Last year, when we reached this culminating point in my favorite photographs list, I found that I could not escape the immediate and haunting images of Syrian refugees and in particular of  Nilufer Demir Aylan’s Story showing a police officer cradling the lifeless body of the drowned child.  When I first saw that picture everyone said that it would prove to be a “game changer.” I doubted it at the time and have not been proven wrong.

So now twelve months later we find ourselves on “that sad height.” We are haunted once again, this time by a photograph taken by Mahmoud Rslan of the AFP of a dazed and bloodied Syrian boy named Omran Daqneesh, who had just been  rescued from a destroyed building in Aleppo after an air strike. Again the call for outrage and inaction. This must be my “Favorite Photograph # 10 for 2016.” Rslan has captured all the tragedy and despair of the moment, ever so masterfully.Funny to call it “favorite,” since it will haunt me for a very long time. Little Omran reminds me ever so much of the two children revealed beneath the Robes of the Ghost of Christmas Present in Charles Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol.” Their names we are told are “Ignorance and Want.”

I do not know the answer to the problems which cause such tragedies or the solution to global impotence. I only know that there will be more such photographs. The New Year will usher in its own iconic photographs of misery. I only know that the world could benefit from more empathy and acts of human kindness.

I think that it is important to every once in a while, perhaps more often than not, to spend some time studying the photographs of Ansel Adams. So for Favorite Photograph 2016 #8 I have chosen Adams’ “Mount Williamson, The Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California, 1945.” This image is exemplary in what it teaches us about the superfluity of color, about the possibilities of  tonal range and depth of field. It is truly a masterpiece, and I cannot tell you how often I have stood before it in awe at a gallery or exhibition. It makes you want to rush back out with your camera to try again to equal the master.

And there is one other point about it that has always struck me and that is the perspective. You have this sensation that you want to bend down and see things from a bit lower. Adams created this sensation with his camera position and along with the depth of field it lends a sense of dynamism and three-dimensionality to the image. A contributing factor to this sense of motion is the way in which the human eye perceives. We construct the whole in our minds but our eye perceives in a series of points of concentration, which in this case involves details of the foreground, midground, and background. That is why the depth of field is so important in making this image work. If you were to fuzz out one element it would have the effect of stabilizing the image in your eye. But as is, the whole effect is like being there.

Today’s Favorite Photograph is one of the great social commentary juxtaposition photographs of all time, Dorothea Lange’s, “There’s no way like the American way, 1937.” It shows African American men and women in Louisville, Kentucky, lining up to seek food and clothing from a relief station, in front of a billboard proclaiming, “World’s Highest Standard of Living.” This was taken during the Great Ohio River Flood of 1937. It is iconic and arguably Lange’s greatest image. It is a documentary of both its own time and all time. And it reminds us of the need for empathy and human kindness – a fundameental lesson that many have forgotten.

Figure 1 – Herbert Ponting’s “Sled dog listening to gramophone, 1910.” From the Wikicommons and in the public domain in the United States because of its age.

I am fascinated by the documentary photographs taken by Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley of the British Antarctic expeditions of over a century ago. So, this morning I found myself revisiting all of these old friends and searching out which image was my favorite among the great Antarctic vistas. But in the end, I came back to the photograph by Ponting of Figure 1. This shows one of the led dogs on the ill-fated Scott Antarctic Expedition intrigued by the “human magic” of the grammophone.

This image is pointed for several reasons. It documents technology with other technologies. The fact is that in those days of the early twentieth century it was the dogs not the technology that resulted in success or failure. It was the profound and saprophytic relationship that had intertwined man and dog since prehistoric times. Ponting’s photograph is transitional between two centuries, between the Victorian and the Edwardian ages.  And what this photograph ultimately says is that in that hostile and tenuous environment, where life and death hang in the balance and where the melodic voice of civilization is barely audible, it is the old alliance between man and canine that ultimately counts.

“He had been suddenly jerked from the heart of civilization and flung into the heart of things primordial.”
― Jack London, The Call of the Wild, 1903.

I was writing this blog on Christmas Day. My wife gave me a signed copy of Abelardo Morell’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” for the holidays. Now that is a truly wonderful book of photographs. And it got me thinking about all of the wonderful photography books that my wife had given me over the years. Several of these were portfolios by the great nature photographer Eliot Porter(1901-1990). Porter photographed the places that we liked to visit, Maine and the Adirondacks, and so has always carried a special meaning for us. And there was also an amazing book of photographs of Antarctica. 

Porter practiced photography in the milieu of Ansel Adams with the major exception that most of Porter’s images were in color. And color, mostly dye transfer prints in those days, was not as easy as it is today. He was a master at his craft. And I have spent a couple of days now revisiting some great images. I have been looking for the perfect image for this favorite series. Then I found something unusual. It was not a dramatic color image of nature. But rather an intimate portrait in black and white of his seven year old son Stephen with a bull snake. Yes the image is of nature, but in reality the image captures ever so perfectly the meaning of American boyhood.

I find that the best place to find favorites is to go back to basics – back to the images that you have loved, it seems like forever. So today’s favorite is one of my all time favorite portraits, Yousef Karsh’s, “Winston Churchill, 1941.” This image was produced for Life Magazine and is truly iconic. It was an image taken during a time of war and deep national threat. It was an image taken in a world that needed heroes. We always need heroes. And it was an image for the ages. And that raises a significant question. Is the taking of such an image an act solely immediate or is there always a sense of history and timelessness even at the moment of conception.

The story of how Karsh created his Churchill portrait has been repeated so many times, that it itself has become iconic, and certainly bears retelling one more time. Chiurchill had just addressed the Canadian Parliament and Karsh was there to record the moment. “He was in no mood for portraiture and two minutes were all that he would allow me as he passed from the House of Commons chamber to an anteroom …Two niggardly minutes in which I must try to put on film a man who had already written or inspired a library of books, baffled all his biographers, filled the world with his fame, and me, on this occasion, with dread.” Churchill stalked into the room where Karsh’s camera was set up.  He was scowling, “regarding my camera as he might regard the German enemy.” His expression suited Karsh perfectly but the cigar? “Instinctively, I removed the cigar. At this the Churchillian scowl deepened, the head was thrust forward belligerently, and the hand placed on the hip in an attitude of anger.” This was the defiant and unconquerable Prime Minister. This was the epitome of the defiant and unconquerable British people. Churchill later said to him, “You can even make a roaring lion stand still to be photographed,” and Karsh entitled it, The Roaring Lion. The Roaring Lion is one of the masterpieces of photographic portraiture.