every camera i own: the werramat

I first read about the ingeniously designed Werra on this blog post about an amazing Japanese camera shop that specializes in old lenses - the propietor's cutoff date is 1974, but the emphasis seems to be on the 1930s.

The various Werras were manufactured by the legnedary Carl Zeiss plant in Germany, and was named after a German river. I'm not sure what the visual metaphor is from river to camera, but if the Werra flows it is in its design. Even from the limited vantage point of the camera-with-a-kitty photo at right you can immediately see what makes the Werras stand out: the shutter release is the only control on top of the camera.

In the Werra series of cameras, the shutter cock, the film advance, aperture and shutter speed settings are all contained within the lens barrel. Aperture and shutter speed are not unheard of functions for a lens barrel, but the Werra takes it further. A simple clockwise twist of the black ring you see at the base of the lens both cocks the shutter and advances the frame.

Being manufactured by the great Zeiss factory, the lens is pretty sweet, though zone focusing is still not my forte.

Across the street from Ford's Theatre.

But this close-focus shot worked out.

Ann Taylor Window, some Lomo branded 200 ASA stock.

Connecticut Avenue

RIP Arch West.

photobook review: 26° 81°: photographs of immokalee, florida, by joshua dudley greer

Article first published as Book Review: 26° 81°, by Joshua Dudley Greer on Blogcritics.

Palm trees; orange groves; flamingo-pink houses. These are the kinds of images that the State of Florida brings to mind, and these are an integral part of 26° 81°,  Joshua Dudley Greer’s collection of large-format photos. But Greer goes deeper than that in his study of the town of Immokalee: to the trailer park, the migrant worker, the anonymous apartment buildings. In my own trips to Central and South Florida I have found a lot of poetry beyond the Mouse and his kin, in the scruffy commerce of small towns like Webster and Brooksville. Greer finds that and more in the people of Immokalee.

Immokalee, fifty miles west of Naples in Southwest Florida, was struck by Hurricane Wilma in 2005, which makes the town an apt stand-in for the struggle and resilience of the natives and immigrants who try to make a living there. Greer’s portraits are sensitive and dignified: of the dowager who is the last surviving daughter of the original settlers of the town, to the middle-aged African-American Reverend, to the young woman celebrating her Quinceañera.

26° 81° is an admirable project with its heart in the right place - half the proceeds of the book go to the Immokalee Foundation, a non-profit that “provides educational tools, opportunities, and encouragement to the children of Immokalee, Florida.” If strong photos and honorable intentions were all that made a successful photobook, then Greer’s monograph would easily pass the audition. But the old saw that you can’t judge a book by it’s cover does not apply if the cover works against the contents, and this is where the book falls short of something more. The handsome binding is wrapped a banal jacket that depicts a powder blue map of the area; perhaps it was the book’s publisher, Joseph Dednik, (credited as “chairman of Prescient Ridge Management”) who saw fit to make the book look like a company report, its title reducing the humanity of the photographs to points on a graph.

Why not just call it “Immokalee?” Geography can be a potent metaphor - it may not be fair to compare this to of Alec Soth’s great Sleeping by the Mississippi, but the use of large-format cameras in a geographically themed project sort of begs the comparison. Where that book’s title concept and cover enriched the work, the framing device here seems made to seduce the policy wonk more than the general photography consumer. I learned about the book from a photography blog that showcased Greer's photography. Had I seen it on the table at Dashwood Books, I may never have opened it. Perhaps the marriage of aesthetic and statiscial concerns describes where the town Immokalee, and the nation, has failed its citizens. Unfortunately, the book’s design does no favors for the strong work inside.

every camera I own: a tale of two hassys

I used to think I'd never own a Hasselblad. The combination of cost and technique seemed forbidding and out of reach. But it wasn't too long after I started revisiting photography in earnest that I had the opportunity to buy a vintage Hasselblad 500CM, with a snazzy finder, at a good price.

December 2005.

It's the best camera I've ever had, maybe even better than the 503CW I switched it out with about a year later. Just looking through the viewfinder and the Hasselblad glass was a pleasure.

January 2006. From the first roll I shot with my first Hassy.

 I've made some of my best photos with it, including the shot that makes up the background image of this blog.

St. Augustine, 2007

With it's "normal" 80mm lens, it's also an excellent portrait setup.

Tosca Zoppe, Little Italy, New York, 2006

Bill, Portland, Oregon, 2006

The Lowest Point in America, Key West, 2006.  I had no idea what I had when I made the shot, but look at the large view here. 

I took the Hassy 503CW back to Florida last month.

photodvd review: Bill Cunningham New York

Article first published as DVD Review: Bill Cunningham New York on Blogcritics.

Bill Cunningham New York, the impressive feature debut from director Richard Press, may well be the best documentary ever made about a  photographer. That the photographer documents New York, for the New York Times Style section and other outlets, makes this  one of the great films about New York, all the more important as it captures a dying world. Cunningham was one of the last holdouts in the artists’ apartments above Carnegie Hall, whose legendary tenants over the years included Marlon Brando and Leonard Bernstein. This scene was further documented in the documentary Lost Bohemia, but BCNY gives the viewer a wistful glance at the corporate carnage at work all over the city: the wide open sapce that was once dance studio of Agnes DeMille (choreographer of Oklahoma and other milestones of American Musical Theater) has been recently broken up into telemarketer’s cubicles.

“If you can’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do, kid.” This is Cunningham’s response to the greedy metropolis, and though he collects a paycheck from The Old Grey Lady, his early work capturing the Downtown 80s scene for Details magazine was largely gratis - and frequently earned him 100-page special issues solely of his work.  The octagenarian photographer has documented New York fashion trends for decades - from haute couture runways to the New York gala scene. But it’s not money that draws his voracious lens (“I eat with my eyes,” he tells a waiter who offers him a plate at a gala). The artist finds what people are wearing on the street just as important, even more so. 

A photographer who seeks out fashion trends might seem to be judge and jury, but while Cunningham makes aesthetic decisions, he has a fondness for all his subjects. Socialite Annette de la Renta admiringly notes, “I don’t think we’ve ever seen a cruel picture done by Bill.” Cunningham in fact had a falling out with Women’s Wear Daily when they changed his copy to make fun of the subjects.

As a study of a dedicated professional, BCNY is also about obsession . The documentary is populated by some of Cunningham’s  favorite subjects: the dandy Patrick McDonald, who never leaves home without his eyebrows and beauty mark in place;  Vogue editor Anna Wintour (who declares that if he doesn’t take your picture, “you’re dead!”); Shail Upadhya, the outrageously dressed Nepalese Diplomat (“This used to be my old sofa; the jacket and pants, my ottoman”). This dense film constantly  entertains with such colorful personalities. But,  as Cunningham explains that he visits Paris regularly “to re-educate the eye,” the film also gently educates the viewer: what makes a dynamic photo, how to put together a comeplling layout, how to organize your obsessions and recognize trends, from fanny packs to chains, from baggy pants to leopard prints, from improvised rain gear to dazzling snow-wear.

Cunningham can find the visual grace in people from all walks of life, and his public face is always smiling. But when that smile breaks, so do you. Despite a certain amount of professional freedom, there is a chilling sense of entrapment to Cunningham’s life. His tiny studio apartment above Carnegie Hall was filled to the short ceiling with magazines and file cabinets of every negative he’s ever made (he is the only New York Times staffer still using film). In a quietly heartbreaking scene near the end of the film, the artist is asked about his personal life; he’s never really had one. His Catholic uprbringing made his sexuality something not to be spoken of. Has his flurry of work been at the expense of his own happiness? Bill Cunningham New York is an unforgettable portrait of a man and a city. It is filled with great joy, but not without the bittersweet.

every camera i own: the superheadz 110 book

The cameras produced by Japanese company Superheadz are typically also labelled Lomo, but they are not the same animal. If I had to choose between a Lomo store and  a Superheadz store, I'd likely pick the overpriced Japanese plastic camera shop. But this is not a horse race, and both manufacturers live in harmony at the ICP Shop (where I bought this) and Urban Outfitters alike.

The camera is designed to look like a small book, with gentle deer gracing the cover and assuring the potential subject on the street that this person approaching you is simply learning about nature. But really, who would this fool? The book's "spine" swings out on a hinge to reveal the lens, though cameras look nothing like this anymore and maybe some unsuspecting person would not raise an eyebrow when confronted by this mild device. I would not know, as I did not take advantage of the surreptitious feature of the calm pea-green design. You are getting sleepy.

The book camera takes 110 film,  a cartridge format introduced by Kodak in 1972. A few years ago I found some of the first pictures I'd ever taken, made with some 110 Instamatic in the mid 70s for a school project about Neanderthal Man. I blogged more about it here, in one of my posts on the weeding and decluttering that I have lately neglected.

110 is one of the lowest-resolution film formats - the negative is barely bigger than a postage stamp, another cultural artifact that, like film, is either not long for this world or is likely to be relegated to use by niche markets and hipsters. Because what hipster doesn't like to use stamps? So 110 film is hard to come by (I had to cannibalize a Kodak 400 cartridge from another Superheadz camera to use with the book) and even harder to process. I had wrongly assumed that the local Walgreens where I've been taking my toy camera film for developing and scanning would be able to handle 110, and as is my wont I finished off the roll in the lab's vicinity.

Where America doesn't process 110

So I sent it off to Parsons Kansas, where Dwaynes Photo closed down the last remaining Kodachrome processing outfit last year. Dwaynes is still in business, and is one of the few places that processes these outmoded formats.

front royal is a truck

when lee friedlander sings

every camera i own: the olympus xa

The Olympus XA is a compact rangefinder with a 35mm f2.8 lens and aperture-priority auto exposure. The latter is controlled by a level on the left side of the front of the camera, just under the Zombie Kitty's tongue as pictured. Set your desired aperture (and the proper film speed, on a dial just below the lens) and the XA's shutter will remain open for however long makes a proper exposure. At least this is how it works in theory - mine seemed to regularly overexpose shots. It might be time to check the battery.

If the compact size and aperture-priority auto-exposure sound a little familiar, that's because it's the same principle upon which the Lomo's flagship LCA series is based. Except in a better built package, and one that in most cases (the rare XA4 macro is the major exception) is available for half the cost of an LCA. The XA's clamshell design also never had the hip cachet of the LCA, but that's marketing for you. I regularly give Lomo a hard time  on this blog, but if their popular hipster machinations help keep film alive, then send me a crate of Sardine can cameras.

I bought my XA online sometime in the past decade but never really got to know it. When I dug it out for this project I found it still had film in it from when I last used it.  I ran through what I thought were the last few frames on it so that I could take it to my go-to cheap photo lab at Walgreen's. The problem was it was a roll of 36 exposure, black and white, which Walgreen's doesn't process.

self-portrait, 2011, fuji neopan 400

Here I was about five years earlier, on the NY subway.

self-portrait ca. 2006, new york, fuji neopan 400

When I find one of my old cameras that still has film in it I usually have no easy way to tell when I made the pictures. This one happens to have been pretty easy.

my desk, some of which looks much the same five years later.

I wanted to run a fresh roll through the camera. I was near Georgetown, so where was the closest place to get film? Urban Outfitters. I got a three-pack of Lomo's "fine (for fine-grain, I presume) color film." I don't know what part of it is the film, what part of it was overexposure due to an inaccurate meter, but the colors are washed out:

The cab was a darker blue. But high sunshine (and record heat) may have been a factor too. This seems about right.

I finished the roll trying to relive the glory days of my old boring aesthetic. I didn't quite get there, but this reminds me of the subgenre of boring photos I once played with, the establishing shot:

photobook review: how terry likes his coffee, by Florian van Roekel

Article first published as Book Review: How Terry Likes His Coffee by Florian van Roekel on Blogcritics.

The ingenuity of Florian van Roekel’s How Terry likes his Coffee begins with the cover. With any photobook of these dimensions, you’d expect the pictures to be laid out in landscape orientation, and this is true of van Roekel’s photos. But the cover label is set in portrait orientation. From this angle, the plain black cover has the appearance of  a premium legal-sized notebook, which is exactly what you get when you open the book: a series of lined pages reproduced from such a notebook, with a variety of doodles both ornate and simple. Van Roekel’s subject is the office, and these are the very kinds of doodles you’d make in the middle of a boring meeting where you can’t be bothered to take actual notes.

This office paper trail recurs throughout the book, with blueprints reproducing the layouts of cubicles and other office spaces. The meat of Terry is the photography, but the meta-framework puts it into context and shifts our perspective as the photographs do.

The office is not uncharted territory: Lee Friedlander's At Work tackled the subject in a more photojournalistic vein (while still with his signature art) as he visited workers in factory and office settings. Van Roekel’s approach is more abstract. Rather than simply document the life of the worker, he breaks down the office experience into “chapters” taken at different and increasingly obscure viewpoints in a series of Dutch office buildings. The banal views of the water cooler and the weary office worker at the photocopier may be common. But then van Roekel goes deeper: a close-up of a stray rubber band at the base of an empty swivel chair. Ankle-level views close in on oxblood shoes and dark pants cuffs as workers busily wheel around their cubicle. Subjects are shot from various obscuring angles - from behind, from above, head on but with their face turned and covered by long hair. The people are lit so that their backgrounds often appear black, as if they are on stage. This is the office place as performance space, but a stage where the players are anonymous and interchangabie, in a interchangeable glass tower with interchangable flora that tries in vain to add an organic touch to the blandness inside. Instead, it’s locked out, and likely singed by the hot glass.

Who is the titular Terry, and how does he like his coffee? This is not made clear, though you might guess he’s the one with the Ubuntu coffee mug. As soul-destroying as office work can be, there are little consolations to make one’s dreary career pass more easily, be they doodles or black java. Is Terry a scathing critique of the office or a celebration of the people who toil in its dull conforming glow? The subject matter is loaded, but van Roekel doesn’t tell you how to feel. The artist’s eye simply immerses you in the details of that world. He does what artists do: takes the familiar and makes it strange.

As part of the PhotoIreland Festival, Martin Parr (Magnum photographer and co-author of The Photobook: A History) recently compiled a list of the Best Photobooks of the Decade. How Terry Likes his Coffee made Parr’s list. The book was just published in 2010, but its limited run of 500 copies made it scarce from the start. I lucked into one of a few copies the ICP bookstore got hold of this spring, and that’s probably the last time anybody will be able to get a copy for under three figures. The collector’s market for photobooks is heating up, as evidenced by an article in the Guardian  which notes that limited print runs all but guarantee that prices for good titles will quickly double or triple in value.  I wish I could tell you this didn't earn its costly stripes, but Terry is worth the hunt.

every camera i own: the olympus om-1

The Olympus OM-1 was my first real camera, a hand-me down from my brothers. I started using this one in the late 80's and continued to use it through the early 2000s. Before I began acquiring  cameras - which not coincidentally was around the time I joined flickr,  it was my only camera.

I've had it shelved for ages - the meter died twenty years ago even after repairs, and the shutter speeds seemed sluggish the last time I tried it. But after years hauling around the Nikon N90 as my go-to film SLR, I was surprised how light the OM-1 is. I'd forgotten how easy it is to carry around. I ran into Chris Chen aka furcafe, and although he's not an OM-1 owner he admires the compact size - not much bigger than a classic Leica rangefinder, he pointed out (as he frequently does, he had a Leica for comparison). Chris pointed out that the shutter-speed controls on the front of the camera, around the lens, strikes him as strange - most cameras have shutter speed controlled by a dial on top of the camera. But this is how I learned it.

The earliest OM-1 shot I can find on my flickr stream, the late Willem Breuker, ca. 1996:




I loaded my OM-1 with Fuji 200 and expected the shutter speeds to result in a lot of overexposed shots. But the roll turned out alright. This old school corner shop is home to the Capital Bikeshare station I use. It also seems to be the only place on the Hill where I can find Pom juice.



Olie's Trollie downtown - the blown highlights may be due more to my not compensating than to slow shutter speeds:

#photobook review: in almost every picture 10: pig, by Michael Campeau

Article first published as Book Review: In Almost Every Picture 10: Pig, by Michael Campeau on Blogcritics.

The tenth volume of the vernacular photography series In Almost every Picture, edited by Erik Kessels, is printed on a pretty pink stock. It’s nearly the color of the Financial Times, but rather than conveying fickle market trends, this tome sets in print a singular, enduring obsession.

When Michael Campeau gathered his family photographs nearly forty years ago, he noticed an unusual image from 1963. It was of his mother, bottle-feeding a piglet in the middle of Au Lutin Qui Bouffe (The Noshing Elf), a popular Montreal restaurant.

The success of a great many photo books goes beyond the quality of the photos themselves. Sequencing and book design - from layouts to paper stock - are all crucial parts of the puzzle. But it all starts with a concept. Campeau’s took shape by coincidence. In 2005, he worked with a friend who was gathering his own family photographs. Among those was a familiar image: in the same restaurant, another piglet was being bottle-fed by a customer.

The photographer placed an ad in local senior’s newspaper in search of similar photos, and his piglet obsession became a study in the piglet obesssion of others. In Almost Every Picture selects over a hundred such images commissioned by restaurant proprietor Joseph B. McAbbie from 1938 to 1973. McAbbie later hired “society photographer” Jean-Paul Cuerrier to make the photographs, which Cuerrier continued to do even after the owner’s death. Cuerrier’s son told Campeau that in a single night his father might take over two hundred and fifty photographs of feeding time.

The piglet and the decor are a constant, but multitudes are to be found in customers of varying ages and social background, from solo diners to couples, from a nun to a gathering of Shriners. Conflicting stories abound as to the fate of the piglets. By some accounts, the milk-fed pink delight grew up to feed elfin customers. But others tell a tale of long pig lives led on an idyllic farm. Au Lutin Qui Bouffe made thousands of piglet pictures, but many are lost. A fire closed down the Montreal landmark, and closed the door on the photo op memorialized In Almost Every Picture. We must rebuild.

#photobook review: More Cooning with Cooners, edited by Kalev Ericson

Article first published as Book Review: More Cooning with Cooners, edited by Kalev Ericson on Blogcritics.

In the last few years, the independent UK publisher Archive of Modern Conflict has released a fine streak of photobooks, from their handsome collection of Kodachromes, The Corinthians; to Larry Towell’s exquisite variation on the family album, The World from my Front Porch; to Nein, Onkel, a collection of snapshots that supposedly gives us a look at the more "fun-loving" side of Nazi Germany. The Kodachromes of More Cooning with Cooners may at first glance seem a more focused sequel to The Corinthians. But the second glance is telling.

The discomfort with which I type or even shorten the title is the first sign that this is not your ordinary collection of vernacular photography. The title is based on a 1924 book called Cooning with Cooners, on the culture of Ohio raccoon hunters. The phrase is seen early in the present book, emblazoned on a trailer hitched to a station wagon in front of which one proud hunter poses with this hound. The photographs gathered here were made by one such hunter who worked through the 1960s, which places it in a context in which the changing world outside them seems to have had little effect on their language and bloodlust. It is a cruel tease that the book opens with a photograph of two playfully alive raccoons, for the rest of the book documents the plundering of the animals (if not, as the accompanying essay points out, to their extinction, as the buffalo), and the dogs and men who hunt them for their pelts.

What the photos lack in sharpness and technical prowess (flash lights glow from racoon, hound, and human eye alike), they make up for in cumulative power: this is what hunting looks like, from suiting up, to dog prep, to the chase, to the kill, to the season’s total. The fact that a 1924 poem called “Dat Scanlus Coonhunt Itch” is used to place the photos in historical context increases the unease, but it is almost overkill - the spirit of the times may not be spelled out in the photos, but you can see between the lines well enough.

The book's endpapers indicate the dramatic arch of the photographs, with an illustration of a raccoon head inside the front boards and a raccoon skull inside the back boards. The accompanying essay does not judge these men who pose with rows and rows of pelts, but posits these photos as the document of a lost subculture. I’m no card-carrying member of PETA, but it’s hard not to look at these images of good old boys with guns and shudder a little. Maybe I’m just a city boy who doesn’t want to know what’s going into his hot dogs. More Cooning with Cooners is a smartly designed book whose selection and sequencing leads the reader places you may not expect to go. It may enchant you. It may disturb you. Sounds like a great photobook to me.

Consumer note: the book is limited to 500 copies, and is already fetching a premium at Amazon. The curious will do better to look for this at places like Dashwood Books or Photo-Eye, or directly from the publisher, who offers a special edition with a photo print and an original copy of the 1924 book, enclosed in a raccoon fur slipcase.

every camera I own: the blackbird, fly 35mm twin-lens reflex (orange)

Market strategy for the Blackbird, Fly (yes, its name has a comma; yes, that's awfully precious) would have you believe that "many TLRs are hundreds of dollars," which I guess is true if you want a Rolleiflex. But you can easily get, say, a Yashica A (or two!) on eBay for less than the Franklin and change that this camera, comma, will set you back.

And yet when I saw one at the ICP Store, long before they'd turn up at Urban Outfitters, I grabbed it. After all, it was in my favorite color. It's a cute little plastic bastard, and comes elaborately packaged in a hip cardboard box with a hip plastic bell enclosing it like hip pheasant comma under glass. Really comma I hadn't noticed that affected comma before comma but it is certainly the kind of minute annoyance upon which one can become fixated comma isn't it.

I loaded it for the very first time about a week ago, nearly three years after it was introduced.

The Blackbird Comma Fly is modelled after the classic Twin Lens Reflex design, but takes 35mm film which you can use in three different formats: with a square or rectangular mask, or without the mask, which is supposed to let the image bleed onto the film sprockets for a larger square negative. I shot a roll of expired Kodak "High Definition" 400 that I acquired from some Flickr group that was handing out expired film, some of it crappy (what I loaded the B,F with), but some of it pretty good - varieties of Kodak's VC and NC (Vivid Color and Natural Color)  Portra stocks.

I shot the B,F without a mask because I am photographically  naked like that, but the Walgreen's where I have been taking my disposable and toy 35mm pictures for developing printed them oblongatic anyway.

I thought 400 ASA film would be too fast for the camaera and I'd end up with blown highlights, but the lens specs beg to differ: a 1/125 shutter speed and an f7 or f11 aperture (never could move the lever that changes them) left me underexposed   on an overcast day:

Loews parking lot, Front Royal, VA.

I often forget that toy cameras have setting for normal exposure and bulb exposure - the former of which has a normal shutter speed (1/125 sec. in this case), the latter of which holds the shutter open as long as the shutter release is pressed.  I have a few very blurry pictures of my nephew as testament.

An under-exposed but not blurry photo of my nephew.

I was excited to see how these pictures would turn out, and so in full "let's finish off the roll on random stuff near the photo lab," I burned nine frames at and around Walgreens.

It is perhaps not a story for the ages, but it is my story.

photobook review: ed van der elsken, love on the left bank

Article first published as Book Review: Love on the Left Bank by Ed van der Elsken on Blogcritics.

Publishers have responded to the demand for collectible photobooks in a variety of ways. Errata Editions reissues highly valued titles, but resizes them to fit a uniform template. Not that I don't want the whole collection. The reissue efforts of Dewi Lewis Publishing may not have the depths of the growing Errata catalog (up to a dozen and counting in the Books on Books series), but they have created magnifiicent facsimiles of a number of classic photo books, from William Klein’s New York (its reissue now out-of-print and collectible) to Martin Parr’s The Last Resort (reviewed here last month), to this week’s title.

Dutch photographer Edward van Elsken published over 20 photobooks in his lifetime. His 1956 classic Love on the Left Bank is a fine example of the photobook as visual literature, for in spirit and texture it comes off as a marriage between Kerouac’s On the Road and Robert Frank’s The Americans (separate if related works - advantage Frank).

This fictionalized book-length photo essay follows the ill-fated love affair of a Mexican hitchhiker with a woman of Paris named Ann against the backdrop of a Left Bank that was then one of the great epicenters of art and culture. High-contrast, grainy black and white film captures the excitement and energy of youth and the city, and the varied page layouts keep the narrative moving. Spreads of jagged smaller panels feature plenty of white space, and Parisian shop-fronts that look as if they were made by an Atget who didn’t have time to stop and dream. These alternate with full-bleed two-page closeups of lovers and other strangers. The images are at once historical and timeless, though some of the Gill Sans-laid text has dated, with exchanges like, “You dance like an African negress” answered by “I’d like to have a child by a negro.”


“Ann” was actually Australian-born dancer/artist Vali Myers, who moved to Paris in 1949 and lived at New York’s infamous Chelsea hotel for a while - a few of her paintings in fact still adorn the hotel's storied walls. Myers’ drawings are featured throughout the book as well. If Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris transports you to the Paris of the twenties, then the gritty photos and rhythmic page layouts of Love on the Left Bank will transport you to 1956.