Looking At Photographs

 My old iMac was looking tired, so I got one eight years newer, a 2017 model with a 27-inch screen.  The added screen real estate is more than I need for most things, but I'm enjoying seeing some of my photos in large size.

The on-screen images from the original .tiff scans are 13x23 inches and they have the kind of brilliance similar to what is provided by a projected slide.  It is a presentation I have not seen before because the biggest prints I have made in the past are 11 x 14, and I only have a few of those hanging on my walls which were done for exhibits.  Also, the images I typically show online are usually limited to a height of 900 pixels which accommodates most online viewers.

An interesting aspect of viewing the large images on the screen is that one can appreciate the potential excellence of film-based images in regard to resolution, tonalities and grain.  Of course, one can do the same with very large prints on paper, but that is expensive.  And, what do you then do with the prints?  My little house has no more wall space for hanging prints, and just sticking them in the closet serves no useful purpose. 

In the past I occasionally did slide shows on my TV using Google's cast feature, but the device for doing that is no longer supported.  I've added some of the pictures I like to my wallpaper folder, and I'm thinking maybe I will set up some slide presentations on the iMac as an alternative to casting.

(The picture of the AFD fire engine was made with my Kodak Retina IIc on Tmax 100 processed in HC110b.)

An Old Favorite

I put a roll of Kentmere 100 through my Kodak Reflex II over a couple days.  It is one of those cameras for which I have a particular fondness because I was able to do a complete cleaning and adjustment without destroying it.  The reason for that is that the Reflex II is rather simple in its construction compared to my other tlr cameras.  The linked gear lenses are largely responsible for that simplicity.  

The pictures from this roll were artistically unremarkable, but I was happy with getting decent tonal results in combination with a fresh kit of PMK Pyro. 

The shot of my friend, Bob, was made in the dark corner of a coffee shop at 1/25 and f:3.5.  I was slightly off on the focus, but still pleased to get anything under those conditions.

 

It was a noteworthy accomplishment for Kodak to produce a full featured twin lens reflex at an affordable price in 1948.  The coated Anastar lens is very sharp and the viewfinder is as bright as anything made in those days.

 

f you have a Reflex II that needs some cleaning up, Rick Oleson's Tech Notes are free to download.

Medium Format

I took my Yashica-Mat for a walk in the Botanic Garden.  There were few other visitors on this sunny winter morning.  I have been disappointed in the increasingly manicured look of the place, but it is still a nice plece of nature to have nearby when I might not feel like going to the river or the mountains.

The conservatory always has an abundance of flowering plants regardless of the season.  This time of year I look forward to seeing and photographing the exotic lilies.

 

 The dry climate side of the site has native plants from the southwest deserts.

The medium format images from the Yashica-Mat have a kind of solidity which is particularly nice compared to what often comes from even the best of the 35mm cameras.

Having the close-up lens kit for the Yashica-Mat adds quite a bit of versatility in subject matter possibilities.  An eye-level finder like I have for the Mamiya C-330 would also be nice as shooting high with the waist-level finder requires a more flexible neck than the one I currently have.  I do have a steadying hand-grip which fits the camera, but I couldn't find it before this outing and my success rate suffered a bit as a result.

A Decade of Discovery

I was looking for something to support my bedtime reading habit.  Not finding anything interesting at the local library website, I turned to openlibrary.org and entered "photography criticism" in the search box.  That got me to Light Readings: a photography critic's writings, 1968-1978 by Allan D. Coleman.

The decade of articles collected in the book were first published in The New York Times, the Village Voice and Popular Photography. Coleman seemed a familiar name and it seems like I must have seen some of the columns as I was in New York in the late 1960s.  I don't recall any of the dozen pieces I've read so far.  

My lack of good familiarity with Coleman is a symptom of my general failure to take advantage of the great photographic resources which were available at the time.  There was really no end of museum and gallery exhibits on photography.  I can really only recall going often to the Museum of Modern Art, and I took no advantage at all of the opportunities for learning from the great people who were teaching courses in New York in those days.

I have since gotten familiar with a lot of the artists in photography that Coleman's columns discuss.  It is great fun to read about many of those people in Coleman's interviews and critiques. His style is spare and perceptive and there a lot of good stories I had not seen before about the New York photography scene in the 1960s and 1970s.

Coleman's historical and social comments are mostly right on.  One instance in which he misses the mark is in a discussion of holography.  I do recall the hype about that 3D imaging technology, but Coleman's prediction that it would be the art form of the future really didn't pan out.

I imagine that Coleman's columns were accompanied by examples of the photographic work he was discussing, but they did not make it into the scanned copy of the openlibrary book.  It is easy enough to supplement the reading with quick online searches for the images.  I also have books by some of the photographers.

I was particularly pleased to find that one of Coleman's articles dealt with the career of Roy DeCarava, whose work I have always admired, mostly through the collection illustrated in the Friends of Photography book edited by James Alinder and with a lengthy introduction by Sherry Turner DeCarava. Coleman's article provides a good overview of DeCarava's style and the difficulties he encountered in obtaining appropriate recognition as a Black artist.

************

UPDATE:

It turns out there is a selection of photos buried in the middle of the online book.  Still helpful, though, to do a quick search in a second tab for examples of the artists discussed.

Also,

I found another document online with a selection of A.D. Coleman's writing that includes some of the columns from the Light Readings book, but covering a longer time period.  It is in a format that is a bit easier to read than the openlibrary scan.

An
A. D. Coleman Reader
Published Writings 1968-2017

Prepared for the Forum on Contemporary Photography
Department of Photography, Museum of Modern Art

September 19, 2018

Thesiger

Andy, at the SHOUT photoblog, recently posted about his delight at discovering the work of Wilfred Thesiger in one of the photographer's books at his local library.  That made me smile as I experienced a similar feeling of elation when I first came across Thesiger's work many years ago.  

I found a copy of Thisiger's Arabian Sands in a San Francisco bookshop. Not long afterward I packed up my family and moved to southern Idaho to pursue my own wanderings in the high desert of the Great Basin, often carrying along thoughts of Thesiger's images.

I don't see references to Thesiger often in any of the websites I visit often.  I don't know why that is as he seems to me to be one of the really great photo artists of Twentieth Century. The archive of 38,000 negatives resides in the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford.  The photos are all viewable online, but they are small, low quality pdf files. I think that reflects the museum's use of the images as a source of income.  If you want explore Thesiger's work without buying prints, the best course is to find any of his fine books.

Thesiger was a self-taught photographer.  He bought a Leica II in 1934 and used it for twenty-five years to record his explorations, beginning with treks across the Empty Quarter in Arabia.  In 1959 he replaced the rangefinder camera with a Leica Reflex.  All of his work is black & white.  He seems never have done any of own processing or printing. Because he traveled in such remote regions he would sometimes go a year before getting to see the results of his photography of the nomadic communities he documented.

I loaned my copy of Arabian Sands when we lived in Las Cruces and never got it back.  A few years ago I found Thesiger's Visions Of A Nomad in a bookshop in Albuquerque.  It is a compilation of Thesiger's pictures from Aftrica, the Middle East and Asia with very good reproductions and useful descriptions of the photographer's techniques and style.  Re-reading the book prompted me to order another copy of Arabian Sands which I will have in hand soon.

 

There is really no shortage of information online about Thesiger.  One of the best things I came acoss recently was an old blog post at The Idle Woman.

Boris Savelev

 I was browsing the photography featured at the Michael Hoppen Gallery website when I came across a selection of pictures by the Ucranian photographer, Boris Savelev, which I had not known before. 

I'm not sure how I missed becoming aware earlier of this artist's long career, characterized by an extraordinary use of color and composition.  According to the biographical information on Savelev's page at the Hoppen site he was born in Ukraine in 1947, but moved to Moscow as a young man where he took up photography after graduating there from the Institute of Aeronautics.  Savelev became well known for his photography in the Soviet Union before its breakup and also had his work featured in many exhibitions internationally.  According to Michael Hoppen:

"He first came to the attention of the Western art world with the publication of Secret City by Thames and Hudson in 1988. This photobook established Savelevs' reputation as one of the most serious artists of a new generation of photographers emerging from the former Sovient Union."

Savelev's early published work in the Soviet Union was all black and white.  In the 1980s he began doing color slides, first using East German Orwachrome, and then switching to Kodachrome for its better capacity for color publication.  In 2000 he began shooting digital with a Leica Digilux. 

 A review of a Savelev retrospective appeared in The Guardian in June of 2024.

There is an interview of Savelev on the Form Magazine website.

Rearranging Reality

 All of my Kodak Retinas have excellent lenses, but I've always felt the Xenon on my 1949 Retina II is the best of the bunch.  Support for that judgment was found on a roll of Kentmere 100 which I put through the camera about seven years ago.  The sharpness and tonalities from the pictures seemed near perfect to me.

When I put the pictures in a blog post, though, what really stood out was the fact that two adjacent pictures really seemed to want to be in the same frame together.  So, looking at them recently, I decided to stitch the two horizontal compositions together  into a single vertical one..

The white picket fence is in front of our house.  The upper section of the composition shows the railroad tracks about a mile to the east.  Both pictures looked pretty good to me, but I thought the combination added some interesting depth. 

Kodak Retina II -- Xenon f:2/50mm