What a beautiful computer! What poetic specificity in its settings! Self-proclaimed veteran geek Nathan Zeldes explains (and translates) this camera-setting calculator from the 1920s:

Kaufmann’s Posographe is nothing less than an analog mechanical computer for calculating six-variable functions. Specifically, it computes the exposure time (Temps de Pose) for taking photographs indoors or out (depending on which side you use). The input variables are set up on the six small pointers; the large pointer then gives you the correct time. The variables are very detailed, yet endearingly colloquial. For outdoors, they include the setting — with values like “Snowy scene”, “Greenery with expanse of water”, or “Very narrow old street”; the state of the sky — including “Cloudy and somber”, “Blue with white clouds”, or “Purest blue”; The month of the year and hour of the day; the illumination of the subject; and of course the aperture (f-number).

(link and photo via bughouse)

Have you ever looked out a window and seen the most spectacular scene as if it were a photo or painting framed by the window? Or perhaps a mundane scene seen through a window became automatically grander because it’d been framed?

Wendy MacNaughton, Mark Likosky, and creative studio Division of Labor made this happen with their Sausalito Street Scene project. I like their cheeky placard, hand-lettered below the sill.

(photos via Division of Labor)

Last year, James Estrin and Josh Haner of The New York Times lauded Bruce Davidson as “one of the most influential photographers of the last half century.”

Prior to this week, the most current edition (2003) of Davidson’s Subway, a portfolio of color photos he started taking in 1980 in and around New York City’s subway system¹, had been long out-of-print and couldn’t be found online for any less than $300 from grubby resellers. Happily for fans of the New York City subway, photography, and photography of the New York City subway, Apeture reissued the book this week and it’s available online for under $45. I’ve ordered my copy.

(photos by Bruce Davidson from Subway (1980); photos screencapped from Rose Gallery)

¹ The grandaddy of this idea, by the way, is Walker Evans’s Subway Portrait series from the ’30s and ’40s, but not published until 1966 as the book Many Are Called. [back]

For The Untitled Project (2002-2010), Matt Siber removed text from mundane city street photos and mirrored it to the right. Check out his website for the full series.

(link via HiLobrow; photo by Matt Siber via siberart.com)

Contact sheets illuminate the creative process and what’s going on in the mind of a photographer. One of my favorite examples is Diane Arbus’s contact sheet for Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. for what it shows about her editoral process—her choice of a grotesque frame from an otherwise ordinary roll. Same thing for the contact sheets of W. Eugene Smith, which reveal how he built the photo essays that made him famous. Contact sheets are powerful; the one for Robert Capa’s The Falling Soldier called into question whether the shot was taken where Capa said it was and whether he may have staged it.

I was amazed to stumble across the following contact sheet, which I’d never seen before. It was scanned from the out-of-print book The Work of Hipgnosis, which recounts the history of the British design firm behind many memorable rock album covers of the ’70s.

It gives a look behind the scenes of the photo taken by Storm Thorgerson for the cover of Pink Floyd’s 1975 album, Wish You Were Here. Here’s something you don’t see a lot in this age of Photoshop and other digital tools: a guy lit on fire for the sake of rock ‘n’ roll. Observe him, in the bottom row of exposures, booking it to get extinguished. What’s nuts is that whenever I previously saw the album cover, I thought the burning man was a mannequin.¹

(photos by Storm Thorgerson; scan via this isn’t happiness)

¹ Confusing the matter, there are two versions of the album cover photo. According to the internet, U.S. vinyl pressings on Columbia use a shot of the burning man standing straight. European vinyl pressings on EMI (and all U.S. CD pressings) use a less realistic (to me) shot of the burning man leaning forward at a weird angle. [back]

The most popular camera on Flickr? The iPhone. It handily beats models from Nikon and Canon.

MG Siegler of TechCrunch theorizes that point-and-shoot camera manufacturers are killing themselves by ignoring connectivity and networking: “We’re heading towards a world where the smartphone is the everyday camera and the DSLR is the special occasion camera.”

These Airequipt slide boxes are from 1959/1960. Each contains one metal tray that holds 36 35mm slides. A friend of mine gave them to me from an estate sale on Long Island. I like the design and typography.

On the other hand, photos with Photoshop-sweetened high contrast (see: a high percentage of snapshots on Flickr) seem to me as if they’re going to look (even more) horribly dated in 10 years.

In the ’60s and ’70s, color art photography by the likes of William Eggleston and Stephen Shore¹ bugged viewers, who deemed it “kitschy, garish and vulgar.” It also featured snapshot-subjects, which further annoyed critics then (and now, I suppose).

What I was thinking about today, though, was how the light and color of that time were captured—possibly even created—by these pioneers through a combination of equipment, film and printing techniques that have since become extinct.

In 1994, for instance, Kodak axed the dye-transfer process used by Eggleston to signature effect. And at points in their professional careers, both Eggleston and Shore dropped off their negatives at drugstore photo labs for processing, a service that’s disappearing.

I may forget the color and light of a day long ago, so I rely instead on contemporaneous photos. They’re not as accurate as my memory—they’re singular moments, cropped and reproduced as blends of plastic, paper and chemicals (or sensors and pixels). I wonder: did ’70s sunlight really have a specific shade or intensity? Yet I trust the photos and let their subtle cues of color, contrast and grain inform my recall and fuel my nostalgia.

(Shore photo via International Center of Photography. Eggleston photos via egglestontrust.com. Shore journal via Aaron Schuman Photography.)

¹ Trivia Time: Shore’s photo of the hotel room is 37 years old today. Here’s a scan of his journal entry (more like an index, really) for that day. I wrote about a few details of that day (and that summer) in a previous entry on Shore.

[back]

Boing Boing noted today (via Kottke.org) designer Richard Howe’s photographic documentation of every street corner in Manhattan, “The Manhattan Street Corners.” (Howe’s site was temporarily unavailable with an exceeded bandwidth limit when I tried checking it out.)

It reminds me of Caleb Smith’s resolution (which, like Howe’s project, took two years) to walk every street in Manhattan.

It also reminds me of conceptual artist/photographer Dylan Stone’s plan to photograph not only Manhattan's street corners but the four sides of every block, for a series he named “Drugstore Photographs, Or, A Trip Along the Yangtze River.”

For comparative purposes, Howe took 11,000 photos covering every corner in Manhattan. Stone, who reckoned he’d need “between one and three rolls of film” per block to accomplish his feat, had taken 26,000 snapshots by the year 2000—and he never finished the project, having covered only the blocks below Canal Street.

“My project, at heart, is about conservation,” Stone wrote. “It is a living, precious photographic archive of an entire city.” And this statement gained resonance after 9/11, as part of his mundane city record included photos of the World Trade Center.

Polaroid phased-out its professional and consumer-model instant cameras over the past two years and announced today that it’s discontinuing Polaroid film, making only enough to last through next year. After that, the Polaroid is gone forever, unless another company keen on losing money decides to purchase a license for the technology.

I’ve been happy with digital cameras for the past six years, but I’ll miss the Polaroid: the chunky plastic bulk of most camera models from the ’80s and ’90s. The loud plastic click of the shutter button, often paired with a gear-grinding sound when the photo was ejected: it was near impossible to take a surreptitious Polaroid. The chemical smell, the gradual reveal of the subject and the contrast of the colors. The strange social custom of arguing over who got to keep a treasured shot, for there’d only ever be one. The weird tic-like actions used ostensibly to speed or even the development of professional-grade Polaroid film: rubbing, shaking, warming the development process under a coat in the cold. Making Polaroid transfers.

My favorite Polaroid anecdote of my own dates from 2000 or so, when I needed a passport right away for an unexpected international business trip. I needed my two identical photos pronto—like, faster than film could be developed, faster than me driving to a drugstore or a photobooth—so I walked next door to the professional photography studio that shared office space with our company and one of the guys there, Wayne, took about 20 black-and-white Polaroid headshots of me, rapid-fire. (Photos for new passports now must be color; in 2000, they could be either black-and-white or color.) We then spread the shots on a table, chose the two that were most alike and trimmed them to the required two-inches square. I saved some of the outtakes. I blinked a lot.

On July 6, 1973, Stephen Shore had pancakes for breakfast at the Howard Johnson’s in Lima, Ohio. Afterwards he drove to the nearby city of Delphos¹ and took three photos: of the intersections of 2nd and 4th at Main, and of the Pitsenbarger Supply Company on 3rd, its brick side wall painted with a small square advertisement for Scherger Monuments (“Preserve Ancestry for Posterity”).

Having taken his photos, Shore then did something unusual: he left some photos. Rather, they were photos of similarly nondescript scenes from similarly nondescript small towns that he had taken earlier then had professionally printed as postcards. He left 30 of them in Delphos that day; he didn’t say where, but the way he worked was to place them into drugstore postcard racks with the others when no one was looking. Then he moved on. By lunchtime, he was in Battle Creek, Michigan, taking more photos and leaving more postcards.

Shore crisscrossed the country that year doing this same thing. He’d printed 5,600 postcards, so he had a lot of ground to cover, and he kept track of it all in a ledger that included copies of his prints, notes on meals he ate, where he stayed and what he watched on TV in his hotel room, ephemera like business cards, gas receipts, parking tickets and, in neat block print, lists of “Exposures Made” and “Postcards Distributed.”

Pages from the 1973 ledger, some of the postcards, and photos Shore took throughout the ’70s and early ’80s are on display at the International Center of Photography in an exhibit titled Biographical Landscapes, and it’s great in its similarities and ordinariness. The large-format color photos show anonymous architecture of highways, intersections and side streets, billboards and signs, gas stations and parking lots, hotel rooms and fast food meals. This stuff would have been completely ordinary and probably boring to someone then, but now the clothing, the cars and the graphic design have a mystical quality and it’s hard to believe any of it ever really existed.

What’s the point of Shore’s work? He’s a New Yorker, born and bred, so a viewer’s first instinct might be to label him a parodist of the oft-maligned middle part of the country, although his images are presented almost exclusively without comment or irony. It may just be, as he said later, that the ledger was borne from “a fascination with how certain kinds of facts and materials from the external world can describe a day or activity,” and that the photos were records of these days and transitory memories. It’s as if he collected traces and evidence to prove to himself that he was where he was. It reminded me of a quote I’ve saved by Cornell University anthropologist Sam Beck: “People need to create their own history, to leave traces of themselves and of the meanings they generate....to leave trails, to say, ‘we are here’....”

Shore’s gone digital and since 2003 has been using Apple’s iPhoto photo-book service, in which the company will professionally print a hardcover book of a digital photo album. There was one at the exhibit that included photos he had taken in New York City a few years ago of pedestrians, signs and cars, and sure enough, I found it dull. But how about in 35 years?

The exhibit didn’t mention whether Shore ever revived his postcard project, but it amuses me to think he may have, just as it amuses me to imagine that Shore’s postcards from the ’70s could lie pressed and yellowing in family scrapbooks, depicting places the senders never were.

¹ Until she married, my mom lived in a tiny farm village just outside of Delphos, which is sort of why I selected it for this anecdote. [back]

When the Germans captured photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson during World War II and tossed him in a POW camp, the Museum of Modern Art feared the worst and began preparing a memorial retrospective. Imagine their surprise when Cartier-Bresson escaped, heard of the effort and offered to help compose his own requiem. The 300-some photos he selected, spanning his best work from 1932 to 1946, are on display as a group for the first time in a half-century at the International Center of Photography.

It was literally a scrapbook he prepared, of photos taken with his trusty Leica, printed playing-card sized and mounted in a leatherbound album embossed with the gilded archaic phrase, “Scrap Book.” Most on display are these small versions; this is an exhibition necessitating repeated bows and squints, so as to scrutinize Cartier-Bresson’s often serendipitous detail. Thankfully, some of the best prints are presented in larger versions, as they were in the original MoMA exhibition—in fact the blowups are literally from the MoMA exhibit, whites yellow-tinged with age.

My favorite photo, crappily reproduced here but presented in both small and large versions at the exhibit, is this one, Madrid, taken in 1933. (The whole series he took that autumn in Spain of peasants, prostitutes, gypsies and everyday people is genius.) Madrid has an utterly calming symmetry, the balance of frozen human movement grounding the scene as a constellation of windows hovers above, and if Bresson’s favored shooting method is to be believed, this was taken without any specific aim. That makes it a composition with beauty of staggering chance. I wondered how many shots or even rolls Cartier-Bresson exhausted during the same session before he got this one.

In the most revelatory element of the exhibition, I was surprised to learn that Cartier-Bresson cropped Behind the Gare St. Lazare, one of his most famous photos and a personal favorite of his. Normally, cropping would not be worth mentioning in a photo exhibit but Cartier-Bresson rarely cropped, preferring moments de grâce. The museum has on display the only extant copy of the original St. Lazare, complete with crop lines grease-penciled down the left side of the proof, hash-marking into oblivion an out-of-focus slab of fence.

I also enjoyed the photos Cartier-Bresson took in Paris in the mid-’40s of celebrities in the worlds of art and philosophy—Picasso, Braque, Éluard, Bonnard, Satre, Camus—including a small series of Matisse, seated comfortably at home in Venice, holding a dove in one hand while sketching it with the other.

It’s the emotional implications that make found photographs so fascinating. They look much the same as the snapshots that fill our own family albums. Yet cut loose from their points of origin, they become objects of deep mystery....

These unofficial images answer a persistent need to believe that photographs can still capture some essential, unvarnished truth about the subject. Where, even before the digital era, professional photographers were often shown to have manipulated images that might appear to represent actuality, amateur photographers can still be given the benefit of the doubt. Their directness, ineptitude, and lack of artifice become signs of reliability. The taste for these pictures is a measure of our enduring hunger to experience unmediated reality.

Rick Poynor, Print magazine, March/April 2006

You’ve probably seen this photo before; it’s Dorthea Lange’s Migrant Mother. You may have seen it in a history textbook, in an art, photography or photojournalism class, or in an museum. Maybe you know you’ve seen it before, but can’t recall where. For you, the image may represent “the Dust Bowl,” “the New Deal” or “the Great Depression.” Lange took five other photos that day in 1936 of the same mother and children. She also took photos of other migrant mothers, as did some of the 21 other photographers in her Farm Security Administration group. Certainly many other photographers have captured images of weary mothers and children.

So why that photo?

For discussion on this issue, I went to the The New School’s Tishman Auditorium tonight to hear a panel session, “What Makes an Image Iconic?”

The moderator was the director of exhibitions for the Aperture Foundation, the nonprofit organization and publisher. The panel was comprised of the director of the George Eastman House, a contemporary photography collector and the director of photographs at the auctioneer Phillips de Pury & Company.

The auctioneer argued iconic photos are almost purely market driven and he made an interesting case. Looking up key photographers in the Price Database of artnet, he found that that different prints of the same image surface at auction time and time again and command the highest bids: William Eggleston’s The Red Ceiling and Tricycle, Ansel Aadms’ Moonrise Over Hernandez, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Michel Gabriel, Rue Mouffetard and Hyères, 1932, and so on. But Migrant Mother cracks this argument; unlike those other images, there are no known clearance or cost restrictions on reproducing Lange’s original photo.

A confluence of factors would seem to be at work in making an image iconic: popularity and promotion of a certain photographer, often a passing of time after the photo has been taken and critical acclaim slowly builds, a highly original image presented in a certain symmetry, a capture of emotion or of a single startling moment in time. The collector, who had a thick Spanish accent and a colorful grasp of English, defined it as an image that “turned his stomach,” although he clearly didn’t mean in a negative sense.

One obvious reason for an image’s iconography may have been sitting right in front of me. An iconic image is one a large number of people have seen, and who is more responsible for that than the critic, educator or publisher who writes or talks about it; the museum director who displays it; the auctioneer who gives it value; and the influential buyer or seller involved in that transaction. In his defense, the museum director stressed that the Eastman House doesn’t play the icon game in that its mission is to acquire the complete works of a photographer, not piecemeal greatest-hits. But you can’t tell me that when that director plans an exhibit, say of Albert Weston’s photos, he’s going to leave out Pepper No. 30, a photo the director also happened to mention is a personal favorite. It made me think of the film I saw recently on art curator Henry Geldzahler, who promoted the art he loved, only to see it commoditized.

Intriguingly, the panel claimed that there have been no iconic pure-art photos since the early ’70s, the same time the market for “classic” photography began to take off. There have been iconic political or journalistic photos since then; the panel cited the photo of the lone protestor standing before the line of tanks on Tiananmen Square. Audience members made cases for the hooded Abu Gharib prisoner photo and the photo of firemen raising the flag at Ground Zero, but others countered that there are many such prisoner and 9/11 images that could be considered equally iconic.

I’d add that iconography can be debilitating, blinding a viewer to other works by the same artist, or of a lesser known artist, that may be as good if not better. I would think that after stewing in limelight long enough, an image could even lose its impact, iconic or otherwise.

February 17, 2006 Update: This wasn’t mentioned by anyone at the session, but according to a Photo District News article I came across today (“Steichen Photo Breaks Auction Record” by Daryl Lang), the 1904 photo by Edward Steichen, The Pond-Moonlight, sold for $2.9 million at Sotheby’s in New York on February 14. That price is more than double that of the previous auction-sale record, which was set by a Richard Prince photo. Two other images exceeded the Prince record that same night, both prints of Georgia O’Keefe from 1919 by photographer Alfred Stieglitz: Nude and Hands. They sold for $1.36 million and $1.47 million, respectively. Interestingly, Steichen and Stieglitz are both well-known, highly regarded photographers and the photos are representative of their style; however, they’re not particularly iconic selections.

Quick: Think of a still image from the Great Depression or World War II.

In your mind, it was black and white, wasn’t it? It was for me, until I took a look at the Library of Congress’ recently publicized American Memory collection entitled “America from the Great Depression to World War II: Color Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1939-1945.” It’s like entering the world of Oz.

There are about 1,600 color photos on the site, taken under the direction of the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information, and dating from 1939 to 1945. Photographers included the famous (Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange) and many others less so. The black-and-white portion of the FSA/OWI’s collection dwarfs the color one (about 164,000 B&W film negatives and transparencies) which likely accounts for many people’s black-and-white memories of those years.

But the American Memory site is vague in explaining this color/B&W inequality. I’d wager it was because color photography was just emerging at that time. Most of the FSA’s portion of the collection (644 images) are 35mm Kodachrome slides. In fact, although the first branded color film hit the market in 1907, the first truly modern color film was Kodachrome, introduced in 1935, less than five years before the government launched its photography program.

Another note: I don’t know what it is with enormous online historical collections of Americana, but the interface on the American Memory site sucks almost as wildly as my beloved New York Public Library Digital Gallery. But put up with it for a spell and I guarantee you’ll find gold.

Though I was there late last month to see The Destruction of Lower Manhattan photo exhibit, I returned to the Museum of the City of New York for the New York Changing exhibit, which opened July 26^th. Since moving here more than a year ago, I’ve become a fan of Berenice Abbott, whose WPA-era photos graced my recent entry on Penn Station. Furthermore, the style of the exhibit was actually the basis for my “95 Years Ago” entry, which showed then-and-now photos of my apartment building side-by-side¹.

Walking to the museum, I purposely crossed through Central Park at Mariner’s Gate off W. 85^th Street for my own New York Changing experience. I wanted to look at this portion of the park from a perspective I gained from reading an AP article on Thursday (“Clues Sought in Pre-Central Park Village” by Richard Pyle) about Seneca Village, a 19^th century settlement that once extended a third of the way into the park, from Central Park West to the Great Lawn, stretching from W. 82^nd to W. 89^th Street. The village was in the news because archeologists had been using radar to probe as far as 15 feet underground for evidence of relics revealing what life there was once like. Decisions to physically excavate the site will be based on the findings.

History once referred to Seneca Village as a squatters’ camp. That was likely because it was founded by free blacks, then settled by them and Irish and German immigrants. History now shows that many of the settlers were property owners and that the area included homes, churches, a school and a cemetery. In 1856, via the currently hot topic of eminent domain, the city paid-off and displaced some 1,600 people from the full 843-acre rectangle that would become Central Park, including the residents of Seneca Village, which was never re-established.

Walking across the site now, it’s impossible to recognize what was once there. Now it’s trees, rocks, paths, playgrounds and softball diamonds, and lots of open space to sun one’s self, as many people were doing today.

The exhibit, on the other hand, shows in a glance how New York has changed, for better or worse, in 70 years. It showcases 51 pairs of photos, placing vintage shots by Abbott next to ones taken recently by Douglas Levere. He took photos from the same place and at the same time of day and year as Abbott, even using the same large-format land camera, one that generates 8x10-inch negatives.

In general, Abbott deliberately avoided familiar views, although there are a few exceptions. The beautiful Flatiron building is thankfully the same in its 1936 photo as it is in 2001 and in fact is now the oldest remaining skyscraper in New York.

More often, however, the photos show what’s different. Crook-handled lampposts have given way to modern gooseneck streetlights. Once great features of the city—its elevated trains, grand old buildings, the Hudson Piers—have long since been demolished. “Skyscrapers complicate the view,” complains a typical placard at the exhibit.

A shot taken from Union Square by Abbott in 1936 shows the S. Klein department store on Broadway in the background, while in the foreground, the rear of Frédéric Bartholdi’s bronze statue of Marquis de Lafayette flanks a sapling. In 2002, the statue stands same as it ever was, the sapling has grown into a full grown tree and S. Klein has been replaced by a Toys “R” Us (which itself went out of business late last year).

I wanted to romanticize a photo of Abbott’s that depicts the Lyric Theatre, a charming-looking establishment plastered with ads for Charlie Chaplin movies and The Return of Peter Grimm, starring Lionel Barrymore. Then I read the photo’s description that such theaters in the Bowery during the Depression had a clientele that was “mostly transients.” But whatta deal they received: a newsreel, a short subject film and two features, all for 10 cents. When Levere rephotographed the scene in 2001, the Lyric had lost most of its ornamental facade and all of its charm, and had turned into a gay porn theater.

I was also intrigued by the fact that for more than a century, merchants sold Long Island oysters from houseboats docked along the East River. An Abbott photo from ’37 shows two of the last of them, the Brooklyn Bridge in the background and discarded shells heaped in the foreground like an omen. These fishmongers (molluskmongers?) moved to the Fulton FIsh Market, which itself is moving to the Bronx. It’s a city in perpetual motion.

¹ Since then, I’ve discovered such rephotography is common. For instance, Eugene Atget’s classic photos of the streets of Paris have been retaken and cast side-by-side by Sophie Tusler (France), Tom Gore (Canada) and Gerald Panter (United States). [back]

Henri Cartier-Bresson died today; he was 95, and a pioneer of photojournalism and candid photography, for which he’s a hero of mine.

Unfortunately, he was one of those shadowy figures that I hadn’t heard about in so long, I thought he might already be dead. Part of this can be attributed to the fact that he gave up his trade in 1975 for drawing, claiming photography bored him. If that’s true, I suppose it’s good he gave it up instead of churning out uninspired junk. But, man, while he was photographing, what a life he had.

He fought in World War II, was captured by the Germans, and escaped. With Robert Capa and other photographers, he founded the photo agency Magnum in 1947 and traveled to cover news in India, Russia and China. He was friends with Henri Matisse. He was the Annie Leibowitz of his time, photographing Camus, Sartre, Chagall, Duchamp, Stravinsky and many others.

But those portraits aren’t as exciting to me as his earliest photos, which he liked to describe as capturing “the decisive moment.” The famous photo of the cyclist in Hyères, France? He was only 23 when he snapped that with his trusty 35mm Leica. It appears at first to have been shot from the hip, with its bland subject matter and irregular cropping. But then you notice the fleeting symmetry of the scene, the angles, the cyclist’s motion enhanced by the railing and curb, the patterns of the railing, steps and cobblestones.

The same year in Paris, he photographed a man leaping over a puddle behind the Saint-Lazare Station.

“In photography,” Cartier-Bresson wrote, “the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotif.”

For more on Cartier-Bresson, check out the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibit.