A fine example
Built in 1925 in the Spanish Revival style, the US Post Office in San Mateo, California is on the register of historic places. Thank goodness. This should prevent some latter day vulgarian pulling it down and replacing it with a glass and steel box.
Snapped in early morning light.
Superb and original work.
I make no secret of the fact that I dislike authority in nearly all its guises, for so much of it is mindless. So when it says “Don’t Walk on the Grass” I generally make a point of doing just that.
Jonathan Haeber is a kindred spirit, but one much more daring. I last referred to his work when he showed pictures of the awful Jackling Mansion – Steve Jobs’s property in Woodside, CA, which he is having such difficulty tearing down owing to misplaced envirolooney thinking, and possibly by local councillors looking for a kickback. C’mon, let’s get real here.
This time, with his pictures clandestinely snapped from within the abandoned PacBell building in San Francisco, Haeber has outdone himself. With friends he gained access to the innards of this neo-Gothic masterpiece through a manhole cover in the dead of night, and the results speak for themselves.
Click the picture for more:
Our world needs more Haebers to restore the ‘can do’ American spirit and to deny creeping authoritarianism. Well done, sir.
The best day for Hopper
In addition to avoiding the clutter of urban life, the early Sunday street snapper sees what Hopper would be painting today.
Snapped this morning. A round trip to PS2 and ImageAlign Pro corrects for the slight tilt in the verticals resulting from the wide angle lens setting.
A fascinating chronicle
When it comes to fashion – the great years of fashion through 1960, that is – the interested student can indulge in one stop shopping with no fear of missing anything of importance. And that one stop is Paris. Throughout the first sixty years of the twentieth century the domination of this creative center of the world was all you needed to know about, a natural magnet for the best and the most innovative in the world of women’s clothing and accessories. Poiret, Vionnet, Chanel, Gres, Balenciaga, Dior – the list is a Who’s Who of the nucleus of clothing design.
Naturally, the greatest photographers of the age gravitated to this force of nature, and it certainly didn’t hurt that their city of choice was the most beautiful the western world had to offer. It remains so to this day. While the British were busy trying to hold on to a fading empire and the Germans were busy killing everyone, the French devoted their efforts to what the French do best. Great clothes, great design and great food. A casual visitor to the City of Light need only glance at the delicious filigree cast iron entrance to any Metro station and he will know that there’s something special in the air.
So the best photographers either ended up in Paris or were to be found photographing Parisian fashion for Vogue and Harper’s. If you liked high-end kitsch Baron de Meyer and Beaton were your first port of call. High style romantics gravitated to Hoyningen-Huene. Ascetics to Penn. And the cubist set settled on Horst P. Horst. That was the top end. But Vogue needed to fill its burgeoning page count with more than any one of these exemplars of taste and quality could produce so they went to the journeymen of the fashion photography world, the Seeberger brothers. Unlike the Penns et al of the photo world the Seebergers never made it into society or the salons. They were tradesmen photographers and traded quantity, in the guise of snaps of the latest fashions, for quality. And the magazines bought their work throughout the period.
This book is a fascinating look not only at the fashions of the era but also at the gargantuan output of the three brothers – you cannot distinguish the work of one from that of the others. It’s production line quality. Invariably taken at the racecourses of Paris, where the smart set liked to show off its finery, the pictures show both the rich and the ‘plants’ (models masquerading as society to better show off Chanel’s latest) in a functional way. The emphasis is totally on the clothes, gowns often photographed from behind to show off the details. If there’s a sea change in photographic style here, it occurs in 1935 when the brothers migrated from 5″ x 7″ glass plate ‘portable cameras’ (the book’s words, not mine – tripods were forbidden at racecourses, so these monsters had to be hand held!) to the Rolleiflex. Depth of field suddenly changes from isolated to contextual, and for the better. You can make out the setting without being distracted by it, whereas in the earlier plate camera pictures, backgrounds are completely blurred, often to distraction. Witness the pre-Rollei cover picture, above.
This is a lovely book, with a compelling, well informed narrative. In 1970 the Seebergers’ collection passed to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France where, mercifully, it safely remains to this day.
Small, yes, but is it fast?
The Olympus Digital Pen is an exciting prospect for those of us interested in an affordable alternative to the ridiculously priced digital Leica M8, whose cost of entry with a lens is well north of $7,000.
At $900 for the body with the 34mm wide angle and optical viewfinder it is affordable as a street snapper but as yet there’s no indication what the shutter lag is like; auto focus with a lens this short is not important as pretty much everything will be sharp all the time, but what the world really needs is a pocketable high quality camera with a decent sized sensor without the interminable shutter lag which makes just about very point-and-shoot out here useless for street photography.
Thank goodness Olympus has had the good taste to release the body in chrome. The more amateur it looks the less visible the photographer becomes.
One other thought – the Pen is smaller than the M8 in every dimension without a lens, and much smaller with the 17mm fitted compared to, say, a 28mm lens.
Check the Comment for some preliminary feedback on shutter and focus lag.