Julia Margaret Cameron Portrait of Sir John Herschel with Cap, 1867

I absolutely love the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879). So this was a tough call for me.  I kept going back and forth between this photograph and her “Annie, my first success, 1864.”  But in the end, the physicist in me won out.  Sir John Herschel ((1792-1871)) was a great British astronomer.   Here he is depicted as an old man.  He seems a wild man with his hair out of control beneath his cap.  It is the expression in the eyes that makes the image.  You know that those eyes have peered for many hours through telescopes discovering the wonders of the universe. The three quarter view is always an interesting one.  Sir Herschel looks to the side, not at the photographer, as if abstracted, his mind on something else.  Perhaps he ponders some problem in celestial mechanics.  We will never know.  I find it wonderful.

Cameron was one of the founders of photography.  There is a excellent book entitled “The Golden Age of British Photography 1839 – 1900,” in which she is described as a “Christian Pictoralist.”  This is very accurate, as illustrated both in her choice of subject matter: mother and child, little girls with pasted on angel wings, and posed allegory: and in the value she attached to her own works: “My mortal, yet divine! Art of photography.”

While many of these themes might not appeal to our twenty-first century sensibilities.  They accurately depict the religiosity of the nineteenth.  Julia Margaret Cameron was a photographic innovator, and the pensive, dreamy poses of her subjects still move us nearly a century and a half after she took them.

Edward Weston, Nude in the Dunes, 1930

So to begin my list of favorite photographs for the end of 2012, I’d like to start with Edward Weston’s, “Nude in the Dunes, 1930.”  Please click the hyperlink above to see the image.  Weston was a master at photographing the nude.  So there are a number of wonderful nudes to consider when looking for a favorite.  In particular we have to consider the marvelous folded “Nude, 1936,” “Nude, 1936” is a classic example of beautiful and peaceful static abstraction.  What I like about “Nude in the dunes, 1930,” is that the nude is placed in the lower third of the image, following the very traditional “Golden Rule of Thirds.”  However, this placement and the sand dune above it gives the image a dynamic sense of motion.  You feel that the nude is slowly slipping out of the picture and you feel the need to push her back up towards the center.  This kind of “trick of the eye” is classic and is here used marvelously.

Weston’s goal in his nudes was to create a perfect sense of the abstract. For me there is always a sense of the sensuous in Weston’s imagery.  This flows from the nudes into his abstract images of shells and vegetables, see for instance “Two Shells, 1927” and, of course, “Pepper No. 30., 1930.” In writing about “Pepper No. 30., 1930” Weston said:

“It is classic, completely satisfying, – a pepper – but more than a pepper: an abstract, in that it is completely outside subject matter.  It has no psychological attributes, no human emotions are aroused: this new pepper takes me beyond the world we know in the conscious mind.”

I was surprised, when I first read that, because for me the appeal of his vegetables and shell images lies in their sensuosity.  They strike our eye because they take on a human character.  They move us for the very reason that they elicit human emotion.

Starting today and then each day until the end of the year, I am going to present ten of my favorite photographs, one each day.  It is my holiday gift to you, or maybe to myself, because each time I revisit a crowning work by one of the great photographers it is a special and inspiring moment.  It is a moment to relearn the power of image.

So just a few rules of the game.

1. I am only allowed one image per photographer.  I have to choose.
2. I have to respect copyrights.  This means that most of the time you are going to have to click on the title to see the image.
3. I’m allowed to talk about photographers that I have previously discussed in this blog.
4. I’m not going to try to order the images on a scale of one to ten, except perhaps the last.  They’re pretty much in random order.

I very much hope that you enjoy these photographs and I invite you to send a link to your favorites for possible inclusion on the blog.

Whenever, I am in search of photographic inspiration, I turn to the pages of LensWork Magazine, which I consider to be the finest photography publication currently in press.  Once again it has not failed me.  In issue #103, I found the wonderful infrared images of Davide D’Angelo.  I highly recommend that you either seek out this latest edition of LensWork, or that you visit Mr. D’Angleo’s inspiring website and, in particular, his galleries: Cieli e Paesi di Langa e Roero (Sky and Earth of  Lange and Roero) and Bianco e nero (Black and White).

Technically, infrared photography is relatively straightforward.  A filter is placed in front of the lens that cuts out visible light and only allows deep red and infrared light to pass.  Historically, images were taken on special infrared sensitive films, and as a result, this light was 700 to 900 nm. The image sensors on today’s digital cameras are intrinsically infrared sensitive.  Indeed, a filter to reduce that infrared sensitivity is built into the sensor.  Enthusiasts often have this extra filter removed so as to overcome, to some extent, the need for prolonged exposure to achieve an infrared image.

The result, in black and white, is that  skies become remarkably deep, trees turn fairy white because of the high reflectivity of leaves to the near infrared, referred to as the “Wood effect” , and nebulous clouds become intensely defined.  It is a magical world and Davide D’Angelo is one of its grand master wizards.  As just two examples of his wonderful explorations into this world, please have a close look at: “Le Vigne di Treiso”   and for a wonderful sense of how sky and Earth and water counterplay with one another in this region of the spectrum,”Image Number 2” in his Bianco e Nero gallery.

I hope that you will agree that Davide D’Angelo’s infrared photographs are truly enchanting.  I guess that there is only one more word to say: “Bravo!”

They are everywhere, robotic eyes, aka surveillance cameras.  I mean you can’t even stop on the side of the road anymore without a camera watching you.  So we find ourselves right smack back into the issue of the subway tragedy.

David Carr in the NY Times’ “Media Decoder” blog has published a piece entitled: “Another Portrait of Imminent Death, but One Worthy of Publishing,” discussing the assassination of Brandon Lincoln Woodard on W 58th Street in NYC last week.  Mr. Woodward was seen on surveillance cameras being shot dead in cold blood.

Unlike the subway tragedy, the photographer was incapable of ethical decision as well as ethical intervention.  Surveillance cameras are meant to deter and prevent crimes.  It failed in that.  But they are also meant to record crimes; and in so doing to prevent further criminal acts.  OK, so there was no question of conscience on the part of the photographer and no question of the ethics of setting up the cameras in the first place.

So what about the decision to publish? According to Mr. Carr, Michele McNally, the assistant managing editor at The Times, who oversees photography explained that “‘The decision to publish the photo was not a close call,’ she said. ‘There is a crime being committed, there is information that could help locate the suspect, and there is other information in the photograph that when it is put out there, could be helpful in solving the crime. It was a no-brainer.’ (By contrast, she said, the Post photo left her ‘ambivalent’ and she ‘would have consulted with many,’ adding, ‘I think a lot of criticism of the picture comes from the way it was displayed in the Post, the headline and caption and the ethics of lifting a camera at that moment in time.)'”

So we tend to accept the decision to publish and publicly show this kind of surveillance imagery.  Indeed, they have become commonplace: convenience store robberies (usually ending with the intended clerk bludgeoning the robber with a baseball bat and chasing him out of the store), high speed highway chases, bank robberies, and my personal favorite, people driving into buildings.

Mr. Carr points out that being shot to death is “far less anomalous than someone being thrown in front of a subway train.”  According to the FBI in 2010, 8775 Americans were shot to death.  Most chilling was Ms. McNally’s response to Mr. Carr.s email about “photo of the shooter, she immediately replied, ‘Which one?’

A reader has brought to my attention a recent article in the New York Times that really follows up on our discussion of responsibility in events and photography.  This article by Maurice Berger, in the blog “Lens,” entitled “Lynchings in the West, Erased From History and Photos”  features the work of photographer Ken Gonzales-Day in particular his “Erased Lynching Series.”  The subject fits in well with our discussion on photography ethics and on the effect of the gruesome on the observer.

Gonzales-Day has pursued mob violence and lynchings that occured in California during the nineteen and early twentieth centuries.  Unlike the Jim Crow lynchings of African Americans in the South, which were conducted under a veil of anonymity, lynchings in California were perpetrated predominantly against Mexicans, native AMericans, and Asians and were glorified in the name of “frontier justice.”  Gonzales-Day has done two things: first he has taken contemporary postcards and photographs of these infamous events and removed the victims; second he has revisited these sites and rephotographed them.

The victimless images have a profound effect.  While in the originals, the eye is invariably drawn and held riveted to the unfortunate victim, here you look instead into the sometimes smiling, sometimes blank faces of the mob of executioners.  And there is always something obviously missing that creates a sense of ambiguity.  Berger discusses the views of Belgian critic and curator Thierry de Duve: ” pictures of atrocities, shocking and disquieting as they may be, result in a ‘vanishing of the present tense.’ Distilling a complex, morally troubling event into an instant, they suspend viewers in a limbo in which they are inevitably ‘too early to witness the uncoiling of the tragedy’ and ‘too late, in real life,’ to do anything to prevent it.”   For Mr. de Duve, this renders pictures of bloodshed particularly disconcerting — almost unbearably — by intensifying our sense of helplessness before history.”

I think that the same may be said of the “subway tragedy” discussed in my blog of yesterday. Vison is our dominant sense.  As a result, the photographic image can affect us profoundly.  Photographs can be strong medicine. On the one hand they may fill us forever with profound sublimity.  One the other hand they may haunt us forever with gruesome reality.

I was sitting in a  Rochester, Minnesota hotel restaurant having breakfast last Friday (and thus suitably insulated from the rest of the world) reading Laura Petrecca’s column in USA Today “Series of subway tragedy photos raises some questions.”  A journalist takes pictures of a man pushed in front of a train seconds before the man is hit and killed.  The ethical questions are profound.

• Should the journalist, who claims he was too far away to help, have taken the pictures or rushed in vain to the man’s aid?
• Should the NY Post have published these pictures and pandered to sensationalism?
• Why are readers drawn to such macabre images?
• Should spectators on the scene have taken endless IPhone and Android images and movies to post on the web? Was it, as Ms. Petrecca suggests, to feed the insatiable beast of the internet in an attempt to achieve a moment of notoriety?

Sincerely, I really don’t know the answers and am quite interested in what readers think.  In such matters I tend to fall back on what my mother taught me about right and wrong and, yes, good taste.

• What the journalist could or could not do is in his own conscience.  If he was indeed helpless then, perhaps, the question becomes one of motivation.  Was he reflexively documenting or was he from the very first thinking of profiting from tragedy?
• My mother taught me to never read the NY Post.
• Voyeurism is widespread, if despicable.  Everyone rubber necks to some extent.  The important point is whether you are repulsed  and whether you feel guilty about being drawn in the first place.  You’ve got sadism  on the deplorable end of human emotion and empathy on the other end – again I never read the NY Post.  When I saw the images on the news.  My reaction was OMG that poor man.
• As for the internet beast, there’s some of that.  I think significant too is the reality that taking camera to hand, or eye, is abstracting.  You cease to be a participant in events transforming instead into being a spectator, a documenter, a chronicler.  It is a defense mechanism.

Laura Petracca goes on to quote John Churman, who is a leader in the NY Society for Ethical Culture: “many photo takers have been ‘desensitized’ by watching traditional news media do ‘unseemly’ things, such as stick a microphone in the face of a distraught person to probe their feelings”…(it is) invasive and intrusive” and then they go on to mimic it.

My mind returns again to Eddie Adams’ “Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing the Viet Cong Guerilla, Bay Lop, 1968.” What is it that makes Adams’ photograph acceptable photojournalism, and the image of the subway tragedy not?