Word-Salad Past Its Best Before Date

I admit it.  I am using Deana Lawson to prove a point.  I am taking advantage of a well-known and highly respected photographer’s work to illustrate how the usually black-clad, face-less critics and gallery owners describe a photographer’s work.  I aim to show how descriptions are nothing more than elaborate word-salad – a hopeless sequence of adjectives and expletives – assembled for the benefit of the writer, and seemingly meaningless to everyone else.

In the context of Deana Lawson, let me start by saying that I never stage photographs.  I don’t ask people to stand or sit just so.  I have only twice in my life asked a stranger whether I could take their photograph, and on both occasions I did not ask them to pose in a particular way, nor did I do anything but say ‘thank you’ after I made my photograph.  As such, I really struggle with elaborate tableau photography with heavy direction and great control with nothing left to chance.  By extension, I am not a great fan of Lawson’s work.

It is not that I cannot admire the skill of someone making such photographs, but I do find a more genuine approach by the photographer capturing a random moment in time through simple observation much more compelling.

Now, that I have revealed my bias, what I really want to write about is the way in which those that are in the business of displaying, criticizing, or selling art describe what is on display on the walls.  This whole discussion started with a sentence I read in a newsletter announcing that the Gagosian Gallery is now representing Deana Lawson in New York, Europe and Asia.

I re-read the announcement twice and I still don’t understand what it means.  Enter Mr. Google….. I did a search for Deana Lawson, I lifted the descriptive sentences found on the first couple of result-pages and dropped some of them in random order below, with the final entry being what started this whole process; the quote from the Gagosian Gallery press release.

In no particular order:

MoMA:  “….saturated color continues to be a signature feature of Lawson’s practice, and in Roxie and Raquel the multiple yellows, whites, and blacks in the scene come together in a complex and compelling picture of family dynamics.”

Artsy.net:  :Photographer Deana Lawson shoots intimate staged portraits that explore Blackness, legacy, and collective memory. Her pictures, which reflect both actual histories and contrived narratives, focus exclusively on Black subjects posed in richly detailed environments and interiors. “

Cat Lachowskyj for Lensculture.com: “These photographs contain multitudes — references to African diaspora, complex emotions, unspoken dreams, dignity, pride, love, visible scars, the trappings of household circumstance, the tenderness of generations.”

Wikipedia.org:  “Deana Lawson is an American artist, educator, and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is primarily concerned with intimacy, family, spirituality, sexuality, and Black aesthetics.”

Dodie Kazanjian for Vogue Magazine:  “In her relatively brief career, Deana Lawson has become a Diogenes, a signifying truth-seeker of unviolated Black humanity and beauty.”

The Photographer’s Gallery: “Deana Lawson’s work explores how communities and individuals hold space within a shifting terrain of racial and ecological disorder.”

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw:  “Quoting Lawson:  ‘Someone said that I’m ruthless when it comes to what I want.  Maybe that’s part of it: I have an image in mind that I have to make. It burns so deeply that I have to make it, and I don’t care what people are going to think.’ Unfortunately, this kind of totalizing control isn’t good for anyone except Deana Lawson and the people who are making bank off it while blinding most of the art world to the consequences of this problematic artistic strategy.”

And finally, the Gagosian Gallery press release:  “Lawson is renowned for images that explore how communities and individuals hold space within shifting terrains of social, capital, and ecological orders.”

I am finding the descriptions by the various institutions, websites, and critics really, really difficult to understand.  I may not be a critic, and my command of the written language may be less evolved, but it is hard to imagine that the entries above are even about the photographs by a single artist!

I return to what I have said so many times in the past:  Walk into a gallery, look at the photographs, make up your mind about what you are seeing, and only then read the labels, the gallery introduction, the catalogue, the critics.  I know, this is not always possible if you are going specifically to enjoy something you have read about, or seen an announcement for, but try anyway, because we are so often pulled down rabbit holes that are not of our own making.

What we see and what we read in a photograph is deeply personal and has nothing to do with the intention of the maker, current trends, geo-politics, or anything else, or maybe it does for you.  There should be no pre-judgement here.  Simply enjoy the experience of seeing something and ‘reading it’ with your own lens and let others worry about where the work fits in the annals of art history, current culture, or artistic trends.

Harbel

Christie’s Visionary Collector – Mr. Paul G. Allen?

I guess the good news is that the Allen collection going up for sale at Christie’s this week contains seven photographs.  Allen is by Christie’s hailed as a visionary collector, a self-made connoisseur, who took no advice from experts and collected with his heart, for himself, and on his own.

Yet, the only thing that made sense in all the hype I read, was that he was drawn to the pointillists and Jasper Johns because of their use of dots and letters and random words, which Allen could relate to from his time working with, and developing code.  The rest feels a lot like one, or two of everything.

The stars are all here and of course, as a constellation, they are labeled by Christie’s as a visionary collection.  It seems over a period of relatively few years, Allen was able to use his bottomless pot of gold to assemble a collection of art works, which as a whole has neither depth, nor much vision that I can tell, but which all share the same characteristic; the works are all ‘safe’.  The artists are already in the cannon of art history.  There are no flyers, no mistakes here.

Of course there is the possibility that Christie’s only picked the smooth, leaving the rough for the local North West auction house to sell.  Yet, I wonder if this is the usual self-made person, turned insanely rich, turned art collector/patron, turned museum director darling, fundraising target….  One of those people who helps the art market, without really helping art.

Like the bored spouses of hedge fund managers with nothing to do, who are trying to make their own museum.  This, in an effort to be taken seriously on the cocktail circuit and catch the eye of the museum director, in order to secure a seat on a coveted board of trustees.  They collect to gain acceptance.  They collect to be seen and to gain access.  They bring nothing to the party, other than the frightening smell of eau des nouveaux riches.

I am of course being harsh, and probably overly critical, but doesn’t it always seem that museum directors spend their time collecting ‘patrons’ of the arts who 25 years ago wouldn’t have known a pie chart from a Damien Hirst spin painting?  Patrons who with their money bought their way into a society, which is volatile and insecure, and entirely dependent on a bank balance at one particular moment in time, and of course a squeaky clean personal history with no suspect behaviour that has not been covered up properly.  They carry the designer handbag, outrageously expensive fragrance, and single-use outfits worth as much as the annual culture budget of a mid-size town.

The problem is it doesn’t help.  It is safe.  It does not support the artists that need the help now, not when they are dead.  The true visionary artists that are living in cold studios and who rarely benefit from their work until the obituary has been written.

Paul Allen – visionary – collecting visionary artists…. hardly.  But let us for fun have a look at the seven photographs that made the cut and joined the Allen collection and are now on sale with all the hype that Christie’s can provide.  The 7 are in order of catalogue appearance….. drum-roll please:

Edward Steichen:  Flatiron 1904/5, acquired in 2001

Man Ray:  Swedish Landscape 1925 (Rayograph), acquired 2000

Andreas Gursky:  Bibliothek 1999/2014, acquired 2014

André Kertész:  Cello Study 1926, acquired 2000

Irving Penn:  12 Hands of Miles Davis and His Trumpet, New York, July 1, 1986, year of acquisition not indicated

Paul Strand, Mullein Maine 1927, acquired 2002

Thomas Struth, Stellarator Wendelstein 7-X Detail, Max Planck IPP, Greifswald, Germany, 2009, acquired 2015

It seems to me that there is neither head, nor tail to these seven; not in process, subject matter, period… they have only one thing in common, they are safe names and they are expensive.  They are, like the rest of the visionaire’s collection, safe work by safe artists.  This just goes to show that with deep pockets comes…. no forget it.  Nuf said.

Harbel

NFTs Decline – a New Future for Digital Art

“One of my pet peeves is how people now equate digital art with JPEGs and spinning little GIFs when it’s a medium that has a 60-year-long history that consists of everything from algorithmic drawings to internet art.” says Christiane Paul, the Whitney Museum’s digital art curator. (New York Times – Oct 31, 2022)

I take some pleasure – as an analogue photographer who does not use digital tools beyond scanning prints for my website – in seeing Christiane Paul’s comment above.  After all, analogue photographers have for the past, I don’t know how long, been looking for respect as a branch on the Evolution of Art tree.

I think photography is now firmly established as its own limb on the Evolution of Art tree.  This is now finally an undisputed fact.  Some photographers have for a while now been encourage the digital side to find its own way.  Those to whom the removal of content from the frame and the addition of enhancements, or even foreign objects, are the norm. Those to whom the photograph itself is merely an ingredient in a final work.  Those are digital artists.

It seems that now the new NFT digital artists are snubbing the .JPGs that for so long have been the tool of choice for most digital artists.  The format where the huge raw file post enhancement has come to rest.  It is not without a certain mild satisfaction that I read that the NFT market has tanked and those that endure are finding their way to public institutions for rescue.  There is no doubt that NFTs are here to stay, but there needs to be a distillation of quality, a new transparency, and a better understanding of what an NFT is and what it is intended to do.

Perhaps the NFT, when properly understood, can turn the digital photographer towards the new digital reality and lead the split in the photography branch on the Evolution of Art tree.  One branch continues to show photography that is maybe 95% what the maker saw through the camera (I am not greedy, I can live with a bit of correction, but not addition, or removal of entire elements), and a second, new branch, which is digital art.  It is the branch that holds works on paper that is based on minimal manipulation and is an honest, or near honest representation of what was in front of the photographer when the shutter was pressed.  And a second branch which should remain on a screen in the digital world from whence it came.

While the NFT market may be down by 97% year-over-year in value and speculators and manipulators are feeling it in the pocketbook, it is a time for rebirth and sincerity and more than anything transparency.   The NFT is here to stay.  Nobody alive today can remember 1929, when stock tips from the person operating the elevator suggested it was time to get out of the market.  In the NFT world, the market has spoken, people got out.  It is time for recovery.  Maybe this time a transparent and clear delineation might help with the split between photographic art and digital art.

Harbel

Addiction to the Digital Darkroom

At the risk of yet again sounding like a broken record to those that read my blog from time to time, I cannot help it. This morning I was looking at the various newsletters that I subscribe to and came across the work of Lisa Kristine.  A photographer, whom one can only admire with her commitment to end slavery and her desire to document the world, often of those less fortunately than ourselves.  In the lead-in to her short answer questionnaire on The Eye of Photography, her first experiences in the darkroom with her uncle….. perfect…. I really want to love her work!

Kristine, Lisa – Slavery – Freedom – Ghana

Normally not a super fan of colour work, Lisa Kristine’s colour images are both arresting and very strong. Her compositions are terrific and the impact is both hard hitting and beautiful, all at the same time.  However, in the two black and white images that I found – shown here – there are some inherent challenges, which I think are symptomatic of the time in which we live.

Kristine, Lisa – Rickshaw Wallah – Kolkota

Turning the real into the unnatural

Painters face an eternal question. When is the painting finished? The canvas sits there on the easel. The painting is fabulous. The painter holds the brush and is trying to make it better. The tiniest of brush strokes that will surely take the painting even further. The temptation is always there to do that little bit extra, correct that little something that you are sure everyone will notice, but only you can see. That little bit of magic that will forever change the work to your best. Some need others to say when enough is enough, when finished is truly finished and the work cannot get any better.

In the digital darkroom, the situation is much the same, but the temptation often overwhelming. I have written about Steve McCurry’s photographs and the choices of National Geographic Magazine, as well as several others who have taken it too far, under various guises. Knowing when to stop is equally as important to the photographer, as the painter.

I know my eye is sensitized to black and white photography, which I freely admit that I prefer. I won’t comment on colour saturation, or try to insert myself into what should or should not be done in colour work, but what I have trouble with is the excessive light and shadow in black and white work. The two examples here are in my view past the point of what one might achieve in optimal conditions with an analogue camera and film, or for that matter what one might see with the naked eye. I think this is at the expense of the message and the reality that the work tries to represent.

Am I really the only one that finds it hard to look at these super bright, hyper-unrealistic photographs that can only be born from software. They do not exist in the natural world and are purely the result of a need to make excellent impossibly better!

Harbel

(may not be reproduced in full, or in part without the written permission from the author)

Diane Arbus – A Wasted Opportunity

The Louisiana Museum, Denmark – March 24, 2022 to…. Forget it.

I managed to get to Louisiana, an art institution in Denmark, which has for many years been at the forefront of staging excellent exhibitions of mostly 20th century art. The museum has a strong enough collection to lend and borrow and thereby attract the best.

I admit my expectations were high. Diane Arbus was why I got into photography in the first place. The very unstable looking kid in Central Park holding a hand grenade was my trigger to change direction from Renaissance Art to Photography. Reading that the first ‘major’ exhibition of Arbus’ work in Scandinavia was only half an hour up the road from where I was staying, was an opportunity too good to miss.

This past Sunday, I made the short journey and couldn’t wait to see something about this great photographer that was new. Maybe even a few images I had not seen before. Maybe a visit with some of my favourite works. Alas, I was deeply disappointed. 

The selection of work was limited – exclusively drawn from the Art Gallery of Ontario collection in Toronto – and the whole thing felt like a travelling road-show. It felt canned and hung because it was easy and fast.  The AGO collection is far from exhaustive and has large gaps.  The Louisiana Museum had many months to plan and prepare this show, given COVID and with our new knowledge of how to use tools like Zoom, or Teams, I see no reason why they did not take the opportunity and bring together something much more exciting. 

My main challenge, was placing the works in chronological order, which doesn’t really work with the Untitleds, which form such a major part of her body of work.  The subjects, which Arbus photographed in her many Untitled images, often have Down’s Syndrome, while others again are simply institutionalized ‘inmates’ with no voice of their own. These photographs are problematic in today’s context. Hanging them does not take into account critical issues around exploitation and the gaining of permission. Yes, the State may have allowed Arbus access, but that does not give her the right to shoot without permission, or does it? 

Diane Arbus: Untitled (1)

One of the early labels attached to an image I do not recall, quotes Arbus saying something like, and I am paraphrasing: “….. my style of photography and a short lens demand that I ask my subjects permission before photographing them.”  I do believe the Museum should have spoken to this when it comes to subjects that never had the choice, nor the voice. I presume by mixing in the Untitleds with the other works, the curator somehow thought he didn’t have to comment? 

The labels accompanying each photograph start out being plentiful in content, but virtually become title, medium, date towards the time when Arbus’ style was more fully developed (larger square format prints). There is no mention of the famous set of images of which she sold only a single set to none other than Richard Avedon (unless I missed it), nor was it clear which grants she did, or didn’t get.  There was a blown up low quality poster print of one of her applications glued to the wall – I think to the Guggenheim Foundation – which if successful should give hope to every aspiring photographer. It was rambling and poorly written, and certainly not terribly helpful for a jury to evaluate. The label did not say if she was successful in that particular instance.

Had the Louisiana curator and his team bothered to let it be known that this show was being assembled, there are experts abound who know Arbus and her work inside-out and backwards.  Where for instance were the reference works?  Where was Lisette Model’s Woman with a Veil, San Francisco, 1949, which so deeply inspired Arbus’ work.  Where are the contemporaries.  The Winogrands, etc. The Museum even had the recently published book from the seminal 1967 show in its bookshop, but it doesn’t show any examples. (New Documents – Arbus, Friedlander, Winogrand, MoMA 1967, curated by John Szarkowski).

Finally, Identical Twins hung on its own. A perpendicular short wall set up just for this image. Unfortunately, I am a little over this image. Over exposure perhaps, but it remains the cornerstone of any serious Arbus show, as it should. Identical Twins was – I think – printed by Arbus herself (I assume it was, as no Selkirk reference was given). It hung there in all its glory, but with a mat so tight to the image that you cannot see the border or framing at all. Anyone with any knowledge of Arbus and her work will know that she spent many, many darkroom hours working on how to use the edge of the negatives to create a frame around her work. The edge of the negative being part of how Arbus worked.

I have read many accounts of how Neil Selkirk – who printed for the the Arbus Estate under the direction of Arbus’ daughter – spent hours trying to copy the technique Arbus used to give the proper feel to each print. I do not understand why Identical Twins was framed the way it was. It makes no sense, as every other square format photograph in the larger size was hung in a frame with a mat that clearly showed the entire negative frame.

In the image below, which I grabbed off the internet, it is very clear what the border of an Arbus printed image of Identical Twins should look like.

Stephen A. Fran: Diane Arbus with her photograph Identical Twins, during a lecture at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1970.

The Danish population overall is not well educated in photography, the history of, or even the names of some of the key masters of the art.   This is a great shame, given the role of photography in art today.  You need only go look at the ‘photography’ section at the only important auction house in the country, Bruun-Rasmussen, to see that there is no market, nor it seems any interest in Denmark.  Nobody is laying the foundation of knowledge, which is so disappointing. Louisiana’s has had a key role in bringing 20th century art to life and to the Danes. It had an opportunity with Diane Arbus to start doing so for photography, but chose instead to bring in a canned show with little or no context.

I looked into the curator, whom I understand is well respected. From my little and limited research online, he has the art history credentials, but with no, or very limited photography background. He is incidentally also the head of acquisitions at the Louisiana Museum, which again does not bode well for photography.  Incidentally, I happen to know a couple of the photography curators that used to work at the Art Gallery of Ontario.  They eat, breathe, sleep and dream of photographs.  At Louisiana…. not so much.

The Diane Arbus show was such a wasted opportunity for the Louisiana Museum, and for their second act, well, the second act is just shameful. This summer, the Louisiana Museum will have a show of Richard Prince’s work. I wrote about this appropriating, unscrupulous, so-called ‘artist’ in a recent post. Needless to say, I will not be going.

Harbel

Lost and Soon Forgotten

Dropped and lost gloves as found – The Dirty Dozen

I blame Irving Penn.  I saw his photographs of cigarette butts in a show in the 1990s.  The stunning platinum/palladium prints, the tonal range, the softness and texture, yet sheer scale of these small found and collected cigarette butts blown up many, many times in size, left me with a new awareness and perception of what you can photograph and what works as both great subject matter and great art.  In short Penn’s cigarette butts blew my mind. 

While my reaction to the Penn photographs was one of awe, they were also liberating.  Somehow they gave me permission to think about different things to photograph.  In photographic terms, what Irving Penn did for me with his cigarette butts was make me consider new subjects and more importantly, they reminded me to look down, scanning the ground, as I have since spent countless hours doing, while walking the streets with my camera thinking in 24 x 36 mm virtual rectangles. 

What I think about today, when I look at these same Penn’s photographs is how much of a lost opportunity the cigarette butts represent.  I think the context of these butts would have been interesting.  Where were they found?  Was there a puddle, were there other objects nearby?  Were there twigs, dirt, dried leaves?  There is a context that is missing.  I recognize that the perfectionist studio photographer does not venture into the natural world, but craves lights, tripods and so forth to be comfortable. In no way does this obsessive nature diminish the work, it just means that the story isn’t finished.  The game is underway, but all is not revealed.

As a result of my obsession with these Penn photographs, I have been looking down a lot when I walk.  Sometimes this has been very rewarding.  In particular, I have found that ‘the lost glove’ has found a special place in my photographic vocabulary.  For the past 15 years, I have been setting aside negs of lost gloves with the idea that maybe one day there would be enough good ones that I could do something with them.

I now have my dirty dozen, as I call them.  Some are weathered, dirty and often wet, while some look like they were dropped only minutes ago.  One is even covered in barnacles, spotted when I was walking along the beach after a storm.  I have thought often of what Penn would do with these gloves, but then I decided they probably wouldn’t work for him, as what makes them good is the shape, the context, the environment, the setting in which they were found.  None of my gloves have been moved, touched or enhanced by flash, lighting or other tools.  Nor have the photographs been manipulated digitally.  What you see is what I saw when I walked around with my head down and saw yet another single glove that had lost its owner and was now destined to end its life decaying or being scooped up by a road sweeper, or the flick of a broom.

Harbel: After the Thaw
Harbel – Lost Peace
Harbel – Black Wool
Harbel – Cross Walk
Harbel – Wool Mitten
Harbel – Folded Glove
Harbel – So Good Glove
Harbel – Barnacle Glove
Harbel – You Rock Child
Harbel – Lost with Razor Clams
Harbel – Lost with Puddle
Harlel – The Other Glove

There is a sadness that comes with every lost glove.  To me it is the perfect metaphor for loneliness. Once there were two, now only one remains. In recent times, the lost glove is a harsh reminder of what so many people have gone through during the past many months of COVID isolation.  It is the lost, the forgotten who suffer most. 

Harbel

Who’s Shooting Anyway?

Give the photographer credit where due.

When you see a photograph credited to a particular photographer, what do you expect?  The person held the camera, pressed the shutter, set the F-stop and exposure time?  Selected the lens perhaps? Created the set?  Dressed the model? Was in the vicinity of the studio, or set?

It seems so feudal when two dozen assistants work diligently to set up the shot and the maestro shows up for a second, or two and presses the shutter (or not) and takes all the credit.

Granted, in every discipline of work and play there are leaders and followers; prima donnas and blinded fans; kings, queens and serfs.  However, as a photographer, does this mean that once you have shown that somewhere in your past you could actually compose and crate a beautiful photograph that you can rest on those laurels for the rest of your life?

Case in point the photograph I saw online in a newsletter the other day, shown below.  I am showing the credit, as it was given in the publication, however, it is very clear that Testino is neither holding a wire release, or pressing the shutter.  Clearly, one of his 12 assistants makes this photograph (there are 11 in the photograph that I can see, so one behind the camera makes 12).  There is no ‘Testino’ in this shot, as far as photographer goes, only a set full of people milling about and a famous photographer – Testino – standing on some kind of box, or piece of furniture holding a camera as though taking photos of the ceiling, and trying to look cool.

Mario Testino – Mario Testino, New York 2011

Is this where we are?  Testino claims the work of one of his assistants and we are OK with that?  Probably the poor photographer that actually made the photograph is an unpaid assistant, intern or…..  Are we OK with this?  Really?

Has the profession of photographer rolled into the present age completely un-checked? Values such as honesty, truth, credit-where-credit-is-due…. sharing the wealth, accolades and triumphs with employees?  A slave by any other name is still a slave.

We all like new talent, because they do their own work, their own set-up, they press the shutter, make the decisions.  Leibovitz’s original work for Rolling Stone comes to mind, not the spliced together images in Vanity Fair magazine, or the portrait of the Queen that wasn’t even there.   We fawn over their skill and speak of their ‘raw’ talent, and then they become this soft in the middle, standing on a box, pretender.  Past prime and living off the work of those that are unknown, uncredited and forgotten.

I have an idea; let’s roll credits for photographs, just like we do for film.  We can see who did the screenplay, built the set, lit the place, and was the Key Grip (I still don’t know what that means, but it always rolls by in the credits), and perhaps the maestro can list him- or herself as the Executive Producer.  The one that doesn’t do anything, but sits on set in a comfortable chair and secretly cannot believe his, or her own luck.

Who’s shooting anyway?

Harbel

Exquisite Platinum Prints

One of the advantages of being locked up due to the COVID pandemic, has been the time to read and look at the excellent prints that I have in my boxes by some of the great photographers, whom I admire.  It also gave me time to go through thousands and thousands of my own negatives to see if there are any worthy of platinum/palladium printing.

My friend Gerry Pisarzowski in Toronto, Canada, is a world-class platinum/palladium printer and I have long wanted to make a few.  Gerry shares my world-view on what constitutes a great print, and he is a master at making them. 

After much time spent looking at small rectangles through a loop and at my silver prints, I picked 20 negatives and made the decision to have them printed in platinum/palladium.  There is a magic to platinum/palladium prints that is hard to describe, so this is probably not the greatest forum to try to present what should really be seen and touched, yet, it is worth trying.

Harbel: Yorkshire 2017

The classic platinum/palladium print has a beautiful flat surface, the paper is mat and often has a little texture, like water-colour paper for instance.  A print usually bears the very dark brown, or pure black strokes made with the brush when the platinum/palladium coating was applied, before being exposed to the light source.  As such, platinum/palladium prints have the white of the paper, the black of the brush stroke frame, and finally the image itself.  Some people mask the brush strokes either with a mat when framing, or by using a frame when applying the coating.  Personally, I love the effect of the hand painted frame around the photograph, and I think it a great shame to hide it. 

Much has been said about the platinum/palladium print as the king, or indeed the queen of photographs.  I know this in part technical, as the process makes an incredibly stable and safe photograph, however, I think it is also because of the rarity of the platinum photograph.  It is not a cheap process. The materials are expensive, and prints tend to be small, because it is a contact process, meaning that the negative is the same size as the final print.  Given that small prints don’t seem to be in vogue at this time, where often prints seem to be judged by their square footage, as opposed to their quality, platinum prints are unique and special. Very special.

In a time when bigger is better, the luxury of being able to hold in your hands a small print made with care, using deep knowledge of the process and a bit of black magic is not only wonderful, but so different than what you would expect from a digital, or silver gelatin photograph.

I can warmly recommend that if you can find a great platinum/palladium printer, it is worth the effort and cost to make a few and experience what your photographs can also look like when presented on fine papers using noble metals. You could start by visiting my friend Gerry Pisarzowski’s website for more details of the process and perhaps you too can enjoy holding in your hands a magic platinum/palladium photograph. (http://geraldpisarzowski.ca/)

Harbel

A Postcard Interrupted

Since I was a very young boy, I have been travelling to major sightseeing destinations around the world, mostly in Europe, but also in North America and Asia.  Instead of making my own photographs, I bought postcards, because I knew that those that make postcards wait for the perfect weather, the perfect clouds, the perfect light and the perfect scene that represents the city, palace, church or temple.  Usually these postcards are in colour.  They are a standard size, and either in a vertical or horizontal format. 

Postcards rarely show any people.  I guess, people tend to place the photograph in time, and place due to the clothing that people wear, the haircut, or the handbag.  This would impact the longevity of the card and reduce sales!  Photographers also avoid cars for the same reason, as a particular model will tell the person looking at the photograph when the photograph would have been taken.  As such, most photographs have no people in them, no cars and try to be as timeless as possible.  In short, you sell more postcards if the image is perfect and there are no references to time.  These photographic postcards survive year after year on custom metal stands that are rolled out every morning, and returned inside every night.  But are they not dead?

I have always looked at these photographs as impossible.  How do you get the light to be perfect, the clouds just so, with no people around and no indication of the year, month or day the photograph was taken?  Of course this has gotten easier with time, as software now can remove undesired elements, but when I was a kid, I am sure the photographers waited for months for just the right circumstances.

Harbel: Piazza Navona

To me, these photographs are interesting, but not real… or at least they seem impossible.  I have over the years been fortunate to spend extended periods of time in several major cities and have wondered what might be possible.  I still stand confused and in disbelief.  If the clouds are right, the angle of the sun is not.  If the angle of the sun and the clouds are right, then an irritating delivery van is parked in the wrong place, or a flock of tourists wonder across my frame.  A poster advocates for a political candidate, or a poster for a movie.  All are time stamps that just don’t seem to be there in the perfect postcards in front of the tobacco shop.

Harbel: The Papal Apartments

So, what can I do to take iconic images and rethink them?  I thought that perhaps by going to black and white I could maybe do something.  But that has been done before we had colour postcards, more than 120 years ago.  But then it came to me that I could create movement around these well-known places by using a simple instrument.  A bird or two to suggests that there is life in these places, that they are not dead, even though they may be devoid of people.  Is this a new way of seeing?  Surely not, but it is my way of rethinking the standard postcard, and I have been doing it for years.  The confluence of good light, an iconic setting and a bird, or two does not happen often, but sometimes, you can get lucky…..

Harbel: The Taj

Harbel

Youth on Wall – a Chris Killip Masterpiece

15 years ago, I bought my first photograph by Chris Killip.  The photograph represents a time in history, where a committed, but impressionable 30 year-old Killip witnessed the bottom of an economic cycle in Northern England, when industrial manufacturing was dying, and poverty and despair were the order of the day.  

Killip, Chris – Youth on Wall, Jarrow, Tyneside, 1976

I relate to the photograph in my own personal way, as I am pretty sure that the young man in the photograph is more or less my age.  It is difficult to say exactly, as Killip has not said anything about his subject, other than naming the photograph: Youth on Wall, Jarrow, Tyneside, 1976.  In 1976, I was 15 years old, much the same, I think as the young man in this photograph.  My father always said that I should always remember that we do not pick where we are born.  The Youth on the Wall grew up at a time when things were tough, factories shutting, unions being busted, and the industrial heartland of the United Kingdom gutted. 

The young man is wearing a warn jacket – half a suit, I think, that has seen much better days – with pockets appear to have held clenched fists for a very long time, and perhaps a rolled up tweed cap.  We can see a couple of stripes at the bottom of a sweater, which to me looks like part of a former school uniform.  We cannot see what he wears under the sweater, but I would guess a not-so-white undershirt.  His trousers are black and suggest that they have been worn a lot.  Long wool socks connect the trousers that look shorter than they probably should have been at the time, with the massive worn boots, that seem impossibly big, or at least several sizes larger than what this otherwise gaunt young man should need.  But what really grabs me, aside from the great photographic composition, are the clenched fists pressed against the young man’s forehead, and the lines emanating from his closed eyes, and across his forehead below the very short hair, no doubt cut quickly with a machine.  It is as though the youth wants to will himself to disappear.  To vanish from the trials and tribulations that form his seemingly endless reality. 

The composition of the photograph reminds me of Ruth Bernhard’s nudes in boxes.  It is as though the young man is making himself as small as possible to fit in a tiny space identical to the photographer’s frame.  His clothes remind me of the grafters that would show up every day looking for backbreaking work in the docks of Liverpool, or Belfast.  Men hoping to be picked by the crew bosses for a day’s work loading, or unloading ships by hand.  Colin Jones’ work comes to mind.  I can imagine that the youth has a rolled up cap in his pocket and could easily fit in among the thousands of day-labourers hoping to stave off the greedy landlord for another day and buy the basics for a simple meal for himself and his family.  Of course, Killip’s youth is much too thin and weak to ever get called upon by the crew bosses. 

Chris Killip passed away on Tuesday.  He was 74.  He is best known for his work in North England in the mid-1970s.  He created a body of work that was collected in one of the most important photography books of the period: In Flagrante.  Killip lived among his subjects, shared their loss and their despair and understood the context of his photographs – if not yet the importance – such that he was able to vanish into the background and show the raw reality of what was happening at a time in history that was cruel, hard, and for many an endless fight to simply survive.

I look at this photograph every day when I walk into my living room.  It reminds me that I should take nothing for granted and should be happy to be alive, healthy and eager to take on the day.

Chris Killip (1946 – 2020) Rest in Peace, and thank you for the daily reminder.

Harbel 

Note: First published on The Eye of Photography: https://loeildelaphotographie.com/en/in-memoriam-chris-killip-1946-2020-by-soren-harbel-dv/

Wearing the Mask

A 1648 engraving found at the Museum of Medicine in Madrid shows the ‘Plague Doctor’ in full costume.  The costume design is credited to the French Royal Physician, Charles de Lorme in the early part of the 17th century. The protective costume was designed to keep the doctor safe, while treating patients who suffered from the Plague. It was also known as the Black Death. The plague was wide spread in densely populated cities across Europe in the middle ages, resulting in millions of deaths.

Harbel – The Mask

The key feature of this protective outfit is the characteristic mask with the large beak shaped nose. The beak was filled with various aromatic and medicinal herbs to protect the airwaves of the wearer from infection.  The Plague Doctor wore full PPE, in those days made of impregnated leather boots, gloves and a cloak, as well as a hat and is often seen with a short stick that he would use during his examination of the patient.

Stephan Gladieu – The Plague Doctor in his mask

The photograph above is a modern take on the Plague Doctor traversing Paris at a time of high stress during the 2020 COVID19 pandemic. The photograph is by Stephan Gladieu, a great French photographer, perhaps best known for his colour portrait work.

The profile is unmistakable. The warning very real!

The sight of the Plague Doctor silhouette walking the empty streets to the home of a poor suffering citizen, or to the hospital to treat patients suffering from the bubonic plague, would be incredibly alarming. Very scary. I cannot help but think that this is perhaps a great message even today. 

Be careful and stay safe, AND wear your mask whenever you are around other people.  It is the right thing to do. The safe thing to do. It is the least you can do to protect and respect those around you.

Harbel

Because Life is not made of 1s and 0s

The lab where I buy my Ilford FP4 film is in Valencia, Spain.  Their service is excellent and I am happy to give them a shout out:  Carmencita Film Lab is great.  They ship quickly and always have stock on hand.  I have not tried any of their other services, but if they are anything like their film service, I am sure they are great! 

The reason I decided to write this blog entry is the tag line on Carmencita’s website, which I have used for the title here: Because Life is not made of 1s and 0s.  I am starting to see a renaissance in the use of film.  People stop me and ask about my camera.  In the line-up at airport security – as it used to be – there was always curiosity around my old beaten up Leica, but the frequency is definitely up. 

I take this as a signal that the concept of the limitation to just 36 frames, the wabi-sabi of having to wait to see your imperfect negative and print, along with the idea that digital manipulation is not a requirement, is back in vogue. 

After all, digital manipulation has nothing to do with the concept of capturing light and shadow, which is the foundation of black and white photography, it is about fixing it later.  Photography should be about you and your pursuit of excellence in the moment, much like drawing a circle freehand, over and over again, knowing you will never do so perfectly, but you still keep trying!    

To many, I will always be a dinosaur.  A slowly evolving photographer, who has spent countless hours trying to get the camera to help me capture my particular split second view of the world around me.  I frame, I shoot, and I hope that I get what I conceived in my mind’s eye.  Sometimes it works, more often it doesn’t.  I like the idea of chance… of serendipity. 

Harbel: Broken Umbrella

So, for those that are interested in analogue and those that see film as the new frontier: Welcome!  For those that are still shooting film and love it:  Keep doing your thing! 

If we are lucky, the analogue ripple may one day turn into a proper wave – if not a tsunami – and we may actually trigger the rebirth of interesting printing papers on par with what existed in the first half of the 20th century.

One more time:  Life is not made of 1s and 0s! 

Amen.

Harbel

The Albino – A Nino Migliori Masterpiece

I came across a photograph by the Italian Master Photographer Nino Migliori.  Like most other photographers, I have known Migliori only for a single image.  In fact, I will admit that I knew the photograph, but not the maker for many years.  I am of course thinking of his spectacular Il Tuffatore (The Diver) from 1951, which I always think of in the company of Kertesz’s Underwater Swimmer from 1917.  Both of which have achieved almost iconic status. 

Migilior, Nino – The Diver 1951

“The Diver” – shown above – is the result of a great eye, a great composition and a little good fortune, given the speed of film in 1951.  But, to my happy surprise, I ran into an auction catalogue, where I saw another Migliori image, which I had not seen before, and which I find wonderful.

Born in 1926, Migliori is closing in on his first century.  He has worked in what I would describe as an independent and slightly irreverent manner his whole life.  His work reflects a great love of his native Italy, while at the same time making images that are not necessarily geographically specific, but rather show the genius of a great observer.  I have previously quoted Eduoard Boubat, who noted that the difference between a great photographer and everyone else, is that “the wandering photographer sees the same show that everyone else sees. He however stops to watch it.”

When you stand in the window and look at the rain come down and your daily walk with your camera is messed up, because of bad light and rain, it takes a certain genius to see this photograph develop in front of you.  Add to that the great fortune that someone down there didn’t get the memo about the exclusive use of black umbrellas…..  The photography gods were clearly on the side of Nino Migliori.

Migliori, Nino – The Albino 1956

The photograph plays with scale. It takes a while to figure out what you are looking at, and to me at least, it has an almost botanical feel.   A close-up photograph of a pillow of perfectly formed dark flowers with a single bloom that is without pigment?  Or, with a smile on my face, I thought it could be the pope amongst his flock, but of course on closer inspection, the tightness of the crowd and their umbrellas throw you back to a time when people carried black umbrellas, wore hats, and suits and actually went to the office.  Now people sit at home thinking of a time when crowded streets and subway platforms were the norm, hoping one day to return.

It is time to look at more work by Migliori.  I look forward to it!

Harbel  

The Danger of the Artist’s Statement

I recently purchased a photograph by a young Greek photographer.  I really enjoyed the feel of the image and the mystery that he has achieved with what could either be simple analogue tools, or some heavy computer intervention.  I prefer to think it is the first!  Of course.

I did what I always do, ignoring the context entirely.  The photograph was in a selection by the photographer that showed up this morning in one of my photography newsletters.  I figure that given all the shows and exhibitions around the world that are suffering either from COVID-closure, or a very restricted audiences, that we owe it to the photography community to buy a piece here and there to keep everyone committed to their art in bread and water, if not steak and Chateau Lafite.

I may have made the purchase as a reaction to the news that for the first time in 20 years, I will not be attending Paris Photo, which was cancelled yesterday.   The Paris Photo organizers hung on much longer than they should.  My gallery friends said months ago that they would not take booths this year… that 50% of sales go to the United States, and given what is going on in the US, it would be unlikely that many, or any Americans would attend, or even be allowed to attend, etc.  Long story short; Paris Photo finally bowed to the increasing number of COVID cases in France and elsewhere, as well the recently imposed restrictions on the size of crowds.

Feeling my growing depression over not going Paris Photo, I was so pleased to see something I liked in one of my newsletters and jumped on the chance to acquire a super photograph.

But, I digress… the reason for today’s blog entry is for me to perhaps suggest that there is great danger in the written word.  Personally, I don’t like artist’s statements, nor do I like curator’s commentary most of the time.  I like to let a photograph speak to me on it’s own terms and having that impression help form my interpretation of what is happening in the image, and my response to it. 

The danger to me comes when the artist sets out on some kind of verbose rampage and completely messes with my feeling, or interpretation of a work.  There is a degree of risk here.  Because, if I see it, love it and want it, but then read that my reaction to the image is completely off side, relative to what the photographer says she, or he intended, one of two things happen:  Worst case; I turn around, shake my head and walk away, or best case; I buy it anyway and spend the rest of my life trying to dispel from my mind the statement made by the artist.

Karabelas, Nasos – Woman #101

The image here I love.  Beautifully executed, the image allows my imagination to go wonder, while the other half of my brain goes on to an internal dialogue about the technical aspects of the execution – utterly hoping that it is not all about software.

Here is a portion of the artist’s statement:

“…..  Each photo is an entity, which includes a certain mental condition. So, we are dealing with a variety of emotional loads within a world that is equally ambiguous with ours. The forms obtain a dreamlike dimension. Sometimes you can not easily understand their contours. Τhe exploration of the forms inside the photographs gives us the opportunity to discover the various aspects of our psychosynthesis.

In this particular case, I went ahead and purchased the photograph, because I really think it is a great photograph, but it was close.  I almost walked away.

The lesson here is to not overthink the work, or at least let it speak for itself, because paraphrasing one of my favorite Japanese photographers: If I could write, I would not be a photographer.

Harbel

Photography IS Art

– It is sinking in…. even among non-photographers!

Early this morning, I was walking through the Milano Centrale railway station.  For the most part you could fire a cannon in the place and hit nothing.  For an average Wednesday, it was a little sad.  No, very sad. COVID19 is still very much in play here in Italy and people are playing it safe.  Doing what they now call ‘smartwork’ which is the new term for working from home.

I passed a bookshop that was open early, maybe dreaming of selling a newspaper or two, and much to my surprise it finally happened……  The photography monographs were mixed in with the painting and sculpture monographs.  First, I was irritated, because seriously, who wants to go through reams of books to find the photographers.  But then, it dawned on me.  This is probably the first time I have encountered an art section, and not an art section, a photography section and an architecture section.  I realized that this might just be the wave of the future – finally – where books on Rembrandt sit next to books on Marc Riboud.  Martine Franck next to Helen Frankenthaler.  You get the idea. 

Mario De Biasi – Milano Centrale 1950s

It is perhaps appropriate that I discovered this in Milan and not some other city, because this month kicks off the 15th Milan Photo Festival, which runs from the 7th of September to the 15th of November.  Milan has always had a great crop of artists, chief among them Gianni Berengo Gardin – my personal hero – who turns 90 this year!  Galleries work hard, alongside auction houses to educate and bring great exhibitions to the citizens of Milan and those that come to visit from elsewhere. 

The photograph above is one from my collection, a small vintage print from a platform at Milano Centrale in the 1950s. More people then, than now, but nice to see that Campari was still a great drink then, as it is today! Mario De Biasi was a great photographer, not well known outside Italy, but worth a look!

Sound the trumpets:  Photography is art! 

Hard to believe after just shy of 200 years!!

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    

 

As a Man Sees, so He Is

I borrowed this title from William Blake.  What does a photograph say about the photographer.  When a photographer makes a photograph, does he reveal a little of him, or herself?  Many photographers have chimed in on this topic over the years.  Here are a couple that made me think:

“Without the camera you see the world one way, with it, you see the world another way.  Through the lens you are composing, even dreaming, with that reality, as if through the camera you are synthesizing who you are” – Graziale Iturbide

Or:

“Great photography involves two main distortions:  Visual simplification and the seizing of the instant in time.  It’s this mixture of reality and unreality and the power and truth of the artist’s statement, that makes it possible for photography to be an art” – Roger Mayne

Whatever your preference, in some ways, we are talking about the holy grail of photography.  The so-called personal style.  The ability to make a photograph that is recognized immediately as being by you.  I once read that Frank Horvat, who is now in his 90s was accused of not having a ‘personal style’ and therefore was difficult to discern and identify as a master of the medium.  I would argue that Horvat has periods of personal style, which are fairly easily identifiable, but that the length of his career, going into seven decades now, has allowed him to move here and there on the style spectrum, sometimes making it hard to identify his work. 

I think deep down, most photographers would judge their life’s work as complete, if they could walk up to a relative newcomer in the photography world and that person were able to say that a particular photograph is by them.

Particular photographers have particular ways of composing their images, some have particular times of day that they work, usually early morning or just before sunset.  Some go after a particular subject matter time and time again.  Some print in a particular way.  Some overexpose, some underexpose.  I remember reading that Bernard Plossu said he only wants greys in his photographs.  I am quite sure Ray Metzker would argue against that, were he still alive.  Metzker favours a lot of intense and deep blacks. So many ways of seeing, so many photographers.  Such a broad and varied range of possibilities.

Photographers strive.  Few succeed.  With great passion comes hope of maybe a little of the photographer’s personality seeping into every image and someone out there being able to discern your work from that of all others.  We live in hope.  At least some do.  Others are quite happy being forever anonymous and will argue that it is a mistake to do anything but document in a democratic coat of pure, neutral observation.  Ah, if only…..

Harbel        

Photo Book Escapism – In a Time of Great Distress

As a lot of us are locked up at home.  The World is holding it’s breath.  Life as we know it is grinding to a halt.  It is time for comfort, but also for escaping for a time to another place, or another time.

I have for many years bought many, many books of photographs.  Books that fill book cases and book cases, and… well, you get the picture.  At a time, when I am sitting here in my favorite chair with a cup of tea with lemon and honey – it is too early to add alcohol – I have pulled a couple of books from the shelf and have spent an hour looking at great images by masters of the medium.

Harbel’s bookcase

Personally, I have been working on two books of my photographs for a long time.  I keep changing the sequence of the images, playing with layouts and wondering about which photograph should go on the cover.  I wonder about titles for the images (those that have read a few of my blogs may know that I am not a big fan of titles), and what kind of an introduction I should have. 

As I wonder about these things, it gives me pleasure thinking of the experience that people will have when leafing through my books.  At least the 5 people that I will give the book to!  I am not expecting best sellers, but I feel that photographs in a book are different than individual photographs in a frame on a wall. Also, books of photographs are a way of leaving a message. A footprint, when I will be nothing but dust.

Books of photographs are in their own right works of art.  And we all know that art is of critical importance to us all.  It enriches our lives and makes for a more bearable existence, particularly in times of crisis.  We all see the horror, or sci-fi movies set in the future, where the set is deliberately made to look anonymous, walls plain with no decoration and wardrobes monochrome in the black/grey/white range.  This is no coincidence.  This is about taking away our humanity and turning us all into just beings in a maze.  Like white mice in a medical lab.

We must keep our humanity and we must do so every day.  A book of photography is about us.  About our lives, our world, our time, and what has come before. 

One of my favorite quotes:

Instagram is like frozen pizza, exhibitions are noisy – but a photo book is an act of analogue rebellion in an obnoxiously digital world. – Teju Cole

Makes me laugh every time. So true!

Stay safe.  Make some tea, or pour yourself a whisky. Get a book of photographs from the bookcase, and if you don’t have any? Get some. Order books of photographs for home delivery!  Escape for a bit. Think of another time, or another place. Transport yourself there. This is what a great book of photographs can do. Innocent escapism! Calm!

Harbel

Paul Hoeffler – Lee Morgan

No Outlet

I remember sitting in Paul’s livingroom, or should I say office.  Paul Hoeffler was a great photographer, who lived in a large, old Victorian house in Toronto.  It was the biggest room in the house.  Filled to the gills with files, photographs, reels of taped music… Jazz playing in the background.  Softly.  We were going through some boxes together and Paul was telling me stories.  I liked to sit and listen, as he would hand me a print to look at.  I would take in the circumstances that he was describing, while holding the resulting photograph.  It added an extra layer to the conversation.  Paul was a great storyteller.  One story in particular, which he never actually dictated to me, so I will have to paraphrase, was about his photograph of Lee Morgan. 

Paul described Lee Morgan as one of the very best trumpet players he had ever heard.  A promising and rising star on the Jazz scene.  I am not a musician, so it is hard for me to recount all the superlatives and capabilities as a musician that Paul described, but suffice it to say that he was if not the second coming, at least destined for the stars. 

Paul explained that he had been photographing a performance in 1958 of Lee Morgan playing in Rochester with Art Blakey.  He had met him the year before in Newport.  Paul took a great number of very good photographs of him that night.  But the one that struck me, was an unusual photograph for Paul.  Taken outside the venue, it is Lee Morgan after the concert.  More portrait like, but also very atmospheric.  He is holding his horn, as if about to play.  His carrying case on the ground.  Clearly Paul must have asked him to pull his trumpet out for the photograph.  He never did quite explain how that came about.  But, here is Lee Morgan in his overcoat, horn near his lips, fingers ready to go, his case on the ground in front of him, a little to his right.  He is standing on what looks like wet pavement, with a scattering of leaves around his feet.  But, what you immediately notice is the beaten up sign attached to the telephone pole.  It reads: No Outlet.  The photograph is from 1958.

This photograph Paul saw as a spooky premonition of what was to come in 1972.  He often singled out this photograph when I was around and shook his head.  Somehow feeling connected to a story that he was not a witness to, nor had any part in, but which he somehow felt. 

Paul Hoeffler, – Lee Morgan No Outlet

For those that don’t know, Lee Morgan got introduced to heroin by Art Blakey, during a time when he played with Art Blakey and his Messengers.  The down spiral was hard and the heroin quickly took over.  He met Helen Moore, who ran a kind of after hours gathering place for jazz musicians, doubling as a soup kitchen for down and out jazz musicians in NY.  The story goes that she took pity on Morgan, got his horn back from the pawn shop, and helped him back from the edge. 

They remained a couple for 5 years.  Never got married.  But might as well have been.  Morgan came back with a vengeance and unfortunately, so did the bad behaviour; the booze and the womanizing, which Helen took badly, as the story goes. 

Moore went to one of Lee’s concerts, at the same time as another woman that Morgan was seeing on the side, at the time.  The two women got into a fight during intermission.  Helen reportedly went home and picked up a gun and in a fit of anger shot Morgan in the chest during the second set.  She was heard screaming:  “Baby, what have I done!” as she ran towards the stage.

The joint was appropriately called:  Slugs. 

Lee Morgan was 33.

No Outlet.

Harbel

Note: I have previously written a blog entry about the great Jazz Photographer Paul Hoeffler. This is my second short entry about Paul.

Probably the Most Important Living Photographer in America – Shelby Lee Adams and his Appalachian People

One can only stand back and admire Shelby Lee Adams and his commitment to a full and honest presentation of the people of Eastern Kentucky’s Appalachian Mountains.  For nearly 40 years, he has been doing this with a large format 4”x5” camera, a heavy tripod and repeated visits that have made his sitters close friends, who look forward to his visits, and the photographs that he brings, as a gesture of thank you for letting him make their photographs. 

I think of Shelby Lee Adams as a contextual portraitist.  A photographer who includes enough circumstance and environmental content to not only portray the image of the person, but who also includes references to where the sitter comes from and what they are about.  I could perhaps refer to this as the antithesis of the Irving Penn Worlds in a Small Room photographs.  Where Penn photographed in his mobile studio against a neutral background, Adams works hard to include the references around the sitter to help the viewer better understand the subject of his photographs.

Shelby Lee Adams: Brothers Praying

I understand that Adams walked and drove with his uncle, a retired physician, who after a year of retirement in Florida came back to Kentucky and in a WWII Willy’s Jeep did many years of house calls in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Eastern Kentucky.  Often riding with his uncle, Adams earned the trust of the many families he met, and one could say, earned the right to return with his heavy and cumbersome tripod and lights.

The photographs that Mr. Adams makes are of course anchored in a long tradition of great photographers.  The list is long and you can no doubt come up with everyone from Disfarmer, to Evans, Dorothea Lange and so forth, but when you take the time to study Adams’ work, you realize that he is different.  The Farm Security Administration set out to document migration and the lot of those that suffered during The Dust Bowl of the 1930s and started the slow move West.  The mostly anonymous people in the FSA archive, who may from time to time be identified with a short description following a quick exchange with the photographer, before they moved on to the next shot, remain largely unknown. FSA photographs are documents, or proof of a certain suffering.  Adams’ work is different. 

Adams’ sitters have a glow in their eyes, an affection that comes across only when the sitter is a close friend, beyond just being a subject.  Adams has spent many, many hours with the families, has shared meals, drunk good home made sour mash and enjoyed the company of these largely forgotten people that somehow the American Dream left at the doorstep.  Proud, free and honest, often grounded in a strong Christian faith, the people of Shelby Lee Adams’ photographs come to life in a way that can only happen when you can feel an intimacy between the person with the button and the person in front of the lens. Adams says: “I can’t emphasize enough how vital a non-judgmental eye and sincere recognition is…. Kindness and empathy contribute on this journey. “

Shelby Lee Adams: Mary, 1989

Shelby Lee Adams of course is also a master printer.  His work comes across in beautifully toned prints on paper that is the best available.  I am sure, he would have dreamed of having some of the papers that were available 50, or more years ago.  There is a classic elegance to the work that would have been perfect on a warm 1930s paper.  However, we live in the 21st century and we work with what is available and Mr. Adams does a wonderful job presenting his subjects in a manner that can only be described as timeless, reverential, but honest and true to the circumstances under which the people live in the Hollers of Eastern Kentucky.

When still available, Shelby Lee Adams worked with a Polaroid back for his 4”x5” camera and used to give the Polaroid to the subject of his photograph, before organizing himself for the actual exposure.  Taking home the film and developing and printing the images in his studio at the very north tip of the Appalachian Mountains, Shelby Lee Adams returns a couple of times a year to visit and share the resulting images with his friends, who greet him with a smile and a hug.

You can feel Shelby Lee Adams’ photographs.  This is rare and wonderful and justifies my nomination for the title the Most Important Living Photographer in America.

Harbel

The Americans – the Book – Robert Frank’s Lessons for all Photographers

“I want to do a big project on America, and I’d like to apply for a Guggenheim grant.  You would need to sign a paper for me, agreeing to publish a book with my photographs.  I think that would allow me to get the grant.”

Robert Frank to Robert Dalpire, 1954, Artist and Publisher ‘The Americans’

Much has been written about the photography book that defines the genre; ‘The Americans’ by Robert Frank, published by Robert Dalpire.  I am interested in this book for three major reasons.  One; of course because it is a wonderful collection of photographs by a Swiss photographer seeing America for the first time.  Two; the building of a book of images, none of which dominate the others.  Three; the origin of the layout and how it came to be.

Let me address these three points in order. 

There is something wonderful about seeing a place for the first time.  There is something even more wonderful about being a photographer and seeing for the first time.  America in the 1950s was a place that experienced unprecedented growth.  Prosperity and the development of the suburbs, grilling on the barbeque, big – no massive – cars with fins and all manner of chrome and engines so big, a small village could run for a week on the gas alone.  There was advertising everywhere and progress looked like it would go on forever.  Optimism was the American way in the 1950s. 

Against this excitement of a new era, Robert Frank traveled to the United States and got in a car and drove, and drove, and drove and made pictures all along the way.  One could say he looked behind the veneer of what appeared to be endless happiness, freedom and hope.  He saw, as only an outsider can, which is what makes ‘The Americans’ such an incredible book.

On my second point, I have written before about how when you make a book you cannot have one or two home-run photographs, you need to have a balance of images that are complementary, without a single stand-out image dominating.  There is a fine art to acknowledging that you may not want to take your best photograph and put it on the cover of a book, because it has a tendency to dominate everything in the book, to the point that nobody sees anything but the incredible image on the cover.  In short, you need a different approach to making a book than making a photograph.  Robert Frank understood this.  He decided on one image per double-page-spread.  Letting each image speak for itself, without a context, or a story.  Just an image.  No image dominates the others, and no image stands out as being better, or more successful than the others.  There is an elegance and balance here, which every book-maker and photographer could learn from.

On the third point; In an interview Robert Dalpire, Frank’s publisher, says that he and Frank laid out the photographs on the floor, with no pre-determined number of photographs.  Dalpire is quoted as saying:  “….There was no problem in terms of the selection.  As for the sequence, we did it just like that, intuitively.” Dalpire and Frank ended up with 174 pages.  What they did that day changed how photography books are made and has set a standard rarely achieved since.

Finally, I would like to address the critic.  In ‘The Photobook; A History, Volume 1’ by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger (Phaidon, 2005), there is a description of how ‘The Americans’ is structured around four segments, or ‘chapters’, as Parr/Badger call them.  Each section introduced by the American flag.  Parr and Badger say the book has…“an internal logic, complexity and irresistible flow that moves from the relatively upbeat pictures at the beginning to a final image of tenderness….”.  To this Roger Dalpire responded: “I say it is non-sense. It is a very subjective remark that has no relationship to what we did.”

Jean-Michel Basquiat is quoted as saying: “I don’t listen to what art critics say. I don’t know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.”  Yet, we place great emphasis on what is good and what is bad, according to a few people, who in many cases are powerful influencers, who can make or break a career.  We cannot all be like Basquiat and not care, mostly because we all need to make a living doing whatever work we do.  Artists are no different, they may work for themselves, or in collaboration with a gallery, but there are still influencers out there that can make or break their career with the stroke of a pen.  A nasty review and the buyers and public stay home with their wallets tightly shut.

All this said, it is great to see now and again that the critic, who takes himself seriously and writes eloquently about photography, in this case photography books, is completely overthinking the work and is outright wrong, creating context that simply is not there.  Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Harbel

The Humble Homage

I recently wrote about plagiarism.   About the need to pay tribute.  About paying homage to those that inspire us.

I know when you see a lot of photographs, you are likely to borrow, or at least recall certain composition elements, or particular subject matter.   This is as old as time.  Romans copied Greek statues, and basically, it has not changed much since.

Picasso is said to have stolen liberally from his peers and borrowed even more from those he called his friends.  Books have been written about his rivalry with Henri Matisse, and when you see a Juan Gris cubist painting and one nearby by Picasso, you would be fully in your right to think one is the other, and the other the one. 

In photography plagiarism has been discussed widely, and this blog is not so much about that, as it is about how we pay tribute, and are inspired by great photographers.

I had a chance to walk a Marc Riboud retrospective, maybe 10 years ago.  Marc Riboud was a Cartier-Bresson protégée, who broke free from the Master and Magnum, the agency that he founded, to follow his own path.  Riboud spent a lot of time in China around the time of the Cultural Revolution and is responsible for some of the most iconic photographs of China at the time.

Riboud, Marc: Le Petit Lapin
– Shanghai 2002

One of the most unassuming, but genius photographs that he took was indeed in China.  It is titled: Le Petit Lapin – Shanghai 2002 (The Little Rabbit).  As you can see above, it shows a simple white plastic bag, with its handles knotted.  With a little imagination, it is a small rabbit sitting on a table in a Chinese classic garden. 

When I left the show, aside from his most famous photographs, such as the Painter on the Eiffel Tower, or Washington DC 1967, the photograph that stayed with me to this day was the simple plastic bag.

For years after, I kept seeing tied white plastic bags, and I kept thinking that I too could take a photograph that would perhaps be my version of the white rabbit.  I have been at this for years.  Then one day, I was in Aix-en-Provence, and saw what I think is a fair homage to the master.  I don’t place objects, nor do I move things to create composition, I merely observe, focus and press the shutter. Did I get a monkey off my back. Not really. I still see knotted white plastic bags as rabbits.

Harbel: The White Rabbit – Homage to Marc Riboud

So, for what it is worth.  Here is my homage to the great Master, Marc Riboud, who will be an inspiration for the rest of my photographing years.

Mr. Riboud, you may have passed, but your legacy lives on.

Harbel

Paul Hoeffler – the G.O.A.T. Jazz Photographer

Paul Hoeffler was my friend.  We spent many a night discussing great Jazz musicians and his photographs over bottles of single malt whisky.  Always Jazz music playing in the background, softly, as often Claire, his wife, would be giving piano lessons in the next room.  Paul is virtually unknown outside a small circle of committed admirers, yet, he deserves so much more…..

I think back on the man that didn’t take the obvious photograph, but was more in tune than any other musician photographer, that I can think of.  Paul knew music.  He knew Jazz.   His office and studio took up the entire living room in his traditional red brick house in Toronto’s Roncesvalles area.  And unlike any other photographer that I have visited, Paul’s place was equally full of records, discs, reel tapes and recordings of every kind, and the boxes, and boxes of photographs and negatives that made you careful where you sat and vigilant about where you put down your whisky glass.

But first things first.  I was introduced by my bank manager, who thought I knew something about marketing and perhaps could help one of his customers figure out what to do with a room full of prints and negatives.  We met and I would say that had Paul been a sailor, I would have called him salty.  He was in his early 60s when we met.  Paul was born in 1937.  And he was surrounded by a very large amount of stuff, which I think only he knew his way around.  When we met, he had had a long career in places like Rochester, NY; New York City; Providence, RI, before moving to Toronto and settling down for keeps.  I got the impression that he was sad at the state of the art of photography, in the sense that he felt that he no longer could get the access he needed to make the photographs that mattered.  Too many managers, handlers, agents, security guards, fences and locked doors.  He would often say things like: “those times are gone”, or “it is not like that anymore”.  A little bitter perhaps.  I don’t know, but a master of the highest order.

Paul studied photography at RIT, the famous Rochester Institute of Technology. Names like Minor White and passers by like Ansel Adams were the cast of characters that gave courses and instructed the young Hoeffler. RIT is of course located in the legendary city that spawned Kodak, and therefore seemed like a logical place to study photography.  He started to shoot at virtually the same time as Tri-X film became the film of choice for consistent black and white photographs.  As a young student one of his first assignments was a Jazz concert. And as they say, the rest is history.

Paul knew the music, almost as well as those playing it and he therefore knew where to be and where to focus during a performance.  I was fortunate to work endless nights with Paul on a catalogue for an exhibition.  A humble 24 page booklet, yet, I heard and re-heard stories that eventually got transcribed by me and became part of the catalogue. 

I don’t think anyone will be able to find a copy of the catalogue today, so I will take the liberty of recounting a couple of the stories.  Ones that have stuck with me. 

Let me start with the 1955 meeting with Louis Armstrong.  During a break in the concert at Rochester, Paul Hoeffler went back-stage and went into the dressing-room where Armstrong was holding court.  I will leave the words to Paul, as I recorded them:   

“Armstrong was there with a lot of fans and admirers.  People would come up and say:  ‘Louis, I am a little short, can you help out?’  He had his big roll of bills, and he would peel off a $5, a $10 or a $20.  The place cleared out a bit and I was shooting some pictures.  He had a bandanna around his head and he looked at me and said ’Oh, you might want to have a picture like this.’ He put his horn up to his lips and posed for me for several pictures.  I had enough sense to shoot a few frames and stop and say:  ‘Thank you, very much.’  I added; ‘Incidentally, in the movie last year, you played a tune called Otchi-Tchor-Ni-Ya.  Would there be any chance of you doing that in the second half?’  Trummy Young the trombonist, was with him and Louis nudged to him and said:  ‘Remember the movie we made about the white trombone player, Miller?’  Trummy smiled.  ‘Remember the tune we played, Otchi-Tchor-Ni-Ya?  Our friend here would like to hear that in the second half.  Think we can do it?’  Trummy nodded.  I thanked him very much and went out.  For the second half of the program, I went into the pit right in font of the stage.  The band came out.  Armstrong played a tune and then spotted me.  He nudged Trummy, looked at me and announced to the audience: ‘Last year we made a film about Glen Miller.  And in that we played a tune called Otchi-Tchor-Ni-Ya.  We have a special friend here tonight, who made a request to hear that tune, and right now we would like to play that and dedicate it to our friend.’  I was 17.  I was floating.”

Paul was full of stories like this.  He would tell me he was on stage with Erskine Hawkins and his band taking pictures, under the watchful eye of Julian Dash, the tenor sax player, who had suggested he stay close.  He was the only white boy in the entire roller skating rink, and following a disgruntled girlfriend shooting a couple of rounds, apparently upset that her boyfriend had taken another girl to the dance, Paul understood and stayed close.  Nobody was hurt.  I don’t know if this explains how Paul had access, but he took photographs from under keyboards, behind drums….  That night, Paul shot the audience from the stage and produced what he often referred to as his Dream Dancing photographs.  A little fuzzy, very moody, they show outlines of bodies moving around the dance floor.  You can almost hear the music.

Paul Hoeffler: Dream Dancing

Finally, the one shot that I think says it all about how Paul worked. He was at a show with Count Basie and his Orchestra. He was, as usual in prime position, but he didn’t do the obvious, he photographed the wives and girlfriends waiting in the wings. Desperate for the show to end and their lives to begin again. It is a photograph with so much atmosphere and so much feeling, and at the same time an eye for what it was like being on the road, night after night putting on a great show.

Paul Hoeffler: Wives and Girlfriends

I am often reminded of how Herman Leonard, or William Claxton photographed Jazz, and while Paul was in contact with many other jazz photographers, he was in my mind better.  Unlike Leonard, who seems to desperately cling to a steady supply of cigarette smoke emanating from conveniently placed ashtrays, Paul didn’t need these tricks to make magic.  He felt photographs. 

I will probably write a couple more entries about Paul and his photographs.  He passed away from cancer some years ago.  Never a dull moment around Paul.  He was full of stories, full of life and had a deep, very deep knowledge of the music and the musicians that he photographed.  Paul Hoeffler, the Greatest Of All Time. I miss him.

Harbel

Karl Lagerfeld – A Great Line

Karl Lagerfeld, the ‘Kaiser’, fancied himself a photographer.  I watched a documentary about his work some years ago and basically, a small army of assistants set up the shot and Karl stepped in, in his black driving gloves, high collar, skinny black tie, sunglasses and white ponytail and pressed the shutter.  Did he have the vision?  Probably.  Did he do the work?  Not really.

I am not sure I consider this the work of a true photographer, but I do have respect for Mr. Lagerfeld’s creative skills in many areas.  The man had a great eye, there is no doubt.  Watching him sketch, or in a decisive manner declare that a skirt should be one centimeter shorter, with 15 minutes to show time, was amazing to watch.  He worked endless hours and without a doubt brought Chanel to new heights and likely had a great influence on how women have dressed over the past three decades.

I have seen a bunch of Lagerfeld’s photographs over the years and bought two for my own own collection about 15 years ago.  I like the graphic feel of these images, while I am sure that he didn’t select the settings on the camera, nor arrange the lighting and so forth, he did design the black and white clothes, which suit Helena Christensen incredibly well.  The look would not be out of place, even 30-odd years later.  They were taken by Karl – at least nominally – and used for his Chanel campaign.  I am not entirely sure what year, but judging by the cut, sometime in the late 1980s?

While I don’t think of the Kaiser as a great photographer, I do think of him as having a great line, both on the page and when asked in any number of languages for a comment. Speaking always at high speed, he delivered some wonderful lines over the years. My favorite quote, and an opinion that I share emphatically, particularly as a person who spends way too much time in airports, where perhaps the worst fashion statements are made, he said with his usual machine gun delivery:

“Sweatpants are a sign of defeat. You lost control of your life so you bought some sweatpants.”          – Karl ‘the Kaiser’ Lagerfeld

Karl Lagerfeld (10 September 1933 – 19 February 2019) RIP

Remembering Ara Güler – The King of Istanbul

I met him once. He sat in his café-cum-bar at a corner table by the window. He was the belle of the ball, the one that everyone in the know was looking at discreetly, or in some cases staring at wildly. A legend. A celebrity. A man who managed to capture the essence of Istanbul.

Sure, he claimed he was much more than that, when asked. He would talk about all his travels, where he had visited and photographed, how he was hand picked by Henri Cartier-Bresson to join Magnum, but the legacy persists: He was the king of Istanbul, the pride and the living visual memory of the great city.

His photographs are atmospheric and truly sensitive to what it means to see Istanbul for what it is and what it was. The cross-roads, the cradle and the mystery that is the front door to Asia, the legendary city of sultans, the gateway, mysterious and wonderful. Any photographer would have given their eyetooth to make some of the photographs that Ara Güler so amazingly did over and over again, day after day. Orhan Pamuk’s words and Ara Güler’s photographs in many ways define Istanbul.

Ara Güler had a great eye and was an early riser. His photographs reflect some of the things you could only possibly experience when rising at dawn and making your way to the port, where your friends and people that you could relate to, allowed you to travel with them on their boats and make photographs of tough lives well lived, witnessed by someone who was there, but was also himself one with them. It seems to me he photographed like the invisible man, making photographs that bear witness and simply shows what daily life was like only a few decades ago in a city that has changed so much.

It always impresses me when photographers have a body of work they are famous for, as opposed to a single image or two. Ara Güler doesn’t have a signature image, at least not one that I would willingly identify as such. I recognize a lot of his images that I saw in his little gallery upstairs from the café in Istanbul, or in his several books. But unlike many of his peers, he created a feeling and an atmosphere with his photographs, which nobody else seems to be able to capture. Many have tried photographing Istanbul at various times over the past 100 or so years, but I always end up comparing them to Ara Güler and I always conclude that they are good, but not quite as good as those made by the King of Istanbul.

He who wanted to be remembered for so much more, will always be the one who photographed Istanbul: Ara Güler, the one who did it better than anyone else.

Ara Güler (August 16, 1928 – October 17, 2018) was fittingly born in Istanbul, and passed away in Istanbul, may he rest in Peace.

 

Harbel

  

Photography – The Emergence

Having spent a few days in the United Kingdom, I came away both troubled and encouraged. I got to photograph one of my bucket list locations; Castle Howard. Located just north of York, it is a castle, anchored in my mind from the time the lavish production of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited with Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews aired in 1981.   Strawberries and Champagne….., need I say more. I had the grounds of Castle Howard all to myself for a full hour before the buses arrived, it was truly a magical time, despite the drizzle.

Having carried on to the great colleges of Cambridge, it was with some sadness that I saw galleries lining King’s Parade and Trinity Street, opposite King’s-, Trinity- and St. John’s colleges. None of them, not a single one offered photography. There was jewelry by local artists, sculpture in various media and paintings, even a couple of hyper-realist painting that could have passed for colour photographs. I say this because there was a time, when I thought that photography had rightfully taken its place along with the other fine arts. But alas, it seems there is a long way to go before the vox populi start to share in the enjoyment of a great photograph.

I figured that with design magazines and the occasional great photography museum show, it would be a matter of only a short time before everyone would want a great photographic image on their wall.

What does it all mean? Well, the half-full view would be that it is a great time to buy a photograph, the half-empty view that photography will never catch up and take it’s rightful place among the fine arts. But economics will tell you that it has been one of the greatest areas of investment over the past 20+ years, and there is no end in sight. When you compare what you can get for your money in photography versus in painting or sculpture, the choice is simple.

At the end of the day, you read this because you area interested in photography, and as such, I am preaching to the converted. However, there is no doubt in my mind that even compared to the stock market, photography is a great place to be.   Much better to look at than a stock certificate, or a bond.

I don’t think I am wrong in saying that a lot of museums around the world are waking up to the fact that they forgot to collect photography and should be adding to their collections. Much great work is being purchased by museums and institutional collectors, driving up prices in the auction market. Museums rarely speculate, they want the sure thing, unless it is specific to their region, country or national identity, but they do want a collection that reflects the masters of the medium. You as the private collector have an opportunity to help set the market and identify great photographers.

It is a great time to be a collector and a great time to be a photographer!

Harbel

The Near Death of PHOTO – a once essential medium

It is not long ago that the French magazine PHOTO celebrated a significant milestone, yet, it is profoundly interesting to see that what was anticipated each and every month by thousands and thousands of enthusiasts for decades, is about to end on the heap, as so many newspapers and magazines in recent years. For years, PHOTO was the go to publication for information about what was showing where, photographers portfolios, often done as only the French can with a gentle splashing of artful nudity without being vulgar, or offensive.

So, what happened? In a time when photography is everywhere, with billions of photographs being taken every day and everyone seemingly a photographer, how does one of the cornerstones of the art disappear? One would think that well printed photographs in an inexpensive format with a long tradition of having its finger on the pulse, would be attractive to all those taking photographs and all those aspiring to make better ones.

I am not sure that I have an answer, but perhaps photography has become so democratic and accessible that we no longer need the guidance and advice of others to succeed in taking the perfect photograph. With the right setting and the right technology….. As Chef Custeau said in Ratatuille: “Anyone can….”.

Those of you that read my blog from time-to-time will know that I hate above all else those that have their backs turned. Those like the 30-something lady in the horse carriage coming along a narrow street that spills into a stunning square upon which the façade of the Pantheon for 2000 years has offered a breathtaking salute to the architectural achievement of man. Yet, she entered the square sitting in a horse drawn carriage alone, with her back turned, capturing herself in the foreground and the Pantheon in the background, seemingly happy to experience one of the greatest visual sensations anywhere on the screen of an iPhone. No peer pressure here. No Facebook addiction. No sucked in dimpled cheeks and fake smile. Simply her arriving at one of the greatest human achievements ever. Experiencing a moment in time that cannot ever be repeated on a small 3-inch screen, particularly difficult to see in the bright sunshine.

Perhaps this in a small way explains why the magazine PHOTO is no more. Or maybe it doesn’t?

Harbel

 

A Matter of Privacy – The Vivian Maier Photographs

In a time of great anxiety over personal privacy, protection of identity, and the right to be forgotten, it seems only fair to question the photographs of Vivian Maier.

I was in Bologna last week and noticed yet another exhibition of photographs by Vivian Maier. During the same week the new privacy guidelines kicked-in in the European Union. Your right to privacy…..

The story of Vivian Maier has been told many, many times. Death. An unpaid storage unit. The discovery of thousands of negatives by the hitherto unknown photographer. The opportunity for great profits.

Vivian Maier lived in silent anonymity and is known only to a few, most of whom were only children, when she seems to have had one eye on them, and the other looking down and through her Rolleiflex.

Little is known about why or when she found the time to photograph and nobody that I have heard, or read about ever saw a print of her work in her own lifetime.

As a photographer, why do I care about the work of Vivian Maier? Well, I like some of it, and I even have one of the many books of her work. But my question is whether anyone has the right to print and sell her work, when there is no will, no relatives and only an unpaid storage unit.

Put myself in her shoes. I am dead. Maybe I don’t care? I have taken thousands of photographs in my time. I have maybe a couple of hundred – at most – that I think are pretty good, and only a couple of handfuls that I know are great, at least in my own opinion. Yet, here I am – 6 foot under – hearing all this fuss about my negatives and the modern, unauthorized prints made from them. Here I am with no control over which photographs are shown and which are not. Here I am with no control over the size of each photograph, how it is printed, silver gelatin or maybe platinum-palladium?  Here I am with no say at all. None.

For a deeply private person should she not have the right to privacy. The right to her personal expression. The right to control her own work?  Even after she is dead.

Which photographs we show to other people is a deeply personal choice. Case in point: Henri Cartier-Bresson, maybe the greatest of the greats from the 20th century.  Before WWII, he cut individual negatives from his rolls of film and put these select, individual negatives that he was proud of, in a small box. He discarded the rest. Thousands of negatives destroyed. Gone. He buried the small box in the backyard and went off to war. The content of the box became famous. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s legacy.

Vivian Maier had no time to cut her negatives, select the frames that would remain her legacy after death. Instead a few people she has no connection to are selecting from thousands of negatives, which are to be her fame. Which are to be her legacy. Vivian Maier died in 2009. She was 83. She cannot possibly have known the kinds of dealers and speculators, both buyers and sellers who stand to profit from her work.

Do a few highly motivated dealers and entrepreneurs – or should I say opportunists – have the right to make decisions for Vivian Maier? Currently tied up in the courts and unable to sell a single print, the opportunists are raising awareness, publishing books, making documentary films, and organizing non-selling exhibitions to promote Vivian Maier’s great eye and great contribution to photography. I assume, all with an eye on a huge payday, should they win in court and be able to sell actual prints that Vivian Maier never saw, never agreed to, and never approved.

We know nothing of Vivian Maier’s wishes, we know nothing of her choices. What we do know is that in her lifetime virtually all her work was kept private and confidential. Like personal data: Private and Confidential.

I don’t believe anyone has the right to decide for Vivian Maier which of her photographs should be printed, shown, sold or given away. If any at all!

Perhaps a public institution like the Library of Congress could have a role to play in preserving the negatives that Vivian Maier made during her lifetime. I might even accept that academic researchers and scholars could have access to her work for the purposes of research and maybe occasionally publishing an image or two in the context of documentation and conservation of our past. But this should not be for commercial gain.

Respect the will of the artist. And failing the presence of a will, respect the rights of those that cannot speak for themselves any longer.

Harbel

In Support of the Vintage Photograph

In continuation of my previous entry on the Vintage Photograph, here is Part II:

The case for giving special consideration to the vintage print is straightforward and logical. Consider that until only a few years ago, there were very, very few collectors and no photography market to speak of.  Until very recently there was no reason for a photographer to print multiple prints of the same image? He might print a couple to swap or give to close friends, fellow photographers, or on occasion send out in lieu of a Christmas card.

Following the argument that the vintage photograph is as close to the original vision of the photographer, the vintage photograph is the panacea of collecting.  Add to that the fact that there was no photography market until very recently, there are no more than a small handful of any given photograph.  More often than not, vintage photographs will be small in size.  They were easy to send, or give away, so the most likely size of a vintage photograph is 8″ x 10″ or smaller.  This is the real deal.

The source for vintage material is often the photographer directly. But just as often the source is wherever a photographer might have sold his work, a commission for a magazine, a company, or a person sitting for a portrait.

It is not that long ago that a career photographer would simply send over a print with the original negative to whomever gave the assignment, and that would be it, as far as the photographer was concerned. As a result, many now-defunct publications and newspapers had filing cabinets full of original prints and negatives sitting in a dark basement or storage room.  Some photographs are lost forever, known only from the magazine or newspaper where they appeared.  Some were picked from the dumpsters by what now must be seen as very wise and foresightful people. Some were sold in bulk to junk dealers, antiquarians, or antique stores. Wherever they went, they never seemed to make it back to the photographer.  These are the true vintage photographs.

Some large publications – which shall remain nameless – tried to sell photographs they had in their archives. With the market for photography going up dramatically over the past two or three decades, I am sure you can imagine the CFO getting wind of the goldmine sitting in the old filing cabinets in the basement. However, seller beware; a number of publications have been sued successfully by photographers for not returning material to them after use. So far, living artists have been more successful than estates in winning these types of cases, and I am sure many more battles will be fought before it finds an equilibrium.

Giving strength to the photographers’ claim to their rightful property is the famous Magnum Photos cooperative.  The cooperative was founded by some of the greatest photographers of the 20th century, and changed how photography is treated by the media. As a first, Magnum photographers retained the rights to a given image and licensed the media to a single use of a photograph by way of a contract, forever changing the value of the photograph and limiting its use. Magnum changed the balance of power between the publication and the photographer.

But back to the case for the Vintage Photograph….. The price of a vintage print by Edward Weston can go into the mid-six-figures, whereas the prints from the same negative printed by his son Cole will be in the four- or low-five-figure range. Edward Weston watched Cole print, he approved the prints, however to the purist, they are just not the same. There is no contest.

If you find a good image in a garage sale, flea market or antique store, give it a good look, see if it is stamped and maybe even has a scribble on the back, and you may have a small or even a large jewel for your collection. Always look for vintage first. It is the photograph in its purest form.

Harbel

 

Manipulated Photograph, Disgraced ‘Photographer’ and Another Soiled Competition

Here we go again!

Another famous – and now infamous – photography competition presented by London’s National History Museum admits having awarded a prize to a photograph, which is more than likely fake.

The 2017 edition saw Brazilian Marcio Cabral’s photograph titled ‘The Night Raider’ win the best ‘Wildlife Photographer of the Year’ competition.

Marcio Cabral:  The Night Raider

Stuffed Anteater at the Emas National Park

Thanks to an anonymous tip and a snapshot of a stuffed anteater – see above – we have the elements that led to the embarrassed National History Museum making a press statement, which reads, in part:  “After a careful and thorough investigation into the image ‘The Night Raider’, taken by Marcio Cabral, the Natural History Museum, owner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, has disqualified the photograph.” It goes on, “the investigation comprised of two mammals experts and a taxidermy specialist at the Museum, plus two external experts; a South American mammals expert and an expert anteater researcher.”

I see before me a sketch with Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin as anteater and taxidermy experts.  A cartoon introduction of an anteater attacking a termite hill, courtesy of Terry Gilliam.  It would bring tears to the eye of any fan.  But I digress… 

Back to the Press Statement:  “Evidence examined included high resolution photographs of a taxidermy anteater that is kept on open display in the educational collection at …. the Emas National Park – the large park where ‘The night raider’ was taken.” and continues: “….there are elements in overall posture, morphology, the position of raised tufts of fur and in the patterning on the neck and the top of the head that are too similar for the images to depict two different animals. The experts would have expected some variation between two individuals of the same species.”

When questioned Marcio Cabral, the ‘photographer’, apparently supplied RAW image files from ‘before’ and ‘after’ the winning shot, but none included the anteater.  He did however, provide a ‘witness’, who claims he saw the live anteater.

Friends, you just can’t make this stuff up!

Some advice to those that run competitions for photography (and not digital art or manipugraphs):  Demand the raw file, or the negative from those about to be declared winners. Compare the finished photograph to the raw file or negative.  Ensure the image is representative of what was before the photographer at the time the photograph was taken.  It is more work, but it saves the competition, catches out the cheats and bad apples, and makes the world a better place!

If serious photographers, serious photography editors, serious publishers, serious judges, serious museum goers, serious collectors and serious audiences don’t take a stand, competitions will continue to be put in disrepute, people will stop believing, and the few will continue to ruin it for the many.

For someone like me who still shoots film, prints in a darkroom, and likes silver gelatin photographs, this is nothing new, just another nail.

Harbel

Note: To read the entire press statement from the National History Museum, please see: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/press-office/Wildlife-Photographer-of-the-Year/wildlife-photographer-of-the-year-image-disqualified.html

For more visit:  www.Harbel.com

 

The Photograph versus other Fine Art – Everyone is a Critic

A few years ago, I was sitting on a plane en route to Madrid. I was reading what was then the International Herald Tribune. I tore out a review of a photography exhibition taking place at the time. I have had this review burning a hole in my desk drawer and it is time to discuss! Obviously, the review was written by an art critic that was not an expert on photography, as you will see from the quote below:

“The issue of whether photography can be art is an old one that dates back to the origins of the activity itself. Ever since the pictorialist photographers of the 1870s attempted to compete with painters, borrowing from their compositions and subject matter, photographers have never ceased measuring their own work against that of plastic artists. They have come up with chemical and lighting tricks, they have used collage and montages, superpositions and hybrids….”, etc., etc.

It is quite clear that some critics until this day consider the plastic arts — that would be your painting, sculpture, and so forth — far superior. To them photography is beneath them and more of a craft or a technical skill. This may be in part because not all university art history degrees incorporate photography? Mine did, but you could easily have avoided photography all together, as all the photography courses were electives and the introductory Art History courses mentioned virtually no photography or photographers at all. As such, the critic above is not equipped to have an opinion, other than one based in personal taste, rather than foundational knowledge (it is common knowledge, and generally agreed, among photography art historians that Pictorialist photography did not start until 1885 or 1889, and was very dead by 1920).

But, all this aside, what is it that makes the critic frown upon the photographer and his work? Is it because it involves mechanical equipment? The chemicals in the processing? The ability to make multiple images? Each of these activities can be found in a number of the plastic arts, yet that does not seem to matter. A sculptor’s foundry, a painter’s lithographs, Andy Warhol’s silkscreens, all have some form of tool kit, along with a base material, be it stone, metal, canvas or paper. So why is photography treated differently?

Perhaps the best thing is to ignore the critics all together. Or listen to Jean-Michel Basquiat, who said: “I don’t listen to what art critics say. I don’t know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.”

Harbel,
San Sebastian

See more on my website: harbel.com

The Philosophy of the Complete Photographer

Ink and brush are the tools of the Japanese Zen monk, who hour after hour commits himself to the drawing of an enso. An enso is a circle painted in a single stroke, pen touching paper the entire time and lifted only once the circle is complete, or the ink is no more and ends in a feathered wisp.

Ensos are often considered to be of two styles, the one that is complete, and therefore a full circle, the other being left incomplete with the final wisp of ink not quite making it to where the circle was initiated.

The Zen monk, looks to the ink stone and the brush to achieve a physical manifestation of Buddhist practice. The circle, when perfect, round, and complete symbolizes the highest form of enlightenment, the achievement of true perfection, earth, the universe, nothingness, the void….. The incomplete circle, symbolizes the determination of the monk to strive towards enlightenment, through meditation, repetition and the minimalist expression of perfection.

Several years ago when I started making photographs, I was encouraged to read Zen in the Art of Archery. The book describes the art of perfection in shooting a bow and arrow through the eyes of German professor of philosophy, who studied archery in Japan in the 1920s.

In the book, Professor Eugen Herrigel speaks of achieving a state of mental calm and focus that allows the shooter to become one with the bow and arrow, as the arrow moves towards the target:

“…The archer ceases to be conscious of himself as the one who is engaged in hitting the bull’s-eye which confronts him. This state of unconscious is realized only when, completely empty and rid of the self, he becomes one with the perfecting of his technical skill…”

Achieving the technical knowledge, predicting the outcome and putting together all the elements perfectly, is of course the optimal execution of any task we set for ourselves. In photography, this is reflected in how well you know your camera, your film, lens, and all the right settings to achieve a particular outcome, when making a photograph.

I think all photographers know the feeling when they are close. When you have one of those moments, when the mind’s eye achieves perfect balance in composition, the lighting is just right, the shadows fall just so, there is a greater harmony. When the photographer then manages to intuitively get all the camera settings right, and depresses the shutter, there is a possibility that the circle may be complete. But we also recognize that when we look at the final print, there is always the little tweak, or the thought of what if….. The enso remains incomplete.

Whether you think of yourself as the bowman, or the monk with his brush, you must be content in your desire to grow, learn and improve.  You must be satisfied that you are on the path to enlightenment.

I believe in perfection.  I recognize that I am unlikely ever to achieve perfection. Like the monk and his incomplete enso – my photography is a work in progress. This is why I incorporated an enso in my logo and in my footer. It is a reminder to keep working, to keep striving…

Harbel,
Copenhagen

See more on my website: 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.

The Pursuit of an Imperial Past – Roman Rationalist Sculpture

Rome never quite dealt with, or reconciled its attempts at a new empire. A number of fascist architectural buildings and monuments remain much as they were at the end of the ill-fated reign of Il Duce. Rome was declared an open city during the war, something I for one am very grateful for, but there are consequences, good and bad.

Being an open city, Rome has been left with a legacy of buildings and sculpture that are full of symbols, and history of a time that most would like to forget. Yet they remain.

In Berlin and Munich most every sculpture and building of the so called 1000 year Reich, has either been destroyed by the bombs from above, or by dynamite at the end of the war. The few buildings that were allowed to remain, deemed to leave no risk of becoming some kind of cult shrine, were scrubbed clean, their original purpose soon forgotten. Few would know, or remember that the Ministry of Finance for the Republic of Germany in Berlin was once The Ministry of the Airforce, which once housed the obscenely large offices of the equally obscenely large Reichsmarschall Göring.

In Rome, on the other hand there are many examples of buildings and sculpture that were part of the new vision, or should I say the rear-view vision of Mussolini, his architects and his artisans. No real attempts have been made at scrubbing them clean of their Fascist history.

Two particular examples of this are the sports complex a little north of the city centre and the EUR. Both were intended to showcase the glory of the new empire, one as an Olympic venue and the other, as the heart of what should have been a world exposition in 1942, which of course never happened.

The photographs here are a few from my record of the macho Roman revival of the 1920s and 1930s. The sculptures are large, white and powerful. Almost exclusively male, and displaying their finest athletic prowess, but there is a sinister side to them. There is a mix of athleticism and military might in these sculptures. They cross over from athletics and sport to soldiers of war. The line between sport and war gone.

On some level, the sculptures are evocative of ancient Greece and Rome, but are Rationalist, in the same way that the contemporary architecture is. The delicate features of ancient Greece and Rome are replaced by angular, hard faces and ripped bodies. Where Greek sculptures and their Roman followers worked hard on the folds of fabric and the perfect locks of hair, the Fascist neo-realism is more in your face, usually nude, or almost nude, and designed to impress. This was supposed to be a new imperialism. These statues represent the macho, oversized superhuman soldiers, who failed so miserably, even against Abyssinians armed with shields and spears.

Hollow promises of greatness stand in Rome, 80 years after Mussolini found his end, killed by his own people and hung upside down by a rope, following his feeble attempt at disguise and flight. Like the coward he was.

What you see in these photographs is the result of my interpretation of a legacy that has gone from being something sinister to being used by everyday Italians trying to run faster, jump higher or throw further. Kids kick a ball around, and tennis players surrounded by marble seats, play in the heat of the afternoon. They play in the shade of the giants, that no longer serve any master.

The sinister may be gone, but the story remains.

Harbel
Rome

See more on my website: harbel.com

All images on this website are subject to copyright of the photographer

The Photographer and the Bowler Hat – Shoji Ueda

I don’t know if Shōji Ueda and René Magritte ever met. Probably not, but there is an uncanny use of bowler hats and umbrellas in their photographs and paintings along with a surrealism that I think would have made them great friends.

I returned from the MEP in Paris yesterday. I visited the exhibition currently on, called Mémoire et lumière (Memory and Light), which is a collection of photography by various Japanese photographers dating from 1950 to 2000. There are only a handful of prints by Shōji Ueda, but they are entirely their own, when put next to the rest of the exhibition.

Ueda’s work is in some ways very minimalist. Some might say simple. He often used his family and friends as props/models and various simple tools such as hats, umbrellas, small frames, etc. to build his deceptively simple, yet very evocative photographic language. Using mostly a wide angle lens, good light, which allows for a lot of depth of field with good focus from front to back, he has created something that Salvador Dali would have applauded, as would Magritte and other surrealists, who were looking for a new language. A new way of seeing.

Ueda had the great fortune of living close to large sandy beaches, wide and mostly flat with very little vegetation, which is a superb backdrop for someone trying to make the viewer lose track of distance, horizon and scale.

It would be fairly easy to reproduce Ueda’s photographs, there is nothing technically difficult about the images, but when you factor in that they were made after the war in the late 1940s and 1950s, when Japan went through a very inward facing period, they stand out. A mixture of loss, guilt, profound sadness, and extreme poverty led to most photographers turning to dark, gritty scenes that very much reflected the post-war mood in Japan. Ueda went in a different direction.

Ueda chose to make photographs that were optimistic, often fun, clean, focused and minimalist. The beaches near his home led themselves particularly well to making horizons disappear and almost floating his models, family and friends on the sand, where on overcast days, it is close to impossible to figure out where the sand ends and the sky begins.

In one photograph, Ueda has placed a woman on the sand 30 or 40 meters from the photographer himself holding up a small, black rectangular frame and shooting though the frame, presumably using a cable-release, he has captured the woman far away in a way that is not much different than a formal Japanese studio photograph. With hand extended holding the frame and wearing a fancy scarf, the vision of the stylish artist, as the bohemian, is complete.

There is a language in these photographs that on the one hand gives rise to admiration of the innovation and style of the photographs, and on the other makes you admire the fact that this is so relaxed and fun that it invites the viewer not to take any of it too seriously. A delicate balance, but clearly one that Ueda mastered fully.

Ueda went through several seasons of photographing on the sand, at different times of the year, but always using the monochrome to his advantage and making his subject float in a surreal manner, matched mostly by the surrealist painters a couple of decades earlier.

There are many Japanese photographers in the show at the MEP, and it is worth a visit, but for me, Shoji Ueda calls for a deep dive into what else he has done and may even one day call for a visit to Japan to see his museum. An entire museum dedicated to this superbly gifted photographer.

Mémoire et lumière runs through the end of August. Worth a trip, and maybe an escape from the Paris summer heat. Or, if you are in Japan take the time to visit the Shoji Ueda museum in the city of Kishimoto, Tottori Prefecture.

Harbel,
Paris

See more on my website: harbel.com

Images are borrowed from the web and are by Shoji Ueda and are for illustration purposes only, no rights owned or implied.

Giuseppe Leone – The Great Sicilian

He doesn’t look 80, more like 60! We shake hands. He lifts my old M6 from my chest to see if there is a screen on the back. There isn’t. A big smile spreads across his face and he gives me the thumbs up. It turns out that for many years, Giuseppe Leone has been shooting with the same analog Leica. He still does, still uses film and develops and prints his own work. My kind of photographer!

At Corso Vittorio Veneto 131 in Ragusa, Sicily, Guiseppe Leone keeps a studio with a window to the street showing classic black and white portraits – three framed and hanging in a row – facing the street. But if you walk up a couple of steps and open the door, you start to see that there is a lot more going on here than simply portraits on demand.

On the ground floor, you get a glimpse of the Sicily that we should all be eternally grateful that Mr. Leone has captured and preserved for over 60 years. If you are fortunate enough to be invited upstairs, you will enter a large space that with a few extra steps opens into the neighbouring building. Here you find lots of Mr. Leone’s photographs from across Sicily. All sizes, some mounted some not, some framed in simple black frames. All a little random, but the photographs are wonderful. This is also where he does his portrait commissions. On the third floor is the darkroom. Throughout, he has a few small glass front cabinets that hold old camera equipment. With pride he pulls out an old daguerreotype portrait to show us that he is part of a long line of photographers that have served humanity by making a permanent record of individuals, friends and family.

Mr. Leone shows us several photographs of the island that he very rarely leaves. There are photographs of the miles and miles of dry stone walls, a testament to the tough life working the fields. There is a record of great architecture influenced by all the invaders and occupiers of Sicily; Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Spaniards, Piedmontese, to name a few. There is no place in Europe that I can think of, able to boast this kind of happy co-existence in architecture, landscapes and the genetic make-up of its people. It is with the people of Sicily that Mr. Leone is at his best. His people. The peasants going to church, going to the market, tending their sheep, cows and goats. There are celebrations on religious holidays. Guiseppe Leone captures the people of the island, in a manner the French would call ‘humaniste’. He particularly likes to photograph children at play, who are often improvising with the absolute minimum of toys, but making the most of a cardboard box and vivid imagination. There is a lot of Helen Levitt in these photographs.

Mr. Leone still runs a commercial photography studio for portraits, and has engaged widely in wedding photography along with other commissions to feed his personal pleasure of making great photographs of his island. The Sicily that he loves.

Looking at his photographs, it is evident that he has a wonderful feel for telling the story. As Helmut Newton would say: “making a movie in a single frame”. Even among his wedding photographs, which to shoot can be very repetitive and perhaps even boring to those that weren’t there, there are great examples of Mr. Leone’s keen eye: The bride is headed towards the getaway vehicle, multiple generations of family and friends are looking on. An old woman sits on a chair, her arms around a grandchild, or great-grandchild, with a priceless look of disapproval on her face. It seems that even when working, Giuseppe Leone cannot help himself. It is in his blood.

Mr. Leone is a skilled photographer. A large print at the top of the stairs Mr. Leone claims as his first. It is also the first image you see on his website, though the photograph is much more impressive in person. I was told he made this photograph in his mid-teens: A steam train with a string of tanker rail-cars is crossing a very tall arched bridge, below in the deep valley, a narrow silver steam snakes along a wide floodplain, the unmistakable silhouette of the big dome of the Duomo in old Ragusa is in the background. The air is misty, perhaps mixed with the smoke from the train giving the photograph a soft filtered light. The photograph is bold. Taken almost directly into the sun. Great skill, or unbelievably good luck, I have no idea, yet given all the great photographs that came after, there is no doubt that Giuseppe Leone has a wonderful ability to be present and anonymous among his people, the villages and towns, hills and valleys that make up the great island of Sicily. He understands Sicily. Maybe this is because Mr. Leone has always been here.

You can see more of Guiseppe Leone’s photographs on his website: http://www.giuseppeleone.it/.

Harbel,
Sicily

See more on my website: harbel.com

Images are borrowed from the web and are by Giuseppe Leone and are for illustration purposes only, no rights owned or implied.

Discovering New Talented Photographers

Bernard Plossu (born 1945) is not a well-known name in international photography, unless you happen to be French. Or at least, he was not to me. He is an avid traveler and his photography reflects everything from the journey itself, to what he sees when he gets there. I cannot say that I have known his name for long, only that I found him, a couple of years ago, when I was preparing for a great trip to Morocco with a Moroccan born Canadian friend, who took us on a fantastic trip from Essaouira to Fez, via Marrakesh and the southern interior, across the Atlas Mountains, not once, but twice!

Like I always do, when I travel, I take a look at photographers who have shot in the area that I am going to. I had a fair bit of notice, and therefore could look around Paris Photo, which I attend every year. One of the booths had a great photo of a few djellabahs laid over a stone-wall. A beautifully composed black and white photograph, in a size that I can hold and admire – the print was approximately 20 x 30 cm – and was hanging just below eye level. My eyes wondered to the label, which advised that the photographer was Bernard Plossu and that the photograph was taken in Morocco.

During our trip to Morocco, I made a lot of photographs, some with which I am almost entirely satisfied and a few I wish I could do over. It is difficult to make photographs in a place where the population is notoriously unhappy about you pointing a camera at them, so a lot of images, out of necessity, are ill prepared and very spontaneous.

When a people dresses in a characteristic way, it is often easy to go a little ethnographic, which is of course totally acceptable, but there are countless photographs in circulation of ‘types’. Postcards were sold by the millions in the first half of the 20th century, depicting your standard ‘type’ in a hood, face in the shadow, walking along the narrow streets of Fez with his donkey, or the more underground postcards of disrobed girls, often young, who for small change became eternalized in the cannon of poor taste and colonial dominance.

As you walk through the streets of almost every town and city in Morocco, you notice that not much has really changed in 100s of years. Delivery vehicles are often replaced with carts and donkeys, for the simple reason that the streets are very narrow and dark to keep the punishing sun at bay, and the temperatures just a few degrees cooler. In Morocco, it is possible to make photographs, which are entirely timeless. But at the same time you are at great risk of the cliché. So what do you do? Well you might think like Plossu, who seems to have been looking for the things that may be timeless, but would not have been photographed by the conventional travel photographer. Working in black and white, as do I, Plossu has taken great advantage of the bright light and deep shadows that are so intense in sun-baked Morocco. And of course, you then add the shapes that are so foreign to the west, of men and women wearing a cloak with a pointy hood and pointy slippers, which on their own make great shadows and in combination can take on a modernist feel when the composition allows.

One of the great things about Plossu is his eye. He has been very consistent throughout his career. He likes things a little quirky and things that are a little off. He has spent many years building his personal collection of photographs 1200 or 1300 of which have recently been given to the MEP, the French museum for photography, which is one of the great stops in Paris, should one be through here in the future.

The interesting thing about the collection that Plossu has donated is the absolute breadth of photographers and subject matter, from landscapes, to portraits, to close-ups and pure photojournalism. They are mostly small in size, forcing the viewer in tight to have a good look. But most importantly, the 1200+ photographs are by more than 600 different photographers, and all are the result of Plossu being given the work, or him having traded his own work for it. It is a remarkable achievement, to build a large collection of great photography, without spending a cent.

For me, the viewer of the 160, or so photographs from the Plossu gift, that are currently on display in the upper gallery of the MEP, the excitement is around discovering photographers that I have never heard of, and am seeing for the first time.

Each year, we go to galleries far and wide to discover new photographers. Some years, we go for many months without discovering someone new, who fits our particular esthetic. The Plossu show was the first time in a very long time that I saw dozens of names in the credits that I had never heard of. A cornucopia of talent and a joy to behold.

I made a lot of notes and enjoyed several evenings of pleasure scouring the internet looking up photographers to find more of their work.

Sadly, the Plossu gift has no catalogue, or even a list of photographs on display, at least not that I could find, but it does remain in the MEP collection after the exhibition comes down, in a few days. I went twice, and could go again, there was that much to discover. Thank you M. Plossu, you have opened my eyes yet again and I like what I see!

Harbel,
Paris

See more on my website: harbel.com

Humor in Photographs – the final frontier…. or not serious?

For many years, I have sought that elusive moment, when something comes together in a frame that is both funny and serious at the same time. We should not well in other people’s misfortune, nor should we create so much laughter that the entire photograph becomes a joke. It is all about balance. The balance between the serious and the funny, in a well made photograph.

Elliott Erwitt, who in his long career has made many such photographs, and who himself will admit it is difficult, extremely difficult, said: ““Making people laugh is one of the highest achievements you can have. And when you can make them laugh and cry, alternately, like Chaplin does, now that’s the highest of all possible achievements. I don’t know that I aim for it, but I recognize it as the supreme goal.”

There are few, very few that on a consistent basis can make photographs that on the one hand make us stop and think, and on the other draws that elusive smile with the little wrinkles around the eyes. Many photographers have one, or maybe two photograph in their entire body of work that manage to hit both serious and funny at the same time in a fantastic composition, that is well lit, balanced and, as my wife would say; delicious.

Often the well made humorous photograph represents a mere split second, and there is little time to ensure that all the compositional elements are optimal and just the way you want them, have the right lighting and balance between light and shadow. More often than not, it is one of those photographs, were you see it, lift your camera, as you spin round and press the shutter, all the while praying that you have the settings right. It is only in the darkroom, or on the light table that you see what else is in the frame!

Occasionally, you get a subject that stays put long enough that you can actually take your time to move around, get the context and composition right, before you make the photograph. But, alas, this is very, very rare!

Elliott Erwitt and Martin Parr both have a terrific ability to see the quirky side of life, sometimes even creating the opportunity to make a great photograph. I am not much for staging, but I think some people are simply wired to see the bright side of life, the humour in it all! Bless them, because I enjoy their work tremendously and am always on the lookout for the elusive moment, when it all comes together.

If Elliott Erwitt was known for his serious political commentary (of which he has done lots), his documentation of major global events (he has done a lot of those too), and gorgeously composed landscapes, cityscapes, portraits, etc. (of which he has made many), would he be even more famous? Could he command higher prices for his work? I would venture that unfortunately, while humour in a photograph is perhaps the ultimate challenge, it is mostly dismissed as not serious.

Like Erwitt, Martin Parr is a great, great photographer, he has a fantastic eye for colour, composition and has the nerve to get in real close in an anonymous, flaneur kind of way, which is both revealing of the subject, yet like he was never there. His work truly captures a particular moment, an irony, a fraction of a second that can stand for all eternity, as a validation of just how terrible hair was in the 80s, and how class structures are alive and well, with big hats and chipped nail polish.

Will Martin Parr and Elliott Erwitt continue to be seen as some kind of side-show to the more serious main event? I don’t know, but it is cruel, and unfair. The work of the photographer, who manages to consistently find the fun in our daily lives, in an unencumbered way, must surely be cherished.

                                                 The dreamer. By Harbel

There will only ever be one Chaplin. 100 years on, we still view the old films with amazement, and a mixture of tears and laughter! Now, if only I could put that in a single frame….

Harbel,
San Sebastian

See more on my website: harbel.com

Making my Photographs – Simplify, Simplify, Simplify….

When I make a photograph, several things happen at once: I see something and start to frame the subject in my minds eye. I use my experience and my history. I reference the massive archive of photographs that I have seen during my formation as a photographer, I judge my camera settings, frame, focus and press the shutter.

On a technical level, I consider the light. The shadows. I consider what I am capable of achieving, and whether I can make an interesting image. Over time, I have simplified this component of image making considerably. I choose to work with a Leica M6, a 50mm lens, 100 ASA film and that’s it. I don’t use a filter, a tripod, a reflector, or any other tools or accessories. Minimal equipment. Minimal mechanical intervention.

When I make a photograph, I have to move around until my subject matter is framed, as I want it. I use a 50mm fixed lens, so I can’t zoom, or grab a wide-angle lens and crop my way to what I want to have in my photograph. I deliberately have taken the camera and made it a constant. The camera is a necessity to crate my work.

I respect tools, but they are tools, like a paint-brush or hammer and chisel. I don’t drag around a big back-pack stuffed with several camera bodies, multiple lenses, different film speeds, colour film, black-and-white film, nor digital cameras with different lenses. I don’t go home to a 27-inch monitor, take my raw files and slice and dice until I am happy with my result. The camera is simply a way for me to fix what I see on a piece of paper.

What I find incredible disruptive to my creative process, is letting equipment and computers add strings of variables that are more about the edges of what sciences and equipment can do, than what is really there, in front of me.

Edward Steichen said: ‘Once you really commence to see things, then you really commence to feel things.’ I find that when you are true to what you see, and are true to how you represent it, then you have managed to express yourself, and have done everything you can to feel, and silence the tools.

When you have had a camera a long time, and work with few variables, you can better predict an outcome and you can walk away, when you are beyond the limits of your capabilities, and I am very comfortable with that!

Harbel,
Paris

See more on my website: harbel.com

Death by Selfie – On Seeing and Making Photographs

Much has been written about how photography has changed. How digital cameras and cell phones have changed how we see and observe, how we remember, and how we create photographs and memories.

When the objective is to show your friends, post photos and perhaps brag a little about where you are, and what you are doing, the selfie is now replacing the experience of being in the moment. When your back is turned to the Mona Lisa to take a selfie, why bother going to Paris and the Louvre in the first place?

The world has flipped on it’s head, or rather it has turned it’s back. In Porto I passed a bit of street art, below. Thought provoking? It is true: Selfies can kill you! Or at least, it can kill your feelings and the experience of seeing.

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As walker Evans famously said: Stare. It’s the way to educate your eyes. Stare. Pry, listen eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long. But, if you are merely pointing your phone, or worse turning your back and pointing the phone in the best narcissist fashion towards yourself, then what are you really seeing? You are dying inside, because you are not truly seeing anything at all!

Photography intellectuals are starting to muse about how digital and phone shooters should start pretending that they are using analog equipment. Yes, film! For the simple reason that they worry about how shooters of selfies and rapid-fire digital equipment no longer see, or think before they shoot! After all, the analog photographer has at most 36 frames, before the moment is lost. Forever.

Harbel,
Paris

See more on my website: harbel.com

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

Gallery visit Milan – Herbert List and more

It is rare that you get to meet someone quite as enthusiastic as Alessia Paladini. She is the Director of the Contrasto Galleria in Milan, where I spent a couple of very engaging hours initially looking at the show currently hanging, which is a great mix of vintage and modern prints by Herbert List. The vintage prints have that something, which sadly no modern paper seems able to give us. There is a warmth and tonal range that we can only dream of today. Not sure if the slower film in the 1950s helped, but at any rate, the small 6×6 inch vintage prints were enough to make a grown man do a second take. We then got into the boxes, where I wanted to see some of the vintage material of one of my great heroes Gianni Berengo Gardin.

Berengo Gardin is a photographer who in addition to making great photographs has has an incredible record of more than 250 book projects, is well into his 80s and is still going strong, having just finished the 2017 calendar for the Italian Police Force. We looked at great photographs, some not much more than postcard size, all the way up to quite large modern prints. The vintage photographs, like the List photographs, had a wonderful feel to them and with only a couple of exceptions were of Italian scenes.

Gardin does not like being referred to as the HCB of Italy, he prefers being compared to his friend Willy Ronis. But if HCB is not the right comparison, then Ronis is not entirely bad company!

If you are ever in Milan, take a look at the shows at Contrasto Galleria, they are in a beautiful gallery space, off the beaten path a bit, but well worth the walk or metro ride. You will not regret it!

And NO, I derive no gain from mentioning or proposing you visit Contrasto. I am merely providing a service announcement for like-minded photographers and collectors!

Harbel,
Milan

See more on my website: harbel.com

Vera Fotografia – Photography As It Should Be

On the back of each of Gianni Berengo Gardin’s photographs there is a green stamp. It reads: “Vera Fotografia”, his way of saying that what you see in his print is what was in front of him when he made the photograph. It has not been manipulated, changed or enhanced with Photoshop or other digital editing software.

But does a simple green rubber stamp really change anything or prove anything. In an email exchange with the editor of Black and White Magazine in the UK, it was yet again pointed out to me that we photographers have been manipulating our images in the darkroom since the very beginning. We crop, dodge, burn and tone our prints and so, it should be OK for the ‘contemporary’ photographer to use digital tools to achieve a desired outcome.…. Indeed.

I take the point, but perhaps there is a test that we could all employ, that being: Could the photograph in front of you, digital or analog have been made under optimal conditions with a camera and film; printed in a darkroom using an enlarger and standard chemistry? If so, it is worthy of the coveted green stamp: “Vera Fotografia”.

I am not here to criticize, merely to point out that I make photographs with an old leica M6, 100 ASA film, a 50 mm lens. No tripod, filters, flash or reflectors. Just me, my camera and what is in front of me. My negatives are printed full frame, with the black outline of the negative. To me that is: “Vera Fotografia”.

Harbel,
Paris

See more on my website: harbel.com