Category Archives: Photographers

Skrebneski – Portraits

Book reviews, Photographers

A flashback.

An email from a friend had me rushing to my bookshelves – sadly now dispersed over three rooms owing to their seemingly organic growth – in search of my Victor Skrebneski picture book. “You have to look at these” was the general thrust and, in fairness, I had probably not looked at ‘Victor Skrebneski – Portraits, A Matter of Record’, for ten years. Used copies can be had for a trivial sum on the web.

The only snag was that I couldn’t find the book. Whereas my own pictures are ordered in studied manner, my workshop tools each have an allocated space, DVDs reflect a near manic filing method replete with bar codes and scanners, when it comes to picture books my approach is one of sheer chaos. By design.

The goal is simple. By adopting a random approach to arranging these, the sole determinant of position being whether the height of the book will fit the shelf, the experience of looking, of searching, of surprise, is enormously heightened. The trade off is that if you tell me to find a book by, say, Minor White or Cecil Beaton, well, prepare yourself for a wait as the chances are that I will not have the faintest idea of its location.

Not that I mind being asked. Not at all. Because you can bet that in the frenzied search I will come across several other long lost friends that deserve an airing.

Victor, Victor, Victor, where on earth are you?

My first pass was a goose egg. No Skrebneski to be found in the ancestral manse.

Tried again the next day. Now I remember. The book was huge. Not huge in the sense of the modern novel or biography, whose quality is invariably in inverse proportion to the quality of its content. No, huge in the sense of big. Not thick. Big.

So I reset the grey matter to search for Big, which helped not one whit. There are lots of Big photography books. Lots of tall shelves to accommodate them. But persistence won the day and there it was, Skrebneski’s book of portraits of famous people.

To this day the photographer makes his home in Chicago, that haven of civilization in the culturally arid desert that is the mid-west. True, the climate is abominable, but all these famous people must have made the pilgrimage to Skrebneski’s studio for a reason, and it was clearly not for the weather.

Now if you usually think of fashion photographers as purveyors of candy and fantasy, I agree. However, Skrebneski’s portraits are on a higher level.

The reason is, of course, self evident once you peruse his work. ‘Portraits’ is a collection of his ‘black-turtle-neck-dark-lighting-period’, for lack of a better cliché, and one of the most amazing aspects of the pictures is that in many you can see the subjects’ eyes …. but you cannot see their eyes. Meaning they are lost in unlit sockets. Somehow this conspires to make them more dramatic, conferring a sense of ‘Guess Who I Am?” on the portrait.

The strong sense of déjà vu is fomented by the fact that I was a young man growing up as a photographer when these were taken. I can recognize fully half of the subjects today, the book having been published in 1978. It’s no accident that the index is not referenced, so you have to follow along diligently, flipping back and forth, if you want to put a name to a strange face. Skrebneski is playing along with his style which is, once again, “Who Am I?”

Let’s see. An Audrey Hepburn, her face in such extreme close-up that you cannot recognize her.

That iconic image of Miss Blow Up, V. Redgrave. Every red blooded male recognizes that one.

Orson Welles, haughty, threatening, mischievous.

Diana Ross at the top of her game. Gorgeous, powerful.

Karen Graham. The Estee Lauder Woman. So used to the lens she seems almost bored. Wow!

Brooks McCormick Jr. and his threatening German Shepherd. (Have you noticed that nearly all the killer dogs have German names – Rottweiler, Doberman, German Shepherd, Weimaraner?)

Georg Solti. A wonderfully warm man whose orchestral rehearsals I used to attend frequently when a student. The price of concert tickets was beyond me back then.

The ageless Patrick Lichfield, society photographer with great hair.

An ice cold Hubert de Givenchy followed by the radiant warmth of Oscar de la Renta. Personalities displayed in their couture.

Cliff Robertson looking for all the world like Francis Bacon. Probably those unlit eyes remind me of Bill Brandt‘s work.

Irving and Mary Lazar. The cold eyes of the one and the almost equally cold eyes of the other. Not people to mess with.

Truman Capote looking …. well, like Truman Capote.

And finally, Fernando Bujones. When I saw Bujones dance Giselle the ‘Bujonistas’, as the press dubbed his followers, were whooping and hollering. So naturally I joined in, and what are you going to do Lincoln Center? Arrest us?

I have named but a few. It’s a book worth tracking down.

Political photography

Hall of Shame, Photographers

Anti-American photojournalist’s writings exposed.

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, art critic Richard B. Woodward writes about how famous Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker fabricated a story to suit his anti-American mind set. No surprise that German Hoepker proudly boasts of making his home on Manhattan’s upper east side.

The picture in question shows five people in Brooklyn chatting on the waterfront on September 11, 2001, while smoke billows from the World Trade Centers behind them.

Specifically, and scandalously, Hoepker wrote:

“It’s possible they lost people and cared, but they were not stirred by it.”

And here’s more of his tripe:

“Four and a half years later, when I was going through my archive to assemble a retrospective exhibition of my work from more than 50 years, the color slide from Brooklyn suddenly seemed to jump at me. Now, distanced from the actual event, the picture seemed strange and surreal. It asked questions but provided no answers. How could disaster descend on such a beautiful day? How could this group of cool-looking young people sit there so relaxed and seemingly untouched by the mother of all catastrophes which unfolded in the background? Was this the callousness of a generation, which had seen too much CNN and too many horror movies?”

Needless to add, Hoepker’s fraud was aided, abetted and amplifed by none other than, yes, you guessed it, The New York Times, whose Frank Rich called the image “shocking”. You can imagine how much research went into that opinion. Any publication with ethics policies would fire Rich for his drivel; I imagine a promotion is probably in store for him for getting circulation and anti-American feelings up.

Hoepker’s fraud was exposed when none other than one of the people portrayed in the picture wrote to Slate magazine stating:

“Had Hoepker walked fifty feet over to introduce himself he would have discovered a bunch of New Yorkers in the middle of an animated discussion about what had just happened.”

Subsequently, the woman in the picture – a professional photographer, no less – also contacted Slate with a poignant and moving rebuttal.

The Wall Street Journal writes succinctly that “In effect, (Hoepker) has Photoshopped (the image) in his mind so that it now belongs neatly in a more contemporary storyline of this nation’s culpability for world unease”.

Well written.

While I disagree with Woodward’s earlier statement that digital trickery has “…not eroded the truth value of photographs…” – I have shown many examples of Photoshop fraud in this journal which should make everyone sceptical – it is heartening to see people taking a stand against America’s detractors, not least against those who would, in the same breath, proffer inane apologia for all that was good and great about all those moral German industrialists during WWII. You can substitute ‘German industrialists’ with ‘terrorists’ and ‘mass murderers’, and it works just as well.

Update 9/102014: Hoepker’s cynical exploitation of tragedy for personal gain, his self-serving response notwithstanding, is further addressed here.

Update July 12, 2024:

Mercifully Hoepker has finally done the decent thing and passed on to his German heaven. A first for him, doubtless.



A bad man passes.

His crass profit making from one of America’s greatest tragedies confirms that no German should ever lecture Americans on what doing the right thing means. Good riddance.

Keld rediscovered

Photographers

The Great Dane is back.

I first learned of the sparse, severe work of Danish photographer Keld Helmer-Petersen from early issues of Leica Fotografie magazine from the 1950s. His focus on carefully composed details of ships, ropes, man made items for the most part, was appealing for its clarity of vision and very sparing use of color. It has aged a lot better than Danish furniture.

While ‘lifestyle’ magazines leave me cold for the most part – why would you pay for marketing after all? – there’s one that is head and shoulders above the others. Indeed, as the only way to get it is to be the registered owner of one of their products, its hardly marketing at all. After all, you have already paid up. And the best thing about their products is that no one will know what you have. If you like gauche Rolexes, look elsewhere. That magazine is put out by the makers of one of the very few mechanical items more lovely to behold than an early M Leica. It is called Patek Philippe and I urge you to get a Patek if for no other reason than to enjoy the publication:

Most noteworthy in its editorial policy is the frequent focus on art and photography. The currrent issue (Volume 11, Number 7) has, in its large pages, superb portolios of the work of Don McCullin (of Viet Nam war photography fame) and Keld Helmer-Petersen. An equally fascinating article looks at modern makers of sundials. Add substantive pieces on French sculptor Camille Claudel and Francois Junot, a Swiss maker of mechanical objects (see the cover, above), and you have content not likely to be found in the pages of some nouveau riche-targeted hack job put out by ‘luxury’ car makers extolling the virtues of their plastic upholstery and the latest in internal decorating.

While Keld-Helmer Petersen made his living as a commercial photographer, it’s his 1948 book ‘122 Colour Photographs’, which I am lucky to have in the library at home, that made him famous. When everyone was working in monochrome, he turned to color because, in his words “You have to think of colour as form….”. It helps that the interview is conducted by a famous photographer, the Englishman Martin Parr, so it is neither banal nor trite.

It looks as if his ‘rediscovery’ may encourage Petersen to publish again and I urge you to place the book on your short list.

And just in case you fall for Patek’s tag line “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after if for the next generation”, let me disabuse you of that belief. The reality is that it’s like owning a rangefinder Leica, meaning a cleaning and overhaul every five years at horrendous cost. These are intensely mechanical devices, after all. The next generation had better hope I don’t go belly up if it wants mine (the Patek, not the Leicas; I’m selling the latter). Leicas get obsoleted. Pateks do not.

Joseph Sudek

Book reviews, Photographers

A master of lyrical monochrome.

There is so much to like in the Aperture book ‘Josef Sudek – Poet of Prague’ that it’s hard to know where to begin. Sudek (1896-1976) spent nearly his whole life in Czechoslovakia. From 1940, inspired by contact prints from large negatives he devoted himself to this way of working, using a cumbersome large format camera and tripod.

None of this was made easier by the fact that he had lost his right arm as an army soldier in WWI, yet no allowances need be made in looking at his wonderful pictures. What a life. Surviving the first war only to see his country dismembered by the greedy Germans, Poles and Hungarians while cowardly French and English politicians stood by and watched. Surviving twice more, this time WWII and the Cold War, and finally enjoying the fame that was deservedly his late in life.

The reproductions are superb, none finer than those of his series of St. Vitus Cathedral taken in the late 1920s. The narrative is outstanding, written by people who both knew and worked with him.

My favorite quote of his, on page 44, goes as follows:

“It would have bored me extremely to have restricted myself to one specific direction for my whole life, for example, landscape photography. A photographer should never impose such restrictions upon himself.”

The book can be bought for 50% of its original hardcover price, which was $40, from Powell’s Books and should be in every photographer’s library.

A Blast from the Past

Photographers

Extraordinary recreations by a Russian photographer.

Run, don’t walk, to see the work of Dmitry Popov, a Russian photographer who has meticulously recreated scenes from the first 60 years of the American Century for a car magazine. Each features period automobiles together with actors in period clothing recreating the time and feel of a place (mostly) in America, none better than this one at the Golden Gate in San Francisco. The man reading the San Francsco Examiner, leaning on his magnificent Buick, is doing so on September 3, 1939 – the war that America won for an ungrateful Europe would not start here until some 27 month later, when Japanese tourists visited Hawaii.

Popov writes:

“Every photo shoot is preceded by thorough research of the era. When and under what conditions a particular vehicle model was produced sets the theme. The majority of my photographs are the result of a classically arranged photo shoot. The actors, costumes, hair, makeup, setting, and props are all fashioned to the standards of the era. Although each of the photographic series on each site is presented only partially, the collection taken in its entirety tells a story. The term “Photo-Clipping” would best describe my collection. The series of pictures tells a “moving” story using still images. Most of photographs on this site were taken between 2002 and 2004 for a Russian automotive magazine Autopilot produced by the Kommersant Publishing and Golf Style Next magazine, Moscow, Russia.”

This is story telling in the classsic mould of Life or Picture Post magazines of the era, when photojournalism was king and television in every home was still a distant idea in RCA’s corporate brain.

You don’t have to like cars to enjoy Popov’s fabulous work, though it doesn’t hurt if you do.

Highly recommended.