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.

************

UPDATE:

It turns out there is a selection of photos buried in the middle of the online book.  Still helpful, though, to do a quick search in a second tab for examples of the artists discussed.

Also,

I found another document online with a selection of A.D. Coleman's writing that includes some of the columns from the Light Readings book, but covering a longer time period.  It is in a format that is a bit easier to read than the openlibrary scan.

An
A. D. Coleman Reader
Published Writings 1968-2017

Prepared for the Forum on Contemporary Photography
Department of Photography, Museum of Modern Art

September 19, 2018

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.

Sally Mann

I am a long-time fan of Sally Mann, so I was pleased to happen on a link at Photrio to a video of an appearance she made at the Rhode Island School of Design.  She spoke briefly about her latest book, Art Work: On the Creative Life, and she then answered questions from a panel of three RISD teachers.  Mann talked about her long career and her photographic style and techniques, mostly with large format gear.

Mann did a nice job of explaining her creative process.  She admitted that she really often only has a vague idea initially about where her efforts will take her, relying on the pictures she makes to reveal a path toward a theme. She complimented her long-time editor in assembling her projects into book form.

I was particularly interested in seeing that her photography, even though having a spontaneous look, really depends on a lot of staging and direction.  I have three of her books, so I'm a little surprised that I was not more consciously aware of that aspect of her work earlier.  Given the fact that Mann has mostly used cumbersome large format cameras, it is really inevitable that some directorial work is required to produce her images.

I have expressed some distaste for staged work before, most recently in regard to a big show at the Albuquerque Museum of the work of Cara Romero.  I think the difference is that Mann's staging contributes to bringing out the fundamental character and experiences of her subjects, while Romero's elaborately staged and oversized images seem to me to be contrived and lacking in a clear meaning.

Mann's earlier work focused on her family, but she says she now makes no pictures of people and is only doing landscapes. She expressed some positive feelings about the possibilities of digital and said she currently often uses a small Leica digital camera.  At the same time, she also is clearly excited about the opportunity to explore experimental darkroom  techniques such as solarization.

Testing The Limits

While the Anscoflex II offers some control beyond that available from other simple cameras, the possibilities are still considerably less that those offered by more sophisticated designs.  The control features of the camera must also be used with some care and discretion.

What I found while working through the twelve available frames on some Kentmere 400 was that the close-up lens and the yellow filter cannot be simultaneously employed.  So a close-up with the filter compensating for bright sun with fast film is not an option.

I also found with the ruby window removed for improved frame numeral visibility that I needed to carefully avoid exposing the film's paper backing to any hint of direct sunlight.  The first half of this roll of film looked good in terms of exposure, but there were some washed out frames further down the roll.

So a deliberate and thoughtful approach to using the Anscoflex II along with stationary subjects enhance the likelihood of success.  I found that trying to grab shots of our active dog out in the yard was a bit beyond the boundary of success.

Winter Light

The little Nikon EM and its Series E lens gets little love from many Nikon enthusiasts, but it has always performed well for me.

I'm currently using a composite of the above images as the desktop background on my old iMac.

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.