Sorting out the Nikon S

 When I first acquired and used a Nikon S in the mid-1960s I really had no idea about the development of Nikon's rangefinder line.

 For instance, I was unaware at that point that the dimensions of the negatives the camera made were slightly different from the standard of the time.

 

The film strip at the top of the above image is from the Nikon S.  Below that is a strip from my Leica IIIa showing the 24 x 36 dimension of the frame which was the standard for European and U.S. 35mm cameras.  The frames from the Nikon S are spaced slightly wider and are just 34mm across. That really makes no practical difference in image acquisition, though it does make cutting the strips into manageable sizes a little easier.

I shot a test roll of Kentmere 400 to verify the functioning of the camera.  I think the resolution and contrast from the 1.4/50mm lens look good.  I'll try to do something more creative in the next round.

I don't see a lot of pictures being posted online from the Nikon S, though the Nikon rangefinders are clearly popular with collectors judging by the sale prices.  The S-model is the most accessible economically, while prices for earlier and later models as well as lenses and accessories approach the stratospheric.  I'll likely settle for just the addition of a generic lens cover.

(Jason Schneider has posted a history of early Nikon lens development on Rangefinder Forum.)

Six Decades

 I bought a Nikon S about sixty years ago and used it briefly to do what I still consider my best street work in New York.  I regretted selling the camera and thought about replacing it ever since.  So, I bought one on ebay from a guy named Igor in Cleveland. 

The camera looked almost like new except for a couple bumps on the leather on the back.  The only functional issue was a very slight vertical misalignment of the rangefinder.  Fixing that requires taking off the front panel to get at the adjustment port.

The little oval hole next to the viewfinder window on the right contains the vertical adjustment mechanism which consists of a set screw to lock the adjustment and a a ridged wheel which is turned to move the image up or down.  The adjustment was accomplished easily.  The front panel went back on with just a little careful wiggling to get it in place over the rangefinder focusing wheel on the left.

As I expected, the Nikkor-S 1.4/50mm lens yielded nicely sharp results from the first roll of film I got through the camera.  

I won't be able to duplicate the kind of work I did with the camera in New York, as pounding the pavement for miles in a day is no longer an option for me.  However, I'm still looking forward to becoming reacquainted with an old friend.

From a few years ago...

Alejandro

Now a Phoenix police officer and the father of our latest great-granddaughter.

Hattie and her mom

 

Coffee and a Burrito

 We visited Bike In Coffee which is at an old farm west of downtown Albuquerque.  We drove there, but many people do get there along the bike trail that parallels I-40.  I shot most of a roll of Kentmere 400 in the Zorki 6 with the collapsible Industar 22.

The camera and lens performed fine, but I don't shoot the camera enough to be used to the unconventional location of the rewind button which is right next to the shutter release.  I managed to lose about a quarter of the shots by pressing the wrong button.

Still a nice morning outing and I always find a lot of picture opportunities at the place.

 

Margaret wants to go back on a Thursday when the bluecorn pancakes are featured, so I'll likely have some more pictures of the place soon.

WPD

 I have to confess that I don't recall previously being aware of World Photography Day.  According to the NPR website:

"Every year on Aug. 19, World Photography Day celebrates the art, science and history behind pictures. The day was first recognized in 1991 to commemorate the invention of the daguerreotype, a photographic process developed in 1837."

and

"...To celebrate this day, NPR asked readers and listeners to share the story behind their favorite photo they have ever taken. "

So, I am late to the game, but willing to play.  I've made a lot of pictures, but I can easily narrow down the possible candidates by focusing on my favorite subject.  I like all twenty-one images I've posted in the Margaret folder in my Flickr account.  Those pictures were made over a period of fifty-six years, and each was a favorite at the time.  Still, I think the first has some especially nice qualities, so I'll call it Number One.

As I noted in a response to a comment on the picture a few years ago,
"...I took the picture in a cheap hotel in the SF Tenderloin soon after we got to San Francisco. I bought the Speed Graphic just before leaving NYC along with the 4x5 polaroid back. I don't recall now what I really intended to do with that outfit at the time, but I'm glad I got this shot with it."

So, that's my story.  What's yours?

A Delightful Read

The Ongoing Moment
by Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer writes about the history of photography when making photographs required cameras containing film to record images. While there is no lack of such histories of photography's first 150 years, Dyer presents the information in a novel and entertaining style.  

Like any good historian, Dyer employs scholarly methodology to present the relevant details of photographers' lives and personalities which contributed to the unique qualities of their work.  Additionally, and more importantly, he illuminates the photographic productions of each photographer by identifying and comparing treatments of subjects and themes which were common to all.  

Sometimes influence was obvious as in these shots by Strand and Kertesz.

Strand

Kertesz

More often, photographs simply reflected elements which were common to the reality of reigning customs such as the wearing of hats.  So, with photographers who focused broadly on society, hats were an inevitable element of the their compositions as, during most of the period here discussed, adults very rarely exposed their heads in public places.  

Take a look, for example at the vast catalog of portraits of people riding the New York subway by Walker Evans; you will be hard pressed to find more than one or two -- man or woman -- without a hat.

Evans

Hats, fences, benches, doorways, roadways, stairways, building fronts -- there were a lot of common elements which showed up, but of course each of the famous photographers of the era put their own spin on the subject. Dyer presents all of this with insightful observation and humor.

Kertesz and Strand excelled at making images of groups of pedestrians seen from a high vantage point.  

Dorothea Lange used hats as a central element in portraying social status as in her White Angel Breadline.

Lange

As Dyer points out there was a somewhat surprising interest shown by top-tier photographers in the public life of blind people, who were often pictured trying to scrape out a living on city streets.  Those images came from photographers as diverse as Lewis Hine, Gary Winogrand and Diane Arbus, who chronicled  the life of the blind 60s street musician and poet, Moondog.

Arbus

 The last photographs in Dyer's book are dated 2001.  That is a significant inflection point because it signaled the definitive abandonment of the old print-based media for the emerging internet platforms.

In the older era, outlets for public access to photographic artistry was largely confined to a few magazines, newspapers and books, along with occasional gallery and museum exhibitions.  Those limited outlets offered opportunities for a relatively small number of photographic artists whose careers could be subject to examination by critics and historians.

The exponential expansion of media space in the internet universe made a coherent conceptualization of the photographic arts challenging, if not impossible.  There are authors today attempting to  meaningfully examine contemporary photography, but the possibility that any of them will achieve the kind of definitive synthesis available to Newhall or Szarkowski is remote given the immense scope of the task.

Unerstanding A Photograph

I had some hope of enlightenment about the theoretical underpinnings of photography from John Berger' book, Unerstanding A Photograph; his writings are often mentioned in discussions of the topic.  I was disappointed, less for his efforts rather than by my own state of readiness to accept his approach perhaps.  I just don't have any patience for the philosophical navel gazing style.  

The Aperture publication is a compilation of Berger's articles, starting off with a 1967 picture of then recently-dead Che Guevara. Berger's comparison of the picture to Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson" seemed apt and the discussion pointing to the vital place of the photo's viewers in forming the ultimate meaning of the image is useful.  However, the author's white heat anger about American Imperialism in the midst of the Vietnam war seems jarring at this remove, and it detracts from the article's purpose.  Still not a bad beginning, but it did not lead me to where I was hoping to end up.

 

Berger makes the obligatory nod to the subject of whether or not photography can be considered Art and he references the tired idea of its  capacity for infinite reproduction. That is banal truth which does not limit commercial possibilities.  It ignores the fact that the print which is the ultimate product is very often the end result of a complex process such as that required to make a palladium print, or the simple fact that a polaroid print is often a one-off item. I think the line of argument basically shows that Berger was not a practicing photographer.

The bigger problem about photography as art in Berger's exposition -- along with so many others -- is that a thorough definition of Art in modern societies is missing.  For what it is worth, my own definition of a Fine Art object is one with no useful function which nevertheless has commercial value for people with too much money who are seeking a status badge. Perhaps not the last word on the subject, but at least I made the effort.

Berger nearly redeemed himself for me with his unequivocal praise of two of my great favorite photographers, W. Eugene Smith and Paul Strand. I'm sure there are a lot of other admirable qualities to be found in Berger's writings by those with more patience and knowledge than me, but I may not live long enough to discover them.

Getting to Evans

 I decided the time had come for me to come to grips with the work of Walker Evans.  I have never found myself drawn to it, but it has obviously had great significance for a lot of people who have lauded its uniqueness.

I started off by reading the biography by Belinda Rathbone.  I think this may have been the first of several since produced, and I thought it was a prodigious accomplishment of weaving together interviews, letters and diary entries.  The Rathbone narrative depicts a bright, ambitious artist with what might be interpreted today as a libertarian personality with something of an empathy deficit.

Evans' aim was to create a mirror in which the country could see itself as it was without an excess of interpretation or ideological slant as was the case with some of his FSA-era contemporaries like Dorothea Lange.  Interestingly, one of his early sources of inspiration was Paul Strand, who was thoroughly attached to a revolutionary agenda. His close friends, Agee and Ben Shahn,  were also quite different from Evans in their view of society's ills and possible reforms.

I think Evans undoubtedly succeeded in his documentary goal, but it seems there is some justification for the proposition that his goal was too limited, particularly in regard to his portraits, both the formal versions done with large format, and the on-the-fly examples coming from the Rollei, the Leica and the Contax.  The people shots seem to me to resemble  rather dry, scientific portrayals - completely accurate in detail, but almost devoid of much real feeling for the life experiences of those captured on film.

With the thought in mind that some of my negativity toward Evans was due to not seeing quality reproductions of his images, I made a trip across town to the Cherry Hills branch library to borrow a copy of Many Are Called, a selection from six hundred hip shots made in NYC subway cars from 1938 to 1941.  In the book, only published over twenty years later,  the period dress styles are well documented, but the mostly vacant expressions of the subjects reveal little of the fraught times in which the pictures were made.

Evans had made candid street pictures before using a right-angle finder on his Leica.  However, that was not a technique suited to the subway environment.  For Many Are Called he strapped a Contax II to his chest with the lens peeking out between two buttons of his overcoat, and with a long cable release running inside his sleeve to a bulb release in his hand. The shiny chrome surfaces of the camera were blackened to further obscure the presence of the camera.

Evans' technique for getting pictures without looking through the viewfinder has been described in every account of the project, but I have not seen anyone refer to the fact that the camera had a knob advance which must have required some rather awkward manipulation , presumably through an inside slit in the pocket of his coat.

The dim incandescent lighting in the old subway cars must have presented a challenge.  The f1.5/50mm Sonnar lens would have been up to the low light conditions, but using its maximum aperture would have meant a serious limitation on the depth of focus. On the other hand, Evans' subjects were securely anchored in place at a firmly established distance from the photographer on the car's opposite side.

I do like many of Evans' pictures of city and small town scenes including the storefronts, signage and posters.

 

I would be very interested in seeing some opinions about Evans from present day observers; I am open to the idea I may have missed some crucial aspects of his work.

For Strand Fans

Paul Strand: Southwest is a slim volume, but it contains a lot of pictures and information about the photographer that I had not come across elsewhere, including the romantic entanglements of Strand, Stieglitz, and Georgia O'Keeff as shown in the letters they exchanged.

There are a number of pictures in the book made during Strand's visits to the famous church near Taos.  It turns out Strand made fifty images of it.  One of those, a palladiaum print done by Richard Benson sold for $3,500 at a Swann auction in 2021.

None of the books I've seen, including Greenough's substatial volume, have very good explanations of how Strand got his prints made and circulated over the years of his long career.

Like his contemporaries, Stand started out making platinum prints as contact images from his negative plates.  He later made silver-based prints, but then some of the last ones were platinum again.  A lot of those in museum collections are clearly contact printed based on their sizes. Strand also liked seeing his work get wide distribution through books.

Strand's innovative work has always been an inspiration for me and I never tire of looking at it and reading about how it came to be produced.  I'm thinking my next step will be to track down a copy of his book on Mexico.

Heart of the Circle

 Heart of the Circle

 Photographs by Edward S. Curtis of Native American Women

     Edited by Sara Day

I found this book today at the main library.  It is a marvelous collection depicting Native American women at their daily tasks or in portraits.  All of the pictures are in the Library of Congress.  Most are viewable online, and high-resolution copies can be downloaded.

The text accompanying the pictures provides cultural and historical context along with some notes about the photographer's interactions with his subjects.

A Navajo Smile - 1904

Papago maiden

A Desert Cahuilla Woman - 1924

Pakit - Maricopa

Qahatika Girl - 1907

Ola-Noatak - 1928

Lummi Type - 1899

 

 A search revealed that the book is remarkably inexpensive, so I've ordered myself a copy.

Saturday in Old Town

 We enjoyed an afternoon performance by the Spanish Broom group on the patio of the Tiny Grocer cafe.

Diana & Nikon

I have been wanting to read Diana & Nikon, Janet Malcolm's book about photography, for a long time.  The essays on photography  originally appeared in the New Yorker, and the collected articles were made into a book in 1980.

The book is not available in the branch library closest to me and I was about ready to buy it online.  The prices for Malcolm's book on Amazon seemed a bit steep, so I did a search to see what the options might be.  I was pleased to find a downloadable copy available at no cost on the Internet Archive website.  It is the expanded version published by Aperture in 1997 which contains five additional essays not in the original.

I've read just the first chapter so far, and it is excellent.  Malcolm casts a critical eye on several books about Stieglitz, Weston and Adams and comes up with quite a few stories about those pioneer modernists that I had not seen before.  As described in an Aperture article on Malcolm's photography writing, she had a decided preference for the fomalist style, but her knowledge and opinions about photography developed very substantially in the years she wrote for the New Yorker.

It is hard to find good writing about photography these days.  I can't think of anyone of Malcolm's stature being published now in the sources I used to look to. I think it is about five years since the NY Times stopped running the regular column by Teju Cole.  There are reviews of major exhibitions like the recent blockbuster show in New York of Diane Arbus' life work, but none show the depth of knowledge of Malcolm and some of her contemporaries like John Szarkowski, whose books can also be found in the Internet Archive.

Finding Meaning in Photographs

 Photographs are made with a purpose in mind, though the intent or meaning may not be fully articulated at the time of exposure.  The meaning attributed to the resultant image may only emerge when it is processed or edited, or perhaps only after it is seen in the context of other images. In fact, meaning in photography or in any artistic expression is ultimately the product of social interaction, and it may change over time.

For amateur photographers like me who are blog authors, the construction of meaning is a central task.  The photographs displayed in blog posts, though often from a single roll film, are often the product of multiple sessions, often with little direct connections.  The challenge then is to come up with some unifying meaning which imbues the product with some appearance of intentionality.

A convenient unifying theme for me and other bloggers centers on the medium and gear used in the production of the pictures in a blog post.  The pictures are evaluated partially in terms of how they express the characteristic capabilities of the camera, the film or the processing. Here, for example is such a picture.

My Hat -- Argus A2F

I think it likely that an observer's first question on looking at the picture of my hat is why such an image was made and exhibited. Well, my answer is that the image displays very good sharpness from a camera which historically has gotten little respect since its appearance in the 1930s.  ( For me, the image also has some relevance as an example of pareidolia.)

Another convenient point of departure for identifying unifying meaning  is a focus on formalist features.  One can always talk about compositional elements and how they come together in a photograph or a group of pictures.  Line, mass, tonality and balance all contribute to a sense of meaning which is essentially visual and perhaps not easily articulated because of a common disconnect between visual perception and explanatory processes.

There are times of course when even amateurs undertake a photographic exercise with the intention of communicating specific meanings.  Portraiture is one example of that in which an attempt is being made to portray the subject's essential physical characteristics, or perhaps link them to perceived personality traits.  A similar process may be the basis for a broader view of a subject with a natural history or cultural focus. An example of that was my effort to assemble a portrait of a community through the pictures I made in New York's Chinatown in the late 1960s.

The construction of meaning through social interaction is apparent in blog posts and in pictures posted on photo sharing sites in the fact that provision is made for image-specific comments.  While the hope is most frequently that positive evaluations may be expressed, there is also an opportunity to recognize or clarify the fundamental intent or meaning behind the offered images.

I can never discuss the topic of this post without reference to the writings of Terry Barrett.  The wikipedia article on Barrett provides a very good overview of his long career a an art critic, though there is little mention of his focus on photography, expressed so well in his book, Criticizing Photographs.

I have not found anything that surpasses Barrett's book in terms of depth and thoroughness.  I'll appreciate suggestions.

Medium Format

 Of my twin-lens cameras the one I enjoy shooting the most is the Yashica-Mat.  It has a very bright finder, a fine lens and it is light in weight.  When I decided to use the camera recently I thought I would maximize the advantage of the big negatives with some 100-speed film.  However, when I looked in the refrigerator film drawer I found that the closest to that I could get was an ancient roll of Ilford SFX 200.

I decided to give the film an extra stop of exposure to compensate for the sixteen years it had gone past its expiration date.  That seemed to be about the right match for the HC110b processing, judging by the results.  

I started off by documenting a bit of an ordeal we are currently experiencing.  The street that runs by the south side of our house in the process of repaving.  The work starts off noisily about 6AM daily; that has been going on for about three weeks, and it looks like the job is about halfway to completion.

The upside is that it is pretty interesting to watch the big machinery being operated close-up.  Also, the early start of the workday is understandable given the near-100 degree temperatures we have had recently.  (Some shots through that window with my little Lumix digital camera are posted on my other blog.)

I finished off the roll during a couple walks through Old Town.

Plein Air

South Plaza

I made several shots of this gorgeous 1948 Chevrolet, but could not quite capture the excellence of the restoration.

I think I would be very uncomfortable driving around in such a car, fearful of damaging such a perfect and expensive project.

A Nikon Lightweight

I have done several repairs on my Nikon EM to keep it going.  I like the camera because of its small size, light weight, and the fact that it accepts any of my Nikon lenses.  The-aperture-priority-only feature is not a problem as it is my preferred mode for any of my slr cameras.  I shot a roll of Kentmere 100 in the camera over the course of a week recently in Old Town and in the nearby Sawmill neighborhood.  The meter worked fine throughout, and I thought the Series E 1.8/50mm lens and the film delivered nice results.

La Plaza Vieja

Cervantes in repose

Sawmill Tower

I got out early on my three-wheeler to beat the heat and that got me to the Sawmill neighborhood just as the Flamenco School was about to open.

National Institute of Flemenco

The yearly Festival Flamenco just concluded here; it is an event that attracts performers and enthusiasts from all over the world, and it has grown steadily in popularity.  I was actually happier when it was of more modest proportions.  The prices for most of the Festival events have gotten beyond what I am prepared to support.  However, there are opportunities to enjoy Flamenco throughout the year and many are very affordable and even free.  The Spanish Broom group often shows up around Old Town and they offer performances at no charge, relying instead on donations through their website.