let us now catalogue famous people

well I think the received wisdom is that frank replaced the classical formalism of photography til then with this technically very imperfect, underexposed, haphazard style - like he wasn't afraid to leave huge blank spaces in his pictures, negative values become just as telling as the thing depicted. like you could apply the three or four part test in that article to frank's photos and probably half of them would fail.

maybe what's valuable is that HCB's composition-ality points is one way to take good pictures, but it's not the only way, and perhaps you can take just as good pictures by not following those rules

I've always thought that it's illuminating that this is the picture that inspired HCB to start taking photographs

http://i.imgur.com/pjUqd.jpg

hopefully-real-quick clarification, but could you just define/expand on 'negative values' in your post, dayo? sorry to jerk back to technical q&a but i'm sorta interested in whether you're specifically talking about like gradation and rendering, like with the eggleston thing about the difference between seeing different prints of photos & what it was that made them come alive. i can see how those aspects would be particularly relevant to the affect of frank's stuff.

oh I just meant negative space

like I was thinking about the one that you posted from New York Is... like how the lady, ostensibly the subject (or is she...) of the photo, is at the very rightmost of the photo - cropped off.. what are we to make of the rest?

http://ettagirl.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/picture-4.png

or idk, like the way he'll fill in the foreground with... undifferentiated mass, what does that do for the picture compositionally?

http://www.artcritical.com/appel/images/frank_med.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/jcYnS.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/fa8sW.jpg

didn't read the article about HCB but i will say that those last three frank's are hell of formal

Blog dude would probably draw red squiggles on 1 &3 about leading lines and the rule of thirds.
I've always been drawn to imbalance in composition, but I also worship at the altar The Dog

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/38/Goya_Dog.jpg/300px-Goya_Dog.jpg

Blog dude would probably draw red squiggles on 1 &3 about leading lines and the rule of thirds.

that's also kind of the point - you can draw red squiggles + look for congruences in pretty much every picture ever taken

also w/ those pics I was pointing out that there wasn't a 'figure/ground' relationship per se as the HCB blog post was so keen on emphasizing... and the shadow detail was pretty crummy... &c!

well I think I agree that the squiggles/red lines thing can be applied to most pictures. still maintain that Frank's photos are pretty solidly composed. negative space being a tool he used frequently and well.
read this last night, btw, which includes some entertaining line drawing renditions of some Frank compositions: http://jnocook.net/frank/frank.htm
Have yet to read this: http://jnocook.net/frank/rfa.htm - today at work maybe

now that I finally put in a RSS subscript to american suburb x I will probably be posting a lot of links to there too

http://www.americansuburbx.com/series-2/s/suzanne-opton-vermont

this one made me really sad, I wonder what the backstory is

also I realize that plax is probably cringing at my compositional analysis upthread, there are probably v specific painterly terms to be used, it cannot be helped tho

so I got this book from the library and was gonna scan a few of the interviews because they were good, scanned one and did a quick google search and look somebody already put the whole text on the internet

http://www.archive.org/stream/photographywithi00well/photographywithi00well_djvu.txt

I recommend the frank, the szarkowski, the w. eugene smith, probably the sontag as well (haven't read that yet)...

Have yet to read this: http://jnocook.net/frank/rfa.htm - today at work maybe

― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Thursday, February 23, 2012 9:04 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark

I like the first half of this essay - a 'european perspective'

Blog dude would probably draw red squiggles on 1 &3 about leading lines and the rule of thirds.

that's the thing, I don't think the rule of thirds would work for either 1 or 3 - a good 'rule of thirds' photo of a road would place the horizon line at either the top third or bottom third, with maybe clouds or some scenery filling in the other 'thirds' lines. frank is pretty consciously squeezing the horizon + sky out in 1 and 3, imo

Look at 1 as thirds vertically and divide the top third in half again. It's just at the bottom of edge of the top third that the values change - the road is lighter, there's a semi-horizon as it dips over the hill, etc. - before you get to the real horizon and sky.

Rule of thirds is the laziest and most overrated compositional rule, though (IMO).

even so, the part where the semi-horizon occurs is nowhere near the line delineating the top 'third' of the photograph

the essay CV linked to mentioned that the top pic is just a reinterpretation of this dorothea lange pic

http://i.imgur.com/0CaYw.jpg

which, imo, feels much more stable and composed and probably does yield to a rule of thirds analysis

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/an-amateur-snapshot-of-kodaks-early-days/

oh & http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/kodaks-amateur-photographers-new-york/

these are pretty stunning: richard mosse, went to the congo with some militarized infared film that turns everything with chlorophyll red http://richardmosse.com/photography.php?pid=1

http://www.emptykingdom.com/main/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Richard-Mosse_web1.jpg

I see Jason Eskenazi has been brought up - just ordered his Wonderland book.

Love his video on Kickstarter:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1903672981/the-black-garden-a-new-photography-project

wonderland is prob my fav photography book after the americans

http://www.adammarelliphoto.com/2011/06/robert-capa/

dude who wrote about HCB does Capa
I do think he had a point w/ some of the HCB shots (like the Japanese women facing different directions)
but a bunch of these are silly, with the 'diagonals of the Chinese pilot' the worst. His eyes are horizontal to the frame and don't line up diagonally with anything else, but they get a black line (instead of red)

http://lalettredelaphotographie.com/entries/5602/mort-de-ishimotoyasuhiro

xp when you have a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail

you could probably do a lines analysis of every flickr member's gallery

Harry spoke of his work as an extension of his life; in a grant proposal he wrote that he would use the money “to photograph as I felt and desired; to regulate a pleasant form of living; to get up in the morning—free, to feel the trees, the grass, the water, sky or buildings, people—everything that affects us; and to photograph that which I saw and have always felt.”

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2012/03/eleanor-callahan-harry-callahan.html

photo booth v good this week

http://life.time.com/culture/its-about-time-gjon-milis-stroboscopic-portraits/

i know this isn't double exposure, exactly, but double exposure is one of those early-attractions-of-photography, cf lens flare, that i never play with anymore

I love taking pictures of stores with glass displays because in B&W it looks like a double exposure, you get two for the price of one

however I'm not sure I've ever fully understood conscious double exposure - transposing two radically different scenes - don't really understand harry callahan's double exposure photographs, wish somebody would explain them to me

Got 'Wonderland' today - normally I'm 100% opposed to photos crossing the gutter at all, but this is the perfect binding if you're going to make everything a double-truck spread, it lays flat enough that the images aren't compromised.

have generally hated pictures across the gutter too, but I like the way that a lot of japanese photo books through caution to the wind wrt cropping, printing quality, image placement etc. AND I just discovered an amazing store in NYC, Kinokuniya, that has a *lot* of photo books. picked up W. Eggleston's Paris which I've wanted for a couple years and put off getting, and a Morimaya book. They've got full shelves of Morimaya and Araki books though, and many more that are a mystery to me, AND tons of Japanese photo magazines, including ones that seem to have endless profiles of all manor of vintage film cameras, only I can't read them!

ugh through = throw, where is my brain

and manor = manner, of course

anyway, I was never in the mood for that sort of high contrast, heavily cropped, low quality printing before, but I appreciate it now as a change of pace from the immaculately printed and pristine photo books I'm used to.

they stocked Photographica magazine, but sadly not this back issue: http://kenshukan.net/john/archives/2009/12/30/travel-photography-by-photographica/

tons of Japanese photo magazines, including ones that seem to have endless profiles of all manor of vintage film cameras

by stuff, I mean magazines that aren't really stories or histories of vintage gear, just pictures of it with cataloging details

gaaaah I wanted to pick this up but now it's sold out

http://www.japanexposures.com/books/product_info.php?products_id=10336

oh man kinokuniya, how have you lived in new york without a japanese stationery hookup? the bookstore there is v nice.

thought of you when i read about this in the nyer, china: it's work by luigi ghirri & a bunch of other mid-century guys, it looked interesting: http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/art/galleries/current-and-upcoming-exhibitions-3

guess I should have know about that place sooner indeed. I might check that Hunter thing out. looks cool.
today I trade in (probably) my nearly unused Voigtlander 35mm for an old Leica screwmount Summitar. psyched.

i spent the last couple of days wondering how i need to change my life to acquire a leica. i am thinking about becoming an arms dealer.

hey look at this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt7HhRMUUxY

it is obviously so hilarious - trembling hands, a generally weird solution to books-on-screen - but you know, still, chromes.

the photobook website/video thing is so weird. folks worried that not enough people will come over to see how great their book collection is I guess.

guess I should have know about that place sooner indeed. I might check that Hunter thing out. looks cool.
today I trade in (probably) my nearly unused Voigtlander 35mm for an old Leica screwmount Summitar. psyched.

― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Tuesday, March 13, 2012 8:54 AM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

hmmm - that voigt is a $300-400 lens no?

it used to be that you could get a summitar for around $200. they're nice lenses but they don't have clickstops.

yeah $350 or so? The Summitar is $199 at Adorama. I don't know what they'll offer for the Voigtlander but if it's low I'll just eBay it or Craigslist it instead.

schlump, do you have a budget for buying a camera? sometimes a Leica can be cheaper than you expect.

also, the summitar takes a weird filter - it won't take a standard 39mm filter, you either need to source the special leica filter or find a 3rd party custom job. if you care about filters, that is.

incidentally - I got my canon 50mm 1.8 back from essex after I sent it to be CLA'd - handles really nicely. I got mine from KEH - think I got lucky because this one had, afaict, no scratches on the front or rear elements but it was still listed as BGN. previous copies I've owned have had scratched to hell front elements, also sourced from KEH.

been shooting with the 50mm for the past few weeks as a result. feels weird!

I mean, it really is a short telephoto. HCB must have been standing a-ways back to get those shots.

pretty much don't touch filters, so I'm not sweating it. I see the color skopar going for upwards of $300 used on eBay though, so I'll keep that in mind when at Adorama

xxpost

speaking of 'cataloguing famous people' has anyone read the Todd Papageorge "Core Curriculum" book? He goes on at one point speculating that HCB must have actually used a 35mm from time to time (mostly in the early days), despite the 'only 50mm' reputation.