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)

Why Pinhole?

PHOTOGRAPHS record an intersection of light and time. We have become accustomed to viewing records of such events made with sophisticated lenses capable of producing images which are uniformly illuminated, sharply focused, and without obvious distortions. Pinhole images are quite different in character from those produced by lenses. Such images are found to be fundamentally unsharp if examined closely. However, it will also be seen that the small aperture of the pinhole creates a depth of focus which makes everything equally in focus from a few inches to infinity. Projecting an image from a pinhole onto a flat plane results in some vignetting due to light fall-off at the frame edges, and there will also be some stretching out of the image features at the edges. 

  Although the pinhole thus presents a type of image to which we are unaccustomed, it might be argued that the pinhole is depicting a truer version of reality because there is nothing but air between the real world and the image projected onto the film plane. One can curve the film plane to compensate for some apparent distortion and light fall-off, but that just introduces a different set of linear peculiarities, and lens designers are always faced with similar trade-offs. In the end, it is probably all a mixture of interpretation and illusion that we are really talking about, and one of the pinhole's virtues is that it reminds us of the slippery nature of reality. 

  The pinhole phenomenon has been known and exploited since Antiquity. Projected pinhole images occur frequently in nature, but it takes some good luck to find them in a location that is sufficiently shaded to make them perceptible. One time this happens with predictable regularity is during a solar eclipse. If one looks then at a wall shaded by trees, the pinholes formed by the intersections of leaves and branches will be seen to be projecting a multitude of images of the crescent sun. Once the origin of such images was deduced – and people had sufficient leisure and resources – the pinhole image became a source of entertainment and functionality. Renaissance artists made use of camera obscura images as drawing aids, and the development of glass lenses greatly increased the portability and practicality of image projection devices. 

  While an understanding of the pinhole phenomenon was a necessary precursor to photography, pinholes actually played a very minor role in the discovery of that process early in the 19th Century. By that time, lens design was already well advanced and the brightness of images projected by a lens was crucial to the photographic process because of the weak response of early photo-sensitive materials. Also, it was not the projection of an image – be it through a pinhole or a lens – that signalled the arrival of photography, but rather the ability to fix the image somewhat permanently on a flat surface so that it could later be viewed and transported. Photography was thus at that point more a triumph of chemistry than of optics. There was some experimentation with pinhole photographic images from the earliest days, but it became a much more feasible pursuit with the development of modern, fast films. The invigoration of interest in pinhole photography since the early 1980's may also be thought of as kind of a backlash to an over-abundance of "perfect" lens-made images which has somewhat devalued their importance in everyday life. 

    Perhaps the greatest attraction of producing pinhole images is the lure of making something out of nothing – a kind of magic. A light-tight box with a hole in it and a piece of film or photographic paper wielded by anyone is capable of producing a detailed depiction of a natural scene beyond the capabilities of the finest draftsman. That was certainly part of the allure of early photographic endeavors, and it is possible to recapture some of that early enthusiasm for the photographic arts by constructing and using your own pinhole camera. Of course, one can also spend real money on acquiring somewhat complicated and artfully designed pinhole cameras, but none of them is really likely to produce images superior to those from the simplest home-made pinhole cameras if used with a bit of patience and perseverance.

(This article originally appeared on my old website.)

An American Journey

Christie's is auctioning the Diann G. and Thomas A. Mann Collection of Photographic Masterworks in October.  The 277 page catalog for the collection can be purchased from Christies, or it can be downloaded free as a pdf file.  This is an amazing collection of photographic images spanning a century of photography, with detailed notes for each item.  Thanks to Mike Johnston of The Online Photographer for the heads-up.

Song Without Words

In the process of reading Anna Karenina recently I recalled that Tolstoy's wife, Sophia, was a photographer.  I went looking on line for information about her and turned up a nice little review of the book, Song Without Words by Leah Bendavid-Val.  The review author is himself a blogger, photographer and resident of Albuquerque, Joe Van Cleave.  He does a nice job of selecting excerpts from the book and giving them some perspective from the point of view of a photographer.

I thought the book was excellent in its presentation of the life of Sophia Tolstoy in her own words and pictures.  A few of the photographs have been published elsewhere, but the great majority are made available for the first time in the book.  I checked out the book from our library, but I'll likely get a copy for myself as it can be had for near nothing from on line booksellers through Amazon.

There is one question which I have about pictures at the beginning and end of the book which show a small 5x7-format view camera said to be the one used by Sophia Tolstoy.  As Van Cleave faithfully reports in his review, the illustrated camera was said to be a Kodak purchased around 1895.  At that time, George Eastman was in the process of buying up camera companies in Rochester and slapping his company name on the products, which did include view cameras.  I looked through the online catalogs from the period and could not find anything that looked very much like the camera in the book.

I did find several on line illustrations of very similar cameras such as this one at the Live Auctioneers site which is a back-focusing tailboard model.

This camera and the others like it I found were identified as being of German origin, circa 1880.  In the above illustration, you can see a shutter module in the background which is not shown in the book.  Given the style and content of the pictures made by Sophia, it seems very likely that she would have had a shutter on her camera, rather than just relying on a lens cap for making the exposures. I think it is pretty clearly not a Kodak, so one has to wonder if the camera in the book made the photos, or if recollections about the camera's origin have become clouded by time.

In any case, the camera's identity is a pretty small part of the well-told story.  The book contains facsimiles from Sophia's diary entries and the there is no question about the authenticity of the photographs.  There is a nice selection of the photos from the book which can be found at the photo-eye bookstore site.