Figure 1 – Edward Steichen, Rodin–Le Penseur, 1906. From the Wikimedia commons and the Google Art Project and in the public domain.

Today’s favorite photograph is Edward Steichen’s (1879-1973) “Rodin–Le Penseur, 1906.”  The image, as shown, is a photogravure. It shows the French Sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) pensive in his studio with some of his work looming over him.  Of course, the emphasis is on what is arguably his greatest, or at least his most famous work, “The Thinker,” and Rodin mimics the pose.

Compare this photograph to the first image that we posted in this series of Favorite Photographs, Roman Vishniac’s, 1938 photograph, “The only flowers of her youth.” In that case, the extreme power of the image only is revealed if you know the context of the photograph.  Consider “Rodin – Le Penseur,” even if you do not know who Rodin was, you immediately get both the sense that he is a contemplative cerebral man, that his world is dark and tumultuous, and that he has some association with sculpture and art. The image tells the entire story.  It speaks for itself – and only the very select few photographs attain that level of self explanation.  In so doing, Steichen’s “Le Penseur” is truly a masterpiece of portraiture.

In 1932 photographer Andre Kertesz created a collection of images mostly of nudes placed in front of a warped “Circus Mirror.”  The results are fabulous, and the real problem is picking just one favorite.  I have chosen for this year’s list “Distortion #51.”  I think that my reason for making this choice is that it reminds me so much of Edvard Munch’s (1893-1944) famous 1893 painting “The Scream.”

For me experiencing this photograph begins with remembrances of the “funny house” at a carnival or circus.  But it morphs away from mere remembrance.  Even standing in front of one of these mirrors creates ambiguity in your mind about what reality is.  You start to realize how fragile your self image is, how easily distorted.  Then there is the figure inside the mirror, your true self, screaming in desperate terror and frustration begging to be recognized.  All of this is but a fleeting moment ’til you return to your comfortable sense of “undistorted” self.

Back in 1975 before the advent of serious ecotourism the continent of Antarctica was just opening up to people other than professional explorers.  One of the great nature photographers of the day was Eliot Porter (1901-1990).  He has been credited with bringing color to landscape photography.  I have several of his books in my library, none more cherished than his photoessay on Antarctica.  There are many truly beautiful landscapes in this work that attest to the raw, perhaps cruel, beauty of that place at the bottom of the world.

But the picture from that collection that stands out after nearly four decades most clearly in my mind, as if I was experiencing it for the first time today, is today’s Favorite Photograph 2013: “Dog Skeleton, Robert Scott’s Hut, Cape Evans, Ross Island, Antarctica, December 1975.”  What this picture shows is perhaps a bit gruesome.  Still it continues to give me goose bumps.  It shows the mummified remains of one of the sled dogs from Robert Falcon Scott‘s (1868-1912) ill fated attempt to reach the South Pole.

I show this image because it is significant.  Would you call it beautiful?  Probably not.  It illustrates just how multifaceted the role of photography can be in defining our lives.  This image permanently records a fragile relic.  Alond with that relic it brings palpability to an event that occurred now a century ago.

Today’s Favorite Photograph for  2013 is by contemporary Cleveland-based  photographer Linda Butler.  It is entitled  “Pig on a Motorcycle, Niehe, 2001.”  A farmer is taking his pig to market and has stopped at a local restaurant.  The pig sleeps “happily” on the back of the motorcycle.  He is in a stupor because he has been fed fermented mash. Unfortunately, we cannot say that no pigs were harmed in the production of this photograph, but at least it is not the photographer’s fault.

“Pig on a motor cycle” is part of Ms. Butler’s wonderful and important project Yangtze Remembered: The River Beneath the Lake.  I have spoken about Butler’s work and  this project before.  It documents village life in the Three Gorges region of China, before it was completely inundated to provide hydroelectric power for modern China.  As such it is a tale of two China’s: the old and timeless China and the new modern China.

Yangtze Remembered: The River Beneath the Lake is just part of Ms. Butler wonderful opus.  She is, perhaps, best known for her work “Inner Light, The Shaker Legacy.”  I highly recommend exploring her website and, in particular, her extraordinary photographs of the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, “Meditations on an Altered World, 2005-6,” and “Death of a Farm, Georgetown, KY, 1986.”  These series are haunting in their lack of people, but just the same the human presence is so palpable.

It has been brought to my attention by photographer Vincenzo Vitale  that I made an error in attribution in my December 26, 2014 post.  The photograph “Children on a Spiral Staircase” was not taken by Cartier-Besson, but by his second wife photographer Martine Franck. (1938 –  2012). She was a well-known Belgian documentary and portrait photographer and like Cartier-Besson a member of Magnum Photos for over 32 years. She was also co-founder and president of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation. It is, of course, embarrassing, and I am very grateful to Mr. Vitale for bringing this to my attention.

If you search the web you will find this photograph attributed to Cartier-Besson, all over the place.  That is not a defense but illustrative of just how pervasive the internet can be in diseminating incorrect information. This is why I have gone back to the original posting and added this correction.  It points very clearly to the need to be vigilant of the quality of information that we get from the web.  Our cell phones are ever with us and whenever a question arises we look it up instantly, but are often oblivious to veracity.

In the present case, I believe that it is very important that this beautifully composed and crafted photograph be properly attributed, especially as it draws our attention back to Ms. Franck’s wonderful work. It seems appropriate to quote Martine Franck on photography:

Instead of writing my blog this morning, I find myself endlessly searching the prolific work of Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004).  Cartier-Bresson is often credited with the “invention” of street photography and he was a founding member of Magnum.  Often associated with Cartier-Bresson is the phrase “the decisive moment.”  It is setting up your camera and then waiting patiently for that moment when the photograph is defined and ready to be snapped with a single press of the (Leica) shutter.  So much of his work is in our collective consciousness as defining the twentieth century – and defining the meaning of “candid photography.” To pause for a few moments in the heart of Cartier-Bressons work is to learn to understand the meaning of phorography.

The image that I have chosen for today’s “Favorite Photographs, 2013” is Cartier-Bresson’s classic and well composed image of children on a spiral staircase.  I believe, but am not sure, that this picture was taken in 1932.  Perhaps a reader can inform me of the correct date and whether it has a title that Cartier-Bresson used.

Cartier-Bresson was a master at using lines, such as the spiral, in defining his pictures.  And even in as static a subject matter as children peering down from a staircase, the spiral creates dynamics.  But of course, with spirals there is something more.  This is, of course, the “Golden Proportion,” the perfect division of a rectangle from an aesthetic point of view, and how by repeatedly dividing progressive rectangles by the “Golden Proportion” one obtains the Fibonacci spiral.  This spiral occurs repeatedly in nature: in, for instance in the shell of the chambered nautilus and the horn of the ram.  It creates a sense of natural perfection.  This is the effect that Cartier-Bresson seeks here. He does not center his spiral at the center of the image but rather so as to divide the image by the Golden Proportion. The position is pretty much perfect* and you wouldn’t really have it any other way.  I suppose that it is best stated in Cartier-Bresson’s own words:

“To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart. It’s a way of life.”

* I have measured this approximately.  If you divide the vertical length of the image by the longer distance between the center of the spiral and the top of the image, you get a ratio of ~1.68, which is close enough for government work to the Golden Proportion of 1.62.  The actual size of the photograph is 1.5, which, of course bows to the artistic approximation of the Golden Proportion namely the Golden Rule of Thirds.

Figure 1 – Einstein Ring due to gravitational lensing (lower left) due to LRG 3-757, 2011 from ESA/Hubble & NASA via the Wikipedia and in the public domain.

I’m going to shock many of you today by choosing as my Favorite Photograph 2013, #4 an image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope entitled “A horseshoe Einstein ring from Hubble, 2011.”  I’ve chosen the full field version that shows the surrounding star field (see Figure 1), because it is well so beautiful.  A robot eyes photograph, Wolf? Really?  Yes that’s right and I use it to illustrate an important point.  What is the purpose of photography? It can be many faceted.  To create something beautiful? To create emotion. To inform.  So here we have something that is both beautiful and informs.  It is a scientific triumph that proves something really important, namely Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

Let’s not get into the middle of a scientific controversy here. Although Orest Chwolson (1924), Frantisek Klin (1936), and Albert Einstein (1936) all postulated the existence of gravitational lenses.  Einstein’s work is the most famous and it is really a key element of his general theory, according to which light is bent by gravity.

So if there is a massive object such as a galaxy or cluster of galaxies between a very distant galaxy it’s light is bent my the massive object so that its image is distorted.  It can be distorted in many ways since the massive object typically acts as a very bad lens; it can be like looking through a soda bottle.

Figure 1 is a particularly perfect example. Here we look at the blue light from a distant galaxy warped by the gravitational field of a luminous red galaxy.  The alignment is essentially perfect so that the distant galaxy is warped into a huge blue horse shoe that surrounds the luminous red galaxy.

I was amazed when I first saw these beautiful images – and they are beautiful, because they show something that I only imagined but never thought that I would see.  This is a wonderful example of the magic of photography, of the gift of expanded vision that robotic eyes can give us.

And speaking of Alice Liddell… I keep finding myself hypnotically drawn to the images of photographic pioneer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879).  Despite her overwrought religious images, which really don’t speak to my tastes or sensibilities, I just love both her skills as a photographer and all the allegory in her pictures.  This was a continuation through the new medium of photography of the metaphorical and mystical pictoralism then dominant in painting.  We may consider, as an example, yesterday’s image by Charles Dodgson “Alice Liddell (1852-1934) as a beggar-maid from the story of Cophetua, 1858″ with “King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, 1884” by Edward Burne-Jones, from the Tate Gallery, in London. How few today can recite the story of Cophetua, and yet to educated Victorians it was well-known.

Today’s image, Cameron’s “King Lear Allotting his Kingdom to his Three Daughters, 1872 ” shows a mature Alice with her sisters in another allegorical pose.  This time the story is from Shakespeare story, a choice that was rare for Cameron.  The three Liddell sisters pose as Lear’s daughters.  Cameron’s husband poses as Lear.  On the left, daughters Regan (Lorina Liddell) and Goneril (Elizabeth Liddell) whisper flatteries in their father’s ear.  Note the brilliant gesture of Lorina’s pointed finger.  While Alice as Cordelia stands with demure resignation on the right enduring her father’s wrath.

I discussed this photograph on December 1 ago in the context of a current exhibition of Cameron’s works at the Metopolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  At the time I commented that to my mind Lear among Shakespeare’s tragedies comes closest to a pure tragedy in the Greek tradition.  Let me explain this in a bit more detail, and at the risk, I am sure, of inflaming Shakespearean  scholars everywhere.  The other tragedies tend to fall into the category of the “tragic flaw.” Macbeth suffers from ambition, and perhaps from paying too much attention to his wife, who has even more ambition than he. Othello is insecure and too prone to jealousy.  Romeo and Juliet are, well I’m sorry, just plain stupid. Hamlet, well, as Lawrence Olivier tells us in the prelude to his 1948 movie version of Hamlet: “This is the story of a man who could not make up his mind.” I think it a bit more complicated than that.  As a Catholic, living when he did, Hamlet was taught that there were no ghosts since people were not resurrected until the time of the Last Judgment.  So if not a ghost, then his father’s “ghost” must be a demon sent from hell to trick him.  Still Hamlet fails to act and avenge his father’s murder.  In the end he winds up killing King Claudius not because Claudius murdered his father but because he murdered his mother.

Lear on the other hand is very different theatre.  Lear himself suffers from a senile dementia.  It is not his fault.  It derives not from a flaw of character but from a twist of nature.  He is dependent and prone to the flattery of his two evil daughters Regan and Goneril.  But Cordelia recognizes that her duties must be split.  She must at the same time be filial to her husband and to her father.  At the end of the play like a true tragic Greek figure she goes knowingly to her death, because it is her duty and destiny to protect her father.  She is the true epitome of daughter-hood.

All of this is in Cameron’s picture.  And recognize also that it was Cameron’s stated goal to depict the nurturing, motherly, and daughterly role of women in society.  Her choice of Lear is not surprising.  Among Shakespeare’s plays it is the one that studies must closely the contrast between the vices and virtues of women.  The image is soft, masterly to the point, and I think brilliant!

Figure 1 – Charles Dodgson’s “Charles Dodgson “Alice Liddell as a beggar-maid from the story of Cophetua, 1858,” from the Wikipedia and in the public domain.

Today’s favorite photograph is Charles Dodgson‘s (1832-1898) ” Alice Liddell (1852-1934) as a beggar-maid from the story of Cophetua, 1858.”  It contrasts, so similar yet so different, from the image of yesterday, Roman Vishniac’s “The only flowers of her youth, 1938.” One is imagined the other real.

Dodgson is, of course, the real name of Lewis Carroll the author of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass.”  And Alice Liddell is the namesake of the stories.  They were written for and dedicated to her.

It is difficult to look at one of Dodgson’s photographs of young girls without the more sordid aspects of these relationships coming to mind.  And, as I have said before, such too is the case for Dodgson’s contemporary Oscar Reijlander (1813-1875).  However, to my mind this is really a wonderfully playful and sensitive image.

It is an image of emergent beauty and coming of age into womanhood.  So what about this Cophetua person? Cophetua was a mythical  African king who lacked sexual attraction to women. One day he is looking out his palace window, when he sees a young beggar, named Penelophon, who is suffering for her lack of clothes.  It is “love at first sight!”   Oy! So Cophetua vows that he will have this beggar as his wife or he will commit suicide.  Cophetua scatters a path of coins to attract Penelophon and when she approaches he informs her that she is to be his wife.  Now how can she refuse this offer? Uhh! The details of this story, unfortunately, make it even harder to ignore the more sordid side of Dodgson’s attraction.  Did I mention that Alice Liddell was six at the time of this photograph?

Needless-to-say a key appealing element of this image is its historic association, who the photographer is and who the subject is.  Beyond that the enigmatic expression on Alice’s face is charming, as is the three quarter view with her eyes towards the camera.  The way in which her hand is cupped to tell the story of Penelophon is such a simple yet compelling gesture.  The smudges of dirt on her legs add detail, and finally the lighting is wonderfully dramatic.  This picture reaches out to us across time from what was only the second decade of photography.