of my book, Street Smarts, by clicking the picture below.

Click the picture to download my book.

City surroundings and architecture have never been more ephemeral and every good street photographer has something akin to a duty to document that which he sees around him, for it will be gone before he knows it. And he needs to do this before the world is taken over by Starbucks, McDonald’s and Apple stores.

Fred Herzog

Photographers

Street snaps in color.

Fred Herzog (1930 – 2019) is an Austrian-born street photographer who did much pioneering color work on the street of Vancouver in the 1950s and 1960s.

Click the picture to go to Amazon US. I do not earn any click-through money.

His gentle views of street life, generally in the poorer parts of town, use color effectively, the emphasis being very much on the use of color than on the selection of dramatic moments.

If, like me, you believe that most street monochrome work is a cop out, the photographer being incapable of controlling color, then this book is for you. Others working in a similar style during this period include Helen Levitt and Saul Leiter.

The Radical Camera

Photographers

A fine show at the CJM.

Sammy’s, New York, 1941. Photo by Lisette Model.

Once upon a time unobserved street photography, high angles, low angles, crazy angles, was unknown. Until, that is, the New York Photo League (1936-51) came along. From the Depression to the Red Scare, these New York photographers, mostly poor, mostly Jewish mostly left-wing, redefined how we see. So much so that whereas their work was shocking and new back then, today we think nothing of the unposed street snap which they popularised.

San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum has an outstanding show of some 150 original images taken by this group of photographers who changed how we see. It has just opened, runs through January 21, 2013, and is highly recommended for those of the street snapper persuasion.