Category: Photo History

I’ve not always been the greatest fan of photography’s oldest magazine, the British Journal of Photography, though I was a subscriber for over 20 years, but there are often things it does very well. One of them is a feature by Dimitri Beck, editor in chief of Polka magazine, (whose Paris gallery and offices I visited last November for a show by Daido Moryami), an interview with deservedly the best-known photographic editor of the last century,  John G Morris.

Now 96, Morris is still working with photographers, but the occasion for the article is the showing for the first time of the photographs he made himself in Normandy in 1944, a month after the Normandy landings, when, keen to see things for himself, rather than staying at the Life Magazine London offices, he invented the job of ‘pool editor for Western Front’ and went out daily with the Life photographers for 4 weeks, taking his Rolleiflex with him and shooting a dozen rolls of film.

The pictures, being shown until Sept 15 at Visa pour l’Image in Perpignan, certainly evoke the era and place from the few examples I’ve seen and show he was proficient as a photographer, but rather pale beside the iconic images from others that he edited.

If you are not familiar with the story of Morris, the film Eleven Frames, directed by Douglas Sloan gives some idea of his work and has Morris himself telling the story of Capa’s D-Day pictures. You can also see a video interview made earlier this year with him by Alessia Glaviano on Vogue Italy.

Morris’s autobiography,  Get the Picture: a Personal History of Photojournalism was first published in 1998, came out as a paperback in 2002 and has since appeared in various languages and is still available.

“Some photographers feel the camera separates them from their own feelings about people and events. To the contrary, the camera makes me closer” wrote Abigail Heyman in her 1987 Aperture book ‘Dreams & Schemes: Love and Marriage in Modern Times‘, certainly the only book of wedding photographs I own, and in which I think her pictures demonstrate the truth of her statement.

You can read her obituary, published yesterday in The New York Times, which also has  a small gallery of images, beginning with a portrait of her by Bill Jay, taken in her New York home in 1980.

When I wrote about her ten or so years ago for my ‘Directory of Notable Photographers’ (a listing no longer on line) I searched the web with little success to find anything by or about her, recording my conclusion:  ‘No useful material available on the web’, and I don’t think things have changed much, with just a few isolated images on various blogs. Information about her is also still rather sparse , and a little of what I did find and used was perhaps not absolutely accurate. It’s a shame that her work isn’t more readily available.

Her first book, ‘Growing up female; A personal photojournal’ was published in 1974 and sold many copies, becoming something of a feminist icon. Although there were a number of images I admired, I didn’t buy a copy and still consider it a less interesting work than ‘Dreams & Schemes‘. Her third book, ‘Butcher, baker, cabinetmaker : photographs of women at work‘ picturing them in occupations at least then normally thought of as male preserves seems considerably less personal than the first two. All three are available very cheaply second-hand (or, as usual if you prefer, very expensively, one of her works being offered in apparently similar condition by different sellers at around a fiver or over £99.)

The NYT obit states “She was one of the first women admitted to the prestigious photographer’s cooperative Magnum“, but she was only nine when Eve Arnold was accepted as a member and there were a number of others before Heyman become linked to them in some way. Although various sources describe her as a former member of Magnum Photos I’m not sure what her exact relationship was to the organisation as her name does not appear in the index of Russell Miller‘s Magnum book, and she is not included in the list of present and past members on Wikipedia.  Perhaps one of my readers can clarify?

She was one of the founding members of Archive Pictures, along with Mark Godfrey, Mary Ellen Mark and Charles Harbutt, who all left Magnum in 1981 as well as Joan Liftin who had been the director and editor of the Magnum Photos Library. In the mid-80s Heyman ran the Documentary and Photojournalism Department at the International Center of Photography in New York – a position later held by Liftin.

Heyman also founded Picture Project, a photography publisher which seems to have brought out two books, ‘Flesh & Blood‘, a collection of family pictures by various well-known photographers, and a second edition of her own ‘Dreams & Schemes‘, and to have been associated with the University of New Mexico Press in publishing ‘My Fellow Americans’ by Jeff Jacobsen.

Thinking about D-Day for the previous post led me to the work of one of America’s most prolific photojournalists, Art Shay, who at the time was the navigator on a B-24 bomber named ‘Sweet Sue’ and whose “Whitmanesque poem to my beautiful new bride” about his experiences got published in the Sunday Washington Post.

Shay, born in 1922 and still active at 91, has been described as “Chicago’s premier photojournalist” and his record of around 1,100 magazine covers is certainly impressive (and it’s around 1,099 more than me.) His work is deeply embedded in aspects of American culture, particularly of the 1950s, and there are some aspects of it that rather pass me by in the short video about him on PetaPixel, though anyone who gets the testimonial there from Studs Terkel certainly deserves and gets my respect.

Shay’s work appears on the Chicagoist blog in a regular ‘From The Vault Of Art Shay‘ feature each Wednesday, and there is also a blog devoted to him and his work, as well as an artist’s page at the Stephen Daiter Gallery. You can also read about him in Wikipedia.

One of the shows I went to a while ago but never got around to reviewing was
Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour which was the inaugural show by the Positive View Foundation at Somerset House over the Christmas period. In part I didn’t review it because I wasn’t at all convinced by it as a show; it seemed a particularly sloppy piece of curating, a rag-bag of colour photography around a less than threadbare conceit. But among the work by 15 photographers on show, there was some of particular interest, particularly by Saul Leiter, Helen Levitt, Alex Webb and someone rather less well-known to me, Fred Herzog.

Herzog was born in 1930 in Germany, where he grew up and life was pretty tough during the war and afterwards. In 1952, having become a photographer, he emigrated to Canada, settling shortly afterwards in Toronto, where he worked as a medical photographer. In his spare time he walked the city taking pictures, using Kodachrome. Although his work was included in a few mainly group shows in Toronto over the years, it was only in 2008 following a show at the Equinox Gallery the previous year that it really began to reach a wider audience around the world.

Part of the reason it didn’t become known earlier was technical. It was difficult – and expensive – to make good prints from Kodachrome, so it was hard for him to show his work. Cibachrome was the first really practical direct printmaking process from slides, and it wasn’t ideal with its high contrast added to the already high contrast of Kodachrome favouring extreme impact at the expense of subtlety. Getting truly good prints needed expensive masking or laser scanning, and it was only with the advent of high quality inkjet printing from digital scans that making good and decently archival prints from Kodachrome became reasonably cheap. And it is these inkjet prints that have made Herzog’s work available to a wider audience.

Herzog’s work interests me both because of the subjects he took but also because it shows that – like I think ther work of many other photographers – there was interesting work in colour before colour was discovered by the art photography industry in the 1970s and 80s.  Photographers who were using colour not because it was saleable and could be shown in museums and galleries, but because of their interest in recording life in colour. We now know of Herzog, but I’m sure he is the iceberg tip.

There is also an individuality about his work. Unlike that of another recently discovered ‘unknown’ photographer I don’t look at his pictures and immediately think of the work that other photographers had made earlier and disseminated widely. Herzog was making his own history, not just repeating – however well – what he had appreciated in the work of others.

You can read more about him – and about the controversy that arouse over his views about the Nazi holocaust in a couple of features, Marsha Lederman’s The collision: Fred Herzog, the Holocaust and me  in the Vancouver Globe and Mail, and Timothy Tailor’s The Way Things Are: Fred Herzog’s Art of Observation in Canadian Art.