Eve Arnold

Eve Arnold ©Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos (from NYTimes website)

Eve Arnold passed away this week at the age of 99, peacefully in London. Born in America in 1912, she lived in Britain since 1961.

There have been many obituaries written, so I won’t try to expand on them here. A quick google search reveals obituaries in the Irish Times, the New York Times, The Telegraph, and many others. One that caught my eye was the obituary in the Guardian:

“… Arnold’s black and white photographs of 1950s Harlem, documenting existence under racism and apartheid, exploited labour, global poverty and working women’s lives are the most meaningful and powerful of her images. …

“…Eve Arnold was the first woman to be invited to join the Magnum photo agency, back in the 1950s. Visit Magnum’s website today and look at its list, 60 years on. Less than 10% are women. …”

Eve Arnold, RIP.

– Rory

Tim Hetherington & Chris Hondros

Tim Hetherington & Chris Hondros deaths in Libya have been reported widely during the past few days. Both were talented journalists, photographers, film makers and writers. There is nothing I can add really to what has already been said by those who knew the men and their work. May they rest in peace.

Chris Hondros on the NY Times

Tim Hetherington on the NY Times

– Rory

RIP Miroslav Tichý

RIP Miroslav Tichy, April 12th 2011

Artist and photographer Miroslav Tichy passed away on April 12th, 2011 (b.1926).

Although I have been aware of his work for a few years, and have read a little about his methods with home made cameras and so on, I don’t really know a whole lot about him. However well he was known (or not) in Czech, he seems to have come to prominence in the western world around 2004, when he was exhibited in Seville (BIACS). When I learnt about his death I did a quick search around the web and came across an excellent article on American Suburb X. The following is a paragraph from the article, by Roman Buxbaum, who was a neighbour of Tichy’s as a child:

The only thing I know for sure about the beginning of Tichy’s work in photography is that the first camera he began to use sometime in the 1960s was an old field camera inherited from his father. The photos are without numbers and without dates. The way they were stored has meant they have been shuffled again and again like playing cards. Approximate dating is possible only by judging from the styles of clothes, kinds of cars, and other things in the photos. The materials on the reverse side of the mounting and the frames also reflect the times when Tichý used them. Most of the photographs were made in the 1970s and 80s. I had a planned number I wanted to do: I would make such and such a number a day, such and such a number in five years, and when I did it, I quit. He bought his film, photographic paper, and chemicals from a drugstore next to the church. To save money, he often bought 60-mm film and then in the darkroom cut it lengthwise into two strips. He set up a darkroom on the courtyard of his house. He made himself an enlarger from boards and two slats, which he pulled out of the fence. The slats are joined together with sheet metal so that they can be slid in and out lengthwise, that’s how he focuses the picture. To keep the enlarger head from slipping, he wedged a piece of sheet metal between the slats. Obrzek He made the lamp box by placing a light bulb into a tin can. He took a lens from a disused camera. Between the light source and the lens he made the negative tray out of plywood with a hole for rewinding the spool of the negatives. The whole enlarger was hermetically sealed with black paper, tape, and shreds of fabric.

The article is long (put the kettle on), but well worth a read. There is a wealth of other information around the web on Tichy, and there is an official site (I assume it’s the official site) here.

– Rory

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The Forgotten Ones … RIP Milton Rogovin

 

Milton Rogovin (c) Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Via my favourite photo blog, The Online Photographer, I learnt today that the great socialist photographer, Milton Rogovin, has died. He was 101.

Rogovin took up photography after being persecuted during the McCarthy era. Says the New York Times,

Mr. Rogovin was an optometrist whose business was decimated and his children shunned after he refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1958. An article published that year in The New York Times reported that friendly witnesses described him as “the chief Communist in the area.” He turned to photography because his “voice was essentially silenced,” as he once said. What followed was more than 40 years of powerfully straightforward pictures of others without voices: the poor and working class of Buffalo’s East Side and Lower West Side, Appalachia, Mexico, Chile and other countries.

A wonderful photographer, his last book was The Forgotten Ones, published in 2003.

A short film worth watching is available on youtube.

– Rory

Goodbye’s and Hello’s

Kodachrome

I’ve never been a huge user of slide film, but you can’t dispute the joy of looking at a perfectly exposed slide. The colours can have a magic that we don’t often see in prints. The demise of Kodachrome has been well documented this year. Produced since 1935, it was an icon of photography in its own right and beloved of millions of photographers. Paul Simon put it in his own words –

Kodachrome

They give us those nice bright colors

They give us the greens of summers

Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, Oh yeah

I got a Nikon camera

I love to take a photograph

So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away
If you took all the girls I knewWhen I was single

And brought them all together for one night

I know they’d never matchmy sweet imagination

everything looks WORSE in black and white

 

Some of the photographers we said goodbye to in 2010 were

Henry Miller (c) Peter Gowland

Peter Gowland, March 17th 2010

 

Demonstrators huddled in a doorway, seeking shelter from high-pressure fire hoses, in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963. (c) Charles Moore

Charles Moore, March 13th 2010

 

(c) Jim Marshall

Jim Marshall, March 24th 2010

 

Paul Newman, 1964 © Dennis Hopper

Dennis Hopper, May 29th 2010

 

John Lennon (c) Brian Duffy

Duffy, May 31st, 2010

 

Kate Moss (c) Corinne Day

Corinne Day, August 27th 2010

 

So, with goodbye’s to some of the greats, lets look forward to 2011. Cork Analogue Photographers are welcoming new members (interested? leave a comment below). We are planning on printing and exhibiting the Faces Project, a portraiture project we shot during the Cork Live at the Marquee concerts. We will also hold a version of the Disposable Camera Day – probably along the lines of a Crappy Camera Day (crap camera? check. roll of film? check. day out? check!). So we’ll be out and about

All the best to everyone for 2011, have a happy and healthy New Year. I’m off for a drink now 🙂

– Rory

Corinne Day

(c) Corinne Day

Sorry to hear the British fashion photographer Corinne Day has died. Day’s photographs in The Face magazine were the first fashion photographs of Kate Moss.  She died on Friday Aug 27th.

The photograph above I found on libertylondongirl, a blog by fashion editor Sasha Wilkins who says the following about Day’s shoot with Kate Moss:

Kate Moss was fifteen when she shot the story, styled by Melanie Ward, which launched her career. The photographs were taken on Camber Sands in England, a traditional seaside resort, and were astonishing for their raw, verité feel; an antidote to the glossy Vogue supermodels. The images were seen by Fabien Baron, and Moss’s relationship with Calvin Klein began. It’s difficult to over emphasise how influential this story was at the time.

– Rory

Duffy 1933 – 2010

(c) Duffy. English fashion model Jean Shrimpton leans against a wall in London's Primrose Hill, wearing a close-fitting hood, 1960. A photoshoot for Vogue magazine. (Photo by Duffy/Getty Images)

Sixties fashion photographer Duffy died on May 31st. His website says the following

On Monday May 31st 2010 we lost one of the greatest anarchic, creative and dynamic minds of our time. After many months fighting a degenerative lung condition Brian duffy finally lost his battle

Duffy was born in London to Irish parents –  it says on his website that he was conceived in Dublin, born in London. He was a part of the generation that defined the swinging sixties in London with his photographic contemporaries (rivals?!) David Bailey and Terence Donovan.

View his images on his website here

The BBC have published some of his more famous photos here

And a write up here.

– Rory

Addendum: There was an excellent obituary written by Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian yesterday which you can read here

And a BBC4 documentary which accompanied his exhibition last year, “The Man Who Shot the 60s”, which can be viewed here

– Rory

Dennis Hopper

Double Standard (c) Dennis Hopper

Hollywood actor and prolific photographer Dennis Hopper died yesterday, Sat May 29th. The news is obviously all over the net, this little snippet is from the NY Times:

Mr. Hopper had several artistic pursuits beyond film. Early in his career, he painted and wrote poetry, though many of his works were destroyed in a 1961 fire that burned scores of homes, including his, in the Los Angeles enclave Bel Air.

Around that time, Ms. Hayward gave him a camera as a gift, and Mr. Hopper took up photography.

His intimate and unguarded images of celebrities like Ike and Tina Turner, Andy Warhol and Jane Fonda were the subject of gallery shows and were collected in a book, “1712 North Crescent Heights.” The book, whose title was his address in the Hollywood Hills in the 1960s, was edited by Marin Hopper, his daughter by Ms. Hayward.

Dennis Hopper

– Rory

Peter Gowland dies at 93

Jayne Mansfield by Peter Gowland

Peter Gowland, who used camera, sunshine and imagination to portray ravishing women at a time when the pinup girl was a nearly ubiquitous fixture of American life, died on March 17 in Los Angeles. He was 93.

The cause was complications from a fall, his wife, Alice, said.

Mr. Gowland’s photographs appeared on more than 1,000 magazine covers, including those of Playboy, Rolling Stone and Modern Photography. In 1954, The New York Times called Mr. Gowland “America’s No. 1 Pin-up Photographer.”

Read on at the New York Times by clicking here

– Rory

Jim Marshall Dies

Photograph Copyright Jim Marshall

Jim Marshall, a photographer who took some of the most famous images of rock and pop musicians, including Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar aflame at the Monterey International Pop Festival and Johnny Cash at San Quentin prison, died on Tuesday night in a hotel in New York. He was 74.

His death was confirmed by Peter Blachley of the Morrison Hotel gallery in New York, which represents him there. The cause was not immediately known.

Read more at the New York Times

– Rory

Irving Penn

Irving Penn has died at the age of 92.

From the NY Times “… In his catalog essay for a 1984 retrospective of Mr. Penn’s work at the Museum of Modern Art, John Szarkowski, then the museum’s director of photography, wrote, “The grace, wit, and inventiveness of his pattern-making, the lively and surprising elegance of his line, and his sensitivity to the character, the idiosyncratic humors, of light make Penn’s pictures, even the slighter ones, a pleasure for our eyes.”  …”

Click here to read more

– Rory

Willy Ronis

“… The last of the great French mid-century photographers has died. Willy Ronis, who had been on dialysis and in a wheelchair for some time, entered a Paris hospital several days ago. Stephane Ledoux, head of Eyedea Presse, owner of Rapho agency, said he was “bright and spirited to the end.” He was 99.

Ronis is best known for his pictures of everyday life in Provence and in Paris, in particular the working-class districts of Belleville and Montmartre. His most famous picture is “Le Nu Provencal,” a nude of his wife, Marie-Anne Lansiaux, bending over a sink in a rustic bathroom. …”

Read On at The Online Photographer

– Rory