Category Archives: Photographers

Edward Hopper and photography

Book reviews, Paintings

Even if you don’t care for painting, check him out.

I have written before about the American painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967) and of both the love I have for his work and the strong influence he has exerted over my way of seeing as a photographer. For Hopper is that most photographic of painters. And I don’t mean photographic in the dry, sterile, rather sick sense of the photorealists (gee, if you are going to kill yourself making a painting look like a photograph, why not just photograph the bloody thing and save some time?). No, I mean it in the sense that with his people-in-the-city paintings there are all the elements of photographic composition with the painter’s singular advantage that distracting clutter can simply be blended out with some brushwork.

Case in point:

Edward Hopper, Two on the aisle, 1927

You get a touch of realism in the ‘decisive moment’ timing of the picture, a touch of surrealism in the detailing of the woman’s face and a touch of Degas (also a fine photographer) in the back of the woman in the box on the right. The perspective is gently skewed in the best Bonnard tradition.

Invariably, when it comes to people, Hopper trends to the lonely vision of the American Experience, as here:

Edward Hopper, New York Ofice, 1962

I know exactly how he felt.

Leica M3, 50mm Summicron, Kodachrome 64, Anchorage, 1978

Nor is that vision unique to American cities:

Leica M3, 35mm Summaron, Kodachrome 64, Paris, 1974

There are many fine books on Hopper. One I recommend is “Edward Hopper: Light and Dark” by Gerry Souter, Parkstone, 2007. Barely published and already remaindered, it’s replete with many illustrations (over 140) and Souter’s text makes for interesting reading, devoid of pomposity. Any photographer looking to sharpen and refine his vision could do worse than plonking down $25 for a remaindered copy.

Click the picture for Amazon.

Italy from Above

Book reviews

A superb book.

The most beautiful women.

The world’s greatest art.

The finest fashions.

The most beautiful cars.

The magic of opera.

The best wines.

The most sublime architecture.

The deepest possible contempt for government and taxes.

The realization that you work to live, not vice versa.

And if that wasn’t enough, why not throw in the most gorgeous landscapes?

That is Italy and to say that the photography in this large book is spectacular is to do the photographers – Antonio Attini and Marcello Bertinetti (names to conjur with!) – an injustice.

No fewer than 423 pages grace this book which comes with a DVD of the Alps. Aptly enough, the foreword is by Franco Zeffirelli, and if you haven’t seen a Zeffirelli staging of an Italian opera, well, you haven’t lived.

Mine came from Edward R Hamilton, a tad shopworn, for $19.95, DVD included. Sure, they don’t take web orders but at that price, what’s your hurry? Get an envelope and a stamp. And don’t ask. Just go out right now and get this fabulous book.

As an adjunct, if you want to learn how Brunelleschi worked his magic on the dome in Florence, add this while you are at it.

Real Chicago

Book reviews

Book review.

One of the reasons I so like Chicago is that I have never had to visit it in the winter. Add the fact that is is the quintessential American city, has mid-west standards and values, not to mention America’s finest architecture, and you have a place well worth visiting. No one who has lived there could remotely think of New York, by contrast, as anything but a European city.

The title of this book says it all. Divided into decade chapters from the forties to the nineties, it comes as no surprise that the best work here is in the first two chapters. When you realize that five frames per second is discounted as slow in the world of modern DSLRs, think about the working stiff with his Crown Graphic and a couple of film holders. He generally had but one chance to capture the decisive moment, and you see lots of that in this book. Something about these old pictures speaks differently, too. Maybe its their dignity, grace and composition. They move you in the way modern photojournalism seldom does.

My remaindered copy cost all of $15 and I recommend you add this book to your photo library.

And if you think I have glossed over the decades of machine politics and corruption in America’s second city well, I learned everything I ever needed about Chicago’s law enforcement from the succinct words of the humorist P. G. Wodehouse. “At least when you buy a Chicago cop, they stay bought”. Honor and integrity. Got to love that in your local police force.

You can see my library of photography books by clicking here.

For a fabulous evocation of what the city must have been like in the early post war years, click here.

Leni Riefenstahl

Hall of Shame, Movies, Photographers

To know her work is to understand.

Few would dispute that the greatest movie about the Olympics is Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl’s 1936 masterpiece chronicling the Aryan master race in the 1936 Olympics. It shows perfect specimens of the nordic man-god ideal variously chucking the discus, running like a gazelle (albeit slower than the schwartzer untermensch Jesse Owens), and generally being, well, white and superior. Sure it’s dated (whitey is unlikely to win much of anything in the modern sham known as the Olympic Games) but the photography is superb.

The movie follows on from one far greater, perhaps the most evil film ever made, Triumph of the Will. Watch it with an open mind and you, too, will be swept up in the cleverly managed tension which builds throughout the movie until her slightly less than Aryan leader finally makes his appearance for the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg. The style is one of a succession of still images rather than that of a movie. Between Riefenstahl’s adulation of this bad man and the Propaganda Ministry’s financing, she produced the greatest fake documentary yet made. I was forcibly struck by just how plagiarized her work has become in watching the old version of Spartacus with Kirk Douglas and just about any of the tedious Star Wars epics from Geroge Lucas (a man who has never met an actor he can direct). Look at any of the crowd scenes of the armies of bad guys from either director and you have a shameless rip off of the best/worst in Riefenstahl’s propaganda masterpiece. Look at the post war The Third Man and you have all her camera angles writ large by director Carol Reed. She left an indelible mark on the documentary genre.


Hitler’s favorite film maker supervises filming

Sure.

She was just following orders.


A big lens and no moral compass, Riefenstahl participates enthusiastically in the 1934 Nuremberg Nazi party rally.

They should have whacked her at Nuremberg – where could have been more appropriate? – along with all the others in 1946, and have saved the world another 50 plus years of her denials and apologia. Her total absence of shame rightly confines her to this journal’s Hall of Shame.

Update August 30, 2024:

This Guardian review of a new documentary about this evil woman confirms what I wrote back in 2008, above. They should have whacked her at Nuremberg.