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Douglas Kirkland

Digital Journalist is featuring a gallery of photographs from Douglas Kirkland's new book, Freeze Frame. There are revealing pictures of John Lennon in Spain, one of Jeanne Moreau on Hollywood Boulevard, director Herb Ross holding aloft ballerina Leslie Browne as Baryshnikov looks on and Director James Cameron instructing Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet on the set of Titanic. The photos of Kirkland with his subjects are memorable in their own way.

Kirkland's wife, Françoise, lets you into the world their assignments provided:

"We got involved in the lives of our subjects, sometimes spending weeks at a time with them. Julie Christie took me shopping at Biba, the hip store in Swinging London. Brigitte Bardot ignored me, wanting Douglas all to herself. While we were sitting with John Lennon in a minibus in Hamburg a mob of fans arrived and rocked the bus. We stayed up all night discussing politics with Melina Mercouri and her Greek refugee friends. On the set of A Countess From Hong Kong, Marlon Brando delighted in teasing me and making me blush, while on Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, Robert Redford and I discussed love and philosophy between takes. Once when Douglas and I tramped through the corridors of the Beverly Hills Hotel with our photo equipment, well-appointed guests complained to the management about the hippies really taking over!"

Read her account in My Lover, My Life, view the gallery and introduction by Kirkland from Freeze Frame.

Lee Miller

A celebrated and brilliant woman photographer who has perhaps been overshadowed in the US by Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke-White, American Lee Miller is the subject of a retrospective at the V&A.

The V&A presents a biography of Miller beginning with her modeling career across a number of pages and contains a limited gallery:

"Lee Miller (1907 - 1977) is one of the most remarkable female icons of the 20th century - an individual admired as much for her free-spirit, creativity and intelligence as for her classical beauty. Charting her transformation from muse to ground-breaking artist, this centenary exhibition provides a unique exploration of her life and unprecedented career as a photographer."

"Born in Poughkeepsie, New York, Miller began her modelling career on the cover of American 'Vogue' before meeting Man Ray in Paris in 1929. She became both his lover and muse and under his guidance started to produce her own imagery."

"On returning to New York Miller set up her own studio working in fashion, advertising and celebrity portraiture. In the 1930s she documented her travels to Egypt and Romania whilst spending summers in Europe with her Surrealist friends."

"In 1940 she became a freelance photographer for 'Vogue' and later war correspondent. She was the only woman in combat photojournalism in Europe during the Second World War. The magazine published Miller's searing dispatches including reports on the Liberation of Paris, the siege of St Malo, the death camps in Dachau and Buchenwald and the banality of Hitler's apartment in Munich. After the war Miller married Roland Penrose and returned to portraiture, concluding her career with a humorous series titled 'Working Guests' photographing famous artists, including Picasso, on their farm in Sussex."

Miller's photos at the archive kept at the Sussex farm are generous in number and focus on her work during World War II in the main. A number of her portraits of artists can be seen at the Guardian's site. In addition, an excellent video including an interview with her son and the curator of the V&A exhibit is available at the Guardian.

'Chim' Seymour at the DeYoung

At the same time that Ken Burns' lauded series for PBS on The War was being shown, an exhibit of David Seymour's photographs was on view at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco (DeYoung).

Here is the introduction to the exhibit at the DeYoung:

Chim, like Robert Capa, was a Parisian from Montparnasse. He had the intelligence of a chess player; with the air of a math teacher he applied his vast curiosity and culture to a great number of subjects… He accepted the servitudes of his profession and turned out to be brave in situations that seemed utterly foreign to his personality. Chim picked up his camera the way a doctor takes his stethoscope out of his bag, applying his diagnosis to the condition of the heart. His own was vulnerable.
— Henri Cartier-Bresson

"David Seymour (1911–1956) was known from his earliest days as a photographer by his moniker 'Chim' because his Polish birth name, Syzmin, was so hard to pronounce. He is among the great masters of twentieth-century European photojournalism. He is best known as the founder, along with Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and George Rodger, of Magnum, the famous cooperative of photojournalism, which celebrates its sixtieth anniversary this year. Born in Poland, Seymour went to Paris in the early 1930s, where he took up photography as his preferred medium and befriended the great photographers Cartier-Bresson and Capa. The photographs in this retrospective — over seventy works — span his career, from his early years in France to photographs taken in Egypt in 1956 during the Suez crisis, when his life and that of photographer Jean Roy were cut short by Egyptian machine gun fire.

"First and foremost, Chim was an unapologetic humanist. As beautiful as his photographs are, their aesthetic value is secondary to the insight into the lives of the people and their circumstances that he captured on film. Highlights include the demonstrations of French workers in the 1930s, the torment of the Spanish civil war, the melancholy aftermath of the Second World War, the plight of refugee children throughout Europe, and scenes of struggle and resolve in countries such as Greece, Poland, Italy, Israel, and Egypt.

"In addition, Chim’s engaging and cosmopolitan character allowed him to approach some of the leading personalities of the day to be the subject of his camera. Included in this exhibition are compelling portraits of Pablo Picasso, Peggy Guggenheim, Bernard Berenson, Arturo Toscanini, Ingrid Bergman, Kirk Douglas, and Audrey Hepburn. It is a great pleasure to announce that through the generosity of Chim’s nephew, Ben Shneiderman, thirty-six photographs in this exhibition have been given to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco."

The juxtaposition of the portraits of Hollywood's most glamorous stars and artists and that of war's survivors create their own emotions for the viewers. Use the zoom feature for closer views of Seymour's haunting work.

More of Seymour's photography can be viewed at the agency he co-founded, Magnum.

Easy Rider & Leisure

The Yancey Richardson gallery in New York City is exhibiting photographs from a show entitled Easy Rider: Road Trips Through America. The gallery's release describes the road theme and the photographers who captured it:

"Easy Rider explores the common themes of social commentary, cultural geography and photographic biography produced by the marriage between the road and photography.

"The road allowed Farm Security Administration photographers Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans to document the plight of Americans suffering floods and dustbowls during the Great Depression. Similarly bleak, Robert Frank's mid 1950s road trips yielded a portrait of the nation at odds with the projected optimism of the era and culminated in The Americans, a landmark publication, which influenced generations of later photographers.

The open road as a symbol of freedom is exemplified in Allen Ginsberg's 1964 shot of Neal Cassady at the wheel of Ken Kesey's Merry Prankster bus; Cassady's incessant cross-country journeys were a primary inspiration for Jack Kerouac's definitive Beat generation novel On the Road. Having spent four years riding with the motorcycle gang the Outlaws, Danny Lyons produced the book The Bikeriders, which emblazoned motorcycle counterculture onto the American psyche and inspired the film Easy Rider.

"Subsequent generations of photographers continued to take to the road in order to explore the cultural landscape."

Photographs by Karine Laval in an exhibit, Leisure, are on view at Bonni Benrubi's gallery, also in New York City. Most of the pictures are at pools in France, Spain and Portugal: "Her most characteristic series, such as Electric City, on the night and city lighting, White, on the snowy winter landscape of Norway, and Pool, on the relaxed and leisure environment of swimming pools in summertime, transport viewers into simple and naïve atmospheres meant to portray everyday life in XXI century society."

Harry Benson

Best known, perhaps, for his career at People magazine, photographer Harry Benson has been there from the time of the Kennedy administration. Indeed, the first photograph displayed in this bit of his National Portrait Gallery exhibit, Harry Benson: Being There, is of Jacquie in London, during a visit to her sister.

Robed Ku Klux Klan women with their young children, a grieving father holding an American flag after his son's Arlington Cemetery funeral, and a intimate picture of Bill and Hillary in 1992 are some of the insights that Benson achieves with his camera.

His photographs continue at Digital Journalist including a 1961 picture of JFK and Charles de Gaulle in Paris surrounded by galloping French honor guards that was requested by JFK Jr. for his office; Ronald Reagan at his Santa Barbara ranch just prior to his announcement regarding running for California governor; Bobby Kennedy marching in the 1968 St. Patrick's Day parade, the day he announced his run for the Presidency; and Richard Nixon and Diane Sawyer.

Ed Kashi

Photographer Ed Kashi's photo essay, Aging in America, seen at the website Digital Journalist reflects what many turn away from — ourselves growing older: At the beach, competing in the Miss Exotic World Contest, at gaming machines, in the Prison for the Aged and Infirmed, veterans at a Democratic Convention, participating in a track event at the Senior Olympics and as part of the Retreads tour of the countryside during the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.

There's also a video that accompanies the exhibit (requires QuickTime).

Peter Howe comments on the exhibit and book:

This publication that is the culmination of a multi year project takes a broad and uncompromising look at the phenomenon of growing older, its pitfalls and promises, the joy and despair and sometimes just the plain boredom. Although it clearly illustrates the premise that, as the lovely Howard Chapnick used to say, "The Golden Years are not for sissies" they don't need to be filled with dread either. From the remarkable 90-year-old heavy machinery operator who tried retirement for three weeks and then gave up because of boredom, to the senior rodeo/Olympics/bikers/models/cops, the book is balanced between the despair of degradation and a vitality and energy that is truly uplifting. Two of my favorite pictures are of a couple of gloriously craggy Sioux ladies looking like outcroppings in the Grand Canyon and the magnificent Dixie Evans, the proprietor of the Burlesque Hall of Fame in Helendale, California as she prepares to go on stage. The importance of the work is that Kashi and Winokur are providing a preview for us of our future, not only personal, but social and cultural as well. The book is full of interesting observations and facts, in particular that by mid-century there will be more people over the age of 55 than under 18. For a youth oriented culture such as ours, this will demand major readjustment of our attitudes to so many aspects of life including beauty, retirement, health and social services.

Catherine Leroy

Many of those who served in Viet Nam will be familiar with and touched by the photographs of French photographer Catherine Leroy. She died recently at age 60 but those images will not be soon forgotten.

Leroy's series of photos depicting Marine Corpsman Vernon Wike ministering aid to a fellow Marine at the Battle for Hill 881 are haunting. They are part of PieceUnique's section, Under Fire: Images from Vietnam. Work by famed Viet Nam-era photographers are on view: Tim Page, Dirck Halstead, Larry Burrows and David Burnett, among others.

Catherine had a 1968 Life Magazine cover and story entitled The Enemy Lets Me Take His Picture

Anniversary of the 1906
San Francisco Earthquake

San Francisco celebrates the 100th anniversary of the 1906 quake through a number of exhibits. Fortunately, the Virtual Museum of City of San Francisco presents a number of online exhibits covering this event.

The following excerpt is from the timeline of the quake:

April 18, 1906
San Francisco was wrecked by a Great Earthquake at 5:13 a.m., and then destroyed by the seventh Great Fire that burned for four days. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of trapped persons died when South-of-Market tenements collapsed as the ground liquefied beneath them. Most of those buildings immediately caught fire, and trapped victims could not be rescued. Reevaluation of the 1906 data, during the 1980s, placed the total earthquake death toll at more than 3,000 from all causes. Damage was estimated at $500,000,000 in 1906 dollars.

Fire Chief Engineer Dennis T. Sullivan was mortally wounded when the dome of the California Theatre and hotel crashed through the fire station in which he was living at 410-412 Bush St. Acting Chief Engineer John Dougherty commanded fire operations.

The earthquake shock was felt from Coos Bay, Oregon, to Los Angeles, and as far east as central Nevada, an area of about 375,000 square miles, approximately half of which was in the Pacific Ocean. The region of destructive effect extended from the southern part of Fresno County to Eureka, about 400 miles, and for a distance of 25 to 30 miles on either side of the fault zone. The distribution of intensity within the region of destruction was uneven. Of course, all structures standing on or crossing the rift were destroyed or badly damaged. Many trees standing near the fault were either uprooted or broken off. Perhaps the most marked destruction of trees was near Loma Prieta in Santa Cruz County, where, according to Dr. John C. Branner of Stanford University, “The forest looked as though a swath had been cut through it two hundred feet in width.” In little less than a mile he counted 345 earthquake cracks running in all directions.

Eyewitness accounts include one by Emma Burke:

We never knew when the chimney came tearing through; we never knew when a great marine picture weighing one hundred and twenty-five pounds crashed down, not eight feet away from us; we were frequently shaken loose from our hold on the door, and only kept our feet by mutual help and our utmost efforts, the floor moved like short, choppy waves of the sea, crisscrossed by a tide as mighty as themselves. The ceiling responded to all the angles of the floor. I never expected to come out alive. I looked across the reception-room at the white face of our son, and thought to see the floors give way with him momentarily. How a building could stand such motion and keep its frame intact is still a mystery to me.

Stand in front of your clock and count off forty-eight seconds, and imagine this scene to have continued for that length of time, and you can get some idea of what one could suffer during that period.

Photographs of the disaster include wreckage of St. Ignatius Church and College which is now the Davies Symphony Hall, wreckage of the Palace Hotel, Golden Gate Park Refugee Camp, and a view of the Mutual Savings Institution and Chronicle Building.

Lantern Slides

The University of Wisconsin's Digital Collection includes the Brittingham Family Lantern Slide collection consisting of 1,845 images. The wealthy family had their family documented through slides spanning 1897-1922, and ranged over their travels to 22 states and 32 countries.

" The subjects of this collection range widely from informal pictures of children at play to detailed interior shots of the Brittingham homes. Scenic landscapes, cityscapes, and street scenes from around the world are in abundance. The Brittinghams traveled from the Grand Canyon to Eastern Asia, and everywhere captured particulars of dress, architecture, and locomotion.

"During the late 1800s photography was radically simplified by the invention of dry gelatin plates, which could be mass produced and which eliminated the need for a tripod. These circumstances paved the way for the handheld camera, which sparked a widespread photography craze. The Brittinghams, who had both money and leisure time in abundance, were perfectly situated to become amateur photographers. It is not clear what kind of camera the Brittinghams used, but the existence of both glass and film negatives suggest there was more than one."

To read more about the Brittingham family, visit the UW-Madison Archives History and Exhibits page

Photographer's Agent

In looking for a selection from the new exhibit of Joel Sternfeld's work, we came across his agent's site, Bill Charles. On the site besides a portfolio of Sternfeld's, (including a senior woman driving a cart) we discovered many other photographers whose photos you might like ... or might not, for that matter.

Sasha Bezzubov
Anthony Suau
Jeff Mermelstein
Jeff Reidel and
Sage Sohier

New Link

Ag Magazine's Portfolios - The England-based magazine includes with each quarterly issue three portfolios of photographers. This site has an archive of many of those included.

There are features available on the site and the following title is one such example: From analogue to digital in fine monochrome by Barry Thornton, part one in a four-part series of step-by-step guides.

Part of the philosophy of the quarterly is explained thusly: Central to the ethos of Ag is the fine-art print, and every volume features expert advice on ways to maximise your own photographic potential, whether that be through revisiting 'alternative' processes or by applying digital techniques to traditional materials. Other areas of exploration include self-publishing, archival permanence and photographers taking issue on aspects of contemporary practice.

Paparazzi, The Book, & Magnum's Anne Bancroft

Peter Howe, the author of a new book about the paparazzi, writes in Digital Journalist:

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised by the extent to which the paparazzi will go to get their pictures, until I found out how much further this goes from merely hiding in bushes. When exclusive pictures of Princess Diana were fetching hundreds of thousands of dollars, über-paparazzo Phil Ramey once rented a submarine at $16,000 a day to try and get pictures of her sunbathing on exclusive Necker Island in the Caribbean. It wasn't until he was offshore at a depth of 50 feet that he discovered this vessel, being a nautical research tool and not a warship, didn't possess the periscope upon which he was relying to shoot the pictures that would justify the investment.

Another instance of the "whatever it takes" mentality at work was the operation mounted by the National Enquirer to try to cover the wedding of Michael J. Fox to Tracy Pollan in Vermont in 1988. They set up a military-style operations trailer, overflew the site in a helicopter, and discovered that the only way to get close enough to the tent in a field that would house the ceremony and reception was to cross another field in which a herd of llamas were peacefully grazing. Their tranquil existence was soon to be shattered by a group of Enquirer photographers dressed in llama suits provided by the magazine edging toward shooting range. Not only was this one occasion when the paparazzi could justifiably be described as acting like animals, but it was also an example of the best-laid plans of tabloids going awry. At the very last minute, and despite the fact that it was a warm and humid day, the organizers lowered the sides of the tent, thereby thwarting the llama-like shooters.

Read the rest of the article at Digital Journalist

Magnum has put together 16 of the photos their photographers took of the actress, Anne Bancroft. Some were taken during filming of The Pumpkin Eater and The Miracle Worker, some on the beach, and relaxing on a set.

©Tam Martinides Gray, 1999-2008