“You have never had it so good”

Photography

Harold Mac knew it.

The state of the art around Harold Mac’s time.

A British Prime Minister and the wealthy scion of a famous publishing company once told the British that “they have never had it so good”. That was Harold Macmillan in 1957. This applies equally to photographers today. And while Harold Mac was addressing one of those rare periods of prosperity that England only enjoyed once since (unless you were a bankster), for photographers it continues to get better, and at an accelerating pace.

Sure, we can grumble that full frame DSLRs are behemoths which deny the original full frame concept introduced by the Leica almost a century ago. And why don’t most cameras have proper viewfinders? But if you are prepared to give up a little flexibility, and make a compromise or two, the raft of expected features today is breathtaking. Consider:

  • Collapsible lenses
  • Pocketability
  • A few ounces at most
  • Hundreds or thousands of images stored on a postage stamp-sized card
  • Miniscule batteries
  • Auto focus
  • Auto exposure
  • Face recognition
  • Built in flash
  • Auto red eye elimination
  • Auto White Balance
  • ISO1000 and up
  • Motor drives
  • Movie capability
  • Wifi or 3G transmission of images from the camera
  • Near total silence
  • LCD screens, often swivelling
  • Wireless remotes
  • Automatic dust removal
  • Anti-shake
  • GPS
  • Panorama capability
  • Time lapse
  • Phone calls from cell cameras
  • Vast range zoom lenses
  • Broad processing capabilities at the touch of a keyboard and mouse
  • Projection quality on just about any LCD screen size you can think of
  • High dynamic range
  • Throwaway cheap – compare the fraction of disposable income taken versus 50 years ago
  • Instant results
  • No film
  • No futzing with chemicals
  • Waterproof
  • Available in pink

Of that long list, the 1925 Leica offered but the first three …. and the Leica or Nikon of Harold Mac’s time offered no more, though either now weighed twice as much!

These thoughts ran through my mind after seeing the David Bailey movie I wrote of the other day. Every time he raises that Pentax to his eye I think of the horrendous amount of back-end work needed to realize the artist’s vision. And that assumes he focused and exposed the image correctly in the first place.

Technology obsoletes labor and expertise. For many economies that’s not a good thing but for all photographers it’s a dream come true. So what if “anyone can take a picture”? Kodak said “You take the picture, we do the rest” over a century ago. Kodak is gone but that jingle is finally true. The “we” is largely microprocessors/telcos/computers/cell phones, and the amount YOU have to do has never been less. All you need is a forefinger and an eye. The latter is in as scarce supply today as it has ever been. But the technical obstacles to the realization of vision have never been lower.

The state of the art today. Weight? <5 ounces.

Bailey would have killed for that little Sony in 1962 as much as Cartier-Bresson would have in 1932. And Roger Fenton would have killed for either the Sony or that Leica of yore:

Roger Fenton’s gear wagon, Crimean War, 1855. Weight? 500 pounds + horse to feed and water.

And you thought your kit bag was large?

The Thirsty Bear

Dining

Brew pub.

I stopped by the Thirsty Bear the other day for lunch.

Rain threatened, so I drove. Bad Idea. Ever tried to park in San Francisco at lunch time with a big conference playing at the convention center?

The pub is not much to look at from outside, but you come here for the beers, all brewed on site. The crowd is distinctly up market and I found myself chatting at the bar with an attendee at the Moscone Center’s laser technology conference down the road. A Cornell and Stanford grad, some 68 years old and working at Los Alamos in New Mexico where we make weapons of mass destruction, this vital and engaging companion proved a boon to a decent meal and pint, even if my IQ was a mere fraction of his!

The first on the G3 with the Oly 9-18mm at 9mm, the other two on the iPhone 4S.

I enjoyed a Meyer ESB, subtler than is typical of the breed with a creamy head, with my chicken sandwich and fries. The portions of the latter were nice and small, with no resulting bloat.

$17.50 for the lot, and the barman serving me was polite, efficient and personable.

David Bailey’s Pentax

Photographers

The best movie about the man. Ever.

We’ll Take Manhattan is the best movie ever about the life of David Bailey, the photographer who with Donovan and Duffy changed fashion photography, simultaneously causing an irreversible cultural upheaval. Bailey, who pre-dated the Beatles, was a working class lad who broke the rule that Vogue photographers had to be public school boys – or at least spoke like them – form ruling substance as ever. And, until Bailey, with his rugged masculinity, came along, it didn’t hurt to be somewhat effete, to put it politely. The girls, after all, would be safe. The likes of John French and Cecil Beaton would never rule again.

The acting in the movie is exceptionally good, and Aneurin Barnard as Bailey just nails the in-your-face, don’t-give-a-damn, cheeky Cockney persona of the original. I speak from experience. While a student at UC London in the early seventies, I was also a student member of the Royal Photographic Society which, while it took itself awfully seriously, also had the redeeming factor that it would invite great photographers from across the world to speak every now and then. Amazingly, one such lecturer was Bailey, and to say that his presentation was irreverent is like calling the pyramids labor intensive. By the time he got through with ‘effing this’ and ‘bollocks that’ I was both charmed and exhausted from laughing, not necessarily emotions shared by the many Colonel Blimps in the audience. He just did not give a damn and he changed photography. On a natural high, I walked home from Mayfair to Kensington that night, and I swear I flew. As a matter of fact, crossing Hyde Park, I lay down under the stars on the big lawn, stared at the sky and concluded that not a whole lot was wrong with a world which allowed a Bailey to rise to the top.

Not only does Barnard get the rôle down, but his handling of the TLR Rolleiflex T (the nobs used the 2.8C) and the SLR Pentax S3 (the well heeled hewed to the SV) is picture perfect. He really knows how to use a camera, something missing from just about every picture about photographers. (Hemmings does not do as well with his Nikon F in Blow Up). The filmmakers get the shutter sound of the Rollei wrong and show the S3 as having TTL metering, when it had none, but these are minor gripes. The movie chronicles a trip Bailey and his girlfriend Jean Shrimpton make to Manhattan on assignment for British Vogue and there are wonderful depictions of Clare Rendelsham and the fearsome NY editor, Diana Vreeland who, quite clearly, breakfasted on broken bottles. Vreeland’s successor, Anna Wintour, prefers razor blades.

Karen Gillan gets the naïvete and innocence of the young Shrimpton just so; her only disadvantage is that acting Shrimpton is simply impossible, as acting is the lesser part of the rôle. You have to look like The Shrimp and that, I’m afraid, cannot be done.

The beyond perfect Jean Shrimpton, 1960s.

Many years later Bailey, famous for his use of the Pentax, had his camera featured in what is surely the greatest gear ad ever. ‘David Bailey’s Pentax’ was all the copy said and that’s all anyone needed to know. He subsequently revealed that he had taken sandpaper to the camera to convey the battle scarred look, and in retrospect it’s obvious when you look at where the ‘wear’ occurred on the body. In the real world, the areas on the front near the prism could never be worn from use. And while I never thought about it at the time I first saw the ad, I love the way Bailey fooled one and all. That’s all you need to know about the man.

Sandpaper works wonders.

The movie premiered on the BBC on January 24th, 2012. Because the BBC is run by a bunch of people with umbrellas up their posteriors, the chances we will ever see it here are remote. They have been promising to release their iPlayer on a subscription basis in the US for ages now. What they really need is someone to get a hold of their payroll and a blue pencil, apply the latter to the whole senior layer of management and privatize the bloody thing, because for the last two years this is what I get when dialing up their application in the most powerful consumer market in the world:

The BBC. Arse indistinguishable from elbow.

The profit motive has clearly yet to darken the BBC’s doors and it’s high time it did. Wanna get the movie? Good luck – cultivate your British friendships. It’s worth the effort.

My fantasy about early Bailey? Click here.

Comment from the writer/director: See the Comments for details of a US showing from John McKay, who wrote and directed the movie. He also adds some fascinating details regarding Aneurin Barnard’s photography during the making of the movie. Be sure to watch the short in John’s link where he tells how the original locations were used in his movie.

Here’s the short:

David Bailey Takes Manhattan on Nowness.com.

Midnight in Paris

Movies, Photography

America’s greatest film maker.

If you don’t already know that Woody Allen is America’s greatest film maker, then it’s high time you took your Spielberg schmaltz-blinkered saccharine brain and aired it out a bit. Allen seems to have moved much of his film making to Europe in recent years (hardly surprising after all those years in a nation which denigrates intellect as ‘elitism’ and puts down our best and brightest as ‘geeks’ and ‘nerds’) with such movies as Everyone Says I Love You, the finest musical (with ‘Chicago’) of recent years, Match Point, (a fine society murder-thriller), Vicki, Christina, Barcelona (the story of a muse, an electric Penélope Cruz) and, most recently, Midnight in Paris, a charming piece of nostalgia and whimsy rivaled only by his own Manhattan.

Allen has long commanded access to the very best actors – who wouldn’t want to act for the American master? – and the cast of Midnight in Paris is as good as it gets. His recreation of Gertrude Stein‘s salon of writers and painters of the 1920s is perfection itself. There is no better way of illustrating this by comparing the photographs of a leading American member of that group, the surrealist photographer Man Ray, with Allen’s realizations in the movie. Man Ray and the great Lee Miller were lovers at the time.

Hemingway by Man Ray and by Woody Allen

Dali by Man Ray and by Woody Allen.

The actors in the Allen movie, shown above, are Corey Stoll and Adrien Brody, respectively.

You don’t have to love Paris to love the movie, but if you are a Francophobe it beats me why you are reading my blog.

It’s not enough to be an original thinker with a fertile mind. Those alone are not prescriptions for success. A solid work ethic is the glue that binds, and you can read all about Allen’s here.

For Allen’s take on Manhattan’s architecture, click here.

UX in Paris

Photographs

Urban exploration at its finest.

I have been lucky to feature some outstanding urban exploration photography here, both from England’s SilentUK and from the American master Jonathan Haeber and his team.

But it will come as no surprise that when it comes to Urbex, or UX, at its finest, that Paris should be the source, as profiled in a simply gripping article in Wired magazine. Along with London, Paris is the location of the finest subterranean Victorian-era civil engineering and UX does for Paris what SilentUK does for London.

Click the picture for the story.

UX is appealing in so many ways. The sheer spontaneity of the movement, the act of finding something beautiful and bringing it back to life, the process of exploring recent and neglected industrial history, the rebellion against ‘The Man’ and the opportunity to make fools of inept administrations, while showing those of us above ground some of the magic that went into the making of great cities, UX is all of that and more.

The article from Wired is long, it’s filled with mystery, excitement and romance, and who can resist the appeal of gazing at stolen Legers, Picassos and Cezannes located but feet from their original location, unknown to the ferrets charged with their custody?

If you hew to the romantic appeal of restoring a 1790 clock with a team lead by a master horologist from one of the world’s great mechanical watch makers, all done clandestinely and underground, then sharing the peal of that restored masterpiece with all and sundry to the amazement of the buffoons in government, then you will thrill to this magnificent piece of journalism and the courageous people who make Parisian UX amongst the world’s greatest. And in case you believe that the US Government has an exclusive on stupidity, just check this out: