Salt
I recently saw a 2009 documentary movie called Salt about a photographer’s work in the Australian desert. This should not be confused with the 2010 film of the same name, which is a completely different thing.
Salt is a documentary about Australian film Murray Fredericks and his annual pilgrimage to Lake Eyre in the state of South Australia. Lake Eyre is the Australia’s largest lake, but it’s typically mostly dry. Angus rides a specially built bicycle across the lake bed and camps on the lake bed, often for several weeks. During that time he uses view cameras to photograph the seemingly infinite landscape on the lake. It’s fascinating to see how different the “empty” landscape appears at different times of the day and in different seasons. Given the conditions he must endure, his work is truly a labor of love.
The movie is definitely worth watching if you’re into landscape photography and interesting concepts in art photography projects.
For more information, visit the website for the documentary.
A look at Ansel Adams’ photography and music
I came across a very interesting 1958 documentary video about Ansel Adams. As well as showing Adams at work, it also showed him in his home, and playing the piano. In fact the music in the video is performed by Adams. Ansel Adams was training to be a concert pianist when he realized that photography was his calling. Clearly his music remained important to him and the artistic discipline he acquired through learning piano is reflected in his photography.
It’s an interesting look at one of the greatest photographers and it’s a treat to see footage of him working, even if it’s just for a few minutes.
(Credit: I came across this video on a blog page titled Rediscovered Ansel Adams video shows rare footage of the master photographer at work by Steve Meltzer on imaging-resource.com).
Printing is part of photography too
I think that printing as part of photography is often neglected compared with the actual composition and taking of the photograph.
Recently, I have been reading a book about Australian photographer Olive Cotton. Cotton was very skilled in her use of light, and I recently posted an example of her work. The book described how Cotton in her later years spent two days each week at her dark room printing old and new negatives.*
In describing how Cotton took advantage of her later years (after she had stopped taking clients) to print negatives, the book makes an interesting observation:
“But photography offers a generous deferment to those who, for whatever reason, need time to unite the two component parts of taking the negative and making the print”
With digital photography, are we too often forgetting the second component part of photography … or at best, outsourcing it? It is perhaps ironic that digital photography has made the printing process easier and much faster, and yet the printing aspect of photography is often neglected.
Ansel Adams, who trained as a concert pianist, before embarking on a photography career, likened the taking of a negative to composing a piece of music, and the printing he likened to a performance of the music. Within certain constraints set by the composition, each performance of the music can vary.
The printing part of photographic art can be tedious, but it is tremendously rewarding and should not be neglected by photographers.
* Source: “Olive Cotton Photographer”, National Library of Australia, 1995, p1.
Ernst Haas: Color, motion, and creativity
I love the work of Ernst Haas. He was a pioneer of color in photography often combined with experimental techniques.
Haas was born to artistic parents in Vienna, Austria in 1921, and a student he became a skilled painter. His father was a keen amateur photographer, but Ernst had no interest in photography until after his father’s death. He began to use his father’s darkroom to print negatives of family photographs, and his interest in photography quickly grew.
Haas moved to the United States in 1951 and began experimenting with Kodachrome color film. His work was published in many notable magazines. His photo essay on New York City published in Life magazine in 1953 was his first major color essay, and also Life’s first large-scale color essay.
Saul Leiter: Color, reflections, and transparency
This second article on color photographers looks at the work of Saul Leiter. His color urban landscape work in New York in the 1950s is truly remarkable for its composition and for his early use of color at a time when black-and-white was considered the only medium for artistic photography.
Leiter was born in December 1923 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Leiter’s father was a Talmudic scholar, and he also studied to become a rabbi. Unhappy in Pittsburgh, he moved to New York to become an artist. Initially focused on painting, he became drawn to photography. Edward Steichen included some of Leiter’s early black-and-white photographs in an exhibition titled “Always the Stranger” at the New York Museum of Modern Art. Leiter recalled that his images were just tacked to the walls, and not beautifully framed as images are exhibited now.
Paul Outerbridge: Pioneer of color
This is the first in a series of five posts about some early color photographers. All five photographers in this series were working and exhibiting in color before the 1970s. Before the 1970s, color was considered the realm of commercial photography and snapshots, but as an art form, black-and-white was considered the only appropriate medium. I intend writing these articles chronologically, starting with American photographer, Paul Everard Outerbridge Jr.
Outerbridge lived from 1896 to 1958, and as a teenager, he worked as an artist and illustrator, including as a set designer. He began photography while in the U.S. Army, and then enrolled in the Clarence H. White School of Photography at Colombia University in New York in 1921. Clearly he was a quick learner, and within a year of commencing his study he had been published in Vanity Fair magazine. He and his wife moved to Paris in 1924 where he became friends with photographers such as Edward Steichen, Man Ray, and Berenice Abbot, and was socializing with artists such as Pablo Picasso, Marcel DuChamp, and composer Igor Stravinsky.
Outerbridge began experimenting with color in the late 1920s, and mastered a complex and expensive color process known as the “tri-color Carbro” subtractive process. In the 1930s, he estimated that each print cost $150 and took nine hours to process. His perfectionism made him reluctant to change over to Kodachrome transfers leaving his commercial work more expensive than his competitors, which in turn left him in financial difficulty.
Ansel Adams: Master of the darkroom
Last year, I attended a lecture given by California photographer John Sexton, a former assistant and associate to Ansel Adams. In his lecture, he recalled an example of working with Adams in the darkroom where Adams was attempting to print a negative he had taken approximately 50 years earlier. Over the intervening decades, he had tried printing the negative but had never been satisfied with the results. Over the course of several days of working 3-4 hours a day on the image in the darkroom, Adams finally achieved a print he was happy with. Sexton recalled Adams beaming to have finally produced a successful print from the negative taken 50 years earlier.
I find this such an inspirational story for a couple of reasons. The story inspires me because of Adams’ passion for his work and his perseverance of working on an image over a period of 50 years before getting a satisfactory result. But the story also inspires me because it reminds us how much darkroom work that Adams did on his images. In his lecture Sexton even showed a before and after comparison of one of Adam’s images, and the results were dramatic. Of course, Ansel Adams photography was dramatic and he achieved much of the drama in the dark room. The analogy that Adams used was that capturing the image on camera was like composing a musical work, and printing the image was a performance of that music. It’s a great analogy.