Thursday, August 11, 2011

Louise Dahl-Wolfe

Louise Dahl-Wolfe at Work in her Studio




"Mary Jane Russell in a Dress by Dior"


"Carson McCullers," 1940

"Cecil Beaton"

"Crostobal Balenciaga," 1950



"Lauren Bacall," 1942


"Night Bathing"

"Twins at the Beach"


Louise Dahl-Wolfe biography from the Museum of Contemporary Photography at
Columbia College in Chicago:

Louise Emma Augusta Dahl was born to Norwegian parents in San Francisco, California on November 19, 1895. In 1914 she began her studies at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) where she stayed for six years, studying design with Rudolph Schaeffer. She became interested in photography in 1921 upon meeting and seeing the pictorial work of Anne Brigman. Dahl worked as a sign designer for the Federal Electric Co., San Francisco from 1920 to 1922. She studied design and decoration, and architecture at Columbia University, New York in 1923. In 1924 she was employed as an assistant to decorator Beth Armstrong in San Francisco, and from 1925 to 1927 she worked for Armstrong, Carter and Kenyon, a fashion wholesale company. In 1928 she met the sculptor Meyer Wolfe in Tunisia and married him in San Francisco. She wanted to take the last name Wolfe, but later, lest she be mistaken for a particular commercial photographer by the same name, she adopted the hyphenated “Dahl-Wolfe.”

Dahl-Wolfe began to concentrate on making photographs while in San Francisco and Tennessee in the early 1930s. She spent the summer of 1932 in Gatlinburg, Tennessee photographing the people of the Smoky Mountains. One of those portraits became her first published work, appearing in Vanity Fair in 1933, and Edward Steichen included her Tennessee pictures in a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1937. From 1933 to 1960, Dahl-Wolfe operated a New York photographic studio that at first was home to the freelance advertising and fashion work she made for stores including Bonwit Teller and Saks Fifth Avenue, but soon was in use for Harper’s Bazaar projects (including such photographs as the carefully staged Japanese Bath from 1954 and Isamu Noguchi, New York, the 1955 portrait of a designer and his lamps).

From 1936 to 1958 Dahl-Wolfe was a staff fashion photographer at Harper’s Bazaar. During that tenure, Dahl-Wolfe’s photographs featured in the magazine included 86 covers, another 600 published in color, and thousands in black-and-white. A cover image of Betty Bacall sent the model for a Hollywood screen test where she soon changed her name to Lauren. While working for Harper’s Dahl-Wolfe pioneered the use of natural lighting in fashion photography and shooting on location. She photographed in locations all over the northern hemisphere: from Laguna Beach, California (Rubber bathingsuit, January 1940), to the winter quarters of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Sarasota Florida (Two models with elephants, May 1947) to Granada, Spain (Jean Patchett, 1953). Her innovations and modernist touches kept her widely celebrated in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and she is remembered as an influence on a generation of photographers including Horst, Richard Avedon, and Irving Penn.

Dahl-Wolfe preferred portraiture to fashion work, and while at Harper’s she photographed cultural icons and celebrities including film-maker Orson Wells (1938), writer Carson McCullers (1940) designer Christian Dior (1946), photographer Cecil Beaton (1950), writer Colette (1951), and broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow (1953). In addition to her Harper’s responsibilities, Dahl-Wolfe was able to pursue her own vision in the studio and sometimes even while on assignment. For example, she asked a model to pose for the unpublished Nude in the Desert while on location in California’s Mojave Desert shooting swimsuits that would appear in the May 1948 edition of Harper’s.

From 1958 until her retirement in 1960, Dahl-Wolfe worked as a freelance photographer for Vogue, Sports Illustrated, and other periodicals. Major exhibitions of her work include Women of Photography: An Historical Survey at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1975); The History of Fashion Photography (1977) and Recollections: Ten Women of Photography (1979) at International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; and Portraits at the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson (1986). Retrospectives include shows at Grey Art Gallery, New York University (1983); Cheekwood Fine Arts Center, Nashville, Tennessee (1984); and Louise Dahl-Wolfe: A Ninetieth Birthday Salute at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (1985). Louise Dalhl-Wolfe lived many of her later years in Nashville, Tennessee, though she died in New Jersey of pneumonia in 1989.
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Thursday, August 4, 2011

Roman Loranc


Roman Loranc portrait by Kim Weston





"Little Shasta Church"

"The Great Unconformity"

"Franciscan Church, Vilnius"

"Small Chapel on the Hill"

"Chimney Sweep"

"The Gang"

"Tufted Hairgrass"

"Small Chapel"

"The Last Road"

"Quietude"


I am most grateful to Mr. Loranc for his kind permission to post his work on my blog.



Some photographers believe their strongest work comes from exploring their immediate surroundings. "I think of myself as a regional photographer," Loranc says, "but that does not mean the photography cannot be understood beyond the region. Right now people all over the United States indicate to me that regionalism, born of an informed attachment, has universal appeal." Loranc shoots most of his pictures within an hour's drive of his home in California but he is also interested in exploring his ancestral roots in Europe. For this reason he makes occasional photographic forays into Poland and Lithuania.

"I'm fascinated by the ancient churches of my homeland," he says. "These are holy spaces where millions of people have prayed for hundreds of years. They are places of great humility, and remind us how brief our lives are. I feel the same way when I'm photographing ancient groves of native oaks in California. I was unconscious of this when I began, but upon reflection, I think the oaks are just as sacred as the old cathedrals of Europe. They are sacred in that they have survived for so many years. I'm aware that the native people of California held all living things as divine. For me a grove of Valley Oaks is as sacred as any church in Europe."

"I think about how interconnected the world is," Loranc says. "When I'm out on a crisp winter's morning, shooting a stand of native oaks, I see oak galls hanging from the trees. These were once used to make the pyrogallol chemicals I use to develop my negatives. So the oak trees I am photographing played a part in the developer I use to process my negatives of those trees. It is healthy to remember that we are often linked to the natural world in ways we don't even suspect."

Loranc shapes the photo from start to finish. He operates a 4x5 Linhof field camera, shoots the majority of his photographs with a 210mm Nikkor lens, using Kodak's classic Tri-X film, and hand prints his negatives on multigrade fiber paper. Mr. Loranc is a firm believer that images can best and most genuinely be captured only through the use of film. As such, all of his prints are from film, and the only film he uses is Kodak’s Tri-X, which he has found to be reliable, consistent and, of utmost importance, only of the highest quality. The innate drama of the landscapes is reproduced through a variable split-toning (sepia and selenium) technique. All the printing, spotting, and archival mounting are done by the photographer.

Roman Loranc was born in Bielsko-Biala, Poland, in 1956. He emigrated to the United States in 1981. In 1984 he moved to California, and shortly thereafter fell in love with the Central Valley.

*Majority of biography text borrowed from Black & White Magazine, Aug 2004, David Best and from Bloomsbury Review, Nov/Dec 2003, John A. Murray
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Friday, July 29, 2011

Werner Bischof


Werner Bischof




"The Mimi Scheiblauer School for Deaf/Mute Children," 1944

"Germany, Cologne, The Interior of a Shattered Cathedral," 1946

"Town of Hiroshima:  A Victim of the Hiroshima Atomic Explosion," 1951

"Kabuki Actor, Tokyo, Japan," 1951

"Michiko in Town, Tokyo, Japan," 1951

"Farmer, Cambodia," 1952

"On the Road to Cuzco, near PIsac, in the Valle Sagrado of the Urubama River, Peru," 1954

"School in the Forest, Otwock, Poland," 1948

"New York City," 1954



Werner Bischof was born in Switzerland. He studied photography with Hans Finsler in his native Zurich at the School for Arts and Crafts, then opened a photography and advertising studio. In 1942 he became a freelancer for Du magazine, which published his first major photo essays in 1943. Bischof received international recognition after the publication of his 1945 reportage on the devastation caused by the Second World War.

In the years that followed, Bischof traveled in Italy and Greece for Swiss Relief, an organization dedicated to post-war reconstruction. In 1948 he photographed the Winter Olympics in St Moritz for Life magazine. After trips to Eastern Europe, Finland, Sweden and Denmark, he worked for Picture Post, The Observer, Illustrated and Epoca. He was the first photographer to join Magnum with the founding members in 1949.

Disliking the 'superficiality and sensationalism' of the magazine business, he devoted much of his working life to looking for order and tranquility in traditional culture, something that did not endear him to picture editors looking for hot topical material. Nonetheless, he found himself sent to report on famine in India by Life magazine (1951), and he went on to work in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Indochina. The images from these reportages were used in major picture magazines throughout the world.

In the autumn of 1953 Bischof created a series of expansively composed color photographs of the USA. The following year he traveled through Mexico and Panama, and then on to a remote part of Peru, where he was engaged in making a film. Tragically, Bischof died in a road accident in the Andes on 16 May 1954, only nine days before Magnum founder Robert Capa lost his life in Indochina.
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Thursday, July 21, 2011

Boris Smelov


Boris Smelov


















Boris Smelov biography from The State Hermitage Museum (taken from The State Hermitage 2009 retrospective of Smelov's work):

Photographer Boris Smelov (1951-1998) became a legend of St. Petersburg’s photography during his lifetime. He was a living classic who evoked veneration from all who were somewhat connected to the art of ‘photography’. Critics and professional photographers unanimously acknowledged Boris Smelov as one of the best European masters of photography. The image of St. Petersburg that he created is not only high quality photographs but, undoubtedly, the most eloquent utterance ever said about that city at the end of the last century, the utterance that can be equal to Brodsky’s poetry in its significance. His Apollo from the series of photographs of the Summer Garden sculptures is a photo of a proud marble profile of the ancient god with trickling raindrops and a crawling spider. This photo was reproduced repeatedly and became a symbol of St Petersburg culture of the end of the twentieth century, a symbol that was so rich in content and significance that it could tell more about Petersburg - Petrograd - Leningrad - St. Petersburg than the most solid collected papers from research conferences.

Creative work of Boris Smelov is a valuable and bright phenomenon of Petersburg culture between 1970s and 1990s. It is connected with Petersburg, it is dedicated to Petersburg, but at the same time deprived of local history narrow-mindedness. His works can be compared with the most artistic models of the world photography such as works of Cartier-Bresson, Doyen and Curtis.

Smelov is an artist who stands at the brink of the centuries, he is a domestic artist who at the same time stands at the level of the highest achievements of international photography displaying the connection between the relatively new art of photography and traditional art, in the first place traditional art of St. Petersburg, an international city by essence. Photography is a discovery of the nineteenth century. It changed and determined world perception of a modern man more than any other discovery. A photograph can create a consecutive chain of moments defining nervous pulse of a city life.

Each photo work is not just a simple document, it is the embodiment of what lies deep down in our consciousness and what comes only in our dreams and fantasies, for reminiscence is a form of fantasy. Accidental moments interlace with one another making an important message, a whole text about the city, its unique expressiveness that might be more whole and significant than its immutable immovable monuments. In the pungency of experiencing such moments torn out of the time flow one can feel the unique fragrance of Boris Smelov’s art, which he himself called ‘intuitive photography’. In his case intuition, however, is always accompanied by accurate and precise reckoning of intellect.

Boris Smelov did not photograph specifics of real Leningrad and it would even be perfunctory to say that he was trying to catch the phantom of Petersburg in his photographs. His Petersburg is not just a city it is a City with the capital letter. It has something relating to the City image of another great photographer, Parisian of the twentieth century Eugene Atget, to whom Smelov was very close as appeared. Unexpected angle of Boris Smelov’s photographs gives a new meaning to the familiar common places - the city is not a frozen text anymore. It enters into discussion with the spectator, communicating something new and unexpected, be it a magical light coming from the inside of St Isaac’s Cathedral rhyming with the glowing lonely window in the wall that towers above the snow-covered roofs, or tired silhouettes of random passengers against the background of Neva panorama that is seen through the windows of an evening tram.

The name of Smelov is well-known to photographers, collectors, critics and historians of photography. Today any more or less famous Petersburg photographer has not eluded his influence. This is a generally recognized fact. He was represented at various exhibitions during his lifetime as well as after his death. It is impossible not to mention him when talking about Petersburg photography, however, until now there was not a single large-scale museum exhibition dedicated to his work, not a single album dedicated only to him was published. The exhibition presented in the Hermitage is the evidence of recognition of this outstanding master whose talent is appreciated at its true value.
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Thursday, July 14, 2011

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944), Self Portrait





"Leo Tolstoy," 1908

"Greek Woman Harvesting Tea in Chakva, Georgia"

"Headquarters of the Urla Railway Administration," 1910

"Mohammed Alim Khan (1880-1944), emir of Bukhara," 1911

"Zindan (prison) in Bukhara," 1907

"Young Russian Peaasant Women Along Sheksua River Near Kirillov"

"Monastery of St. Nilus on Stolbny Island in Lake Seliger near Ostashkov," ca. 1910


Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii biography from Wikipedia:

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) was a Russian chemist and photographer. He is best known for his pioneering work in color photography of early 20th-century Russia.

Early life

Prokudin-Gorskii was born in the ancestral estate of Funikova Gora, in what is now Vladimir Oblast. His parents were of the Russian nobility, and the family had a long military history.  They moved to Saint Petersburg, where Prokudin-Gorskii enrolled in Saint Petersburg State Institute of Technology to study chemistry under Dmitri Mendeleev. He also studied music and painting at the Imperial Academy of Arts. In 1889, he traveled to Berlin to continue his studies in photochemistry at the Technical University of Berlin with Adolf Miethe, who was working on color dyes and three-color photography.

Marriage and career in photography

In 1890, Prokudin-Gorskii married Anna Aleksandrovna Lavrova, and, later, the couple had two sons, Mikhail and Dmitri, and a daughter, Ekaterina.  Anna was the daughter of the Russian industrialist Aleksandr Stepanovich Lavrov, an active member in the Imperial Russian Technical Society (IRTS).  Prokudin-Gorskii subsequently became the director of the executive board of Lavrov's metal works near Saint Petersburg and remained so until the October Revolution. He also joined Russia's oldest photographic society, the photography section of the IRTS, presenting papers and lecturing on the science of photography.  In 1901, he established a photography studio and laboratory in Saint Petersburg and further developed Miethe's methods on color photography. Throughout the years, his photographic work, publications and slide shows to other scientists and photographers in Russia, Germany and France earned him praise, and, in 1906, he was elected the president of the IRTS photography section and editor of Russia's main photography journal, the Fotograf-Liubitel.

Perhaps Prokudin-Gorskii's best-known work from the time is the only color portrait of Leo Tolstoy (see above), which was then reproduced in various publications and printed for framing and on postcards.  The fame from this photo and his earlier photos of Russia's nature and monuments earned him invitations to show his work to the Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich of Russia, Empress Maria Feodorovna, and, eventually, the Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his family in 1909.  The Tsar enjoyed the demonstration, and, with his blessing, Prokudin-Gorskii got the permission and funding to document Russia in color.  In the course of 10 years, he was to make a collection of 10,000 photos.  Prokudin-Gorskii considered the project his life's work and continued his photographic journeys through Russia until after the October Revolution.  He was appointed to a new professorship under the new regime, but he left the country in August 1918.  He still pursued scientific work in color photography, published papers in English photography journals and, together with his colleague S. O. Maksimovich, obtained patents in Germany, England, France and Italy.

Later life and death

In 1920, Prokudin-Gorskii remarried and had a daughter with his assistant Maria Fedorovna née Schedrimo. The family finally settled in Paris in 1922, reuniting with his first wife and children.  Prokudin-Gorskii set up a photo studio there together with his three adult children, naming it after his fourth child, Elka. In the 1930s, the elderly Prokudin-Gorskii continued with lectures showing his photographs of Russia to young Russians in France, but stopped commercial work and left the studio to his children, who named it Gorskii Frères. He died at Paris on September 27, 1944, and is buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery.

Photography techinque

Prokudin-Gorskii's own research yielded patents for producing color film slides and for projecting color motion pictures. His process used a camera that took a series of three monochrome pictures in sequence, each through a different-colored filter. By projecting all three monochrome pictures using correctly colored light, it was possible to reconstruct the original color scene. Any stray movement within the camera's field of view showed up in the prints as multiple "ghosted" images, since the red, green and blue images were taken of the subject at slightly different times.

The exposure time of the frames is likely to have varied, even if the developed negatives were later on similar glass plates. In a letter to Leo Tolstoy requesting a photo session, Prokudin-Gorskii described each photo as taking one to three seconds, but, when recollecting his time with Tolstoy, he described a six-second exposure on a sunny day. Blaise Agüera y Arcas estimated the exposure of a 1909 photo taken in broad daylight to have had combined exposures of over a minute, using the movement of the moon as comparison.

Though color prints of the photos were difficult to make at the time and slide show lectures consumed much of the time he used to demonstrate his work, his studio worked in publishing prints of the photos in journals, books, postcards and large photogravures.  Many of the original prints from his publishing studio have survived to this day.

Documentary of the Russian Empire

Around 1905, Prokudin-Gorskii envisioned and formulated a plan to use the emerging technological advances that had been made in color photography to document the Russian Empire systematically. Through such an ambitious project, his ultimate goal was to educate the schoolchildren of Russia with his "optical color projections" of the vast and diverse history, culture, and modernization of the empire.

Outfitted with a specially equipped railroad-car darkroom provided by Tsar Nicholas II and in possession of two permits that granted him access to restricted areas and cooperation from the empire's bureaucracy, Prokudin-Gorskii documented the Russian Empire around 1909 through 1915. He conducted many illustrated lectures of his work. His photographs offer a vivid portrait of a lost world—the Russian Empire on the eve of World War I and the coming Russian Revolution. His subjects ranged from the medieval churches and monasteries of old Russia, to the railroads and factories of an emerging industrial power, to the daily life and work of Russia's diverse population.

It has been estimated from Prokudin-Gorskii's personal inventory that before leaving Russia, he had about 3500 negatives.  Upon leaving the country and exporting all his photographic material, about half of the photos were confiscated by Russian authorities for containing material that was strategically sensitive for war-time Russia.  According to Prokudin-Gorskii's notes, the photos left behind were not of interest to the general public.  Some of Prokudin-Gorskii's negatives were given away, and some he hid on his departure.  Outside the Library of Congress collection, none has yet been found.

By Prokudin-Gorskii's death, the tsar and his family had long since been executed during the Russian Revolution, and Communist rule had been established over what was once the Russian Empire. The surviving boxes of photo albums and fragile glass plates the negatives were recorded on were finally stored in the basement of a Parisian apartment building, and the family was worried about them getting damaged. The United States Library of Congress purchased the material from Prokudin-Gorskii's heirs in 1948 for $3500–$5000 on the initiative of a researcher inquiring into their whereabouts.  The library counted 1902 negatives and 710 album prints without corresponding negatives in the collection.

Due to the difficulty in reproducing prints of sufficient quality from the negatives, only some hundred were used for exhibits, books and scholarly articles after the Library of Congress acquired them.  The best-known is perhaps the 1980 coffee table book Photographs for the Tsar: The Pioneering Color Photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Commissioned by Tsar Nicholas II, where the photos were combined from black-and-white prints of the negatives.  It was only with the advent of digital image processing that multiple images could be satisfactorily combined into one.  The Library of Congress undertook a project in 2000 to make digital scans of all the photographic material received from Prokudin-Gorskii's heirs and contracted with the photographer Walter Frankhauser to combine the monochrome negatives into color images.  He created 122 color renderings using a method he called digichromatography and commented that each image took him around six to seven hours to align, clean and color-correct.  In 2001, the Library of Congress produced an exhibition from these, The Empire That Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated.  The photographs have since been the subject of many other exhibitions in the area where Prokudin-Gorskii took his photos.

In 2004, the Library of Congress contracted with computer scientist Blaise Agüera y Arcas to produce an automated color composite of each of the 1902 negatives from the high-resolution digital images of the glass-plate negatives. He applied algorithms to compensate for the differences between the exposures and prepared color composites of all the negatives in the collection.  As the library offers the high-resolution images of the negatives freely on the Internet, many others have since created their own color representations of the photos, and they have become a favourite testbed for computer scientists.  A century after Prokudin-Gorskii explained his ambitions to the tsar, people all around the world are finally able to view his work, fulfilling his goal of showing everyone the glory of the Russian Empire.
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