Figire 1 – Autochrome of Shackleton’s Endurance Under Full Sail, 1915, by Frank Hurley, from Shackleton’s “South.” In the public domain because of its age.

We have been talking a bit about fact that 2014 marked the centenary of the begining of World War I.  Lesser known, but perhaps more positively it marked the centennial of Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-antarctic Expedition – and the so called Worst Journey in the World. The BBC recently highlighted the return of photographer Mark Chilvers and journalist Jonathan Thompson from the Antarctic, where they went to mark the centenary and to follow, so to speak, in Shackleton’s footsteps.  The result is a set of  wonderful and stunning portraits and bio-interviews with some of today Antarctic explorers.  While we now have gps, cell/satellite phones, and the internet, as an environment the Antarctic remains unforgiving and its environment temporally leveling. It still takes a special breed of personality to attempt the Antarctic in more that a tourist mode.  Indeed, even as a tourist the experience can be transformational. Chilver’s beautiful photographs bring us eye-to-eye with these modern explorers, Shackleton’s heirs.

Figure 1 – Holmes’ first appearence in film in Sherlock Holmes Baffled 1903, American Mutograph and Biograph Company, from the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain because of its age.

I have to admit that last week, on New Years Eve, I snuggled up beneath the blankets and turned on PBS to watch Jeremy Brett(1933-1995) as Sherlock Holmes and got Live from Lincoln Center instead.  Hmm, far be it for me to question the knowing gnomes at PBS, who read my mind and think like me in kind – I feverishly await the return of Downton Abbey.  However, as I swung to the rhythm of George Gershwin, my mind kept going back to Holmes and I started searching for images.

Figure 2 – Theatre poster of H. A. Saintsbury as Sherlock Holmes.

There is a different Holmes for each generation and that is very much to the point. Despite the fact that if you return to the original stories you will find that there is a common thread of prejudice in each one. You’ve got your anti-Semitic story, your anti-Mormon story, your anti-Indian story, and your I don’t like much of anybody story. God bless the Victorians and Edwardians! Did I mention the recurrent theme of misogyny? “Quick, Watson, the needle.”  But I digress.  This is not the point.  Everybody (well maybe not my wife) loves Sherlock.  Indeed, when asked which fictional character she would want to date Margaret Atwood was very recently reported as saying: “I fancy Sherlock Holmes, but he doesn’t date much, and anyway the date would be interrupted because he would have to rush off in the middle of it to trap some criminal.”

Holmes, who first appeared in print in 1887 and ultimately was featured in four novels and 56 short stories.  The events in the stories take place from about 1880 to 1914. And so, Holmes is reinvented in each generation, which you know is really quite wonderful. And friends, this is the stuff that memes are made on. So I did some investigating about Holmes as a meme.  While my interest is the photographic it seems only right to point out that photgraphic and cinematographic image that we have of Holmes derives from Sidney Paget‘s (1860-1908) original illustrations of Holmes. The elements are all there in Paget’s drawings.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records Holmes is the most portrayed movie character with more than 70 actors having played the part in, get this, over 200 films. The story begins with his first screen appearance in the 1900 Mutoscope film, Sherlock Holmes Baffled. And curiously, it would require a modern day Holmes to figure out who exactly portrayed Homes in that brief film.  But that Holmes smoked a cigar and is, well baffled, by the perp.

William Gillette (1853-1937) in 1899 played Holmes in The Strange Case of Miss Faulkner, a synthesis of four of Conan Doyle’s stories. It was Gillette who introduced the well known phrase “Elementary, my dear Watson.”  Harry Arthur Saintsbury took over the lead and by 1916 had played Holmes on stage more than a thousand times.This play ultimately formed the basis for Gillette’s 1916 film, Sherlock Holmes. And it was there that  Gillette dramatically introduced Holmes’s signature curved pipe. Meme in the making!

For my generation Sherlock Holmes was the great british actor and film star Basil Rathbone with the equally great Nigel Bruce as Watson.  And there the meme is mature, deerstalker pipe and all.  This was the stuff that cold Saturday afternoon black and white television was made of.  This was my first introduction to the Hound of the Baskerville’s – very spooky stuff indeed.  I was only a bit skeptical when Holmes leaped forward thirty years from his own era to do battle with Nazis in “Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror.” But, of course, Holmes has gone and come and I can guarantee will continue to come in the future in a myriad of incarnations.  Such is his wonderful timelessness. And if there is a time machine to be found this forensic genius and skeptic, who in the Adventure of the Sussex Vampire assures us that he does not believe in vampires, will find it.

Figure – Basil Rathbone as Homes. Image from the Wikimediacommons, uploaded by SchroCat and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Frank Eugene, “Minuet, 1900.” In the public domain because of its age.

In doing this past year’s Favorite and Noteworthy Photographs, I discovered and was quite taken by an image by Frank Eugene (1865 – 1936) entitled “Minuet, 1900.” It is shown in Figure 1. Frank Eugene was an American-born photographer, a founding member of the Photo-Secession, and one of the world’s first professors of photography. So marched photography ever so slowly from craft to fine art, which was, of course, a significant goal of the Photo-Secession.

What one sees in “Minuet” is typical of Eugene’s heavily worked negatives.  There is the very fine photographic detail of the dancer’s beautiful dress, the delicate precision of the lace and the setting of her hair, and at the same time scratches scribed with an etcher’s pen in the background to create the ambiguity: photograph or etching?  The faces of the audience are obscured in an impressionist fog and not seen at first.  To me, what is truly amazing about this image is that the subject’s back is turned to us.  We are barely thought of viewers. It is so antithetical to what we normally see as the “rules” of composition. And yet, the beauty of the woman is revealed to us by her slender, alluring neck with its alluring Ingresesque curve and by the mystery of her hair.  In these elements it is truly a genius work.

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.

A reader and colleague recently introduced me to the magnificent portrait of arctic explorer Peter Freuchen (1886 – 1957) and his wife Dagmar Freuchen – Gale (1904 – 1991) taken in 1947 by portrait and fashion photographer Irving Penn (1917 – 2009) and really fell immediately in love with it.  Luscious blacks and whites and fabulous contrast intentionally created between the towering and massive figure of Peter and the petite figure cut by his wife Dagmar.  It is not without reference to the story of beauty and the beast. I know of few portraits that bear the same intense level of drama and capture both of its subjects ever so perfectly.

Freuchen was one of those larger-than-life figures who defined the twentieth century. Freuchen who was, by the way, six foot seven inches tall, was an arctic explorer, journalist, author, and anthropologist. He starred in an Oscar winning movie and was an Danish resistance fighter against the Nazi.  Sentenced to death, he managed to escape to Sweden.  He is also famous for winning the $64,000 question on the “$64,000 Question.

Legends about Freuchen abound.  He amputated his own toes which had gone gangrenous from frostbite and cut his way out of a blizzard shelter with a knife fashioned from his own feces.  How many people can claim that?

Dagmar Freuchen-Gale, was a teacher, artist, editor, expert on world cuisine. She was a well known fashion illustrator, working for working for magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.

For me this is a new but very deservedly favorite photograph.