West Coast Magic

No……, we are not talking California, but the West Coast of Denmark!

Harbel – Low tide, Jutland, 2021

West Jutland is a 500 km stretch of windy, sandy coastline that is sparsely populated except for a few weeks in the summer, when the Germans roll up from the south and the Danes come from the east and go to their cottages hidden in the dunes.

Harbel – Hitler’s Atlantic Wall anno 2021

Protected by dikes a few small and medium size towns – including Ribe, Denmark’s first Capital – sit exposed to the elements with wind and rain best suited for boots and all-weather gear.   Forget the umbrella, it won’t last 10 minutes.

Harbel – Tree at the Coast, Jutland, 2021

You could think of the coastline as one long beach with a few sandy islands off shore.  The geographic contours remain flat and low.  Most of the time you feel you can see forever. 

The beaches are a paradise for wind- and kite-surfers, and naturally, the chief topic of conversation is the weather.  The good news is that if you don’t like it, it can and will change momentarily.

Harbel – The Guardians at Viking Cemetery, 2021

Vikings came from this land and traces remain, as do the remains of Hitler’s unsuccessful Atlantic Wall.  Mostly, it is ocean, sand, dunes, small houses and fishing boats, and for those few weeks in summer, there is no better place on earth.  West Jutland – raw, wild and wonderful!

Harbel

Venice and the Cruise Ship

I have spent many, many weeks of my life in Venice.  I have amassed a great number of images from this incredible city, which I visited for the first time when I was 4.  I walked with my grandmother along the canals and went into little cafes.  I had my first cup of espresso with 3 sugars.  I do not remember, but no doubt I was wired for the next few of hours!  But I remember this city as being pure magic from the first time I saw it.  All the cool buildings, the canals, the boats, and no cars!

There is a sensation that you get nowhere else, when you enter the city in the lagoon from the only rail and road artery to the mainland.  Most pop out of the big, wide and flat modern train station that is one of very few buildings built in the city during the 1930s.  Across the canal, past the chaos of vaporettos (water buses), water taxis and flat-bottomed delivery boats, and the odd iconic gondola, there is the first classic church dome.  The copper dome of San Simeone Piccolo.  This is my first memory of the city.  But this blog is not about pretty buildings, canals and bridges, but rather about tourism and what we can do about it.

As tourists, guests and visitors to a city, or country, we have an obligation to participate in the economy in a meaningful way.  This means that we stay locally, we eat and drink locally, and contribute to the cultural maintenance of a location by buying museum tickets and perhaps bringing home a trinket, or in the case of Venice, perhaps a great piece of glass.  There is the potential for fair trade between tourists and hosts. 

In Venice, this has gone completely off the rails.  This is in part due to insane cruise ship traffic, which brings visitors to the city in the lagoon, who eat, drink and sleep on their ship and who benefit from volume discounts at museums and galleries and who can be seen walking around in groups with green or red number-stickers on their shirts, or worse with matching hats or jackets.  They march like armies of ants through the narrow streets and alleys completely oblivious to everyone around them, listening intensely to a narrative provided by a tour guide, who is rarely local, but has learned the basics from a book, or worse.

Harbel – St. Marks Square

Here are the numbers: based on scheduled calls for cruise ships with more than 500 passengers, 1.2 million cruise ship passengers were destined for Venice in 2020, had it not been for Covid19, 56 cruise-lines would have delivered 514 cruise ship arrivals over the year. 

Venice is a small city with a shrinking population.  The city has a total population of just over 60,000 inhabitants.  In 1950, it was 170,000.  The number has been falling every year since tourism grew to levels, where it was more profitable to have a shop selling cheap trinkets to tourists than a hardware store.  It becomes more and more difficult to live in the city under constant siege from hoards of tourists. 

Harbel – A cruise ship tourist

Lots of thinking has been going on during the corona-crisis in the city.  What if…..  Citizens have enjoyed their own city for the first time in years.  People have tried to reimagine what a better managed tourist destination could look like.  But I digress.  This is a blog about photography, and of course, the city is a wonderful destination for photographers, but also one where the arrival of the cruise ships offer a sad reality that is hard to miss.  While I normally do not give cruise ship tourists much time, or film, it is telling that even I, who tries to be timeless in my work, pretending I am local, cannot avoid the disaster that is an overrun city, where more than 1.2 million people come off their cruise ships adding nothing and contributing nothing, but congestion and misery.

Harbel – Cruise Ship Venice

I feel strongly that cruise ship traffic to Venice should be banned.  The ships are too big, too disruptive, and they damage the seabed and the foundations of the very buildings that tourists come to experience. 

Tourist visits should be allowed only, if staying overnight in the city in a hotel.  And there should be a minimum-spend per day.  I believe countries like Bhutan still enforce a daily minimum spend to help pay for the negative effects of tourism. 

Harbel – Canaletto Umbrellas

There is great beauty in Venice, but it doesn’t work without local people that make it a living, working city.  It would be sad, if tourism traffic finally breaks the back of the city and turns it into a Disneyland.  I can recommend visiting Las Vegas to see what would happen to Venice, if unscrupulous financial interests are allowed to continue to destroy La Serenissima, the Most Serene Republic.

Sadly, the cruise ship tourists do make for good subjects, but I can certainly live without them. 

Harbel    

 

Paul Hoeffler’s Saturday Night at the Roller-Skating Rink

Hoeffler, Paul – Hat and Two Dancers

One of the stories that Paul told was of an evening at a Rochester roller-skating rink.  Paul was at a performance by Erskine Hawkins and his minimalist Tuxedo Junction band.  I have selected a few photographs from that evening below, but first, a word or two from Paul:

“The economics of touring with a 16-piece band forced Erskine Hawkins to bring only 6 musicians, including himself on trumpet and Gloria Lynne, vocalist, to play a dance in Rochester, NY.  The performance was held at a converted rollerskating rink.

Hoeffler, Paul – Lady X

Mr. Hawkins and the players were in good spirits, and supportive of my photographing the event.  The tenor player, Julian Dash, strongly suggested I stay with him on the bandstand, when a ‘friendly shooting’ took place.  A girl was most unhappy that her boyfriend had brought another girl to the dance and brought a gun and fired a couple of rounds – nobody was hurt.

Hoeffler, Paul – Dream Dancing

This was a typical evening at this all-black function.  At many of these events, I was one of the few, maybe the only white person there.  There was no hostility, and many people were interested in what I was photographing.  This is a time that no longer exists.  Like Atget’s images of Paris at the turn of the century, these images are a time capsule, a record of a period in our history and in our culture, which we cannot return to.”

Hoeffler, Paul – Gloria Lynne

What I particularly admire about this photography event is the lack of photographs of the band.  I find it infinitely intriguing that Paul spent most of his time on stage shooting the other way.  Out, out onto the dance floor.  It looks cold, along the walls, people are wearing overcoats.  Must have been freezing.  Those that worked the dance floor look a little more comfortable, for a time.  Gloria Lynne pulling a cigarette from a package, surrounded by paper cups of coffee, perhaps spiked with a bit of whisky to keep warm.  There is a wonderful mood in these photographs, a mood that is almost dreamy.  Paul would often refer to these photographs as the Dream Dancing series.  I got the impression that of all his work, these images rose to the top of his list.  He was proud of these images.  This was not Herman Leonard, or William Claxton.  No cigarette smoke to set the mood. This was something entirely different.  More real, more escapist perhaps, and definitely dreamy…..

Harbel

The Mystery of the Crying Frenchman


For many years, I have looked for a print of the famous war photograph that shows the profound sadness and despair among Frenchmen, not loyal to the Vichy puppet government.  I finally found a press print. 

Anonymous – The Weeping Frenchman

Like so many other mystery photographs, this one is attributed to an anonymous photographer. Some sources I found, say the Associated Press. But always one for a good mystery, I started looking a little harder.

There is newsreel footage from a solemn time in Marseille (not Paris, as has been assumed by many) where a parade of French Regimental Banners left French soil for safe-keeping in Algeria, so as not to fall into the hands of the advancing German Army. The banners left France onboard ship, returning only with the Invasion by Allied Forces towards the end of the war.  I assume this would have been in the fall of 1939.
I have always wondered why no photographer ever took credit.  Why no print was ever made that didn’t seem a little muddy.  As though the only way to print this image was from a not-so-great inter-negative.  Not an original negative.  Not a first-generation print.  I always thought the image was so good that the quality was perhaps secondary. Perhaps the image was so important that I should look for it even if it wasn’t in perfect condition.

But then, the great reveal………  I found this old newsreel on Youtube of all places.  The link is here, posted by someone called “All is History”:

Here is a screen capture at 29 seconds:


There is no way that a photographer would have been able to take a photograph at the exact same angle, from the exact same place, at the exact moment.  In other words, the credit for this incredibly important image goes not to a photographer, but to an unknown cameraman, covering the news.  Part of a newsreel for everyone to see in the theaters of what little remained of a free Europe, before the feature film that would follow.

It is a mystery that has probably been solved.  It is perhaps a little sad, as we now know that in fact there is no anonymous photographer, but rather a cameraman, who was in the right place at the right time.  Of course, now the cameraman is elusive, but that is a mystery for another day.

The ‘photograph’ of the crying Frenchman has become legend.  It has become the embodiment of so much pain and suffering by the occupied people of France.  It has been claimed as showing a heart-broken spectator to the German army marching down the Champs Elysee.  But the footage does not lie.  The voice-over tells the story: 

“Gone is the Republic of France.  Gone is free speech and a free representative government.  Gone is liberty, equality, fraternity.  With their ears they listen, but their minds and their hearts are down by the Mediterranean, where the colours of the regiments are being taken to Africa, out of the Nazi grasp.  The people weep, as their glory departs, but they don’t as yet know that France has hope, a rallying point.  Charles de Gaulle, a soldier in the great tradition of France is not surrendering. He will continue to fight, gathering about him loyal Frenchmen from all over the World, who become the free French army.  The fighting French.  Yes, the people weep as they watch their colours go, not knowing that two years later these same flags would be unfurled in North Africa.”

Clearly, the footage is a mix of film from different locations and different times.  The voice-over must have been added later. The mix of Charles de Gaulle footage and the footage of the banners leaving Marseille are not contemporary. However, the footage of the crowds and the banners leaving, I believe, are indeed from the same reel and as such, I can see nothing that would dispute either the origin of the photograph, or the ‘photographer’, the unknown cameraman.

Let me close by saying that I love the photograph.  I don’t care that it is a single frame from a few feet of film.  It is I believe a symbol.  A moment in time.  What a photograph can sometimes do when it is very successful.  It stands as a testament. 

It is France at a time of deep sorrow, captured forever in a photograph.  A single frame.

Harbel

The End of Analog Photography for Canon. The Dawn of a New Era

This week Canon announced that they were discontinuing the production of analog cameras. No more film for Canon! It was maybe inevitable, even predictable.  Volume manufacturers let the numbers game dictate their business.

I feel a little sad, as my first serious camera was a Canon. Some 30 years ago the semi-automatic T70 became the tool for my first real attempts at making photographs. I had had a number of cameras before then, but always compact models. Mostly for travel. I had a Minox – very quiet spy camera – and an Kodak Instamatic. Canon was my first serious camera.

It may well be that this move by Canon will trigger like moves by their competitors, who have maintained a presence in the film segment for years with small sales volume, little innovation and tiny profits (if any at all). It will, I think, create a segment in the market that will continue to specialize in analog. Perhaps a few of the big companies will sell off their analog divisions for a song?

Interestingly, my lab friends tell me that they are seeing a lot of new customers bringing in film for processing. It is the old thing…that’s new again. In every generation the old is new again, like when my friend’s kids brought a home made CD to his car and said ‘Dad, play this…. It is really cool’. It was The Beatles.

I am of course a hardcore film photographer. I am committed to keeping the art alive. Focus on framing and composition. Light. Capturing light and shadow. Printing full frame.  After all, it is what photography is about: Capturing light!  Not whether your computer skills are up to snuff.

I have previously lamented the fact that photography has not found a way to divide itself into analog and digital in a meaningful way.  Perhaps the Canon decision will help restart the debate again.

Canon – RIP

Harbel

The Gastronomy of the Eye

I have been asked to put together an exhibition on the theme of Paris and France for a brand new spot in Copenhagen, Denmark. Having spent extended periods of my life in the City of Lights, this is a very welcome challenge.

Location is not usually a way I think about my photographs, and putting together the show presented an interesting challenge. I started to think about the idea of the flâneur. A flâneur is a uniquely Parisian term, rooted in Old Norse, where a verb flana meant to ‘wander with no purpose’. In sixteenth century French the verb flânerie evolved and took on the meaning of “idly strolling with no particular urgency or destination”. In the nineteenth century someone engaging in flânerie became a flâneur. A person widely romanticized in the second half of the 19th century by the likes of Baudelaire, who referred to the flâneur as one who engages in the ‘botany of the sidewalk’, and Balzac – who gave me the title for this show – referred to the flâneur as someone engaged in ‘the gastronomy of the eye’.

What can one say about Paris? She is in your blood. Nowhere else does a river, acres of cut stone, and uncompromising nineteenth century urban planning come together to successfully form a city that dreams are made of. A city of light, of enlightenment, philosophy, and fifty years ago, where the spirit of ’68 erupted to echo around the world, so very apropos.

People who live in Paris have found a way to coexist and share their good fortune with millions and millions of visitors each year. Parisians get on with their lives, enjoy their croissant, their café-au-lait, their petit verre and slices of saucisson sec. More often than not, they do so on the sidewalk, protected by an awning, sitting at tables that are impossibly small, on chairs that are comfortable, but not too comfortable.

Paris is a tempting mistress. A place where you can disappear and be the photographing flâneur. I wander the streets of Paris, soaking up the atmosphere, taking in the smells, merging with the pavement and the walls to see, but not be seen. I see, compose and photograph, only to once again fade into the background.

If you happen to be in Copenhagen, please visit the exhibition anytime after April 19th, 2018 at: Frenchy, Store Kongensgade 69.  Frenchy serves a mean coffee and the brunch is legendary.

Harbel

For more information, visit harbel.com

 

 


 

The Trouble at Magnum Photos, Manipulated Digital Photographs, and New Investors

• Last year the famous photographer Steve McCurry was caught having digitally manipulated a number of his photographs. He blamed his ‘team’ (Petapixel.com, May 6th, 2016). But what about his other family, his Magnum family?

• Only a few weeks ago, Peter Vik announced he was leaving Magnum Photos, because he refused to sign a new contract with an outside investment group. He left Magnum to protect his freedom, as a photographer (British Journal of Photography, June 15th, 2017).

These two news items may have nothing in common at first glance, but they may be symptomatic of trouble at Magnum Photos and perhaps a warning of things to come.

I have for many, many years been a strong supporter of the legacy that has led Magnum Photos to be a place for photographic independence, where photographers retain control of their photographs, sold for single use only to media far and wide.

When the founders of Magnum came up with the single use policy, it laid the foundation for the livelihoods of many of the best photographers of the past 70 years. The price for this success was of course a certain set of iron-fisted leaders that forced photography in a particular direction.

One of the early drivers was Henri Cartier Bresson (HCB). A fiercely independent photographer, who with a substantial family fortune behind him could afford to be selective in his assignments, and who as luck would have it with his first self-assigned project for Magnum Photos struck gold. HCB was in India to photograph Gandhi. As it happened, this was the day before Gandhi was murdered. HCB went on to cover the funeral leaving the world with some very iconic photographs that were sold to newspapers and magazines far and wide. In some ways, this single assignment cemented the name of Magnum Photos and made it what it has been for the past seven decades.

HCB was the backbone of Magnum Photos for many, many years. He worked hard at critiquing and schooling superb young photographers like Marc Riboud until he was satisfied that they had mastered the HCB esthetic. Shooting in his image, one might say. But strong personalities have their own challenges.

When Kryn Taconis an early Dutch member of Magnum came to Paris after having returned from Algeria, where he had been photographing on the side of independence (and therefore against the French, in the eyes of HCB), Magnum Photos on the specific orders of HCB refused to circulate his photographs through their usual channels, effectively muzzling Taconis. Taconis soon left the collective.

I met Kryn Taconis’ widow a few years ago, around 2002, I think. By then she was in her 90s. She showed me a photograph by HCB. A modest size print of Kashmir, from 1947. The inscribed photograph was HCB’s gesture of contrition for having effectively censored Kryn Taconis out of Magnum. He had come to visit, in person, admitting he was wrong to block Taconis’ work, by letting his own personal politics get in the way. He was a dollar short and a couple of decades late. Kryn Taconis had passed away in 1979.

In modern times, when Steve McCurry was found to have manipulated his photographs to perfection, he blamed his ‘team’. McCurry made a lame argument that he was not shooting on assignment, and had not supervised sufficiently, etc. Had there been only one of these manipulated photographs, it might have been OK. Write it off to assistant enthusiasm, perhaps? But there are several internet-sleuths, who have uncovered further examples by simply comparing photographs by McCurry that are in circulation on the web. Does this taint all of McCurry’s work?  You decide….

The final product

The original image

Reuters and AP and several other agencies, including National Geographic, all seem to endorse and enforce a code of conduct: Mr. Gerry Hershorn, who until 2014 was Photo Editor for Reuters, put it this way: “Well, there are … some very accepted practices. If you take a picture and somebody’s skin tone is purple by mistake, it’s very common for a photographer to bring the skin tone back to a proper skin tone color. A photographer is never allowed to change content. You can’t add information, you can’t take away things.”

Not long ago, AP severed all ties to Narciso Contreras. He had digitally removed another photographer’s camera from one of his photographs, taken in Syria. AP acted swiftly and scrubbed their website of all Contreras photographs. Santiago Lyon, VP and Director of Photography said in a statement: “AP’s reputation is paramount and we react decisively and vigorously when it is tarnished by actions in violation of our ethics code. Deliberately removing elements from our photographs is completely unacceptable.”

Don McCullin, one of the last greats of photojournalism – and not a member of Magnum – put it this way: “Digital manipulation of photographs is ‘hideous’ and has left photographers able to ‘lie’ to the public by doctoring images. Pictures have been ‘hijacked’ by digital, with old-fashioned skills of the dark room eclipsed by computer generated colour.”

When it comes to Steve McCurry, Magnum Photos has chosen to remain virtually silent.

It seems that when the big names in photography make mistakes, like HCB with his politics, or Steve McCurry with his digitally perfected colour photographs, there are different rules. HCB may be dead, but I do not think he would be happy about Magnum Photos taking on outside investors, and starting to lose control of the collective he founded. Likewise, had he been alive, I am pretty sure he would have asked Steve McCurry to leave Magnum Photos.

But, if Steve McCurry were asked to leave Magnum Photos, what would the new investors say? What would losing a revenue stream from work by what used to be one of the great photojournalists of his time? This may explain the silence from a usually outspoken Martin Parr, who just stepped down as President of Magnum.

For all its faults, Magnum Photos may be the last refuge for some of the best photographers in the world, who might otherwise have had to shoot weddings and corporate annual reports to survive. In a world where a cell phone video by an anonymous witness, has replaced professional photojournalism in most media outlets, it is tough to be a photojournalist.

I worry…. If books are anything to go by, Magnum Photos is doing everything it can to invent new revenue streams. There is a TV series in development, and I understand that there are discussions about how best to leverage the brand. With the new investors in place, who will be looking for a return on their investment, can coasters and coffee mugs be far behind? AND in refusing to tackle the McCurry issue, has Magnum opened the door to doubt about authenticity, and legitimacy of itself, and its collective of great photographers?

Harbel,
San Sebastian

See more on my website: harbel.com

Images are borrowed from the web and are attributed to Steve McCurry, and are for illustration purposes only, no rights owned or implied.

Colour is for clothes, black and white is for the soul!

On Black and White versus Colour photography

The Canadian photographer Ted Grant famously said: “When you photograph people in colour, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!”, I have modified this slightly to fit my view on the eternal debate over colour versus black and white photography.

I think it should read: “Colour is for clothes, black and white is for the soul….” While the difference may be subtle, I think limiting this great insight to photographing people only, is a dis-service. In the abstract sense, if you look around you and strip away colour in your mind’s eye, instead looking at shapes, forms, shadows, planes, texture and reduce this to two dimensions, you have the ingredients for making a black and white photograph, regardless of subject matter.

When you do this, you are in a sense simplifying your surroundings to planes, textures, light and shadow in shades of grey. I find this stripping away to essential elements that can be observed, not distracted by the influence of colour most serene. It is no longer reality, but an essence, a distillation.

I make photographs in black and white, using an analog Leica camera, printing full frame from the original negative, without any kind of digital manipulation. I use the same lens all the time, the same film all the time, and don’t own a tripod, or flash. I do this by choice. I try to keep the tool side of my photographs constant, so that I can focus on looking at what is in front of me and knowing – most of the time – what I can hope to capture in a photograph.

I find that when you spend a lot of time making photographs, you tend to start seeing the world around you in stills, almost like looking at a film one frame at a time. You find yourself constantly framing your surroundings, looking at the light, and sometimes making the photograph, should you have remembered to strap on the camera that day.

It brings to mind the painter Modigliani, who in abject poverty, unable to afford canvas and paint, was asked how his painting was going? He answered that he had already painted several paintings that day, in his mind. This is how I feel about photographs. Whether you actually make a photograph, or simply construct one in your mind’s eye, the result is a constant state-of-mind that encourages the creative mind to keep searching and looking for the elusive perfection, which comes together ever so rarely.

Others may be able to keep colour in the context of how they construct their images, but I find that colour interferes with my particular esthetic. Not to say that there are not great colour photographs present and past, but it is not for me.

Happy New Year!

Harbel,
Rome

See more on my website: harbel.com

Visiting with Harry Callahan

I have always thought of Harry Callahan as a cool photographer. Cool in the sense that he is cool in the way we talk about a great garment or a spectacular bit of design. But more important, he is cool in terms of how his images are composed. Unemotional and somehow distant. I don’t remember ever seeing anyone in a Callahan photograph smiling, nor any photographs that display a sense of humour. Some of my friends say it is because he trained as an engineer!

I have looked at Callahan books. Many books. I have seen individual prints in galleries, museums and at exhibitions, and at auction. My first experience with a full show was at La Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. Yesterday.

The show blew me away. By way of background, Callahan received a grant and took a sabbatical. At the encouragement of Steichen, he left his comfort-zone in the northern US and departed for Europe. He spent the majority of this time in Aix-en-Provence, in the south of France. He stayed there for 10 months with his wife and son. The show comprises a selection of the photographs he made during that stay.

All the prints are small in size, the majority of the prints are perhaps 15 cm or 18 cm square (6 or 7 inches) or 16 cm x 24 cm (6 x 9 inches) for the 35mm. This is a size that I truly enjoy. You have to get your nose almost to the glass, often attracting great concern and nasty looks from the custodians, but I digress.

Firstly, the printing is what my wife would call delicious. Callahan printed these images in the early 1990s. His vibrant blacks and great tonal range almost invoke the papers that are sadly long gone. Secondly, there is a patience in these photographs. Each is composed perfectly, with nothing out of place. Perfect balance. Perfect texture. Perfect light.

Callahan has used the narrow streets of the medieval city to great advantage, looking for the sun low on the horizon in winter, causing wonderful intense shadows and capturing, usually a single figure, in the bright rays. This is Ray Metzker, but somehow more real and less about effect and more about the moment.

His landscapes are from the area around the old city, and his architectural photographs are not the elegant villas, chateaux or even the wonderful cathedral, but rather the simple straight lines of houses in the side streets, with no ornamentation, save the odd drainpipe, fitted tightly into each frame.

Eleanor is of course also there, but mostly in double exposures with various landscapes. I am not a big fan of double or multiple exposures, but that does not take away from my overall experience.

You can do this show in a matter of minutes. It is basically a single room. But you can also linger, as I did, and get your nose real close. This is a true master at work.
For those in Paris: Go see the show. For those that are not: Get the book: Harry Callahan: French Archives.

Harbel, Paris

See more on my website: harbel.com