Jazz and Photography

When you surround your life with things photographic and jazz music, it is a great and wonderful surprise when you stumble across a photobook that features both. This is what happened recently when I came across this outstanding book by Sam Stephenson on the work of W. Eugene Smith, The Jazz Loft Project.

This book is a collection Smith's photographs and tape recordings documenting a period of jazz history in a cold water loft located at 821 Sixth Ave. in New York City from 1957 to 1965. The people documented in this book is a who's who of jazz. The photographs are vintage Smith that only his eye could have captured. And only someone like Smith, who is the consummate documentarian would of had the insight to create audio recordings of these great musicians. "He had wires reaching like roots through walls and floors to microphones all over the place." He exposed 1,447 rolls of film (about 40,000 pictures) and made 4,000 hours of reel to reel recordings. Some of this material appears in the book, transcripts from the recordings are of conversations captured between Smith and the musicians or the musicians themselves. This volume is amazing as a slice of time during one of the greatest periods of jazz.

The photographs that are reproduced are of both musicians and life inside and outside the loft. Many of the images are from the fourth floor windows looking down onto the street life at dawn, when these musicians were leaving or just the dramas playing themselves out on the street. Life on the corner of W. 29th and Sixth Ave. is played out for Smith's camera in the rain, snow, during the day or night. There are numerous images of the musicians in stark black and white playing their instruments together or alone. This loft was a gathering place for them to practice and jam without any concern of bothering neighbors. And Smith was there to document it all. Zoot Sims, Thelonius Monk, Hall Overton, Lee Konitz, Don Cherry, Ronny Free are some of the greats captured in this book.

Author Stephenson did a tremendous job of culling through the mountains of material over a seven year period to create this book. His introduction and notes throughout are insightful and provide context for this period of jazz and photographic history. My many thanks to him for doing this work. I encourage anyone who loves jazz and appreciates great photography to buy a copy of this book for their library.

Learn more at the Web site: www.jazzloftproject.org. Watch the video and more, the Jazz Loft Project channel.

The Nude as Art Work

I love getting photography books as gifts. This year was no different. The one that I received worth a comment is "Nude Visions" from the German art book publishers Kehrer Verlag. Most of the photographs are part of the vast photography collection at the Münchner Stadtmuseum. This book is a catalog of over 200 nude photographs spanning the history of photography and including many great photographers.

At first glance, I was excited to see a collection of photographs that explore the human figure as so many artist have over the millennia. My anticipation was that this volume would take a look at photographs that treated the human form as a beautiful object to be admired and rendered with light and shadow that celebrates the figure. Yes and no.

The book is just what it intends to be; a catalog of nude photographs. Yes, there are many pictures from artists that reproduce images modeled from the great master painters, and many that explore the human form in modern ways (Edward Weston, Willy Zielke, Lucien Clergue). My disappointment comes from the many photographs that are without aesthetics, that are clinical in their presentation of the nude. Photographs taken where the figure might as well be a piece of furniture instead of a beautiful sculptural object. These are the ones I skipped over in search of the unique vision. And, they do exist throughout the book.

The photographs that are true works of art are indeed magnificent. Many are worth spending time studying and enjoying both the art of the image and the form of the figure. There are many photographers that I was not familiar with that had stunning images; Rudolf Lehnert & Ernst Landrock and Franz Grainer from the 1920's, or Marianne J. Leissl from the 1930's. And there were wonderful discoveries; Josef Breitenbach, Ed van der Elsken, and Gerhard Vormwald.

On balance, I rate the book a B. I am glad to have it in my library.

Photo Story and Food

What is the most important thing in your life? For me it is looking at interesting photography and collecting photo books. For my wife it's food. When you combine the two together we have food photography and sometimes cook books with great photography. Recently we found a great book in a used book store that had both, "Memories with Food at Gipsy House" by Felicity & Roald Dahl with photographs by Jan Baldwin (Viking 1991).

This book had both fascinating photography and recipes along with interesting stories about the authors' family life. The photographs were not the typical commercial food shots, but wonderfully arranged foods in settings that made for attractive imagery while at the same time helping to illustrate the stories and recipes. A complete aesthetic experience.

On the other hand, there is "serious food photography!" These are photographs of food as objects or models. Sort of like fashion photography. These photos are designed to make you hungry. You sit there drooling over this amazing photograph of mouth watering food and wonder if it tastes as good as it looks. Now I know from past experience, photographing food is both an art and a craft while at the same time a complete fake.

What I mean, is that there is great skill in preparing the food to be photographed, staged, styled, and lit. The fake part comes from the fact that the food is prepared just to be photographed and not eaten. As a matter of fact, you do not even want to nibble on it unless you want a mouthful of chemicals used to make it all look good. Check out this interesting food photo video.

My preference for food photography is the type used to illustrate the Dahl book. I will be keeping my eye out for more of these books.

Stealth photography

Stealth - I have been thinking about all my photographs that have not been seen by anyone. Or my wife's photographs that have not been seen by anyone but me. What happens when your photography is not seen by anyone but yourself? Is this like that old question: "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound?" If you do not show your photography to anyone, does it really exist or have value?

Ok, so now we are thinking about why make photography or art to begin with? The obvious answer; we can not help ourselves. We have this urge to create that picture. We feel that if we don't create that image, something will be terribly missing from our lives. It becomes more important to create than to share it with anyone. Those of us who spend our waking hours (and much of our sleep) thinking about that next creation are walking the fine line between genius and egotist. (More about this later, perhaps.)

Not to mention the aesthetics of that all important creation. We do make critical choices in that process of creating the picture that brings all our experience and talent to bear. Then the decision of selection and editing. Which picture to champion and hold out as the "best" of the series.

Then, why do some of us never display these images? Or more accurately, do we hold back until we have the confidence to bear our souls to the public?

Photobooks worth keeping

How do you know what photobooks to keep and which ones to take down to your local used book shop? I have been thinking about this as my bookshelves have lost space to add anymore. I know, many of you are thinking, just add more bookshelves. Yes, that is doable, and most likely I will do that. But it did start me thinking.

It is not easy to pull a book off the shelf and decide that there is no value anymore (to me). Why did I buy it in the first place? It must of meant something at the time. Someone put time and energy into creating the book. I have always been a believer in the passion that is behind every work of art, including photobooks. At the time that I acquired the book, there where very good reasons for making this decision. This train of thought has lead me to the inevitable list, "top 10 reason to buy or keep a photobook."

The top ten reasons to buy (or keep) a book:
10. It was a good buy or its a first edition.
9. It will increase in value over time.
8. It is rare and not many copies are left in circulation.
7. It appears on some list of top 100 important photography books.
6. It is included in The Book of 101 Books edited by Andrew Roth.
5. It is included in either volumes I or II of The Photobook: A History by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger.
4. It is a perfect specimen of a photobook and comprises all that is key to a great book; wonderful photos, sequenced with intelligence, and is beautifully printed.
3. You learn something new or gain new insights about life and art every time you look it.
2. You are the author/creator of the book.
1. You truly love this book.

Feel free to create your own top ten reasons for keeping a book.

Digital or Not Digital

Recently I heard about the concept of a 10,000 year photography gallery. This idea has been put forth by photographer Edward Burtynsky in a presentation to the Long Now Foundation back in July 2008. The concept of the 10,000 year gallery is to archive images of our times that represent the culture of human kind today for future generations to see. Think cave drawings viewed today from our ancestors.

Part of Burtynsky's presentation was about the medium of display. His argument was that photographic prints, especially color prints, degrade badly over time (digital imagery may not be practical because the machinery used today to create the images most likely will not survive in 10,000 years for the most fundamental reasons of environmental forces, etc.). Of course during every century, the images could be transferred to the technology of the day, but this solution may become cumbersome and requires a level of maintenance that is not practical. So instead, Burtynsky proposes the use of “carbon transfer prints.” This technology was invented back in the 1800's and there are a few, exactly three practitioners of this process. One happens to be in Seattle, Art & Soul. The carbon process transfers the image to just about any surface; water color paper, ceramic, steel, etc. The concept being that carbon wont degrade, the material wont deteriorate, and the imagery will last for millennia in the 10,000 year gallery.

Great, right? Not so fast. The problem is that the practitioners of this process are very few and there may not be new generations of people who know how to do this process. What happens when the few folks with the skill to create carbon prints turn into carbon themselves? We have all this great imagery of human kind turning into dust. As a culture, we are so quick to race towards a digital world and leave the analog (carbon) world behind, we lost tack of the value older technologies has to offer. Digital is great for today, but what about the archival prints? Sure, we can make a print that lasts maybe 80 or 100 years. Then what?

Students of photography, think about learning this craft. It may be ancient, but it will last millenia.

Photobook of the Future

While thinking about the long view of the photobook, I began to wonder what the next generation of imaging may be. For some of us, we have seen the rapid decline of celluloid and the rise of digital imaging. The history of photography has had a long transition to digital with the most rapid change occurring during the last decade.

So what will be the the next format? Will the photobook of the future be more akin to a digital paper that displays images captured with a floating lens? Or maybe something virtual that appears with a heads-up display. Will the technology make the photobook of the future obsolete?

I think now we should be thinking about how a single image will have relevance. I am wondering if we will simply have an ongoing stream of pictures constantly being captured with some type of video camera that tracks where the eye is looking. A single frame can be extracted from the stream of images and displayed as an isolated picture for analyses and aesthetic contemplation. A series of these pictures can be sequenced to compose a digital photobook for viewing on digital paper.

Something to contemplate. Have you stopped long enough to wonder about the future of the photobook?

See the blog from The Long Now at the right.

To be continued.