Bill Eppridge, 1938-2013

I must admit that I had never heard of Bill Eppridge until I read his obituary in the New York Times two weeks ago, nor had I ever seen his most famous photograph, taken immediately after Robert Kennedy was shot in 1968.

It is an amazingly successful photograph. There are strong echoes of Caravaggio and tenebrismo painting in the way the light falls with a single direction. They suggest a religious meaning, which the victim's posture, arms outstretched, reinforces. There is a mysterious hand reaching down from above, in the same direction as the light. And there is the young busboy, who looks straight at the viewer; because of this gesture, he is very human, whereas the rest of the drama seems to happen on a higher, mythical plane.

Of course, all of this was composed in a split second. It is a great example of what it means to capture the decisive moment. There was no time to think "oh, maybe I will do this in the style of Caravaggio". Eppridge must have had a fantastic talent and visual education, and was able to do something great on the spot, when there was no room for error From this point of view, the achievement is even more amazing than Cartier-Bresson's most famous photographs. After all, if Cartier-Bresson had failed to capture the best composition in one of his shots of the crowd at George V's coronation, or of the street urchins in Spain, it is quite possible that another equally good opportunity would have come up later the same day; but there was no second chance to take this photograph.

It is humbling that such great work exists, and one does not even know about it.

Just a Thought

I am shy about calling myself an artist. This is just what I do in my free time (although I consider it much more important than what I do for pay). Still, here is a thought about art:

The nature of artistic endeavors is open-ended. After Matisse painted a painting, he painted another one. When Beethoven was done composing a piece of music, he started on another one.

Most free time project are just projects: you plant your flower beds. You build a storage shed. When you are done, you are not likely to start on another one next to it.

Just a thought.

Chrysanthemum

November 2009

Digital

Portraits

Mark Miller remarked in a recent conversation that most informal portrait photos are terribly composed, with the head of the subject in the dead center of the (mostly empty) frame. For him, they are hopeless to turn into paintings. High up on the wall of his studio, he pointed to a large canvas based on one such photograph. It seemed not to have gone anywhere for a long time.
 
I thought of that comment as I was browsing through a catalog of an old exhibition of paintings from the Hermitage. I find many Old Master portraits dead boring; the worst are the ones of high-status sitters, who probably came in with strong opinions about what a portrait is supposed to look like:

Gerard Ter Borch

Portrait of Catarina van Leunink (between 1654-81)

State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia

On the other hand, I was stunned by this Ter Bruggen - it is a jumble of faces, hands, and objects, obviously placed for compositional interest.

Hendrik Ter Bruggen

Concert, 1626

State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia

 

 

I was also reminded of this Ribera in the Art Institute of Chicago:

 

Jusepe de Ribera

Penitent Saint Peter, 1628-32

Art Institue of Chicago

 

 

Nominally, the Ter Bruggen and the Ribera are not portraits, but genre scenes and religious paintings respectively. However, all three pictures here are "paintings of faces". You can argue in favor of the first that it conveys a lot of psychological depth and other like things that people say about portraits, but compositionally it is pretty dull.

Camera Case Repair

Last weekend I spent a few hours re-stitching a case I had bought for my 1953 Zeiss Contessa. The Contessa is a beautiful little camera, and it takes good, contrasty pictures. Mine came with a dead light meter, which I repaired. There is a crack in the corner of the rangefinder glass, but it does not interfere with focusing; I find that it adds a little bit of wabi sabi to the camera. After all, it is ridiculous to expect a 60 year old camera to look new. "Operational" is already a high bar, and I am in awe of the solidity of Zeiss engineering.

To repair the case, I followed the instructions given here, and I am very grateful for them - I would have made a mess without them. Here are some pictures of the work in progress, and additional notes in case you want to try this are at the bottom of the page:

After stitching the first half of the bottom.

The larger hole on the right normally holds a special knob that for winding the film.

The smaller hole in the center is for viewing the frame counter.

Stitching completed. It is not perfectly regular as the original was.

After I took this picture, I darkened the thread with brown shoe polish.

 The camera in its repaired case.

Some additional suggestions if you want to do a similar job.

• Read the instructions at the link above first :-)
• After you thread the needles through the first two holes, make sure both ends of the thread are the same length, otherwise you will not be able to finish the project!
• Using thread that is too thick will make the job really hard, and potentially break the leather. For me, the right thickness turned out to be 1/3 of the thread I had originally picked; I separated one of the three strands that made up the thread.
• Most of the time, the needle should find its way through the existing holes very easily. If you have to push hard to get it through, it is not aimed correctly. However, it can still be hard to pull all the way through. I had a pair of small pliers on hand, and they really helped sometimes.

Les neiges d'antan

Maybe I was a bit harsh on Ms. Maier yesterday.

Here is a try at a more balanced judgement: what we have here is a collective work of art, like jazz or theater. Ms. Maier played the Rolleiflex; some unknown professional played the enlarger (and man, is he good with it); and John Maloof told the story, and he has a hell of a talent at marketing it.

Vivian Maier was not really an artist, I think, but it is hard not to respond to her personal story. She tried to live according to her own rules when young, and was lonely in her old age, like we all are likely to be in this modern world of ours. And what was the deal with her photo-snapping obsession? I hear that she recorded conversations, later made 8mm movies, and kept mountains of old newspapers. One can only make up his own interpretation. To me, it sounds as though she feared impermanence, and tryed to stop the passing of time.

It is not an uncommon sentiment. Japanese culture seems to be more aware of it than most: there is an entire cycle of seasonal occupations, that deal with the enjoyment of transitory beauty, cherry blossoms being the most famous. With the cherry blossoms, I hear that the most beautiful moment is the consider the one in which the petals come off the trees like a snowfall. It takes a lot of control at that point not to give in to the sadness for the end of the flowers (which, of course, foreshadows our own demise). Maybe Vivian felt this form of mono no aware acutely, and tried to cure it with her camera.
It did not work for the people she pictured, who have become anonymous, like characters in a morality play: the Old Lady, the Policeman, the Couple on the Beach, the Bum. They, too, by now, must be sleeping the Big Sleep, as gone as Villon's last year's snow.

Found Photos

Disclaimer: I am a grumpy old man, and intolerant of attention devoted to people other than myself. Among other things, this makes me impatient with the adoration showered on athletes. I have been that way since I was a child, and I have no intention of changing now.

With that out of the way, last Sunday I went by the Photo Center NW to see what was on display (I recommend it, I always find it interesting). They had a show of photographs by a person called Vivian Maier. The pictures are very professionally printed and mounted, and are offered for $1,800 a piece (!). Most left me cool, but a few are very good:

Then there is the back story. In short, we are told Ms. Maier took some 100,000 photographs, left most of them undeveloped, got old, and died. At this point, according to Wikipedia, a guy by the name of John Maloof comes into the story. He is described as the curator of Ms. Maier collection. All of a sudden, there are NPR stories, and publications, and exibitions. He is not mentioned at PCNW at all, and his relation ot Ms. Maier is unknown.

Maybe I am just a grumpy old man, but my guess is that he came by the negatives in a yard sale and saw an opportunity to make a buck by telling a story people like to hear: ignored artist recognized as genius. A few thoughts:

• This happens all of the time: see Charles Jones, whose life is here, and a few photos can be seen here. There seems to be a cottage industry of people scouring yard sales and flea market in search of the next ignored genius.
• One hundred thousand pictures! Of course there were a few good ones! We are in Infinite Monkeys territory here (if you have enough monkeys hitting typewriters long enough, eventually one will produce the works of Shakespeare). I have taken nowhere near 100,000 pictures, have the photographic talent of a gerbil, and I sure enough already have a few good ones stashed away!
• Ms. Maier, I am afraid, was not an artist. By my personal definition of art, there has to be a process of doing, looking at the result, and either improving on it or keeping what is already good. The good pictures we see in the show are the combination of a lucky accident, plus a good darkroom printer, and a smart impresario to suggest a story that did not really take place.

Lomography

For some reason, I have always found the idea of using cameras with serious technical limitations a little bit silly. Why would one buy a Holga with a plastic lens and some light leaks when you can have a vintage Canon or Nikon for the same price, with none of the defects?

At the same time, and with some guilt, I have been playing with an Lomography app on my phone. The app is called Lomogram, and is one of several that let you apply “old photo” effects to pictures taken with the phone (or other pictures, if you get them on to your phone). I am not sure where the guilt comes from; maybe from the fact that I am creating fakes? Maybe from the fact that the fakes are sentimental and nostalgic? Is the cheesy film markings that one can use as borders? I am sure much could be learned from analyzing this feeling.

Either way, there is no denying that I really like the output. I have even become a regular Facebook user so that I can share my pictures. The reason I like them is that they are surprisingly good, and that is not because I make them, but because the app uses sound composition devices. You can apply rounded corners and vignetting, which help to keep the viewer inside the picture frame. You can apply simple white or black frames, which also help to do the same. And you can alter the colors. Not every color effect works on every picture, but some make the picture nearly monochromatic, which lends it unity.

I have posted an album of these altered phone pictures here. Tell me what you think

Graflex View Camera

Phone Photo

August 2012

Sermonette: Why Doesn't The Light Wait?

Among the bags of fan mail that we have received since the start of this blog, one topic stands out. Our public relations assistants, E. Ta and B. Ta (they are sisters, and trace their roots to Outer Mongolia) every day sort the incoming mail into different heaps by subject, and the heap pertaining to this one subject rapidly came to resemble the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
So, rather than replying individually to each sender, which would have considerably delayed the answers, today I will provide an answer in the blog.

The question, of course, is: what does the title of this blog mean? What is this deal with the light not waiting?

The title goes back to a remark by (I think) Ansel Adams: going back to a place where he had visualized a picture but been unable to take it never works. Even at the exact same hour on the next day, there is going to be a miriad of small differences, and the picture is just not going to be there. This puts the story of the taking of the famous Moonrise picture in New Mexico into perspective - Adams tells of having to set up his camera in haste before the last light of the sunset disappeared. Although he was a full-time photographer, and had nothing else to do but getting the pictures, he could not come back for it the next day.

Ansel Adams

Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico

1941

In general terms: at any moment, on any day, we may come across the opportunity to capture a great picture. We have to take it there and then. There is no "later": the opportunity is not going to be there "later". If we do not act immediately, it is as if the opportunity had never presented itself.

This is true of taking pictures, but it is true of human relations as well. Every now and then, we have the opportunity to do something to help someone, make him or her feel better, or take the first step towards a friendship. Those moments have to grabbed there and then - if you postpone them (because you are tired, late for an important meeting, or whatever) they will not come back. In the end, you will believe there were never opportunities to have more friends or live a more meaningful life. Today, I was in the Central Library in Seattle, and took a picture through the windows of the Courthouse across the street. One of the homeless men who spend their days in the library asked me if I was taking a picture of myself. He sounded friendly and eager to talk. I was in a hurry to leave the library before my parking expired. And I am rather shy, so I replied something briefly and left. Now I am kicking myself, but of course it makes no difference now. There is no going back to that moment.

If photography drills this principle into your head, than it is more than just a way of killing time with cool equipment. I know this post sounds like a sermonette, but what has to be said has to be said.

Crying Out For Silver

Last night, Mark Miller hosted a critique session at his school. (I have mentioned Mark earlier in this blog). Each person put up a few paintings (I brought inkjet prints of photos) and Mark, who has an extremely keen sense of composition, critiqued the formal aspects of each. I had never had a critique session for any photo or other work I have done.

The critique was great learning. Mark has an amazing ability to isolate what is not working in each piece. Even good paintings often have problem spots, and one of the hardest things is identifying them (fixing the problem is often relatively easy).

The thing that really struck me in the feedback to my photos was what Mark said about pictures like this one:

Snowfall, Kyoto

February 2005

Digital

He said that the pictures are "crying out for silver" - meaning they would look really good printed with the traditional analog process.

I took the picture in 2005, and did not start learning silver gelatin printing until about a year ago, in 2012. When I did, one reason was that I could not get my digital pictures to print satisfactorily with inkjet printers. It amazes me that, it took Mark 10 minutes to understand what had taken me seven years. Seven years are a long time (yes: life is short, and the craft difficult).

There are cases in which we have an idea in mind of what a painting is supposed to look like, and to try and paint it, we ignore the much better painting that is trying to happen on the canvas. This has happened to me many times as a beginner. Going slow and looking at things for what they are is a useful life lesson I have learned from painting (and Mark was the one who pointed this out to me).

In this case, however, I think I was just ignorant. I have had limited exposure to photography, and I am ignorant of technique. I just had no idea certain things were out there and I could use them.

HCB

Another thought on cropping, back to the idea that inside of each picture there is a smaller, better picture trying to get out.

Not everybody agrees. Some of those who disagree are very good photographers indeed.

Apparently, some believe you ought to compose pictures in the camera, and they go as far as printing photographs with the edge of the negative showing, so that they can prove that there was no editing. They call this margin, I believe, "verification margin" (of course, nowadays it can easily be faked on a computer), and are very proud of it. People of this persuasion track their lineage back to Henry Cartier-Bresson (I am trying to find out if he really expressed the idea attributed to him - I will write more about this when some books arrive from the library).

This view of begs a question: if you have taken a picture, and it is not great, should you throw it away? What if you could save it through a bit of cropping? What if you could save it by dodging and burning?

Here is a memorable picture by Stieglitz:

Alfred Stieglitz

Winter on Fifth Avenue

1892

and its much less memorable full negative:

More cropping

Maybe this is obvious, but the cropping frame just does what visual artists have done for a long time.

In Old Master drawings,it is not unusual to see rectangles drawn to isolate a part of a bigger composition.

The obvious thought is that photography and painting must have a lot in common in terms of the mental processes involved.

In fact, there are a few examples of people who went from one form of art to the other. Henri Cartier-Bresson started as a painter.

Mark Takamichi Miller, who taught me painting, told me he started as a photographer. He told me once that his process was to shoot random pictures, without even looking through the viewfinder. At the end of the day, he would go through the prints, and there would always be at least one perfectly composed frame.

Later, Mark did a series of paintings based on random photographs that he asked other people for in drugstores.

Mark, by the way, is a fascinating character. His way of teaching painting is all about mental process: pay attention to what happens on the canvas, and do not get carried away by what you are doing is a precept that I remember. The underlying idea, I think, is that what we imagine is not always the best idea, and the messiness of what happens will offer nuggets that we should be ready to grab. Which, I guess, is a great philosophy of life, too.

In the process of writing this post, I found out that Mark, whom I had not seen for years, now runs his own art school. I am looking forward to catching up with him again.

Break

Today I took a break from everything, and I did like this guy:

and this guy:

I rented a chainsaw, and did some cleanup in the backyard. It was cold - there was frost on the ground all day, but I was in my shirt and sweating pretty soon.

When the sun got low, I went back in, and made a stir fry with some sliced cabbage and garlic. Winter vegetables on a winter day - it was delicious

Jim's Gift

When I discussed cropping and composition with Jim, I shared my frustration about the lack of a method to create successful compositions. I guess what I was trying to express was that we had just seen evidence that that inside of each frame, there is a better, smaller picture that is trying to come out (see the previous post in this series). I will need to go back to this later.

He seemed to think for a moment, then, "from the recesses of his mind" he asked if I had a cropping frame. Then he went upstairs and came down with an actual cropping frame in hand:

There are two sheets of cardboard that slide past each other. Each sheet has a clever trapezoidal opening, so that when you pull the slide in one direction, you get rectangles in 8x10 aspect ratio, and in the other, in 5x7 aspect ratio. The opening can be made of any size, up to the maximum allowed by the size of the frame. It is really a clever tool.

Jim not only is a genius and a sexy man, he is also very generous and he gave me the tool!

Yesterday and today I sat down with a few contact sheets and tried it out. It definitely helps visualizing the effects of a crop.  I think I will need to figure out a routine to make the most of it. Maybe a good approach is to set the frame to about 1/4 of the print on which you are using it, then move it over the picture to survey the possibilities. Look what is in each of the four corners, and what is in the center. I will have to try this a few times to see if it works.

A side note: there are many articles about cropping on the internet. All of them describe how to crop using software tools (Photoshop, obviously, is a favorite). Very litte refers to the discipline of doing good crops. One would imagine that easy-to-use software would have freed us from having to worry about the tools, so that we could focus on the creative aspects... but we seem to focus on writing about the tools instead!