“In the [nineteen]twenties and early thirties František Drtikol reshaped the genre of classical nude photography by synthesizing into a new aesthetic aspects from silent film, avantgarde art, expressive dance and Art Deco design.” More samples here, here, and here. (last link seen on gmtPlus9)
Read more »

Rudolf Koppitz “extraordinary mastery of pictorial processes - pigment, carbon, gum, and bromoil transfer printing - gained the respect of his colleagues throughout the world and garnered mention in the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1929.” (more samples here) The days are gone when mastering what we call today “alternative” photographic processes could land you an entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Read more »

Modernism in US architecture wouldn’t have been as successful and influential if Julius Shulman had not been around to do the showcasing (more samples here). Find an in-depth interview with Julius Shulman here.
Read more »

Philippe Halsman was yesterday’s celebrities’ favourite photographer. When you look at the photos it’s easy to see why. Check out more samples here. consumptive.org linked to this show that has many production stills from a photo session for/with Salvador Dali. And this page has a nice article about the “Dali Atomicus” (see above). When I saw that photo for the first time I thought it was a collage. Actually, they really kept throwing that water and those cats until they got the shot: “He suspended an easel, two paintings by Dali (one of which was ‘Leda Atomica’), and a stepping stool; had his wife, Yvonne, hold a chair in the air; on the count of three, his assistants threw three cats and a bucket of water into the air; and on the count of four, Dali jumped and Halsman snapped the picture. While his assistants mopped the floor and consoled the cats, Halsman went to the darkroom, developed the film, and reemerged to do it again. ‘Six hours and twenty-eight throws later, the result satisfied my striving for perfection,’ wrote Halsman in his book ‘Halsman on the Creation of Photographic Ideas’. ‘My assistants and I were wet, dirty, and near complete exhaustion?only the cats still looked like new.’” Brilliant! I don’t think my cats would be as happy if I kept throwing them, though. Well, maybe they’d do it for Dali.
Read more »

Li Zhensheng “delivered to the offices of Contact Press Images in New York starting in 1999 approximately thirty-thousand small brown paper envelopes bound together with rubber bands in groups according to chronology, location, type of film, or other criteria” - a visual history of China’s so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Zonezero shows excerpts.
Read more »

Germans seem to possess an extra gene that makes them categorize and sort things systematically. Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932), as a teacher for industrial arts, systematically took photos of plants to show that “the best engineering solutions for industrial design had already been anticipated in nature”.
Read more »

London’s National Portrait Gallery honours Cecil Beaton with a major retrospective exhibition. Read a review from The Guardian.
Read more »

Rest in peace, Helmut!
Read more »

Time to look at the old masters again: André Kertész, at the time of this writing featured at SK Josefsberg. More samples here and here
Read more »

Chances are you’ve never heard of John Deakin but you’ve seen paintings done using Deakin’s photos. I had never heard of him until I stumbled upon a retrospective of his work the other day. John Deakin got commissoned by painter extraordinaire Francis Bacon to do photographic studies that Bacon then used to paint. You can see (bad scans of) some of those photos here - including the utterly brilliant portrait that shows Bacon holding the halfs of a slaughtered pig (compare the painting). Deakin never took any care of either his photos or his equipment so many of the photos are literally taken from the floor of Bacon’s studio. What a shame! Anyway, this article discusses Bacon’s use of photography and here are a few more of Deakin’s photos.
Read more »

F.C. Gundlach’s fashion photography hails from mainly the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Read more »

Today’s edition of utterly fabulous wood s lot features lots of links to work on and by Minor White.
Read more »

František Drtikol (1883-1961) “is most noted for his uniquely modernistic imagery through the use of harsh lighting and strangely contorted forms and backdrops. His primary subject was the female nude. Most of these images were made between 1900 and 1935.” Examples: gallery, gallery 2, gallery 3.
Read more »

Leni Riefenstahl, shown above directing her infamous movie “Triumph of the Will”, is dead. Much can be said and was said about her and by her. Of her most infamous works she said “I was only interested in how I could make a film that was not stupid like a crude propagandist newsreel, but more interesting. It reflects the truth as it was then, in 1934. It is a documentary, not propaganda.” The films certainly were more interesting but Frau Liefenstahl was either too naive or not willing to not miss the point, even though she explicitely expresses it: “the truth as it was then” - that, and nothing else, is the essence of what propaganda is about. Propaganda is not about the truth; it is about the truth as it is, and that means as it is intended to be. Frau Riefenstahl was a Nazi propagandist, maybe not of the absolutely worst kind, but a very talented and remarkable one nevertheless. Her unwillingness to face that and post-war Germany’s willingness to except that to a certain extent exposes maybe the only unsolved problems with Germany’s past. Contrary to what the media want to make you believe there is nothing to be discovered any longer about the war and the genocide of Jews, Homosexuals, mentally handicapped persons, Socialists, and Communists. But Germany has never dealt with those people who supported the Nazi regime in a different way, not by building bombs or by ordering genocide or by fighting wars. There still is a lot to be discovered about how you create a regime like that. The lessons that we could learn extend to our everyday lives - especially when countries go to war selling that very same war on the basis of what very obviously is the truth only insofar as it supports the war, a truth disconnected from facts, a truth that is connected to spinmeisters and liars who dress up as statesmen. Germany has never really dealt with Nazi Germany’s artists - the ones which were only too willing to put their artistry into the service of a regime that knew about the power of images and sounds even though then mass media were almost exclusively non-visual. Artists like Ernst Jünger, the writer, Arno Breker, the sculptor, Herbert von Karajan and Wilhelms Furtwängler, the conductors, and Leni Riefenstahl, the film maker and photographer, helped create Nazi Germany’s face to an extent that never got acknowledged. They never paid a price for that - and how could they? As an artist, you can always claim you were only working on art and nothing else. It’s amazing how Frau Riefenstahl got away with it so easily. Granted, her career was more or less over after the war. But did she go to jail like people like Albert Speer? You could maybe (note the maybe here) how people like Karajan got away with it. Conducting Beethoven’s Fifth in itself is not an act of Nazism - even though getting a thoroughly brown nose is. But making movies which are as explicit about Nazi ideals as any movie can be? It’s like making explicit pornographic movies with the idea of making a movie about sex and then claiming you were never interested in arousing people. Like Ernst Jünger, another very talented proto-fascist, she was left off the hook, and like Herr Jünger she lived until she was 100 years old - reminding the second German democracy of the legacy it never wanted to deal with. So Frau Riefenstahl finally is dead. She was a talented photographer and film maker. But she sold her sold to the devil. Maybe now she can have another toast with Hitler - the person she admired so much. May she rot in hell.
Read more »

Dmitri Baltermants must be the Russian war photographer even though his other work is equally amazing (more photos).
Read more »

Eikoh Hosoe is one of Japan’s most important photographers. More photos here.
Read more »

Frank Horvat’s photography covers 55 years. There are lots of photos to discover: 1950s and 1960s fashion shots, portraits, architecture, some late digital stuff. You need to bring some time to browse through the selection.
Read more »

Fernand Fonssagrives “(1910-2003) was one of the most revered practitioners of ‘beauty photography’ in the early 1940Â’s and was married to the legendary model Lisa Fonssagrives, who then went on to marry Irving Penn. FonssagrivesÂ’ unique eye for combining shape, form and beauty and the extraordinary sculptural beauty that was Lisa Fonssagrives, made for a perfectly balanced partnership that continues to be imitated by photographers to this day.”
Read more »

The New Republic has a review of a new Robert Capa biography. Recommended! It’s not just about Capa but also about how journalistic photos have lost some of their impact - this being the times of Photoshop and of staged rescue operations for supposed POW heroes - and about various other, related things.
Read more »

Classic photography by Cornell Capa. (thru iconomy)
Read more »

Chim - The Photographs of David Seymour shows the work of the Magnum co-founder whose work, quite unfortunately I think, doesn’t quite get the same attention as that of, say, Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Read more »

Rondal Partidge, son of Imogen Cunningham, had a very early start into photography. “Partridge began helping his mother in the darkroom at the age of five. At seventeen he became Dorothea Lange’s apprentice, driving her up and down the back roads of California as she created her well-known images of migrant laborers.” Later, he worked with Ansel Adams. In 1940, he worked on a series called “california Youth” - a lot of which is online.
Read more »

The Photography of Charles Sheeler was shown at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (3 June 2003 - 17 August 2003).
Read more »

“On August 10, 1945, the day after the bombing of Nagasaki, Yosuke Yamahata began to photograph the devastation.” (link)
Read more »

Shinzo Fukuhara and Roso Fukuhara, sons of Arinobu Fukuhara, the founder of Japanese cosmetics brand Shiseido (make sure you visit the page with covers of Shiseido’s in-house magazine Hanatsubaki), contributed to developing modern Japanese photography. In 1924 they founded the Japan Photographic Society. (Shiseido exhibit link thru wood s lot)
Read more »

“Crazy, artistic, stingy, obsessed with taxes. Sex maniac, master architect, drug addict, genius. Carlo Mollino (1905-1973) is one of the most colorful figures in the world of architecture and Italian design. ” (bio) Carlo Mollino was also a designer and photographer who took tons of Polaroids: samples (1), samples (2).
Read more »

Leni Riefenstahl has her own webpage which includes a photo section.
Read more »

The aforementioned George Eastman House also has a nice gallery of photos by master portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh.
Read more »

Beautiful colour photography at the George Eastman House (thru consumptive.org)
Read more »

These days, August Sander is my favourite photographer. He’s most well-known for his portraits which I find nothing but amazing. They’re even more amazing when you consider that when he started doing them this particular style of portaiture - something we take for granted now - was pretty much despised. People didn’t want to see their real faces, they wanted idealized portraits, and photographers spent a lot of time retouching their work. In the end, Sander ran into trouble when the Nazis came to power. His portraits simply didn’t agree with what the Nazis thought of the Germans, and, of course, they didn’t want to see gypsies or other “Untermenschen” portrayed.
Read more »

A huge gallery of photos with plenty of rarely seen ones.
Read more »

Ernst Haas was one of the most influential photographers of the 20th Century. Well-known for his colour photography, he also did a lot of b/w work. Make sure you spend some time on the website, it’s a real feast for the eye.
Read more »

This must be the best photo summing up Nazi Germany that I’ve ever seen. It was taken by Richard Peter in an air-raid shelter in 1946. I found the photo while looking for material from his book “Dresden - Eine Kamera klagt an”. After the destruction of Dresden, Peter had taken tons of photos of the city, the most famous one being a statue overlooking the ruins of the city. The book was published in the early 1950s in East Germany.
Read more »

Leni Riefenstahl is probably one of the most controversial Germans alive. She is widely known for the propaganda movies she made for Hitler and for her photography, in particular for her photos of the African Nuba. Was she, is she a Nazi or not? Here is an interesting article about her by James Faris.
Read more »

The other day, I found an article in the New York Times about Alfred Stieglitz. Until then, I had never been too excited about him but the article featured one of his photos which got me pretty excited. I decided to look for his work online. The best site I could find is the George Eastman House Alfred Stieglitz series. The photo I had seen in the NY Times - an amazingly modern looking portrait of Rebecca Strand - unfortunately cannot be found here but there are tons of other treasures.
Read more »

A few days ago, I posted an entry about Yousuf Karsh’s death. I missed posting the obituary from The Economist which in itself is a very nice piece about photography.
Read more »

Yousuf Karsh just died. Maybe you read about it. He became famous with his Churchill portrait but I think his other works are much more interesting. His portraits are amazingly telling. You get the impression that Karsh was able to show everything you would want to know about a person. It’s interesting to compare his style of photography with what people do today. Do today’s portrait photographers achieve what Karsh did?
Read more »