CAMERA OBSCURA: The Art and History of Photography

Frances Benjamin Johnson, "Self/Portrait" (1896)

2012-01-27T03:30:00.000-08:00

Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864 – 1952) was one of the earliest American female photographers and photojournalists. In the 1920s she became increasingly interested in photographing architecture, and her photographs remain an important resource for modern architects, historians and conservationists. In the photograph above, she can be seen holding cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other in her Washington, D.C. studio (1896).

Stanley Kubrick´s Photographs: Chicago, 1949

2012-01-26T04:15:00.000-08:00

In the summer of 1949, then a photojournalist for Look magazine, Kubrick was sent to Chicago to cover a story called Chicago City of Contrasts.

All images from the Library of Congress

Daniel Yáñez´s Works (2011): Freudian Slip

2011-05-04T12:54:00.000-07:00

Frank Hurley (1885-1962): Antartica Photographs, (1914 - 1916)

2011-03-23T02:07:00.000-07:00

All photographs (c) Frank Hurley / State Library of New South Wales

Shackleton (in Hurley’s diary) Friday, 21 April, 1916:

"To whom this may concern viz my Executors assigns etc. Under is my signature to the following instructions. In the event of my not surviving the boat journey to South Georgia I here instruct Frank Hurley to take complete charge and responsibility for exploitation of all films and photographic reproductions of all negatives taken on this Expedition; the aforesaid films and negatives to become the property of Frank Hurley after due exploitation in which the moneys to be paid to my executors will be according to the contract made at the start of the expedition. The exploitation expires after a lapse of eighteen months from date of first public display. I bequeath the big binoculars to Frank Hurley."

Shackleton following the rescue:

"[Hurley] was one of the most active workers on the Expedition. Extremely clever, could do anything mechanically: always at work: splendid photographer: good for all schemes. No coward and a worker in the boats [going to Elephant Island] and fertile in devising schemes for bettering conditions. Thus you see a man of resource and intelligence... " http://www.frankhurley.org/

The Rescue. 30 August, 1916.

http://www.frankhurley.org/

Daniel Yáñez´s Works (2011): Dear Poch

2011-03-11T02:43:00.000-08:00

(c) Daniel Yáñez González-Irún, 2011

Allan Grant (Life Magazine): Robert Rauschenberg seated on "Untitled (Elemental Sculpture)", 1953

2011-03-01T02:54:00.000-08:00

Photograph of Robert Rauschenberg seated on Untitled (Elemental Sculpture) with White Painting (seven panel) behind him at the basement of Stable Gallery, New York (1953). © Photograph: Allan Grant, Life Magazine

Daniel Yáñez´s Works (1999-2011): "Pardao Blues"

2011-03-01T02:16:00.000-08:00

Yoko Ono and Ornette Coleman at the Royal Albert Hall (1968; photographer not indentified)

2011-02-16T10:03:00.000-08:00

Yoko Ono and Ornette Coleman

At the Royal Albert Hall, London

february 29, 1968

Photographer not indentified

Angelheaded Hipsters: Photographs by Allen Ginsberg, National Theatre, London. www.nationaltheatre.org.uk (from 24 January to 20 March)

2011-01-21T04:06:00.000-08:00

Angelheaded Hipsters: Photographs by Allen Ginsberg, National Theatre, London. http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/ (from 24 January to 20 march)

"I do my sketching and observing with the camera."

Allen Ginsberg, 1993

Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso - Tangiers

"Peter Orlovsky at James Joyce's grave, Zurich Switzerland December 1980, we climbed up the cemetery and found Joyce's statue snowcovered, brushed it off his head."

´Jack Kerouac wandering along East 7th street after visiting Burroughs at our pad, passing statue of Congressman Samuel "Sunset" Cot, "The Letter – Carrier's Friend" in Tompkins Square toward corner of Avenue A, Lower East Side; he's making a Dostoyevsky mad-face or Russian basso be-bop Om, first walking around the neighborhood, then involved with The Subterraneans, pencils & notebook in wool shirt-pockets, Fall 1953, Manhattan."´

"Allen Ginsberg, utility man S.S. John Blair just back from Galveston-Dakar doldrums trip, I handed my camera to the radio-man on the ship's fantail, smoking what? In New York harbor, circa October 30, 1947. "

"We went uptown to look at Mayan Codices at Museum of Natural History & Metropolitan Museum of Art to view Carlo Crivelli's greenhued Christ-face with crown of thorns stuck symmetric in his skull—here Egyptian wing William Burroughs with a brother Sphinx, Fall 1953 Manhattan."

"Neal Cassady and his love of that year the star-cross'd Natalie Jackson conscious of their rôles in Market Street Eternity: Cassady had been prototype for Jack Kerouac's 1950 On the Road saga hero Dean Moriarty, as later in 1960's he'd taken the driver's wheel of Ken Kesey's psychedelic-era day-glo painted Merry Prankster crosscountry bus "Further." Neal's illuminated American automobile mania, "unspeakably enthusiastic" friendship & erotic energy had already written his name in brightlit signs of our literary imaginations before movies were made imitating his charm. That's why we stopped under the marquee to fix the passing hand on the watch, San Francisco, maybe March 1955."

"Bob Donlon (Rob Donnelly, Kerouac's Desolation Angels), Neal Cassady, myself in black corduroy jacket, Bay Area poets' "Court Painter" Robert La Vigne & poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in front of his City Lights Books shop, Broadway & Columbus Avenue North Beach. Donlon worked seasonally as Las Vegas waiter & oft drank with Jack K., Neal looks good in tee shirt, Howl first printing hadn't arrived from England yet (500 copies), we were just hanging around, Peter Orlovsky stepped back off curb & snapped shot, San Francisco spring 1956."

Gregory Corso, his attic room 9 Rue Gît-le-Coeur, wooden angel hung from wall right, window looked on courtyard and across Seine halfblock away to spires of St. Chapelle on Ile St. Louis. Gregory's Gasoline was ready at City Lights, in attic he prepared "Marriage," "Power," "Army," "Police," "Hair" and "Bomb" for Happy Birthday of Death book. Henri Michaux visited, liked Corso's "mad children of soda-caps" phrasing. Burroughs came from Tangier to live one flight below, shaping Naked Lunch manuscript, Peter Orlovsky and I had window on street two flights downstairs, room with two-burner gas stove, we ate together often, rent $30 a month. I'd begun Kaddish litany, Peter his "Frist Poem."

Larry Rivers with his portrait of poet John Ashbery's poem "Pyrography" (1977), his studio Southhampton L. I. July 7, 1985. He worked out with weightlift instructor too that day, as well as new styrofoam 3-D painting.

Francesco Clemente looking over hand-script album with new poem I'd written out for his Blake-inspired watercolor illuminations, we'd done two books before; entrance corner of his loft overlooking Great Jones Street Manhattan, October 1984. He liked this picture.

W. S. Burroughs at rest in the sideyard of his house looking at the sky, empty timeless Lawrence Kansas May 28, 1991. But "the car dates it" he noticed when he saw this snapshot.

I sat for decades at morning breakfast tea looking out my kitchen window, one day recognized my own world the familiar background, a giant wet brick-walled undersea Atlantis garden, waving ailanthus ("stinkweed") "Trees of Heaven," with chimney pots along Avenue A topped by Stuyvesant Town apartments' upper floors two blocks distant on 14th Street, I focus'd on the raindrops along the clothesline. "Things are symbols of themselves," said Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. New York City August 18, 1984

p = m x g [photography by (c) Daniel Yanez Gonzalez, music by (c) John Leafcutter]

2011-01-09T07:29:00.000-08:00

Alvin Langdon Coburn: Vortograph of Ezra Pound (1917)

2010-09-14T04:14:00.000-07:00

Gelatin silver print (20.2 x 15.5 cm). "Only unscrupulously strilking down any sistematically bred amateurism in any field, can prepare civilization for the New Vision's happiness. Ezra Pound"

Daniel Yáñez´s Works (1999-2010): "Institutionalized Pain"

2010-09-05T12:14:00.000-07:00

Frederic Geurts, A Fine Line (photography by Daniel Yanez Gonzalez)

2010-08-09T05:11:00.000-07:00

www.fabrica.org.uk

All photographs by (c) Daniel Yanez Gonzalez
Steel structure by Frederic Geurts

Andrey Tarkovsky: Ivan´s Childhood

2010-07-27T01:39:00.000-07:00

The completion of Ivan´s Childhood marked the end of one cycle of my life, and of a process that I saw as a kind of self-determination.

It was made up of study at the Institute of Cinematography, work on a short film for my diploma, and then eight months´ work on my first feature film.

I could now assess the experience of Ivan´s Childhood, accept the need to work our clearly, albeit temporarily, my own position in the aesthetics of cinema, and set myself problems which might be solved in the course of making my next film: in all of this I saw a pledge of my advance onto enw ground. The work all have been done in my head. But there is a certain danger in not having to reach final conclusions: it´s all too eay to be satisfied with glimmers of intuition rather than sound, coherent reasoning.

Then wish to avoid expending my reflections in such a way made it easier for me to take up pencil and paper.

What attracted me to Bogomolov´s short story, Ivan?

I have to say at the outset that not all prose can be transferred to the screen.

Some works have a wholeness, and are endowed with a precise and original literary image; characters are drawn in unfathomable depths; the composition has an extraordinary capacity for enchantment, and the book is indivisible; through the pages comes the astonishing, unique personality of the author: books like that are masterpieces, and only someone who is actually indifferent both to masterpieces, and only someone who is actually indifferent both to fine prose and to the cinema can conceive the urge to screen them.

It is all the more important to emphasise this point now, when the time has come for literature to be separated, once and for all, from cinema.

Other prose works are made by ideas, by clarity and firmness of structure, by originality of theme; such writing seems not to be concerned with the aesthetic development of the thought it contains. I think Bogomolov's Ivan is in this category.

Ivan reconnoitres in the ´dead, flooded forest´.

Ivan on reconnaissance at the enemy front line.

Captain Kholin and Masha, the nurse, in the birch wood.

Memories of peacetime: 'a cartload of apples, and horses, wet with rain, gleaming in he sun' .

Gestapo photograph of Ivan before his execution.

Gordon Parks (1912 - 2006): The Camera as a Powerful Instrument Against Discrimination

2010-07-17T14:17:00.000-07:00

Gordon Parks, photographer, filmmaker, writer and composer who used his self-taught talents to chronicle the African-American experience. He was also the first African-American to work as a staff photographer for Life magazine and the first black artist to produce and direct a major Hollywood film, "The Learning Tree," in 1969. By the time he was 50 he ranked among the most influential image makers of the postwar years. In the 1960's he began to write memoirs, novels, poems and screenplays, which led him to directing films. In addition to "The Learning Tree," he directed the popular action film "Shaft".

Look at Those Cavemen Go...

2010-06-09T02:37:00.000-07:00

Photography (c) Daniel Yáñez González-Irún, 2010

PORTRAITS: Abraham Lincoln (note from Walt Whitman´s Autobiographia, 1865)

2010-06-07T02:57:00.000-07:00

Abraham Lincoln in Chicago, October 4, 1859

Samuel M. Fassett

DEATH OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN

April 16, ´65. - I find in my notes of the time, this passage on the death of Abraham Lincoln: he leaves for America´s history and biography, so far, not only its most dramatic reminiscence - he leaves, in my opinion,. the greatest, best, most caracteristic, artistic, moral personality. Not but that he had faults and show´d them in the Presidency; but honesty, goodness, shrewdness, conscience, and (a new virtue, unknown to other lands, and hardy yet known here, but the foudation and tie of all, as the future will grandly develop,) UNIONISM, in its truest and amplest sense, form´d the hard-pan of his character. These he seal´d with his life. The tragic splendor of his death, purging , illuminating all, throws round his form, his head, an aureole that will remain and will grow brighter through time, while history lives, and love of country lasts. By many has this Union been help´d; but if one name, one man, must be pick´d out, he, most of all, is the conservator of it, to the future. He was assassinated - but the Union is not assassinated- One falls, and another falls. The soldier drops, sinks like a wave - but the ranks of the ocean eternally press on. Death does its work, obliterates a hundred, a thosuand - President, general, captain, private-but teh Nation is immortal. (Walt Whitman, Autobiographia)

Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois, c. 1846

Attributed to Nicholas H. Shepherd

"President Lincoln on Battle-field of Antietam," October 3, 1862

This portrait shows Abraham Lincoln as he appeared in 1860, the year in which he secured the Republican Party's presidential nomination and then the presidency itself. Lincoln's emergence at the 1860 Republican National Convention came as quite a surprise. http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/gal/nandhlinc1.html

Permission: Northern Illinois University.

Springfield, Illinois, June 3, 1860

Alexander Hesler

Springfield, Illinois, September 1858

Attributed to Christopher S. German

1859

Chicago: S. M. Fassett

Artist: Thomas Le Mere on April 17, 1863

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Portrait by Mathew Brady

Washington, D.C., April 10, 1865

Alexander Gardner

Washington, D.C., February 9, 1864

Anthony Berger

Signed, "A. Lincoln," as President, carte-de-visite portrait by Gardner

Allan Pinkerton, President Abraham Lincoln, and Major General John A. McClernand. This photo was taken not long after the Civil War’s first battle on northern soil in Antietam, Maryland on October 3, 1862. In his role as head of Union Intelligence Services during the war, Pinkerton foiled an assassination attempt against Lincoln. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PinkertonLincolnMcClernand.jpg

Washington, D.C., November 8, 1863

Alexander Gardner

Portrait photograph from April 10, 1865

The last known photograph. Taken at the White House, March 6, 1865. Source Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. Author: Henry F. Warren

Lincoln's funeral train

The American Civil War Photography (1861-1865) - I

2010-05-24T12:06:00.000-07:00

A Civil War hospital

Abraham Lincoln with General George McClellan on the Antietam Battlefield days after the battle (1862)

Company E, 4th US

Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin (second from right) during the American Civil War

Confederate prisoners, Gettysburg, Pa.

A quartet of black children in Circular Church in Charleston, birthplace of secession (1865)

Black soldiers fighting in the Dutch Gap Canal in Virginia.

Source: "The home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg" In Alexander Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (Reprint; New York : Dover Publications, Inc. 1959)

Fugitive slaves crossing the Rappahannock River toward the North (1862)

Amputation being performed at Gettysburg (1863)

Dead Confederates in the trenches at Petersburg, Va., 1865.

Union wagon train entering Petersburg, Virginia

This picture was taken in a Civil War Camp near Washington DC in 1862

General Grant (left) and five officers on Lookout Mountain, near Chattanooga (1863)

Source: Civil War photographs, 1861-1865 / compiled by Hirst D. Milhollen and Donald H. Mugridge, Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1977. No. 0205

Bones gathered from exposed graves on the Cold Harbor battlefield

A field hospital at Savage’s Station, Va. (1862)

Confederate dead of Starke’s Brigade, Army of Northern Virginia, at Sharpsburg, Maryland (1862)

Félix Nadar (1820 – 1910): Short Biography and Main Portraits

2010-05-11T01:06:00.001-07:00

Pierrot Surprised, 1854

French photographer, printmaker, draughtsman, writer and balloonist, Nadar was born into a family of printers and became familiar with the world of letters very early in life. He abandoned his study of medicine for journalism, working first in Lyon and then in Paris. In the 1840s Nadar moved in socialist, bohemian circles and developed strong republican convictions. Around this time he adopted the pseudonym Nadar (from ‘Tourne à dard’, a nickname he gained because of his talent for caricature).

Rossini, 1854

Jean-François Millet, 1854

Gerard de Nerval

Charles Baudelaire

For his friend Charles Baudelaire, Nadar personified ‘the most astonishing expression of vitality’. In 1845 he published his first novel, La Robe de Déjanira, and the following year he embarked on his career as a caricaturist, working for La Silhouette and Le Charivari and subsequently for the Revue comique (1848) and Charles Philipon’s Journal pour rire (1849), which later became the Journal amusant (1856). In London in 1863 Nadar discovered the drawings in Punch and met the illustrators Paul Gavarni and Constantin Guys, who became a friend. Nadar ended his career as a caricaturist in 1865, by which time he had become famous as a photographer.

Théophile Gautier, 1855

Marie Dumas, c. 1856

Franz Liszt

Jules Verne

Nadar became well known for his Panthéon Nadar, a lithographic panorama of contemporary French cultural celebrities, published on two occasions, once in the Lanterne magique (1854) and once in Le Figaro (1858), but unfinished. For some of the c. 300 figures (Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo, for example) Nadar had recourse to already existing portrait photographs. Following this use of photography, Nadar decided to establish himself as a photographer, initially with his brother Adrien Tournachon (1825–1903), whom he apprenticed to the photographer Gustave Le Gray in 1853, before himself training with Camille d’Arnaud and Auguste Bertsch (d 1871). In 1854–5 the two brothers produced a series of portraits of the mime artist Charles Deburau, illustrating various expressions, for example Surprise and Terror. In translating the emotions, according to the studies of the neurologist Guillaume Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne, Adrien, with his interest in theatre, played an important role in this partnership. A number of his own portraits, for example that of the critic Jules Husson Champfleury, and his self-portraits have nothing to fear from comparison with those by Félix. Subsequently, relations between the two brothers deteriorated and led to two lawsuits in 1856–7, during the course of which Félix claimed exclusive right to the pseudonym Nadar. This affair showed a lack of solidarity between them from which the weaker Adrien never recovered.

Eugène Delacroix, c. 1857

George Sand, 1864

Ernest Henry Shackleton

Nadar with Eugène Chevreuil on his Hundredth Birthday, 1884

He remains a crucial figure in the history of photography for having created a type of modern portrait based on the direct psychological approach to his subject and for his pioneering technical feats and championing of the medium. With few exceptions, Nadar’s negatives are held in the Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques et des Sites (head office, Hôtel de Sully, Paris); studio prints are held in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

Hélène Bocard
From Grove Art Online

© 2009 Oxford University Press

Armenia, Tattered Remnants of An Ancient Race (April 1922, Peoples of All Nations)

2010-03-03T03:46:00.000-08:00

Lucien Clergue: Jean Cocteau and the Testament of Orpheus (Viking Studio, 2001)

2010-01-15T11:53:00.000-08:00

Traductor

This is my personal homage to Jean Cocteau. When he asked me to join the crew of Le Testament d´Orphée as an independent still photographer, he told me, "You are free to do as you please. I look forward to being surprised by your photos. They will reveal something different from my film."
   My first encounter with the poet was in early january 1956. I was then working in a factory, keeping track of inventories of cheese and wine... I used the time left over to read in the bathroom, and this is when I discovered the poetry of Jean Cocteau as well as other poets.
   It is one thing to read poetry but something else altogether to share in the very life of the elements of poetry. Three years later in the autumn of 1959, Jean Cocteau brought me out of the factory to take part in the production of Le Testament d´Orpheé, a black.and-white movie that was to be the last production of the famous poet. He would die four years later. Three weeks in Provence, in the extraordinary village of Les Baux de Provence near Arles, and then three more weeks in Nice...
   Life became a dream for the six weeks. Man-horses, man-dogs, the sphinx, the goddess Minerva, and mythological figures such as Oedipus, Orpheus, and Tiresias were all living with us, talking, eating, and drinking like us.

PORTRAITS: John Ruskin on Colour Photography

2009-12-13T02:08:00.000-08:00

JOHN RUSKIN

1819-1900

The social reformer and art critic, defender of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and friend of Mrs. Cameron, was a very keen amateur photographer. In his Modern Painters he writes that "with the help of the Daguerreotype we should now be able to accomplish the reconciliation of true and aerial perspective and chiaroscuro with the splendor and dignity of elaborate detail".

Fram M. Sutcliffe describes in the Photographic Journal an interview with Ruskin in his home in the Lake Distric, early in the ´seventies. Ruskin told him of his various photographic attempts in the Alps. The talk then turned to the possibility of colour photography. "I tremble to think," said Ruskin, "what would happen if photographers were able to take photographs in colour, seeing what terrible mistakes they make now when they have only monochrome to deal with. They always seem to under-expose their plates, and by doing so upset the whole scheme of tone rendering."

By Barraud

About 1890

Dry Plate

Immortal Portraits (The Focal Press, U.K. 1942)

FOUR QUARTETS (photography and T. S. Eliot): "Time Present and Time Past..."

2009-12-08T09:22:00.000-08:00

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been.

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

photography by (c) Daniel Yáñez González-Irún, 2009
..

EARLY BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY: Slave, Tasmanians, Orphans, Queen Vitoria, Captain Scott... (1850s -1911)

2009-12-08T01:06:00.000-08:00

Jack, a slave (J. T. Zealy, 1850)

Colin Campbell, Baron Clyde (Roger Fenton, 1855)

"The Dying Soldier" (Unknown, 1859)

"The Last Tasmanians" (F. Russell Nixon, 1858)

.
And now a taste of consistent contrast...

First, children from Dr. Barnado's Homes (photos by Barnes and Jonstone, 1875-83):

and then Queen Victoria and her Indian servant (Hills and Saunders, 1893):

Captain Scott (H. G. Ponting, 1911)

Bootblack at the Houses of Parliament (Sir Benjamin Stone, 1897)

W. H. Fox Talbot (1800 – 1877): First Camera Negative, Fist Small Cameras and Short Biography

2009-11-24T00:54:00.000-08:00

Photogenic Drawing, a Plant Impression, c.1839.
. The First Printed Reproduction of a Photograph. Facsimile of a Photogenic Drawing From The Mirror (20 april 1839.)
.

Earliest surviving camera negative, with comments in Talbot´s hand.

First small cameras used by Talbot, c. 1835-1839.

William Henry Fox Talbot was born in 1800 in Dorset, United Kingdom. In 1833, while visiting Lake Como in Italy, his lack of success at sketching the scenery prompted him to dream up a new machine with light-sensitive paper that would make the sketches for him automatically. On his return to England, he began work on this project. In 1839, Fox Talbot reported his 'art of photogenic drawing' to the Royal Society. His process based the prints on paper that had been made light sensitive, rather than bitumen or copper-paper.

Fox Talbot went on to develop the three primary elements of photography: developing, fixing, and printing. Although simply exposing photographic paper to the light produced an image, it required extremely long exposure times. By accident, he discovered that there was an image after a very short exposure. Although he could not see it, he found he could chemically develop it into a useful negative. The image on this negative was then fixed with a chemical solution. This removed the light-sensitive silver and enabled the picture to be viewed in bright light. With the negative image, Fox Talbot realised he could repeat the process of printing from the negative. Consequently, his process could make any number of positive prints, unlike the Daguerreotypes. He called this the 'calotype' and patented the process in 1841. The following year was rewarded with a medal from the Royal Society for his work.

Fox Talbot was also an eminent mathematician, an astronomer and archaeologist, who translated the cuneiform inscriptions from Nineveh. He died on 11 September 1877. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/fox_talbot_william_henry.shtml