Some months ago I discussed Herb and Dorothy Vogel and their amassing, over the course of decades, what is arguably the greatest collection of minimalist art – and this on a budget.  The Vogels donated their collection to the National Gallery in Washington and fifty works to each of the fifty states.  Well, if you’re feeling that the Vogels beat you to it, or if you’re feeling that you should have started collecting some thirty or forty years ago, this may be your golden opportunity to make up for lost time.

The “Soho Photographer,” D. James Dee, who spent his career of thirty-nine years documenting work for artists, galleries, exhibitions, books and portfolios is retiring.  He is closing his Manhatan Wooster Street studios and moving with his wife to Florida.  All of his work, sixty-five file board boxes filled with approximately 250,000 photographs is not coming with him.  Dee explains that if someone asked for four images he would make five and save the extra one.  And Dee is ready to give all his extras away, ideally to a nonprofit archive.

There is one caveat.  To listen to all accounts, Dee has done a rather primitive job of documenting and labeling what’s what.  So this is going to require massive amounts of sleuthing by experts in Soho art history to piece it all back together.  All of the major likely candidate institutions: The National Gallery of Art, Getty Images, and the Fales Library and Special Collections of New York University have declined to take on the collection, discouraged by the lack of captions and the required of storage space.

This is certainly a very valuable archive, and its imminent demise touches on many of the issues at the heart of historic preservation.  Hopefully, a way will be found to preserve it intact, and hopefully too, a way will be found to archive it.  I will keep you informed of what happens.  The moving vans are coming on July 24 and it will be a tragedy if these photographs wind up in the dumpster.

The latest image to go viral on social media is that of the “Turkish woman in red”  It’s actually a short sequence that you can find as a video showing a young Turkish woman being sprayed in the face by police wielding teargas guns.   The image is hauntingly symbolic.  The woman is stylishly dressed in western clothing.  She seems out of place, as if she has suddenly stumbled upon the riot,  As Alexandra Hudson of Reuters points out ” in her red cotton summer dress, necklace and white bag slung over her shoulder she might have been floating across the lawn at a garden party; but before her crouches a masked policeman firing teargas spray that sends her long hair billowing upwards.”  Coupled with the stop action nature of the photos the sequence and individual images take on a dream like quality.  That is until you realize how vicious and nasty spraying teargas directly into someone’s face is. In that context the woman in red stands defiant against the conservative government of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan.  She is demanding her right to sexual equality and independence.

The appeal of the photograph, of course, lies both in its incongruity and in the “girl next door” quality of the young woman.  I cannot help but be reminded of “Les Misérables.”  This story has been played out before.  That was the June Rebellion of 1832.No king now sits on the throne of France.The ultimate power of this sequence of images is that the answer is inevitable.  The future belongs to the world’s youth.  Equality and liberty are not just slogans.  The world ultimately belongs to Éponine, Marius, and Cosette.  All of that is in four little frames, demonstrating once again the power of image.

I came upon a truly stunning picture today by underwater photographer and scuba instructor, Kyle McBurnie which shows a harbor seal looking out from a kelp forest at Cortes Bank, near San Diego, CA.  This image is this year’s University of Miami’s Rosenstiel Center of Marine and Atmospheric Science annual Underwater Photography contest.  The composition of this image is gorgeous.  I love the vertical elements, which give the seal the sense of carefully balanced buoyancy.  Of course we’ve got “picture perfect” use of the “golden rule of thirds.” Finally I just love the wonderful tones of inky blues as well as the way that the surface light enters and diffuses from the right.  You can feel this image.  Bravo and congratulations to scuba instructor Kyle McBurnie.

I am forever looking for wonderful photographs and photographers.  There are a lot of both out there.  It’s just a matter of sorting through all the noise.  As I’ve indicated before, there are only two photography publications that I read religiously, “LensWork” and “View Camera.”  Both of these periodicals take photography seriously.  The focus is art, not equipment or the latest manipulations to be made using Adobe Photoshop.  So they are both great places to be introduced to great photographers.

Recently, as a result of my reading “View Camera,” I decided to subscribe to the Facebook Special Interest Group (SIG) called “Large Format Photography.”  For those of you who are Facebook members I highly recommend this group.  Everyday now I am seeing great pictures.  And the reason is that large format photographers tend to be obsessed with the art of photography and the creation of fine images. So while I am not a practitioner of large format, I highly admire those who are willing to put in the time and effort to do this type of photography.  It’s a laborious process but the results can be quite amazing.

This past weekend I discovered the work of large format artist Susan Harlin.  Of course, I immediately visited her website, where I discovered some very extraordinary photographs.  What Susan creates defines the best of large format, studied composition, tremendous sharpness,  equally tremendous dynamic range that pulls out both subtle tones of black and of white, and just a wonderful velvety sense of tone.

I would start with “Grandad’s Barn, 2012.”  I have to say that this image is simply stunning.  the tonal range is just perfect, the gestalt creates a perfect mellow mood of serenity and mystery.  There’s something about the composition, right?  The subject is the barn; but the lead-in fence takes up most of the picture, creating a kind of background/foreground flip.  Other than genius, the reason is that Susan is using an 8″ x 20″ Korona Banquet panoramic camera.  The dramatic power of such a camera is spectacularly illustrated by her 2007 photograph, “John Ford Country.” In many of her photographs Susan takes the novel and unusual step of turning this camera on its side to create spectacular long and narrow images such as “Icicles, 2010.”

I highly recommend that you visit Susan Harlins website when you have time to study her work.  You can learn a lot from her about creating great images.

I spoke on Wednesday about Johsel Namkung’s “Intimate landscapes.”  That seems almost a contradiction in terms.  You expect to find intimacy in portraits, and today I’d like to talk about the very compelling portraits of John Delaney.  But first we should consider what brilliant portraiture is all about.  If you look at someone, if you converse with them, your eyes meet, and it is through eye contact that intimacy is exchanged and achieved.  So when we speak about great portrait photography, we are speaking about the camera becoming the photographer’s intimate eye.  The camera becomes joined with the photographer, it is now, to the subject, an essential element of the person with whom that (s)he is interacting.

John Delaney offers us a wonderful series of images of the “Golden Eagle Nomads of  Kazakhistan.”  In a sense this is travel photography.  However, what Delaney has done is to set up a mobile studio tent on remote location in which he captures remarkable images of the Kazakhs. Nobody knows exactly when the Kazakhs tamed the Golden Eagle of Central Asia.   Herodotus (484 B.C.E – 430 B.C.E) refers to nomadic eagle hunters in 5th Century B.C. Marco Polo (1254-1324) wrote about them in the 13th century. Genghis Khan is said to have had 5000 mounted Eagle Riders in his personal guard. In these pictures there is a mutual nobility to both the Kazakhs and their eagles, and there is an unpoken intimacy between them as well.  These majestic eagles can attain seven foot wingspans. I want to particularly draw your attention to the marvelous gentlemen of Image #9.  I don’t think that more perfect lighting in a portrait could be achieved.  And the portrait of the adolescent girl Image #14 is just wonderful.  You cannot help but wonder what her dreams are.

Delaney who was a master printer for Richard Avedon, before striking out on his own offers the desire to preserve the image of these noble people before they and their way of life (at least 2500 years old) vanishes forever as his reason for traveling to Kazakhistan to photograph these people.  But if you continue to explore Delaney’s website you learn that you do not have to travel half way around the world to document vanishing ways of life.  In his series “Hoboken Passing” Delaney documents the vanishing store owners of Hoboken, New Jersey a neighborhood “in transition.”  These too are noble and proud faces.

Finally, I would like to point you towards Delaney’s gallery “Himalayan Portraits.”  Once more we find that quintessential humanity that lies within all of us.  I am especially bewitched by the portrait of (presumably) a mother and her two daughters in Image # 10.

John Delaney is a master of portraiture.  His black and white (sepia toned) images of distant people seem quite intentionally to come from the nineteenth century.  In this way they emphasize the distance, creating the sense that we are separated from them in both space and time.  Of course, the essential paradox is that through their eyes we become intimate with Delaney’s subjects.  They are of us.

There is a wonderful retrospective of the work of Seattle-based photographer Johsel Namkung (1919- ) in this month’s “View Camera, The Journal of Large Format Photography.”  As per usual (don’t gripe, Wolf), View Camera is behind in publication; so this is the March/April issue, at least at my Barnes and Nobles.  This portfolio of Namkung’s images celebrates the release from Cosgrove Editions’ new book “Johsel Nankung A Retrospective.”

Namkung’s work fits in with a recent comment to this blog containing the lovely phrase “the sacredness of the primary source.”  Namkung is fairly unique among practitioners of large format photography in the 1970’s, 80’s, and 90’s first in that in worked largely in color and second in that he did little or no image manipulation such as “dodging” and “burning,” staying true to the “sacredness of the primary source.”

To me, Namkung’s work reflects a very intimate form of landscape photography, contrasting, for instance, with Ansel Adams’ monumental big sky vistas.  Instead we have here a cluster of trees or damp moss covered decaying tree limbs in a Northwestern rainforest.  I rush to point out that Adams did this kind of work as well, and to wonderful effect.

I find this genre of the landscape very appealing.  It always reminds me of a Japanese rock garden, where the beauty is both in the entirety and in the minutest detail.  Indeed, it is a continuum between these ends  There is an essential fractal quality to this sort of landscape.  The fundamental defining property of a fractal is that it remains a fractal regardless of scale.  For fractals, of course, this quality represents order out of chaos.  Here what it means is that the beauty of a landscape might lie in a mountain set against dramatic clouds, or it might lie in a grove of trees catching a late afternoon light, or even in a few blades of grass amongst pebbles.  Sir Isaac Newton expressed this kind of intimate beuty in his famous remark:

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Unless you are a big wide angle kind of person and if you always have a zoom lens on your camera you will find more likely than not that you photograph with about a 90 mm zoom.  This is because while the field of  view of the human eye is much larger (~160 deg) , we tend to concentrate our attention in a zone captured by the 90 mm lens (~46 deg.).  This defines Namkung’s work and what we mean by intimate.  I’m not saying that he always uses a 90 mm lens.  But I am saying that his field of view is closeup, detailed, intimate.  It is what your mind’s eye sees and, yes, bewitchingly beautiful.

In addition to the Cosgrove Editions Website , Namkung’s wonderful work can also be seen at the Woodside/Brasseth Galley site.  Further, there is an excellent online interview of Namkung, and oral history, on the Smithsonian Institutution website. That said, I find that two of my favorite Namkung prints are unavailable on the web and are in both the retrospective and the current issue of View Camera.  For once my websearching has failed me.  These photographs are “Hoh Rain Forest, Olympic National Park, 1992” and “Hurricane Ridge, Olympic National Park, 1977.”  So it is well worth getting your hands on one of these “original sources.”

William “Uncle Bill” Lundy in 1955 at age 107. Lundy was a veteran of the American Civil War having served in Company D of the 4th Alabama Cavalry Regiment of the Confederate States of America Army. This pictures is from the Wikimedia Commons. The original is in the archives of the State of Florida and is in the public domain.

Yesterday, in the United States, was Memorial Day, 2013.   There was a little parade in our town and the whole panorama of American Conflict marched by: Revolutionary War re-enactors , Civil War re-enactors, the American Legion, and today’s local soldiers.  It was a beautiful day here in Massachusetts, and a lot of young men and women never lived to see this day or to have anymore more beautiful days.  We owe a great deal to the people who fought and died in very real and necessary conflicts, and perhaps, an even greater debt to those who lost their lives in unnecessary conflicts – conflicts that the world was manipulated into by the twisting and manipulation of information and image.

I would suggest that this debt should really preclude us from taking the easy way out, when we deal with these issues of altered information and image, of corrupted  concept and manipulated meme.  It is really not acceptable to shrug our shoulders at the complexity of moral issues.  Bertrand Russell suggested that ethics is the last bastion of modern philosophy.  So maybe we should be responsible and take these big questions on.

The essential responsibility and the essential solution must lie within us, as individuals.  Government has pretty much made a right dog’s breakfast of dealing with these issues.  I know that a lot of this very complicated problem – indeed of all complicated issues – consists of gray areas.  Platitudes get us nowhere.  And I am keenly aware of the delicate balance between the exercise of social responsibility and repression of civil rights and liberties.*

So maybe we should begin by focusing on the black and white questions.  Whenever we see photographs or information manipulation designed to mislead and corrupt our political process, don’t laugh it off, rail against it, even if it supports your own political point of view.  The first responsibility of a civilized society is to protect its innocents.  A society that allows the victimization and exploitation of innocents, such as the use of children as sex objects in the fashion photography industry, is a failed society – despite all the trapping of technical and economic greatness (and it doesn’t matter which nation we are speaking about), it is a failed society.

We have spoken before about the fact that science and technology offers us choices.  It is product neutral and maybe that’s a cop out.  Choice is the dilemma.  Let us strive to make the right ones.

* This delicate balance is succinctly, yet poignantly, dealt with in Ellen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy’s thoughtful book “In Our Defense, The Bill of Rights in Action.“