Yashica YE

I learned the rudiments of street photography early in the 1960s with a borrowed Yashica YE.  I thought it might be fun to get one to relive those days. There are quite a few available in Japan, however the uncertainties of what import fees might be tacked on to the price made the possibility seem slim of finding one that I could afford.  Then, I saw one listed in the U.S. at a bargain price, so of course I had to buy it.

The Yashica YE worked well, though the nice qualities of the images are due mostly to the Leica Elmar lens that I had mounted for this first test roll.  It would be nice to find one of the Yashicor lenses that normally came on the YE, but they seem to be priced at about three times what I paid for the camera.

The Japanese camera industry made amazing progress in the 1950s as the country recovered from the devastating effects of WWII.  Nikon lenses became an instant hit after David Douglas Duncan used them in Korea, and the Leica and Contax copies made by several companies demonstrated top-notch craftsmanship.

In the picture to the right the Yashica YE is in the middle, the German Leica IIIa is at the bottom, and the top camera is a Leotax Elite.  The top two are very similar in construction and appearance and demonstrate the Japanese camera companies' effort to one-up the German orginal with the addition of  thumb levers for film advance. While those levers enhanced functionality they also increased the camera sizes, and they introduced some construction complexity which make DIY repairs more challenging.

The Yashica YE actually started out being produced by Nicca as the Nicca 33, but that company was bought by Yashica which continued making the camera with very little changes.  In spite of the good quality of these Leica rangefinder copies, however, they all soon disappeared from view, eclipsed by the appearance of the single lens reflex designs produced in both East and West.

Becoming A Photographer

Annie Leibovitz - selfie - 1970

Annie Leibovitz At Work is a good sized book, but it is easy reading and I made it to the end in a day. It is a book for people interested in photography, both those who appreciate the art and those who seek to practice it.

The author is generous in sharing the details of her long career including the development of her style and the equipment she used along the way.  I was struck in reading the first pages to find that she and I shared some time and  places as we both began our serious involvement with photography.  

In 1970 Leibovitz returned to her photography training at the San Francisco Art Institute and took her Minolta SR-T 101 onto the streets of the city where she soon found herself making pictures of the demonstrations against the Vietnam War.

I was doing the same with my Pentax Spotmatic.  Our paths quickly diverged from that point. One of her shots of the demonstrators found its way to the cover of Rolling Stone. The next year she again made the Rolling Stone cover with a portrait of John Lennon. Not hard to discern the reasons for the divergence from my trajectory.  She was young, pretty, sociable, smart and ambitious, and she very quickly developed impressive skills with her camera.

Leibovitz's skills quickly got her a regular position as a staff photographer for Rolling Stone and drew the interest of big magazine editors who wanted attention-grabbing pictures of media celebrities. That set the course for most of her career.

She continued using 35mm for quite a while, having moved up to a Nikon F.  Film remained the only option for a long time and the demands of her commercial work moved Leibowitz to take up a Hasselblad and later a Mamiya RZ67 along with developing her skills with lighting, mostly using strobes. The range of portrait subjects is staggering, from William S. Burroughs to the Queen of England, and every famous media personality in between.

Leibovitz provides a lot of excellent insights about how digital technology became the standard for any kind of commercial photographic work.  While the cameras and associated gear were initially quite awkward to work with, it was still a lot faster than anything that could be done with film with the exception of Polaroids that were generally unacceptable for publication.  She reports being especially impressed with the capability of digital in getting good results from color in low light situations.

I an pleased I got past my initial aversion to celebrity photography to look closely at Leibovitz's impressive career, which actually spanned a much broader swath of the photographic arts.  I'm looking forward now to making my way through her long list of published work.

The Ruby Window Solution

At first glance the Anscoflex II may look like a caricature of a camera.  However, it does have a number of unique and useful features.  Most significant of those features is the extraordinarily brilliant viewscreen -- brighter than any other regardless of origin or price.  The Anscoflex II has a two-element lens rather than the single-element meniscus found in many simple cameras.  There is also a supplemental close-up lens which can be levered in position for shots in the 3.5 to 7 foot range.  Another lever moves a yellow filter in front of the taking lens, which adds some control over exposure as well as darkening over-bright skies.

All of the simple cameras with ruby windows allowing proper frame spacing for paper-backed medium format film including the Anscoflex II present a problem for users.  Those ruby windows worked fine when a lot of those simple camera were new.  However, in the intervening years film makers have quit making the numerals on the backing paper with enough contrast to show up well through the ruby windows.  As a result it can be very difficult to see the framing numerals well enough to properly center the frame, and overlapping frames are a constant danger.

There is a simple solution to the dark window problem.  You can just remove the ruby window, leaving a hole in the camera back through which the framing numerals are easily seen.  The ruby coloring was really only an advantage long ago when films were less sensitive to red light.  Letting through the full spectrum onto the backing paper these days is not a problem as long as the length of exposure is kept short.  That can be ensured with a small strip of black tape covering the window except when the film is being advanced. 

 I was pleased to get 12 perfectly spaced frames on this roll of Kentmere 400.  With my simple cameras I most often use 100-speed film for proper sunny day exposure.  In this instance with the faster film I flipped the lever to place the yellow filter over the lens when the subject was mostly in full sun, and flipped back to the uncovered lens for shaded subjects.

Butkus has the Manual.

Slow Walking EM

 Another fine day for a leisurely stroll through Albuquerque's Old Town.

Ken Rockwell judges the EM to be Nikon's worst camera.  I beg to disagree.  I like the Nikon EM for its compactness, light weight,  aperture-priority automation, and the fact that it can use all my fine Nikon lenses.

I recently had a total disaster with a bad batch of PMK Pyro developer, so this roll of Kentmere 100 was processed in some reliable old Rodinal 1:50.

Staged Images

 Currently on exhibit at the Albuquerque Museum is the photographic work of Cara Romero and ceramics by her husband, Diego.  She is an enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe.  He is from the Cochiti Pueblo in New Mexico.  The photographic images ranged from large posters to billboard-sized images.  I have never been a fan of elaborately staged work, but I found the exhibition interesting for several reasons.

A video narrated by the photographer provided a good overview of style and techniques.

There are online videos which also illustrate the technical aspects of the work, including this shot from a PBS presentation which reveals the image making instrument to be a Canon digital camera.

 Back home after viewing the exhibit I searched online to try to get some idea about how the work was being received.  While I found a lot of links to show Cara Romero has had her work exhibited in museums all over the country, there really seemed to be no critical assessments, but only often-repeated boilerplate publicity.

My conclusion at this point is that even though there may be a lot of talk about contemporary photography, there seems to be no general agreement on exactly what that may be.  High-tech digital imagery and directorial staging certainly are prominent, but how any of that relates to the history and practice of photography over the past two centuries is not at all clear.

It is perhaps not surprising that the statements made by the artist are not particularly helpful, as such self assessments and explanations seldom are.  Romero relates that she was initially very enthusiastic about some of the early work by people like Curtis in portraying indigenous people.  As she got more into developing her own ideas and style, however, Romero decided that there was not much done since the early days to bring forth an updated view of how indigenous people are encountering the world today.  So she offers her current work as an effort to fill the perceived void.

The problem I see with that self assessment is that Romero seems to be working with a pretty narrow slice of indigenous experience.  Most of her models seem to be young creatives living in Santa Fe; they and Romero are certainly interesting and often beautiful people, but the pictures resulting from  their collaboration leave aside rather a lot of daily life of the greater community.

I think it relevant to note that elaborately staged photography is not a new idea.  Perhaps due in part to the cumbersome equipment  of the very early photographers and the hurdle of very long exposure times,  staging images - often depicting biblical subjects - was a very prominent technique.  Here, for instance, is a shot by Julia Margaret Cameron.

 Stieglitz and Strand led something of a rebellion which devalued staged work in favor of more spontaneous straight photography, and that trend predominated for the next half century in defining what should be considered as photographic fine art.  However, some staged work continued to wiggle its way into museums and art publications.  One practitioner who has been particularly enduring is Cindy Sherman, whose explorations of female identity were incorporated in self portraits which she called Untitled Film Stills.

And, finally, it cannot be overlooked that staged images have been the backbone of  advertising illustration without a letup since very early in photography's history. 

In a recent online presentation to the New Mexico Film Photographers group Chip Greenberg presented convincing evidence that the role of photographers in producing the avalanche of staged image ads which we have all been accustomed to may be close to an end.  What he did was produce an image using an AI image generator which was very close in appearance to an image he had made in his commercial photography studio years ago.  That AI image - even after some refinement - probably took less than an hour to make, while the original image on film was the product of days of work.

Following Chip's lead and shamelessly borrowing Cara Romero's concept I picked an online AI image generator of many available with a quick Google search and made the following image in under five minutes.  It won't end up in any museum exhibits, but I think it should generate some soul searching by curators and critics. (More about this subject on my other blog.)

Celebs

I've never had patience for fashion photography or celebrity portraiture.  The purpose of such pictures is mostly about selling something, usually clothing or personalities.  As a result I've largely managed to ignore the work of Annie Leibovitz.  The recent review in Vogue of Leibovitz's reissued and expanded book, Women, has made me rethink my estimation of the photographer's talents.

It has taken some effort to ignore Leibovitz for so long because articles and coffee table books by and about her are everywhere. Her Wikipedia bio covers the essential facts of her life and career, including a list of the cameras she has used. Most of her work has been recorded on film.

The examples of Leibovitz's work in the Vogue review is a pretty good selection from what she has done over the years.  The ones I particularly like fulfill my basic requirements for portraiture; they suggest something significant about the subject's character, or maybe something surprising and unexpected.  I think the 2025 pictures of Angela Davis and Michelle Obama meet those criteria.

So, next time I'm at the library I'll see if my new regard for Leibovitz's celebrities holds up well enough to motivate me lugging home one of those big books.

Laurie Smith at the Border

 In the November issue of The Sun magazine I came across the extraordinary work of Laurie Smith which I had not known before.  Her photo essay about immigrants at the southern border is all black and white, and apparently done with some kind of Leica. 

Smith's career as a photographer was built mostly on 30 years making magazine food photographs, which is perhaps the reason I did not find her earlier.  Meanwhile, she has apparently done a lot of photography along the Southwest border with Mexico.  Her essay, At The Border, is by far the best I have seen on the subject.  She has also done some excellent color work in Haiti.