A Decade of Discovery

I was looking for something to support my bedtime reading habit.  Not finding anything interesting at the local library website, I turned to openlibrary.org and entered "photography criticism" in the search box.  That got me to Light Readings: a photography critic's writings, 1968-1978 by Allan D. Coleman.

The decade of articles collected in the book were first published in The New York Times, the Village Voice and Popular Photography. Coleman seemed a familiar name and it seems like I must have seen some of the columns as I was in New York in the late 1960s.  I don't recall any of the dozen pieces I've read so far.  

My lack of good familiarity with Coleman is a symptom of my general failure to take advantage of the great photographic resources which were available at the time.  There was really no end of museum and gallery exhibits on photography.  I can really only recall going often to the Museum of Modern Art, and I took no advantage at all of the opportunities for learning from the great people who were teaching courses in New York in those days.

I have since gotten familiar with a lot of the artists in photography that Coleman's columns discuss.  It is great fun to read about many of those people in Coleman's interviews and critiques. His style is spare and perceptive and there a lot of good stories I had not seen before about the New York photography scene in the 1960s and 1970s.

Coleman's historical and social comments are mostly right on.  One instance in which he misses the mark is in a discussion of holography.  I do recall the hype about that 3D imaging technology, but Coleman's prediction that it would be the art form of the future really didn't pan out.

I imagine that Coleman's columns were accompanied by examples of the photographic work he was discussing, but they did not make it into the scanned copy of the openlibrary book.  It is easy enough to supplement the reading with quick online searches for the images.  I also have books by some of the photographers.

I was particularly pleased to find that one of Coleman's articles dealt with the career of Roy DeCarava, whose work I have always admired, mostly through the collection illustrated in the Friends of Photography book edited by James Alinder and with a lengthy introduction by Sherry Turner DeCarava. Coleman's article provides a good overview of DeCarava's style and the difficulties he encountered in obtaining appropriate recognition as a Black artist.

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.

More from the Duaflex

 Another sunny December day and another roll of film in the Kodak Duaflex.  This time it is some Arista Edu Ultra 200 of indeterminate age.  The box does not seem to have an expiration date.  I got it some time past from Free Style.   I suspect this is repackaged Fomapan as the pre-soak came out of the tank very blue.  All of the shots were made with a light yellow filter over the lens.  Processing was in Rodinal 1:50.  

See some more about the first model Kodak Duaflex and its designer in an article on my old website.

The Duaflex in Old Town

New Mexico is having an exceptionally warm and sunny winter.  Good conditions for one of my sunny day cameras, the Kodak Duaflex.  I loaded it with Kentmere 100 and took a walk around Old Town.

I processed the film in Rodinal.  That works well with most 100-speed films, but not so much this time.  I had to adjust tonalities significantly in Photoshop.  I am going to try again,  maybe with 400-speed film, along with a yellow filter for the bright sun scenes and processing in HC110.