Category Archives: Photographers

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.

Life Along the Line

Book reviews, Photographers

Splendid.


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

This book of O Winston Link’s extraordinary night steam railroad photographs improves on Steam, Steel and Stars of which I wrote over 5 years ago. The earlier tome remains available but is far costlier, for some reason, and is missing two things which makes the newer book better. The new one includes a handful of moving color pictures and a CD with recordings of steam trains made by Link himself.

This is the first I have read of his involvement in sound recording, an endeavor to which Link applied himself with the same intensity exhibited in his picture making. There’s an index to the recordings on Page 236 but zero information on the tracks once the CD is imported into iTunes. Try Track 4 to experience the immense power of a heavy steam locomotive working hard – a Class Y train moving coal trucks. Ideal background sound for any train enthusiast’s den. You can hear Link on Track 06 – he sounds remarkably like Groucho Marx! Recorded in June 1958, in the very last days of steam. The haunting, plaintive whistle of the big Y6-b can be heard on Track 07. Link’s recording technique is outstanding – for example try Track 08 where you can hear water dripping off the tunnel walls until the sound of the locomotive drowns everything out. The recordings make reference to photographs showing the trains in the locations where they were recorded.


Link’s assistant operates the giant Ampex tape recorder, with two helpers.

Nothing about Link’s efforts was easy. From the large view cameras, huge tripods, hundreds of flash bulbs, miles of cable, large power supplies and gargantuan tape recorders, this was a very focused effort indeed. Next time you make a color movie, sound track and all, with your iPhone think about what Link had to go through.


Steam at night. As evocative as it gets.

The above image is not only immensely moving, the work that went into it is well described and worth the price of the book alone.

Highly recommended. It bears repeating that you do not have to be a steam train nut to enjoy this book. All you have to like is great photography.

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.