Thanksgiving 2023

Photography

Happy turkey day to all.

A lot has changed since I wrote of my first Thanksgiving in America. That was in 1977, the column ran in 2006. I recall, back in 1977, the special at the supermarket had turkey marked down to 29 cents a pound. Yesterday the price was:


At the supermarket yesterday.

Adjusted for inflation that 1977 turkey comes to $1.76/lb, so the price has just about halved since then. Further, buy $125 of groceries and the turkey is free! Is this a great country or what?

And driving home from the supermarket I chanced on a dozen of these big boys tucking in at the side of the road. Sadly the gun rack has yet to be installed in my luxury sedan but I did have the big Nikon and a suitable lens with me. Had the shotgun been available my turkey would have been well and truly free in 2023:


Wild turkeys. D800, 28-300mm Nikkor.

So what else has changed in those 46 years? Well, America is finally giving up on its endless and ever losing foreign wars. A fascist pig/rapist/criminal/seditionist is waiting in the wings to have another go at doing to the nation what he has been doing to women for decades. Our judicial system seems more corrupt than ever with a Supreme Court comprised largely of religious bigots. Womens’ rights, as a result, have seldom been under greater threat since they got the vote. America is turning inwards, as it does from time to time, yet I remain supremely confident that this too will pass and our course for the sunlit uplands will be firmly reestablished.

So, if you have not the time to read that 2003 piece, it’s worth quoting the words of Milton Friedman, the economist, from that screed. Friedman is another who has sadly fallen out of fashion in the past couple of decades:

“A society that puts equality – in the sense of equality of outcome – ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality or freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom. On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality. Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today’s less well off to become tomorrow’s rich, and in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a richer and fuller life.”

When it’s not busy behaving in a self destructive manner America largely remembers those words, and I have every confidence that it will continue to do so in the long term. Besides, where on earth is there anything better?

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Roger Deakins – Byways

Book reviews, Photographers

A fine street snapper.

In addition to being amongst the most renowned of cinematographers, Roger Deakins is also a fine street snapper, with a style dating back to the 1950s when the moment was everything and composition mattered. These two attributes of a good street snap no longer exist, destroyed since 2007 by the iPhone which means everyone has a camera and thinks he is a good photographer.

So it’s a special pleasure to look at Deakins’s photobook with many examples of his street snaps over the years. The gentle sense of humor, typical of his generation of Englishmen, pervades many of these images and the book is highly recommended. If I have a favorite it’s this one, a sobering reminder not to associate with people who do not imbibe:


Prohibition lives.

Home theater – final touches

Home theater

The Home Theater was pretty much complete 6 months ago but as I had a couple of old tripods sitting around largely unused it seemed appropriate to add a couple of cameras to go with them.

The 120” screen is flanked by a 1960s Nikon F on a period Linhof S168 tripod at left and a Calumet 4”x5” view camera with a Schneider Symmar lens, on a 1930s English Gandolfi wooden tripod at right. The Nikon F, which brought back so many horrific images of conflict and death from the front did more to end the Viet Nam war than any politician or soldier. This was before the Pentagon learned to keep photographers away from the front lines, so as to sanitize and extend our endless wars. The Calumet view camera was a staple of Hollywood’s glamor photographers, the large 4” x 5” negatives making the retouching of warts and achievement of glossy perfection relatively easy.

Here are snaps of those two cameras:


The Nikon F, with a 50mmf/1.4 Nikkor lens.


The Calumet monorail view camera with more twists and turns than a politician.

Further, on the sofaback, there is one of these:


The Zeiss Ikon Contax camera is similar to the one which photographer Robert Capa took with him when he parachuted in to Omaha Beach with the 82nd Airborne on D Day. The few surviving negatives (the lab ruined most of the film) are amongst the greatest war images made. He lost his life when stepping on a landmine in Indochina a few years later.

These additions, as well as some further light sealing for errant sun rays, largely see the Home Theater project completed.