Tons of hour-long lectures can be found on the channel’s Images, Ideas, Inspiration playlist, most of them photography related and all of them fascinating.
You’ll find something for everyone on this channel—from a lecture by gallery rep Margit Erb talking about her close personal and professional relationship with the great Saul Leiter, to a talk by Dancers Among Us photographer Jordan Matter, to Jack Hollingsworth’s fascinating talk titled “Small Camera Big Results.”
There are a total of 99 videos in that playlist alone—approximately 99 hours of education, inspiration, and ideas.
Above you can watch Jack Hollingsworth’s lecture, “Small Camera Big Results.” He has “traveled to over 20 countries and shot over 400,000 images with his iPhone,” and here he discusses his iPhone photography technique, and all the apps he uses.
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The early years of the Soviet Union roiled with internal tensions, intrigues, and ideological warfare, and the new empire’s art reflected its uneasy heterodoxy. Formalists, Futurists, Suprematists, Constructivists, and other schools mingled, published journals, critiqued and reviewed each other’s work, and like modernists elsewhere in the world, experimented with every possible medium, including those just coming into their own at the beginning of the 20th century, like film and photography.
These two mediums, along with radio, also happened to serve as the primary means of propagandizing Soviet citizens and carrying the messages of the Party in ways everyone could understand. And like much of the rest of the world, photography engendered its own consumer culture.
Out of these competing impulses came Soviet Photo (Sovetskoe foto), a monthly photography magazine featuring, writes Ksenia Nouril at the Museum of Modern Art’s site, “editorials, letters, articles, and photographic essays alongside advertisements for photography, photographic processes, and photographic chemicals and equipment.”
Soviet Photo was not founded by artists, but by a photojournalist, Arkady Shaikhet, in 1926 (see the first issue’s cover at the top). Though its audience primarily consisted of a “Soviet amateur photographers and photo clubs,” its early years freely mixed documentary, didacticism, and experimental art. It published the “works of international and professional photographers” and that of avant-gardists like Constructivist painter and graphic designer Aleksander Rodchenko.
The aesthetic purges under Stalin—in which artists and writers one after another fell victim to charges of elitism and obscurantism—also played out in the pages of Soviet Photo. “Even before Socialist Realism was decreed to be the official style of the Soviet Union in 1934,” Nouril writes, “the works of avant-garde photographers,” including Rodchenko, “were denounced as formalist (implying that they reflected a foreign and elitist style).” Soviet Photo boycotted Rodchenko’s work in 1928 and “throughout the 1930s this state-sanctioned journal became increasingly conservative,” emphasizing “content over form.”
This does not mean that that the contents of the magazine were inelegant or pedestrian. Though it once briefly bore the name Proletarskoe foto (Proletariat Photography), and tended toward monumental and industrial subjects, war photography, and idealizations of Soviet life during the Stalinist years. After the 60s thaw, experimental photomontages returned, and more abstract compositions became commonplace. Soviet Photo also kept pace with many glossy magazines in the West, with stunning full-color photojournalism and, after glasnost and the fall of the Berlin wall, high fashion and advertising photography.
Fans of photography, Soviet history, or some measure of both, can follow Soviet Photo’s evolution in a huge archive featuring 437 digitized issues, published between 1926 and 1991. Expect to find a gap between 1942 and 1956, when publication ceased “due to World War II and the war’s aftereffects.” Aside from these years and a few other missing months, the archive contains nearly every issue of Soviet Photo, free to browse or download in various formats. “Dig deep enough,” writes photo blog PetaPixel, “and you’ll find some really interesting (and surprisingly familiar) things in there.” Enter the archive here.
“In another time I guess I would have been content with filming girls and cats,” said Chris Marker. “But you don’t choose your time.” Though the inimitable filmmaker, writer, and media artist couldn’t choose his time, he did enjoy a decently sized slice of it, passing away in 2012 on his 91st birthday. His six-decade career’s best-known achievements include the innovative science-fiction short La Jetéeand the semi-fictional travelogue essay-film masterpiece Sans Soleil, but Marker’s vast body of work, most all of it deeply concerned with the combination of words and images, covers a much wider territory — aesthetic territory, of course, but given Marker’s peripatetic tendencies, also physical territory, scattered all across the globe.
Perhaps that sensibility landed Marker, 33 years old and with his most famous work ahead of him, a job as an editor at Paris’ Editions de Seuil, where he conceived and designed a series of travel guides called Petite Planète. He considered each volume “not a guidebook, not a history book, not a propaganda brochure, not a traveller’s impressions, but instead equivalent to the conversation we would like to have with someone intelligent and well versed in the country that interests us.” Launched “nearly a decade after World War II,” writes Isabel Stevens at Aperture,” the first time when “foreign locales seemed tantalizingly within reach, Éditions du Seuil introduced the books rather charmingly as ‘the world for everyone.’ ”
“Apart from the ambition to provide something different from run-of-the-mill guidebooks, histories, or travelers’ tales,” writes Catherine Lupton in Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, “the most innovative aspect of the Petite Planète guides was their lavish use of illustrations, which were displayed not merely as support to the text but in dynamic layouts that established an unprecedented visual and cognitive relay between text and images.” Though Marker contributed some of his own photographs (as did his French New Wave colleague Agnès Varda), his chief creative contribution came in blending these and a variety of “engravings, miniatures, popular graphic illustrations, picture postcards, maps, cartoons, postage stamps, posters, and advertisements” into “a heady and heterogenous mix of high cultural and mass-market scenes,” all arranged with the words in “a manner that engages knowingly and playfully with the parameters of the book.”
True Marker exegetes will find plenty of connections between Petite Planète and the rest of his oeuvre. Though no cats ever made the covers, plenty of girls did — or rather, plenty of women did, since a local female face fronted every title he oversaw. One of those faces, gazing statue-like from one volume on Japan, will look awfully familiar to anyone who’s seen Le mystère Koumiko, Marker’s documentary on a young lady he met in the street while in Tokyo for the 1964 Olympics. And in Toute la mémoire du monde, Alain Resnais’ short on France’s Bibliothèque Nationale made in collaboration with a certain “Chris and Magic Marker,” we witness the cataloging and shelving of a Petite Planète never written — and one that actually departs from the planet at that.
Around the same time, Marker published Coréennes, a highly Markeresque visual travelogue of war-torn North Korea. I recently wrote about its Korean edition for the Los Angeles Review of Books, though the long-out-of-print English version remains hard to come by. The same goes for the Marker-designed Petite Planète books, translations of which London’s Vista Books put out in the 1950s and 60s, and about which Adam Davis at Division Leap has begun a series of posts with a look at Germany. You can examine more of the originals at Let’s Get Lost, Index Grafix, SÜRKRÜT, and this slide showfrom The Ressiabator. Our hyperconnected era, at a distance of sixty years, places us well to understand the meaning of Marker’s statement on his travel-guide project: “We see the world escape us at the same time as we become more aware of our links with it.”
Most of my generation’s exposure to Japanese culture came heavily mediated by anime and samurai films. One cultural artifact that stands out for me is TV miniseries Shogun, an adaptation of James Clavell’s popular novel, which gives us a view of Japan through the eyes of a British novelist and his British hero (played by Richard Chamberlain in the film). Shogun depicts a feudal Japanese warrior culture centered on exaggerated displays of masculinity, with women operating in the margins or behind the scenes.
Even the great Akira Kurosawa’s visions of feudal Japan, like The Seven Samurai, are “not exactly inundated with the stunning power of female warriors brandishing katanas,” writes Dangerous Minds, “it’s a bit of a ソーセージ-fest.”
And yet, it turns out, “such women did exist.” Known as onna bugeisha, these fighters “find their earliest precursor in Empress Jingū, who in 200 A.D. led an invasion of Korea after her husband Emperor Chūai, the fourteenth emperor of Japan, perished in battle.” Empress Jingū’s example endured. In 1881, she became the first woman on Japanese currency.
Preceding the all-male samurai class depicted in Clavell and Kurosawa, the onna bugeisha “learned to use naginata, kaiken, and the art of tanto Jutso in battle,” the Vintage News tells us. Rather than pay mercenaries to defend them, as the terrified townsfolk do in Seven Samurai, these women trained in battle to protect “communities that lacked male fighters.”
The onna bugeisha’s ethic was as purportedly as uncompromising as the samurai, and it shows in these fierce portraits from the 1800s. Although many tales of prominent onna bugeisha come from the 12th-13th centuries, one famous figure, Nakano Takeko lived in the 19th century, writes Dangerous Minds, and died quite the warrior’s death:
While she was leading a charge against Imperial Japanese Army troops she was shot in the chest. Knowing her remaining time on earth to be short, Takeko asked her sister, Yūko, to cut her head off and have it buried rather than permit the enemy to seize it as a trophy. It was taken to Hōkai Temple and buried underneath a pine tree.
Another revered fighter, Tomoe Gozen, appears in The Tale of the Heike (often called the “Japanese Iliad). She is described as “especially beautiful,” and also as “a remarkably strong archer… as a swordswoman she was a warrior worth a thousand, ready to confront a demon or a god, mounted or on foot.”
In the photos here—and many more at The Vintage News—we get a sense of what such a legendary badass may have looked like.
It is not often noted that the surrealist movement in the 1920s originated with poets like Paul Éluard and André Breton, himself a trained psychologist, who drew explicitly from the work of Sigmund Freud, “the private world of the mind,” as the Metropolitan Museum of Art puts it. And yet we certainly see the influence of Freudian poetry in the work of Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and Man Ray. We also see it, inexplicably, in the work of Hieronymus Bosch, that 15th century Dutch painter of bizarre works like The Garden of Earthly Delights, a triptych that becomes exponentially more nightmarish as one scans across it from left to right. (Take a virtual tour of the painting here), and from which photographer Lori Pond draws in the astonishing photographs you see here.
How does such a faraway figure as Bosch, whom we know so little about, seem to communicate so closely with our epoch’s artistic movements? The Garden of Earthly Delights, writes Stephen Holden at the New York Times, “outstrips in boldness many of the extreme digital fantasies in Hollywood horror films.” Bosch’s incredibly detailed paintings “feel startlingly contemporary.… Reproductions of his paintings have adorned rock album covers, been parodied on The Simpsons and printed on silk bodices designed by Alexander McQueen.” And he was, in fact, named “Trendiest Apocalyptic Medieval Painter of 2014.”
We might well wonder what Bosch would have done with the same technologies as those who now pay him tribute. Perhaps something very much like Pond has with her Bosch Redux series, a collection of photographs of very close-up details in several of Bosch’s paintings, featuring one or two characters. To make these photos, writes Alyssa Coppelman at Adobe’s Create blog, Pond “bought props online, in antique stores, and at swap meets, and friends donated her old Halloween costumes.” She hired a prosthetics designer and her “taxidermy teacher.” For photos like that above from the central panel of the triptych, Pond even hired a set builder to create a life-sized boat that could fit the two real-life models.
Many of these effects might have been accomplished by early twentieth century surrealists, and indeed, when these details from Bosch’s work are amplified they resemble nothing so much as those psychoanalytic modernists. But Pond admits, “I fully abide by the maxim, ‘A photograph isn’t a photograph until it goes through Photoshop.’” She makes the usual adjustments, adds filters and effects, then employs “textures, backgrounds, and other small details from the original paintings,” making Bosch a collaborator in these close-up remixes, which come from The Last Judgment, The Temptation of St. Anthony, and The Garden of Earthly Delights, of course—the painting that first gave her the inspiration when Pond saw it at the Prado in Madrid. You can see many more examples of the series at Pond’s website, sixteen surreally apocalyptic visions in all.
Since the taking of the very first photograph in 1826, photography has developed, as it were, in ways hardly imaginable to its first few generations of practitioners. The most thorough transformation so far has, of course, come in the form of the digital revolution (and especially its latest fruit, the camera phone), which has in many real ways delivered on its promise of making “everyone a photographer.” But the ability to take a picture is one thing, and the ability to take a picture worth looking at — let alone looking at more than once — quite another.
Fortunately, high technology has democratized not only the means of production, but also the means of learning with online courses like this free one on digital photography sourced from no less an institution than Harvard University.
Even a basic understanding of all those topics will put you far ahead of the average social-media snapper, but as with any pursuit, gaining some knowledge creates the desire for more. You thus might also consider taking the digital photography course from Stanford professor and Google researcher Marc Levoy we featured last year. (Also see this free massive open online course, Seeing Through Photographs. It’s from the MoMA, and it starts again on January 23.) It would take a lifetime to master all the gear and attain all the know-how out there, even if photography stopped changing today, but don’t let that intimidate you. Just bear in mind the wise words of Hunter S. Thompson: “Any man who can see what he wants to get on film will usually find some way to get it; and a man who thinks his equipment is going to see for him is not going to get much of anything.”
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There was a time when anyone with even the remotest interest in photography knew the name Eastman, if not the life and work of George Eastman himself. Eastman Kodak—the company founded in 1888 by that entrepreneur, philanthropist, and Great American Success Story—once held a dominant share of the camera and film market. Generally known in later decades just by the name “Kodak,” Eastman’s company seems to have nearly disappeared from the market in the digital age (though it may be poised for a comeback).
Yet many of the devices and materials Eastman’s company invented saw daily use in film and photography throughout all of the previous century. Eastman bought the patents for and manufactured the first roll film, indispensable in both industries until recently. (He has two stars on the Hollywood walk of fame for his technical contributions.) With the ease of roll film, Eastman’s company also created and sold the first camera for consumer use in 1888, simply called the Kodak.
“The camera was a great success,” writes a Kodak history, “and many people, among them a lot of women, started taking photographs. When the 100 pictures of the film were shot, the photographer could mail the camera to Eastman Kodak, where all the technical work would be done by skilled people.”
Eastman’s legacy lives on in another important capacity as well: since the 40s, his Rochester, NY mansion housed one of the largest, the oldest, and perhaps the most impressive collections of photography in the world, the Eastman Museum. “In 1989,” the museum tells us, it “completed construction of a 73,000-square-foot building (more than 70 percent of which is below ground level) that included climate-controlled collection vaults, exhibition galleries, libraries, offices, and photographic conservation and film preservations labs.” And now, over a quarter of a million of the Eastman Museum’s holdings are available online in searchable galleries of “thousands of photographs that date back to the medium’s earliest years,” notes Claire Voon at Hyperallergic, “as well as “objects from its massive library of artifacts that together chronicle the history of image-making.”
You’ll find the 1921 portrait of Igor Stravinsky, at the top, and the front cover of an 1888 Kodak manual (“Part First”), below it. You’ll see experimental oddities like the 1889 “Self-Portrait ‘Transformation’” by Louis Docos du Hauron, further up; and striking portraits like Lewis W. Hine’s “No Soap, Pittsburgh Steel Worker Child 1909,” above. “The museum holds the collections of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre,” writes Voon, “Lewis Hine, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Nickolas Muray, and Edward Steichen, so their works are available here for you to easily browse.” You’ll surely recognize at least one of those names. Before Eastman, Daguerre became one of the fathers of photography in the early 19th century. Just below, see an 1844 portrait of the artist and inventor by a contemporary, Jean Baptiste Sabatier-Blot, “among the most famous portraitists of the Parisian daguerreotype of the 1840s,” as Monoskop describes him.
“Objects from the museum’s photography, technology and George Eastman Legacy collections are now searchable,” the Eastman Museum writes in its press release, “and more objects from the museum’s vast holdings are being added on an ongoing basis.” And, to honor Eastman’s considerable legacy in motion pictures, “objects from the moving image collection will become accessible in the coming months.” For now, we can see work by pioneering English photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who began conducting motion studies in the 1870s, which contributed to the development of Eastman’s film and Thomas Edison’s cameras. See Muybridge’s 1877 “Man in derby riding horse” below, and enter the online Eastman Museum collection here.
America has specialized in both the beautiful and the terrible, inspiring awe of every positive and negative variety. That goes for both the human achievements that have happened there as well of the natural environments they’ve happened in and around, both of which define America equally and have made it the kind of place the word sublime, mixing in as it does a tinge of fear with admiration, was coined to describe. Ansel Adams, who ascended to the top of the photographic pantheon with his career spent shooting the 20th-century American West, seemed born to capture that sublimity.
How did he do it? The 1958 documentary Ansel Adams, Photographer (also available on Archive.org) offers a twenty-minute look into the life and work of the man whose name has become a byword for the majestic black-and-white American landscape. We also hear a few of his philosophical positions on his work. “Perhaps music is the most expressive of the arts,” says Adams himself after a few minutes at the piano. “However, as a photographer, I believe that creative photography, when practiced in terms of its inherent qualities, may also reveal endless horizons of meaning.”
We then see and hear about all the (highly pre-digital) cameras and associated tools with which Adams engaged in that practice before heading out to the coast to watch him in action. “Like every good photographer,” says the narrator, Adams “pre-visualizes his final print right there,” a technique we’ve previously covered here on Open Culture. Then out comes the light meter, in order to “estimate what exposure he needs now and what development he needs later.” Every choice Adams made — about “film, lens, filter, lens extension, lens aperture, shutter setting,” and more — he meticulously recorded in his notebook.
After developing and examining the negative in his lab, he tries out a “test exposure,” which pleasingly turns out as a “quite well-balanced” image, but one that nevertheless suggests improving tweaks for the next one. (Color film’s relative lack of flexibility in this part of the process kept black-and-white Adams’ photographic form of choice.) “Once Adams has achieved the print he wants,” the narrator tells us, “he is able, simply by controlling exposure and processing, to make from one negative hundreds of fine prints in a day. By this technique, he can produce portfolios of original prints which are in themselves works of art.”
Much has changed about photography since Adams did it, of course, though mostly in the technical sense. As the process of simply making a photograph becomes ever faster and easier, the discipline, concentration, and appetite for rigor of a photographer like Adams, whose “standards are as high as those of an architect or an engineer,” become ever rarer and more valuable. Like all of the most important artists, his process in combination with his very nature transcended the limitations of his time, resulting in images of America that, to this day, still look not just as if we could step right into them, but realer, somehow, than reality itself.
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