Avoiding old fuddy-duddidom

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Figure 1 - Mark Twain by Underwood and Underwood, 1907, from the US Library of Congress via the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Mark Twain by Underwood and Underwood, 1907, from the US Library of Congress via the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain.

Last night I was watching a rerun of Ken Burns’ documentary on the life of Mark Twain.  Long-term readers will know that I love Mark Twain and will take any opportunity to post a picture of him.  Hence Figure 1. This is a wonderful, Vermeer side lit image from 1907 by Underwood and Underwood, who were once the premier distributors of stereographic photographs in the world.

As I was watching this documentary, I kept pointing out to my wife all of the classic historic photographs that Burns was using.  I must be rather annoying.  Still, it is profound to watch Twain evolve before us from daguerreotype to albumin print – as technology itself evolved.  Twain was certainly an adapter of technology.  People in Twain’s “Gilded Age,” saw the promise of technology – and that’s what I really want to talk about today.  He/they would have really loved our digital cameras and world, for sure.

There is no surer way to achieve true fuddy-duddidom than to be a Miniver Cheevy (Yes, I’ve spoken about this before) and deny, fear, and loathe new technology. I have friends who tell me that they cannot deal with these new-fangled computer gadgets and that these young whipper-snappers, with their noses in their cell phones, are going to be the ruination of the world.  Really?  You mean like the bicycle, the motor car, the radio, the telephone, the television?  Give me a break! That, friends, is a fuddy-duddyism, and I am an anti fuddy-duddialist.  Adapt, people! Truly, adopt and adapt, or perish.

Does perish seem a strong word?  Well, it’s not, and that’s because I can pretty much guarantee that you are going to eventually perish like a techno-dinosaur.  The world belongs to the young, for the time being at least.  So their technology is ultimately the world’s technology.  By virtue of their longevity (compared to you), they are right!

I have a particular disaffection for people that deny digital photograph.  Be a proponent of silver gelatin if you want, but don’t give me this story about how vastly inferior digital images are.  They are not.

I love digital.  But years ago I also fell in love with the  brilliant subtlety of platinum-palladium printing. Never done it myself.  Would love to try it.  The same is true of the daguerreotype.  In fact, I have progressed so far that I can now type that word without relying on spell check to keep me literate.  What a pain it would be to have to revert to looking it up in a dictionary, especially since it is one of those words were you might not know where to begin.  And on my recent trip to the MFA I have become totally enamoured of bromoil printing.  That I really want to try.  The painterly effects are amazing and spectacular for all the reasons that, and here’s the real point, I love photography.

Photography is the point.  I can see the virtue of all forms, except possibly wet silver collodion, which just strikes me as a major pain in the ass.  Actually I’m just being cute.  There’s a special beauty in collodion as well.  Here we are talking about photographic art.  Digital photography has done a spectacular job of making the art of great print making widely available.  Don’t be a fuddy-duddy, learn, love embrace all manner of technology.  It is the future!  As far as your photography is concerned, finding your ideal medium is like a singer finding his or her voice.  And remember that your voice matures with time, but never ceases to delight.

 

The first Nikon One Touch

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Figure 1 - Nikon "One Touch" autofocus consumer camera, 1985. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Nikon “One Touch” autofocus consumer camera, 1985. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

This past weekend I was depositing my trash at the town dump.  It sounds like a simple task.  But among Yankees (I am a Yankee come lately, and BTW this has nothing to do with a certain baseball team that has appropriated the name) this is more of a rite thank a task.  Trash is sorted and recycled, and most importantly treasures are recycled, or passed on to new owners.  I usually focus on the book swap, but this Saturday I wandered into what is fondly referred to as “the put and take.” The name explains it all. And there waiting for me was the little black beauty of Figure 1- a Nikon One Touch.

Now I do not collect old cameras, although I do have a few old consumer cameras of note.  That was a minor collection started for me by my son, who one Christmas gave me a nice little Kodak Brownie. Incongruously, it too is made of black plastic.  Go figure!

Of course, I went home to explore this little Nikon more thoroughly.  As it turns out the “One Touch” is part of the L-Series.  The L-Series began in 1983 with the L35 AF/AD.  This was Nikon’s entrance into the autofocus market for consumer cameras – really a moment in photgraphic technological history.  I use the term “consumer cameras” to distinguish them from SLRs.  That explains the AF.  What the AD stands for is “auto-date” the camera marked each frame with the date. This was pretty high tech for 1983.  In 1985 Nikon introduced the first of the “One-Touch Series,” the  L35AF2/L35AD2/One•Touch. This has a elegant automatic window that covers the lens when it is not in use.

So what’s the point?  The point is that these cameras are elements of a transitional technology that took us from 35mm SLRs with their autofocus and autoexposure features to today’s DSLRs and more importantly today’s pretty sophisticated digital point and shoots.  Today you’ve got to try pretty hard to take bad pictures.  It can be done, however.  But the significant fact is that today’s cameras, which are really little photographic robots complete with their own little microprocessor brains, make it a lot easier to take technically good pictures – freeing the Sunday photographer to fulfill his/her artist destiny.

So my heading into the little “put and take” shed was a sort of trip down memory lane back into into the early eighties.  Those were the days of big hair styles.  Who can forget Meg Ryan in “When Harry met Sally,” which was 1989?  The other part of the nightmare were shoulder pads, which often came in several layers making the women look like football players.

The birth of a moon

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Figure 1 - NASA's Cassini satellite in orbit around Saturn documents the formation of a new moon on April 15, 2013. From NASA and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – NASA’s Cassini satellite in orbit around Saturn documents the formation of a new moon on April 15, 2013. From NASA and in the public domain.

Figure 1 is an example of something that I never thought that I would see.  It is a moment of thought-provoking grandeur, brought to us by tireless robotic eyes that extend our vision and our horizons, like those of Ulysses’ mariners ever outward.

According to a paper published in the planetary astronomy journal Icarus, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has documented the formation of a small icy object within the rings of Saturn that may be a new moon.  These images were taken by Cassini’s narrow angle camera on April 15, 2013.  They show disturbances, a perturbation merely, at the very edge of Saturn’s A or outermost ring.

NASA scientists also found other unusual protuberances at the ring’s, which they believe to be gravitational disturbances caused by nearby massive objects.  This may significantly increase our understanding of the process of formation of Saturn’s ice moons like the cloud enshrouded moon Titan and the ocean moon Enceladus. Scientists believe that the ring system of Saturn once supported the outgrowth of giant ice moons, but that the process is now largely complete.

We tend today to take this kind of imagery for granted, rather than marvel at it with the awestruck devotion that it deserves.  It all began with Draper’s first daguerreotype of Earth’s moon in 1839.

The ultimate folly

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Figure 1 - "No man's land in Flanders field, France, during World War I," from the wikimediacommons, original in the US Library of Congress and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – “No man’s land in Flanders field, France, during World War I,” from the wikimediacommons, original in the US Library of Congress and in the public domain.

One hundred years ago today, July 28, 1914 Austro-Hungarian guns began firing in preparation for the invasion of Serbia.  It was the ultimate folly, the opening shots of World War I or the “Great War,” and by the time it was over four and a half years later 10 million had died to be followed soon by 50 million succumbing to the Spanish Flu pandemic the the war’s end engendered. I say the ultimate folly, but watch the news tonight and wonder if we have learned anything.

The First World War was well photographed.  There are gruesome stills and even video footage of the misery and carnage.  I thought that I would post a couple of images in tribute or remembrance. Figure 1 shows the “no man’s land” in Flanders, France a desolate, alien, and gruesome place. And Figure 2 is a different view of this nether world.  It shows an aerial reconnaissance photograph of the opposing trenches and no-man’s land between Loos and Hulluch in Artois, France, taken at 7.15 pm, 22 July 1917. German trenches are at the right and bottom, British trenches are at the top left. The vertical line to the left of centre indicates the course of a pre-war road or track.

“Zonder liefde, warme liefde
        Sterft de zomer, de droeve zomer
        En schuurt het zand over mijn land
        Mijn platte land, mijn Vlaanderland.”+

+”Without love, warm love
The summer dies, the sad summer
And the sand scours my country
My flat country, my Flanders”

Jacques Brel, “Marieke”
Figure 2 - An aerial reconnaissance photograph of the opposing trenches and no-man's land between Loos and Hulluch in Artois, France, taken at 7.15 pm, 22 July 1917. German trenches are at the right and bottom, British trenches are at the top left. The vertical line to the left of centre indicates the course of a pre-war road or track. From the wikimediacommons, originally from the UK Imperial War Museums and in the public domain.

Figure 2 – An aerial reconnaissance photograph of the opposing trenches and no-man’s land between Loos and Hulluch in Artois, France, taken at 7.15 pm, 22 July 1917. German trenches are at the right and bottom, British trenches are at the top left. The vertical line to the left of centre indicates the course of a pre-war road or track.
From the wikimediacommons, originally from the UK Imperial War Museums and in the public domain.

The faceless army

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Figure 1 - The faceless army, Natick Massachusetts. (c) DE Wolf, 2014.

Figure 1 – The faceless army, Natick Massachusetts. IPhone photograph. (c) DE Wolf, 2014.

I need to make a confession.  It was a beautiful day here in Massachusetts and despite the glory of the sunshine and a gentle breeze, I went to the Mall for a morning walk.  So I feel that I need to explain why, to explain my strange little foible.  I go in search of espresso.  I end my walk sitting in a chair, observing the shoppers, and sipping on espresso.

Saturday morning is a contemplative time for me.  So in my contemplations I have begun to become aware that there is a silent, faceless, often headless or armless army among us.  These are the manikins or mannequins.  The used to have faces with beautiful painted eyes.  And I have been trying to understand how they have lost their heads and become faceless.  I suspect that it has something to do with the desire to make them neutral so as not to attach a racial or ethic identity to them.  Indeed, where I grew up the eyes were always blue.

But the effect of all this dismemberment and eradication of identity is rather eery.  Today was the most disturbing yet featureless faces covered with canvas, like in a nightmare. They are everywhere and they come across as something very alien – or maybe are all too familiar.  The facelessness or headlessness betrays a social decapitation.

They are not us.  Or worse, they symbolize modern man and modern woman in some disparate existential sort of way.  They are like the homeless, the poor, the slaves – we try to ignore them.

Perhaps less caffeine tomorrow. 8<}

 

Such stuff as dreams are made on

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A fun, or is it a confusing, fact about the internet is that you can be reading something and you think that it was written yesterday only to discover that in reality it was written three or more years ago.  Well, OK, today I was reading the New york Times Lens Blog and I came or the little arrow of my pointer wandered upon this posting by Kerri MacDonald from August 4, 2011. Never mind the date.  It is still interesting!  It is a discussion of a then fresh photography book by  James Mollison entitled “Where Children Sleep.”   The project shows pictures of children, each paired with images of their bedrooms.  In a sense it takes you to the anvil of dreams, the very place where childhood dreams are forged.

Two points come out of this work.  First, that children are meant to dream, and second, that because of exploitation many are robbed of this quintessential element of childhood.  I found the captions in LensBlog a little distracting.  I don’t need to be subliminally told what to think.  I prefer looking at Mr. Mollison’s website and feel the emotion, the sadness and the outrage for myself.  These emotions emanate from the power of the images themselves.  And some of these are very powerful images.

The other side of all of this is that for those children, who can dream, their intensity of dreaming is palpable.  We were all children once and we all can remember dreaming of what would be or what could be.  These, as Ms. MacDonald, points out are the essential unifying elements.

“Everybody sleeps. And eventually, everybody grows up.”

 

Holy cow, Batman.

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Well “Big Bang Theory” enthusiasts Comic-Con 2014 is currently running through this Sunday in San Diego.   It is Friday and, as always, I am looking for something light among “The Week in Pictures” features on the various news services and I found from the EPA this photograph of a pretty young lady named  Emily Reeve who is dressed as a 1950’s pop art housewife.  The image, of course, is meant to pay homage to the many wonderful pop art works by Roy Lichtenstein. And as I was researching this blog, I was not totally surprised to find a plethora of photographs of “pop art women” from Comic-Cons” present and past.

Comic-Con is, needless-to-say the ultimate dress up event, and I wish I were there with my camera. Perhaps the right get-up for me would be “Tintin” with camera.  Oh, BTW the cast of the “Big Bang Theory” usually puts in an appearance.  Pretty girls with dots painted on their faces and Penny, what could be better?

Bromoil printing

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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.

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.  Note the painterly quality of the image.  Is it a painting or is it a photograph.  This is the effect that the pictorialists were after.

 

 

 

Yesterday I discussed photographic Pictorialism and I got interested in what exactly their bromoil process entailed.  There is a lot of information about it to be found on the web, both at the Wikipedia site and, if you want to try it for yourself at the Alternative Photography site. We have previously discussed the world’s first photograph and this is a good place to begin considering the bromoil process.

For his first successful photograph Niépce, in 1826, used a pewter plate as a support medium that he covered with bitumen of Judea (an asphalt derivative of petroleum).  He exposed the plate for approximately eight hours. The exposed regions of the plate became hardened by the light, much like dentists currently cure cements with UV light.  Niépce removed the plate and used a mixture of oil of lavender and white petroleum to dissolved away the the unhardened bitumen.  This produced a direct positive image on the pewter, which has now lasted close to two hundred years.  Pretty cool, I think! And you will note oil-based.

In a more modern “oil print” the paper is covered with a thick gelatin layer photosensitized with dichromate salts. You layer a conventional negative above this sensitized paper and expose to light.  This is referred to as “making a contact print.”  The light exposed regions like in Niépce’s image become hardened. After exposure the paper is washed in water.  The less exposed non-hardened regions absorb more water than the higher exposed hardened regions.  You then remove excess water with a sponge and while the paper is still damp parts, you apply an oil-based lithographers ink.  Oil and water don’t mix, and as a result the ink preferentially sticks to the hardened regions thus creating a positive image.

The “bromoil print” is a variation of the oil print.  Here one starts with a normal silver bromide print on photographic paper.  This is then chemically bleached and hardened. The gelatin which originally had the darkest tones, is hardened the most.  The highlights will absorb more water.  Finally, you ink this print as you did in the “oil print.”

The first point is obvious.  This process requires a lot of skill.  But corollary to that you wind up with an enormous level of artist control over the process, once you have mastered it.  I also find intriguing how akin this process is to the printing process of lithography.  In bromoil printing the photographer essential releases him/herself from the bonds of the silver gelatin process and gains a delicate and moody control of the art, which is precisely the effect that the pictorialists sought.

 

Truth and beauty at the MFA

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Figure 1 - F. Holland Day The Last Seven Words of Christ, 1898, from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain in the United States because it is more than 70 years old.

Figure 1 – F. Holland Day, “The Last Seven Words of Christ, 1898,” from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain in the United States because it is more than 70 years old.

There is an intimate exhibition of pictorialist photography at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts that runs through February 22, 2015, entitled “Truth and Beauty.” This exhibition celebrates the museum’s recent acquisition of four major works related to the Boston leader of the movement, F. Holland Day. His The Seven Last Words (1898) (see Figure 1), purchased in 2013 and three portraits of Day by Edward Steichen, James Craig Annan, and Clarence H. White.

For those of you not in the know, like myself, the last seven words of Christ refers not to seven parting words, but to seven parting phrases that bear deep meaning in Christianity. The last of these called “the words of reunion” are “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” Holland Day’s work is a small series of self portraits depicting the Christ upon the cross.  The copy at the MFA is much more subtle than the one depicted in the figure from the Metropolitan Museum in NYC. Day’s work has been referred to as “an important touchstone of Modernist photography,” by the New York Time.  Because of its small size and delicate toning it connects you with a very personal spiritual moment, even if you do not share the particular religious connotation.  This, I believe, is because it relates to a universal pattern of human consciousness – that which Joseph Campbell refers to as one of the great monomyths or the “Masks of God.”

Pictorialism as a movement in photography that triumphed in the thirty year period from 1885-1915, and like so many intellectual movements owes its demise, in part, to the traumatic events of the First World War.  Its ascendance coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the invention of photography and to the threat of impending mediocrity to the art posed by George Eastman’s introsuction of the box camera in 1888.  These were fifty years during which the debate in the art world was whether photography was merely a means of recording an image or itself a fine art.  It was highly influenced by both classic traditions and the contemporary concept of fine painting as being  a means of conveying emotion through moody out-of-focus, often misty, imagery.

The first use of the term pictorial, in the context of photography, came in 1869 in English photographer Henry Peach Robinson‘s “Pictorial Effect in Photography: Being Hints On Composition And Chiaroscuro For Photographers.” He defined this style in terms of the then centuries old term from Italian painting “chiaroscuro” referring to the use of dramatic lighting and shading to convey an expressive mood.”  Robinson advocated “combination printing,” mixing elements from multi-negatives and  heavily manipulating the final print or negative.

Pictorialists often advocated and practiced the use of what they referred to as “enobling processes.” They would alter the appearance of their photographs using gum or bromoil printing.  These are materials that stick to the emulsion and enabled the photographers to create highly moody effects and so much altered their images that they were often mistaken for drawings or lithographs. A classic pictorialist image of this type, that we have spoken extensively about before, is Edward Steichen’s “Flat Iron Building at Night, 1904.”  It is probably a tribute to Steichen’s success with this image that today the blue versions are mistaken for early examples of color photography, which they are not.  Another pictorialist photographer whom we have previously discussed is Annie Brigman.  Among the striking images in the MFA exhibit is Alfred Stieglitz’s “The Hand of Man, 1902,” shown as Figure 2. It epitomizes the kind of moody imagery that defines pictorialism.

As noted, photography changed irrevocably with the world in 1914.  However, the pictorialist movement, championed by such masters as Holland Day, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Steichen triumphed before photography evolved to its next phase. Their principal advocacy was to see photography accepted as a “fine art.”  In 1910 the Albright Gallery in Buffalo bought 15 photographs from Stieglitz’ 291 Gallery.

As I’m writing this, I am revisiting the many wonderful works of the long career of Edward Steichen.  A retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 2000-2001 in NYC began with his pictorialist images and ended with photographs like his “Matches and Match Boxes, 1926.”  It demonstrates, on the one hand, how much art and photography have changed, and, on the other hand, how wonderful the medium is in its diversity.

Figure 2 - Alfred Stieglitz, "The Hand of Man, 1902." From the Wikimediaxcommons and in the public domain because it was published before 1923.

Figure 2 – Alfred Stieglitz, “The Hand of Man, 1902.” From the Wikimediaxcommons and in the public domain because it was published before 1923.