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Photography’s ‘Old Masters’ and ‘Beat Generation’ plus an Art Deco Kaleidoscope
English: Ansel Adams The Tetons and the Snake River (1942) Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming. National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the National Park Service. (79-AAG-1) Français : Ansel Adams. Les Grands Tetons et la rivière Snake (1942). Parc National des Grands Tetons, Wyoming. Archives Nationales des USA, Archives du service des parcs nationaux. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Two photographs each by Laura Gilpin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andre Kertesz, Man Ray, Brassai, and Richard Avedon, three by Edward Weston, four by Irving Penn and also from Alfred Stieglitz, five from Ruth Bernhard, and a whopping twelve and fourteen prints from Henri Cartier-Bresson and Ansel Adams respectively. That’s the creme de la creme in a gigantic 240 lot auction of photographs tomorrow, 6th April at Sotheby’s.
Let’s start off with a surprise. Fifty albumen postcard-size prints of the West from the 1880s by Carleton E. Watkins at merely $10,000-$15,000? This might be the bet of the evening for an investor cum art collector.
The first few lots are female figures by Ruth Bernhard. Bernhard’s powerful studies of the female form are such that they may bring to mind classical statues of Greek goddesses; witness Bride. The impression of statutary is accentuated by two devices: the clever lighting and the low angle Bernhard has shot from; her lens is at about the height of the model’s thigh.
The potent expressionistic qualities of black-and-white are brought home in an unusual low-key landscape in which the eye is led back from the near-black foreground via the lines of the roadway as it – the eye – is naturally drawn to the white structure in the background. A painterly masterpiece by Paul Strand.
A very different kind of landscape is Ansel Adams’s At Timberline. The bleak ‘music’ of this nature study comes about from ‘contrapuntal’ curves and jags – the curves of the limbs and more obvious jags of the twigs. Worth mentioning are the tones and the crop – see how the tip of the tree touches the top edge of the frame and how it ‘rises’ from the bottom edge.
The potency of forms and the drama of nature one usually expects in an Ansel Adams image are on showy display in Clearing Winter Storm. Smell the cool mist, smell the moist earth . . . . Equally potent and equally dramatic, albeit a human drama, is The Steerage. This arresting image of the flotsam and jetsam of humanity is a photogravure on vellum measuring 13 1/8 by 10 3/8 inches – and estimated at $10,000-$15,000. Is that an error? Or is Christmas (very) early?
‘Synecdoche’ is a word that describes a type of phrase; a particular kind of figure of speech. Lot 67 by Minor White is a photographic (and high-contrast and gorgeous) synecdoche – a pylon rises out from the heavens . . .
From the West Coast to the East Coast, New York City. Just how did Margaret Bourke-White shoot this aeroplane from on high, so perfectly aligned with Manhattan’s grid and the diagonal of the frame?
The name Harold Edgerton may not ring a bell but check out Lot 75 and the photographs will ring one . . . this auction has it all, from Photography’s ‘Old Masters’ to Photography’s ‘Beat Generation’!
Thurman Rotan’s Daily News Building can only be described as ‘Art Deco Kaleidoscope’. Pity that this pre-Photoshop marvel is available only in a dinky 4 3/8 x 8 5/8 inches; it would make for a smashing poster.
Dreamy, soft-hued, colour closes out our mini-survey; this hypnotic Nature Study by Eliot Porter is an impressionistic meditation on nature. It’s one of a set of three; view the third for a body of water in two lushly saturated and near-complementary hues. This lot is anything but dinky; the items are poster-sized at 36½ x 30 inches.
One cannot cover even the highlights of an auction of this magnitude in a blog post; any lover of photography will find it a pleasure to browse through the e-catalogue. Check out W. Eugene Smith’s sensitive human impressions, Yousuf Karsh’s intimate portraits, and Ormond Gigli’s go-go girls, for instance, and remember that this auction includes scads of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s finest photographs.
Visit our BPro blog to read about another auction of photographs at Sotheby’s.
Indoor Photography With Directional Sunlight
DP School recently published an ‘exercise’ that encourages you to take indoor photographs using natural lighting from a window, and learn by experimenting. It’s a very useful skill to develop; instead of using flash, ambient light pouring in through the windows makes for a pleasing, natural appearance for photographs of, say, family members playing indoor games or having coffee at the kitchen table.
The crux of A Simple Exercise on Working with Natural Light in Portraits by Mitchell Kanashkevich and Darren Rowse is to “get your subject to move to different spots in relation to the window. Move around with the subject, take photos, and pay attention to what effect the movement of both of you has on the way that light makes the subject look.”
The article steps you through three positional setups of light source, subject and photographer. A photograph and a schematic accompanies each exercise. These basic setups are meant to serve as a springboard for you to introduce variations and experiment.
Notice how the positional setup for exercise 3 results in a photo reminiscent of Michelangelo’s chiaroscuro and also causes ‘wells of light’ in the subject’s eyes.
You can experiment by mixing in the following variables to Kanashkevich and Rowse’s valuable exercise.
• If the room is small, the colour of the walls will have an effect on your exposure. Dark walls will not reflect light and so the window’s uni-directional light will result in hard shadow areas on your subject. White or very light walls will reflect light and you will end up with a less contrasty photo with some natural fill-in.
• Given that sunlight is entering through a window the sun must obviously be quite low on the horizon when its light is generally softer. However, if you find that the light is hard you can put a mesh screen or gauze over the window; that will impart to directional sunlight an even gentler radiance.
• If you have tungsten or blue fluoroscent lighting in your room, keep the lights off else you’ll get an interesting effect: a graduated cast across your photographs. However, if you have daylight-balanced lighting, specially with a dimmer, you could keep it on to fill in the shadows.
• Use props such as glassware on a table or jewellery on a female subject to catch and reflect the uni-directional sunlight for eye-catching effects.
• Depending on the quality of the sunlight and how your room reflects it, try warming or cooling filters or adjusting the White Balance in your camera.
A Medley of Photos from the Past 24 Hours!
Easter Traditions
One holiday, so many traditions. Contrasting photographs in the Baltimore Sun Darkroom show that Easter, associated with eggs and bunnies in the West, means something rather different in Eastern Europe. It is more traditional, religious, and even ‘pre-religious’ – a pagan rite of splashing cold water on women is alive and well in Slovakia.
Wouldn’t photographs illustrating “Easter Traditions Around the World” make for a wonderful coffee table picture book?
‘Aurora Meteoris’
Was it dumb luck that led to Shannon Bileski capturing a once-in-a-lifetime image of a meteor streaking through the Aurora Borealis? Nope. According to PetaPixel, though there was an element of luck, Bileski evinced a real dedication and commitment to what she had set out to do: “. . . at 11:10pm just as everyone else was packing up their camera gear, the green glow in the sky intensified. Bileski began snapping some shots with her Nikon D800 and . . . suddenly” . . . it happened!
The story’s an object lesson for aspiring newbies; as for Bileski, she deserved her ‘luck’.
Canine Connection
Daily Mail has published a fun gallery of (what look like) time-lapse composites of canines spry and limber. The photographer in question, Rhian White, surely needs to be an expert in, besides photography, dogs and Photoshop!
Many of the images, such as this one of a Jack Russell terrier, are pretty sequential action shots. However, a few are quite artistic, none more so than this beautifully conceived and composed creation that could adorn many a hallway.
‘Engagement Photography’
That’s Wedding Photography’s bridesmaid. And who cares about bridesmaids when you, the photographer, have got the bride, i.e. the wedding, to worry about? Laura Babb thinks otherwise, she suggests that pros ought to offer an ‘engagement shoot’ and explains why.
It seems like a good idea, for such a session would be a professionally-photographed record of one of the last few days that the carefree loving twosome were just that and not a Mr. and Mrs. with responsibilities.
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