Category Archives: Photographers

The most fun I ever had taking pictures

Leica, Photographers, Photography

Before digital came along, that is!

The seventies were a truly miserable time to be in England. Administrations alternated between the senile Conservatives, devoid of ideas and wedded to the status quo, and the Labor party, its members fuelled by the politics of envy. A weak Conservative Prime Minister, Ted Heath, caved to the blackmailing strikes of the miners. He alternated power with the socialist Harold Wilson who went along merrily with the trades unions funding his party, doing whatever it took to stay in office. Neither ‘leader’ had personal convictions worth a damn.

I had graduated a mechanical engineer from University College, London in 1973 intent on working for Rolls Royce Aircraft. There was only one small snag. The year I graduated Rolls went bankrupt, as ingested birds shattered the innovative carbon fiber turbine blades in its RB211 engine, rendering it useless. The engine was intended for Lockheed’s superb Tristar passenger jet and Rolls almost took Lockheed down with it. Well, the alternative for an engineering graduate who actually wanted to be an engineer was to work for some big government institution or become an academic. Hardly palatable alternatives for one dirt poor, ambitious young man. Realize that this was a country that accorded the sobriquet “engineer” equally to the fellow installing railroad ties and to the chap at Rolls Royce. Still, I suppose the railroad ties did not snap like so much brittle chocolate.

So I decided to emigrate to the greatest country on earth, but there was a small matter of qualifications. The business of America is Business, and I didn’t know a balance sheet from an income statement. Taking advice from a smart merchant banker my mother somehow steered me to, I decided to learn about finance with another degree on the wall. It’s a damnable comment on the English educational system of those times that the very concept of an MBA did not exist, whereas in America it had been around for the best part of a century. It wouldn’t do now, would it, to teach business? Muddling through was the preferred method, preferably aided by good choice of parents.

Well, I had had the privilege of working with Americans as they visited Britain, over on tours from New York or Boston or Chicago, and I learned more from them about business four years firm than in my whole life until then.

The last thing I did before taking that one way flight was to visit Paris. This was in 1977. I had no savings. My most precious asset was my Leica M3 and its 35mm Summaron lens with that clunky viewfinder appendage. So I borrowed fifty pounds from a sister, got on the ferry and next thing I was at Gare du Nord looking for my seedy garret. My first goal was to visit the Louvre, the Jeu de Paume and the Orangerie to feast on three of the world’s greatest art collections. A related interest, of course, was to take pictures, so the M3 and a few rolls of film came along.

There was no draconian security in those days, of course. Photography was permitted everywhere and no one really minded very much. Especially if you were reasonably discreet. The Leica and I were a seasoned pair by now. We had been recognized time and again in the photographic press, culminating with the award of the Photographer of the Year prize by Photography magazine, the leading UK monthly, and, better yet, had been published in Leica Fotografie, the house organ where all things Leitz were good.

To whom did I look for inspiration in those days, photographically? Well, that’s easy. Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Kertesz, Brassai. In other words, I was a street photography junkie, though I didn’t know that word at the time …. Make it fleeting, let serendipity arrange the forms just so and click. Leica. 35mm lens. TriX. D76. A combination that had seen thousands of photographers through for years on end.

The Louvre was a magical place back then. I. M. Pei, great architect that he is, had yet to con gullible Parisians with the ugly pyramid that defaced one of the world’s great spaces, much as the Pompidou museum had already done a few blocks away. Care to revisit the latter and see how well it has aged? I don’t think so.

The forecourt of the Louvre before I. M. Pei. Leica M3, 35mm Summaron. TriX/D76.

The first and prevailing sense one had on entering the museum through its vast facade was the smell of oil paint. Artists were permitted, encouraged even, to bring their oils and easels and practice by copying the works of the masters. The lighting was, of course, magic, like only Parisian lighting in the spring can be. And as this was before everyone had money, before equality had raised its ugly head, the museum was far from the zooed place that modern art collections have become. In the words of the philistine American to his wife, with but one hour to catch a flight, confronted with a priceless Italian church to view: “OK, honey, you do the inside and I’ll take the outside”. Drive-by tourism. No, people had more time to savor art back then.

What passed for fashion in the seventies. Mona at the Louvre. Leica M3, 35mm Summaron. TriX/D76.

I forget the details, but suspect that I visited the Louvre on all but one day of the week I spent in Paris. And I also took pictures, the Leica by now a part of me. Second nature.

And until good, responsive digital cameras came to market, that’s the most fun I ever had making pictures.

Early porn. Louvre. Leica M3, 35mm Summaron. TriX/D76.

In case you wonder, this painting is of Gabrielle d’Estrees and one of her sisters in the bath, c. 1595, painter (mercifully) unknown. Gabrielle d’Estrees was the mistress of that old Frog, Henry IV. In her hand she holds a ring given to her by the king as a sign of their bond, and her sister is pinching her nipple indicating she is pregnant with the king’s child. Yeah, right. The surrealistic background image is of a servant sewing baby clothes.

Click on the link in the left hand column for details of the book that resulted. That will take you to a written presentation along with my commentary, so you can hear what I really sound like!

Still movies

Movies, Photography

Some of the best still photography is in movies

Once I realized that the carpal tunnel problems I was having, meaning wrist pain when working my hands hard, were not going to go away, I sold all my woodworking equipment and set about converting the woodworking shop to a home theater, with the following result:

Completed in time for last Christmas, I have maintained my commitment to watching a movie a night ever since and must say I have rarely had so much fun. 1,000 watts of surround sound and a 100” screen are not that difficult to enjoy!

So with some one hundred movies added to the growing collection at home, I stopped to think what was it that I enjoyed most on the big screen, forcing a narrowing down to just three movies.

Easy.

Luchino Visconti’s ˜Death in Venice” (1971)
Sergio Leone’s ˜Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968)

and

Walter Hill’s ˜Streets of Fire” (1984)

On reflection, the common thread running through these films includes a surpassingly simple plot (writer goes to die in Venice and becomes infatuated with a young boy, gunman seeks revenge, tough guy rescues former flame from kidnappers), magnificent music (Gustav Mahler, Ennio Morricone, Ry Cooder and Jim Steinman) and stupendous settings (Venice, the great American West, 50s Chicago).

But the surpassing attribute of all three is easily identified and is the primary reason I am so attracted to these masterpieces.

Stunning still photography.

Still photography? In a movie?

Death in Venice is little more than a series of stills, making up a movie. Lush beyond belief, it’s what makes Visconti such a favorite at the old abode.

Once Upon a Time in the West emulates the Visconti style, or maybe I should say that Visconti emulates Leone, the western having been made first. Some close-ups last for minutes (minutes!) on the screen.

But Walter Hill’s Streets of Fire is the most photographically arresting of the three. Set in a permanently dark, wet Chicago, mostly under the elevated subway (the “El” in local parlance), it’s all neon, reflections, brooding atmosphere.

To illustrate, here are some stills from the great cimematographer Andrew Laszlo:

The bad guy makes his first appearance in the music hall, intending to kidnap the star heroine:

Outside the police station, the good guy is seen driving by in his hot rod:

Abstract expressionism at its best:

The good guy returns, ever the loner, after rescuing the girl:

A wonderful shot of the diner around which much of the action centers, seen through the support struts of the El incredibly atmospheric:

Before the final confrontation between the forces of good and evil, Hill pulls off an overhead tracking shot which equals that incredible one in ˜Once Upon a Time in the West” where the camera rises way above Claudia Cardinale’s head to show the new western town being built. Here Hill may not have the advantage of Morricone’s soaring score, yet he does something magical from a photographer’s perspective. He starts with a shot of the bad guy holding up an air horn to summon his evil team:

Then, as the camera rises, he switches focus to the evil hordes assembling in the background, the change in focus transforming the bad guy’s face into a death mask:

The movie has a nice symmetry to it, ending where it started with the heroine giving a driving performance of a rock number in the broken down hall. Both are by Jim Steinman – the fabulous ‘Nowhere Fast’ to open and the even better ‘Tonight is What it Means to be Young’ to close this masterpiece of a movie:

And there’s that neon again, the background to her singing reminding one of nothing so much as a work by the futurist Marinetti.

As for the ending lyrics, beat this:

Let the revels begin
Let the fire be started
We’re dancing for the restless
and the broken-hearted
Let the revels begin
Let the fire be started
We’re dancing for the desperate
and the broken-hearted

Let the revels begin (Tonight is
what it means to be young)
Let the fire be started (Before
you know it it’s gone)
We’re dancing for the restless
and the broken-hearted
Let the revels begin
Let the fire be started
We’re dancing for the desperate
and the broken-hearted

Say a prayer in the darkness for the magic to come
No matter what it seems
Tonight is what it means to be young
Before you know it it’s gone
Tonight is what it means to be young
Before you know it it’s gone.

Finally, the picture of the heroine on stage with a foreground of clapping hands, a scene which might as well have been lifted from one of Hitler’s Nuremburg rallies in the late 1930s:

The only thing wrong with this movie is that there is so much of this kind of thing that much is easily missed on a first viewing, but I cannot think of a better reason for an aficionado of film to rush out and install a home theater.

As for photographers, it’s simply a must.

Update December, 2017:

Streets of Fire is finally available on BluRay. Amazon has it.

Competition lives

Photographers

And it helps improve the breed, as ever

When I read the other day that Mamiya was quitting the photography business, having blown not a few Yen in developing its medium format digital camera, I confess my first reaction was unease. While Mamiya may have been guilty of poor market analysis – Canon’s 35mm format sensors being the equal of just about anything medium format offers at a fraction of the price – it is never a good thing to have less choice.

Take a look at today’s monopolists and their uniformly execrable products and customer service – Microsoft’s operating system, Adobe’s Photoshop, Intuit’s Quicken, the handful of oligopolistic US defense manufacturers, the US Government (the worst monopolist of all) – and you get the idea.

However, I thought a more analytical approach might make better sense of Mamiya’s demise, so I dug out the old 1976 Wallace Heaton Blue Book, the photography equipment catalog published by a famous London camera store, and did some figuring.

Here were your choices some thirty years ago:

First, 35mm SLRs: Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Leica, Rollei, Zodel (Zodel?), Olympus, Minolta, Miranda, Yasicha, Petriflex, Praktica, Mamiya and Exakta were listed in that order.

35mm rangefinder cameras included Leica, Minolta, Yasicha, Canon, Agfa, Dignette (what?), Nikon, Rollei, Olympus and Konica.

No digital cameras, of course.

Seventeen manufacturers all told.

Then I went to the B&H web site to see what’s out there today.

SLR film cameras: Canon, Contax (now defunct), KonicaMinolta (kaput), Leica, Nikon, Pentax, Phoenix, Sigma, Vivitar and Voigtlander.

35mm film cameras: Canon, Contax (now defunct), Fantasea, Goko, Kalimar, KonicaMinolta (now defunct), Leica, Lomographic, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, Rollei and Zeiss.

Digital cameras: Bushnell, Canon, Casio, Epson, Fuji, HP, Kodak, KonicaMinolta (gone), Mamiya (gone), Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax, Rollei, Samsung, Sanyo and Sony.

Make that twenty four active manufacturers, or some 40% more than there were thirty years ago. And many of these are consumer electronics companies first (Canon, Casio, Epson, Fuji, HP, Panasonic, Samsung, Sanyo and Sony), and camera makers a distant second.

So while Canon could do with some serious full frame sensor competition, the capitalist world as seen through the metric of choice of photo gear seems to be ticking along just fine. Those that fell by the wayside, KonicaMinolta, Mamiya, Miranda etc. just failed to make products enough people wanted, which is as it should be.

Look, the alternative is GM – a company making products no one wants with its hand out to the government, aka the taxpayer’s pocket. I prefer a good bankruptcy myself.

Boxers

Book reviews, Photography

Book review

I confess that I approached ‘Boxers’ by Carol Huebner Venezia (an American photographer, the exotic name notwithstanding) with great anticipation. The publicity talked of how the photographer had got inside the psyche of the professionals in Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn where many famous fighters had trained. Further, the publicists intoned, she counterbalances the tough end of the sport with pictures of fighters in Italy. I quote:

“Boxing offers those working class men who learn the sport a slim chance of realizing the American dream. But the price for social standing and above-average income is often broken bones and chronic health problems. In contrast, in Assisi, in the center of the Italian boxing world, boxing is about athletic competition and the art of the sport.”

Well, based on what I see here, she never made the remotest emotional contact with her subjects in either location. Indeed, some of the best pictures have no boxers in them – one of a young child in the ring and another of swinging sacks, or whatever you call those things, that boxers pummel. Nary a boxer in sight. Great pictures though.

Despite the high fallutin’ text, based largely in academic drivel, the woman’s inability to get inside the brains (or what’s left of them) of her subjects is mystifying. It’s not as if she didn’t try, as the pictures span over a decade.

Let me quote from the introduction just to reassure you I am not making this up:

“If we look at the group of pictures as a whole, there appears to be a clear impulse to movement both in the single photographs and as a sequence”. What? Nearly every picture in the book is stiffly posed in a pale imitation of August Sander. Sander is much lauded in the introduction let it be said, and the comparison only goes to show the photographer in a negative light.

One of the few snaps with movement is of the swinging medicine (yes, now I recall what they call them) balls in a deserted gym. Why these should be moving when there is no one in sight beats me, but it’s a neat idea, I suppose.

Here’s another Doozie from the intro:

“The objective approach of this photography avoids pathos or any explicit critique of society”.

Please.

So that’s where our higher education monies are going? To pay boobs to write claptrap like that? What a travesty. Time they got a real job and learned to write English.

Lots more of the above garbage is to be found in the introduction. No need to dwell there.

On to the pictures.

There are a scant thirty all told, one of which, the one so badly exposed that no facial details can be discerned, also appears on the cover. Not exactly what you would call value in a $30 paperback. Fully half of these are static portraits, some in what could be a studio setting, of half naked guys who, absent their gloves, could as well be construction workers. Or fit investment bankers, come to think of it. The remaining pictures are generally so irrelevant to the genre that I really wonder why the woman bothered? Maybe she liked to go to Gleason’s for the vicarious pleasure of seeing all those muscles, the camera as an excuse, but the guys in the ring clearly did not accept her as one of their own. Heck, she’s probably the wrong gender and color anyway.

I would like to say something positive about this book. I cannot. I just feel I have been ripped off.

Update May 18, 2009: This book is so unquestionably bad, the photography so regurgitably awful, that I finally consigned my copy to where it belongs. The garbage bin. Good riddance.

Harry Callahan

Book reviews, Photographers

Book review

Harry Callahan (1912-1999) left a substantial body of work, yet I cannot help thinking he rues the fact that what he is remembered for most is the many pictures, frequently nudes, of his wife Eleanor.

And while he was an enthusiastic experimenter, be it with double exposures or light traces, these wonderful early pictures set a standard and style imitated, but seldom equaled, by many since.

It’s not that Eleanor is some sort of model ideal of a woman, whose modern image in men’s eyes dictates exaggerated breasts and miniscule hips. Quite the opposite. She is powerfully built, a woman of the mid-West, with solid bones and generous hips. A Real Woman. And does he do her justice. Whether it’s the powerful, face-on image showing a determined chin and direct gaze, or the many nude-in-landscape studies which define the genre, his photographs of his wife are never less than special and deservedly define his oeuvre.

The Chronology of his life in this book, published by Bulfinch, goes a long way to illustrating his restless mind and thirst for experiment. I quote:

1938 – Purchases first camera, a Rolleicord 120.

1941 – Begins to work with a 9 x 12 Linhof Technica (sic) camera.

1941 – Moved by the sharpness of Adams’ (sic) prints, trades enlarger for an 8 x 10 camera and begins to make contact prints.

1943 – Buys 35mm Contax single-lens reflex camera (sic – can’t they get anything right?) and begins two-year series of photographs of pedestrians.

The latter rival, by the way, anything done by Walker Evans in this genre, adopting a far grittier approach.

This is curiosity at its best and not mere fascination with equipment as Callahan takes lots and lots of pictures along the way.

He starts exhibiting in 1941 and thereafter it seems there is scarcely a month when a show or publication does not come to market.

Rightly so, for there is much to be learned from the mind of this true original, whether from the early monochrome or later color work.

Highly recommended.