Photo History | >Re-PHOTO

Gang of Two – Only In England

Around 45 years ago, two young men, both with a mission about photography bumped into each other in the offices of the British Journal of Photography and got talking. Despite their very different backgrounds they recognised each other as kindred spirits and became good friends.

One was the son of a respected English artist, who died only months after his birth, leaving his mother to bring up a family on a very restricted income; aided by support from various bodies including the Artists Orphans Fund she was able to send him to one of England’s oddest and most antiquated minor public schools, from where he went on to study to be a graphic designer. The other came from a large Irish Catholic family in the Bronx, where public schools were something rather different.

But both had studied at separate times with the same man, Alexey Brodovitch, a legendary graphic designer and art director, and had experienced the vibrant photographic culture in New York in the early 1960s where they found both had many common friends. Both too had very little regard for the small clique that made up the British photographic establishment of those times, and then and later both made themselves unpopular by saying what they thought about them and their limited perspective on the medium. There is a considerable contrast between what some well-known names now say about Tony Ray-Jones and their relationship with him compared with their views expressed at least in private while he was still alive. John Benton-Harris continues to challenge with his widely-informed and forthright opinions on the medium.

The two men photographed together very occasionally, with most of Ray-Jones’s pictures being made outside London and most of Benton-Harris’s in and around the capital – John says they agreed to split the photographic country between them along these lines. But they worked together in other ways, educating the editors of Creative Camera and introducing them to many of the American photographers whose work they published, and John printed much of Tony’s work, both before and after his death. The show did contain at least 5 prints he had previously owned for many years, and probably other prints in the first section were among those he had printed for Tony Ray-Jones; certainly the majority were from negatives from which he has printed.

So I was very interested to hear John’s opinion on the show ‘Only in England‘ which featured both work that was printed by (or probably mainly for) Ray-Jones during his lifetime and also new prints made from work that the photographer had rejected as not being good enough. After its showing at the new Media Space in London’s Science Museum, this opens today (March 28) at the National Media Museum in Bradford and continues until 29 June 2014.

After I’d written my own review of the show (and earlier I’d posted a short note based on the promotional video), I had some lengthy conversations with John, and was pleased to hear that he was busy writing his own review. Since then I’ve asked him quite a few times how he was getting on with it and finally yesterday he was satisfied that it was complete and ready to be seen.

Finally, with a little computer assistance from me, the review is now up on John’s blog with a couple of pictures, at last completed to his satisfaction. It is a long piece with the title ‘Only Baloney‘, a title which relates to one of Ray-Jones’s favourite phrases (I think borrowed from Brodovitch), as John mentions in his piece:

‘Instead we were given a lot of phoney baloney (Tony’s polite way of saying bullshit) about how a friendship that never was, and a methodology that has nothing to do with Tony’s way of approaching and commentating on existence by a photographer who claims so much respect and appreciation for Tony and his seeing, yet deliberately ignores the information and other evidence he left us and that is also clearly present in Tony’s prints.’

The review reads very much in John’s own voice and expresses his views about both the show and some of the aspects of the rewriting of photographic history it represents. John did give me permission to put the whole of his review on this site, and I may do so later, but for the moment you can read it on his The Photo Pundit blog.

I was pleased to find that his view is largely similar to what I had previously written about the show, though his close knowledge of both the man and his work gives his view a much greater weight. There is quite simply no one who can speak about Tony Ray-Jones and his photography with greater personal knowledge and authority, although many still seem to want to ignore his views.

And, also on John’s blog there is a great bonus. On March 7, artist Edward Mackenzie, another English former Brodovitch student (he recently moved back to this country and set up his studio in Stoke-on-Trent) gave a talk at the Media Space, about Tony Ray-Jones who he met in New York in 1966 him along with Tony’s brother, Philip Ray-Jones. You can see the two of them in a photograph at the top of another post I helped John put on-line yesterday which is the text of Mackenzie’s talk. It’s an interesting and slightly different perspective of both the man and his work.

McCullin & Somerset Levels

One of the more famous residents of the flooded areas of the Somerset Levels, and someone who has for some years devoted himself largely to photographing that landscape is Don McCullin, and as I listened to the news some of his black and white landscapes came to mind. There is one at the bottom of an article from the National Gallery of Canada (you’ve just missed his show there) that seems particularly apposite, a deliberately dark and moodily printed image of flooded field and a silhouetted line of winter trees under a heavy sky, The Somerset Levels below Glastonbury, UK (1994).

McCullin hates being described as a war photographer, but many of his most famous images are war photographs but of course he has done so much more. There is a short video of him talking that is worth watching mentioned recently on fStoppers, and an excellent and well-illustrated recent feature by Gerry Cordon, McCullin: a conscience with a camera.

This includes another of his images from the Levels, as well as a rather hillier Somerset landscape, and also tells the story of what McCullin describes as the only picture that he has ever staged. Some of the same ground is covered in an article about his photography the McCullin himself wrote for The Guardian in 2012. For a slightly different perspective you may like to read My Husband Don McCullin, written by Catherine Fairweather of Harpers Bazaar where it was published in 2013.

I’m not quite sure what to make of a Canon advertising film, Inspiration, made in mid-2012 in the Languedoc-Roussillon region of the South of France, when Canon sent him with a well-known wedding photographer Jeff Ascough as his guide to “discover more about shooting with Canon digital cameras.” It says “Don McCullin is still shooting with his Canon EOS 5D Mark III DSLR and a variety of Canon EF lenses” and good luck to him, though should I reach his age I think I might prefer something rather lighter. I think the best of these digital images by him are still in monochrome, and there are some nice pictures of him by Ascough.

Charles Harbutt

One of the daily posts I receive from L’Oeil de la Photographie (The Eye of Photography) was about Charles Harbutt and brought back to me some warm memories of a workshop of his I attended around 15 years ago at Duckspool. It had been a workshop with Harbutt back in the 1970s at Paul Hill’s The Photographers’ Place in Derbyshire which had changed the life of Peter Goldfield, leading him to found Duckspool, and as I wrote (sadly on the occasion of Peter’s death in 2009) “perhaps had I met him 20 years earlier it would have changed my life too.”

I’d come across Harbutt in the 1970s, but only through the pages of his book ‘Travelog’, published in 1974 which very much reflects his attitude to photography that he expressed in a lecture you can read in Visura Magazine. The Unconcerned Photographer, delivered in 1970 when he was President of Magnum Photos. It’s perhaps a curious co-incidence that in it he twice quotes from and comments on his Magnum colleage Leonard Freed, the only other photographer whose workshop at Duckspool I attended.

In the article on L’Oeil de la Photographie, Harbutt says how the The Image Gallery Redux show which is at Howard Greenberg’s gallery in New York until Feb 15th 2014 reminds him of his early years in photography, as it includes a picture taken when he was only 17 and “three pictures from a migrant farm workers story I did for a magazine called Jubilee where I worked when I got out of college in 1956.” He tells the story of that job in Cuba, and its a good story that I won’t spoil here when you can read it in his own words.

The best place to see Harbutt’s work online is Visura Magazine, where you can find a slide show of his photographs and a number of articles.

Another article from the same day The Image Gallery Redux 1959-1962 gives some more information about the show, which features work by Harbutt and 21 other photographers, including Duane Michals, Saul Leiter, Sid Grossman, Charles Pratt, David Vestal and Garry Winogrand, who all showed work at the pioneering New York gallery opened by photographer Larry Siegel. The Howard Greenberg Gallery web site was suffering from ‘technical difficulties’ as I write, but you can still download the PDF of the Image Gallery from the show with thumbnails and titles to see what those of us who are not in New York are missing.

If like me you value the work of L’Oeil de la Photographie you can sign up for its regular daily e-mails and also donate to keep their work going.

Incisive not Decisive?

As a young man I was very flattered when someone who I knew to be knowledgeable about photography came up to me at an exhibition and compared my work on show to that of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Not that I would ever claim to be in the same league, but it was good to be flattered.

Cartier-Bresson was at the time about the only photographer known by name, at least to an educated public, in the UK, and even those who couldn’t have brought his name to their lips would probably have recognised some of his pictures. To be a photographer at least for the general public was to strive to emulate him, though by that time I was one of a tiny minority who had got to know the work of Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Gary Winogrand and others.

There were few photographic books on the shelves in libraries or in any but truly specialised book shops (and London had the best of these in the Creative Camera bookshop in Doughty St, to which I made regular pilgrimage.) Cartier-Bresson’s 1952 ‘Images à la sauvette‘, published in the USA as ‘The Decisive Moment‘ still defined photography some twenty years later, a kind of photographic gold standard.

As often pointed out, the ‘decisive moment’ is perhaps a poor replacement suggesting something rather more static than the French, more literally translated as ‘Images on the run’, replacing its slanginess with formality, taking it away the streets and illegal activities and into polite and rather stuffy discourse.

Here is a quote from an article I published on Cartier-Bresson in 1999 (though based on earlier lecture notes):

It was however his next book, Images a la Sauvette, better known by the title chosen by its American publishers, The Decisive Moment that put his photography and ideas to a world-wide public. The French title uses the term for illegal street trading and could perhaps be translated as ‘Images on the Run’ or ‘Stolen Images’ and perhaps more accurately reflects the dynamism of Cartier-Bresson’s better work than the more static suggestion of the ‘decisive moment’ which has however become indelibly linked with his photography.

I’ve never owned the book ‘The Decisive Moment’ (by the time I came to photography it was long out of print and rather expensive), though I had it on ‘permanent loan’ for some years from the library of the school where I worked in the 1970s, and rather regret being honest enough to return it. It’s still perhaps the best single book of his work, although there have been many others.

You can read an interesting discussion of the ‘Decisive Moment‘ in a long article by writer, photographer and psychology professor John Suler, a chapter from his book Photographic Psychology: Image and Psyche, which to my surprise includes a different quotation from my article above (though I have absolutely no connection to the Catholic High School in San Diego on which this short essay is still available.)

You can also watch the 18 minute film nade in 1973 , Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Decisive Moment in which the man himself talks about his work (in English) to a background of some of his best pictures.

But though I admire much of his work, I’ve never really found Cartier-Bresson’s metaphor productive (and it perhaps isn’t one that informs a great deal of his own published work.) And I also don’t share his view that documentary is boring; for me it is at the heart of photography.

When I think about how I work with a camera the image that comes to mind is that of a scalpel, attempting to cut a significant moment out of space and time. I don’t of course mean that I stand there confronting the subject camera in hand and think of myself carving out a picture, but there is something accurate and precise that I strive for in framing and composition and timing – and a delight in using instruments that do the job cleanly and well – like the Leica and Nikon – rather than blunter tools. Its a determination to try to be incisive.

There’s a tautness about a good photograph, and a focus, a wholeness, something that you look at and see as a picture rather than wondering why ever the photographer chose that particular place and time to press the shutter. I may hope I will produce decisive pictures, but the activity that lead to them is incisive.

Ctein & Prints & Slides

Ctein is a printer and photographer whose thoughts on photography I’ve occasionally read and been informed by for many years, once upon a time in print and now on the web where he has a weekly column on The Online Photographer. His latest post there, Fashion and Fad in Fine Photography, is what he calls “a quick, anecdotal look at history” in particular related to prints and photography, and makes some debatable points about prints and the history of photography.

I don’t fully agree with much of what he says. Prints became important from the start of photography, when the in many respects highly inferior Calotype process soon dominated the Daguerreotype largely because it enabled the production of prints, crude though they were compared to the minute detail of the silvered plate. Prints enabled photographs to be shared, to be made into books, stuck onto cards, and in the first 50 or so years of photography artistic concerns were generally hand-in-hand with technical advances such as the albumen print and wet and dry plates which enhanced finer reproduction of detail, better tonality and also ease of use. Even processes such as platinum printing were prized for their ease and convenience, and even photographers with a somewhat cavalier attitude to sharpness and detail in making their artistic negatives printed their work in a straightforward manner.

Contrary to what he suggests it was only after some fifty years of largely straightforward print-making that some photographers, wishing to distinguish themselves as ‘artists’ from the common herd of commercial photographers began to aspire to “prints that emulated, in some fashion or another, painting or drawing.” And for some twenty or thirty years this became the dominant fashion in art photography.

Ctein is I think wrong to suggest about the move back to realism represented by f64 (and of course others), that “Although wrapped in the flag of artistic sensibility, it was at least as much a pragmatic decision.” Having myself dabbled in some of the darker arts of alternative processes, I think in many ways processes such as gum bichromate are considerably more forgiving than the making of fine ‘straight’ photographic prints. Anyone who thinks otherwise is invited to study the Daybooks of Edward Weston and the Basic Photo Series of Ansel Adams.

But less contentions and more interesting to my mind are his comments about colour printing, and particularly on working for print publication. As he says until some time in the 1950s, “printing houses and press operators swore that you couldn’t get good reproduction from a slide; you had to work from a print.” But by the time I came to photography in the 1970s “most printing houses had forgotten how to deal with prints and slides had become the canon.”

At that time, colour negative film was almost entirely seen as an amateur medium. Anyone serious about colour worked with slide film. I spent 15 years cursing it, and paying good money for bad prints when I wanted to frame work – or struggling myself with the toxic chemistry of Cibachrome and cursing its over-high contrast. Spending hours making unsharp masks or trying to get sensible results with Agfa reversal print chemistry. Ctein became well-known as a maker of dye-transfer prints, and remains one of very few printers still able to offer these, but that was something out of my price range.

I saw the light in the mid 80’s, largely as a result of the adoption of colour negative by a number of fine-art photographers, but also because I realised that since so little of my work in colour was actually being published it made little sense to sing to the publishers tune when colour negative would give me better prints. It still remained a tricky job to print from colour neg, involving considerable investment in a roller processor and expensive enlarger as well as a lot of cursing to get colour balance right, and there is something in what Ctein says about black and white remaining as the preference for photographers because it was easier to produce. Certainly now it has become easier to produce good colour prints than good black and white, with digital camera and inkjet printing, I can find little reason to want to work in black and white.

One major development for me was the introduction of film scanners. At first an expensive option through a lab, and later with a high quality desktop film scanner of my own, it removed the difference between whether you worked in negative or transparency (except for the inherent defects of both types of film) or even if you worked in black and white. What publications now wanted was not prints or slides but a digital file.

Now I’ve moved completely to digital cameras. Even the few niches that I used to think I needed film for I’ve now found ways to do them with digital, either as well or better. I can make prints on my own inkjet printer – black and white or colour – or send the files to a lab on-line and get prints – inkjet or C-types. Though more and more I’m working for the screen rather than paper. Though I’m still working on books of my work I’m intending to publish them as PDFs rather than in print (with perhaps the option of a print version of the PDF for anyone still addicted to paper.)

Ctein is right to conclude that for photography “the sensibilities and pronouncements are likely to continue to change with technology and convenience” but there is more to it than that. It isn’t just about convenience, but that technology enables us to do things better as well as easier, makes new opportunities possible.

Getting Bailey

The first post that I wrote for ‘About Photography’, where for around 8 years I wrote a regular weekly photography column as well as setting up a web site dedicated to photography, was about David Bailey. Looking back, it wasn’t one of my better articles, but – perhaps because it had a touch of humour as well as a little insight – it got me the job.

Bailey has never really been one of my favourite photographers, but there are certainly things about him and his work that I admire. And clearly he is a guy with a dedication to photography, and a fashion photographer only because that was (according to him) an easy way to make a living so he could take pictures.

While some BBC Radio programmes never make it to iPlayer and others disappear after a week, you have, according to the web site, ‘over a year’ to listen to David Bailey talking to (and photographing) presenter Tim Marlow about how he got started and his attitude to portraiture and fashion. The first of two programmes in the series ‘Getting the Picture’, The Camera Has Attitudes, can be heard now, and the second part of the conversation with Bailey, He Seduces Everybody! will be on-line after it has been broadcast on Monday 20th January.

These programmes come in advance of a new show at London’s National Portrait Gallery, Bailey’s Stardust, which runs from 6th February to 1 June 2014. Meanwhile you can search the gallery’s collection both for pictures taken by him and pictures of him.

There are quite a few sites around the web with articles on Bailey, and more with some of his pictures. But perhaps the most interesting of them is by Francis Hodgson, David Bailey – Still Troubling After All These Years. Writing at the time of the show David Bailey’s East End at the Compressor House in London’s former Royal Docks in 2012 (a show dedicated to , Hodgson comments:

David Bailey has had insufficient attention. That sounds absurd. One of the most famous photographers we have? Certainly, but he’s almost never had a public show – one big one at the Barbican (and the Barbican is oddly funded, it’s not really a national venue) otherwise scraps. It is impossible to imagine a German photographer of equivalent status, a French or a Dutch, to have received so little public confirmation. Our curators really haven’t been doing their work if Bailey can unearth treasures on this scale in a few months of trawling his own files.

And it is so obviously true, and something the show at the National Portrait Gallery will really do little to correct, because its focus is simply on one very limited aspect of Bailey’s work and perhaps this is not really his strongest suit. Some of them are excellent for the genre, and certainly head and shoulders (excuse me!) above some of the mediocrity that seems to be the NPG’s forte, but there is much more to the man than these images which are largely about celebrity.

Of course, Hodgson’s complaint is one that could be echoed about many other British photographers and about the British establishment’s attitude to photography in general. And if our own institutions don’t bat for them it’s hardly surprising that so many have not gained the international reputation they deserve.

Hodgson finishes with the final footnote :

I see that the show is dedicated to the late Claire de Rouen, bookseller of the Charing Cross Road, and a person whose enthusiasm for photography was the engine for an entire generation of UK practitioners.

Many of us were indeed encouraged and stimulated by her enthusiasm at the Photographers’ Gallery where I first got to know her (and in the Porcupine) and then later at Zwemmers and then her own bookshop further up the Charing Cross Road. If only there were more like her.

Lauren Henkin

David Vestal whose passing I mentioned yesterday, was a man whose work very much reflected the interaction between craft and vision that is at the heart of photography, and the same is certainly true of the landscape photography of Lauren Henkin, as you can see from the interview with her published recently on Petapixel.

This starts by looking at what made her become a photographer, and she picks as a key moment a visit with her parents to a Harry Callahan retrospective at the US National Gallery of Art in 1996, when she was in her early twenties, around the end of her BA in Architecture, where she says “Callahan’s prints (in particular the photographs of Cape Cod), I had a visceral reaction to them.”

She goes on to describe taking a master printing workshop with George Tice, certainly one of the finest printers around both in platinum and silver I think I probably first registered his name when he was one of the photographers featured in the ground-breaking volume ‘Darkroom‘, published by Lustrum Press in 1977 – on the verso of the title page under the usual details of the colophon the statement ‘PHYSICAL FACT/PSYCHIC EFFECT‘. A series of prints Tice had made from the same negative “opened up the path for me to develop a vocabulary for my prints.”

Henkin goes on to mention two other even more familiar names to me, Tyler Boley and Jon Cone, pioneers in fine art digital printing, whose helpful comments on-line in groups such as Digital Black and White the Print and Piezography 3000 have been a part of my daily life for a dozen or more years. You can read an intersting article written in 2012 by Cone, The State of the State of the Arts in Black & White, which is illustrated by the work of Henkin and Boley among others.

It was Jon Cone who, following on from his experience with Iris printers pioneered high quality black and white printing on Epson desktop inkjet printers. I started printing with his PiezographyBW Quad ink system in 2000, producing black and white images on matte papers that startled me by their quality, matching or surpassing those I’d made some years earlier with platinum, platinum/palladium and kallitype (albeit with less control over image colour.) I went on to be a beta tester for the next generation of PiezoTone inks.

Cone’s work led printer manufacturers to up their game, and although I’m convinced that Piezography’s latest generation is still the ultimate in black and white printing quality (now on both glossy and matte papers – and yes, capable of more than silver) I no longer use them. Most of my printing is now in colour and I don’t print enough for it to seem worth changing to the cheaper ConeColor system that gives results identical to the Epson inks. If I ever get around to printing serious black and white portfolios I’ll start by investing in a new printer and the latest Cone inks.

But back to Lauren Henkin, who goes on to talk about her inspirations, mentioning photographer Robert Adams as well as painters, sculptors, architects and poets and then moving on to discuss her latest project. The Park, taken in that highly photographed space, Central Park in New York over three years, and her earlier work. Visually, even on screen, it is delightful and her website has an admirable and classical simplicity that complements the fine imagery.

I’ve yet to have the opportunity to see her actual prints as her work hasn’t been exhibited in the UK (she has been in group shows in Arles and Paris, along with a long list since 2007 in the US and Canada.) But its perhaps a reflection on the kind of photography that is promoted by the relatively few spaces that show contemporary work here that London (or some of our other major cities) is not yet on that list.

Henkin is also co-editor of Tilted Arc, a web site with the strap-line ‘Art and argument, fact and fiction. And verse.’ which has recently began a series ‘Women in the Landscape, a new ongoing feature,”conversations between women photographers whose work focuses on the land”. The first conversation is between Henkin and Canadian photographer Jessica Auer, whose work is well worth exploring.

David Vestal (1924 – December 5, 2013

When I first became seriously interested in photography and was taking pictures, back in the early 1970s (before then I’d been interested but to skint to actually buy film for the the camera I’d owned for around ten years) there was really only one magazine in the UK worth reading, Creative Camera, though that didn’t stop me buying some of the rest, mainly to drool over the equipment I still couldn’t afford.

There were also articles on technique, though mainly about taking photographs, recycling stuff about depth of field, exposure, panning and the rest, and occasionally about printing tricks, but little or nothing about making expressive images or about great photography. Photographing landscape would be illustrated by a few camera club images by the deservedly unknown author rather than the work of Ansel Adams or Edward Weston, let alone anything more modern.

For magazines with a wider interest in photography you had to go the the larger branches of Smiths which stocked the US magazines; Popular Photography, Modern Photography, Camera 35. In these magazines I learnt more about photographers and photography, though they also had technical reviews that went into far more depth than the UK mags – and made me buy the Minolta 28mm rather than the Leica to fit my Leica camera (and also to save up for the Leica 90mm f2.8 which I still occasionally use with an adaptor when I need a long lens on the Fuji-X cameras, while the Minolta, though once a fine performer has succumbed to fungus inside the lens.)

There were several regular columnists in these magazines who stood out, and foremost among them was David Vestal. No mean photographer himself, as you can see from the set of pictures at the Robert Mann gallery, Vestal had learnt photography from one of the legendary teachers of photography, Sid Grossman of the Photo League in New York in the late 1940s, an himself became a legend.

I learnt much from his regular columns, not just about the how of photography, but also about the why and he was a man who inspired many. I don’t think there will be a better obituary for him than that by Jim Hughes in The Online Photographer; Hughes knew him well and in March 1972 began to serialise his “David Vestal’s Book of Craft—An Advanced Course in B&W Photography for Beginners and Others” in Camera 35 – and I became a regular reader. In 1978 it was published in book form as “The Craft of Photography”, and was one of the finest introductions to advanced photography ever to appear. Even if like me you never now go into a darkroom with intent it remains a book worth reading.

Film Night

I’ve not watched all the 16 films that are listed in 16 Photography Documentaries every Street Photographer should watch on the Street View Photography site, though there are some that I have seen. Most of the 16 can be found on YouTube, although a few are only available on DVD.

Perhaps I’ll find myself some spare time over Christmas to watch some of the others, although I usually keep pretty busy, and I find it hard to just sit and watch, especially for the longer films. Daido Moriyama: Near Equal is 1hr 24 minutes, and so far I’ve just dipped into it at a few points, so I can’t tell you if it is worth watching as a whole. Picking up his ‘Shinjuku 19XX-20-XX‘ from my bookshelves and looking through a few pages is rather more satisfying if I only have a few minutes to spare. But if you don’t have the book (or others with his work – and there are some available more cheaply), YouTube is considerably cheaper.

And while film is seldom a good medium for looking at photography, it can be good at talking about it, and the film features the photographer and a number of other people (fortunately with subtitles for people like me whose Japanese is non-existent.)

I’ve never considered myself a ‘street photographer’, a term which always seems to me to lack any real meaning, though usually I work on the streets, and certainly see my own work as being a part of that great body of photography that was celebrated in ‘Bystander: A History of Street Photography‘, a book that annexed at least half the history of photography to its presumed genre (as you can appreciate from this speed-reading video.) I don’t think any of those included in the original publication in 1994 – Atget, Stieglitz, Strand, Cartier-Bresson, Brassai, Kertesz, Lartigue, Walker Evans, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and more – called themselves street photographers either.

I don’t have the Eggleston DVD mentioned in this feature. but I did put another one on my Christmas list a couple of years ago, William Eggleston Photographer, a Reiner Holzemer film (extended trailer here) made in cooperation with the William Eggleston Trust, and I might watch that again. And since people never know what to get me for Christmas, I might just search for a few more films I could add to put on a list for this year.

Saul Leiter (1923 – 2013)

Saul Leiter who died yesterday was a photographer who became better known in his eighties than he had been earlier in his life, as it was only in his seventies that he took many of his old 35mm Kodachromes taken on the streets out of their boxes and made the prints which showed his colour work from the 1950s and 60s, an age before colour photography became respectable to the art world.

Of course he wasn’t completely unknown before. He’d exhibited paintings on walls along with some very well-known artists, worked as a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, and even had his black and white photographs exhibited in MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) when Edward Steichen was at the helm.

Back in 2006, his show ‘Saul Leiter: Early Colour’ attracted a great deal of favourable critical comment, and at the time I noted:

Currently on show until 21 Jan 2006 at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York is Saul Leiter: Early Color. For a real photographic treat go to the gallery web site and look through the 42 superb images dating from 1948-60, mainly taken in New York, but also from Rome, Venice and Paris. Despite the title of the show, the site includes 12 fine black and white pictures.

Leiter, born 1923, the son of a distinguished Talmudic scholar, began to study at Cleveland Theological College before leaving for New York to work as a painter. There he met Abstract Expressionist painter, Richard Pousette-Dart, who was also working with photography, and he also began taking pictures, working with 35mm colour on the streets of New York in the late 1940s.

Colour was alive and well in photography long before its discovery by the art world as ‘new color’ in the 1970s with the work of William Eggleston, Stephen Shore and others.

(Links updated – the Howard Greenberg gallery link is to his artist page there rather than the 2006 show and is not the identical selection and there are now only 39 works.)

One of the nicest current pieces I’ve seen about him is on Faded and Blurred, but you can also see selections of his work on Retronaut, Time Lightbox, Jackson Fine Art, Gallery 51, InPublic and of course Lens Culture, as well as watch the trailer for the film about him, ‘In No Great Hurry.’

As he says in the opening moments of the trailer, “There have always been people who liked color, its not as if I was the only person“, but although there certainly were others – such as Helen Levitt and possibly others currently unknown whose work may yet come to light – his work is permeated by a remarkable lyricism which apparently continued unabated even after he switched to digital in recent years.