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

What's On Your Desktop?

  All the available wall space in our little house has been long occupied by prints and paintings.  The one space which remains available and easily changed is the desktop screen on my old iMac.  Lately, I've been displaying some of my favorite photographs there.

For the purpose, I tend to prefer black & white or a limited color palette along with a strong graphic design.

I tend to size my photographs for online display to be slightly smaller than my 21.5-inch screen, but stretching them slightly to fit does not seem to result in any significant degredation.

 I have also drawn on my collection of 3D graphics which I was making years ago .  They are all ultra-simple and give me an uncomplicated working space.

Of course there is no shortage of images available on the Web which can be appropriated for the desktop.  A source I have been using for a long time is The Biodiversity Heritage Library which has over three hundred thousand images of natural history subjects including a lot of great old drawings.

There are collections of desktop images that come along with any computer operating system, but it seems a lot more fun to personalize your desktop with your own work or images you admire from other sources.