A week ago I went fishing with friends in Norway. Not a rod in sight. I am usually not going around with a camera just in case, but this was different.
😊 Pelle
Category Archives: Memories
“a man with the camera of an artist, the pen of a poet and a genius for the impossible”
Said by Harrison Salisbury about David Douglas Duncan. A life in photography. This is fantastic reading from Washington Post with many great links for more interesting material.
Top image, Marine Capt. Ike Fenton during a Korean War battle in 1950. (© David Douglas Duncan/Harry Ransom Center)
😊 Pelle
It is not always as you think it is…
How a Galway Pub Led to a Skyscraper
A friend just sent me this article about another classic image many thought, for good reasons, was made by Hine. A great story. He found it in The New York Times.
🙂 Pelle
Rare photographs that changed lives
And photography still changes lives! 🙂 Pelle
http://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-43031764
Twenty-four photographs from the Lewis Hine archive have been auctioned in New York. The rare prints were from the collection of the late New York photographer Isador Sy Seidman.
American sociologist Hine was one of the most important documentary photographers of the 20th Century. Because the notion of photojournalism and documentary did not exist at the time, Hine called his projects “photo stories”, using images and words to fight for the causes he believed in.
The prints span Hine’s career and many are from his most well-known projects, centring on the poor and disadvantaged from the Carolinas, New York and Pittsburgh.
All photographs courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries.
The above image: Hot day on East Side, New York, 1908.
I found these photographs in BBC.
I admit
That I don´t often get too impressed by photography that I see. But this is just wonderful. I think! 😀 Pelle
From Washington Post
Timeless tintypes of the world’s most photographed subjects
At Sundance Film Festival, photographer Victoria Will had just minutes with some of Hollywood’s most famous actors and directors — arguably, some of the most photographed people in the world — but she chose a process that at its core is imperfect: tintype.
The 19th century wet-plate photography process predates film. There are no negatives, no large digital files or multiple frames, and no do-overs. Each image is one of a kind.
It starts in the darkroom, where each plate must be coated by hand with light sensitive emulsion. The exposure starts with a comically blinding amount of light, which is reflected off the subject into the camera lens and onto the aluminum plate still wet with emulsion. Any dry patches will remain undeveloped. It is an unforgiving medium. It also makes each image undeniably unique.
“I love that when you make a tintype you are making a thing, a physical photographic object — one that you can hold and experience in a different way,” Will told In Sight. “But I also love the finicky nature of the chemistry. Each plate is one of a kind. In the digital age these two aspects of the medium really inspire me.”
On one of the last pages of the book is a quote from Walker Evans: “The eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.” When asked, Will said it sums up what she loves and why she is so drawn to photography. “A successful image for me is one that makes you feel. It needs to touch you in some way,” she said. “I think unconsciously, and clearly articulated by Evans here, photographers are moved by emotion. That’s what is actually pushing the shutter.”
Read this!!!
This is just a wonderful, moving story about love of photography. Read the article and see amazing photos from great photographers. By Ceri Jackson, BBC.
😊 Pelle
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/david_hurn_photographer_swaps_magnum
Swaps – Photographs from the David Hurn collections runs from 30 September 2017 to 11 March 2018 at the National Museum Cardiff
All you’ve got is a box with a hole at the front. That’s what we’ve all got and that’s all we’ve ever had since photography was invented.
“All that happens is the image of life out there goes whizzing through that lens and goes bang onto some material or other and you get a trace of that life on the back of the box. And you’ve got once chance at it, unlike painting or writing you can’t go back and edit, in photography the moment’s gone and will never happen again.
“So, all we have is this box with a hole in the front. So how come if there was a sheep dog trial for instance and Cartier-Bresson, McCullin and Bruce Davidson were there, they are all photographing exactly the same thing but if you showed me 10 pictures from that event I would be able to tell you who had taken what picture?
“It’s the signature of someone which can’t be contrived; it’s the purest thing to their real personality, the world seen through their eyes. The pictures are stamped with the unique style of the individual who shot them.
“But what is necessary for the authorship to come through is an impeccable command of the technical side. The best photographers might say ‘Oh, the technical side is unimportant’. Well, the technical side is staggeringly important but it has got to the point with them that they don’t have to think about it. That only comes through hard work and incessant practice.
“I always stress this point… you’re not a photographer because you are interested in photography.
“The picture is out there, you don’t make the picture, you just have a good visual eye and press the button at the right time. For that you must have an intense curiosity and tenacity, not just a passing visual interest, in the theme of the pictures. This curiosity leads to intense examination, reading, talking, research and many, many failed attempts.
“The idea that there’s no future in taking pictures is nonsensical. If you go to Smiths in Paddington station there’s 3,000 magazines for sale and they’ve all got pictures in them, they’re on websites.
“Everybody’s floundering a little bit as to how to make any money from it but those sorts of problems will be solved, clever people will find ways. Pictures are going to be needed there and the skills are still going to be the same.”
It is a measure of the force of the medium of photography that a picture that probably took a 60th of a second to shoot continues to fuel the life of another man 62 years on.
The Observer W Eugene Smith, the photographer who wanted to record everything
Together with Avedon, Penn, Steichen, Strand, Arbus, Cartier-Bresson, Albert Watson and a few more, he is one of the truly great photographers. For me. They are all different and perhaps I should not compare them. So I don´t. Read the article from The Guardian, by Sean O `Hagan.
See the images and imagine the sound that he recorded. 😊 Pelle
Smith took many famous pictures, but also taped hours of audio of jazz greats, writers and artists of the day in his New York loft. A new book explores his strange world
Smith was perhaps the single most important American photographer in the development of the editorial photo essay. His visual narratives, usually published in Life magazine, were often brutally atmospheric. He evoked the horrors of the second world war in the Pacific, where he was injured by mortar fire, and chronicled the working life of Dr Ernest Ceriani in the small town of Kremmling, Colorado, in his 1948 series, Country Doctor, now recognised as the first extended editorial photo story.
In 1955, Smith became a member of the Magnum picture agency, travelling to Pittsburgh for his first assignment, which entailed producing 100 photographs in three weeks to mark the city’s first centenary. He worked on the project for three years, producing around 21,000 photographs. Today, his legacy is maintained by the W Eugene Smith Memorial Fund, which celebrates and encourages the kind of humanistic photography he pioneered, if not the impossible tasks he set himself and his beleaguered editors.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/aug/06/w-eugene-smith-photographer-record-everything
• Gene Smith’s Sink by Sam Stephenson is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on 22 August ($26)
My first view of China
On my first trip to China recently I took some personal photographs. Very much street photography. China is a very interesting graphic country. What the signs say I don´t know, but I like the looks of them. The images below are mostly from the streets and I can imagine keep right and left…
😊 Pelle
The Met Celebrates Irving Penn, Revolutionary Photographer
They do, and once again I wish I had all the time in the world just going around enjoying exhibitions. Together with Avedon and Albert Watson he is one of my absolute favorite photographers. Over the years I have got so much inspiration from his work. The frozen fruits, cigarette butts, flowers, the backdrops and SO MUCH more. Recently we have been fortunate here in Stockholm to see his work at Åmells. What more could a photographer my age ask for? 😊 Pelle
Top image: A photo shoot for “Mouth (for L’Oréal), New York, 1986.” Credit Irving Penn Foundation, Metropolitan Museum of Art
An animated portrait of the movie star Marlene Dietrich, shot in 1948. Credit Irving Penn Foundation, Metropolitan Museum of Art
“Rochas Mermaid Dress (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn), Paris, 1950.” Penn married the model that year. Credit Irving Penn, Condé Nast and Metropolitan Museum of Art
Penn’s use of sharp, angled corners in his sets fit the narrow frame of his subject in the portrait “Marcel Duchamp, New York, 1948.” Credit Irving Penn Foundation, Metropolitan Museum of Art
“Irving Penn: Centennial,” spanning decades of the photographer’s work, opens on Monday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Credit Irving Penn Foundation, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Alex Wroblewski for The New York Time
Testing Testing, one, two, three
Just checking out a new camera, EOS 5D mklV. Larger file size and quicker focus. A nice friend to bring along on todays walk. Together with a Macro f100 2.8.😊 Pelle
On a photographers mind 