Flying In A Blue Dream

Greetings Shipmates.

Well that was a peculiar two weeks.

Me old Mog was soundly beaten in the 100 metre Kattomeat dash by a professional cat.

I thought Olympic sports were set up purely to demonstrate the beauty of amateurism? Certainly these days it seems far far away from the mores of olive eating, hair plaiting, naked men in the baking heat of the Med. For a cat of Mog's years, the competition was just too great and in the end he had no fun and came back to the ship with droopy whiskers and a sodden tail. Meanwhile the sleek, aerodynamic, lycra-clad cats took the prizes.
Mog feels scruffy and old and unloved, but as I said to him, there's no shame in it. If he hadn't held the torch for the Kattomeat dash for all these years, it would have slipped into the mire of bizarre and forgotten cat sports of yore. He felt consoled for a bit.

Then the sun shone and then it didn't and then it did, and we sat and chatted and he felt better.
He was particularly heartened by the massed chanting of:
"Mog-o! Mog-o! Mog-o! Mog-o!"

The Goode Shippe FB is now fully laden with new stores and to be honest yer Cap'n wants to be out and about, plying the seas of ether, discovering new lands for you to enjoy.

You need a break sometimes if only to consol a sad cat.

***

Sometimes things just happen.

I think they happen for a reason, and they can be strangely interlinked.

There I was at work a couple of weeks back handling some re-reissues of classic albums, when what jumps out at me but a photograph. Not just any photograph either. A wonderful, dreamy, gorgeous slice of colour and beauty. It was the cover of Flow Motion by Can and was made by their (now dead) guitarist Michael Karoli. 

Here it is and if this doesn't make yer jaw drop I don't know what will.

Mr. Karoli was not a professional photographer. He was an avid photography buff and above all, a highly influential and passionate musician from arguably one of the most important post-1960's German bands.

I dare you to try and research his photographs though - it is an impossible task.

So how has he got it so right?

I don't know, all I do know is that I would count myself proud to have produced such a work.

Remove the lettering and you have something that would (and should) grace any modern gallery in the world.

This shows an immense ability and an eye for a startling composition don't you think? It is so dreamy, and the use of colour is immensly calming and satisfying. 

It is a precursor of Lomography by some twenty years. I think it is fairly obviously either a double or treble exposure or a composite print as there appear to be three elements: the woman with her hand on her hip and the tree; the silhouette to the right; the overlay of flowing water.
However he made it, it is a masterful photograph and I just think it is incredible.

Isn't life wonderful when you have a serendipitous meeting . . .

***

Anyway, after mentally filing the above as a possible side excursion for a future FB, fast forward a couple of weeks. 

There I was minding my own business browsing the books in Waterstones on a very wet Monday when I encountered Ernst Haas. Not personally you understand as he too has been dead for a number of years. No it was a Thames & Hudson Photofile book.

I was aware of Haas's monochrome work, but not really his colour.

The cover of the book looked intriguing, so for want of something better to look at, I opened it and was punched straight in the face by one of the best colour photographs I had ever seen.

Western Skies Motel, Colorado 1978 - this may not look ideal on your monitor, but believe me, it is beautiful.

I don't know about you, but I am getting strangeness, intrigue and downright beauty off of it.
I am not a colour photographer. At all. It is just something I have never done, and yet now I find myself wanting to scratch that itch.

I've always had a sneaky admiration for some of the groundbreaking colour photographers like (the these days totally ignored) Eliot Porter and the highly regarded Stephen Shore. So why isn't Ernst Haas better known?
Although Kodachrome (slide film) had been around since 1935 and had been widely taken up by the photographer at large, it was difficult to reproduce, and was also virtually always reliant upon being returned to the manufacturer for processing.
The earliest possibilities of colour were pointed out in 1938 in a book called The Leica Book In Colour in which 72 photographs were reproduced, but it wasn't until the introduction in 1942 of Kodacolor (a chromogenic film - basically a mixture of silver halide and dye layers . . . colour negative film as we still know it) that things really started cooking. However, you have to remember that in 1942 the majority of the world was a theatre of War, and what with the privations afterwards, colour film and processing were costly. (Agfa had actually introduced the world's first chromogenic film in 1939, but there was a little matter of it being manufactured in a country trying to achieve world domination!)

Anyway, if you look at the situation thus (and interject the worst human conflict mankind has every known) it is easy to understand the delay in its uptake and what a huge impact affordable colour film and its processing and printing would have had back in the 1950's and 60's.
It wasn't just huge, it was genre changing.
(Just as an aside, even in the 1970's I remember large parts of London where there was nothing but craters surrounded by fencing. I would say it took roughly 30 years for a full state of recovery to occur in the metropolis).
When Mr.Haas started to make his mark, back in the 1950's, monochrome was pretty much the be-all and end-all. It was easy to reproduce and everyone did it, but a huge tidal shift occured (no doubt helped in part by Mr.Haas and other brave photographers [I'm thinking of the wonderous National Geographic guys]). The tidal shift was such that these days colour is the norm and monochrome photography is the unusual thing.
I mean, who takes pictures in black and white? It is as archaic as that black and white TV set your Gran dispensed with in the 1980's, and yet it is as vital and passionate art form as you could ever wish to encounter **. 

It was a natural shift though - it stands to reason - the world is a colourful place. Why not record it so?
For myself, the problem I find is that pretty much every image I view is colour. It is everything and everywhere. It is all-conquering and commonplace. And it can be (dare I say) a tad boring.
Now to me there is something wrong with that.
Certainly there are any number of colour practitioners out there who would no doubt beg to differ, but I think the problem is that colour has become so incredibly easy, and with that easiness has come familiarity, and we all know what the old saw says that breeds . . . .
Taking your film to be processed at the chemists or your local camera shop, or sending it away and waiting with anticipation for that stiff envelope to return, sort of broke down the mystique of colour, and in recent times, digital has taken away from that even further. You snap, you view on the tiny LCD or on a computer monitor, you delete, you save. Even the difficulty of making a colour print has vanished into the haze of pointless human activity - you can print your holiday snaps whilst yer Ma gets the shopping at Tescos for chrissakes!
Colour printing was difficult. Not only that, but go beyond what used to be 'amateur' additive printing into the heady world of dye transfer prints (which were the pinnacle of colour reproduction and were exhorbitantly prohibitive at the time and have virtually vanished now as Kodak [the only supplier of materials] ceased production of said materials back in the mid-90's) and you were looking at something that cost, not just in man hours but also a big hole in your wallet. With the advent of digital, most (if not all) workers in this time consuming and expensive process moved over to digital *** and the ubiquitous, bloody ink jet print. This being said the quality of colour IJ printing can be wonderful, and even advanced printers who used to practice the dark art of dye transfer now find themselves stating that their IJ prints are almost indistinguishable from the real thing - but they won't have the archival life, nor do they really have that rich other-worldly beauty that set a dye-transfer apart. I also think that the effort involved in DT printing must have embued itself into the final product somehow . . .
And it is now all gone; you just set your profile, load up your printer and click print.
There's as much craft skill as a chimp with a banana.
Everyone does it.
Simple.
And familiar.

***

But all this is rather moving away from my original theme, namely a young Austrian man called Ernst Haas and his powerful vision.

Ernst's big break came when a photo-essay he made on a Rolleiflex was published in the magazine of the occupation forces, called Heute, in August of 1949.
It was entitled  Und Die Frauen Warten . . . (The Women Are Waiting) and was an incredibly moving essay on the repatriation of Austrian troops from the Russian front.
A large spread of 15 photographs over 8 pages culminated in the second photograph below.

It was obvious to all, there was only one way to go for someone with that sort of ability and it was up.

He was accepted that year by Magnum, the famous photographic agency, and moved to New York in 1951, quietly establishing himself as one of the world's foremost photographers. 

His work was widely published in LIFE, Vogue, Look, Esquire, Paris Match, Queen and Stern. 

LIFE printed their first ever colour spread (and a major Haas sequence) in Images Of A Magic City in 1953 - and one cannot underestimate the influence this would have had on the public at large.
Certainly colour had been used for covers and adverts and single images, but a spread like this was new.
Click this link:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=F0gEAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

The magic of Google books will take you to Part One. Page 108!
And the following edition too which continues it and also features a photo essay by my hero W.Eugene Smith:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=XUIEAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=true

Mr.Haas' work continues on Page 118, Eugene's on Page 165.
Now obviously the scans aren't great, but you'll get the idea.
As a small aside, Ernst pretty much only ever used Kodachrome for his colour work, and it shows - the colours the early versions of Kodachrome showed are to me the epitomy of good colour.

His book The Creation which was based upon his work with the director John Huston and the film The Bible, went on to sell 350 000 copies, which is an extraordinary number of books.

LIFE again, in 1958, devoted no less than 36 pages to a sequence of his work called Magic Color In Motion. (Notice too the use again of the word magic. It kind of shows how new and exciting colour was.)

Mr.Haas was the first person to exhibit colour photographs at the Museum Of Modern Art in New York in 1962 - a feat that would not be repeated until the William Egglestone exhibition some 14 years later.

Popular Photography Magazine listed him, in 1958, as one of the world's ten best photographers.

This isn't small potatoes, this is big stuff. 

Popular and populist, lauded by his peers, and yet now largely unknown (when I say that I mean just not spoken about in the same awed tones of the likes of the over-rated Egglestone). 

So how did this happen?

According to Lenscutlure.com Haas was sidelined by Szarkowski, Steichen's successor as curator at MoMA.

"Though introducing Haas’ work to a large audience and a major milestone in the history of the medium it would not come to have the same effect on the development of the artist’s career. On the contrary: Haas' exhibition though planned by Edward Steichen (renowned photographer and curator of MoMA at the time) was in the end realised by his successor John Szarkowski. With this shift in curatorship, Szarkowski would enforce a different taste. Having the duty to complete Steichen’s idea, but keen to champion his own and dissimilar ideas, Szarkowski’s enthusiasm regarding the artist and the exhibition Ernst Haas - Color Photography was meek, the praise in his accompanying texts all but faint.

Steichen, once in favor of pictorialism, thus a subjective photography, valued Haas’ profound use of the camera, while Szarkowski on the other hand chose to favor a less embellished sentiment; a more hard edge modernist inspired American approach. It was this disregard and clashing of personal agendas that would ultimately and erroneously see Haas excluded from the canon of color photography; his indisputable talent became the victim of the cyclical debate of what art photography should be."

So there you go. An incredible photographer with a gifted vision, sidelined by art-speak and politics. Oh how the world never changes!
Repeatedly down-graded by the photo-cognoscenti, Mr.Haas became almost an after-thought in photographic history.

And yet the power moves on.
Steidl's book Ernst Haas - Color Correction and numerous bods like me on the net, are slowly trying to help his memory gain the reputation it deserves.
He should be uttered in the same breath as Adams and Weston, Steichen and Strand.
His almost surrealistic images and incredible sense of the use of simplicity and complexity in the same image, and above all his sense of colour, are profound.
I don't think I can look at colour photographs in the same light again without holding them up against this un-lauded Master.

Below are some images he made in New York, on Kodachrome, in the 1950's. 

The third of them takes me back to the start of this rather lengthy FB.

One can never know for sure, but if I were to bet on it, I would say that Mr.Karoli was incredibly influenced by Mr.Haas, and quite possibly by photograph number 3.
But who can say. All I know is that this all reads rather like Shooting the Past **** , and that it has been a pleasure to head off across country like this without anything being planned.

Colour photography can be rich and powerful, sensual and overwhelming, true and false. It can (if used carefully) be an enriching tool for the concerned photographer. You just have to be careful how you use it.
One day soon I will scratch that itch and load some colour film and see what happens, but all the time I will keep at the back of my mind Mr.Ernst Haas as the pinnacle of what you can do with it.

Don't you think he truly deserves to be more highly regarded?
Hope so.

Anyway, as usual, take care and stay dry.
Thanks for reading and as my friend Canadian Bob (who coincidentally grew up in 1950's New York) always says: Watch Out For The Signs.

** You have only to do a bit of a trawl on the 'net to discover that monochrome photography is not only alive and kicking, but is generally regarded as being the only serious form of photography

*** http://www.charlescramer.com/dyetransfer.html Hard. Damn hard!

**** About a photographic archive and starring Timothy Spall, it is one of the best dramas ever made by the BBC http://hmv.com/hmvweb/simpleMultiSearch.do?searchUID=&pGroupID=0&adultFlag=false&simpleSearchString=shooting+the+past&primaryID=0

Transcendence

Greetings me Dearios - the weekend is here and the sun is splitting the sky, so why are you indoors reading this when you could be out there doing something useful with your time? 

I don't know and I don't want to know. 

You can keep it to yourself.
But if you are still indoors, and you promise to keep quiet about it, your Cap'n will take you on a trip back in time.
Sailin' the Seas of Yore with a benevolent wind at your back.

***

It is hard to imagine the difficulties faced by early photographers, and by early I don't mean the likes of me who gets up at ungodly hours most days . . . no . . . I mean back in time. Early 20th Century in particular. Users of glass plates and makers of Platinotype and Cyanotype and Kallitype prints and all these incredible words that today are by-words to the ever present and soulless inkjet print. 

If you only make inkjets for whatever reason, and have never handled a wet print or worked in a real darkroom even for a brief period of time, then you have never experienced magic.

But darkroom work is tough.You approach the start of a session with passion and enthusiasm and you can often leave, for want of a better Scots expression, feeling like shite.

Productivity and fun in the darkroom are solely the result of sheer hard work; blood, sweat, tears and fixer-fingers. 

But you know, to quote Rik Emmet: "nothing is easy, nothing good comes free" and whilst it is hard to produce a print that makes you want to hang it on your wall, believe me, it is really worth the effort.

I can understand what you might be thinking though, namely how can something supposed to be so artistic and creative be so difficult? 

Well for a start, photographic printing is a skilled and highly concentrated activity. Hours whizz by in a flash and you find yourself out of time before you know what you have done (if anything!).
I have lost whole days, working from the morning and still not been ready to sit down for my tea . . . yes folks, it can be that bad.

Even masters, like a favourite of mine Mr. Eugene Smith, felt that darkroom work was the hardest and least enjoyable aspect of his work, and yet, you only have to look at one of his Pittsburgh pictures to know that his struggle under safelights was helping him produce profoundly beautiful works of art.

(W.Eugene Smith - Dance Of The Flaming Coke)

On the surface you might think it is easy to produce a print from a negative, and it is.
You can make a print in a snap. You can make a ton if you like, but whether those prints satisfy is another matter altogether, and it can become a problem that can lead to all sorts of self-doubt.
The older I become, the less satisfied I get with my printing, and the strange thing is, I know that I can print very well. To get to something that is enriching and visually stimulating is hard, damn hard, and I am not going to wax too long about it at the moment because it distracts from the purpose of this FB.

The point I am trying to make is how was it possible for someone (working back at a time in the early 20th Century, when the reliability of silver gelatine photographic paper [which we take for granted] was but a dream) to produce a work of such profound beauty that I seriously doubt any of the renowned photographic artistes these days could hold a candle too it.

The photograph I am alluding too was by one Mr.Frederick Holland Day and it was made in 1907. It is called 'The Vision'.

He was one of those early workers. A collection of dreamers and visionaries, impassioned artists, but above all else photographers and craft workers. Names like Clarence White, Frederick Evans, Alfred Steiglitz, Paul Strand, Edward Steichen, Alvin Langdon Coburn, George Seeley, Robert Demachy and many others.

Names not often heard these days but giants of photographic imagery.

Although primarily associated with Pictorialism (basically and to reduce a thesis down to a few words: trying to make a photograph [a product of science] look rather like a painting [a timeless, organic human endevour]).
I feel that their output is still relevant today - indeed the influence has crept back in, as large numbers of television programmes you see these days use narrow depth of field. Camera magazines are packed with photographs taken with lens apertures wide open for that soft focus effect..

But this is moving aside from Mr. Holland Day.
He was by all accounts a remarkable and private man who has been judged mostly solely on his imagery.

He was fond of making images with nude male youths, and you can just tell when you mention that, that people will go 'Nudge nudge, know what you mean squire'.

But I'll be contentious here - I don't think he was motivated by sexuality.

He was an educator, a publisher, widely travelled and moving in influential circles.

A man who was moved by poetry and romanticism and a yearning for earlier, simpler times. I believe that just maybe the use of the male nude was a harkening back to that imagined Golden Age.

And how can I say this?
How can I claim to know what motivated another artist?

Well I think the proof of the pudding is in the eating:

It is hard to believe that an image created over 100 years ago can still affect one so deeply.

It certainly does affect me. It is profound and beautiful and has seeped its way deep into my psyche over a number of years. There is something archetypal about it, evoking a dawning age; an idealised romanticism from the deep deep past of mankind.

The photograph is one of a series based on the Greek myth of Orpheus, the poet and musician, made by Day from 1907 to 1908 and shows a close up of Orpheus' head over his stretching figure. Apparently this is a visual metaphor, referring to  Orpheus' murder by the Maenads who tore him to pieces and beheaded him. His head was said to have floated down the river, still singing.

It is a platinum print held at the National Media Museum here in the UK and was donated by the Royal Photographic Society, and appears to be a contact printed from two plates. The actual image size [71/2 x 91/2 inches] doesn't appear to conform to plate sizes, however one could assume there was some cropping of the print involved before it was mounted. 

Timelessness is the marque of great art, and I believe Frederick (hope he doesn't mind me being too familiar) has achieved it in spades. The image is perfect - I don't think there are many images you could apply that term to.
Frederick gave up photography altogether when the Russian Revolution halted supplies of Platinum and I think that says as much about the artist in him as you could write in ten thousand words.

Whilst reading up more about him I came upon some facts of note. One of Mr. Day's other asides was that he tried to educate young immigrants in the slums of Boston.

One of these was a Lebanese youth by the name of Kahlil Gibran.

That is a name that sort of stops one in one's tracks. Indeed in tootling around I found a photograph of him made by Frederick circa 1898 when Gibran would have been around the age of 15.

 

(Kahlil Gibran by Frederick Holland Day c.1898)

The dreaded Wikipedia states: "Gibran started school on September 30, 1895. School officials placed him in a special class for immigrants to learn English. Gibran also enrolled in an art school at a nearby settlement house. Through his teachers there, he was introduced to the avant-garde Boston artist, photographer, and publisher Fred Holland Day, who encouraged and supported Gibran in his creative endeavors. A publisher used some of Gibran's drawings for book covers in 1898."

It is all too easy to put two and two together and think that the 'publisher' was none other than Copeland & Day - Frederick's own publishing company, which was active from 1893 to 1899.

Anyway, you'll know the name of Gibran as the author of 'The Prophet' (published in 1923), and I think I shall leave it to him to round off today's FB.

Now you should really go outside and get the wind at your back and the sun on your face.
Take care.

Excerpt from The Prophet:

This would I have you remember in remembering me:

That which seems most feeble and bewildered in you is the strongest and most determined.

It is not your breath that has erected and hardened the structure of your bones?

And is it not a dream which none of you remember having dreamt, that builded your city and fashioned all there is in it?

Could you but see the tides of that breath you would cease to see all else, 

And if you could hear the whispering of the dream you would hear no other sound.

But you do not see, nor do you hear, and it is well.

The veil that clouds your eyes shall be lifted by the hands that wove it,

And the clay that fills your ears shall be pierced by those fingers that kneaded it.

And you shall see.

And you shall hear.

Yet you shall not deplore having known blindness, nor regret having been deaf.

For in that day you shall know the hidden purposes in all things.

And you shall bless darkness as you would bless light.