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.

A site with over thirty years of self portraiture.

I wrote about photographers’ propensity for self-portraiture a while back.

Check out the work of Arno Rafael Minkkinen who seems to have made a career of the genre. That is not meant in any sense to be derogatory as his photography is simply outstandingly original.

The site design is sheer agony to get through, with big pictures constantly reverting to small originals, but it’s worth the effort.

To wet your appetite, here is an extract from the site’s brief Preface:

I consider myself to be a documentary photographer. If you see my arms coming up from under the snow, I am under the snow.

But I also look at the world through the mind. “What happens inside your mind can happen inside a camera.” It is the line I wrote as a copywriter for a camera campaign before becoming a photographer.

From the July 21 issue of the Wall Street Journal.

These extracts from the article in the July 21 issue of the Wall Street Journal include some excellent advice from the greatest living nature photographer:

“Get up early. The best light is often at dawn, and animals and people are often at their best early in the morning.” Mr. Lanting often rises at daybreak to wander around his own backyard, snapping photos of birds and hoping to spot a bobcat or two.

You can read the whole thing by subscribing on line to WSJ.com.

A cruel, exploitative photographer without a shred of decency.

Diane Arbus, of course, is famous for having killed herself at the age of 48 in 1971. Since then, this unknown photographer’s work has sky rocketed in fame and value. Proving that nothing so much enhances the value of your work as suicide.

Which is not the same as saying that her photography is either good – it is not – or genuine. Indeed, few photographers have produced more shamefully contrived work than Arbus, which qualifies her instantly for the Hall of Fakes.

Arbus was smart. She cottoned on to the fact that the photographic intelligentsia was buying It, It being her cruel, exploitative view of a world seemingly filled with monsters, freaks and the deformed. There’s not another photographer who so cruelly mocks his subjects, distorting them this way and that, ridiculing them at every turn, without the least indication that she had either a heart or a conscience. It’s as if one of those poor fools who photographs beggars on the street suddenly acquired a taste for the bedside manner of the IRS and proceeded to put it to work in the local mental institution with a camera as a weapon.

Her work, then, is the antithesis of class, of decorum, of decency.

But face it. The intelligentsia, the taste makers, goodness help us, believed the exact opposite of what her pictures represented. Where there was poor taste, they saw insight. Where there was cruelty, they saw sympathy. Where there was depravity, they saw honor. Or said they did. She got away with it, until her lack of conscience eventually caught up with her, culminating in a miserable ending of slashed wrists and a drug overdose.

The best example of her fakery is perhaps seen in the contact sheet of the seemingly crazy child holding the hand grenade. Robert Frank, you cannot help thinking, would have pounced on this subject as an example of American depravity. Anything to knock the country that is his adopted home. At least his picture would have had some class. But taking a look at Arbus’s contact sheets you see, to your amazement, that this is in fact a very ordinary little boy playing with a toy. It’s just that in this one accidental shot he is grimacing just so and the whole thing takes on a look of insanity. A sweet, ordinary child, rendered crazy for the ages by the lying, dishonest vision of a supreme fake.

Don’t believe me? Then let me quote her for you and you be the judge:

“Freaks was (sic) a thing I photographed a lot. It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don’t quite mean they’re my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”

You can find her garbage on the web as I’m damned if I’m reproducing it here.

May we not see her like again.