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 blueberry 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.