Figure 1 – Emile Joachim Constant Puyo, Montmartre, ca. 1906. This is one of the images featured in the MFA exhibit on Pictorialism. This image is from the Wikimediacommons and from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. In the public domain in the United States because it is more than 75 yrs. old.

Drum roll, please.  This year’s Favorite and Noteworthy Photograph #10, the winner, and the last image on Hati and Skoll for the year 2014 is Emile Joachim Constant Puyo, “Montmartre, 1906.” I have spoken about this image before.  I saw it earlier this year at an exhibit at Bostons Museum of Fine Arts and fell immediately in love with it.  The image is truly stunning and represents bromoil printing at the glorious high point of photographic pictoralism.  The diffuse pointillism of the image closely mirrors contemporary impressionism.  The foggy vision of the Sacré-Cœur Basilica is amazing and quite magical. And then there is the enigma. Exactly what is the young woman looking at on the street below?

I’ve got to take a deep breath here.  After showing images related to World Wars I & II in this series, I thought it would be of value to show something related to the War in Vietnam – as an event closer to our immediate memory.  But I had something completely different in mind.  I was thinking about the anti-war movement and a photograph of students sticking flowers in the muzzle of National Guard rifles. Hmm! I found that image pretty quickly but I started to search the credits on it, and this took me into the vividly black and white world of Vietnam War press images.  It was really just before color became dominant, and the black and whites from that war are ever so brilliant, vivid, and starkly gruel.

It all came back like an old nightmare and I realized that the image by Nick Ut showing children fleeing an accidental napalm attack by the South Vietnamese Airforce with little Phan Thị Kim Phúc screaming in terror and pain her clothes burned away defines the Vietnam War.  It is the most significant image of that war.  Indeed, it is, without any doubt, one of the great images of the mid – twentieth century, and it marks a turning point in what is expected from press photographers.  We now expect imbeddness, and we expect reality. And somehow it is amazing that with all this reality that the wars continue.

It is always intriguing when I can post an image on the same date as it was taken.  Today’s favorite photograph has been referred too from the outset as the greatest photograph of World War II, “St. Paul’s survives the Blitz.”  It was taken on December 29, 1940 by Herbert Mason, who was the chief photographer for The London Daily Mail and it was taken from the rooftop of the Mail’s offices. St. Paul’s took a direct hit from an incendiary bomb that night, but Churchill had created  a special corps of firefighters to save the building.  They were at work that night climbing the beams and rafters with hoses. Luckily the bomb fell through to the basement, where it was easily extinguished.

It is perhaps unnecessary to speak of the image’s significance or what makes it a great photograph.  It took two days before government censors allowed the photo to be published, unsure of whether it would have a negative or a positive effect on the British people.  In the end it stands as a profound testimonial to the resilience and determination of the British people in the face of Evil and tyranny.  In the way that only a photograph can, it gave life to the words that the Prime Minister had spoken in parliament that previous June 4:

“We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

Such is the power of that image that it gives us a profounder understanding of the sacrifices that were endured in the defense of liberty and human rights three quarters of a century ago, and maybe the image, as good images do, transcends time and is a lesson for modern men and women in the face of the challenges that we face today.

The greatest image of World War II? Perhaps, but certainly one of the most meaningful and one of my favorites.

Ansel Adams, The Tetons and the Snake River, 1942. From the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain because it was taken by an employee of the National Pak Service, US National Archives Identifier 519904.

There are several Ansell Adams photographs that are my favorites.  And I think that I should be allowed at least one in this year’s “Favorite and Noteworthy Photographs 2014.” The Tetons and the Snake River, 1942” is one of them.  The drama of the sky, the mountains, and the river are simply exquisite. The glow of the snow, of the sun in the clouds, and of its reflection is the river are truly wonderful.  In the depth of the dynamic range, the dark forest, the shaded mountains, the snow, and again the sky are magnificent and show Adams at the height of his craft and the zone system at its best.  The winding river carries the eye in a sort of dance as it divides the image into the requisite thirds in a most curious manner. And speaking of the eye, the great thing about Adams’ work is an almost contradictory dichotomy.  Every time that you see one of his great images, you see an old friend.  You remember seeing it for the first time, but it is always as if you are discovering it anew.

Ansel Adams, The Tetons and the Snake River, 1942. From the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain because it was taken by an employee of the National Pak Service, US National Archives Identifier 519904.

Figure 1 – Arnold Genthe, Nora May French, 1907. From the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain because of its age.

I continue to be extremely intrigued by autochromes.  As a result, I do a lot of web searches on them.  So, not a surprise, I have become quite interested in an early adopter of this technology the German American photographer, Arnold Genthe, who created some very marvelous autochromes at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century.  So in preparation for this “Favorite and Noteworthy Photographs 2014” I found myself studying Genthe’s work, particularly the extensive collection of the United States Library of Congress. To my surprise what kept drawing me, almost mesmerizing me, was not an autochrome but rather the beautiful sepia image of Figure 1, a portrait of American Poet Anna-May French.

Born in Berlin, in his day Genthe was famous for his images, often taken with a hidden camera, of San Francisco street life.  He was an early documenter of San Francisco’s Chinatown. His studio was destroyed in 1906 by the great San Francisco earthquake and fire.  Probably his most famous photograph was of this great disaster,  Looking Down Sacramento Street, San Francisco, April 18, 1906.  Soon after the earthquake, Genthe joined the artists’ colony in Carmel-by-the-Sea, and it was there that he met an photographed Anna-May French.

Why is this photograph appealing?  To me it is the soft Vermeer side light.  The eyes with their catch-light have a lovely appeal and are filled with what William Butler Yeats referred to as “the pilgrim soul in you.”  But most of all there is the way that the lighting dramatically emphasizes the wildness of the subject’s hair.  It is just wonderful.

And as for the story behind those eyes, of Nora’s “pilgrim soul”, Nora May French (1881-1907), the dates a very ominous.  French was a bohemian poet in Carmel-by-the Sea circles.  She was trapped in the ambiguity of the bohemian lifestyle for a young woman of her day, tormented by social pressure to accept a conventional marriage.  On November 11, 1907 while staying with friends in Carmel Nora attempted suicide with a handgun.  But as a result of her trembling hand, she missed her mark only shooting off a lock of her hair.  But during the night of November 13-14 she killed herself by ingesting cyanide.  As a tribute, her friends collaborated in having a memorial collection of French’s poems published in 1910.  The rest, as Hamlet said was silence, for almost a hundred years.  In 2009 her poems were republished as “The Outer Gate: The Collected Poems of Nora May French.” On the cover is Genthe’s portrait.