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.

Bird Photography

 I first became aware of photography by birds when I acquired a well-used copy of Pigeon Heroes by Marion B. Cothren, with a copyright date of 1944.

The book's foreward carries impressive credentials:

and here is the relevant passage from Page 14:

This picture is from Page 16:

We always have a few pigeons hanging around our back porch, attracted by spilled birdseed from a feeder there.  I haven't yet seen any pigeons toting cameras, but I'll try to pay closer attention.

* * *

 Bird photography first took off in 1907 thanks to the efforts of a German pharmacist who had some previous experience with delivering prescriptions using carrier pigeons.  His success in this accomplishment was particularly impressive given the fact that the primary photographic medium of the time consisted of glass plates coated with a light-sensitive emulsion.  In fact, doubts about the feasibility of such an endeavor resulted in a rejection of the initial patent application.  That was overcome by the submission of certified images from the bird-borne cameras.

 

All the warring parties in both WWI and WWII took an interest in developing the potential of bird photography for intelligence gathering.  In the post-war years the CIA developed a pigeon-based program, but the results of that effort remain classified except for a stuffed pigeon with camera in the agency museum.

Loose lips sink ships.

As might be expected, bird photography has been significantly advanced by computerized miniaturization of the photographic gear.  That is well-illustrated on Youtube by a BBC production featuring eagles, hawks and falcons outfitted with video cameras which transmit their images by microwave.

 All of the above is well-documented in the Pigeon Photography wikipedia article.

Miyatake's Camera

 Toyo Miyatake, a skilled and successful photographer, was one of ten thousand Japanese-Americans imprisoned during World War II in the Manzanar concentration camp in central California.  Anyone of Japanese ancestry was forbidden to possess a camera at the time. Miyatake, however, did manage to include an old shutter and lens among the small amount of belongings his family was allowed to take to the camp.

With the help of other craftsmen among the camp's prisoners Miyatake put together a wooden bodied camera from found materials, including a piece of drain pipe to which the shutter and lens were attached to allow focusing.  Film holders, a ground glass, film and processing chemicals were smuggled in.  When it was all assembled, Miyatake set about surreptitiously recording the daily life of the Manzanar community in a body of work ultimately comprising over a thousand images.

Toyo Miyatake, High school students on school grounds, Eastern Sierras and barracks in background, ca. 1942–45 (Aperture #251)

Miyatake's story was nicely told in a 2023 article by Ken Chen in the #251 edition of Aperture.  There are also numerous videos available on the subject, including Episode 3 of the 10 Camps, 10 Stories series on Youtube. There is a PBS short featuring Miyatake's son,  How Tōyō Miyatake Handcrafted His Camera in Manzanar.  

In fact, Miyatake's story has been told many times over the years, but it seems that it needs retelling even more these days.

Toyo Miyatake (portrait by Ansel Adams)

 * * *

The history of WWII Japanese Internment is documented with great thoroughness at the Densho site.  See, for instance, Manzanar Children’s Village: Japanese American Orphans in a WWII Concentration Camp.

Connecting The Dots

Carl Van Vechten-1934

I was able recently to dispel a little of my ignorance about music with the help of Angela Davis and her history of early Blues performers, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. The book also included a reference to the writing and photography of Carl Van Vechten who compiled a vast catalog of images of performers and creators in all the arts who were attracted to New York - and particularly to Harlem - beginning in the 1920s.

 

Celebrity photography has never held much interest for me, but the sheer volume of Van Vechten's accomplishment demands attention. He managed for several decades to make portraits of just about anyone who achieved fame on stage, in films or in recordings, often as they were just beginning their careers. Here are four by Van Vechten on the way up in the 1940s and '50s at Wikipedia:

Harry Belafonte

Marlon Brando

Truman Capote

Lena Horne

There are many big collections of Van Vechten's work in museums and university archives; the Library of Congress houses 1,388 of his portraits.  The biography page on the LOC site also contains some information about Van Vechten's gear and techniques:

In the early 1930s, Miguel Covarrubias introduced Van Vechten to the 35mm Leica camera. He began photographing his large circle of friends and acquaintances. His earlier career as a writer and his wife's experience as an actress provided him with access to both fledgling artists and the established cultural figures of the time. Some of his subjects from this period include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Alfred A. Knopf, Bessie Smith, and Gertrude Stein.

Van Vechten's portraits are frequently busts or half-length poses, in front of bold backdrops. Dancers were usually photographed on stage. Van Vechten did his own darkroom work, but frequently used an assistant to help set up lights for the portrait sittings.

*  *  *

Miguel and Rose

Since I could only summon up some vague memories of Miguel Covarrubias I googled the name and easily turned up a lot about his life as an artist and writer.  I discovered that he had written a well-received book about Bali that included photographs by his wife, Rose.  Best known by her adopted stage name, Rosa Rolanda, she was multi-talented like her husband and found success in dancing, choreography, and painting as well as photography.  

Rosa was a skilled photographer and it is apparent in the portraits she made - especially those of her friend Frida Kahlo - that she had a  talent for making people feel comfortable in front of her camera.

Rosa Rolanda's charm and performance skills frequently put her in front of the cameras of some of the most highly regarded photographers of the time, including Man Ray, Steichen, and Weston.

by Man Ray

 

by Edward Steichen

by Edward Weston

I always thought the picture by Weston was one of the best he ever made, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the sitter was Rosa Rolanda.  Now, I am looking forward to getting to know her photography.

Rose Covarrubias with Leica (World-Telegram staff photo)

A leftie?  I don't think so.  I am pretty sure this shot has been flipped left to right based on the watch and the index finger poised over the topdeck shutter release.   Also, with the left eye looking through the finder, the nose would be completely behind the camera body.    (World-Telegram staff photo)