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.

A famous British photographer.

Somewhat forgotten today, whereas the light of her peers from Beaton to Penn continues to shine brightly, Madame Yevonde (Yevonde Middleton) was the ‘go to’ society and advertising photographer for the best part of half of the previous century, starting in 1920. She pioneered the use of the three plate Vivex color process in the early thirties, where three primary color images were successively exposed, then merged at the printing stage. Conceptually similar to Technicolor used in the movies, this process resulted in highly saturated colors in a world used to black and white.

If you were a society woman in 1930s London, then Yevonde was your photographer of choice, as you sought to memorialize your flouncing about in flimsy fabric dressed as a Greek goddess. The pictures verge on kitsch, but it is high quality kitsch.

Madame Yevonde. Click the picture for the Madame Yevonde web site.

Lady Milbanke as Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons (!)

1930s advertising shot using the Vivex process.

Click the first picture for the web site, which is a lot of fun.