Category Archives: Photographs

The Krays

Movies, Photographs

English gangsters..

The night club scene of 1960s London was dominated by two gangster brothers, the Kray Twins. Identical twins, Ronnie was seriously insane and Reggie just a tad less so. Each committed murders in public and ended up serving a life sentence in gaol.



Reggie and Ronnie Kray by David Bailey, 1965

While the brothers established a measure of respectability after opening an upper class night club which was a magnet to the knobs and actors of the time, they inevitably returned to their roots of psychotic violence and mayhem, their empire ending once they were incarcerated.

David Bailey’s superb portrait of the pair pulls no punches. They are in your face, the submissive Reggie and the dominant Ronnie looking ready to lay about them with whatever weapon came to hand. Bottle, lead pipe, knife, sword (!), gun. You name it. They were not fussy. Bailey grew up in the same poor East End of London as the Krays so he will have been particularly attuned to their make up. It shows.

Two excellent movies have been made about the Twins. The deeper psychological portrait is to be found in The Krays where the Kemp brothers from the rock group Spandau Ballet deliver insightful performances. The more recent offering, Legend, sees Tom Hardy deliver a tour de force performance, acting both brothers. The script is less nuanced but the movie is worth watching for Hardy alone.

Bailey’s picture haunts me to this day. The other week I was taking some studio portraits of a pair of Welsh Terriers owned by friends and, well, I couldn’t help but plagiarize Bailey’s composition. Buckley, the male at left is clearly submissive, while Tilly, the female is the dominant one of the pair.



Buckley and Tilly, the Welsh Terriers.
Nikon D800, 16-35mm AF-S Nikkor, Novatron strobes.

Welsh Terriers were bred to flush out badgers whose setts (underground homes) would cause foxhunting horses to break legs. You probably should not mess with these boys any more than you would with the Kray Twins.

Kodachrome reds

Photographs

Unique

Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of Kodachrome was the vivid rendering of reds. Just like early Technicolor in the movies.



San Diego. Leicaflex SL, 50mm Summicron-R.


Central CA. Leicaflex SL, 50mm Summicron-R.


DTLA. Leicaflex SL, 50mm Summicron-R.


Long Beach. Leicaflex SL, 50mm Summicron-R.


Central CA. Leicaflex SL, 50mm Summicron-R.


St. George, UT. Leicaflex SL, 50mm Summicron-R.


Chicago. Leicaflex SL, 50mm Summicron-R.


Santa Barbara. Leicaflex SL, 90mm Summicron-R. A beautifully balanced body/lens combination.


SoHo, NYC. Pentax ME Super, 28mm Super Takumar.

All scanned using the Nikon D800.

Bermuda

Photographs

Gorgeous.

Bermuda is a feast for the eyes and it’s probably impossible to take a bad photograph there. It’s even harder to take a good one, given the abundance of color and subject matter.

These are from a trip in August, 1999 and clearly affluence had reared its more than welcome head as my 35mm Summaron and 90mm Elmar had been upgraded and a 20mm Russkie lens added, but the Leica M3 remained. For once I switched from Kodachrome 64 to Ektachrome 64 and the slides have held up well, not fading one bit.





Lunch al fresco





The ziggurat pattern directs rain water to underground storage tanks



The ultrawide 20mm Russkie Orion lens was ideal for this sort of surrealist image



Siesta time


The island is solid rock so graves are above ground







Leica M3, 20mm Orion, 35mm Asph Summicron, 50mm Summicron, 90mm Asph Summicron, Kodak Ektachrome 64, ‘scanned’ with the Nikon D800.

Pictures from my Window

Photographs

Thank you, Ruth.

In 1978 Central Park Werst resident Ruth Orkin published a book of pictures titled A World Through my WIndow which depicted her small slice of the world. Taken from her window overlooking Central Park she captured a host of pictures of New York, New Yorkers and the changing Manhattan seasons.

My rather more humble abode at 310 West 56th Street west of 8th Avenue, a few blocks south, offered less glamorous vistas, but no less interesting. 14 floors up and three blocks west of 6th Avenue (“Avenue of the Americas” to tourists) it was high enough and set back enough to offer interesting possibilities.

As losing my Leica M3 to a chain snatcher would have killed me – these were among the worst years for personal safety on the streets of Manhattan – I bought an inexpensive Pentax ME Super with 20mm, 40mm pancake, 135mm and 200mm Super Takumar lenses. Loss of any of these to theft would be inconvenient but not heartbreaking. While the quality of the body was ‘iffy’ at best, the camera was small, unobtrusive and the lenses were fine. The minuscule 40mm ‘pancake’ was especially sweet.


Wooden water tanks abound on older buildings


Night vision


Water tank with pigeons


My local restaurant on 8th Avenue, when my bank balance approached zero. The southern Italian restaurant just behind, Patsy’s was (is?) a favorite Mafioso dining place.


The MoNY (Mutual of New York) building was on my west side on 7th Avenue. The spire announces rain/snow/fog and so on, and the temperature and humidity were alternatively displayed below.


MoNY on a frigid evening, a storm approaching


Detroit steel


Old and new


6th Avenue skyscrapers. No architect was involved in the design of these horrors.


Carnegie Hall on 7th Avenue


Sunset


Birds


Tanning, with pup

Taken in 1980-86, Pentax ME Super, 40mm, 135mm and 200mm Super Takumar lenses, Kodachrome, ‘scanned’ with a Nikon D800.

Kodachrome – the only excuse to use film

Bio, Film, Photographs

Gone, but not forgotten.

The Big Yellow God. Thus was Kodak known in the 1970s because you mailed your exposed Kodachrome slide film in a yellow mailer to Rochester, NY and time and the USPS permitting, you would get your slides back, beautifully mounted in 2″x2″ cardboard, in a yellow box, in a couple of weeks.


The Ektachrome outlier was their 160ASA/ISO speed demon!

In 1970 Kodak lost a trust busting suit which allowed only the BYG to process Kodachrome and the floodgates opened to independent processing shops who could afford the costly gear and crack the 17-step process, which included a couple of re-exposure steps to effect reversal of the image. Consonant with that old economic adage that “All control drives up price” prices crashed and Kodachrome became the most popular film on the planet. That explains the above slides lacking the Kodak imprimatur on the cardboard mount. They were processed by indie shops which had a faster turnaround.


The Kodachrome process.

While my color snapping had seen but one roll of Kodachrome exposed in Paris along with one of grain crazy Ansco/GAF’s 500, I no longer had a darkroom after taking my last TriX monochrome image and, quite frankly, I was bored to death with black and white. So why not the best? I loaded up my Leica with Kodachrome 64 (I considered the 25 ASA alternative too slow) and had at it. This was in November, 1977.


My first color image in the US. November, 1977, Anchorage, AK.


Indie Kodak processing lab, Anchorage.


Harsh and high contrast.


Kodachrome yellows and reds were to die for.


On the Natchez, Mississippi River, New Orleans.


Brennan’s, New Orleans.


Bourbon Street, New Orleans.


New Orleans.


Bergdorf’s, NYC.


NYC.

Kodachrome was a very contrasty film with unique rendering of yellows and reds. It was not especially fine grained, as these ultra-high resolution scans from my Nikon D800 disclose. At ISO 100 on the D800’s monster 36mp sensor there is zero digital ‘grain’. You only see what was stored on the film itself. No matter. They print just fine.

Leica M3 and Leicaflex SL, 50mm Summicron, Kodachrome 64, ‘scanned’ on the Nikon D800.