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Subway, Lifeblood
August 21, 2010 8:01 AM
Extraordinary photos of the New York subway system in the 1980s by Bruce Davidson.
Not to be missed.
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The Power of Pictures in the Struggle for Civil Rights
August 1, 2010 12:13 PM
Discovering Shanghai’s Secret City
August 1, 2010 11:44 AM
Serve the People! Images from China during The Cultural Revolution
August 22, 2009 9:27 AM
Maintained by: Professor William A. Joseph
Department of Political Science
Created By: Giuliana Funkhouser ‘04 and Joyce Hsu ‘05; revised by Devyani Parameshwar ‘06 and Mimi Lai ‘06
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Helmut Newton’s Wicked World
June 11, 2009 8:59 AM
The Leica as Teacher
May 31, 2009 10:17 PM
Copyright The Online Photographer
Apropos the video we linked the other day, I would just like to throw this out there for what little it’s worth…if any young or beginning photographer of real ambition within the sound of my voice would like to radically improve his or her photography quickly and efficiently, I suggest shooting with nothing but a Leica and one lens for a year. Shoot one type of black-and-white film (yes, even if you’re completely devoted to color and digital, and hate film and everything it stands for. You don’t have to commit to this forever; it’s an exercise). Pick a single-focal-length 50mm, or 35mm, or 28mm. It doesn’t have to be a “good” lens—anything that appeals to you and that fits the camera will do. Carry the camera with you all day, every day. Shoot at least two films a week. Four or six is better (or shoot more in the spring and fall and less in the dead of summer and winter). The more time you spend shooting, the better. The amount of film you shoot is related but not so important. (Photographing is like jogging: benefit accrues to time spent doing it, not how fast you go or how much ground you cover.)
Proof the rolls of film by contact and file them sequentially in a notebook. Get or make between one and six workprints per roll, however you choose to do it (even if you scan your picks and look at the pictures on a computer screen), and, every five or ten rolls or so, have one nice print made, or make it yourself. Craft well, but don’t crop and don’t fuss; just take what the camera gives you.
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A taste of my work…
May 24, 2009 10:17 PM
Some of my photography, nicely organized:
Click to see images
I’m in the midst of a major update of my website: howardwfrench.net. Stay tuned.
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Bill Jay on Photography
May 23, 2009 5:40 PM
A link to Bill Jay’s writings on photography.
Bill, a real force for the medium, died recently.
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Danny Lyon Profile: Stubbornly Practicing His Principles of Photography
April 26, 2009 1:37 PM
Copyright The New York Times
Published: April 24, 2009
“LISTEN, do I have time to feed my pig?” the photographer Danny Lyon asked, picking up the telephone one morning at his home in rural New Mexico. “It will only take about 10 minutes. I’ll call you back,” he said, adding: “That way I can start the day with a clean conscience.”
Among a group of revolutionaries whose work rose to prominence in the late 1960s and ’70s and transformed the nature of documentary photography — a group that includes friends and colleagues of Mr. Lyon’s like Mary Ellen Mark and Larry Clark — the idea of conscience has been imbedded more deeply in Mr. Lyon’s photographs than in those of all but a few of his contemporaries.
At a time when picture magazines were still a holy grail for young photographers, Mr. Lyon, self-taught, began his career as the first staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. A week after hitchhiking south in 1962 at the age of 20 he was in jail with other protesters in Albany, Ga., next to the cell of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And Mr. Lyon’s first book, the classic “Bikeriders,” made after spending more than two years as a member of the Outlaws motorcycle gang, was not just a pioneering example of New Journalism but, as he later described it, an attempt “to destroy Life magazine” and what he saw as its anodyne vision of American life.
His newest book, “Memories of Myself,” published this month by Phaidon Press, seems on its face to be the kind of comfortable, coffee-table retrospective that a revered 67-year-old artist receives at this point in his life. It is a selection of self-assigned — and largely unpublished — photo essays that he made while wandering from Chicago to Galveston, Tex., to Brooklyn to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, over almost four decades. But even this book is a product of political calculus, as Mr. Lyon described it. He has been traveling for many years to photograph a remote, impoverished region of China with a book in mind but with little idea of who would be interested in it.
“It’s not always easy to get these things published,” he said. “I’m pretty uncompromising and not very commercial.” So when Phaidon approached him a few years ago with the idea of a career survey, he offered a deal. “I basically said, ‘If you do the China book, you can do the retrospective.’ ” (Phaidon, which does not comment on its negotiations with authors, would say only that it plans to publish two books by Mr. Lyon, in addition to “Memories of Myself,” calling him a “great photographer.”)
It is the kind of bargain Mr. Lyon has been striking his whole life, especially during years when he was supporting a family of four while insisting on making the kind of work he wanted to make, a stubborn vision that has probably contributed to his photographs and independent films not being better known. Even now, with his work in important museum collections around the country, a survivor’s hustle remains and sometimes still comes in handy: a few weeks ago, at his dentist’s office in Albuquerque, he traded a nice print for a root canal. “The market has taken a body blow, and I needed the dental work,” he explained, adding, “I was so happy to do it.”
Like Mr. Clark, who blurred the line between observer and participant and wanted to confront middle-class viewers with the American underclass, Mr. Lyon has made a peripatetic attempt to photograph people who are generally unseen or unwanted, even hated, and he has never been able to approach it with a journalist’s distance. When he began his motorcycle work in the mid-1960s while at the University of Chicago, he writes in the new book, “I was a bike rider, a photographer and a history student, probably in that order.”
When he became involved in what many critics consider his most powerful work, “Conversations With the Dead,” based on more than a year photographing inside the Texas prison system in the late 1960s, he developed deep bonds with several inmates, including one who had been convicted of rape. Another, James Ray Renton, a talented escape artist who was later convicted of killing an Arkansas police officer, became an unlikely friend and devoted correspondent for more than 30 years. (In “Like a Thief’s Dream,” Mr. Lyon’s book about their relationship, he describes testifying as a character witness for Mr. Renton at his murder trial in 1979 and, in addition to his testimony, offering Mr. Renton some marijuana during a courtroom recess. Mr. Renton declined.)
“To some, he’s idealizing people who really are not good people at all — they’re just criminals,” said Larry McMurtry, who was teaching at Rice University in Houston in the 1960s and befriended Mr. Lyon while he was there working on the prison book. “But to Danny maybe they’re good people who just never had a chance.”
“He hasn’t really changed his principles any at all since he was young, when I first met him,” Mr. McMurtry added. “He’s an idealist, to a large extent.”
In a long, animated, tangent-filled telephone interview after he went to feed his pig (which turned out to be not his but a neighbor’s, borrowed to entertain Mr. Lyon’s visiting granddaughter), Mr. Lyon more or less agreed with Mr. McMurtry and asked: “Is there something wrong with me because of that? I don’t know.”
Raised in Kew Gardens, Queens, where his father, Ernst, an immigrant from Germany, was a doctor (one of his patients in New York was Alfred Stieglitz), Mr. Lyon ached to flee the conformity of an upper-middle-class life. He discovered “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” at a formative age and was fired by the intensity of James Agee’s prose even more than by Walker Evans’s pictures.
“Agee was a stone realist, and that had a huge impact on me,” he said. One of the new book’s more lyrical essays is a series of portraits Mr. Lyon took after driving to Knoxville, Tenn., in the late 1960s simply because he wanted to see Agee’s birthplace.
Click to read more and to see some of Danny’s work
Posted at 1:37 PM · Comments (0)
Helen Levitt, Who Froze New York Street Life on Film, Is Dead at 95
March 30, 2009 12:27 PM
Copyright The New York Times
By MARGARETT LOKE
Published: March 30, 2009
Helen Levitt, a major photographer of the 20th century who caught fleeting moments of surpassing lyricism, mystery and quiet drama on the streets of her native New York, died in her sleep at her home in Manhattan on Sunday. She was 95.
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© Estate of Helen Levitt
Helen Levitt in 1963.
© Estate of Helen Levitt
Bubbles capture the attention of four girls in a photograph by Helen Levitt, who had an eye for the vignettes of New York streets.
Her death was confirmed by her brother, Bill Levitt, of Alta, Utah.
Ms. Levitt captured instances of a cinematic and delightfully guileless form of street choreography that held at its heart, as William Butler Yeats put it, “the ceremony of innocence.” A man handles garbage-can lids like an exuberant child imitating a master juggler. Even an inanimate object — a broken record — appears to skip and dance on an empty street as a child might, observed by a group of women’s dresses in a shop window.
As marvelous as these images are, the masterpieces in Ms. Levitt’s oeuvre are her photographs of children living their zesty, improvised lives. A white girl and a black boy twirl in a dance of their own imagining. Four girls on a sidewalk turning to stare at five floating bubbles become contrapuntal musical notes in a lovely minor key.
In Ms. Levitt’s best-known picture, three properly dressed children prepare to go trick-or-treating on Halloween 1939. Standing on the stoop outside their house, they are in almost metaphorical stages of readiness. The girl on the top step is putting on her mask; a boy near her, his mask in place, takes a graceful step down, while another boy, also masked, lounges on a lower step, coolly surveying the world.
“At the peak of Helen’s form,” John Szarkowski, former director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, once said, “there was no one better.”
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Verichrome, I do mind dying
March 5, 2009 9:41 AM
Copyright Dante Stella
From a very affecting essay. Follow the link below.
…When the world is gone, or when I am gone from the world, I will miss a great many things. It could be the smell of rain, the pink light of a northern sunset, or the intoxicating smell of perfume when I was sixteen years old. But what I might miss most is the smell of a roll of 120 film, pushing the paper tongue thumbwise into a plastic takeup spool, or the whirring of an old Rolleiflex.
We don’t have it now, the gelatin or the silver or the sucking sound of a metal shutter flattening reality into a still frame. There is no struggling in the dark with loading film into developing reels or the surprise of seeing that the negatives actually came out. We don’t have the magic anymore. For the would-be chemists and physicists, there was so much documentation, the disintegrating, mildewy Kodak data guides that showed curves in so much precision and told us what to do, at what temperature, and for how long: it was all method to tame the magic. Today you can find those booklets in the free bin at the front of King’s. But for all of the technique, all of the numbers and the graphs, there was always the faith of Tri-X Safety Film: you take the picture, we do the rest…
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Playboy: The Hugh Hefner Story
January 26, 2009 2:40 PM
Copyright N+1
The Complete Centerfolds is a coffee-table book compiling every Playboy centerfold published from the magazine’s inception in 1953 until 2007. Six short essays preface the decades, but there is no other text. As you might expect, the pleasures of the book are instant and visual. My favorite Playboy centerfold is Miss September 1983, dressed for a college football game in striped socks and a tartan scarf. She has a flask, a fuzzy wool cap, and a team pennant. Her neo-Gothic surroundings are meant, I think, to evoke Yale. A single branch of ivy cascades next to her, and a textbook lies abandoned at her feet. She is naked. It sounds funny in writing, but somehow there’s nothing funny about the photograph, or about any of the photographs in The Complete Centerfolds. Is laughter an anti-aphrodisiac?
The first thing that strike the casual reader is the anatomical variety among bunnies. Nipples, for one thing. Some are as big as cupcakes, others are the size of a penny. They are occasionally erect and come in a range of colors as varied as drugstore lipsticks. Pubic hair is another delight to behold, appearing first in 1971 and thriving until 1997. Gauzy coronas of pubic hair, technicolor dreampubes of every shade. You forget how assertive a healthy growth of hair can look. It comes as a pleasant shock in the midst of a creamy-smooth expanse.
Pubic hair diminishes as the nineties draw to a close. Neat triangles turn to Band Aid-sized strips, which become little Hitler mustaches or nothing at all. The modern crotch is a bit prim, a bit less forthright. You’d think that depilation would lend a youthful look to the genitals but it has the opposite effect instead, making the girls look older and slightly jaded. (Intimate grooming signals forethought.) The youthful quality of the early centerfolds disappears.
A 1956 memo to Playboy photographers listed Hefner’s criteria for the centerfolds. The model must be in a natural setting engaged in some activity “like reading, writing, mixing a drink.” She should have a “healthy, intelligent, American look—a young lady that looks like she might be a very efficient secretary or an undergrad at Vassar.” Many centerfolds feature the implied presence of a man: a flash of trouser leg in the corner, a pipe left on a table. These props transform the pinups into seduction scenarios. Their premise is simple: by identifying with the absent man, a viewer can enter the scene.
The centerfold’s signature is what we might call the “Playboy aesthetic”—something responsible both for Playboy’s long run of success and its schmaltziness. As Hefner put it in a letter to Russ Meyer (director of Faster, Pussycat! Kill Kill!), the ideal centerfold is one in which “a situation is suggested, the presence of someone not in the picture.” The goal was to transform “a straight pinup into an intimate interlude, something personal and special.” Playboy readers are meant to be participants, not voyeurs. Hefner’s vision of American sexuality was a distinctly pasteurized one—sex cleansed of its ugly (and often exciting) power plays. “Clean sex,” he insisted, “has greater appeal than tawdry sex.” Strippers, threesomes and S&M had no place in his magazine. The Playboy centerfold was a world away from the European ideal of a sexually-sophisticated temptress. Hefner’s girls were always girls, first of all, or bunnies— not women. There was no knowing gleam in a centerfold’s eye.
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Robert Frank’s The Americans: How a Swiss émigré’s cross-country road trip changed photography.
January 23, 2009 8:56 AM
Muge: Going Home
January 9, 2009 9:49 AM
A very compelling take on Chongqing, one of my favorite places in China:
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Born of Willful Passivity: The Art of William Eggleston
January 2, 2009 6:16 PM
Copyright The Wall Street Journal
The photographer William Eggleston has always depended on the kindness of editors. This shy, dissolute Southern cavalier (soon to be 70 years old) has almost never held a job or selected his own work for a book or an exhibition. It’s as though reading a storyline into the tens of thousands of images he has shot around the world since the 1960s were superfluous or vulgar, something for others to bother with.
At the beginning of his career he left that task to two of the most capable minds in American art: Walter Hopps, who discovered him in 1970 when he was director of the Corcoran Gallery; and John Szarkowski, who as director of the Department of Photographs at the Museum of Modern Art gave Mr. Eggleston a one-man show in 1976 that changed the course of photography as an art.
That controversial exhibition and its peculiar catalog, “William Eggleston’s Guide,” legitimized color photography, overturning a hierarchy that had favored black-and-white since the medium’s invention. Unlike artists of earlier generations, Mr. Eggleston did not use color for freakish or decorative effect but with a natural ease, “as though the blue and the sky were one thing,” in Mr. Szarkowski’s appreciative phrase.
Editing Mr. Eggleston is vital, and this function, even before the deaths last year of Messrs. Hopps and Szarkowski, had passed in this decade to the German curator and writer Thomas Weski. Deputy director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, he organized “Los Alamos,” the sprawling 2003 exhibition of photographs that Mr. Eggleston took around the U.S. between 1964 and 1974, and he is co-curator, with Elizabeth Sussman, of “Democratic Camera,” the retrospective now at the Whitney Museum through Jan. 25.
Mr. Eggleston’s temperament is that of a boulevardier. His books seldom have a single theme and never feature a group of identifiable characters. They don’t even confine themselves to a single city, state or country. Instead, his international oeuvre — mainly shot with small-format cameras in available light — consists of tiny epiphanies that correlate only if you want them to. The seeming randomness of the artist’s attention, as much as the color, is what baffled many viewers back in 1976.
What were the connections, if any, between places and people? Did the dog sipping from a puddle in the road have anything to do with the naked man standing in a red room with graffiti on the walls? Were the green-tiled shower and the interior of the oven in the same house? (I once asked Mr. Eggleston if he had ever photographed methodically. “I’ve taken a few stabs at it and it’s just not me,” he replied.)
Mr. Weski and Ms. Sussman have kept things loosely chronological but not imposed too much order. A room of his grainy black-and-white photos from the 1960s conveys ambiguous reactions to his native South undergoing suburbanization. Another room features a legendary black-and-white video he made in 1973-74. “Stranded in Canton,” as he titles it, offers a peek at the artist’s bizarre and fluid social world and his nonjudgmental attitude toward what his camera sees. Shot mainly at night in New Orleans, it has appearances by Delta bluesman Furry Lewis, a man biting the head off a chicken, and numerous rambling monologists.
The rest of the show is color, done with the fresh, restless eye for which Mr. Eggleston is renowned. He should be a hero to any artist opposed to the pompous or monumental. During the ’70s and ’80s he looked at things few had noticed before — the objects that collect under a bed, the strange emptiness of a suburban garage, an evening meal set for one — and he discovered therein unique harmonies and discontinuties that only a color photographer could grasp.
Many photographers since Walker Evans have focused on decaying structures and mourned the replacement of the ramshackle cabin with the new mall. Mr. Eggleston shares that sensibility. But when he switched to color in the late ’60s and early ’70s, first with transparencies and then with print film, he also recorded the wide range of hues unique to the industrial age: the faded paint of automobiles and storefronts, the many shades of gray and brown in cement and macadam, the bold solids and stripes of manufactured clothing.
Against these synthetic dyes, he has often contrasted a girl’s red hair or dark skin, a scruffy patch of grass, a pattern of sun across a sink, a startling blue sky. Such combinations of manmade and natural color exist everywhere and help to define the look of our time, even if most of us have failed to pay attention.
Looking inside a freezer, he finds that ice has a lavender tinge. A woman’s hand stirring a drink aboard an airplane seems to turn it into gold as sun through the window strikes the glass. Many artists have fallen for early morning dappled light. But in his photograph of a phone off the hook on a flowered sheet, the sun at that hour gives extra temporal mystery to a scene of a conversation interrupted for reasons we are not privy to…
Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.
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China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance
November 21, 2008 2:09 PM
My photography of Shanghai is included, along with an essay, in a forthcoming book of essays bearing this title.
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Bruce Gilden’s best shot
November 20, 2008 10:19 PM
Copyright The Guardian
In 1998, I met an ex-professional boxer and martial-arts expert in Japan, and we became friendly. He introduced me to these two yakuza, and we went for dinner in a small tempura place in the Ginza district of Tokyo.
My father was a racketeer type, so they got along with me and I got along with them.
I know their background of respect, and generally they’re polite. Some of the low-level yakuza that I’ve seen in an area of Tokyo called San’ya are really nasty and vicious, though - not nice people, and quite dangerous.
The guy who is having his cigarette lit is about 5ft 6in tall, and just as wide. When I first saw him, he was wearing a bright yellow suit. The other guy invited me to his house and told me all about his wife, who was a model and had just come back from Paris. He also told me that he can never get into the US because he’s got tattoos all over, and they don’t want yakuza in the country.
I don’t know exactly what these two guys do. I think they must keep order in the area. They work for some upper-echelon boss, and I’m sure they make good money. They have to cut their own finger joints off if they do something wrong, and my boxer friend was missing a piece of his finger. I didn’t look to see if these guys were, and you can’t quite tell in the picture.
After dinner, we went to a coffee shop, and I saw them lighting cigarettes. I took a picture with a Leica M6 and a hand-held flash while they were doing it, and then I asked them if they could repeat the gesture and I took three or four more. The big guy having his cigarette lit has the most fantastic expression. That’s what I love about it. The way he’s looking at us, like he’s looking right through us. You just know that these are tough guys.
Posted at 10:19 PM · Comments (0)
Old South Meets New, in Living Color : William Eggleston
November 7, 2008 10:29 PM
Copyright The New York Times
Thirty years ago photography was art if it was black and white. Color pictures were tacky and cheap, the stuff of cigarette ads and snapshot albums. So in 1976, when William Eggleston had a solo show of full-color snapshotlike photographs at the august Museum of Modern Art, critics squawked.
It didn’t help that Mr. Eggleston’s pictures, shot in the Mississippi Delta, where he lived, were of nothings and nobodies: a child’s tricycle, a dinner table set for a meal, an unnamed woman perched on a suburban curb, an old man chatting up the photographer from his bed.
That MoMA’s curator of photography, John Szarkowski, had declared Mr. Eggleston’s work perfect was the last straw. “Perfectly banal, perfectly boring,” sniffed one writer; “erratic and ramshackle,” snapped another; “a mess,” declared a third.
Perfect or not, the images quickly became influential classics. And that’s how they look in “William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008,” a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art that is this artist’s first New York museum solo since his seditious debut.
Naturally we see the work more clearly now. We know that it was not cheap. The dye transfer printing Mr. Eggleston used, adapted from advertising, was the most expensive color process then available. It produced hues of almost hallucinatory intensity, from a custard-yellow sunset glow slanting across a wall to high-noon whiteness bleaching a landscape to pink lamplight suffusing a room.
And compositions that at first seemed bland and random proved not to be on a 2nd, 3rd and 20th look. The tricycle was shot from a supine position so as to appear colossal. The woman on the curb sits next to a knot of heavy chains that echoes her steel-mesh bouffant. The affable guy on the bed holds a revolver, its barrel resting on his vintage country quilt.
Posted at 10:29 PM · Comments (0)
Searching for Robert Johnson
October 19, 2008 10:42 PM
Copyright Vanity Fair
In the seven decades since his mysterious death, bluesman Robert Johnson’s legend has grown—the tragically short life, the “crossroads” tale of supernatural talent, the genuine gift that inspired Dylan, Clapton, and other greats—but his image remains elusive: only two photos of Johnson have ever been seen by the public. In 2005, on eBay, guitar maven Zeke Schein thought he’d found a third. Schein’s quest to authenticate the picture only led to more questions, both about Johnson himself and about who controls his valuable legacy.
by Frank DiGiacomo November 2008
In June 2005, Steven “Zeke” Schein was killing time on his home computer when he logged on to eBay and typed “old guitar” into the auction site’s search engine. Classically trained as a guitarist, Schein had turned his longtime passion for the instrument into a profession when, in 1989, he had joined the sales force at Matt Umanov Guitars, in Manhattan’s West Village. In the more than 15 years that Schein had worked there, he had cultivated a regular clientele that included Patti Smith, ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, and record producers Daniel Lanois and John Leventhal; he had also sold guitars to Bob Dylan, Pete Townshend, Brad Pitt, and Johnny Depp, among other celebrities. His job had also exposed him to the painstaking, detail-oriented detective work that often goes into identifying and authenticating vintage guitars. Even when the make, model, and serial number of an instrument are apparent, pinpointing its age and value sometimes requires scrutinizing the idiosyncrasies of its construction. The design of the instrument’s tailpiece, its headstock, the number of frets embedded in its neck, its paint job or finish—all could be identifying factors.
Possibly a photo of Robert Johnson, left, and fellow bluesman Johnny Shines
The photograph bought on eBay by Zeke Schein, who believes it depicts Robert Johnson, left, and fellow bluesman Johnny Shines. © 2007 Claud Johnson.
Schein enjoyed this aspect of the business, and when he had nothing better to do, he would sometimes log on to eBay to test his knowledge against the sellers who were advertising vintage guitars on the Web site. At the very least, he found it amusing that some people had no idea what they were selling.
Posted at 10:42 PM · Comments (0)
William Claxton Dies
October 13, 2008 12:56 PM
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-claxton13-2008oct13,0,4633702.story
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2008/10/william-claxton.html
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article4936102.ece
Posted at 12:56 PM · Comments (0)
