Category Archives: Photographs

Mother Russia

Photographs

Nothing changes.

What on earth can one make of Russia? For centuries it has stumbled from one brutal murderous dictator to another seemingly yet more heinous. Democracy, simply stated, is a concept they are incapable of embracing, preferring the cold clutches of the state and cheap booze. The current Russian poll to seek out the greatest Russian has Stalin in a healthy lead. Runner-up? Tzar Nicholas II. This from a nation that has given us Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Horowitz, Nureyev and on and on. You figure it out. I cannot.

So how is it that so cruel a system has given us much of what we think of as great art today, whether in music, painting, ballet, opera, architecture, you name it? Maybe it’s simply that the Slav creative gene only works well when depressed.

Click the picture for a beautiful monochrome photo essay by James Hill on the remains of agrarian Russia, appropriately published in that most socialist of US papers, The New York Times:

Game Boys

Photographs

Photo Essay by Shauna Frischkorn.

I quote from the original:

Eyes cast upward in ecstatic contemplation—500 or 600 years ago these expressions might have been found in a work by Raphael or Guido Reni. But Shauna Frischkorn, an associate professor of art at Pennsylvania’s
 Millersville University, has captured the agony and the ecstasy of our own age in a wide-ranging series of portraits: no monks or saints, just ordinary teenage boys playing Halo. She says that “while they seem passive, they’re actually performing fast-paced maneuvers and executing split-second decisions, making these portraits of intense concentration.”

Whatever the frightening implications of this misdirected intensity may be, the essay is intensely original and worth taking a look. Click the picture for more.

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.

The King

Photographs

No, not Elvis.


Sensuous curves on the car driven by the greatest ever.
2002 F1 Ferrari. 5D, 100mm Macro, Ring Flash.

No sport enjoys such a rapid pace of technological change as motor racing so comparisons of drivers between generations is a pleasant diversion if not one based in objective measurements.

But few, I think, would disagree that Michael Schumacher was the greatest ever – sportsman, gamesman, competitor, professional.

One color works here – what else for a Ferrari?

Machismo

Photographs

It doesn’t get more macho than this.


Suspension detail on a pre-war Alfa Romeo racer. 5D, 100mm macro, ring flash, 1/200, f/11, ISO250.

My normal habit of underexposing by half a stop does wonders in preserving the dynamic range in the printed version. This has an almost Fritz Lang-like mechanistic intensity which greatly appeals to some part of my nature. The curves of the bodywork are easy on the eyes, too.

I find that f/11 gives you workable depth of field and the best definition. Smaller apertures do not show the Canon 100mm macro at its best. I simply change the ISO until f/11 is indicated.