Category Archives: Documentary Photography

Renouncing the Digital Feedback Loop (Reclaiming Your Autonomy from Technology)

A sloppy, irresolute photo taken with a film camera

Photographs are everywhere, and it’s easy to lose sight, or not even see, their reality as things in themselves. Most people have a simple way of understanding photographs, as reflections of existing states of things. The belief is this: photos represent the world itself, even if they are windows from a particular point of view; the photographic world and the world out there are essentially the same. I call this the ‘naïve’ view of photography.

This naïve view begs the question, of course, of what to do about black and white photography. Most things “out there in the world” are not exclusively black and white or tones thereof. So, black and white photography, even within a naïve view, is an abstraction.

What of color? Well, we can agree that the color of the scene presented doesn’t miraculously transfer itself onto a roll of film or a sensor. The process of “reproducing” color photographically is a transcription, the same as any other image making process, an attempt to ‘re- create’ a state of things via an abstraction. Like any abstraction, what is transcribed and the transcription itself will always vary to some extent even when the intent is to be as “accurate” as possible. How its ‘re-created’ is a function of two things – the choices and skill of the photographer and the potential offered by the tools one uses.

So, if photos are abstractions, we have to, in the jargon of semiotics, ‘decode’ them (make the intention behind them understandable), because ultimately photographs are about communicating something. How do we do that? As a photographer and not a philosopher, I’d suggest that a successful photograph is one where the photographer’s intention has been realized, where a human’s intention overrides any intentions inherent in the camera itself.

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Vilém Flusser was a Czech born philosopher of language and communication who wrote verbose philosophical tomes no one reads anymore, assuming they ever did (that’s him, above). In 1983, prior to the digital age, Flusser wrote Fur Eine Philosophie der Fotografie (Towards a Philosophy of Photography) in which he argues that cameras themselves have intentions (I presume, were you to cut through the ponderous academic jargon, he’s really talking about camera manufacturers driven by profit motives). He lists them as follows:

to place the camera’s inherent capabilities into a photograph;
to make use of a photographer;
to create a feedback relationship between photographers and the camera and its products which creates progressive technological improvement so as to produce “better” photographs;
to produce “better” photographs.

All of which is to say, in common parlance, that the photographic tools you use and the capabilities they offer you will tend to structure the types of photographs you produce with them, by naturally pushing you in the direction of utilizing what they (the photographic tool), not you, might do best. Examples of this phenomenon would be the “bokeh” craze currently all the rage with a certain type of gearhead, or the current fetish for sharpness, where the benchmark of the “quality” of a photograph is determined by how resolute your corners are.

Maybe it’s just me, but photographic aesthetics seem to have changed markedly since the inception of digital photography, to my mind for the worse. Optical characteristics have increasingly replaced emotional resonance as the criterion of a “good” photograph, the result of a repressive stranglehold of sharpness and resolution on the photographic imagination which is itself driven by the particular characteristics of digital capture. Flusser would say that the camera has made use of the photographer, its intentions having triumphed over the potential intentions of the human, the result of the inevitable feedback loop between tool and user. I would add that, as far as creative possibilities are concerned, this is a step back rather than a step forward.

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Of course, you could argue that the same logic applies to traditional film photography, and you’d be correct up to a certain point. The types of photographs you’re able to take with film also structure the results you get. With film photography that structuring typically takes the form of limits on what you can do, circumscribing your ability to take photos in certain situations or producing results within a limited aesthetic spectrum, setting the parameters within which the photographer must work as opposed to actively pushing him in a certain direction. There’s a big difference.

Above is a photograph by Antonin Kratochvil, a Czech born photographer and a personal favorite of mine. He’s long been known in journalism circles for his idiosyncratic approach, both technologically and aesthetically. Fellow photographer Michael Perrson describes seeing Kratochvil in a Croatian refugee camp using two old Nikons with beat-up, generic 28mm lenses, cameras “that looked like they could no more be traded for a pack of chewing gum than be a tool to make professional photos,” other photographers snickering at the Eastern European hack. Pictures he shot there would find their way into Broken Dreams, his award-winning monograph of the ecological devastation of Soviet era Eastern Europe.

As Perrson notes, what makes Kratochvil a great photographer is not his equipment but rather his unique sensibility. “He believes in the craft of photography, the skill and the ability of the photographer not to let his tools control his actions.” This simplicity releases in him the freedom to see things in unique ways. Kratochvil himself laments the ever-increasing incursions of technology into the photographic process – “technology has made it so that anyone can take ‘competent’ photos. It follows that if anyone can do this, where is the respect?” For Kratochvil, the camera is simply a tool; seeing is what’s important, and a given state of technology should never compel you to see the world in any given way.

Kratochvil strikes me as a very wise man in addition to being a superb photographer. But I’m certain that most smug digital technocrats, those whom digital precision and technical perfection have led by the nose, will find his work naive and technically amateurish, as if that was the sole criterion on which photography might be judged. Such dismissiveness is the tribute the inadequate pay to the articulate.

The Camera That Brought Me Back to Myself

“The Leica strikes me as a symbol of revolt against the boredom of everything ordinary and modern. It’s useful for works of art, but not much else. It exudes the kind of authenticity that we have been denied every day of our miserable lives. You don’t use this camera to please a client or to make a deadline; you don’t use it to make money at all. When I pick up this camera I know I’m holding the perfect tool to do something deeply personal and creative, something that no one else can criticize.”

I was obsessed with photography when I was young. I lived in Memphis and I wanted to follow along in the tradition of William Eggleston, whom I idolized. I studied for four years and made a very serious stab at capturing the tumbledown look of the South. I even worked at a newspaper for a time. But something went wrong. The work simply wasn’t good, and in spite of stupidly struggling with the problem day and night, I just couldn’t find my way to the ideal image. I’ve got to admit, I didn’t know what I was doing.

Years passed. The shitstorm of trying (or failing as it were) to be a responsible adult destroyed my illusions about producing a great work of art, and for a full decade I lived very poorly, having completely lost the thread of my original vision. My camera collected dust and was eventually forgotten amongst other weird relics from my former life as a “creative person.” It was a cliche I laughed about, wondering how I could ever have been so naive. I made asinine remarks whenever I encountered people who liked to bullshit me about “following your dreams” and so forth. I worked in the service industry, mopping up after rude tourists who had apparently made better life-decisions than I had. My conclusion was that even if you completely threw yourself into what you truly cared about, no one would ever thank you for it. You would have to cram it into your off hours with little or no emotional energy left for the task. You would have to pay for it out of your own empty pocket. Things would only get more and more difficult as time went by. You were doomed.

I may have been wrong; I don’t know. That’s just what I happened to be feeling during those years of insecurity.

Things went on uneventfully in this way, until about a year ago, when something interesting happened. I was unemployed, and having some time on my hands, I found my way into the obscure world of Tarkovsky movies. Something in his imagery got through to me, and a long-lost memory flickered to life. I started dreaming about photography again, and those dreams quickly escalated to a feverish obsession, just like it had been in the 90’s, when I was a teenager.

My fiancé, sensing the crisis, offered to front me the money to buy some new photography tools and start over. It was a Purple Rain kind of moment, white guitar and all. Her generosity was enough to change everything for me. In spite of the desire to be optimistic, we’ve got to be real and acknowledge that it’s impossible to think about creating a body of work when your life is in shambles, and your idea of luxury is a pack of cigarettes. Sometimes you just need some help, and god willing, sooner or later you might happen to get some.

I wanted to use a Leica. I didn’t know why; I just did. Maybe it was because all my favorite images had come from this mythical camera. It was impractical, weird, anachronistic, expensive. I had a very hard time talking myself into believing that it made sense to get one -because it didn’t. I could have used any cheap camera, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to do it right this time. No compromises. It’s odd how you can know something at an emotional level, but you have to drag your rational mind, kicking and screaming, along with it.

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I won’t bother reciting all the reasons why Leica cameras are special; we’ve heard it all before, and a good bit of it is true. I settled on the M3 with a 50mm Summicron lens, and I am not disappointed. I love this camera. I have spent many afternoons staring at the thing over a cup of coffee and wondering why I care so much about it. As strange as this may sound, the reason is not entirely obvious. Yes, it is a “nice” camera, beautifully designed and a pleasure to operate… but that isn’t enough. It’s a camera after all, not a designer accessory (at least it used to be). The images it has produced for me are excellent, but if it were really about image quality and sharpness we would not being using 35mm film in the first place. There’s something else going on with this camera. I think the things people say about it are just excuses for fetishizing something when they can’t rationally explain why. People are complex creatures full of unknown depths, and the Leica speaks to those depths.

I thought about this carefully and I came to the conclusion that the magic of the thing is in the sheer impracticality of it. The Leica strikes me as a symbol of revolt against the boredom of everything ordinary and modern. It’s useful for works of art, but not much else. It exudes the kind of authenticity that we have been denied every day of our miserable lives. You don’t use this camera to please a client or to make a deadline; you don’t use it to make money at all. When I pick up this camera I know I’m holding the perfect tool to do something deeply personal and creative, something that no one else can criticize. Hell, the idea of it seems almost subversive to me after all these years, and that is a very powerful feeling.

Leica signifies all these things to me, and probably to a lot of other people as well. It’s what the kids at the art college would call the Leica’s “discourse.” Some part of you senses this when you have one in your hands, even if you haven’t got the slightest idea what it is. It seems so serious, so pure. The thing’s got gravity; it’s literally heavy. The symbolism is clear.

Today I am back in the fight with the kind of impatience and desperation that could only come from having wasted so many years without taking a photograph. I went out with just this one camera and one lens, and worked up a photo essay about depopulation in the high plains of Colorado. Good or bad I don’t know, but it is without any doubt the single best piece of work I have ever done. It has been like rediscovering all the lost ambitions of youth, and learning that they weren’t dead after all. Moreover, they have come to fruition, finally. I think the inspiration of the camera may have had something to do with that.

Joseph Oxandale was born in Louisiana in 1980 and earned his BFA from the Memphis College of Art in 2004. After doing a stint with The El Dorado News-Times in Arkansas, he moved west to Colorado. He currently lives in Denver.

To see more of his excellent High Plains photographs, visit

http://oxandaleworks.weebly.com/high-plains-lament.html

Photography as Magic

We’ve all got one photo we’ve taken that resonates with us. It won’t win an award, which isn’t the point. The point is that It has a meaning for us, and we keep coming back to it when thinking of the photos we’ve taken we really like. Above is mine, taken in 1970 when I was 12 and just learning the fundamentals of film photography. It’s of two kids in my neighborhood. Nothing special, but it reminds me of my childhood – my aspirations, the shape of my personality even at that early age, by extension people now old, people now dead. The kid down the street who died way too young; the dog next door I adopted as my own because I wasn’t allowed my own pet; friends I’ve lost touch with long ago; my father, long gone.

I thought it was cool simply as a good photo back then. I still think it’s cool, and I still think it’s a good photo. Not bad for a 12 y/o kid. But it’s become something more than that for me now. Each time I look at it a rush of involuntary memories come back to me, memories shaken loose by a simple decision, long ago, to point my camera at something and click. This is the enduring magic, for me, of photography. Photography can make you feel young again – or yet. It can give you a visceral connection to the past, providing a clarity that memory, always reconstituting itself, cannot. In spite of its inherently abstract nature – the reality that stasis is a constructed illusion, as Roland Barthes spent a book arguing – it still can possess an authenticity that can’t be rationalized away. Those people there, in that picture, once stood in front of that camera, 50 years ago, just like that. That, to me, is magic.

For Sale: The Leica That Didn’t Take the Famous Photo of Che Guevara

Alberto Korda and his Leica IIIc

A Leica III camera belonging to Alberto Korda, he of the famous photo of Che Guevara looking revolutionary, is currently for sale on the Dutch auction website catawiki.nl.

Korda’s Leica III

The Leica III is being sold by Korda’s son, Dante, who describes the camera as follows:

My father, Alberto Korda, was one of the few cuban photojournalists responsible for capturing the world’s attention with the Cuban Revolution Propaganda. He followed the Cuban leaders around and became Fidel Castro’s personal photographer for more than a decade (request from Fidel Castro, who was one of his admirers). My father’s passion and exceptional skills as a photographer made every event of the revolution a magnificent moment, a genuine representation of an era of changes and beauty.

This camera was one of the favorite cameras of my father. My father actively used this camera in the fifties and sixties and kept it the rest of his life. That’s why it’s likely that my father took with this camera one of the world’s most famous photo’s ever made. The iconic image of the freedom fighter Che Guevara.

Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity and provenance from Dante Korda

Unfortunately for Dante, this is not the camera his father used to take the iconic shot, which was taken with a Leica M2.

Korda took the photo on March 5, 1960, at a funeral service for Cubans killed when a ship carrying arms to the revolutionaries in Havana sunk. He attended on assignment for the newspaper Revolución, carrying a Leica M2 with 90mm. Castro, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Che were on the speaker’s platform. When Korda approached the platform, he immediately noticed Che. “I remember his staring over the crowd on 23rd street.” Struck by Guevara’s expression, Korda lifted his Leica M2 loaded with Plus-X and took just two frames — one vertical and one horizontal — before Che turned away.

The Duality of Leicaphilia

When I speak of “leicaphilia” in what follows I’m referring to the love of all things Leica that animates many of us partisans of the iconic Leica brand. If you don’t suffer from it you probably won’t understand it. If you just read about it, without having suffered from it yourself, with all the semi-mystical attributes often ascribed to Leicas by folks who should know better, you’d be within your rights to dismiss the whole phenomenon as simply another irrational mania that afflicts humans in a myriad of ways, whether it be in the form of the religious or political, psychological or philosophical. Even for us long-time Leicaphiles, suffering the most from the malady, it’s difficult to justify many of our enthusiasms in our more rational moments.

I understand, and I’ve often used this blog to try and deflate some of the more pernicious claims seriously addled Leicaphiles sometimes make – you know, your Leica makes you a better photographer, or you’re not really serious about photography unless you use a Leica, or there’s an identifiable ‘Leica Glow’ one gets when using Leitz optics, or one can easily identify negatives and files produced by Leica cameras and Leitz lenses, or your M8, with its obsolete sensor and abysmal DXO score, somehow still produces files rivaling what you can get with a Nikon D5.

And then there’s all the ancillary crap attempting to hitch its wagon to the exclusivity that association with Leica can provide – bags, grips, leather cases, thumbs-up contraptions, lens hoods, soft release shutters, red dots, black dots to cover up the red dots, replacement leather skins of various textures and hues, and my personal favorite for ridicule, Frankensteinian dual hot-shoe brackets that allow you to mount both an external finder and meter on the top of your diminutive little IIIf, akin to putting a lowering kit and spinning neon wheels on your beautiful vintage BMW 2002.

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I don’t pretend to be a ‘fine-art photographer’. Photography for me is a process of documenting things, of keeping records. As a documentarian, I try not to romanticize the tools I use. And, while, emotionally, I’m still stuck in the film era, from a practical perspective the ease of digital wins out when I need something with a minimum of fuss or on a deadline. (When I need something absolutely permanent, however, film always wins out). My philosophy, when it comes to choosing a camera to use for a given need, is this: grab whatever works best. Lately, that usually means a Nikon D3s or, if quick and easy, a digital Ricoh, or, for what’s really dear to me, a film camera, preferably a rangefinder – an M4 or M5, a Hexar RF, a Voigtlander Bessa R2S or a Contax G, all great cameras – or a Nikon F5 loaded with HP5.

Amsterdam, 2015, Hexar RF and 28mm M-Hexanon, HP5 @ 800 in D76

It’s really only peripherally about the camera you use. It’s ultimately about the photographs you create, and the photos you create are a function of your technical mastery of your tools coupled with your aesthetic and reportorial sense. It’s about understanding shutter speed, aperture and depth of field, mastery of exposure; using the correct lens for a given task; understanding how perspective changes with distance and focal length; understanding the physics of the color of light; and last, and most importantly, knowing what’s important to point your camera at.

Having said all that, I’m just as susceptible to all the nonsense than are the unapologetic fanboys who give Leica a bad name in more serious circles. I obsess over the particulars of thoughtfully made photographic tools — the tiny details done just right, the haptics of a knurled knob or the aesthetic balance of chrome and vulcanite, the muffled ‘thlunk’ of a mechanical shutter.

Damn if I don’t spend a lot of my time fondling my film Leicas, ‘exercising’ the shutter while waiting for the decisive moment, or just simply carrying them around with me, admiring them for their mechanical beauty. Right now my enthusiasms seem to be centered on a Leica IIIg with cool vintage 5 cm lenses attached. Of course, tomorrow it might be different; I could very well pick up an M2 and switch emotional gears, now proclaiming it the coolest camera ever, or a black M4 mounting a Summicron that feels sublime in use. It need not even be a Leica. It could be a Nikon S2 or SP or F or even an F5, a Hexar RF or my current obsession, a Bessa R2S. Consistency, I must admit, is not my strong suite when it comes to my irrational attachment to film cameras. In this I am in agreement with Salvador Dali, who advised that it’s best to frequently contradict oneself so as not to be predictable, because the worst, the most boring one can be is predictable, consistency being, as Oscar Wilde once noted, the last refuge of the unimaginative.

The sorts of fondler’s interactions many of us enjoy speak to a need that is embedded in our relationships with traditional film photography, a tactile enjoyment of the process of photography and the pleasures given by the finely crafted tools we’ve used in that process. A fascination with, and admiration of, the tools themselves is part of what drew us to photography in the first place, and us fondlers have no need to apologize for this.

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Our often irrational attachment to our old cameras, I think, is ultimately about a desire for permanence in an endeavor whose technologies now evolve at warp speed. The charms of really nice film camera are many: the look and feel of tools well-crafted for long use, the familiarity created by using them for decades. It feels nice to use a camera for a long time. Do you remember the digital camera you were using 15 years ago? Mine was a Nikon d100. And there were those funky experiments that wrote their files to 3.5-inch floppies. Remember those? See where this is going? In 15 years, at our current pace, you won’t even recognize your ‘capture device’. In any event, I have no interest in having to learn the nuances of a new technical device every other year.

Its why I love my iiif and iiig, my M4 and M5, my Nikon F and S3. Mechanical cameras, and the technology they embody, can be passed down from fathers to sons and daughters without the need of technical manuals. Learn the traditional skills of photographic capture: aperture, shutter speed, film speeds, and you’re able to figure out the marginal differences of any mechanical camera in a matter of a minute or two. In learning to master it, it becomes an habitual extension of your way of seeing, rather than a device that stands between you and what you see. I can pick up an M4 after not having touched one for years, and can still immediately operate it almost unconsciously. If I let my digital camera sit for too long, invariably I’m scrolling through menus and submenus trying to figure out some basic operation, usually standing flat-footed while what I grabbed the camera for plays itself out unphotographed.

The advance in digital technologies is stunning, but it has vitiated quaint notions of any practical longevity for a camera, even those, like Leica’s, that still pay lip-service to the idea that you might purchase a camera with longevity in mind. Camera product cycles now track the cycles for computers, because your digital camera is a computer. Manufacturers fight to see who can cram the most buttons on the back of their latest image capture device, and ‘camera nuts’ dutifully hand over their money for the latest best new thing. Hard-core consumers, longing for the next thing even as we’ve just laid hands on the current version, are where the money is, so as we queue to buy the latest ‘must have’ camera we reinforce and reward manufacturers and help perpetuate the very process by which we remain dissatisfied, perpetually craving the next update. I suppose, given the realities of consumerist capitalism, these cycles are inevitable and will remain with us as Nikon and Canon, and to a lesser extent Leica, cram more “new and improved” digital cameras down our throats well into the immediate future.

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When it was new, a Leica M4 camera cost a lot of money. Fast forward to 2016, and a simple online calculator using the Consumer Price Index (CPI) indicates that the relative purchase price of an M4 today would be $7,080.00. This answer is obtained by multiplying $1500 (approximately what a black M4 would cost new in 1974) by the percentage increase in the CPI from 1974 to 2015. So, a new Leica M4 in 1974 cost about the same, in real dollars, as a new Leica MM costs today. But the difference is this: when you bought the M4 you expected to use it for decades. I have an M4 made in 1974. It still works exactly as intended and I use it often. It’s not just a collector’s piece that sits on my shelf. I will eat my hat, however, if that MM you buy today will still be in your bag in 15 years, let alone working. And forget 40 year-old Monochroms. In a relatively short time you’ll have to sell it at a loss, or its electronics will fail and you’ll be out-of-pocket for its replacement with something else. This is the current reality now that cameras have gone from being something like a durable good, as was the M4, to a consumer electronic commodity that you replace every two years or so.

Maybe, leicaphilia isn’t simply about fondling and exclusivity; maybe it’s also the most prominent manifestation of a fading photo-cultural memory that many of us value highly and don’t want to see disappear. I’m convinced there remains a market for modern cameras (even with electronics) that are intuitively simple and built, cameras that eschew the technological dead end in favor of efficiency and directness of function, yet we often sneer when someone like Leica gives them to us. Some of us still like the notion of over-built even if there is less intent to keep something forever. It speaks to a psychologic longing for some sense of permanence in a temporary world.

Part of what makes us leicaphiles, more than just the fetishization of a particular camera, is the appreciation of the tools we’ve traditionally employed as photographers, when a Leica or a Nikon, Canon or Hasselblad film camera was the simplest, best means to do what was important. Our camera was our tool, and we built a relationship with it that lasted for decades. It’s this that’s been lost in photography’s evolution, a sense of rootedness and tradition that spanned product cycles. A simplicity and directness, a tactile pleasure in the use of our photographic tools, seen in the continued appeal of slow-boat analogue techniques and of old Leicas.

Ignore Everybody

“Whoever cannot see the unforeseen sees nothing.” Heraclitus

Robert Frank called photography an art for lazy people, and I agree with him, as far as that goes, especially in the digital age where you can point your automated camera at something, apply some funky filter with the push of a button to what you’ve captured, and send it out on social media for the world to see, a finely finished product with nothing much to say.

It’s actually saying something that’s difficult. Successful creative works are never the product of technological factors. They make no concessions to current taste and listen to no counsel but their own. This is not to say, however, that there aren’t foundational skills you need to master as a precondition to saying what you want to say. Developing the skill sets necessary to be creative is rule based. Once you understand the rules, you’re better able to get out of your own way and let the process and your own creativity bring you to someplace unexpected.

Likewise, slavishly ape-ing others isn’t going to get you there either. Emulating either the conceptual or formal decisions of other photographers will not teach you where those decisions come from or how they were arrived at, but is merely a shortcut to your own creative solution, since your mentor has done all the legwork. Structured creative guidelines can easily become comfortable formulas that inhibit unanticipated solutions. A photo workshop is a bus tour; real creativity comes with the unstructured walk.

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The solution to creating your own vision is to identify and observe the “rules” and then learn to break them. Creativity arises out of the tension between the rules and your imagination. But don’t confuse true creativity solely with a false concept of “originality.” Enduring, authentic aesthetic choices are rarely without some stylistic antecedent, but are historical and culturally specific, grounded in cultural tradition. So look at other work, lots of it. Not just any, however, but the stuff that’s lasted, that’s remained relevant across constantly changing, ephemeral fashion. You can’t move your thinking beyond an established aesthetic if you don’t know where that aesthetic begins and ends. On the other hand, too close of a focus on a given aesthetic can result in a closed perspective. Originality can only exist with a standard from which to deviate.

So, the “rules” are pretty simple when it comes to creative pursuits: Learn to use your tools. Learn the formal and conceptual ideas that govern the use of those tools for your given creative end. Learn the history of your medium and acquaint yourself with the best of what’s previously been done in the field. Then, ignore it all and take your own way.

“Exactly What It Was Like”

By Wayne Pinney for Leicaphilia.

I am the perennial novice. I own leica M film cameras, as well as a IIIg and IIIc. Hand developing film has opened a great new world. This photo of my daughter’s peagle (beagle, pekingese mix) was taken recently with my Ricoh GR Digital I- the original 8.1 MP camera. I have been using it a lot lately for the reasons much like the ones articulated here. The Ricoh is so convenient, and at high ISO does an exceptional job of duplicating film grain in B&W mode.

As I look at the photo, I find that I love it…..more than many other photographs I have taken of cherished moments and people. Tonight, a thought occurred to me regarding the magic of such photos: Is it possible that their magic is related to the fact that the camera, when used on the spur of the moment, and without benefit of preparation, captures something exactly as the chaos of the moment dictates how the brain receives and stores it……something that, because of its fleeting blurriness defies spoken description?……taps deeply into that nebulous thing that makes photography so unique? You know, that thing Barthes struggles with. As I look at the photo, I keep thinking: “Yeah! That is exactly what it was like.”

Wayne Pinney is a self-described “perennial novice” who lives in SE Indiana.

The Role of Chance

Imagine that you set out on a walk at a certain time, having intended to do it at that time and not another. Two blocks from your home you meet a stranger with a weapon. He assaults you. Neither the fact that he is where he is, at that time, and you were where you were, at that time, are accidents. But the convergence of both acts is.

Of such cases, Jacques Monod, the Nobel winning scientist and author of Chance and Necessity concludes: “Chance is obviously the essential thing inherent in the complete independence of two causal chains of events whose convergence produces the cause of the accident.” These chance accidents, Monod concludes, are essential for reality to exist, for they create the possibility of “absolute newness.”

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The English art historian Horace Walpole was entranced by a Persian fairy tale about three princes from the Isle of Serendip who possess super powers of observation. In a letter penned in 1754, Walpole suggested that this tale contained a crucial idea about human creativity: “As their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” And he proposed a new word — “serendipity” — to describe this talent, which was a creative skill rather than merely a result of luck.

Monod and Walpole were onto something that most creatives understand and nurture. Serendipity and chance breed the creative. It’s an idea of the artistic process that has a deep pedigree. Leonardo Da Vinci suggested that art students observe the random spots and stains on walls, for in those creations of happenstance the artist would find an unrefined beauty, untainted by the complications of the rational ego.

In my experience, the most interesting photos aren’t summoned; they just happen, at times and in a manner of their own choosing. It’s less down to your skill than to your preparation. The best you can do is be open to it, ready and able to recognize and receive it when the chance manifests itself. Hence, the old adage “f11 and be there.” But it’s anathema to current photographic trends, with the fetishization of the super-sharp and hyper-real that’s accompanied the digital age. And that’s partly why I value it so much. The most enjoyable photographs, for me, are random. They are the happenstance convergence of optics and light. And in this sense they are always unique, singular, uncontaminated with cliched compositional considerations, more in line with a reality with too many possibilities to be reduced by the false values of clarity and precision.

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I find that being outside of the mainstream of photographic practices has liberated me in creative ways, differentiating what I do and how I do it from the general photographic culture. Given that I’ve gotten off the technological hamster wheel, I feel free to allow the serendipitous into my practice. Stick a lens on a body – any lens, any body – and shoot. Point at stuff and shoot – out car windows, walking down the street. Just shoot. Don’t worry about how sharp your lens is, or what film you’re shooting, or the tonal range of the scene. Don’t bother metering, just guess. But shoot.

I like to take my camera with me while driving – an old meterless Leica with a 35mm lens, loaded with HP5 pushed 2 or 3 stops, exposure guessed at, focus approximated – and point it out the window occasionally and depress the shutter. Sometimes I get an image I like and I keep it.

Bruce Davidson and His Leicas

Bruce Davidson’s Leicas

Bruce Davidson began taking photographs at the age of ten . After attending Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University, he was drafted into the army and stationed near Paris. There he met Henri Cartier-Bresson. When he left military service in 1957, Davidson worked as a freelance photographer for LIFE magazine and in 1958 became a full member of Magnum. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1962 and documented the civil rights movement in America. In 1967, he received the first grant for photography from the National Endowment for the Arts, and used it to document the social conditions on one block in East Harlem.

Q: Why do you like the Leica so much and why is it a great tool for what you do?

A: For me, the things that define the Leica mystique are that it’s small, it’s relatively light, quiet and unobtrusive. Modern reflexes look like sneakers; they don’t look like cameras. They look like something else from another world. That’s why I’ve always had Leicas in my life. For example, right now I’m thinking about doing something where I want to walk around. I want to be very invisible and not aggressive in any way. That means quiet and that means Leica…

…most of my bodies of work from the circus photographs in 1958, the Brooklyn gangs and even the civil rights movement, the Leica worked because it’s quiet, mobile and has excellent optics. I remember during the civil rights movement, when I wasn’t sponsored, but on a fellowship, something happened to my Leica and I called Marty Forscher, the Leica repairman for all the professional photographers. He talked me through it and I fixed the camera myself on the road — which was pretty amazing.

I’d like to back up to the question “when did Leica come into your life?” It came into my life when I was a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). At that time, in the early 1950s, there were 140 students in the photography department, including two women. Of course, I was smitten by one of them and I was trying to court her. I met her at the women’s dorm in the living room sitting on a couch. She said, “I want to show you something.” She ran up to her room and came down with this huge book of photographs called The Decisive Moment, a collection of images by Cartier-Bresson, and we sat together looking through all of the amazing photographs. I had never seen anything like it. She said to me, “I really love this photographer.” So, I said to myself, “If I could take pictures like this guy maybe she will love me too.” So, I went out and spent all my monthly allowance on a used Leica. I actually tried to imitate the imagery of Cartier-Bresson. Of course, it didn’t work. The young female student ran off with a history professor, and I was left with Cartier-Bresson. That’s what started me off. I began to take street photographs.

Q: So how was it meeting Henri Cartier-Bresson when you were in Paris?

A: It all started when I went from RIT to working for Eastman Kodak. I had my own studio at Kodak, but I was bored so I decided to apply to Yale. I got in and took Yosef Albers’ color course. I then was drafted into the military and was sent to the Arizona desert. It was the most remote, isolated camp you could find — 7,000 feet up in the desert. I would hitchhike on weekends to Mexico to photograph bullfighters, and I made friends with Patricia McCormick, a female bullfighter. While thumbing my way from the fort to the Mexican border, I came upon an old guy in a Model T Ford and I stopped him. The town was called Patagonia — really just a post office, a grocery store, a bar and a railroad site. And this old guy took me in and I lived with him on weekends. I forgot about the bullfighting and I just photographed this old couple with my Leica. That was my first full-bodied work and if you look at it closely today, it really predicts the way I would spend my life photographing.

Q: Can you share the story about how you discovered the Brooklyn gang?

A: As I remember, there was a gang war going on that was all over the Daily News. I took the subway to Brooklyn, found the group and took color photographs of their wounds and bandages for their lawyers. That started my relationship with them and the rest is history. It was slow going in the winter months, but when they went to Coney Island in the summer, that’s where I took the most pictures….I think got in with them because I had a Leica. It was small, it was quiet and discrete, and it was simple. I would take pictures of them and then I would bring the pictures back to show them. I didn’t judge them. I wasn’t a social worker. I just photographed the mood of these teenagers — a street gang.

Garry Winogrand and His Leica M4….errr, M3?

So, here’s a picture of Garry Winogrand with his famous M4, you know, the one he ran about 100,000 rolls through and generally beat the hell out of, the camera itself now somewhat of an icon. Except that, as alert Leicaphile Andrew Fishkin points out to me, the shutter advance lever is most definitely not an M4 lever, but rather the old style M2/3 full metal lever. So, given the presence of a dedicated exposure numbering window next to the shutter release, this would appear to be an M3 as opposed to an M2. Whatever Winogrand was doing with an M3, well, we’ll never know.

Winogrand’s M4

As for the lens, the more I look at it, it looks like a 21mm Super-Angulon and not the 28mm Elmarit he “always” shot with. So much for “what everybody knows” about Winogrand.

Famous War Photographer Don McCullin Hates Digital Photography

Lebanon civil war, young Christians with the body of a Palestinian girl, Beirut, Lebanon, 1976

Don McCullin doesn’t trust digital photography. Calling it “a totally lying experience”, McCullin, famous photographer of war and disaster, says that the transition to digital capture, editing and storage means viewers could no longer trust the truthfulness of images they see.

One of the 20th century’s greatest war photographers, McCullin covered conflicts in Cyprus, the Congo, Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, El Salvador, and the Middle East. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including his acclaimed autobiography, Unreasonable Behaviour (1990), and 2001’s retrospective Don McCullin. Winner of numerous awards, including two Premier Awards from the World Press Photo, in 1992 he became the only photojournalist to be made Commander of the British Empire (CBE).

Speaking at Photo London in Somerset UK after having been named the Photo London Master of Photography for 2016, McCullin said he did not consider his photograph “art” and did not enjoy it being “sanitized” as is so easily done with digital media. According to McCullin, the inherent truth of photography has been “hijacked” because of the quick and easy nature of digital image making. “I have a dark room and I still process film but digital photography can be a totally lying kind of experience, you can move anything you want … the whole thing can’t be trusted.”

Under pressure of time, McCullin does use digital cameras for assigned work, but he remains committed to film, recalling one of his best experiences with film being just this year, standing on Hadrian’s Wall in a blizzard. “If I’d have used a digital camera I would have made that look attractive, but I wanted you to get the feeling that it was cold and lonely,” which it was, he said. For that, a roll of old school Tri-X or HP5 fit the bill perfectly.

McCullin particularly dislikes how digital cameras allow manipulation of color. “These extraordinary pictures in colour, it looks as if someone has tried to redesign a chocolate box,” he said. “In the end, it doesn’t work, it’s hideous.”

The Responsibilities Of Film Photography

Me and my Dad, 1970.

Call me a contrarian, but I’ve always seen things in a slightly skewed perspective from the average guy. Having lived on both sides of the cultural divide, first blue-collar, and then the recipient of an extended education, I know puffery and outright bullshit when I see it. I’m much more proud of my state school diploma than I am of my Ivy league degree, feeling I worked a helluva lot harder to earn the former than the latter, see no reason for a Rolex when I can wear my Seiko 5, and much prefer the indigenous culture of Mississippi to the derivative New York City culture where I was raised. Given a choice, I’ll choose a $12 Rebel Yell bourbon over the $150 bottle of Port Charlotte Islay single malt that sits untouched on my sideboard. A Modernist, I find Joyce and Pynchon unreadable when compared to the profound simplicity of Primo Levi. In short, I’ve seen both sides of the life, and prefer the simple values of the unpretentious to the vanity and prejudices of the fashionable.

I remain a “film guy”. Lately, I’ve been giving an inordinate amount of consideration as to why that might be. Part of the reason, certainly, is that I’m getting to that age where I’m thinking about what I’ll leave to the next generation. For me, photography has always been about documentation, capturing life lived both small and large, recording who I am and what I want life to be, and for this, I want something tangible, something I can put in a box that’ll be found and hopefully passed on to posterity. I don’t trust digital 1’s and 0’s to be there to do that, and I suspect we are being sold a bill of goods in our headlong embrace of the virtual future, not really thinking through its ramifications for the transmission of culture across generations.

But maybe it goes a bit beyond that. I’ve come think that there might be something about the practice of film photography that makes it so important for me as well. It takes patience, and that patience is, in a small way, a commitment to the future as much as it is a connection to the past. The craft of photography. Another word we’ve lost sight of.

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My Dad Being a Goofball, 1971.

Photography is and always has been a technologically driven medium. In order to stand out from the pack, photographers seek the unique, and technology usually provides the quickest perceived means to that end. The irony, of course, is that the majority of photographers attempt to differentiate themselves by pursuing the same technological advances, ending up right back where they started — creating work that’s indistinguishable from everybody else attempting to do the same. And so technology cranks the wheel again.

Unfortunately, each new advance in camera technology widens the gap between how a camera operates and how I actually need it to operate. To a modern photographer on the technological treadmill, it seems to me the simplicity of traditional film photography should be liberating: no more straddling the bleeding edge; no more learning and re-learning the latest computer techniques; no more money thrown at the next big trend, only to see it quickly fade into cliché. But it’s a tough sell, usually poo-pooed by digital technocrats as being the death rattles of a dead technology.

For some of us it’s as simple as appreciating the beauty of the mechanical works of art that create our photography. Photographic tools, like the Leica and Nikon RFs of the 50s, can be functional art in themselves.. In them, the tactile aspect is still supreme and there is something to mastering a technology without the neurotic need to constantly upgrade in an elusive search for better results. But of equal or even greater value for many of us is the deliberation required by analogue processes, a deliberation at odds with the requirements of current photographic usage, a mindedness and focus not required, and increasingly becoming lost, in the transition to digital.

Which all helps explain why my shelves are stocked mostly with mid–20th century mechanical film cameras. It’s because no other class of camera has ever satisfied my photographic tendencies, aesthetics and desires nearly as perfectly as the 35mm mechanical rangefinder.

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Le Pure Cafe, rue Jean Mace, Paris

One of the benefits of living in Paris is the food. The best of it is found, not in the latest trendy Michelin-starred haunts of status seekers and haute bourgeois or in tired standbys found in guide books, but in the local cafes you’ll find on virtually every corner of the city. Almost invariably, the meals you’ll find there are inexpensive, simply presented, and incredibly good. Unlike an American meal, where we too often equate quantity of choice with quality, somebody has taken the time and effort to prepare and present one or two dishes simply and elegantly, with the means and in a manner that allows you to savor the experience of enjoying it. One of my favorites is Le Pure Cafe, in the 11th on rue Jean Mace, right around the corner from Le Belle Equipe, where medieval-minded lunatics recently slaughtered 20 people for the sin of enjoying life.

What does this have to do with photography, you ask? To paraphrase Elliott Erwitt, photography should be taken seriously and treated as an avocation, and the analogy to cooking comes to mind: Taking photos digitally and editing them on a computer is like cooking a TV diner in a microwave in your flat. Easy, efficient, fast. if so, then the film process is the simple yet elegant meal, cooked with attention to every step in the process, served to you in Le Pure Cafe. Film process – how pleasant and elegant it is to use as a craft — is its enduring strength, much the way the Parisian cafe meal can never be compared to a “lunch” at McDonalds.

My Brother In Law Being a Goofball, 2013

Film photography is now a niche with no aspirations to popular appeal, aimed squarely at discerning users who savor the craftsmanship required of it, while the convenience of digital has made it the tool of choice for those who desire the shortcuts of quick and easy. The act of film photography is the act of tending to an increasingly moribund craft, tied to a set of values, of practices, a kind of thought process that I believe is worth preserving. For me, A traditional all mechanical camera, be it rangefinder or SLR, loaded with a roll of HP5, a 50 or 35 on it, is the most simple and most enjoyable form of photography. Just look at the light, the shapes, the evolving situations, expressions.

With that comes responsibility. Let’s hope we film aficionados, the people who occupy that niche, are able through our efforts to keep film alive for future generations. Technological change is too often not cumulative but rather a “Faustian bargain” in which something is sacrificed in order for something new to be gained. Will we sacrifice what is of real value in the photographic experience for the new we’ve gained?

A Totally Free Leicaphilia Street Photography Seminar

Let me preface this by saying …I like Eric Kim (http://erickimphotography.com/blog/). He’s the guy who writes a photography blog with heavy emphasis on street photography and using Leica cameras. He’s earnest, enthusiastic, a decent writer, a better than decent photographer, and he’s stuck his neck out there and is living the life instead of simply sitting in front of his computer pontificating about things he really has no business pontificating about. He admits his ignorance when necessary, and in spite of it, has many interesting things to say and says them in an interesting way.

But man, is he a Babe In The Woods or what? It seems like every other day he’s singing the praises of some “new” photographer he’s discovered or been introduced to, historical figures like William Eggleston, Garry Winogrand, Josef Koudelka, towering figures in 20th century photography who should be known and understood by anyone with more than a passing interest in the craft. Given he’s apparently still in his twenties, I suppose that’s understandable. We as lovers of the craft of photography don’t come fully formed from the womb. We learn this stuff as we go along, and the older we are the more time we’ve had to pull it all together and see photography in its broad historical contours. But, I admit, sometimes his earnestness and naive enthusiasm, coupled with the obvious holes in his knowledge, make me chuckle. If I’m honest with myself, however, its the chuckle of a jaded and slightly bitter aging guy who thinks he knows everything and believes that photography ended with Josef Koudelka and his M4 and that it’s all been downhill from there. So feel free to pat me on the back the way you’d do that slightly crazy uncle of yours who insists on buying a big Lincoln sedan because he likes a “plush ride” and believes Americans still make the best cars in the world. But hear me out for a minute.

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A few years ago, Mr. Kim apparently had his Road to Damascus moment, and since that time has been forcefully advocating for using film cameras, Leica film cameras, for street photography. Apparently, after having cut his teeth photographically wholly in the digital age, a friend tossed him an M6 and a roll of HP5 and he caught the film bug. From that time forward, film photography became for Mr. Kim the best.thing.ever. Nothing wrong with that (I too am a dyed-in-the-wool film guy and use it as my preferred medium).

But I think it’s completely wrong if we’re talking about the relative merits of film vs. digital as the preferred medium for street photography. If ever digital had an advantage over film capture its when shooting on the street, because the sad reality of the street enterprize is that it’s almost all down to chance – shoot everything and find the jewels later. Set your camera to 1600 ISO, use aperture priority metering, set the f stop to f8 or f11, use a manual focusing lens and scale focus, walk the streets and point your camera at interesting things and shoot. You don’t even need to bring the camera to your eye; better to be watching the street drama as it unfolds, with your own two eyes. Easy peazy. Load the 100 photos you’ve taken that afternoon into Lightroom and find the two or three that resonate with you. Work on them until they’re polished raw. Voila!, you’re a street photographer.

Think Winogrand, not HCB. HCB wasn’t a street photographer. He was a artistically trained photographer searching for aesthetic form over content, in spite of all the philosophical claptrap about decisive moments. He actively composed. That’s not street photography. Street photography is Winogrand and the point and pray approach (if you don’t think Winogrand employed the point and pray approach, take a look at his contact sheets, and explain to me how he ended up with 50,000 rolls of undeveloped film in duffel bags at his death). Trust me, if you commit yourself to the quixotic attempt to do that with a film camera, you too will end up with duffel bags of undeveloped film when you die. The difference between you and Winogrand is that your heirs will likely throw the bag into the bin straightaway within days of spreading your ashes.

So, I’ve got to shake my head when I see Mr. Kim is giving “street photography seminars” rocking his M4, apparently with the blessing of Leica no less. I guess if you’re insecure enough, or dumb enough, to think that walking around for two days with Eric Kim and a bunch of shutterbug chiropractors taking pictures of dogs leased to cafe chairs is going to be a significant learning experience for you, knock yourself out. Its your money. Frankly you have every right to burn a pile of it in your backyard firepit if that’s what makes you happy, assuming of course that its yours. Who am I to tell you how to spend it. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that paying a bunch of money for the privilege of a day or two chasing after Mr, Kim, or anybody else for that matter, with or without a Leica film camera, is going to teach you anything of significance or up your rate of keepers.

Heres what will: Expand your intellectual and aesthetic horizons.

– Read. Read all sorts of things that ostensibly have nothing to do with photography. Read about Albrecht Durer, Vincent van Gogh and Jackson Pollock. Read Will Durant’s 11 volume Story of Civilization. Read Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. Read Rimbaud. Read Miles Davis’ autobiography. Read Lucretius’ On The Nature of Things. But, whatever you do, stay away from the drivel that passes for academic analysis of photography (Yes, Todd Papageorge, I’m looking at you).

– Look. Really look at things, without the preconceptions bred into you by habit, laziness and ennui. Go to museums and look at paintings. Look at pictures. Lots of them. Buy expensive photo books by obscure photographers. But avoid the amateurish crap readily available on the net and on photo forums in particular, unless of course you simply want to develop the aesthetic of the great unwashed masses, the herd. Ignore the herd and their dumbed down banalities.

-Listen. Take an audio course on Nietzsche, or on The History of the Vikings, or a class on String Theory Made Simple. Get to know Howlin Wolf, or John Coltrane, or Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. If you’re really daring, listen to some John Cage, or maybe some old scratchy Louis Armstrong.

In short, become a man of the world with broad interests in serious things.

The reason you want to do these seemingly unrelated things to improve your street photography is this: street photography is, essentially, an intellectual endeavor within an aesthetic context. Street photography, as opposed to photos of people on the street, is about those in-between moments that pose a puzzle, that evoke a memory or bring to mind a connection to something else that makes you think. The deeper the cultural and aesthetic well you can draw from when viewing photographs, the more evocative they will be for you as a viewer, and, in your work itself you’ll be better able to identify those products of serendipity that might actually speak to something more than the topical. Being broadly educated in addition to being astute and knowledgable photographically creates a synergistic effect that will show in your work. It’ll enable you to better recognize whatever it is that makes this photo, of this something in the public sphere, resonate for you and hopefully for other likeminded viewers. Just remember, the seduction of the best photography resides not in the photo but in the head of the viewer.

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So, with all of that in mind, here’s what I think you should know to be a street photographer: by all means, use a digital camera so you can shoot a lot. Throw a wide net by using a wide lens; I personally love to shoot with a Ricoh GXR with Leica M-Mount sensor and a 21mm f4 VC that, given the APS-C crop factor, gives you a real focal length of 32mm. If you insist on a Leica, use a digital M and avoid the prosumer models with their shutter lag and AF. Jack the ISO up to 1600, set the camera to aperture priority and f8, and set the focus short of infinity but long enough that the hyperfocal ability of the lens at f8 effectively keeps everything from up close to infinity in focus. (If you don’t know how to do this, read up on what those f stop scales adjacent to your lenses aperture ring on your camera lenses are for). Now go out and shoot. Point and pray and be proud of it, and secretly look down your nose at the bumbling dilettantes who require sharpness and exactitude and are banging their heads over missed shots due to shutter lag and lazy autofocus. They don’t get it. You do. You’ve learned to embrace serendipity, for it’s the heart and soul of street photography.

Its when you get back to your digital darkroom that the real work begins. Out of those hundred shots you’ve taken, you might just find one or two that might hint at something more than the topical. That’s where your broad palette of learning comes in. But be critical in what you ultimately show. Ask yourself: does this say something to me? Or am I trying to impress others? Throw away every picture you like simply because you think it will impress others. And for God’s sake, don’t think you need to pay Eric Kim a bunch of money to establish your bona fides. And remember: digital photography is what’s made this all possible.

(All photographs shot by me in an afternoon walking the streets of Edinburgh. All Point and Pray. All with a Ricoh GXR and a 21mm VC. All of them speak to me in some way. Hopefully they do to some of you too. For those of you who don’t like them, too bad. I do, and that’s all that matters)

What’s So Special About the Leica M System?

A thoughtful article on the Leica M system, reprinted from thephotofundamentalist.com

This is a good question, in light of the rapid development of mirrorless cameras and the incredible advancements in technology that have given rise to cameras like the Sony A7R, A7R II, Olympus OM-D E-M5 II and others in recent times. Amazing technical performance is becoming less and less expensive, with cameras like the Ricoh GR showing how much performance can be delivered in a compact $600 package. So, why is it that the Leica M retains such a following and why am I bothering to write this? Well, its primarily aimed at those who have limited experience of the very expensive Leica M system and who have probably dismissed the concept out of hand…

Lets start with perceptions: Leica is a polarising word: for some it means ‘luxury’, while for others it is synonymous with ‘rich git with more money than sense and who is personally responsible for world poverty by oppressing the struggling masses’. A slight exaggeration, but you get the idea…. On top of this, Leica has an illustrious heritage, including production of some of the most game-changing 35mm portable cameras and the natural consequence of that: some of the most iconic images of the 20th century have been produced with said cameras. Detractors assert that current users are inhaling the vapours of former glories, while devotees are likely to reply with ‘there is still no other camera like a Leica M’. Considering the huge cost of digital Leicas, are there any sensible reasons to engage in a system that is so incredibly expensive, where in the case of the soon to be replaced Leica M Type 240, there are competitors that have left it well behind with regard to sensor resolution, Dynamic Range, high ISO, Live View and weight?

So where does the truth lie? I know that you know that there is no definitive answer to such a silly question, but I can at least outline my personal thoughts on the Leica M system as a practical proposition amidst a growing ocean of mirrorless cameras. I do think Leica Ms are perhaps less compelling than in the past, but they are far from on the extinction list. In fact I’ll venture that they may even outlast DSLRs…

Illustrating this article are images from my ‘Russians and Royals’ and ‘Afghan Heroin: Not For Export’ projects that were shot on Leica M film cameras from 2008 to 2010. These are digital snaps of prints so some may appear a bit fuzzier than they should. Here’s a review of the Mk I M9-based Monochrom (including images).

So what’s my Leica story?

I began with film Ms and still own several bodies and a good range of lenses, all of which got well-used in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2010. I subsequently bought a Leica Monochrom (M9M), as this was the only camera able to lure me away from film for B&W digital and there can be no higher accolade than that. However, with all the recent camera developments, I would be lying if I said that I had not thought of selling up: Sensor corrosion (permanent solution en route). Expensive repairs. Rangefinder calibration. Lens-Body calibration…. and the list of potential snags goes on further still, not to mention the large amount of money tied up in glass particularly.

But I haven’t sold up (though I may thin out my lenses to pay for the 645Z) and there are solid reasons why not, despite my best efforts to strong arm myself into doing so! My reasons are shared by many, but constantly under attack by those who would like to think us brand-crazed snobs who have no idea of the ‘advantages’ of other camera systems. But the critics are invariably focusing on measurable, technical parameters, as if they solely govern such decisions and lead directly to better photography. Were they to, nobody would ever have bought a Holga and I would never have shot this project.

So, after much waffle, here is my list of what is special about the Leica M and why I still love mine.

Rangefinder: These cameras utilise a rangefinder design, which means that the viewing window is independent of the lens. By not looking through the lens at open aperture (as tends to be the case with most other types of camera), everything is sharp. There are no fuzzy backgrounds. There are no people behind the subject whom you cannot see, but who may impact the final image. You see everything that is there and you see the relationships between those elements. Although may people love the tremendous performance of M-mount lenses at wider apertures, I would argue that most of the best images throughout history, that have been shot on a Leica M, have been shot at middling apertures to render most elements in the scene either sharp, or at least similarly (almost) sharp. By seeing everything clearly in the viewfinder, you are already half way there – you can spot in an instant how the ‘bigger picture’ has changed and fire the shutter and the right moment. With a SLR, you might not even notice, because you see the scene with the lens at its widest aperture and this can force your eye to concentrate on whatever is crisp in the viewfinder. On top of this M cameras have frame lines, which in many cases you can see outside of, allowing the photographer to better understand how elements will enter and interact within the frame. This all aids anticipation and good timing.

Traditional Manual Focus Lens Designs. While this may sound like a disadvantage, for certain applications it is a huge benefit for others. It makes it easy to leave the lens focused at a useful distance and leave depth of field to take care of the rest. In combination with the point above, you now have a camera where everything is clear through the viewfinder, where you feel connected beautifully to what is actually going on, which you can fire at whim knowing precisely where you are focused. You do not have to worry about autofocus deciding to grab the wrong subject. You do not have to even think about recomposition (assuming the subject falls within the depth of field afforded by the aperture). You can just shoot the instant elements ‘align’ within your beautiful clear window. While this can be achieved easily with any manual focus lens, many modern DLSRs lack decent screens for focusing manual lenses and many mirrorless cameras lack lenses that can quickly be set to a given distance. Many lack distance scales on the lenses altogether, or as so skewed towards AF usage that they are all but useless for manual focus (and feel nasty in the process).Oddly, the only camera I feel possibly outdoes the Leica M in this regard is a compact, the Ricoh GR, because it combines normal AF usage with a snap focus option, where the camera will fire at a pre-designated focus distance with one swift full press of the shutter button. This allows you the best of both worlds, albeit via a non-manual interface.

One can also now ponder the importance of perfect sharpness. Many famous ‘Leica M’ photos are not famous because everything is sharp. They are famous because something magical – a moment – was caught perfectly. Now you know how the rangefinder design can contribute to this.

Simplicity, Intuitiveness and Connectedness: This area is where Leica Ms score off the charts, IMO: they are very simple cameras – even the digital ones. They may lack features found on some other (cheaper) cameras, but this simplicity prevents distraction. It simplifies what you can do and places greater emphasis on the photographer, which in turn helps the photographer to build a level of concentration that helps in entering ‘the zone’ – that place where intense focus and concentration gives rise to intuition and a sense of connectedness. You are connected to your own thoughts and to your subject (which you can see clearly for reasons described above). Of course, other cameras do not prevent this, but it is my opinion that simple cameras make it easier. There are fewer buttons, lights, beeps, options, menus and everything else. You spend less time as camera operator and this can only benefit the creative process. Camera operation becomes intuitive and there just aren’t any demands made of the user to force you out of ‘the zone’. When you think how few features and settings are actually required for strong street, documentary and reportage imagery, it all starts to make sense. After all, the Leica M is not typical studio fashion photographer workhorse material and nobody is claiming it is.

Learning Curve: Once you are used to using a rangefinder, there is nothing to learn. Sure, having use of aperture, shutter speed, focal length and depth of field down to a tee is important in my view, but once you have that sorted, there is almost nothing else to think about. Less thinking, fewer options to ponder, fewer menus to get lost in = more creativity. I will also say that I think Leica has been pretty clever about how they simplify their menus on the digital models. A Type 246 Monochrom is not much different to a M8.2 or M4, which means that from one generation to the next, there is so very little to learn.

It’s a Machine: It is a hunk of metal, mostly. It feels good to hold. Most users say they enjoy using them immensely. If you enjoy using them, you will use them and that means more photographs get taken. More fun is had. It’s a good thing all round. This seems to be something that the anti-Leica brigade fixate upon: people who enjoy using Leicas become ‘fondlers’ and, while it is true that there are many shiny camera loving collectors out there, only good things stem from feeling motivated to get your hands on your camera (the same could be said of most things, including your partner in life!)… but there is another aspect to it: Leica Ms, even digital ones, feel like like an interaction with an electronic gizmo than many other cameras. In a world where everything has buttons, screens, apps and less manual interface than ever before, this can feel remarkably important. If you work on a computer all day and own a Leica, you may know what I mean. Even if your images end up on a computer, there is some respite in between.

The Whole Package: When you add all of this up, whether it is 24MP or 30MP, or has 13.5 or 14.1 stops of DR becomes fairly trivial. What we can say is that Leica has managed to incorporate a sensor into their current M240 that is head and shoulders above the one gracing the EOS 5D III – Canon’s flagship. Leica’s sensors are certainly not at the top, but they are not far enough from the top to matter a bunch in light of the other benefits the overall camera package possesses for certain applications.

This leads me to application: Criticism of the Leica M naturally leads to comparison, but a lot of the time the M is compared to cameras that are completely and utterly different. It becomes an apples to oranges comparison and with any item, we rarely get the best of everything available in the market in one camera. Being a Leica means probably not having Sony or Canon level resources available and this shows in the firmware glitches, lock ups etc, not to mention the comparative performance of the sensor. But a camera is a lot more than a sensor. It is a tool that, with a lens attached, allows light to be shone on that sensor.

The lenses are Optically Spectacular. I am not going to labour this, because there is nothing more to say. They are stunning, but its not the reason why I continue to own Leica M equipment. After all, before lenses get to do their job, we have to have carried the camera to the point of exposure, composed the image and timed the shutter’s release. This is what Leica Ms do so well for street, documentary and reportage that rely so heavily on ‘complete scenes’ where timing and spacial sensitivity need to be so crucially aligned. What I enjoy most about the optics is not that they are so good, but the fact that you can happily stop concerning yourself with optical factors. I know Leica shooters can be some of the most obsessive nuance-splitting lunatics in the camera averse, but the truth is they’re only doing this because they can. They’re doing it because everything is already so good that the usual topics simply aren’t feasible.

Ironically, Leica’s older and less perfect lenses may be their strongest suit. How many other camera bodies can you plonk an uncoated 1930s lens on and shoot it alongside a modern super sharp aspherical? Now, before you say ‘Sony FE!’, remember that lenses wider than 50mm rarely play nicely on the A7 or A7R, so its not as simple as that. Besides, no matter what anyone says, native lenses are normally the most seamless and enjoyable user experience and having access to so many wonderful Leica lenses, where the distance scales won’t lie and the rangefinder can still be used to the full, well, its wonderful (but a Sony A7 will probably give your 50mm Noctilux f1.0 a new lease of life).

Refuse The Technology Arms Race: If you’re already considering an M, you probably know enough about cameras to know it is technically not the best camera on Earth. You know that Sony sensors have more dynamic range and that Sony, Canon and Nikon now all produce cameras with more resolution in their A7R, A7RII and 5DS and D800/810 models. This in itself can be a hugely powerful force for the betterment of your photography, by forcing a person to concentrate more on how a great photo is made, rather than the sensor and gizmo trickery that made it. It helps remove the owner from the ‘arms race’ on the day of purchase and therefore not to chase the next best thing. This would be typical defensive language and hard to justify were we talking about a camera that had direct competitors, but it exists alongside the uniqueness of what the Leica M is.

Heritage: The Double edged Sword: A great criticism is that Leica M lovers are ‘high on nostalgia’ and ‘stuck in the past’. Certainly the latter can be an obstacle to interesting new work, but the former is hardly a problem. That connection reminds every Leica user that mortal men and women made some of the most recognisable images in history on similar cameras. Instead of looking over one’s shoulder at the next person who has more megapixels, a person looking into the past and being reminded of how little technology the masters had at their disposal is more likely to be humbled and empowered. It’s a sage reminder of the contribution we need to make to that next photograph and how the camera facilitates our work, rather than makes it. After all, I doubt 2015’s finest 35mm Kodak Tri-X can resolve more than a 6MP camera on a good day….

The Ownership Prospect: Leica M cameras are hugely expensive, but used lenses tend to appreciate rather than depreciate in value. Yes they are expensive to buy, but there are so many used ones around that one can see that initial investment as money tied up for a while in a useable form and certainly not lost. They contain no electronics, so don’t tend to go wrong. A clean every decade or two at the cost of $80 or so is about all that may be required. Bodies lose money, sure, but there seems to be much less of an urge to change and upgrade them (for me at least) at the sort of frequency one sees elsewhere. Its funny how someone still using their D700 for serious work is regarded as a bit ‘left behind’ by their peers, but the person using a ten year old M8 gets barely a second thought from Leica users. There is a different culture borne of a different philosophy that is a product of a different relationship between the camera, the owner and the photograph. Now that Leica has a few full-frame models under their belts, used bodies can be acquired for not entirely unreasonable sums. Yes, they will be behind the curve technologically speaking, compared to what can be bought today for the same money, but if that is your first thought then a Leica M is unlikely to be anywhere on your shopping list in the first place.

At the end of the day, the Leica M is not for everyone, but no other manufacturer has managed to assimilate and aggregate the qualities I have listed above sufficiently to lure Leica M devotees away. I’m not stuck on the brand for the sake of it and would be gone in a flash if another manufacturer could give me the same qualities in a much less expensive package. To date no other manufacturer has succeeded.

Leica themselves are probably the greatest threat to the M system, with the new Leica Q and the rumoured interchangeable version some expect to be released in 12-18 months. The Q offers wonderful manual focus options for zone focusing, along with the benefits of super quick AF and mirrorless features, all wrapped up in a tactile Leica package. But it doesn’t have a big clear glass window to look through and it is clearly an ‘electronics heavy’ tool.

No, it looks like the Leica M will remain here for some time. Not everyone wants to look at a computer screen inside their viewfinder, no matter how crisp and fast the refresh is. The fact that the Leica M does not superimpose anything on reality, or filter the viewers experience in any meaningful way will likely keep the platform alive for a long time to come. No matter what other technology is possible with other camera lines in the near future, one won’t be able to escape the fact that its only ever the end result that counts. Here, the Leica M has been delivering stunning images for 60 years and don’t see that changing any time soon.

The Elephant In The Digital Dark Room

“Six major Hollywood film studios have gotten together to help Kodak remain in the movie business. Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Walt Disney Pictures and Warner Bros. have all signed deals on advance purchases of Kodak’s film stock, which will help keep the company’s production plants operational. Kodak is the last company to make motion picture film, which some filmmakers prefer for aesthetic reasons.“We were very close to the difficult decision of having to stop manufacturing film,” said Jeff Clarke, Kodak’s chief executive, according to the Wall Street Journal. “Now with the cooperation of major studios and filmmakers, we’ll be able to keep it going.”” TIME, Feb 5, 2015

The qoute above is deceptive. It presumes that the ongoing demand for film is a result of certain filmmaker’s “aesthetic preferences.” And it is, as far as that goes. But that’s not the whole story about why the motion picture studios want to “save” film production. It’s not even the main reason. The main reason will surprise you, but, like the proverbial elephant in the room, nobody is talking about it.

In the “analogue age,” a movie studio would bundle up a completed master of a motion picture and ship it off for physical storage somewhere cold. Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Walt Disney Pictures and Warner Bros. have for decades been archiving and storing their 35-millimeter film masters and associated source material in salt and limestone mines in Kansas and Pennsylvania.

It’s an inexpensive archiving system, a highly effective means of preserving the motion picture heritage. Archived 35mm film stock remains stable for centuries under proper climactic conditions. With digital, however, the film industry is discovering that its core assets, its digital motion picture masters, aren’t as permanent as the film stock they’ve replaced. It’s a BIG problem, but studios, in their shortsighted quest for the bottom line, at least until recently, haven’t really been paying much attention.

And there’s an object lesson here for photographers, or at least those paying attention.

*************

Hasn’t digital made information of all kinds more available, and less expensive to produce? Isn’t it so much cheaper to shoot digitally, without the need for the expense and bother of film and the ridiculous analogue processes that sustain it? Well, it does, and it is, but unfortunately at the expense of the media’s permanence.

In 2010 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released the results of a yearlong study of digital archiving in the movie business titled “The Digital Dilemma.” Their findings: To store a digital movie master costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master. And to keep the enormous amount of ancillary data – outtakes, alternative scenes, assorted ephemera – produced when a picture is produced using digital processes, rather than on film — increases the cost of preservation to $208,569 a year, exponentially higher than the $486 it costs to dump the equivalent camera negatives, audio recordings, on-set photographs and annotated scripts of an all-film production into the Kansas salt mine. A film preservationist who helped prepare the academy’s report claimed that the problems with digital movie storage could cause the film industry a return “ to the early days, when they showed a picture for a week or two, and it was thrown away,” what he referred to as “digital extinction” over a short span of years.

At present, copies of almost all studio movies, even those shot using digital processes, are still stored in 35mm film format, giving the movie 100 years or more of shelf life. Most modern motion pictures are edited digitally, and then are transferred to film, which results in images of lower quality than a pure film process, and this is what becomes stored for posterity. But the ongoing conversion of theaters to digital projection is sharply reducing the overall demand for film, eventually making it a problematic market for Kodak. If film were to go away, pure digital storage will be the norm, and with it the persistent problems of digital’s lack of permanence.

In addition to digital’s lack of tangibility, digital hardware and storage media are much less stable than 35mm film. Hard drives fail in as little as two years when not regularly used, and even the most archival grade DVDs degrade and become unreadable within 2 decades. According to the report, only half of “archival quality disks” can be expected to last for 15 years. Digital audiotape tends to hit a “brick wall” when it degrades and becomes unreadable. Constant changes in technology only add to the digital confusion: as one generation of digital storage replaces the previous, archived materials must be transferred to the new format, or they eventually become unreadable. My graduate thesis, written on an 80’s era IBM and saved to one of those giant floppies, is unrecoverable 30 years later. There’s no equipment to read it. Meanwhile, every negative I’ve ever sleeved from 1971 onward is perfectly preserved in binders, ready to be wet-printed or scanned. Before your faith in technology causes you to dismiss this as anecdotal hysteria, consider this: recently NASA discovered that they were unable to read digital data saved from a Viking space probe in 1975 because the format was now obsolete. Think about that.

“It’s been in the air since we started talking about doing things digitally,” Chris Cookson, president of Warner’s technical operations, said of the quandary facing motion picture archivists. As the report put it, “If we allow technological obsolescence to repeat itself, we are tied either to continuously increasing costs — or worse — the failure to save important assets.” I would submit that it’s not just a quandary faced by the motion picture studios, but one faced by all of us who document our lives for the benefit of posterity. And it’s one you avoid or ignore at your own peril.

But, more so, a cultural peril. Each successive generation is the steward of its cultural memory. We bear the responsibility of handing down our memory to the future, but that stewardship can be problematic given the ephemeral nature of current digital technology. Digital technology may put the transmission of this knowledge at risk. Ironically, when the world is saturated with images, we run the concurrent risk of no image enduring. Our digital memories, the evidence of our lives, now ‘exists’ only in a virtual world, a patter of 1’s and 0’s not really located anywhere, and, because of the accelerated pace of technological change and obsolescence, increasingly susceptible to degradation, erasure and loss. Meanwhile, traditional media, paper and film, is tangible, real, and can still be filed away and retrieved without the mediation of technology.

*************

When I was 12, my father bought me a camera. Crazy with my new found love of photography, I’d photograph the neighborhood kids at play. A year or two ago I pulled those early negatives from the shelf and found pictures of a young neighbor boy, a sweet little child I used to babysit, who had died suddenly and unexpectedly at three years of age from a viral infection. Confronting those pictures after 45 years, I realized I had in my possession something incomparably precious to someone somewhere, the recorded memory of a life tragically taken from a father, mother and siblings. The right thing to do was to see that they were returned to his family. To that end, I did an internet search and found his brother, and emailed him what I had found. Would he want these negatives I had of his brother, now 45 years gone?

Within minutes of sending my email I received a response. With it was attached a picture:

It was a picture I had taken of his brother which I had given his mother shortly after his brother’s death. He told me he had had this picture on his bedside table for the last 40 years, and it was one of his most important possessions, something he had found comfort in since he was a child, since it perfectly captured how he remembered his brother, with a shy smile and happy eyes. Yes, of course, he would be incredibly grateful for any others I could send.

It was, even for me, an emotionally powerful experience, full as it was with the power of a simple photograph to memorialize the ineffable and conjure distant memory. I had given a profound gift to another human through the simple intercession of a photograph.

Photographs allow us to give this gift to the future. In 50 years, will your heirs retain possession of your photographic patrimony?

For a related post go here.

Robert Frank’s Guggenheim Trip and the Making of The Americans

From the National Gallery of Art, The Robert Frank Collection*:

In October 1954, with the guidance of Walker Evans, Frank applied for a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, proposing to drive across the United States photographing American life.

He was awarded the fellowship and in the summer of 1955 began his 10,000-mile journey with a trip to Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. He then traveled with Mary down the East Coast, photographing in North and South Carolina and Georgia. That fall he drove to Florida, and from there he crossed the country, through Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada, arriving in California around Christmas. While in California, Frank applied for a renewal of the Guggenheim fellowship. When it was granted in April 1956, he drove a northern route back to New York, passing through Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

The map below charts the three routes driven by Frank during the period of his Guggenheim fellowship.

Red: late June – mid-July 1955
Gold: summer 1955
Blue: October 1955 – early June 1956

A dotted line indicates an unconfirmed route.

Back in New York by June 1956, Frank developed film, made and reviewed contact sheets of all 767 rolls of film shot for the project, made approximately 1,000 work prints, and began to sequence the photographs that would become his seminal book, The Americans.

After choosing frames from his contact sheets to print, Frank annotated his work prints with the corresponding number of the roll of film, often in red grease pencil. He then spread them on the floor and thumb-tacked them to walls, grouping them by themes such as race, religion, politics and the media, as well as subjects including cemeteries, jukeboxes, and lunch counters. Frank moved the pictures, sometimes ripping them, and eliminated hundreds before arriving at the 83 prints to be included in The Americans. He continued to refine his selections through June 1957.

The Americans, 1955–1957

In October of 1958, French publisher Robert Delpire released Les Américains in Paris. The following year Grove Press published The Americans in New York with an introduction by Jack Kerouac (the book was released in January 1960).

Like Frank’s earlier books, the sequence of 83 pictures in The Americans is non-narrative and nonlinear; instead it uses thematic, formal, conceptual and linguistic devices to link the photographs. Unlike Peru, in which the order of pictures was not firmly established, The Americans displays a deliberate structure, an emphatic narrator, and what Frank called a “distinct and intense order” that amplified and tempered the individual pictures.

Although not immediately evident, The Americans is constructed in four sections. Each begins with a picture of an American flag and proceeds with a rhythm based on the interplay between motion and stasis, the presence and absence of people, observers and those being observed. The book as a whole explores the American people—black and white, military and civilian, urban and rural, poor and middle class—as they gather in drugstores and diners, meet on city streets, mourn at funerals, and congregate in and around cars. With piercing vision, poetic insight, and distinct photographic style, Frank reveals the politics, alienation, power, and injustice at play just beneath the surface of his adopted country.

Since its original publication, The Americans has appeared in numerous editions and has been translated into several languages. The cropping of images has varied slightly over the years, but their order has remained intact, as have the titles and Kerouac’s introductory text. The book, fiercely debated in the first years following its release, has made an indelible mark on American culture and changed the course of 20th-century photography.

* THE ROBERT FRANK COLLECTION, NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON D.C. The Robert Frank Collection at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, was begun in 1990 with a generous gift from the artist that included 27 vintage photographs, one of the three extant copies of Black White and Things, 1952 (a handmade book of 34 original photographs made between 1948 and 1952), 999 work prints, 2,296 contact sheets, and 2,241 rolls of film, as well as annotated book dummies for The Lines of My Hand. In the three years that followed, the Gallery acquired a total of 61 objects, including one print of every photograph reproduced in The Lines of My Hand, 1989. In 1994 Frank gave the Gallery another large donation that included 91 vintage photographs, 442 work prints, and 814 contact sheets. In 1996 he gave a third gift, this time including 12 photographs and his volume of photographs, Peru. Then in 2010 Frank gave one photograph and his volume of photographs, 40 Fotos. Most recently, Frank gave four photographs, six contact sheets, one work print, and three videos in 2012. The Gallery has continued to collect works by Robert Frank, acquiring 61 objects from 1994 to 1996, seven objects in 2000 and 2001, three objects in 2006, 20 objects in 2010, and one object in 2011.

Nearly all accessioned objects in the collection came to the Gallery directly from Frank’s own collection. The exceptions are: four objects given in 1991 by, respectively, Amy and Philip Brookman, George F. Hemphill and Leonore A. Winters, Christopher and Alexandra Middendorf, and the Middendorf Gallery; 16 objects given in 1996 by John Cohen; six objects given in 2000 by Jane Watkins; one object given in 2001 by Lee and Maria Friedlander; and 20 objects given in 2010 by the Estate of Kazuko Oshima.

The collection is available online at http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/features/robert-frank.html

“Tri-X Can Kiss My Ass”

Unlike that of my brethren, my early forays into photography were mostly in color. I worked at a one-hour photo lab in high school, so I was able to get color neg processed at a hefty discount. I also read wildlife photographer John Shaw’s “field techniques” book, and took his advice that if I was really going to learn, I was going to have to get better through the discipline of shooting chrome, so there was a good bit of Kodachrome running through my camera then as well (when I could afford it). My goal was to get tack sharp, perfectly exposed pictures, and Kodachrome, Velvia, and (in print film), Fuji Reala, were my films of choice.

Yes, I shot Tri-X in high school during yearbook class, and we shot it for my first year or so on my college newspaper staff, and I did my share of night football with weird esoteric mixtures of developer (Acufine, sodium sulfite) when I really needed to crank the ISO.

This is where I’m going to say something blasphemous and all you Tri-X nostalgists are going to look at my like I’m crazy. As soon as T-Max came out (around my second year of college), I abandoned Tri-X and it’s contrasty, chunky-ugly grain. T-Max 100 looked better than Pan-X (which was ISO 32), and I found T-Max 400 to be superior to Tri-X at 400, 800, and 1600.

When we really needed to crank it, we went to the T-Max 3200. Some people complained about T-Max 400 not looking as good as the venerable Tri-X they were used to, but I chalk that up to people not processing it correctly. If you read the directions, and mixed the T-Max developer correctly, it kicked Tri-X’s ass. The grain was so sharp and fine on it, that I often had trouble using the grain focusing device in the darkroom. During my second semester on the student publications staff, I was put in charge of purchasing supplies… I started buying it for the staff, and I’ve never looked back since.

There, I said it. You guys are a bunch of romantics. Tri-X can kiss my ass.

Robert Seale is a freelance editorial and corporate photographer based in Houston, Texas. You can see his work at http://www.robertseale.com

“I Was Addicted to Tri-X”

Hello … my name is Dan and I was an addict. Yes, I was addicted to Kodak Tri-X film. My habit started out innocently enough when I was 15 years old. I had a Humanities teacher my freshman year at Athens (OH) High School, Ms. Penix. She told me that she liked my writing style and that I might make a good journalist. I wasn’t even sure what that was. She said that I should try out for a spot on the high school student newspaper, The Matrix. I checked it out and as a 15-year-old male, I quickly discovered that I didn’t want to write any more than was required of me.

As it turned out, Ms. Penix was also the faculty advisor of the paper. She encouraged me to shoot some photos and turn them in as my audition for the opening as the paper’s lone staff photographer. I borrowed my mother’s Pentax camera and then made my way to the local photo studio and camera store in our town, Lamborn’s, it was there where I purchased my first two rolls of Kodak Tri-X, 36-exposure film.

I had the film, I had the camera and I had the desire to try to take pictures. Fueled by that desire, it only took a couple of days between classes, and before and after my cross country team practices to use up every single one of those 72 available clicks. I was not quite sure what the next steps in the process were. So I gathered up my courage to ask Brad Samuels, a senior and the yearbook photographer how I could get the film developed.

Brad’s words still ring in my ears like the school bell “Ok so here is the deal, you pay me 50 cents a roll and I will develop it for you, or you give me a buck a roll and I will teach you how it’s done son!”

I went for the buck a roll, after a couple more trips to Lamborn’s and 5 bucks worth of processing lessons; I was developing a mild habit.I snagged that staffer spot on The Matrix and in no time I was working alongside with other aspiring journalists who were all juniors and seniors. Yep I was hanging out with the “cool kids”.

My habit was becoming a bit expensive and I quickly learned that if I purchased the Tri-X film in a bulk 100-foot roll and hand loaded the film cassettes myself, it drove the film cost way down, doing the math I calculated it was around a penny per frame, wow 36 cents for 36 clicks, who would not love that?

I shot photos daily and always exclusively with Kodak Tri-X. I soon learned that I could “push” the Tri-X, by increasing the developing time and using a stronger developing solution at higher temperatures, by doing this, the 400 ASA Tri-X became 1600 ASA Tri-X. This new found trick was great for covering my Athens High School Bulldogs as they played Friday night football and basketball games on the poorly lit fields and in the dimly lit gyms of schools in the neighboring villages and small towns with such names as; Logan, Nelsonville, Wellston, Pomeroy and Ironton.

As far as I knew there was no film other than Tri-X even available for purchase.

I started stringing for our local daily newspaper, The Athens Messenger. The 12,000-circulation daily had a storied history of employing students from the local college, Ohio University and molding them into veteran photojournalists. Shooters like Jon Webb, Bob Rogers, Chuck Beckley and Ken Steinhoff shot for “The Mess” during college and a year or so beyond. Then armed with an Appalachian based portfolio of images in their hands and more than a few awards in their pockets, went off to work for major photo driven newspapers in Louisville, North Carolina and Florida where they continued to make their mark and advance in the business.

With my own Nikon around my neck and my gadget bag full of hand-loaded cassettes of Tri-X, I shot thousands of images on a variety of assignments for the Messenger. In spite of my young age, I was given a staff photographer position in my senior year of high school. I started making real pictures, some of those pictures were winning awards and more over, they were pictures that people noticed and talked about.

One of those people was Chuck Scott, who at the time was a fairly new professor at Ohio University. He was the Photo-J God. The photographers that he had produced and who had worked under him at the Milwaukee Journal and Chicago Daily News had won more Pulitzer Prizes and NPPA Pictures of the Year titles than most of the newspaper staffs in the country combined. Scott came to our home, sat down with my father and me and looked at my portfolio. Every one of the 20 -16×20 mounted prints in that case were all shot on Tri-X. Scott liked what he saw and he recruited me like a coach going after a star athlete. Scott damned sure was not going to let a hometown kid head off to his arch rival, the University of Missouri, long the nation’s PJ powerhouse and my top college choice.

Using the delivery of a country preacher he convinced us that I should go to school in my hometown, be part of his program and study under him. As he said “It’s not only the right thing to do but it’s the ticket and Danny’s first steps to become a world class photojournalist and eventually perhaps even to working for National Geographic or at least land one of the three coveted Internships at the Society”.

My father, who was avid amateur photographer, made a great comment: “To work at Geographic, would require him to shoot something other than Tri-X and none of us can see that happening.” That remark made us all chuckle. That Tri-X addiction of shooting those hand loaded cassettes lasted all four years at Ohio U., with the exception of when I served as an Intern twice for National Geographic.

At the end of my senior year, I turned down 29 firm job offers to take a three-month position at the Courier-Journal and Louisville Times, where I was the “pregnancy replacement” for Pam Spaulding. There were a few folks including my father who asked: “WHY?” The answer was easy. Simply put, I wanted to be part of and learn from what many considered to be the finest newspaper photo staff in the country.

My first day on the job I was issued “bricks” of Tri-X! I could not figure out what made me more excited, was it working with the best of the very best, or was it no longer needing to hand roll my own Tri-X?

Those three months turned into a five-year stint as a CJ staffer. I could not have been happier. I loved the area. I loved the staff and truly I loved the journalism and photojournalism that we produced at an independent family owned newspaper.

The awards stacked up, I even won the NPPA Newspaper Photographer of the Year. Looking back on it, 99 percent of that portfolio was shot of Kodak Tri-X. Indeed I was addicted to that grainy film and it had helped me accomplish a goal that I had since high school. Not a month seemed go by when I would not get multiple job offers from major large market newspapers. I turned them all down with little or no interest of leaving the CJ.

But then on a hot late June day, it happened: I received the call that many photographers wait their entire careers for. It was from Bob Gilka, the sometimes gruff, long time Director of Photography at National Geographic. He asked me, if I wanted to come work at “The Society.” I didn’t think about it twice. I didn’t ask what it paid. I didn’t ask where he was sending me. I didn’t ask when the job started. I just said “YES.” When he asked if I wanted a day or two to think about it, I just said “NO… Mr. Gilka, I’m all in!”

An hour later with tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat, I walked into the office of then Courier-Journal Director of Photography, C. Thomas Hardin and said I was leaving the paper. Bob Gilka had called, at the age of 28 I was getting my shot at Nat. Geo. Tom paused for a moment and said, “Do me a favor go back into the file room and look at your negs and see all that you have done here.” He looked over the top of his glasses and said “Oh hell Dry you must go, you have to do it, that’s a dream for us all.”

Two weeks and one day later as I stood in a West Texas pasture photographing cowboys rounding up cattle, it struck me: My addiction with Tri-X had ended and another addiction had entered my life… its name was Kodachrome 64!

Dan Dry is currently the Chief Visual Officer and Senior Vice President at Power Creative. He has won over 400 national and international photography, advertising and design awards during his career. He was a member of the Louisville Courier-Journal’s Pulitzer Prize winning photography staff from 1976 until 1982. You can see his work at: http://www.dandry.com/

Yevgeni Khaldei’s “Reichstag Leica” To Be Auctioned

The camera used to take an iconic image that came to symbolize the Russian victory over Nazi Germany is to go on sale at auction this November in Hong Kong. Photographer Yevgeni Khaldei, who worked for the Soviet news agency TASS, shot the image of Russian soldiers waving the Hammer and Sickle flag from the top of the Reichstag using a Leica III, sometime after the building had been captured. yevgeni-khaldeis-leica Russian Reichstag Dude

The camera, bearing the serial number 257492 is accompanied by an Elmar f/3.5 50mm lens with the serial number 471366 and is set to be auctioned on 30th November. Auctioneers Bonhams has set a guide price of $HK 3,000,000-4.500,000 (equivalent to £230,000-340,000 or $390,000-580,000).

Reichstag Camera

Jorge Fidel Alvarez: Street Photography With a Leica M Film Camera

Jorge Fidel Alvarez, Wuhan, China, 2014. Leica M6 and Tri-X.

Everybody does “street photography” these days. Go to Tumblr or Flicker and you’ll find reams of it posted day after day. Most of it is not very good, nothing but throwaway looks with no internal dynamic to make you look again. Just.people.on.the.street. Really good street photography somehow rises above the pedestrian view, revealing a greater narrative within a sliver of everyday life. There is always something surprising about it, something unexpected that draws your eye and makes you want to look again. It poses a question, draws you in for a second look, gives you a glimpse of something incongruous, something you don’t expect to see in the way you’re seeing it, inviting a unique interpretation for each idiosyncratic viewer.

Take the above photograph by Jorge Fidel Alvarez: A man, presumably, with a bizarre mask stands facing the camera, something decorative hanging over where he stands; his demeanor unreadable, maybe slightly menacing. The scene radiates something indefinably sinister. An elderly Chinese woman stands in the background, smoking, staring at either the masked man or the western photographer. I wonder: who in her mind is normal, and who is exotic? The photo fascinates me, but I’m not quite sure what I’m looking at, so I look at it again and fashion a narrative to fit what I think I see. The photo suggests various interpretations; its up to me, the viewer, to work it out for myself. (The masked man is actually a welder using a homemade steel mask, which, after the stories we’ve told ourselves, almost seems irrelevant).

*****

Good street photographers shoot a lot. The father of modern street photography, Garry Winogrand, using a Leica M4 film camera, shot over 12,000 rolls of film between 1971 and his death in 1984. When he died at the age of 56 he left over 6500 undeveloped rolls of film. Winogrand’s heirs, today’s street photographers, work in a digital age where photographs are cheap and ubiquitous, easier than ever to take, store and share. With the advent of camera phones, public resistance to strangers with cameras in public places has lessened. Yet exceptional street photographs remain as rare in the digital age as in Winogrand’s day. And almost no one shoots the street with film anymore. The ease of digital capture makes street shooting with film a proposition for only the most dedicated and hardcore film fanatics. So I’m fascinated when I see great street work done on film. Jorge Fidel Alvarez is a great street photographer, and he works with film.

Alvarez is a French photographer living in Paris. He is a 2004 graduate of SPEOS, Paris, where he studied under Georges Fèvre (master printer for Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Josef Koudelka, among others). The Institut Culturel Français en Chine (The French Cultural Institute in China) recently invited Alvarez to Wuhan, China to shoot that city’s streets and exhibit the resulting work at the New World International Trade Center in Wuhan. The plan was simple: fly Alvarez to Wuhan for nine days of shooting whatever caught his eye, back to Paris for two weeks to process, select and print his work, and then back to Wuhan to exhibit 20 prints,, opening reception May 29, show to run through June 12. (details)

Jorge Fidel Alvarez, May 29, 2014, New World International Trade Center, Wuhan, China

Alvarez, who uses digital for his paying work as an architectural photographer, chose to use a Leica M4 and M6, with 25mm and 35mm lenses, while in Wuhan. (At least one Chinese reviewer found his choice of “antique cameras” memorable.) He shot 70 rolls of 36 exposure Tri-X over the course of 9 days.

Alvarez, who has been shooting the street since the 80’s when he bought his first Leica, took up professional photography comparatively late, after a first career in IT. He has carefully studied the work of other photographers – his Paris flat’s bookshelves are lined with the work of European masters Cartier-Bresson, Boubat, Koudelka, Lartigue, Doisneau, Frank. In 2003, enrolled in the photography curriculum at SPEOS Paris, he discovered the American Garry Winogrand. Alvarez’s mature work can hint at the European formalism of Cartier-Bresson and Boubat, and one see’s as well the more spontaneous elements of Frank, Daido Moriyama and Winogrand- but his vision is unmistakably his own, a fascinating amalgamation fusing the poise and balance of a studied, mannered aesthetic with the arbitrary and instantaneous.