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The images have been scattered about in dusty and moldy warehouses, relics of the pre-Internet age when photography was integral to selling music, and the photographers — names like Irving Penn, Annie Leibovitz, Lee Friedlander and Robert Mapplethorpe — went on to become nearly as famous as the subjects they captured and defined.

“Every day is like, what am I going to find today?” said Grayson Dantzic, the archivist for Atlantic Records in New York. With colleagues at Warner Music Group, Atlantic’s parent, he is part of an ambitious project to recover the company’s story — and a good chunk of American cultural history as well — by excavating the contents of nearly 100,000 boxes from warehouses around the globe, whose accumulated photographs and other memorabilia track popular music from the Edwardian and Victorian ages to disco and jazz, from Beethoven to Miles Davis.

In an industry whose product is now compressed into tidy digital bits, the project is an exercise in record-keeping that is partly motivated by the urgencies of economics. The material is potentially quite valuable, and the company is searching for ways to make money from it, through high-end art books, sales to collectors and applications for iPads.

The project is also a story of what media companies have left behind as they increasingly move to digital formats, a reconfiguring that has upended the economics of the business.

“I wanted to take an inventory of what we had,” said Edgar Bronfman Jr., the chairman and chief executive of the Warner Music Group. “We thought it was important from an artistic standpoint, from a corporate culture standpoint and potentially from a consumer standpoint.”

Mr. Bronfman, who calls the project “Sight of Sound,” added: “I think there’s the potential to make money. It’s indefinable.”

The archive project may also be instructive for reintegrating visual art into music marketing.

“Visual art has historically been a powerful component that deepens fans’ music experience,” said Will Tanous, an executive vice president at Warner who is overseeing the project. “We lost that in recent years. But with today’s emerging digital platforms, we have the opportunity to inspire a renaissance in visual art associated with music.”

After Mr. Bronfman and investors bought the company in 2004 from Time Warner, it took a few years for executives to realize what the company had in storage under Time Warner’s name, and they sent lawyers to the former owners to secure permission to release the materials.

In close to a year of digging, the company has only pricked the surface: there are still 14,000 boxes in New Jersey alone that haven’t been touched, and tens of thousands more elsewhere in the United States and abroad in places like Brazil, Japan and Australia.

Warner Music traces its corporate lineage back to 1811 through its ownership of the music publisher Warner Chappell, whose business then was selling sheet music and the machines to play it: pianos. Among the finds is a black-and-white photo of a Chappell piano being delivered to Buckingham Palace. Songbooks dating to the 1830s are among the oldest items. More recent materials include drawings by Maurice Sendak, who produced cover art for Elektra Records before he became famous as a children’s illustrator; a hand-written history of Atlantic Records by its co-founder Ahmet Ertegun; and recording contracts for some titans of American music.

“Aretha’s contract is right there,” said Mr. Dantzic, referring to Aretha Franklin and pointing to a box on a shelf above his computer. In another box is Ray Charles’s original recording contract, signed with an ‘X.’ In a separate office is a piano from the 1920s that George Gershwin played, come upon in a cluttered storage area.

A photocopy of a letter from Beethoven to a former pupil recommending Chappell as a music publisher, dated 1819, has sent Warner’s archivists digging for the valuable original.

But the bulk of the delights — of potential value to high-end collectors — are the rock and jazz photographs, including a series of unpublished black-and-white shots of Led Zeppelin in the studio in 1969 by Jim Cummins. The intimate collection by Mr. Cummins, who was an Atlantic photographer, portrays a group of young rockers before they became hugely famous and includes a rare image of Robert Plant, the band’s singer, playing the acoustic guitar.

“There was a real sense of documentation back then,” said Bob Kaus, an Atlantic executive who is involved in the project. “Music and art really go together.”

Among other images Mr. Dantzic displayed recently were platinum palladium prints Penn took of Miles Davis; New Orleans jazz photos from the 1950s by Mr. Friedlander, whose work is currently on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; a contact sheet of Ms. Leibovitz’s images of Ms. Franklin at the Fillmore West in 1971, as well as a collection of shots of the same event taken by Jim Marshall, the rock photographer who died this year. (Photography aficionados will enjoy an image Mr. Marshall took of Ms. Leibovitz.) Materials related to some of Mapplethorpe’s early days as a photographer for Elektra in the 1970s — he shot at least one album cover for the band Television — are being sought in an archive on the West Coast.

Before the Internet, photography was so much a part of selling music that record companies spared little expense to hire photographers to shoot album covers and document a band’s work, on the road and in the studio. Today that documentation occurs, but often by the bands themselves, with flip cameras and mobile phones. The vinyl record, in effect, provided a large canvas for a photographer — a surface made smaller with the advent of the compact disc, and virtually non-existent in today’s world of digital downloads.

“I’ve had my ego stroked a lot,” said Mr. Cummins, who recalled entering record stores and seeing his work on giant displays. “You were definitely an integral part of what was done.”

Jac Holzman, who founded Warner’s Elektra Records 60 years ago, was a pioneer in integrating visual art and popular music — and documenting the artistic process at every stage, including the marketing and business aspects. When the company placed a billboard for the Doors on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles in the 1960s, the Doors were on hand, and Mr. Holzman made sure it was all photographed.

“We were all adept at photography,” Mr. Holzman said. “Any employee who would be at a session was given a camera. I never went to a session without a camera.”

These days “you don’t have the canvas to show your work,” said Neal Preston, a photographer who worked for Atlantic in the 1970s and whose own images of Led Zeppelin and others from that era have been uncovered in the archive project. “There is a deep connection for a lot of us in terms of what an album cover means to us emotionally,” he said. “It goes hand in hand with the music. At least it used to.”

Mr. Preston spent years on the road with bands, photographing fly-on-the-wall moments at the behest of Atlantic Records.

“These jobs aren’t given out anymore,” he said. “Bands and labels don’t want to spend the money.”

Lisa Tanner was hired as a photographer by Atlantic in the late 1970s when she was just 17, and hit the road with bands like the Rolling Stones, Foreigner and Yes.

“You just sort of hung out,” she said, “and waited for a moment to happen.” .

Scratching Under the Vinyl Era,
NYT,
8.11.2010,
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/
arts/music/09archive.html

News Photos, on the Move,

Make News

February 2, 2010
The New York Times
By RANDY KENNEDY

In the middle of December two trailer trucks left New York City bound for Austin, Tex., packed with a precious and unusual cargo: the entire collection of pictures amassed over more than half a century by the Magnum photo cooperative, whose members have been among the world’s most distinguished photojournalists.

It is one of the most important photography archives of the 20th century, consisting of more than 180,000 images known as press prints, the kind of prints once made by the collective to circulate to magazines and newspapers. They are marked on their reverse sides with decades of historical impasto — stamps, stickers and writing chronicling their publication histories — that speaks to their role in helping to create the collective photo bank of modern culture.

“The trucks had GPS, and I was so nervous, I was tracking every single second of the trip,” Mark Lubell, Magnum’s director, said.

Since Magnum’s founding in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, David Seymour and William Vandivert, the prints have always been kept at the agency’s headquarters, which has moved around Manhattan. But like many other photo agencies Magnum began digitally scanning its archive many years ago, and in 2006, the cooperative’s membership voted to begin exploring a sale, whose proceeds would be used to help reinvent Magnum for a new age.

Then last year, after discussions between Mr. Lubell and various scholarly institutions around the country, the archive was quietly sold to MSD Capital, the private investment firm for the family of Michael S. Dell, the computer tycoon. And the new owners have reached an agreement with the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin to place it there, for study and exhibition, for at least the next five years. It will be the first time that the archive, which for the last several years had been crowded onto shelves at Magnum’s modest offices on West 25th Street, will be accessible to scholars and the public.

Thomas F. Staley, the director of the Ransom Center — which has become well known for its collections of the papers of writers like Edgar Allan Poe, James Joyce and Don DeLillo — said that it planned to scan every image (Magnum itself has scanned fewer than half), to begin historical research and to organize exhibitions centered on portions of the archive.

“It catches so many of the world’s great photojournalists in one fell swoop,” Mr. Staley said. “These were the best of the best in their field. We want to make it a research collection. We want to bring scholars in to work in it, time and time again.”

Neither Magnum nor MSD — made up of Mr. Dell and two managing partners, Glenn R. Fuhrman and John C. Phelan, both well-known art collectors — would comment about the price of the sale, which included only the prints. (The image rights will be retained by the collective’s photographers and their estates.) But a person with knowledge of the transaction, who was not authorized to discuss it and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Ransom Center had insured the collection for more than $100 million.

The Magnum archive joins a parade of other collections of vintage photographic prints, including those of The New York Times and the National Geographic Society, that have changed hands in the past few years, as publications and photo agencies, moving aggressively to digitization, have realized they are sitting on valuable historical property.

Like other photo agencies, Magnum has seen its fortunes decline in recent years, along with those of the magazines and newspapers that once published the work of its photographers more regularly. The best known of these pictures went on to have long financial afterlives, thanks to licensing agreements that placed them everywhere from television to books and Web sites. But in a world of camera-phone images, bloggers and inexpensive photojournalism flooding the Internet, the cooperative’s finances have suffered.

“You could see the handwriting on the wall,” said Mr. Lubell, who took over as director six years ago, “and the handwriting was shrinking and shrinking.” With the proceeds from the sale the agency — which represents the work of 13 estates and 51 current members, including well-known photographers like Bruce Davidson, Eve Arnold, Susan Meiselas, Martin Parr and Alec Soth — will try to recreate itself as a media entity on the Web, relying less on publications and more on its ability to tell its own stories of world events and trends.

The earliest pictures in the archive date from before Magnum’s founding, to the work of photographers like Capa during the Spanish Civil War. The latest are from 1998, when the cooperative stopped using press prints as a way to circulate its images. In between those years are images that make it seem as if a Magnum photographer was present at almost every significant world event — D-Day, the civil rights movement, the rise of Fidel Castro — and also around to capture almost every celebrity and newsmaker: Gandhi, Monroe, Sinatra, Kennedy, Ali.

“For prints that worked this hard and traveled this much, they’re really in quite good condition,” Mr. Lubell said.

And they are relics from an age of photography that has now almost fully passed. “Given the technical changes that have taken place in the world of photography, including the digitization of images,” Mr. Fuhrman of MSD Capital, said in a statement, “a collection of prints like these will never exist again.”

News Photos, on the Move, Make News, NYT, 2.2.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/arts/design/02magnum.html

Art Review

America, Captured in a Flash

September 25, 2009
The New York Times
By HOLLAND COTTER

Like probably a zillion other school kids, “My country tears of thee” was the way I understood the first line of “America.” Maybe that’s the way the Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank heard it too when he came to the United States from Europe in 1947, at 22, with English his second, third or fourth language.

Sadness seems to trickle through the 83 photographs in his classic 1959 book, “The Americans,” his disturbed and mournful song-of-the-road portrait of a new homeland and the subject of a 50th-anniversary exhibition now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Once rejected for its pessimism, now sanctified for its political prescience, the book distills heartache, anger, fear, loneliness and occasional joy into a brew that has changed flavor with time but stayed potent. You may not know exactly what you’re imbibing when you pick up “The Americans” for the first time, or when you visit the Met show, but a few pictures in, and you’re hooked.

Some images you will recognize even if you never knew where they came from: a shot of a woman standing in an apartment window, her face hidden by a windblown American flag; a middle-aged black woman, maybe a nurse, holding a baby with skin so pale it looks extraterrestrial.

Mr. Frank took those pictures in Hoboken, N.J., and Charleston, S.C. The photograph used on the cover of the book’s first American edition was from New Orleans. It’s an exterior shot of a trolley car seen from the side, its passengers seated in the social order that prevailed in a pre-civil-rights, pre-feminist, pre-youth-culture nation.

From left to right we see, one behind the other, a white man, a white woman, a white boy, a white girl, a black man, a black woman. The white woman looks with sharp-eyed suspicion at the camera; the white boy, impassive but curious, sees it too; so does the black man, who seems to be on the verge of tears.

I’m reading feelings in here, but I think Mr. Frank was reading them into his subjects, which is why his pictures, separately and together, feel so personally laden. At this point, in 1955, he was on the first leg of a transcontinental car trip that would last 10 months and take him 10,000 miles. He was still learning the American language, the language of race and class, a stranger in a strange land that was getting more baffling.

How did he come to be there? Born in a German Jewish family in Zurich in 1924, he was interested in picture making early on. He apprenticed with several leading local photographers in his teens; in his early 20s he was doing promising work, examples of which are in the Met show. But he was temperamentally restless and impulsive. He needed to leave home, so he headed for New York.

He was restless there too. He landed a job at Harper’s Bazaar and quickly ditched it. He left for a photography jaunt to Central and South America, came back to New York, got married, had a child, went to France and Spain for a spell, returned to New York again, had another child.

Socially, his impulsiveness worked for him. He was good at introducing himself to people. That’s how he met Edward Steichen, then curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, and how he later met Walker Evans, who hired him as an assistant and more or less arranged for him to get a Guggenheim fellowship in 1955. That gave Mr. Frank enough money to travel the country, photographing as he went, with the goal of producing a book.

He made three separate car trips of different lengths, the first from New York to Detroit, the second from New York to Savannah, Ga. The third trip, in a secondhand Ford Business Coupe, was the big one. It took him, with many stops, through the Deep South and Texas to Los Angeles. There, joined by his family, he took a breather before heading back east alone, through Montana to Chicago, then to New York.

The New Orleans picture came fairly early in this trip. It was a miracle that he got it. He was focused on shooting a parade when he suddenly swung around, and there was the trolley. Many pictures happened that way. He was in the right place at the right time, but he also had the right reflexes, a dancer’s combination of precision and abandon. And he had the right instincts or, maybe, attitude. For some people a camera is armor. For Mr. Frank it was an antenna, a feeling and thinking device.

Once back in New York at the end of his travel year, he carried his instincts and reflexes into the darkroom and onto the editing table. From the many thousands of pictures he had snapped, he made hundreds of contact sheets; the Met has a fascinating selection. And from these he pulled around a thousand working prints, which he tacked to his studio walls and slowly, slowly whittled down to 100, to 95, to 86, to 83.

That final selection forms the bulk of the show “Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans,’ ” which was organized by Sarah Greenough, senior curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and Jeff L. Rosenheim of the Met’s photography department. As in the book, the sequence begins with the Hoboken flag and unfolds in four sections, distinguished by mood and tempo.

Images of flags, cars and jukeboxes set up a light, steady under-beat for recurring character types: socialites and politicians, bikers and retirees, urban cowboys, hot-to-trot teenagers and just plain folks. A starlet in Hollywood strikes a pose; three drag queens vamp on a New York City street. A hard-eyed waitress glares into space; a hotel elevator attendant dreams a pensive dream as people in furs and suits blur past her.

Occasionally figures appear in landscapes, as in an image of an itinerant preacher kneeling, robed in white, beside the Mississippi River. Just as often, landscapes are all but empty. A Montana mining town seen from a window looks blasted and abandoned; a stretch of New Mexican highway, shot from ground-level, road-kill perspective, is a blank line to the horizon until you spot a speck of a car.

A similar road appears in another photograph, though here the car is parked right in front of us, its headlights on. Through the windshield we see dim figures — Mr. Frank’s first wife, Mary, and their two children — bundled together for warmth. Whether they are asleep or sitting in open-eyed exhaustion is hard to say, they are so shadowy, so near but so far away.

Theirs is the concluding image in “The Americans,” and it is true to the spirit of the sequence as a whole. It is not a perfect picture in any conventional way. Its balances are odd; its atmosphere is blurry and grainy, as if with static or dust. Like many of Mr. Frank’s pictures, it isn’t about an event but about an uncertain moment between events, when emotional guards are down, and dark feelings can flow in. In the way a film still does, it seems to call for a larger narrative to make sense. (In 1958 Mr. Frank announced that he was giving up still photography for films, and he made many.)

The ostensibly throwaway style of this and other pictures had a huge influence, from the 1960s forward, on young artists who understood that traditional models of resolution and wholeness, in art as in life, are unstable, if not illusory. That “The Americans” could embody this concept while being a virtuosic feat of formal discipline and psychic endurance only increased its exemplary status, except perhaps to Mr. Frank himself, now 84, whose attitude toward his book has tended to grow more antagonistic with its critical and commercial success.

And how does the “The Americans” come across today? In the nominally post-racial Obama era, its political urgencies feel less immediate than they once did, but also prophetic. Its mournful tenderness, without being sentimental, seems deeper than ever. The days and nights it records are more than a half-century gone. The preacher, the nurse, the woman hidden by the flag, the sharp-eyed woman and the tearful black man on the trolley are, you imagine, gone.

What’s left is a still-strange country and a book of pictures by a foreigner who came to America impulsively, traveled our roads restlessly, and by not fully knowing our language heard it correctly and told us, the way we could not, truths about ourselves.

“Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ ”

remains through Jan. 3

at the Metropolitan Museum of Art;

(212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.

America, Captured in a Flash,
NYT, 25.9.2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/arts/design/25frank.html

Faked Photographs:

Look, and Then Look Again

August 23, 2009

The New York Times

By BILL MARSH

What a marvel the first photographic images must have been to their early-19th-century viewers — the crisp, unassailable reality of scenes and events, unfiltered by an artist’s paintbrush or point of view.

And what an opportunity for manipulation. It didn’t take long for schemers to discover that with a little skill and imagination, photographic realism could be used to create manufactured realities.

“The very nature of photography was to record events,” said Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at Dartmouth University and a detective of photographic fakery. “You’d think there would have been a grace period of respect for this new technology.”

But the tampering began almost immediately: affixing Lincoln’s head to another politician’s more regally posed body; re-arranging the grim detritus of Civil War battlefields to be better composed for the camera; erasing political enemies.

Sorting icons of truth from icons of propaganda is often a thorny business that can take decades to resolve, and that’s if it gets resolved. The long-argued case of Robert Capa’s shocking “Falling Soldier” of 1936, taken during the Spanish Civil War, has recently flared again. Is this a loyalist soldier in his fatal moment, or is it staged? A Spanish researcher has scrutinized the terrain in the photo’s background and determined that it is not an area near Cerro Muriano, as Capa had said, but another spot, about 35 miles away. Whether this forces the conclusion that the scene was acted out is being debated with fresh vigor. (Critics have raised doubts about the photo since the 1970s.)

Questions dogged Joe Rosenthal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning shot of Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima from the start — the result of a conversation overheard and misunderstood, according to Hal Buell, who wrote a book about the image.

The photo was a sensation when it appeared in newspapers in the States. Back on the war front, someone asked Mr. Rosenthal if his picture had been staged. The photographer, who did not know which frame had been published, said yes — referring to a different picture of those same Marines whooping it up for the camera at Mr. Rosenthal’s request.

Time magazine prepared an article about the alleged set-up that was never published, but details leaked out and went viral in the manner of the day. Mr. Buell, the retired head of the Associated Press photo service, says that despite film of the whole event proving the authenticity of Mr. Rosenthal’s work, a whiff of controversy stubbornly lives on.

One famous photo has been subject to a mundane form of fakery that it can’t seem to shake, years later. The photographer John Paul Filo caught the death of a Kent State student and the anguished reaction it provoked in a young bystander, and won the Pulitzer Prize for it. But the editors of Life magazine saw room for improvement, removing a post from behind the bystander’s head to tidy things up a bit.

The altered image has been published and republished, Mr. Filo lamented, despite his protests. “The picture keeps on living and working,” he said.

Here is a gallery of historic images, identified by Dr. Farid and other sources, that have been manipulated or accused of being frauds.

Faked Photographs: Look, and Then Look Again, NYT, 23.8.2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/weekinreview/23marsh.html

The Faces in the South Bronx Rubble

August 23, 2009
The New York Times
By DAVID GONZALEZ

By the rivers of Babylon

There we sat down and wept

When we remembered Zion.

Psalm 137

THE afternoon sun dipped low over the empty lots around Charlotte Street. There in the long shadows stood three boys against a backdrop of smashed bricks, crumpled beer cans and a busted bike wheel. Behind them, past the tall weeds of this urban prairie, loomed decrepit apartment buildings.

Yet the trio were grinning, their faces friendly, even goofy. Look closer at the picture and you can see why they smile: A scrawny mutt’s snout peeks out from their huddle.

Thirty years ago this summer, I returned to the South Bronx, where I grew up, with a Yale diploma in one hand and a beat-up Pentax camera in the other. Raised to get a good education, become a doctor and escape, I had instead come right back to teach photography — on Charlotte Street, no less, the world’s most famous slum.

In the four years I had been away, the South Bronx had gone from anonymous to notorious, a brand name for urban decay and despair. The landscape of my childhood had vanished, its buildings abandoned, stripped and incinerated.

Private tragedies became public humiliation in 1977. Howard Cosell damned the place, declaring, “The Bronx is burning,” as the cameras showed fires flickering beyond Yankee Stadium. Looters picked clean Tremont Avenue’s stores during that summer’s blackout. President Jimmy Carter made an obligatory pilgrimage — as Ronald Reagan would during his campaign in 1980 — for a photo-op amid the rubble.

The only way I could even try to confront this confusion was to slice it up into snapshots, each frame giving the illusion of a neat answer to inexplicable questions. For five years, I wandered from Fordham Road to Mott Haven, taking thousands of pictures in parks, street fairs, stores and even empty lots.

The negatives ended up stuffed in a closet. And the South Bronx was quietly transformed in the late 1980s by community campaigns that created new homes, community gardens and smaller schools. I became a journalist and traveled to Latin America, where I confronted poverty that made New York’s worst look tame.

But I always came back to the Bronx. I have spent much of my professional life chronicling the same streets I photographed as a young man. Six years ago, I moved back for good, with my wife and son. Some people thought I was crazy; cynics swore it hadn’t changed much from the Bad Old Days of 1979.

This year, I dug out the old pictures. The images may be black and white, but to look back upon them now is to discover that their secrets are revealed in shades of gray. In a landscape that was written off as uninhabitable — if not unsalvageable — you can see creativity, faith and even a kind of innocence.

Click. In the middle of a Mott Haven street, a lone couple hugs tightly and twirls to the music of an unseen orchestra. Squeegee boys dart out among the land yachts rolling off the Deegan to cadge a quick quarter.

Click. A couple with faces etched by lines depicting a tough journey rest for a moment, she with her groceries and he with a beer. An artist fills an abandoned building with lithe torsos made from the charred wood that had choked its apartments. A blind guitarist sings boleros from a faraway island.

The Bad Old Days?

Where some saw only rubble, life persisted in all of its ordinary glory. Where many fled in despair, others made a valiant stand. And where outsiders trembled, those who knew what this had been — and might one day become — clung to an affection that defied all logic.

•

Click.

Youngsters scramble about a schoolyard, a jumble of shapes and shadows. Close up, one plays with a toy gun. Now, look past him, beyond the fence.

Desolation.

Community School 61 was about the only occupied building on Charlotte Street when I arrived in September 1979 to teach photography. It was an old-style red-brick schoolhouse, unlike the Brutalist concrete learning factories that had become popular that decade.

The classroom overlooked a heartbreaking panorama of rubble, on streets that had incongruous names like Suburban or Home. One week, a Hollywood film crew descended on a nearby block and built a wood-frame church. Just as quickly, they torched it, so it could serve as a suitably charred ruin for their movie, “Wolfen.”

The plot revolved around wolves reclaiming the urban wasteland. Right. Then again, if wolves had actually roamed this area centuries before, one could see why they were upset with how things had turned out.

Some afternoons, buses rolled down the street and unloaded their nervous cargo. One by one, tourists stepped out, snapped a few frames of the devastation and retreated to the safety of their seats behind tinted windows. Off they went, with snapshots that became props for their tales of derring-do back home.

The pictures taken by my students were anything but despairing. They clicked happily away in the schoolyard, acting out superhero stories. They snapped their mothers cooking or their kid sisters sleeping. On Halloween, they ran around in costumes improvised from baggy skirts and jackets, their faces hidden behind Groucho glasses.

Before the devastation, this neighborhood had been a familiar backdrop to my own childhood. A music shop where my father bought guitar strings was on Southern Boulevard. The furniture store where he paid his weekly tribute for our plastic-covered sectional sofa was on Prospect Avenue. The five and dime where my mother worked the lunch counter was on Westchester Avenue.

No matter how far north or west my family moved to outrun the fires, we kept going back to the South Bronx. When we lived north of Crotona Park we trekked past Boston Road to visit friends and relatives on our old block on Beck Street.

Halfway between these two neighborhoods, on Southern Boulevard, was the Freeman Theater, which featured musicals by Mexico’s singing cowboy, Antonio Aguilar. To a boy like me, raised watching the broken-English bumbling of mustachioed banditos, Aguilar was a revelation. The Mexicans were the good guys, and Aguilar was the most heroic of the bunch, proudly singing atop his noble steed. In Spanish.

Freeman, indeed.

•

The Freeman went dark in the 1970s and was sealed shut with bricks. The blocks around it grew silent, too, as people left and buildings crumbled. Yet the South Bronx was anything but quiet. Fire alarms and sirens became so frequent that a friend joked that you could dance to their frenzied rhythm.

The Walkman was born the year I returned, 1979, but no one wanted a private soundtrack. Music was communal, binding rebellious teenagers or nostalgic parents. This was the granddaddy of file sharing: blast it out on the streets.

Old men with accordions and guitars would set up outside bodegas, playing for beer and companionship. Teenagers with boom boxes perched atop one shoulder like a bazooka bopped onto subway trains, drowning out the noise of grinding wheels as the No. 5 train made its tight turn onto Westchester Avenue.

Down by the Hub, the commercial crossroads where several streets cut through Third Avenue, loose-limbed dancers with fat-laced Puma sneakers and helmetlike Kangol caps ruled the streets and playgrounds. Felt letters on sweatshirts declared their allegiances — Rock Steady Crew, Rockwell Association — announcing to the world the nascent B-boy culture that would help launch hip-hop’s global assault.

Inside a graffiti-slathered storefront — where a spray-painted gravedigger walked among the tombstones — B-boys and graffiti writers from the Bronx mingled with artists and writers from downtown. This common ground was Fashion Moda, an alternative gallery that became world famous.

The South Bronx was abuzz with creativity, even as policymakers wrote it off. City officials suggested a policy of gradually cutting services to the worst neighborhoods. They called it planned shrinkage. It sounded more like thinning out your family by feeding the kids less each day.

Small surprise that the art from that era mocked the conventional wisdom. Along Charlotte Street, an artist wrote BROKEN PROMISES on the same buildings that served as stage sets for politicians who visited to troll for votes.

Inside a tenement near the Hub, a sculptor repopulated the building with figures made from garbage. The effect was startling: sticklike phantasms leaned against walls. Their heads were cardboard boxes, painted with big eyes and fierce teeth, like a shaman’s mask. Instead of incense to invoke the spirits, there was the pungent funk of mold and garbage, mixed with the burnt aroma of arsons past.

•

A guitarist, his face obscured by sunglasses and a hat, croons tropical love songs outside a shoe store. Behind him, a mannequin’s arm lifts her skirt, frozen in a pirouette. In case passers-by were unmoved by the music, his guitar was emblazoned with “I Am Blind.”

Click.

He was El Cieguito de Lares — the Little Blind Guy from Lares. His Puerto Rican birthplace was where islanders rebelled against Spain in 1868. It was fitting that he was on Fordham Road, since that was the Bronx’s Maginot Line, where businesses, not bunkers, would stop the creeping tide of arson.

Unlike Tremont Avenue, which had been picked clean by looters, Fordham Road bustled. The movie theaters had yet to be converted into discount clothing stores. Alexander’s — its huge sign immortalized in the opening moments of “The Wanderers” — stood sentry.

A few bookstores managed to stay open, as did some old-style candy stores with fountains. Old Irish ladies with no-nonsense cloth coats, and Jewish ones with babushkas and beat-up sandals, chatted in the vest-pocket park across the street from Cye Wells, which probably clothed their sons.

Lapels were wide and pointed, shirts were tight and garish, and none had a strand of natural fiber. Halfway up the Concourse from Alexander’s, a barber did brisk business giving young men identical Tony Manero disco haircuts, kept shell-hard with hot blasts from a dryer and dizzying clouds of hair spray.

Yet on the edges of this world were troubling signs. At playgrounds near Webster Avenue or parks on Jerome Avenue, young men rushed up to strangers whispering, “Pillow, sess, nickels and treys,” as they offered fat little manila envelopes stuffed with pot. Some sales were finalized in restrooms, with the seller offering a free hit.

The fires that everybody worried would rip past Fordham Road never happened — at least not the ones that incinerated buildings. Within a decade, thousands of smaller fires — the kind that set rocks of crack aglow — exacted a deadlier price.

•

“Hey, mista! Take a pickcha!”

Five boys jostled into the frame, all faces and hands, plastic water pistols jutting out at odd angles. Minutes later, four girls stood in the same spot, smiling coquettishly.

Those two pictures were taken on Aug. 10, 1979 — the day I turned 22 — as my friend Rafa Ramirez and I spent an afternoon at a Mott Haven street fair showing off the work of other Puerto Rican photographers. We did this a lot, bringing art to the people as part of our work with En Foco, the Latino photographers’ group that had hired me to teach at C.S. 61.

The children we encountered that day were like so many others from those years. They would ask — if not demand — that you take their picture. They all had their poses, filled with mock bravado or impish charm.

I have no idea what became of them. Maybe the boys got caught up in the insane violence that swept the area when crack wars broke out on those same streets, riddling hallways and passers-by with volleys of bullets. Maybe the girls became mothers before they became high school graduates.

Then again, maybe not.

The projects and tenements that lined those streets were home — even in the Bad Old Days — to people who worked and studied. Others might find it hard to believe, but lawyers and doctors came from there. Yes, there was poverty and violence. But there was also life that defied death.

Of all the stories told by these images, there is one that runs through all of them — my own. They chronicle how I made peace with the past as I figured out the future.

In the Bad Old Days of 1979, I was an exile in the land of my birth, ashamed of my neighborhood and myself. When my father died the next year, one of his friends quietly asked me at the wake, “How’s medical school?” — stunning me with the realization that Papi never had the heart to admit I had forsaken medicine for photography.

Three decades later, I’m still making pictures, with both words and cameras. The landscape is cleaner and safer. For sure, money, health and hope can be in short supply on some blocks.

But life lingers. Kids play in the street. Music blares from windows. And while new faces are in old buildings, a few people still remember me. At churches where I once fidgeted in pews, I drop in for morning Mass, the priest nodding at me from the altar as I settle in.

Click.

A battered trash can rests outside 858 Beck Street, below the window that was my — and my parents’ — room. My earliest memory is of sitting on the floor right by that window. I couldn’t see the garbage. I was too entranced by Papi playing his guitar.

Whether through sheer luck or providence, the buildings from my childhood survived the 1970s crucible. Some days, I can drive through every neighborhood I ever called home, knowing that by the end of my journey, I am happily and exactly where I should be.

In the Bronx.

The Faces in the South Bronx Rubble, NYT, 22.8.2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/nyregion/23bronx.html

Images, the Law and War

May 17, 2009
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — It was a hypothetical question in a Supreme Court argument, and it was posed almost 40 years ago. But it managed to anticipate and in some ways to answer President Obama’s argument for withholding photographs showing the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What if, Justice Potter Stewart asked a lawyer for The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971, a disclosure of sensitive information in wartime “would result in the sentencing to death of 100 young men whose only offense had been that they were 19 years old and had low draft numbers?” The Times’s lawyer, Alexander M. Bickel, tried to duck the question, but the justice pressed him:

“You would say that the Constitution requires that it be published and that these men die?”

Mr. Bickel yielded, to the consternation of allies in the case. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that my inclinations of humanity overcome the somewhat more abstract devotion to the First Amendment.”

And there it was: an issue as old as democracy in wartime, and as fresh as the latest dispute over pictures showing abuse of prisoners in the 21st century. How much potential harm justifies suppressing facts, whether from My Lai or Iraq, that might help the public judge the way a war is waged in its name?

The exchange also contained more than a hint of the court’s eventual calculus: The asserted harm can’t be vague or speculative; it must be immediate and concrete. It must be the sort of cost that gives a First Amendment lawyer pause.

As it happened, Mr. Bickel’s response outraged the American Civil Liberties Union and other allies of the newspaper in the Pentagon Papers case, which concerned the Nixon administration’s attempt to prevent publication of a secret history of the Vietnam War. They disavowed Mr. Bickel’s answer and said the correct response was, “painfully but simply,” that free people are entitled to evaluate evidence concerning the government’s conduct for themselves.

Which is a good summary of the interest on the other side: Scrutiny of abuses by the government enhances democracy because it promotes accountability and prompts reform.

Justice William O. Douglas, in a 1972 dissent in a case about Congressional immunity, described his view of the basic dynamic. “As has been revealed by such exposés as the Pentagon Papers, the My Lai massacres, the Gulf of Tonkin ‘incident,’ and the Bay of Pigs invasion,” he wrote, “the government usually suppresses damaging news but highlights favorable news.”

Indeed, the Nixon administration successfully opposed the use of the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the release of documents and photographs concerning the killings of hundreds of South Vietnamese civilians in 1968 at My Lai. (The decision led Congress to broaden that law.)

Disclosure of abuses can also provoke a backlash. The indelible images that emerged from the Vietnam War helped turn the nation against the war, and may have steeled America’s enemies. And earlier photographs of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were used for propaganda and recruitment by insurgents there.

How, then, to apply the lessons of history and law to the possible disclosure of additional images of prisoner mistreatment by Americans in the current wars?

On Wednesday, when Mr. Obama announced that the government was withdrawing from an agreement to comply with court orders requiring release of the images, he said there was little to learn from them and much to fear. But he offered speculation on both sides of the balance.

“The publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals,” he said. “In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.”

The first assertion, which the Bush administration also made, is not universally accepted. In a 2005 decision ordering the release of the images, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the Federal District Court in Manhattan said they may provide insights into whether the abuses shown were indeed isolated and unauthorized.

And the claim that harm would follow disclosure — that terrorists, for example, would exact revenge — is hard to measure or prove. “The terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan do not need pretexts for their barbarism,” Judge Hellerstein wrote. In the Pentagon Papers case, too, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of publication, saying, in essence, that speculation about potential harm was not sufficient.

There are, of course, profound differences between the two cases. One concerned the constitutionality of a prior restraint against publishing information already in the hands of the press; the other is about whether civil rights groups are entitled to obtain materials under the Freedom of Information Act. But both involve contentions that serious harm would follow from publication.

Justice Stewart’s answer, in his concurrence in the 6-to-3 decision, was that assertions are not enough. “I cannot say,” he wrote, that disclosure “will surely result in direct, immediate and irreparable damage to our nation or its people.” In other contexts, too, the Supreme Court has endorsed limits on speech only when it would cause immediate and almost certain harm to identifiable people. More general and diffuse consequences have not done the trick.

In 1949, for instance, the court overturned the disorderly conduct conviction of a Chicago priest whose anti-Semitic speech at a rally had provoked a hostile crowd to riot. Free speech, Justice Douglas wrote, “may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are or even stirs people to anger.”

Fear of violence, however, was enough to persuade many people that publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad should be discouraged or forbidden.

Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who has handled terrorism cases, said the only prudent course in the current case is to withhold the images. “If you’re in a war that’s been authorized by Congress, it should be an imperative to win the war,” he said. “If you have photos that could harm the war effort, you should delay release of the photos.”

But Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer with the civil liberties union, said history favored disclosure, citing the 2004 photographs from Abu Ghraib and the 1991 video of police beating Rodney King in Los Angeles.

But the touchstone remains the Pentagon papers case. It not only framed the issues, but also created a real-world experiment in consequences.

The government had argued, in general terms, that publication of the papers would cost American soldiers their lives. The papers were published. What happened?

David Rudenstine, the dean of the Cardozo Law School and author of “The Day the Presses Stopped,” a history of the case, said he investigated the aftermath with an open mind.

“I couldn’t find any evidence whatsoever from any responsible government official,” he said, “that there was any harm.”

Images, the Law and War, NYT, 17.5.2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/weekinreview/17liptak.html

Helen Levitt,

Who Froze New York Street Life

on Film, Is Dead at 95

March 30, 2009
The New York Times
By MARGARETT LOKE

Helen Levitt, a major photographer of the 20th century who caught fleeting moments of surpassing lyricism, mystery and quiet drama on the streets of her native New York, died in her sleep at her home in Manhattan on Sunday. She was 95.

Her death was confirmed by her brother, Bill Levitt, of Alta, Utah.

Ms. Levitt captured instances of a cinematic and delightfully guileless form of street choreography that held at its heart, as William Butler Yeats put it, “the ceremony of innocence.” A man handles garbage-can lids like an exuberant child imitating a master juggler. Even an inanimate object — a broken record — appears to skip and dance on an empty street as a child might, observed by a group of women’s dresses in a shop window.

As marvelous as these images are, the masterpieces in Ms. Levitt’s oeuvre are her photographs of children living their zesty, improvised lives. A white girl and a black boy twirl in a dance of their own imagining. Four girls on a sidewalk turning to stare at five floating bubbles become contrapuntal musical notes in a lovely minor key.

In Ms. Levitt’s best-known picture, three properly dressed children prepare to go trick-or-treating on Halloween 1939. Standing on the stoop outside their house, they are in almost metaphorical stages of readiness. The girl on the top step is putting on her mask; a boy near her, his mask in place, takes a graceful step down, while another boy, also masked, lounges on a lower step, coolly surveying the world.

“At the peak of Helen’s form,” John Szarkowski, former director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, once said, “there was no one better.”

The late 1930s and early ’40s, when Ms. Levitt created an astonishing body of work, was a time when many noted photographers produced stark images to inspire social change. Ms. Levitt also took her camera to the city’s poorer neighborhoods, like Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side, where people treated their streets as their living rooms and where she showed an unerring instinct for a street drama’s perfect pitch. In his 1999 biography of Walker Evans, James R. Mellow wrote that the only photographers Evans “felt had something original to say were Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt and himself.”

Helen Levitt was born on Aug. 31, 1913, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Her father, Sam, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, ran a successful wholesale knit-goods business; her mother, May, was a bookkeeper before her marriage.

Finding high school unstimulating, Ms. Levitt dropped out during her senior year. In a 2002 interview with The New York Times in her fourth-floor walk-up near Union Square, she said that as a young woman she had wanted to do something in the arts though she could not draw well.

Her mother knew the family of J. Florian Mitchell, a commercial portrait photographer in the Bronx, and in 1931 Ms. Levitt began to work for him. “I helped in darkroom printing and developing,” she said. “My salary was six bucks a week.”

With a used Voigtländer camera, she photographed her mother’s friends. Through publications and exhibitions, she knew the documentary work of members of the Film and Photo League and of Cartier-Bresson, Evans and Ben Shahn.

In 1935 she met Cartier-Bresson when he spent a year in New York. On one occasion she accompanied him when he photographed along the Brooklyn waterfront. She also trained her eye, she said, by going to museums and art galleries. “I looked at paintings for composition,” she said. In 1936, she bought a secondhand Leica, the camera Cartier-Bresson favored.

Two years later, she contacted Evans to show him the photographs she had taken of children playing in the streets and their buoyantly unrestrained chalk graffiti. “I went to see him,” she recalled, “the way kids do, and got to be friends with him.” She helped Evans make prints for his exhibition and book “American Photographs.”

Both the quintessentially French Cartier-Bresson and the essentially American Evans influenced Ms. Levitt. Cartier-Bresson had a gift for catching everyday life in graceful, seemingly transparent flux; Evans had a way of being sparingly, frontally direct with his commonplace subjects. Ms. Levitt credited Shahn, whom she had met through Evans, with being a greater influence than Evans. Photographs Shahn took of life on New York sidewalks in the ’30s have an unmediated, gritty spontaneity.

James Agee, a good friend, was also a major influence. She had met him through Evans, who noted, “Levitt’s work was one of James Agee’s great loves, and, in turn, Agee’s own magnificent eye was part of her early training.”

The kind of pictures Ms. Levitt took demanded a photojournalist’s hair-trigger reflexes. But photojournalism didn’t interest her. She was too shy, she said, and lacked the technical proficiency that is a must for any practicing photojournalist. “I was a lousy technician,” she said. “That part bored me.”

Fortune magazine was the first to publish Ms. Levitt’s work, in its July 1939 issue on New York City. The next year her Halloween picture was included in the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art’s photography department. In 1943 she had her first solo show at the Modern.

To support herself, Ms. Levitt worked as a film editor. Her friend Janice Loeb, a painter, introduced her to Luis Buñuel, who hired her in the early ’40s to edit his pro-American propaganda films. By 1949, and for the next decade, Ms. Levitt was a full-time film editor and director.

With her friends Agee, who was also a film critic, and Ms. Loeb, she started filming “In the Street” in the mid-’40s. Ms. Loeb was financially well off and was for a time married to Bill Levitt. Mr. Levitt survives his sister, as do several nieces and nephews.

“In the Street,” released in 1952, is the way one imagines Ms. Levitt’s photographs would look if they were to spring to life. The 14-minute documentary of Spanish Harlem, with a piano playing on the soundtrack, is antic, droll, artless and dear.

When Ms. Levitt returned to still photography in 1959, it was to work in color; she was among the first notable photographers to do so. She was helped in this project by Guggenheim fellowships that she received in 1959 and 1960. But much of this early color work was lost when her apartment was burglarized in the late ’60s. In the ’90s she gave up color, she said. She had to go to special labs to get prints made, and the colors weren’t always what she wanted.

Intensely private, Ms. Levitt shunned the limelight and seldom gave interviews. Comprehensive surveys of her career were held at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1980 and at the Laurence Miller Gallery in 1987. But she remained little known to the general public even as late as 1991, when the first national retrospective of her work was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and traveled to major museums.

From the 1930s through the 1990s, Ms. Levitt permitted the publication of only a few books of her images, among them “A Way of Seeing” (Duke University Press, 1965), which includes an essay by Agee; “In the Street: Chalk Drawings and Messages, New York City, 1938-48” (Duke University Press, 1987); and “Mexico City” (Norton, 1997), revisiting her one trip abroad.

Recently, though, PowerHouse Books has published several volumes of her work: “Crosstown” (2001); “Here and There” (2004), black-and-white work not previously published; “Slide Show” (2005), showcasing her color work; and “Helen Levitt” (2008).

Ms. Levitt stopped making her own black and white prints in the 1990s, she said, because of sciatica, which prevented her from standing for long. The sciatica also made carrying the heavy Leica difficult, and in recent years she used a small automatic Contax. She had other health problems. Her lungs were scarred by a near-fatal bout of pneumonia in the 1940s or ’50s, she said. And she was born with Meniere’s syndrome, an inner-ear disorder. “I have felt wobbly all my life,” she said.

Changes in neighborhood life also affected her work. “I go where there’s a lot of activity,” she said. “Children used to be outside. Now the streets are empty. People are indoors looking at television or something.”

Despite her many pictures of children, she had always been “an animal nut,” Ms. Levitt said. Driving in New Hampshire in summer 1985, she recalled, she asked a man near a barn if he had any animals. They’re coming in now to feed, she was told. Sure enough, an enchanting trio traipsed single file down the country road: a thoughtful-looking Shetland pony, a sedate sheep and a frisky mountain goat. She took the picture.

“It was luck,” she said. “Luck, as James Agee said in an essay, is very important in this kind of stuff.”

    Helen Levitt, Who Froze New York Street Life on Film, Is Dead at 95,
    NYT, 30.3.2009,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/arts/design/30levitt.html

Digital photography:

Has it become an obsession?

Everything we do is captured on camera
– and our memories are being superseded by pixels

Wednesday, 11 February 2009
The Independent
By Michael Bywater

On Boxing Day last year, a distraught traveller posted a cry from the depths of his heart on the Auckland community website. "I lost an Olympus digital camera during a trip to Waiheke Island on 29 November," he wrote. "I'm from overseas and have all my NZ experiences and memories in it."

All my NZ experiences and memories.... We've come a long way. Once, this unfortunate traveller would have known that his cri de coeur was what rhetoricians might call a "synecdoche": using the container for the thing contained. "Pass the milk," we say, when we mean, "Pass the bottle which contains the milk". Only an über-geek would quibble. The rest of us do it all the time.

But "memories"? Even the camera companies which have cleverly taken to calling photographs "memories" know they're pulling a fast one. Photographs aren't memories; surely they're containers-for-memories, or memory-joggers? Further down the line, we can say photographs are (or should be) proofs, reports, records, evidence – they can even be works of art. And in a few, rare, photographers like Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau or Brassaï, the graphic line and imagination collide, merge, and produce something new.

But not memories. Thinking of rhetoricians brings to mind the greatest living practitioner of political rhetoric, the young Jon Favreau, Barack Obama's speechwriter. And thinking of Obama brings to mind his daughter Malia, who, at her father's inauguration – one of the most-photographed occasions in history – could be seen taking photo after photo of famous or cool people, shaking hands with Dad.

Further back was a woman who appeared to watch the inauguration on the screen of her camera. She was there. It was real. But perhaps it wasn't really real unless seen on that great tyrant of our culture: the screen. Doesn't matter what screen. Doesn't matter how big or how bright or what resolution. If it's not on-screen, it's not happening.

None of us saw it coming. Twenty-five years ago, when the creatives' favourite computer, the Apple Mac, was born, the screen was a shy little thing. You turned it on, did some work, then turned it off again. Writers printed stuff out, switched off their screens and sent their copy to be typeset. Accountants transcribed their pencil ledgers into primitive spreadsheets then turned off their computers and sat back, rubbing their eyes.

And photographers? Photographers didn't turn it on at all; they still did their work on to silver halides, on film, and in red-light darkrooms. None of us foresaw a time when almost every human activity would be mediated through the glowing matrix of an LCD screen. None of us foresaw the time when the world would become flattened and constrained to the 23-inch rectangle of the widescreen monitor. None of us saw the loss of texture: of snapshots in envelopes and flimsy orange negatives, of slides in mounts and finding the projector and gathering the family. All of us still thought a photograph was something that followed the event, usually after a week's wait; and most of us still believed that, without a projector, a photograph was something that could only be looked at by two or three people at a time.

Over the past decade, though, the photograph has become a commodity; a commodity that (once you've bought the camera) is more or less free. That, and the equally unforeseen rise of the net, the speed of broadband, and the fall in the cost of storage, has meant that this has been the most widely documented decade in human history.

It's time for a new law. In 1961, Arthur C. Clarke wrote that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (to which Larry Niven responded that any sufficiently advanced magic was indistinguishable from technology). What has become clear over the past decade is that any sufficiently cheap technology will become compulsory. Cheap, almost free, digital photography and cheap, almost free, publishing through the likes of Flickr and MySpace and YouTube: these have led to the paradigm of human activity as being something which is verified by being first recorded, then published.

If not... did it happen? Was I really there?

We've even managed to take ourselves out of the necessary loop. Back in the day, a photograph required focusing, exposure, winding on, taking out of the camera, a trip to the chemist's, a wait, another trip to the chemist's and, at last, the chance to see which ones had come out. No longer. On my iPhone I can press a (virtual) button and the camera will not only take the picture, but will publish it, instantly, on the social networking site of my choice. I do not even have to look at it.

The changes brought about by technology have altered more in our culture than simply making it cheaper and easier to make photographs. One of the many retrograde steps, under the guise of progress, is that the "decisive moment" named by Cartier-Bresson and instinctively understood by all photographers (as opposed to just people-with-cameras) has become next to impossible to do with an inconspicuous camera. Press the button on an old film camera and the shutter fired almost instantly. Now, press the button and all sorts of things happen. There are inexplicable pauses, whining noises, a suspicious, synthesised click which makes you think it's done so you move the camera, and then, finally, it takes the snapshot. A good thing they have a screen: at least you can see what it's actually photographed as opposed to what you wanted it to photograph.

More importantly, perhaps, the nature of the photograph has changed. Its transience makes it seem less real: press delete and it's gone. The passage of photons through the lens no longer effects a permanent change. The image is ultimately disposable. Digital technology's potential for almost infinite duplication, too, has changed the game. Once there was a thrill in going to a photography exhibition and seeing pictures "for real" – not printed, but made from light passing through the original negative and on to paper. Nor does it feel "real" that the photograph is, like everything else, just another damn thing on the screen. It has no texture. It doesn't curl in the hand. The head and shoulders of a love object snipped carefully from a 5x4 print is more real than the same thing Photoshopped neatly from a jpeg file leaving no trace of its theft at either end.

Perhaps this is why documentary reportage has almost vanished: the images are no longer so real, and the making of an image – the idea that something is "worthy" of an image, which we all instinctively did when we only had 12 or 24 or 36 frames in our cameras – is no longer special. Nor is the idea of the reporter, the photojournalist, much respected; we are all photojournalists now: citizen journalists, with opportunities for reproduction and distribution of which the great smudgers of the past could only dream.

The relationship between image and reality has changed. We no longer read photographs as texts, but as a commentary on themselves. "Here is proof," says the photo, "that I was here", but "I" isn't the person who took the snap; it's the photograph itself. If you can't remember where you were or when, your friends, or those you publish the picture to, can transfer it to Google Maps, choose satellite view and zoom in to the building where, at 2.17am on 7 January, you were snapping Jezz on your Nokia and uploading it to Facebook. The whole enterprise was conducted to produce a public image. Sometimes I get a spooky feeling we're being elbowed aside, becoming Morlocks to the cameras' Eloi. What's going on in my computer? Armed with all that data – when, where, how high, how bright – and the endless cross-referability of the web, are my photos becoming custodians of themselves? Is the computer looking at them on my behalf? What is iPhoto doing when it's not active? Was I there... or was it just my photographs?

Clearing through my father's papers after he died, I found his photo folder. A real one, made of battered shagreen. In it was a picture of his long-dead brother; one of his father as a young man; one of his wife as a 13-year-old girl with her mother and sister. Pictures of the dead. Pictures of people who could not be seen in reality, ever again, kept private in his desk drawer. Quite at odds with our way of looking now. But so was the idea of photos on a telephone. Why, he asked, would you want it? "Because they're both media," I said, clever me, "and so converge." "Well," he said, "stew and treacle pudding are both food, but you wouldn't want them on the same plate."

And reality and photographs can both be seen... but I wonder what the young woman at the inauguration will see when she looks at her pictures; or whether she will look at them at all.

    Digital photography: Has it become an obsession?, I, 11.2.2009,
    http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/
    digital-photography-has-it-become-an-obsession-1606148.html

Crumbling South Bronx as a Muse

December 1, 2008
The New York Times
By RANDY KENNEDY

When Ray Mortenson first started taking his cameras through the most wasted of the wastelands that made up parts of the South Bronx in the early 1980s, he devised a helpful subway mantra: Take the 5, stay alive. Take the 4, dead for sure.

This was only because the No. 5 line led through a handful of neighborhoods — East Tremont, Mott Haven, Morrisania — that had been so gutted and burned out during the 1970s that whole blocks were almost completely abandoned, meaning fewer chances of stumbling into a mugger or drug deal.

As a sculptor and photographer, Mr. Mortenson began making these Bronx trips because he was interested in the purely physical and visual characteristics of a once dense, elegant urban landscape that had come to look like excavated Pompeii or Dresden after the firebombs. Not that he would have ever wanted part of his city to endure the kind of devastation it did, but once the South Bronx reached that state he approached it aesthetically, as a “hard-art project.”

“I like being here,” he wrote. “I like the way it looks.”

Mr. Mortenson’s rarely exhibited black-and-white photographs, made between 1982 and 1984, are such powerful artifacts of their era that they have always struggled against being pulled into the documentary realm. And now, in a show of the pictures at the Museum of the City of New York called “Broken Glass” — the title is a line borrowed from the lyrics of the Grandmaster Flash classic “The Message” — the pictures have the added resonance of appearing as the nation confronts its most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression, making them feel like a kind of augury.

“You hear about this happening now in suburban places hit by foreclosures — empty houses, windows going broken, swimming pools filling up with trash,” Mr. Mortenson said in a recent interview at the museum.

When he began taking the pictures, he was working as an electrician and engaged by the ideas of artists like Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark, whose explorations of urban decay and entropy had made America’s crumbling infrastructure into a new canvas for art.

In the late 1960s Smithson photographed the industrial ruins around his birthplace, Passaic, N.J., christening them as monuments. In the early 1970s Matta-Clark staged illegal “interventions” in some of the same Bronx neighborhoods that Mr. Mortenson was to visit, slicing whole sculpturelike sections from the floors and walls of abandoned tenements.

Mr. Mortenson’s first photographic explorations of this sort took him to the Meadowlands in New Jersey, where nature and industrial decay met in epic combat. Toward the end of the years he spent exploring the swamps he began taking the elevated subway lines through the Bronx and looking out at the rubble that many neighborhoods had been reduced to. As a child growing up in Delaware, he loved spending time alone walking through forests and fields, and he said he thought of the Meadowlands and then the Bronx in the same way.

“I could spend hours walking around some blocks without seeing anyone,” he said. He would wander around Charlotte Street, one of the South Bronx’s bleakest, which President Jimmy Carter had made infamous in a 1977 visit. (It is now in a suburblike neighborhood of neat single-family homes built not many years after Mr. Mortenson’s photographs were taken.)

He would walk through dozens of buildings that seemed to have been abandoned overnight, with coats still hanging on closet doors and furniture still in the living rooms. But the elements had begun to creep in through the broken windows, peeling the paint and causing ceiling plaster to rain down on the floors.

Mr. Mortenson, now 64, began shooting inconspicuously, wearing a beaten-up Army jacket, with a rolled-up New York Post under his arm and a 35-millimeter camera in his pocket. But as he began to learn the neighborhoods, spending sometimes 12 hours a day there during long summer days, he started to lug around a big, boxy view camera. He would set it up on the streets or inside abandoned apartments on a tripod to make exposures sometimes lasting as long as 10 minutes.

“I’d set up the shot and open the lens and then just walk around the building, exploring, until it was done,” he said.

Occasionally he ran into other human beings. Once he was surrounded by drug dealers, who demanded his film, and in the darkness of some buildings he would almost stumble over scavengers ripping out copper wiring and pipes. “You really had a heart attack when that happened,” he said, “and I’m sure those guys were having a heart attack too.”

In contrast to the work of photographers who have concentrated on urban decay from a more sociological perspective, like Camilo José Vergara, or even from an activist standpoint, like Mel Rosenthal, who was shooting the South Bronx at the same time, Mr. Mortenson’s pictures are devoid of people or even cars. Other than notations of the day they were shot, there is no information accompanying them. “I wasn’t carrying a notebook or even a map,” he said. “I was just going where my eye took me.”

Sean Corcoran, the curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, said he was drawn to the images in part because of the tension in them between art and history. “The act of framing and capturing an image from the world is inherently transformative,” he wrote in the catalog for the show, which runs through March 8. “Yet the pictures also provide an important record of a moment in time.”

Mr. Corcoran writes that they insistently ask the question: “How could things get to this point? What political, economic and cultural shifts could lead to such a collapse?”

Mr. Mortenson said he had not returned to those blocks since he stopped taking photographs in the Bronx in 1984. “I’m ambivalent about it,” he said. “There was something about being there alone, about that time, that I guess I want to keep.”

“It was kind of like being in a horror movie,” he added. “But that was all part of it.”

Crumbling South Bronx as a Muse, NYT, 1.12.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/arts/design/01brok.html

Art Review | William Eggleston

Old South Meets New,

in Living Color

November 7, 2008
The New York Times
By HOLLAND COTTER

Thirty years ago photography was art if it was black and white. Color pictures were tacky and cheap, the stuff of cigarette ads and snapshot albums. So in 1976, when William Eggleston had a solo show of full-color snapshotlike photographs at the august Museum of Modern Art, critics squawked.

It didn’t help that Mr. Eggleston’s pictures, shot in the Mississippi Delta, where he lived, were of nothings and nobodies: a child’s tricycle, a dinner table set for a meal, an unnamed woman perched on a suburban curb, an old man chatting up the photographer from his bed.

That MoMA’s curator of photography, John Szarkowski, had declared Mr. Eggleston’s work perfect was the last straw. “Perfectly banal, perfectly boring,” sniffed one writer; “erratic and ramshackle,” snapped another; “a mess,” declared a third.

Perfect or not, the images quickly became influential classics. And that’s how they look in “William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008,” a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art that is this artist’s first New York museum solo since his seditious debut.

Naturally we see the work more clearly now. We know that it was not cheap. The dye transfer printing Mr. Eggleston used, adapted from advertising, was the most expensive color process then available. It produced hues of almost hallucinatory intensity, from a custard-yellow sunset glow slanting across a wall to high-noon whiteness bleaching a landscape to pink lamplight suffusing a room.

And compositions that at first seemed bland and random proved not to be on a 2nd, 3rd and 20th look. The tricycle was shot from a supine position so as to appear colossal. The woman on the curb sits next to a knot of heavy chains that echoes her steel-mesh bouffant. The affable guy on the bed holds a revolver, its barrel resting on his vintage country quilt.

Although unidentified, these people and others were part of Mr. Eggleston’s life: family, friends and neighbors. The retrospective — organized by Elisabeth Sussman, curator of photography at the Whitney, and Thomas Weski, deputy director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich — takes us through that life, or what the pictures reveal of it, on a tour that is a combination joy ride, funeral march and bad-trip bender. Patches of it feel pretty tame now, but whole stretches still have the morning-after wooziness of three decades ago.

Mr. Eggleston is a child of the American South. He was born in Memphis in 1939 and spent part of his childhood living with grandparents on a Mississippi cotton plantation. His family was moneyed gentry; he has never had to work for a living. Self-taught, he was already seriously taking pictures by the time he got to college (he went first to Vanderbilt, later to the University of Mississippi); his encounter with the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans pushed him along.

By his own account, unless he is working on commission his choice of subjects for pictures is happenstantial. He shoots whatever or whoever is at hand. The earliest picture in the show, from 1961, is of a prison farm adjoining his family’s plantation. Murky and grainy, it could be a scene from the 19th century; the prisoners are all black. Then come any-old-thing images of post-World War II strip malls and suburbs; almost everyone is white.

Although Mr. Eggleston rejects the label of regional photographer, he was, at least initially, dealing with the complicated subject of a traditional Old South (he says the compositions in his early pictures were based on the design of the Confederate flag) meeting a speeded-up New South, which he tended to observe from a distance, shooting fast-food joints and drive-ins almost surreptitiously, as if from the dashboard of a car.

Around 1965 he started to use color film, and his range expanded. He moved in close. The first picture he considers a success is in the show. It’s of a teenage boy standing about arm’s length from the camera. He’s seen in profile, pushing carts at a supermarket. His face is slack, his eyes a little glazed, his body bent in an effortful crouch. He’s ordinary, but the golden sunlight that falls on him is not: it turns his red hair lustrous and gilds his skin. A prosaic subject is transformed but unromantically; lifted up, but just a little, just enough.

In 1967 Mr. Eggleston made a trip to New York, where he met other photographers, important ones, like Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, learning something from each. Although he has a reputation for being remote, even reclusive, he also has a public persona as a dandyish hell raiser, a kind of exemplar of baronial boho. In any case he has never lacked for art-world connections. Mr. Szarkowski was one; another was the curator Walter Hopps, who became a friend and traveling companion beginning in the 1960s and ’70s.

These were the Merry Prankster and “Easy Rider” years, when road trips and craziness were cool, and Mr. Eggleston set out on some hard-drinking picture-taking excursions. He also embarked on repeated shorter expeditions closer to home in the form of epic bar crawls, which resulted in the legendary video “Stranded in Canton.”

Originally existing as countless hours of unedited film and recently pared down by the filmmaker Robert Gordon to a manageable 76 minutes, it was shot in various places in 1973 and 1974. (The new version is in the retrospective.) Mr. Eggleston would show up with friends at favorite bars, turn on his Sony Portapak, push the camera into people’s faces and encourage them to carry on.

And they did. Apart from brief shots of his children and documentary-style filming of musicians, the result is like some extreme form of reality television. Your first thought is: Why do people let themselves be seen like this? Do they know what they look like? You wonder if Mr. Eggleston is deliberately shaping some tragicomic Lower Depths drama or just doing his customary shoot-what’s-there thing, the what’s-there in this case being chemical lunacy. For all the film’s fringy charge there’s something truly creepy and deadly going on, as there is in much of Mr. Eggleston’s art. You might label it Southern Gothic; but whatever it is, it surfaces when a lot of his work is brought together.

Images of gravestones and guns recur, but the real morbidity comes indirectly, like mood, through association. A little girl stands outside a playhouse reminiscent of a Victorian mausoleum; a young man sits in the back of a car, dazed, like a zombie from “Night of the Living Dead.” Houses look empty, meals abandoned; an oven stands open, as if inviting entry; a green-tiled shower suggests an execution chamber.

In many of these images color has the artificial flush of a mortician’s makeup job. This effect achieves its apotheosis in a series of commissioned photographs from 1983 of Elvis Presley’s Graceland. Mr. Eggleston depicts the singer’s home as an airless, windowless tomb, a pharaonic monument to a strung-out life embalmed in custom-made bad taste.

But then there are moments of utter old-fashioned beauty, natural highs. You’re outdoors in the farmlands of Jimmy Carter’s Georgia, in a series of pictures commissioned by Rolling Stone before the 1976 election. Or you’re standing under mountainous clouds on a piece of wide, flat earth that is Mr. Eggleston’s family land.

Probably no one asked for this picture. He took it because he takes pictures a lot, and that’s where he was with his camera that day. The clouds just happened, the way clouds do.

As a group Mr. Eggleston’s more recent pictures, in the series called “The Democratic Forest,” add to, rather than develop or depart from, what came with that giant step he took in the ’60s and ’70s. There are more images of pop-cultural glut, unsavory home cooking and soulful skies. There is also more obvious artfulness as his travels take him to Europe and Asia and onto film sets at the invitation of directors like David Lynch, Gus Van Sant and Sofia Coppola, all of whose work he has profoundly influenced.

The color has grown lusher than ever and the angle of vision indirect as we see reality layered on, refracted through glass, in mirror reflections. The world is still chipped and scarred, but cleaner. The subjects in the pictures feel lingered over. The stoned, on-the-road, trapped-in-yesterday rawness is gone. Some of these new pictures really are banal and a little boring, in part because the mess of life gets left out.

This isn’t surprising. Part of being a long-term traveler is that you get comfortable; you relax. You stop living on adrenaline, stop bracing for jolts to the system. The irritated alertness conducive to a certain kind of art subsides. At some basic level the world is less strange and you’re less of a stranger to it, unless you deliberately derange yourself or hit the road again, or adjust yourself to a new now.

Mr. Eggleston, who lives in Memphis, is now on a project with Mr. Lynch; beyond that, I don’t know what his plans are. The America he presented to such shocking effect more than 30 years ago is now full color — not black and white, not North and South — in every sense. The national soul is still as delirious and furious, but maybe a little more sober, or about to become so. I wonder what one of our finest living photographers will continue to make of it.

“William Eggleston:

Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video,

1961-2008”

continues through Jan. 25

at the Whitney Museum of American Art;

(212) 570-3600, whitney.org.

Old South Meets New, in Living Color, NYT, 7.11.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/arts/design/07eggl.html

4,000 U.S. Combat Deaths,

and Just a Handful of Images

July 26, 2008
The New York Times
By MICHAEL KAMBER
and TIM ARANGO

BAGHDAD — The case of a freelance photographer in Iraq who was barred from covering the Marines after he posted photos on the Internet of several of them dead has underscored what some journalists say is a growing effort by the American military to control graphic images from the war.

Zoriah Miller, the photographer who took images of marines killed in a June 26 suicide attack and posted them on his Web site, was subsequently forbidden to work in Marine Corps-controlled areas of the country. Maj. Gen. John Kelly, the Marine commander in Iraq, is now seeking to have Mr. Miller barred from all United States military facilities throughout the world. Mr. Miller has since left Iraq.

If the conflict in Vietnam was notable for open access given to journalists — too much, many critics said, as the war played out nightly in bloody newscasts — the Iraq war may mark an opposite extreme: after five years and more than 4,000 American combat deaths, searches and interviews turned up fewer than a half-dozen graphic photographs of dead American soldiers.

It is a complex issue, with competing claims often difficult to weigh in an age of instant communication around the globe via the Internet, in which such images can add to the immediate grief of families and the anger of comrades still in the field.

While the Bush administration faced criticism for overt political manipulation in not permitting photos of flag-draped coffins, the issue is more emotional on the battlefield: local military commanders worry about security in publishing images of the American dead as well as an affront to the dignity of fallen comrades. Most newspapers refuse to publish such pictures as a matter of policy.

But opponents of the war, civil liberties advocates and journalists argue that the public portrayal of the war is being sanitized and that Americans who choose to do so have the right to see — in whatever medium — the human cost of a war that polls consistently show is unpopular with Americans.

Journalists say it is now harder, or harder than in the earlier years, to accompany troops in Iraq on combat missions. Even memorial services for killed soldiers, once routinely open, are increasingly off limits. Detainees were widely photographed in the early years of the war, but the Department of Defense, citing prisoners’ rights, has recently stopped that practice as well.

And while publishing photos of American dead is not barred under the “embed” rules in which journalists travel with military units, the Miller case underscores what is apparently one reality of the Iraq war: that doing so, even under the rules, can result in expulsion from covering the war with the military.

“It is absolutely censorship,” Mr. Miller said. “I took pictures of something they didn’t like, and they removed me. Deciding what I can and cannot document, I don’t see a clearer definition of censorship.”

The Marine Corps denied it was trying to place limits on the news media and said Mr. Miller broke embed regulations. Security is the issue, officials said.

“Specifically, Mr. Miller provided our enemy with an after-action report on the effectiveness of their attack and on the response procedures of U.S. and Iraqi forces,” said Lt. Col. Chris Hughes, a Marine spokesman.

News organizations say that such restrictions are one factor in declining coverage of the war, along with the danger, the high cost to financially ailing media outlets and diminished interest among Americans in following the war. By a recent count, only half a dozen Western photographers were covering a war in which 150,000 American troops are engaged.

In Mr. Miller’s case, a senior military official in Baghdad said that while his photographs were still under review, a preliminary assessment showed he had not violated ground rules established by the multinational force command. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing, emphasized that Mr. Miller was still credentialed to work in Iraq, though several military officials acknowledged that no military unit would accept him.

Robert H. Reid, the Baghdad bureau chief for The Associated Press, said one major problem was a disconnection between the officials in Washington who created the embed program before the war and the soldiers who must accommodate journalists — and be responsible for their reports afterward.

“I don’t think the uniformed military has really bought into the whole embed program,” Mr. Reid said.

“During the invasion it got a lot of ‘Whoopee, we’re kicking their butts’-type of TV coverage,” he said.

Now, he said the situation is nuanced and unpredictable. Generally, he said, the access reporters get “very much depends on the local commander.” More specifically, he said, “They’ve always been freaky about bodies.”

The facts of the Miller case are not in dispute, only their interpretation.

On the morning of June 26, Mr. Miller, 32, was embedded with Company E of the Second Battalion, Third Marine Regiment in Garma, in Anbar Province. The photographer declined a Marine request to attend a city council meeting, and instead accompanied a unit on foot patrol nearby.

When a suicide bomber detonated his vest inside the council meeting, killing 20 people, including 3 marines, Mr. Miller was one of the first to arrive. His photos show a scene of horror, with body parts littering the ground and heaps of eviscerated corpses. Mr. Miller was able to photograph for less than 10 minutes, he said, before being escorted from the scene.

Mr. Miller said he spent three days on a remote Marine base editing his photos, which he then showed to the Company E marines. When they said they could not identify the dead marines, he believed he was within embed rules, which forbid showing identifiable soldiers killed in action before their families have been notified. According to records Mr. Miller provided, he posted his photos on his Web site the night of June 30, three days after the families had been notified.

The next morning, high-ranking Marine public affairs officers demanded that Mr. Miller remove the photos. When he refused, his embed was terminated. Worry that marines might hurt him was high enough that guards were posted to protect him.

On July 3, Mr. Miller was given a letter signed by General Kelly barring him from Marine installations. The letter said that the journalist violated sections 14 (h) and (o) of the embed rules, which state that no information can be published without approval, including material about “any tactics, techniques and procedures witnessed during operations,” or that “provides information on the effectiveness of enemy techniques.”

“In disembedding Mr. Miller, the Marines are using a catch-all phrase which could be applied to just about anything a journalist does,” said Joel Campagna, Middle East program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

New embed rules were adopted in the spring of 2007 that required written permission from wounded soldiers before their image could be used, a near impossibility in the case of badly wounded soldiers, journalists say. While embed restrictions do permit photographs of dead soldiers to be published once family members have been notified, in practice, photographers say, the military has exacted retribution on the rare occasions that such images have appeared. In four out of five cases that The New York Times was able to document, the photographer was immediately kicked out of his or her embed following publication of such photos.

In the first of such incidents, Stefan Zaklin, formerly of the European Pressphoto Agency, was barred from working with an Army unit after he published a photo of a dead Army captain lying in a pool of blood in Falluja in 2004.

Two New York Times journalists were disembedded in January 2007 after the paper published a photo of a mortally wounded soldier. Though the soldier was shot through the head and died hours after the photo was taken, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno argued that The Times had broken embed rules by not getting written permission from the soldier.

Chris Hondros, of Getty Images, was with an army unit in Tal Afar on Jan. 18, 2005, when soldiers killed the parents of an unarmed Iraqi family. After his photos of their screaming blood-spattered daughter were published around the world, Mr. Hondros was kicked out of his embed (though Mr. Hondros points out that he soon found an embed with a unit in another city).

Increasingly, photographers say the military allows them to embed but keeps them away from combat. Franco Pagetti of the VII Photo Agency said he had been repeatedly thwarted by the military when he tried to get to the front lines.

In April 2008, Mr. Pagetti tried to cover heavy fighting in Baghdad’s Sadr City. “The commander there refused to let me in,” Mr. Pagetti said. “He said it was unsafe. I know it’s unsafe, there’s a war going on. It was unsafe when I got to Iraq in 2003, but the military did not stop us from working. Now, they are stopping us from working.”

James Lee, a former marine who returned to Iraq as a photographer, was embedded with marines in the spring of 2008 as they headed into battle in the southern port city of Basra in support of Iraqi forces.

“We were within hours of Basra when they told me I had to go back. I was told that General Kelly did not want any Western eyes down there,” he said, referring to the same Marine general who barred Mr. Miller.

Military officials stressed that the embed regulations provided only a framework. “There is leeway for commanders to make judgment calls, which is part of what commanders do,” said Col. Steve Boylan, the public affairs officer for Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq. For many in the military, a legal or philosophical debate over press freedom misses the point. Capt. Esteban T. Vickers of the First Regimental Combat Team, who knew two of the marines killed at Garma, said photos of his dead comrades, displayed on the Internet for all to see, desecrated their memory and their sacrifice.

“Mr. Miller’s complete lack of respect to these marines, their friends, and families is shameful,” Captain Vickers said. “How do we explain to their children or families these disturbing pictures just days after it happened?”

Mr. Miller, who returned to the United States on July 9, expressed surprise that his images had ignited such an uproar.

“The fact that the images I took of the suicide bombing — which are just photographs of something that happens every day all across the country — the fact that these photos have been so incredibly shocking to people, says that whatever they are doing to limit this type of photo getting out, it is working,” he said.

Michael Kamber reported from Baghdad,

and Tim Arango from New York.

    4,000 U.S. Combat Deaths, and Just a Handful of Images,
    NYT, 26.7.2008,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/26/world/middleeast/26censor.html

Cornell Capa, Photographer, Is Dead

May 24, 2008
The New York Times
By PHILIP GEFTER

Cornell Capa, who founded the International Center of Photography in New York after a long and distinguished career as a photojournalist, first on the staff of Life magazine and then as a member of Magnum Photos, died Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.

His death, of natural causes, was announced by Phyllis Levine, communications director at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan.

In Mr. Capa’s nearly 30 years as a photojournalist, the professional code to which he steadfastly adhered is best summed up by the title of his 1968 book “The Concerned Photographer.” He used the phrase often to describe any photographer who was passionately dedicated to doing work that contributed to the understanding and well-being of humanity and who produced “images in which genuine human feeling predominates over commercial cynicism or disinterested formalism.”

The subjects of greatest interest to Capa as a photographer were politics and social justice. He covered both presidential campaigns of Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s and also became a good friend of Stevenson. He covered John F. Kennedy’s successful presidential run in 1960, and then spearheaded a project in which he and nine fellow Magnum photographers documented the young president’s first hundred days, resulting in the book “Let Us Begin: The First One Hundred Days of the Kennedy Administration.” (He got to know the Kennedys well; Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis would become one of the first trustees of the I.C.P.)

In Argentina, Mr. Capa documented the increasingly repressive tactics of the Peron regime and then the revolution that overthrew it. In Israel, he covered the 1967 Six Day-War. The vast number of picture essays he produced on assignment ranged in subject from Christian missionaries in the jungles of Latin America to the Russian Orthodox Church in Soviet Russia during the cold war, the elite Queen’s Guards in England and the education of mentally retarded children in New England.

His work conformed to all the visual hallmarks of Life magazine photography: clear subject matter, strong composition, bold graphic impact and at times even a touch of wit. In his 1959 essay about the Ford Motor Company, for example, one picture presents a bird’s-eye view of 7,000 engineers lined up in rows behind the first compact car all of them were involved in developing: a single Ford Falcon.

“I am not an artist, and I never intended to be one,” he wrote in the 1992 book “Cornell Capa: Photographs.” “I hope I have made some good photographs, but what I really hope is that I have done some good photo stories with memorable images that make a point, and, perhaps, even make a difference.”

Mr. Capa had three important incarnations in the field of photography: successful photojournalist; champion of his older brother Robert Capa’s legacy among the greatest war photographers; and founder and first director of the International Center of Photography, which, since it was established in 1974, has become one of the most influential photographic institutions for exhibition, collection, and education in the world.

It was because of Robert Capa that Cornell became a photographer. Not only was he Cornell’s mentor, along with Henri Cartier-Bresson and David (Chim) Seymour, but it was on his brother’s coattails that Cornell first became affiliated with Life magazine. In 1947, Cornell’s three mentors founded Magnum Photos, the agency he would join after his brother Robert was killed on assignment in Indochina in 1954.

“From that day,” Mr. Capa said about his brother’s death, “I was haunted by the question of what happens to the work a photographer leaves behind, by how to make the work stay alive.”

The I.C.P. was born 20 years later, in part out of Mr. Capa’s professed growing anxiety in the late 1960s about the diminishing relevance of photojournalism in light of the increasing presence of film footage on television news. But, also, for years he had imagined a public resource in which to preserve the archives and negatives of “concerned photographers” everywhere. In this regard, his older brother’s legacy was paramount in his thoughts when he opened the I.C.P., where Robert Capa’s archives reside to this day.

Born Cornel Friedmann on April 10, 1918, in Budapest Hungary, he was the youngest son of Dezso and Julia Berkovits Friedmann, who were assimilated, nonpracticing Jews. His parents owned a prosperous dressmaking salon, where his father was head tailor. In 1931, his brother Robert, at 17, was forced to leave the country because of leftist student activities that had caught the attention of officials of the anti-Semitic Hungarian dictator, Admiral Miklos Horthy. In 1935, his eldest brother, Laszlo, died of rheumatic fever.

Growing up, Cornell had planned to be a doctor, and, upon graduating from high school in 1936, he joined Robert in Paris to embark on his medical studies. But first he had to learn French. Robert, who had become a photojournalist in Berlin before settling in Paris, had befriended two other young photographers, Cartier-Bresson and Seymour. To support himself, Cornell developed film for Robert, Henri and Chim and made their prints in a makeshift darkroom in his hotel bathroom. Soon enough, Cornell’s interest in photography grew, and he abandoned his longtime ambition to be a doctor. He also adopted his brother’s new last name, a tribute in variation to the name of the film director Frank Capra.

In 1937, Mr. Capa followed his mother to New York City, where she had joined her four sisters. When Robert came for a visit and established connections with Pix, Inc., a photography agency, he helped get Cornell a job there as a printer. Soon after, Cornell went to work in the Life magazine darkroom.

In 1940, Mr. Capa married Edith Schwartz, who, over the years, assumed an active role in his professional life, maintaining his negatives and archives, and also those of his brother. They had no children, but she provided a home away from home for hundreds of the photographers they came to know over the years. Mr. Capa wrote that Edie, who died in 2001, “deserves so much of the credit for whatever I have accomplished.”

After serving in the U.S. Air Force’s photo intelligence unit during World War II, Mr. Capa was hired by Life magazine in 1946 as a junior photographer.

“One thing Life and I agreed on right from the start was that one war photographer was enough for my family,” he wrote. “I was to be a photographer for peace.”

The historian Richard Whelan wrote in the introduction to “Cornell Capa: Photographs” that Mr. Capa “often quoted the words of the photographer Lewis Hine: ‘There are two things I wanted to do. I wanted to show the things that needed to be corrected. And I wanted to show the things that needed to be appreciated.’ ” That is what Mr. Capa dedicated his life to doing.

Cornell Capa, Photographer, Is Dead, NYT, 24.5.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/arts/design/23cnd-capa.html

An Image Is a Mystery

for Photo Detectives

April 17, 2008
The New York Times
By RANDY KENNEDY

The phone call was routine, the kind often made before big auctions. Sotheby’s was preparing to sell a striking rust-brown image of a leaf on paper, long thought to have been made by William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography. So the auction house contacted a Baltimore historian considered to be the world’s leading Talbot expert and asked if he could grace the sale’s catalog with any interesting scholarly details about the print — known as a photogenic drawing, a crude precursor to the photograph.

“I got back to them and said, ‘Well, the first thing I would say is that this was not made by Talbot,’ ” the historian, Larry J. Schaaf, recalled in a recent interview.

“That was not what they were expecting to hear, to say the least.”

In the weeks since Dr. Schaaf’s surprising pronouncement was made public, “The Leaf,” originally thought to have been made around 1839 or later, has become the talk of the photo-historical world. The speculation about its origins became so intense that Sotheby’s and the print’s owners decided earlier this month to postpone its auction, so that researchers could begin delving into whether the image may be, in fact, one of the oldest photographic images in existence, dating to the 1790s.

This week the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which own similar photogenic drawings that once belonged to the same album as “The Leaf,” said that they planned to perform scientific analysis and further research on their images as well.

With these decisions, suddenly, a group of antique images known to the academic and auction worlds at least since 1984 — when Sotheby’s first sold them, fetching only $776 for the leaf print — have become the subjects of a high-profile detective story that could lead back to the earliest, murky years of the birth of photo technology and that could help to fill in crucial historical blanks.

Dr. Schaaf, who said he was not paid by Sotheby’s or by the owner of “The Leaf” print, said that he had been aware of the images — also known as photograms, cameraless prints made by placing objects on photosensitive paper exposed to light — for many years. He had seen five of the six prints that were once compiled in an album by Henry Bright, a Briton whose family was part of a group of scientists and tinkerers active around Bristol in the late 18th century.

But as with so many other early photographic images, Dr. Schaaf said, there was so little information about these that he never gave much thought to their origins. “In most cases we just don’t have any place even to get started,” he said.

It was when Sotheby’s inquiry reminded him that the images came from the Henry Bright family that he began to think about them again and to connect the dots with research that he had been doing for years into a group of photographic experimenters who had long predated Talbot and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, the other acknowledged inventor of photography.

Probably in the 1790s, according to accounts written shortly afterward, Thomas Wedgwood, a son of the Wedgwood china family, began experimenting with what he called solar pictures, making images on paper coated with a silver nitrate solution. A friend of his, James Watt, wrote in a 1799 letter that he intended to try similar experiments and in 1802 another friend, Humphry Davy, wrote an account of Wedgwood’s experiments in an article for a scientific-society journal, titling it “An Account of a Method of Copying Paintings upon Glass, and of Making Profiles, by the Agency of Light Upon Nitrate of Silver.”

Like the lost plays of Aeschylus that were written about but did not survive themselves, no known examples of the work of Wedgwood and his circle have ever been found. But Dr. Schaaf, in looking deeper into the leaf image, realized that these legendary lost images had something else in common: their creators were all part of the close social circle of the family of Henry Bright.

“The reason that I got so excited about this was that it was the most solid, indicative collection I’ve seen,” he said. “I’m fully prepared for ‘The Leaf’ to have been made by Henry Bright, or by his father, after the 1790s. But I’ve never seen a story that fits together so neatly.”

He added, with the resolve that comes from more than 30 years of research into early photography and Talbot, “Someone could obviously come along and say that these images are all in fact Talbots, but they would be wrong.”

Jill Quasha is the photo dealer and expert who bought “The Leaf” in 1989 as she was building the Quillan Collection, a group of world-renowned photographs that Sotheby’s sold (without the leaf print) for almost $9 million on April 7. She said that it was still too early to say exactly what type of research would be conducted on the image. Tests could include those to determine the age of the paper and to identify the chemical makeup of any substances on the paper.

“I think it has to be done quickly and efficiently and with the least amount of damage to the photograph,” said Ms. Quasha, who added that she hoped the research could be completed within six months so that the print could be put up for auction again with a more iron-clad, and perhaps stunning, provenance. (As a Talbot, it was estimated to sell for $100,000 to $150,000; if it is determined to be older, it could bring substantially more.)

But Dr. Schaaf cautioned that even when the all scientific evidence is in — along with what might be found by deep sleuthing in the archives of the families of Bright, Wedgwood, Watt and Davy — the best that experts might be able to say about it being among the oldest photographic images is “maybe.”

“Somewhere in the course of the work we might find a smoking gun,” he said. “But then again, we very well might not.”

An Image Is a Mystery for Photo Detectives, NYT, 17.4.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/arts/design/17phot.html

Getty Museum Acquires

Penn Photographs

February 7, 2008
The New York Times
By RANDY KENNEDY

The subjects of the velvety black-and-white pictures are not exactly Irving Penn’s elegantly dressed, or undressed, regulars: a plump charwoman with her bucket and brush; a bespectacled seamstress draped with her measuring tape; a deep-sea diver disappearing into his monstrous helmet and suit.

But Mr. Penn considered these blue-collar portraits, called “The Small Trades,” some of the most important of his long and influential career. He began taking them in the summer of 1950 for Vogue, the magazine with which he has become synonymous, and now they have finally found a home together at a museum. On Wednesday the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles announced that it had acquired the entire series, 252 full-length portraits of workers — waiters, bakers, butchers, rag-and-bone men — that it called Mr. Penn’s most extensive body of work.

“This is a set of images that the Getty has been thinking about and wanting to get for several years,” said Virginia Heckert, an associate photography curator at the Getty, who helped negotiate a deal with Mr. Penn, who sold some of the pictures and donated others. “In the last year it finally managed to come together. It’s a very exciting acquisition for us.”

Mr. Penn, now 90, began the portrait project in Paris for a Vogue series on that city’s workers. He continued it for another year after the assignment, seeking out workers in London and then in New York, where he lived, asking them to come to his studio in their work clothes and carrying the tools of their trade.

Unlike the photographs of August Sander, who took more naturalistic, anthropological portraits of German tradespeople and professionals usually in the settings where they worked, Mr. Penn’s portraits, perhaps owing to his training as a painter and a fashion photographer, are more formal and personal. He posed each subject against a neutral background and tried to use natural northern light.

“There is something quite theatrical about the presentation of Penn’s subject to the camera,” Ms. Heckert said. “They’re basically on a stage.”

But because of the isolated setting, the pictures also seem to reveal something about the people as individuals, not just as functionaries. “It’s really about the subject presenting himself in a more intimate setting to his photographer,” she added. “It’s a more psychological relationship between the artist and the subject.” She added that, at a time when abstraction was becoming the dominant mode in the art world, Mr. Penn’s decision to dedicate himself to art portraiture was important and made the series even more significant. “He didn’t want to go away from the subject but to find a way to describe it in utter detail,” Ms. Heckert said.

Weston Naef, the Getty’s senior photography curator, said that the museum had been working to acquire the series for more than five years, but the sticking point had been copyright ownership of the images. In many cases, he said, Mr. Penn and Condé Nast, which owns Vogue, share the copyrights to Mr. Penn’s images. And the Getty, which had long insisted that it be given copyright power over the trade series, along with the master set of the photographs, decided in the end to abandon the copyright demand.

“This was a real advance for this institution to be able to do that on such a large scale,” said Mr. Naef, who added that when it comes to copyrights for Mr. Penn’s work, “it is always a complicated story.” (He and Ms. Heckert declined to say how much the museum paid for the silver-gelatin and platinum prints, whose sale was negotiated by the Pace/MacGill Gallery.)

In recent years Mr. Penn has been engaging in negotiations that have placed important pieces of his work at prominent institutions like the Art Institute of Chicago and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. Mr. Naef said that the Getty made a compelling case that the workers’ portraits would be well served at the museum, which has extensive holdings of Sander’s work, for example, and one of the best photography collections in the world. The Getty plans an exhibition of the images in September 2009.

“We think he’s one of the greatest living artists in any medium,” Mr. Naef said. “And we like to focus on whole bodies of work. We’re seeing these pictures as if they’re Monet’s waterlilies, a single coherent body of work.”

And in the span of Mr. Penn’s work, he said: “They’re absolutely seminal. They’re like Jasper Johns flags or Rauschenberg’s ‘combines.’ ”

Getty Museum Acquires Penn Photographs, NYT, 7.2.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/07/arts/design/07gett.html

Known for Famous Photos,

Not All of Them His

September 15, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON

Joe O’Donnell’s glowing legacy outlived him by less than a week. The man recalled by some as “The Presidential Photographer” with a knack for having a camera to his eye at just the right moment, became instead someone described as a fraud who hijacked some of the 20th century’s most famous images and claimed them as his own.

Mr. O’Donnell, a retired government photographer, died on Aug. 9 in Nashville at age 85. Obituaries published nationwide, including one in The New York Times on Aug. 14, praised his body of work over several presidential administrations, most of them singling out one famous picture: little John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his slain father’s passing coffin on Nov. 25, 1963. That picture was later determined to have been taken by someone else, and a closer examination of photos that Mr. O’Donnell claimed as his own has turned up other pictures taken by other photographers.

Retired news photographers all over the country, some into their 80s, reacted at the claims in the obituaries with shock and outrage as the only rights most of them have to their own pictures — bragging rights — were quietly taken by a man they never heard of.

“The more I hear about this, the more upset I get,” said Cecil Stoughton, 87, a former White House photographer. “I don’t know where he’s coming from. Delusions of grandeur.”

Mr. O’Donnell’s family said his claims to fame — made in television, newspaper and radio interviews, as well as on his own amateurish Web site — were not out of greed or fraud, but the confused statements of an ailing man in his last years. The only thing stolen, his widow and one of his sons said, was the soundness of his memory. While he was not formally diagnosed with a mental illness, he clearly became senile, his family said.

For them, the backlash has been severe and threatens to overshadow what they say are Mr. O’Donnell’s legitimate works, especially his chronicling of the effects of the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

“I just wish people would realize he was an extraordinary photographer,” said his son J. Tyge O’Donnell, 38, who grew up taking this father’s pictures with him to school to show classmates. “Don’t hold getting old against him.”

The story of Mr. O’Donnell’s colorful life and exaggerations continues to unfold. Tales he has told for decades have been questioned. Much of his travel history remains something of a mystery, because of difficulty in obtaining personnel information from the government from decades ago.

The quest for authorship of a number of famous photos is also complicated by the times in which he worked, when many news and government photographers were not credited for their pictures.

More discrepancies in Mr. O’Donnell’s work continue to surface, and there may be more challenges to their authorship. To date, the scrutiny has centered on the years in the 1950s and 1960s when Mr. O’Donnell photographed presidents and purportedly traveled with national leaders.

The scrutiny has extended to pictures he took as a 23-year-old marine in Japan that he said had been hidden in a trunk in his home until he unearthed the negatives in 1985. The pictures were published in a book, “Japan 1945: A U.S. Marine’s Photographs From Ground Zero,” (Vanderbilt University Press). The authenticity of those pictures has not been disproved.

If Mr. O’Donnell lied about his pictures, it is unclear why. He did not appear to reap financial gains from his claims. Perhaps desire for recognition played a role. He worked for the United States Information Agency, a government body that carried out overseas educational, cultural and media programs.

While he was believed to have witnessed important moments in history, he remained unknown to the public. But his family insisted that he simply confused attending various events with photographing them.

The controversy began with the obituaries describing his role in taking a famous picture of 3-year-old “John-John,” as was John F. Kennedy Jr.’s nickname, at the funeral.

Stan Stearns, a 72-year-old wedding photographer in Annapolis, Md., knows that picture well. He took it.

A photographer for United Press International, he kept a close eye that day on the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, and her children.

“I’m watching her, and she bent down, whispered in his ear,” Mr. Stearns recalled in a recent interview. “The hand went up. Click — one exposure. That was it. That was the picture.”

Mr. Stearns quit in 1970 and has been shooting weddings and portraits since. “I am very, very proud to have contributed this photograph to history,” he said.

But, it seems, so was Mr. O’Donnell.

He said for years that he was at the funeral and that he photographed the boy. “I had a telephoto lens on my camera, and we were across the street behind what we called the ‘bull rope,’ that we had to stay there,” he said in an interview on CNN in 1999.

The image showed on CNN that day was not his own. But neither was it the picture taken by Mr. Stearns, which leads to another complicating factor surrounding the John-John salute: several photographers captured the image that day, each distributed in different newspapers and magazines, many times without credit.

The salute picture broadcast on CNN in 1999 was actually taken by Dan Farrell, then with The Daily News. Now 76, he recalled the picture in an interview last week. “You never want to miss one like that, you know?”

Mr. O’Donnell often spoke of a picture, but his son said he never saw it.

The complaints over the John-John picture expanded to a fuller investigation of Mr. O’Donnell’s career by a group of mostly retired photographers and reporters angered by his false claim.

Several photographs at a Nashville art gallery called the Arts Company, which had represented Mr. O’Donnell and displayed more than 80 of his pictures, were found not to be his own. One of them, a famous image of President Kennedy piloting a yacht, is without question one taken by the photographer Robert Knudsen in 1962, said James Hill, the audio and visual archives specialist at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.

Another renowned photographer, Elliott Erwitt, has become forever linked to the “Kitchen Debate” in Moscow in 1959, for his famous photograph of Vice President Richard Nixon poking Nikita S. Khrushchev in the chest during a heated exchange. He even attended an anniversary reception 25 years later, playfully poking Mr. Nixon in the chest.

So Mr. Erwitt was stunned when he was shown a late-1990s video of Mr. O’Donnell speaking with a Nashville news anchor, and Mr. O’Donnell’s description of having taken the picture.

“They were arguing,” Mr. O’Donnell told the reporter. “Khrushchev was very belligerent and said, ‘We’re gonna bury you.’ And Nixon reacted just as fast as he did, and pointed his finger at him and said, ‘You’ll never bury us.’ ”

Of course, this was mistaken. Mr. Khrushchev’s famous line, “We will bury you,” was delivered three years earlier, in 1956 in Moscow before Western representatives.

Watching Mr. O’Donnell’s interview last week, Mr. Erwitt said, “Unbelievable. The picture is so well known.”

The list goes on. A picture the museum said was taken by Mr. O’Donnell of the Tehran Conference of Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in 1943 is suspect. It has been credited in the past to the Associated Press and the United States Army Signal Corps, but its authorship remains unclear.

Mr. O’Donnell was born on May 7, 1922, in Johnstown, Pa., his family said. He joined the Marines shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, his son said. After the war and his trip to Japan, he worked for the State Department and later the Information Agency, upon its creation in 1953.

An archivist’s paper for a 1998 National Archives conference on cold war documentation cites several of the assignments in 1948 that took Mr. O’Donnell “from the home of a truck driver in Arlington, Va., to the Cherokee Reservation in North Carolina to small-town polling stations in Lancaster County, Penn.” In an interview, the archivist, Nicholas Natanson, said he had examined the collection of photographs taken at the Kennedy funeral and found none taken by Mr. O’Donnell. But he said some photographs had no credits.

Pictures of Mr. O’Donnell standing beside several presidents were some of his proudest possessions, his son said, and there is archival evidence that he photographed Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson. But while Mr. O’Donnell referred to himself in his later years as a White House photographer, he did not seem to have ever held that official title.

He married four times, and had four children. He retired in 1968 after suffering a back injury in a car accident while working in a motorcade on an assignment. He moved to Michigan, where he owned an antiques store and acted as the sexton of a local cemetery, his son said.

The family moved to Nashville in 1979, J. Tyge O’Donnell said. The Arts Company’s owner, Anne Brown, said Mr. O’Donnell was known in the Nashville community as a former presidential photographer, an image no one seemed to question.

Mr. O’Donnell’s health had declined since Kimiko O’Donnell, 46 and also a photographer, married him nine years ago; they met in Japan, she said. “He wasn’t interested in showing any of his photos,” she said. “He had two rods in his back. Three strokes, two heart attacks. Skin cancers. Part of colon taken out.”

It is practically impossible to say Mr. O’Donnell never sold another photographer’s work as his own, but it seems he did not make any substantial profits off any pictures in the last decade or so.

“Where’s the money?” Mrs. O’Donnell asked. The museum owner, Ms. Brown, said she kept several prints Mr. O’Donnell claimed to have taken for sale in a box, but that she had sold only 9 or 10 over a period of years.

When Ms. Brown learned of Mr. O’Donnell’s death, she uploaded to the Web site the dozens of pictures from a computer disk provided by his family years earlier. She also sent a press release about the “Presidential Photographer” to Ventures Public Relations, which sent it to news outlets with misidentified photos of John-John’s salute and President Roosevelt attached.

The O’Donnells had one bit of what looked like good news these past weeks. Mrs. O’Donnell discovered, among her husband’s things, a photograph of John-John, saluting the president’s casket. Mr. O’Donnell had signed the back.

But yesterday, the National Archives matched it to a picture in its collection, and while there is no photographer’s name attached, the picture has been credited as having been taken by someone with U.P.I.

“That is disappointing,” Mr. O’Donnell’s son J. Tyge, said yesterday. “But it doesn’t mean he wasn’t there.”

Known for Famous Photos, Not All of Them His, NYT, 15.9.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/nyregion/15photographer.html

U.S. Searching for Iwo Jima Marine

June 22, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:51 a.m. ET
The New York Times

TOKYO (AP) -- An American team searching for the remains of a Marine combat photographer who filmed the iconic flag-raising on Iwo Jima is honing in on the cave where he was believed to have been killed 62 years ago, officials said Friday.

A lead from a private citizen prompted the search for the remains of Sgt. William H. Genaust, who was killed nine days after filming the flag-raising atop Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi. The seven-member team -- the first on the Japanese island in 60 years -- is also searching for other Americans killed in the battle, one of the fiercest and most symbolic of World War II.

''The team is finding caves that have been cleaned out, and some that have collapsed,'' said Lt. Col. Mark Brown, a spokesman for the Joint POW/MIA Accounting office, or JPAC.

The preliminary search team is looking for the remains of as many Americans as it can find, Brown told The Associated Press. He said 250 U.S. service members from the Iwo Jima campaign are among the 88,000 missing from World War II.

Iwo Jima was officially taken on March 26, 1945, after 31-day battle that pitted some 100,000 U.S. troops against 21,200 Japanese -- a turning point in the war with Japan. Some 6,821 Americans were killed and nearly 22,000 injured. Only 1,033 Japanese survived.

''Our motto is `until they are home,''' Brown said. ''`No man left behind' is a promise made to every individual who raises his hand.''

Brown said a full team would be sent in if it looks like remains are likely to be discovered.

Genaust, a combat photographer with the 28th Marines, filmed the raising of the flag atop Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945. He stood just feet away from AP photographer Joe Rosenthal, whose photograph of the moment won a Pulitzer Prize and came to symbolize the Pacific War and the struggle of the Marines to capture the tiny island.

Johnnie Webb, a civilian official with JPAC, said Genaust died nine days later when he was hit by machine-gun fire as he was assisting fellow Marines secure a cave. He was 38.

Bob Bolus, the Scranton, Pa., businessman who provided the lead in the search, said he became intrigued by Genaust after reading a Parade magazine story about him two years ago. Spending thousands of dollars of his own money, Bolus put together a team of experts, including an archivist, forensic anthropologist, geologist and surveyor, that was able to pinpoint where Genaust's remains were likely to be found.

Bolus, 64, began lobbying the military to search anew for the missing Marine.

''How do we leave an American?'' he said in a telephone interview. ''How do we ignore him and leave him in a cave along with other military personnel who are MIA on the island also? He gave us a patriotic symbol that we see to this day. It's important.''

Bolus, who said he visited Iwo Jima last year and met the grandson of Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the Japanese commander on Iwo Jima, said he's confident Genaust will be found.

''We've put everything in place. Now we have to have him tell us where he is.''

JPAC said the search was the first on Iwo Jima ''since 1948, when the American Graves Registration Service recovered most U.S. service members killed during the campaign.''

Many of the missing Marines were lost at sea, meaning the chances of recovering their remains are slim. But many also were killed in caves or buried by explosions, and Brown said officials were optimistic about finding the remains of Genaust and other servicemen.

''We are looking at several caves,'' he said. ''We are looking for a number of service members, including Genaust. We have maps dating back to World War II and even GPS locations. So far, everything seems to be where it should be.''

Accounts of Genaust's death vary, but he was believed to have been killed in or near a cave on ''Hill 362A.''

On March 4, 1945, Marines were securing the cave, and are believed to have asked Genaust to use his movie camera light to illuminate their way. He volunteered to shine the light in the cave, and when he did he was killed by enemy fire. The cave was secured after a gunfight, and its entrance sealed.

''We decided that the only way to determine if his remains were there was to work on the ground,'' Webb said. ''We believe his remains may be in there, along with the remains of the Japanese.''

Separately, Japan on Monday returned to using the prewar name for Iwo Jima at the urging of its original inhabitants, who want to reclaim an identity they say has been hijacked by high-profile movies like Clint Eastwood's ''Letters from Iwo Jima.''

The new name, Iwo To, was adopted by the Japanese Geographical Survey Institute in consultation with Japan's coast guard.

----------

Associated Press writer Michael Rubinkam

contributed to this report from Philadelphia.

U.S. Searching for Iwo Jima Marine, NYT, 22.6.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iwo-Jima-Marine.html

Basics

Portable Media Players

Aim for the Masses

October 19, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHEL MARRIOTT

SEDUCTIVELY lighted music players may be hogging retail shelf space, but their overshadowed cousin, the portable media player, is looking increasingly attractive.

A new generation of portable media players — primarily designed to play video but, in some instances, to record it — is arriving in stores and on the Web. Many of the players are svelte, easy to use and less expensive than their predecessors. They can hold music videos or full-length movies, as well as play music and display digital photos. And more consumers are taking notice.

EchoStar Communications, the parent company of the satellite television service Dish Network, has done more than take notice. This fall, Dish Network is promoting a line of media players that customers can use to record or transfer television programs and movies for portable viewing. The devices, which the company is calling PocketDish players, are priced from $150 to $400.

“The key to this is the on-the-go lifestyle, people on trains, commuting, on planes, families with a digital video recorder but no time to sit and watch the programs on television,” said Cory Jo Vasquez, an EchoStar spokeswoman.

Meanwhile, broadening lines of media players are available at national outlets like Wal-Mart and RadioShack. Executives at Archos, the French company widely credited with creating the category in 2002, said that the number of retail outlets for its products in the United States had increased to 7,000 this fall, from 1,600 in July.

Part of the allure, consumers and retailers say, is that the category is maturing, offering more features at lower prices. Media players start as low as $100 and generally cost no more than $500 for full-featured models with large, bright screens, high storage capacity and recording options.

“The notion of viewing video on portable devices started to be a lot more popular after Apple introduced that functionality on the iPod,” said Ross Rubin, a consumer electronics analyst, referring to the fifth-generation iPod introduced last fall.

But Mr. Rubin, the director of industry analysis for the NPD Group, noted that the video-enabled iPod uses a smallish liquid-crystal-display screen (2.5 inches) for playback, as do other music players that also play video, including the Microsoft Zune, scheduled for release next month.

Dedicated media players with larger screens have tended to be bulky and overly complicated, critics have noted. They also have generally cost much more than music players that double as video players, Mr. Rubin said. For example, an entry-level iPod that plays video costs about $250. Last year, large-screen video players could easily cost twice that; now they are typically priced at $300 to $400.

“Those are still not high-volume products within the portable media player category,” Mr. Rubin said of the larger, feature-laden video players. “They are not a mainstream phenomenon yet.”

But Larry Smith, chief operating officer for Archos, said consumers had made it clear this year that what they wanted were portable devices that could richly and easily deliver video entertainment. “We think that is a validation of what we have been developing over the last four to five years.”

Mr. Smith noted that not only had media player technologies greatly improved this year, so had the means for getting content for the players, whether recording it directly on the players, dragging and dropping video files from computers, or transferring video from digital recorders like TiVo and on-demand services like AOL Video.

Archos’s products include the new 404 ($300, or $350 for a model that records video in DVD quality) and the 504 (which comes in 40-, 80- and 160-gigabyte versions that cost $350, $400 and $600). At the top of the line is the Archos 604, a full-featured player that the company says is the thinnest wide-screen device on the market, at 0.6 inches.

The 604 ($350) has a bright, high-resolution 4.3-inch screen and a 30-gigabyte hard drive that Archos representatives say can store up to 85 movies, 300,000 pictures or 15,000 songs. The 604 can read all standard video formats with DVD resolution; the absence of that ability has hindered many other media players, analysts said.

A standout feature of the new Archos media players is the introduction of the DVR station. It is a separate dock that houses the players’ video recording capacity and a collection of audiovisual input, output and data ports. Mr. Smith said that moving the recording function to the accessory (which costs $100, or $80 when purchased with a player) allowed the players to be smaller and less expensive, yet have larger screens.

The docking station can schedule recording from most sources, including televisions, cable and satellite set-top boxes, DVD players and videocassette recorders, Mr. Smith said. The station can also play content on television at DVD quality and in 5.1 surround sound. Later this fall, Mr. Smith said, the 604 will come in a Wi-Fi version ($450) that can receive content wirelessly.

The new Zen Vision W by Creative, like the 604, features a wide-screen, 4.3-inch display. It ships with a 30-gigabyte hard drive, but is also available in a 60-gigabyte model that can store up to 240 hours of video.

The Zen Vision W, priced at $300 to $500, reads many of the leading video formats; it includes an FM tuner and voice recorder, but does not record video. Generally, content is transferred from a computer by a U.S.B. 2.0 line.

The PMP7040 by Coby ($330) offers a whopping seven-inch screen. Like the Zen Vision W, it does not directly record video, but it plays video in various formats. It also plays digital music.

Doghouse Electronics, a start-up company in Birmingham, Ala., has recently introduced its first products, the 3.5-inch ($300) and 4-inch ($350) RoverTV portable media players. While both pocket-size devices can play many video formats, they also record from television sets, digital video recorders, DVD players and other sources.

The players use flash memory, and each comes with a 2-gigabyte memory card that can store up to four hours of high-quality video and 2,800 songs, said the company’s founder and chairman, Jim Howard. The players include FM tuners.

Other new media players that store their contents in flash memory — but do not record video — include the K-Pex by Kingston Technology, which starts at $130 and is hardly larger than a candy bar. It has a two-inch screen and one gigabyte of memory built in as well as an expansion slot for a miniSD card. Content, including music, pictures and text, can be transferred by a high-speed U.S.B. connection.

And in a nod to pre-teenagers, Tiger Electronics released last month the Massively Mini media player ($80), a child’s palm-size video and music player with an FM radio and a color screen about the size of a postage stamp. The player has 128 megabytes of built-in storage. It, too, uses a U.S.B. connection to transfer content, including pictures.

For videos, the shiny little player comes with video conversion software. Content suitable for children, including short clips from Cartoon Network and interviews with youth stars like Hilary Duff, can also be downloaded free from www.Tigertube.com. And for adults, the media players seem to have bridged an important divide.

“Typically, I would have said that this would be more geared toward early adopters and men,” said Ms. Vasquez, the EchoStar spokeswoman. “But what we’re finding in doing our research is that women are taking more of a front row in adopting these technologies these days.”

Portable Media Players Aim for the Masses, NYT, 19.10.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/technology/19basics.html

Jerome Liebling

NYT

October 18, 2006

Jerome Liebling’s “Morning, Monessen, Pa.” (1983).

The filmmaker Ken Burns said

Mr. Liebling taught him that “all meaning accrues in duration.”

The Still-Life Mentor to a Filmmaking Generation

NYT

19 October 2006

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/
arts/design/19lieb.html

The Still-Life Mentor

to a Filmmaking Generation

October 19, 2006
The New York Times
By RANDY KENNEDY

For much of a half-century of taking quiet, subtly powerful pictures that demand and reward long looking, Jerome Liebling has been known as a photographer’s photographer. The label is both a high compliment and an acknowledgment that Mr. Liebling, now 82, has not enjoyed the acclaim accorded to many of his contemporaries who first took their cameras to the streets of New York after World War II.

But a more fitting way to describe Mr. Liebling would be as a documentarian’s photographer. And judged by that standard, his work has rarely suffered from a lack of attention. In fact, spend any time watching the films of Ken Burns, or those of the legions of documentary makers he has inspired, and you will see Mr. Liebling’s work, in a sense, even if you have never laid eyes on one of his photographs.

His influence on a generation of nonfiction filmmakers — what Mr. Burns describes as “all of us coming within Jerry’s radiational sphere” — will be the subject of a tribute tonight at the Museum of Television and Radio by several of the students taught by Mr. Liebling, starting in the early 1970’s.

While Mr. Burns is probably the best known of the group, Mr. Liebling also taught Buddy Squires, the cinematographer who has helped to shape many of Mr. Burns’s films, as well as the directors Roger Sherman, Kirk Simon, Karen Goodman and Amy Stechler, who have several Emmys and Academy Award nominations among them. Sometimes called the Hampshire Mafia, they all attended Hampshire, the experimental college in Amherst, Mass., which has produced an unusual number of successful filmmakers and photographers.

Interviewed this week in a Midtown Manhattan studio as he was editing “The War,” an epic soldier’s-eye view of World War II that is to run next year on PBS, Mr. Burns described how he set off for Hampshire College in 1971 with youthful Hollywood dreams of becoming the next John Ford. But under the tutelage first of the photographer Elaine Mayes and then of Mr. Liebling, and no doubt also propelled by Hampshire’s Age of Aquarius idealism — no grades, no departments, no tenure — he fell in love with the power and relative purity of documentary filmmaking.

Mr. Burns recalled how he and his fellow students were terrified of Mr. Liebling. A gravel-voiced Brooklynite who had served with the 82nd Airborne Division in World War II before studying with Paul Strand and joining the Photo League, Mr. Liebling had founded one of the first college-level photography and film programs at the University of Minnesota, where he spent 20 years. The fear was fueled less by Mr. Liebling’s gruffness, he said, than by the fierce honesty of his teaching and by his pictures, which were firmly rooted in the social documentary tradition but seemed to have a resonance that transcended their genre.

“He was so authentic, in a way that a lot of us had never experienced,” Mr. Burns said. “You wanted to be like him. You wanted to tell the truth. You’d go out to take pictures with him, and we all saw the same things he did, and then we’d come back, and he’d put up his prints, and you’d put up yours, and you were devastated.”

He added, still seeming to wince all these years later at the memory: “Sometimes you’d do some work you thought was really great, and you’d show it to him, and he’d stand there for a while and then say, ‘Well ...’ And it was like, ‘Oh God.’ That was all it took. That ‘well.’ You knew you hadn’t done it.”

Mr. Liebling is often mentioned in the company of other photographers with cult followings among their peers, like Frederick Sommer or Dave Heath, whose classic 1965 collection, “A Dialogue with Solitude,” has long been out of print. But Mr. Liebling’s interest in documentary filmmaking — which he has also pursued through the years — has embedded his legacy deeply in the American documentary style that has emerged over the last 30 years.

On the most practical level, Mr. Burns said, Mr. Liebling led him to realize how still photographs could be incorporated powerfully into documentaries. It’s a technique that has become so closely associated with Mr. Burns’s style that Apple’s iPhoto software now offers a feature called the Ken Burns Effect, which incorporates slow, portentous zooms and pans into otherwise ordinary slide shows of family snapshots.

“The essential DNA of all my films issues from still photography,” Mr. Burns said. But Mr. Liebling’s influence on his work, he said, reached much deeper, to a personal and ultimately philosophical level that has guided many of his choices of subject and approach.

“It was this broadly humanistic mantra that he instilled in us,” he said, adding: “Jerry turned me and made me look inward, and it was not always a comfortable thing. I changed as a result of it. It was like molting.” He also taught, Mr. Burns said, that “all meaning accrues in duration — sometimes you have to just slow down and look.”

Mr. Burns smiled and added: “Of course, when you ask Jerry about this, he’s not going to cop to any of it. He’s just going to say, ‘What’s Kenny talking about?’ ”

But in a telephone interview Mr. Liebling actually did cop, at least to some of it. He said that when he was a child of the 1930’s in New York, his photographic impulse from the start was to “go figure out where the pain was, to show things that people wouldn’t see unless I was showing them.”

In doing so, his subject matter was often dark and uncompromisingly noncommercial: the blood-drenched workers at a Minnesota slaughterhouse; mental patients in a state hospital; cadavers used by New York medical students.

In teaching, he said, he tried mostly to impart a deep suspicion of dogma, of piousness and of the compromises that can lie just beneath the surface of American culture. “I wanted them to see that there are no shortcuts,” he said. “It’s too easy if everything is soft, and you can just buy your way and live well.

“I kept asking: ‘Where is your work coming from? Why are you doing it? What is it you see?’ And after a while they started to really look.”

Mr. Liebling, interviewed as he was preparing to drive from Amherst to New York for the tribute, part of the museum’s annual documentary festival, was asked if it bothered him that his work was not better known (though it is in several major collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington).

“Would I want to sell more?” he said, laughing. “Well, yeah. Who wouldn’t?” But he added: “Basically, I just hope that what I have to say in the photographs has validity and that I did it as well as I could.”

Though age has finally begun to slow him, he said, he is still hard at work with a camera and has in fact just returned to printing a series of pictures he first began in 1979 in an apple orchard near his house.

“I guess that’s a long time to be working on an apple orchard, isn’t it?” he said. “But the apples still keep growing each year.”

The Still-Life Mentor to a Filmmaking Generation,
NYT, 19.10.2006,
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/arts/design/19lieb.html

Iowa Town,

People Evolve in Photo Project

July 29, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:35 p.m. ET
The New York Times

OXFORD, Iowa (AP) -- At first, John Honn felt like so many of his neighbors -- a tad suspicious when Peter Feldstein announced his plan to photograph all 676 residents in town. For some, like Tim Hennes, there was also a reluctance to take part in the ''artsy'' ventures of Feldstein, who despite having lived in Oxford for six years was by some accounts still a newcomer.

Yet there they are, part of a collection of friends, neighbors, relatives, classmates, lovers and ex-lovers, colleagues, drinking buddies and quilting partners, each frozen in an insignificant instant of their lives more than 20 years ago in black and white.

Honn, a buckskinner by trade at the time, seems poised to wrestle bear: With his unruly beard, dressed in frontier-style shirt, pants and moccasins, his right hand clutches the barrel of a shotgun that stands upright by his side. Hennes, 21 when photographed, stands with only a hint of smile on his face in cut-off jeans and a worn T-shirt, his left hand clasping his right wrist at the waist.

''I don't remember exactly why I finally went down to the studio that day, other than I think I felt it had become some sense of obligation because Peter was so persistent,'' Hennes says. ''I don't think people could help but wonder what he was doing ... or what was to be gained from it.''

At the time, not even Feldstein -- who snapped portraits of 670 residents of this eastern Iowa town that summer -- knew what to think or do with his work. After a brief exhibition at the American Legion Hall, Feldstein gathered up his prints and stashed the negatives in storage.

''I had no intention of ever coming back and doing this again,'' says Feldstein, who retired last year after teaching photography at the University of Iowa for 32 years.

Now, more than two decades later, he is tracking down anyone who hasn't died, moved or been sent to jail for another round of portraits.

The same rules apply. Subjects wear what they want. Each stands on the same sidewalk square fronting a plaster wall on the side of Feldstein's Main Street studio. None are posed. Smiles, gestures, expressions are optional. No one is allowed to peek at his or her original portrait before Feldstein shoots a new one.

So far, Feldstein has reshot about 60. Matched side-by-side, the portraits show the obvious signs of aging, maturity, weight gain and loss, graying hair. Babies and children have morphed into 20-something nurses, truck drivers and teachers. But there is also evidence that some human traits and idiosyncrasies are impervious to time and change.

Don Saxton, the mayor then and now, still prefers striped, short sleeved shirts. In both portraits, Pat Henckleman tilts her head slightly left and reveals an enduring fondness for Docksiders. Jim Jirus still wears his seed corn hat cocked to the right.

In the current phase of his project, Feldstein has added a new twist, thanks to the help of friend Stephen Bloom, an author and journalism professor at the University of Iowa. Based on interviews, Bloom has crafted short narratives that lend a confessional, poetic and unvarnished dimension to the lives in Feldstein's then-and-now portraits.

In their own words, Oxford residents share struggles with alcohol or abuse. Some recount romantic first encounters with spouses, their faith in God, displeasure with President Bush or, in the case of Jim Hoyt, the recurring nightmares from being one of the first four American soldiers to liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp in Weimar, Germany, during World War II.

Hennes, photographed again last summer, strikes a pose similar to his original, even down to the way he clasps his left hand over his right wrist at the waist. In his essay, he likens himself to George Bailey, James Stewart's character in the movie classic ''It's a Wonderful Life,'' and shares how his dream of getting out of Oxford to attend college in Hawaii was forever altered by one simple act.

''On the way home one day, I stopped at Slim's, and that's where I met Robin. Today we have two girls, ages 16 and 13. I've been on the Oxford City Council for eight years, and now I'm on my second term on the school board. That trip to Hawaii was my ticket out,'' he says.

Honn, now a Pentecostal minister, was photographed in 2005 wearing a blue blazer, dress pants and tie, his beard neatly trimmed; he holds a Bible in his left hand. In the essay, Honn talks of his former obsession with coon hunting, hearing God speak to him for the first time at age 16, and his religious conversion and beliefs.

''I've seen devils, demons, and angels,'' he says. ''I once had a demon come to my bedroom. His face was a silver outline. I rassled with him on the bed.''

Feldstein says he has no favorites, but is particularly fond of the images and intimate tale of Ben Stoker.

When he was first photographed in 1984, Stoker is a just weeks old, cradled in the arms of his father. In the portrait taken last summer, Stoker, in a T-shirt, long baggy shorts and a baseball cap worn backward, creases a slight smile, his hands clasped behind his back.

''When I was 10, the man holding me -- my dad -- died,'' reads Stoker's narrative. ''Pretty much I think of my dad every day. I remember feeling his beard against my face as a little boy. Two years ago, when I was 19, my mother died of cancer. She was my guiding light. I'd be a liar if I said that everything is all right.''

Inspired by the photography of Mike DisFarmer, whose vast collection of portraits chronicled post-Depression life in the rural South, Feldstein and Bloom say their Oxford Project offers a unique and authentic look at personal change and life in a small, Midwestern community.

''But at the same time, this project is not just about Oxford,'' Bloom says. ''This is real. These people and their stories reflect who we are ... wherever we live.''

Interest in the work is growing. Feldstein and Bloom are negotiating a book deal with two publishers. Next year, they intend to exhibit the work at the Des Moines Art Center and they've had inquiries from other galleries.

Like the people captured by Feldstein's camera, the last 20 years have also brought change to Oxford, which hosted more than 4,000 people in 1948 when President Harry Truman made it one of several whistle stops during his re-election campaign.

Located about 15 miles west of Iowa City, Oxford has grown to 725, its growth evident mainly in the new subdivisions and the commuters who live there.

Gone are the multiple grocery stores, hardware store and downtown diners, victims of the crash in the farm economy of the 1980s. A violent storm in 1998 wiped out a healthy swath of old growth trees that shaded homes along its quiet streets. It's reputation as an outlaw, rough-and-tumble town has softened with the closure of a handful of taverns.

But as much as the project documents changes in Oxford and its inhabitants, Feldstein acknowledges that his work has caused a personal transformation.

''Because of this second time around, I've really come to realize that I love the people of this town,'' he says. ''I'm seeing a goodness and a kindness in a lot of people that I didn't expect it from.''

Iowa Town, People Evolve in Photo Project,
NYT, 29.7.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Oxford-Project.html

Arnold Newman,

Portrait Photographer Who Captured

the Essence of His Subjects,

Dies at 88

June 7, 2006

The New York Times

By ANDY GRUNDBERG

Arnold Newman, the portrait photographer whose pictures of some of the world's most eminent people set a standard for artistic interpretation and stylistic integrity in the postwar age of picture magazines, died yesterday in Manhattan. He was 88 and lived on the Upper West Side.

The apparent cause was a heart attack, said Ron Kurtz, the owner of Commerce Graphics, which represents Mr. Newman.

A polished craftsman, Mr. Newman first learned his trade by making 49-cent studio portraits in Philadelphia. He went on to become one of the world's best-known and most admired photographers, his work appearing on the covers of magazines like Life and Look, in museum and gallery exhibitions and in coffee-table books.

Mr. Newman was credited with popularizing a style of photography that became known as environmental portraiture. Working primarily on assignment for magazines, he carried his camera and lighting equipment to his subjects, capturing them in their surroundings and finding in those settings visual elements to evoke their professions and personalities.

Perhaps his most celebrated image is a 1946 portrait of the composer Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky, his expression deeply serious, is confined to the bottom left corner of the picture, cropped to his head and shoulders, an elbow resting on the piano, his hand supporting his head. The rest of the photograph is taken up by the raised lid of a large grand piano, strategically silhouetted against a blank wall, which is divided off-center into a gray and white rectangle. The lid forms the reversed shape of a leaning, abstract musical note.

By contrast, his 1949 portrait of the Modernist artist Jean Arp was taken at such an extreme close-up that the viewer sees only a hand, the right eye and a cheek and a curving, sensuous form that is unidentifiable but evocative.

Each Newman photograph had a metaphoric quality. For the folk painter Grandma Moses he arranged a homey shot, posing her in her Victorian parlor like the woman in "Whistler's Mother." The fashion photographer Cecil Beaton was captured, beautifully dressed, in the salon of his English country house. For Andy Warhol, Mr. Newman composed a surreal close-up collage in which he cut out Warhol's features and repositioned them askew from where they would normally be.

The "environmental" approach was what largely distinguished Mr. Newman's portraits from those of his contemporaries. Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, for example, preferred to work within the bald white arena of their studios.

A Face of Evil

Mr. Newman's methods had more in common with the candid, photojournalistic style of portraiture developed by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Alfred Eisenstaedt. But he was more deliberate about composition; his gift for formal design was always much in evidence. He used a large-format camera and tripod to ensure that every detail of a scene was recorded.

"As my own approach took form, it became evident that a good portrait had first to be a good photograph," he said in a companion book to a 1986 exhibition, "Arnold Newman: Five Decades," organized by the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. The exhibition was just one of many in his career; beyond his magazine work, he established an enviable reputation in the art world. Gallery exhibitions began presenting his work as early as 1941.

Mr. Newman's best-known images were in black and white, although he often photographed in color. Several of his trademark portraits were reproduced in color and in black and white. Perhaps the most famous was a sinister picture of the German industrialist Alfried Krupp, taken for Newsweek in 1963. Krupp, long-faced and bushy-browed, is made to look like Mephistopheles incarnate: smirking, his fingers clasped as he confronts the viewer against the background of a assembly line in the Ruhr. In the color version his face has a greenish cast.

The impression it leaves was no accident: Mr. Newman knew that Krupp had used slave labor in his factories during the Nazi reign and that he had been imprisoned after World War II for his central role in Hitler's war machine.

"When he saw the photos, he said he would have me declared persona non grata in Germany," Mr. Newman said of Krupp.

Mr. Newman enjoyed personifying the stereotypically irascible New Yorker. He often used his gregariousness to coax attitudes or gestures from his subjects. But he never endorsed the critical term widely used to describe his style of portraiture.

"Although my approach has become popularly known as environmental portraiture," he wrote in the early 1980's, "it only suggests a part of what I have been doing and am doing. Overlooked is that my approach is also symbolic and impressionistic or whatever label one cares to use."

He specialized in photographing artists, beginning with those of the New York School of Abstract Expressionist painters, whom he met in New York in the 1940's. He later photographed Picasso, Braque, Miró and other major European Modernists. In the 1960's and 70's his subjects, in addition to Warhol, included Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg and Louise Nevelson.

He was also admired for his photographs of American presidents, from John F. Kennedy to Gerald R. Ford, as well as world leaders like Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and David Ben-Gurion of Israel. His portrait of President Lyndon B. Johnson was chosen as the official White House portrait.

Arnold Abner Newman was born March 3, 1918, in New York, the second of three sons of a clothing manufacturer and his wife. When he was 2, his father's business failed and the family moved to Atlantic City, where his father became a dry-goods merchant and managed several small hotels. During the Depression the family lived part of the year in Miami Beach, where Mr. Newman's father operated resort hotels.

After graduating from high school in Miami Beach in 1936, he studied painting at the University of Miami, initially on a scholarship. But after two years he was unable to afford college and decided to pursue a burgeoning interest in photography, moving to Philadelphia to work for a chain of portrait studios.

There he socialized with students at what was then called the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Arts, where Alexey Brodovitch, the influential art director of Harper's Bazaar, was teaching. The experimental approach that Brodovitch encouraged apparently found its way to Mr. Newman through those students. His photographs soon showed a penchant for graphic simplicity.

In his time away from work, Mr. Newman began to take social-documentary photographs in the manner of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange and, more creatively, to produce graphically abstract views of city walls, porches and chairs.

He returned to Florida in 1939 to manage a portrait studio in West Palm Beach. Three years later he opened his own business, the Newman Portrait Studio in Miami Beach, which he ran during World War II. He traveled to New York frequently and had the first exhibition of his work at the A. D. Gallery in Manhattan. He met Alfred Stieglitz, Beaumont Newhall and Ansel Adams, then the most influential figures in art photography.

Artists in Their Habitats

Beginning in 1941 he produced a series of cutout collages, in which he engineered Cubist effects by cutting his prints into various shapes and combining them to form disjointed images. He returned to this technique in the 1960's in his interpretive portrait of Warhol as well as similar ones of the artist Dan Flavin and the writer Henry Miller, among others.

It was also in 1941 that he took his first artistically successful environmental portraits. And it was then that he began photographing artists in earnest. Among his subjects were Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp and Piet Mondrian. Most are pictured with examples of their work.

He stayed with that approach for essentially the rest of his career, with some exceptions: his most widely reproduced portrait of Picasso, for example, taken in France in 1954, shows only the artist in close-up, holding his hand to his brow.

In 1945 the Philadelphia Museum of Art organized an exhibition of Newman portraits of artists. When the show, "Artists Look Like This," closed, the museum bought the prints.

After the war, in 1946, Mr. Newman relocated to New York and opened Arnold Newman Studios. By now Brodovitch was well aware of Mr. Newman's growing renown and gave him assignments to take portraits for Harper's Bazaar. One was the famous Stravinsky photograph, which was rejected for publication. But soon Life, Look and Holiday were calling, too. In 1947 alone, four of Mr. Newman's photographs appeared on the cover of Life magazine, and in the 1950's, Life and other magazines sent him to Europe, Africa and Asia to take portraits.

Despite his many assignments for Life, he never joined its celebrated photography staff, choosing to remain a freelancer even after his marriage, in 1949, to Augusta Rubenstein and the birth of their two sons, Eric and David. All survive Mr. Newman, Eric living in Minneapolis and David in Portland, Ore. Four grandchildren also survive him.

In 1953 Mr. Newman's work was the subject of a second museum exhibition, at the Art Institute of Chicago, and by the end of the 50's his pictures were so pervasive — many as advertising assignments — that he was voted one of the world's 10 best photographers in a poll published by Popular Photography magazine.

A Focus on World Leaders

In the 1960's, however, Mr. Newman's environmental approach to the portrait lost favor as rebellious and Surrealist-influenced styles gained in popularity. For some critics and collectors, what once looked so fresh and original now seemed too facile; his attention to powerful and successful men and women appeared, in those counterculture days, as too flattering; and his immaculate work seemed too sleek and too well-made. But the rise of the art market for photographs in the 1970's brought his work to the attention of a new generation.

In 1979 the National Portrait Gallery in London commissioned Mr. Newman to create portraits of Britain's leading cultural and intellectual figures. The work, appearing in an exhibition and a book called "The Great British," created a stir largely because no British photographer had been deemed adequate to the task. In 1992 the National Portrait Gallery in Washington produced an American counterpart, "Arnold Newman's Americans," using pictures selected from his work of the last 50 years.

Mr. Newman remained characteristically caustic about the enthusiasm for what is now known as art photography. "Those who call themselves art photographers are pompous, arrogant egoists," he told The Detroit News in 1993.

Mr. Newman taught photography at Cooper Union for many years, and the book, "One Mind's Eye," a collection of his finest portraits published in 1974, became a popular coffee-table accessory for many collectors. Other books devoted to his work are "Bravo Stravinksy" (1967), "Artists: Portraits From Four Decades" (1980) and "Arnold Newman's Americans" (1992).

Mr. Newman photographed so many of the world's most prominent and accomplished men and women that it sometimes seemed as if there was no public figure that his lens had left untouched. But there were subjects he generally steered clear of: actors, actresses, rock stars and anyone he considered, as he put it, "famous for being famous."

"I hate the whole idea of celebrity," he said.

Arnold Newman, Portrait Photographer
Who Captured the Essence of His Subjects, Dies at 88,
NYT,
7.6.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/arts/07newman.html

Art

The Theater of the Street,

the Subject of the Photograph

March 19, 2006

The New York Times

By PHILIP GEFTER

IN 1999 Philip-Lorca diCorcia set up his camera on a tripod in Times Square, attached strobe lights to scaffolding across the street and, in the time-honored tradition of street photography, took a random series of pictures of strangers passing under his lights. The project continued for two years, culminating in an exhibition of photographs called "Heads" at Pace/MacGill Gallery in Chelsea. "Mr. diCorcia's pictures remind us, among other things, that we are each our own little universe of secrets, and vulnerable," Michael Kimmelman wrote, reviewing the show in The New York Times. "Good art makes you see the world differently, at least for a while, and after seeing Mr. diCorcia's new 'Heads,' for the next few hours you won't pass another person on the street in the same absent way." But not everyone was impressed.

When Erno Nussenzweig, an Orthodox Jew and retired diamond merchant from Union City, N.J., saw his picture last year in the exhibition catalog, he called his lawyer. And then he sued Mr. diCorcia and Pace for exhibiting and publishing the portrait without permission and profiting from it financially. The suit sought an injunction to halt sales and publication of the photograph, as well as $500,000 in compensatory damages and $1.5 million in punitive damages.

The suit was dismissed last month by a New York State Supreme Court judge who said that the photographer's right to artistic expression trumped the subject's privacy rights. But to many artists, the fact that the case went so far is significant.

The practice of street photography has a long tradition in the United States, with documentary and artistic strains, in big cities and small towns. Photographers usually must obtain permission to photograph on private property — including restaurants and hotel lobbies — but the freedom to photograph in public has long been taken for granted. And it has had a profound impact on the history of the medium. Without it, Lee Friedlander would not have roamed the streets of New York photographing strangers, and Walker Evans would never have produced his series of subway portraits in the 1940's.

Remarkably, this was the first case to directly challenge that right. Had it succeeded, "Subway Passenger, New York City," 1941, along with a vast number of other famous images taken on the sly, might no longer be able to be published or sold.

In his lawsuit, Mr. Nussenzweig argued that use of the photograph interfered with his constitutional right to practice his religion, which prohibits the use of graven images.

New York state right-to-privacy laws prohibit the unauthorized use of a person's likeness for commercial purposes, that is, for advertising or purposes of trade. But they do not apply if the likeness is considered art. So Mr. diCorcia's lawyer, Lawrence Barth, of Munger, Tolles & Olson in Los Angeles, focused on the context in which the photograph appeared. "What was at issue in this case was a type of use that hadn't been tested against First Amendment principles before — exhibition in a gallery; sale of limited edition prints; and publication in an artist's monograph," he said in an e-mail message. "We tried to sensitize the court to the broad sweep of important and now famous expression that would be chilled over the past century under the rule urged by Nussenzweig." Among others, he mentioned Alfred Eisenstaedt's famous image of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day in 1945, when Allied forces announced the surrender of Japan.

Several previous cases were also cited in Mr. diCorcia's defense. In Hoepker v. Kruger (2002), a woman who had been photographed by Thomas Hoepker, a German photographer, sued Barbara Kruger for using the picture in a piece called "It's a Small World ... Unless You Have to Clean It." A New York federal court judge ruled in Ms. Kruger's favor, holding that, under state law and the First Amendment, the woman's image was not used for purposes of trade, but rather in a work of art.

Also cited was a 1982 ruling in which the New York Court of Appeals sided with The New York Times in a suit brought by Clarence Arrington, whose photograph, taken without his knowledge while he was walking in the Wall Street area, appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in 1978 to illustrate an article titled "The Black Middle Class: Making It." Mr. Arrington said the picture was published without his consent to represent a story he didn't agree with. The New York Court of Appeals held that The Times's First Amendment rights trumped Mr. Arrington's privacy rights.

In an affidavit submitted to the court on Mr. diCorcia's behalf, Peter Galassi, chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, said Mr. diCorcia's "Heads" fit into a tradition of street photography well defined by artists ranging from Alfred Stieglitz and Henri Cartier-Bresson to Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand. "If the law were to forbid artists to exhibit and sell photographs made in public places without the consent of all who might appear in those photographs," Mr. Galassi wrote, "then artistic expression in the field of photography would suffer drastically. If such a ban were projected retroactively, it would rob the public of one of the most valuable traditions of our cultural inheritance."

Neale M. Albert, of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, who represented Pace/MacGill, said the case surprised him: "I have always believed that the so-called street photographers do not need releases for art purposes. In over 30 years of representing photographers, this is the first time a person has raised a complaint against one of my clients by reason of such a photograph."

State Supreme Court Justice Judith J. Gische rejected Mr. Nussenzweig's claim that his privacy had been violated, ruling on First Amendment grounds that the possibility of such a photograph is simply the price every person must be prepared to pay for a society in which information and opinion freely flow. And she wrote in her decision that the photograph was indeed a work of art. "Defendant diCorcia has demonstrated his general reputation as a photographic artist in the international artistic community," she wrote.

But she indirectly suggested that other cases might be more challenging. "Even while recognizing art as exempted from the reach of New York's privacy laws, the problem of sorting out what may or may not legally be art remains a difficult one," she wrote. As for the religious claims, she said: "Clearly, plaintiff finds the use of the photograph bearing his likeness deeply and spiritually offensive. While sensitive to plaintiff's distress, it is not redressable in the courts of civil law."

Mr. diCorcia, whose book of photographs "Storybook Life" was published in 2004, said that in setting up his camera in Times Square in 1999: "I never really questioned the legality of what I was doing. I had been told by numerous editors I had worked for that it was legal. There is no way the images could have been made with the knowledge and cooperation of the subjects. The mutual exclusivity that conflict or tension, is part of what gives the work whatever quality it has."

Mr. Nussenzweig is appealing. Last month his lawyer Jay Goldberg told The New York Law Journal that his client "has lost control over his own image."

"It's a terrible invasion to me," Mr. Goldberg said. "The last thing a person has is his own dignity."

Photography professionals are watching — and claiming equally high moral stakes. Should the case proceed, said Howard Greenberg, of Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, "it would be a terrible thing, a travesty to those of us who have been educated and illuminated by great street photography of the past and, hopefully, the future, too."

The Theater of the Street, the Subject of the Photograph,
NYT,
19.3.2006,
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/
arts/design/the-theater-of-the-street-
the-subject-of-the-photograph.html

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