National Geographic Photographer Steve McCurry Shoots the Very Last Roll of Kodachrome

in Photography | January 22nd, 2013

Ask a pho­tog­ra­ph­er from the cen­tu­ry that just passed to name his or her favorite film, and the answer, very often, will be Kodachrome.

The crisp emul­sion, beau­ti­ful­ly sat­u­rat­ed col­ors and  archival sta­bil­i­ty of Kodachrome made it a sen­ti­men­tal favorite among pho­tog­ra­phers long after oth­er, more prac­ti­cal col­or films had all but pushed it out of the mar­ket­place. The prob­lem was, the very qual­i­ties that made the film spe­cial stemmed from a high­ly cum­ber­some tech­ni­cal process. Kodachrome was a “non-sub­stan­tive” film, mean­ing the dye cou­plers were not built into the emul­sion, as they are in oth­er col­or films, but had to be added dur­ing devel­op­ment. The process was com­plex, and few labs could afford to offer it. Even before the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion, Kodachrome was an endan­gered species.

So while it came as an emo­tion­al shock to many pho­tog­ra­phers, it was no real sur­prise when the East­man Kodak Com­pa­ny announced in 2009 that it was halt­ing pro­duc­tion of Kodachrome. One of the pho­tog­ra­phers who had long-since moved on to dig­i­tal imag­ing but who was sad­dened by the demise of Kodachrome was Steve McCur­ry, an award-win­ning pho­to­jour­nal­ist for Nation­al Geo­graph­ic who is best known for his haunt­ing 1984 image (shot on Kodachrome) of a 12-year-old Afghan refugee girl with pierc­ing green eyes. When McCur­ry heard the news, he arranged to obtain the very last roll of Kodachrome to come off the assem­bly line at the Kodak plant in Rochester, New York. The chal­lenge, then, was this: What do you do with the last 36 expo­sures of a leg­endary film?

The half-hour doc­u­men­tary above from Nation­al Geo­graph­ic tells the sto­ry of that roll and how McCur­ry used it. The film­mak­ers fol­lowed the pho­tog­ra­ph­er on an odyssey that began at the fac­to­ry in Rochester and end­ed at a lab­o­ra­to­ry (the last Kodachrome lab open) in a small town in Kansas. Over the course of about six weeks, from late May to ear­ly July, 2010, McCur­ry trav­eled halfway around the world to make those final 36 expo­sures. The result­ing pho­tographs iclude street scenes in New York and Kansas, por­traits of a movie star (Robert De Niro) in New York, intel­lec­tu­als and eth­nic tribes­men in India, col­leagues in Turkey and New York, and one of him­self. It’s a remark­able take. Although a few of the shots appear spon­ta­neous, most are the result of care­ful plan­ning. McCur­ry donat­ed all 36 slides to the George East­man House Inter­na­tion­al Muse­um of Pho­tog­ra­phy and Film, but you can see almost all of the pho­tos online at the Van­i­ty Fair Web site. As McCur­ry tells the mag­a­zine:

I’ve been shoot­ing dig­i­tal for years, but I don’t think you can make a bet­ter pho­to­graph under cer­tain con­di­tions than you can with Kodachrome. If you have good light and you’re at a fair­ly high shut­ter speed, it’s going to be a bril­liant col­or pho­to­graph. It had a great col­or palette. It was­n’t too gar­ish. Some films are like you’re on a drug or some­thing. Velvia made every­thing so sat­u­rat­ed and wild­ly over-the-top, too elec­tric. Kodachrome had more poet­ry in it, a soft­ness, an ele­gance. With dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy, you gain many ben­e­fits [but] you have to put in post-pro­duc­tion. [With Kodachrome] you take it out of the box and the pic­tures are already bril­liant.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Film Was Made: A Kodak Nos­tal­gia Moment

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National Geographic Gives Us Intimate Moments with a Leopard Seal

in Photography, Science | December 16th, 2012

Too bad there are no leop­ard seals on Nation­al Geo­graph­ic’s pay­roll. Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Paul Nicklen’s inti­mate por­traits of the one who took par­tic­u­lar inter­est in him on a recent Antarc­tic expe­di­tion are delight­ful. Imag­ine how great it would be to have some reverse angle reac­tion shots of Nicklen as his new friend attempts to serve him a suc­ces­sion of live, dead, and muti­lat­ed pen­guins.

He may have turned up his nose at his sub­jec­t’s cui­sine, but Nicklen brings some­thing else to the table, name­ly four days’ worth of up close and per­son­al shots of an ani­mal doing some­thing oth­er than going about its busi­ness. With­out anthro­po­mor­phiz­ing its inten­tions over much, this crea­ture went out of its way to accli­mate its strange guest to his new sur­round­ings, stick­ing around when less­er hosts would have aban­doned him along­side the buf­fet. Pret­ty cool when you con­sid­er that Nick­len’s entire head could — and briefly did — fit inside its mas­sive, sharp fanged jaws.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mari­achi Band Ser­e­nades Bel­u­ga Whale at Mys­tic Aquar­i­um

The Wild King­dom: Brought to You by Mutu­al of Oma­ha (It’s on YouTube)

Film­ing a Sprint­ing Chee­tah at 1,200 Frames Per Sec­ond

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day’s encoun­ters with species oth­er than her own are a fea­ture of her mem­oir, No Touch Mon­key! And Oth­er Trav­el Lessons Learned Too Late

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Annie Leibovitz, Photographer of Icons and Iconic Photographer, Profiled on American Masters

in Photography, Television | December 14th, 2012

One must take care, when writ­ing about well-con­nect­ed cul­tur­al fig­ures, not to abuse the word icon­ic. But when one writes about the pho­tog­ra­ph­er Annie Lei­bovitz, one almost has to abuse it. Here we have a woman who took two of the most mem­o­rable pho­tos of John Lennon, col­lab­o­rat­ed (to the extent pos­si­ble) with Hunter S. Thomp­son, went on tour with the Rolling Stones, fol­lowed Richard Nixon out of the White House the last time he left it, con­vinced Whoopi Gold­berg to get into a bath­tub of milk, and loved Susan Son­tag. This whole post could­n’t pos­si­bly con­tain a com­plete list of her pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al involve­ment with the, yes, icons of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry pop­u­lar cul­ture. Her por­traits of them became icons them­selves, which, in turn, made Lei­bovitz her­self icon­ic. For a visu­al­ly rich sense of the scope of her life and career, look no fur­ther than the doc­u­men­tary above, Life Through a Lens.

This 2008 pro­duc­tion comes from the PBS-dis­trib­uted Amer­i­can Mas­ters tele­vi­sion series, which we fea­tured on Tues­day. Direct­ed by Lei­bovitz’s own sis­ter and there­fore pos­sessed of the unusu­al famil­ial insight you’d expect, Life Through a Lens also includes a great many of the hard-to-inter­view lumi­nar­ies with­out which no pro­file of this pho­tog­ra­ph­er could be com­plete. We hear from Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger, Jann Wen­ner, Hillary Clin­ton, Glo­ria Steinem, Pat­ti Smith, Mick Jag­ger, Kei­th Richards, Bette Midler, Yoko Ono, and George Clooney, to name but a few of her admir­ers who’ve held their own at the busi­ness end of her cam­era. In the four years since this doc­u­men­tary, Lei­bovitz’s pho­tographs — now of 21st-cen­tu­ry celebri­ties like Miley Cyrus, Sasha Baron Cohen, Lady Gaga, Rihan­na, and LeBron James —  have con­tin­ued to impress in the pages of Vogue and Van­i­ty Fair. When­ev­er some­one ris­es toward icon­ic sta­tus, Annie Lei­bovitz’s visu­al imag­i­na­tion can’t be far behind.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch PBS’ Amer­i­can Mas­ters Doc­u­men­taries (Includ­ing Scorsese’s Homage to Kazan) Free Online

Alfred Stieglitz: The Elo­quent Eye, a Reveal­ing Look at “The Father of Mod­ern Pho­tog­ra­phy”

1972 Diane Arbus Doc­u­men­tary Inter­views Those Who Knew the Amer­i­can Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Best

Hen­ri Carti­er-Bres­son and the Deci­sive Moment

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

 

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Ghosts of History: Dutch Artist Eerily Superimposes Modern Street Scenes on World War II Photos

in History, Life, Photography | December 11th, 2012

We all have our fas­ci­na­tions. Some of us are enam­ored of a par­tic­u­lar his­tor­i­cal era. If I had to pick a time peri­od I’d want to vis­it, I’d say the 1930s—after the Depres­sion, before World War II—a “tween­er” decade if there ever was one.

Jo Hed­wig Teeuwisse takes her inter­est in the 1930s to extra­or­di­nary lengths. She wears vin­tage cloth­ing and attends 1930s-theme par­ties. She is also a his­tor­i­cal con­sul­tant and expert on dai­ly life from 1930–1945.

Teeuwisse lives in The Hague but once, while vis­it­ing Ams­ter­dam, she stum­bled upon a trea­sure on the street. It was a box filled with old pho­to­graph­ic neg­a­tives. Some had iden­ti­fy­ing notes but most did not. A his­to­ry nut, Teeuwisse went to work imme­di­ate­ly try­ing to sort out where the shots were tak­en and, if pos­si­ble, the iden­ti­ties of peo­ple in the retro pho­tos.

The results are an impres­sive and amaz­ing archive Teeuwisse calls Ghosts of His­to­ry. More than sim­ply fig­ur­ing out which build­ing is fea­tured in a pic­ture, Teeuwisse cre­at­ed pho­to mash-ups by com­bin­ing ele­ments of a vin­tage image with an image of her own tak­en in the same place today.

We see mem­bers of the under­ground press march­ing down a main Ams­ter­dam thor­ough­fare in June, 1945 along­side shop­pers and tourists strolling down the same street today.

In a pow­er­ful jux­ta­po­si­tion of then and now, three Dutch scouts risk their lives cross­ing Amsterdam’s Dam Square in the after­math of a Nazi attack just two days after Ger­many sur­ren­dered. Note the hats left behind by peo­ple who had fled for their lives, and the con­tem­po­rary stu­dents walk­ing non­cha­lant­ly on.

This image shows the same scene, but with the Nazi recruit­ment office sign promi­nent in the back­ground.

What is so potent about Teeuwisse’s work is that it is so qui­et. She doesn’t have to point out irony because it is so imme­di­ate­ly evi­dent: Those same cob­bles that so many have trod on the way to Madame Tussaud’s Wax Muse­um are scuffed by the boots of sol­diers, fam­ished vic­tims of war aus­ter­i­ty and ordi­nary work­ing peo­ple on their way to the fac­to­ry.

Some make it more plain than oth­ers that his­to­ry is all around us all the time.

There are still many World War II images from that box that remain uniden­ti­fied. Teeuwisse loaded them all up to her flickr site. Take a look. Maybe you’ll find a famil­iar face from your own past.

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Read more of her work at and thenifty.blogspot.com.

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The Photography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

in Philosophy, Photography | November 22nd, 2012

Philoso­phers have often rumi­nat­ed on the aes­thet­ics of pho­tog­ra­phy. Roland Barthes’ Cam­era Luci­da begins with a poignant memo­ri­al­iza­tion of his moth­er, as remem­bered through her pho­to­graph. Pierre Bourdieu’s Pho­tog­ra­phy: A Mid­dle-Brow Art won­dered why and how the medi­um became so wide­spread that “there are few house­holds, at least in towns, which do not pos­sess a cam­era.” And Jacques Derrida’s posthu­mous Athens, Still Remains, a trav­el mem­oir accom­pa­nied by the pho­tographs of Jean-Fran­cois Bon­homme, begins with the mys­ti­cal phrase “We owe our­selves to death.”

For Barthes and Der­ri­da, pho­tog­ra­phy was a medi­um of sus­pend­ed mortality—every pho­to­graph a memen­to mori. For anoth­er philoso­pher, the cryp­tic, poly­math, and noto­ri­ous­ly surly Lud­wig Wittgen­stein, pho­tog­ra­phy was a con­crete expres­sion of his pre­ferred means of per­cep­tion. As he famous­ly wrote in the Philo­soph­i­cal Inves­ti­ga­tions, “Don’t think, look!” For the unsen­ti­men­tal­ly cere­bral Wittgen­stein, a pho­to­graph is not a memo­r­i­al, but a “prob­a­bil­i­ty.” The philosopher’s archive at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge includes the pho­to­graph above, a true “prob­a­bil­i­ty” in that it does not rep­re­sent any one per­son but is a com­pos­ite image of his face and the faces of his three sis­ters, made in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the “found­ing father of eugen­ics,” Fran­cis Gal­ton. The four sep­a­rate pho­tographs that Wittgen­stein and Gal­ton blend­ed togeth­er are below.

Of the com­pos­ite image, keep­er of the Wittgen­stein archives Michael Nedo writes that “Wittgen­stein was aim­ing for dif­fer­ent clar­i­ty expressed by the pho­tog­ra­phy of fuzzi­ness.”:

Gal­ton want­ed to work out one prob­a­bil­i­ty, where­as Wittgen­stein saw this as a sum­ma­ry in which all man­ner of pos­si­bil­i­ties are revealed in the fuzzi­ness.

Fuzzi­ness is a word rarely applied to Wittgenstein’s thought—at least his ear­ly work in the Trac­ta­tus Logi­co-Philo­soph­i­cus where his only goal is a clar­i­ty of thought that sup­pos­ed­ly dis­solves all the “fuzzy” prob­lems of phi­los­o­phy in a series of ellip­ti­cal apho­risms. The philoso­pher also called him­self a “dis­ci­ple of Freud,” in that he sought to “think in pic­tures,” and reach beyond lan­guage to the images pro­duced by dreams and the uncon­scious, “to enable us to see things dif­fer­ent­ly.” Wittgenstein’s pho­tographs are as strange­ly detached and mys­te­ri­ous as the man him­self. Salon has a gallery of the philosopher’s pho­tographs, which includes the por­trait of him (below), tak­en at his instruc­tion in Swansea, Wales in 1947. It’s an icon­ic image; Wittgen­stein half-sneers dis­dain­ful­ly at the cam­era, his steady gaze a chal­lenge, while the black­board behind him shows a riot of scratch­es and scrawls. In the upper right-hand cor­ner, the word RAW hangs omi­nous­ly above the philosopher’s head.

Wittgenstein’s grim por­trait presents a con­trast to the warmer recent pho­to­graph­ic por­traits of philoso­phers like those in Steve Pyke’s new book of philoso­pher por­traits Philoso­phers. We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Pyke’s por­traits of philoso­phers like Richard Rorty, David Chalmers, and Arthur Dan­to. For much a much less for­mal series of por­traits of con­tem­po­rary philoso­phers as every­day peo­ple, swing by the Tum­blr Looks Philo­soph­i­cal.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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Harry Taylor Brings 150-Year-Old Craft of Tintype Photography into the Modern Day

in Art, Photography | November 14th, 2012

Award-win­ning film­mak­er Matt Mor­ris appre­ci­ates craft, hard work and peo­ple who just show up for each oth­er.

His Emmy-nom­i­nat­ed film Pickin’ and Trim­min’ fol­lows the men who cut hair and play blue­grass music togeth­er at Drexel’s bar­ber­shop in North Car­oli­na. In Mr. Hap­py Man, an 88-year-old man talks about the hours he spends every morn­ing greet­ing Bermuda’s com­muters as they endure traf­fic.

The sub­ject of his most recent work came to him in a round-about way, but fea­tures the same care­ful, affec­tion­ate film­mak­ing of his oth­er films. Amer­i­can Tin­type chron­i­cles the process of pho­tog­ra­ph­er Har­ry Tay­lor, who dis­cov­ered a pas­sion for the Civ­il War-era “wet plate” pho­tog­ra­phy.

Tay­lor, based in Wilm­ing­ton, North Car­oli­na, spe­cial­izes in tin­types and ambrotypes. He makes them with the same big cam­eras and messy chem­i­cals used dur­ing the late 1800s. At that time, the process pro­duced a whole new lay­er of detail than ear­li­er tech­niques had done, and allowed for an infi­nite num­ber of prints to be made.

Time con­sum­ing, labo­ri­ous and unpre­dictable, the process requires the pho­tog­ra­ph­er to use a portable dark room when shoot­ing out­side of the stu­dio. Tin pho­to­graph­ic plates are coat­ed with col­lo­di­on emul­sion. (The tech­nique is also called col­lo­di­on process. There’s a nice tuto­r­i­al here.) The plate must be coat­ed, exposed and devel­oped with­in fif­teen min­utes, before the col­lo­di­on los­es its sen­si­tiv­i­ty. It’s an incon­ve­nient sys­tem, espe­cial­ly by today’s stan­dards, but it pleas­es Tay­lor immense­ly as it forces both him and his sub­jects to slow down. You can view some of Tay­lor’s images here.

Mor­ris allows Tay­lor to speak for him­self in the four-minute doc­u­men­tary, let­ting the cam­era linger on Taylor’s wood and met­al equip­ment, the dreami­ness of his images and on Taylor’s own obser­va­tions about how long-expo­sure pho­tog­ra­phy reveals more of the subject’s thoughts. Even the flaws are inter­est­ing.

Make a point to notice the music. Mor­ris approached com­pos­er Hanan Town­shend, known for the scores he com­posed for direc­tor Ter­rence Mal­ick. Mor­ris blogs about the process of record­ing Amer­i­can Tin­type’s sound­track at Marin County’s Sky­walk­er Sound—a fun lit­tle peek behind the scenes.

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Read more of her work at and thenifty.blogspot.com.

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Astronaut Don Pettit Demystifies the Art of Taking Photographs in Space

in Astronomy, Photography, Video - Science | November 9th, 2012

Over the years, we’ve shown you Don Pet­tit’s work — his many time­lapse videos tak­en from the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion. (Find some below.) By now, we take these videos almost for grant­ed. We watch the breath­tak­ing scenery flow by, and we shrug our shoul­ders a bit. Rarely do we step back and think: holy mack­er­el, this cat is tak­ing art­ful videos in space. Nor do we won­der: how does one take pic­tures in zero grav­i­ty any­how?

It’s fas­ci­nat­ing when you think about it. And, now Don Pet­tit gives you a glimpse inside his cre­ative process. Speak­ing at the Lumi­nance 2012 con­fer­ence in New York City, Pet­tit explains the chal­lenges of pho­tograph­ing on the ISS — the equip­ment required, the quick deci­sions you need to make, the obsta­cles that get in the way, the aes­thet­ic choic­es you need to con­sid­er, etc. And then he gets into some intrigu­ing ques­tions. Like how do you cap­ture the col­ors of the auro­ra bore­alis? or what fab­u­lous pho­tographs can infrared pho­tog­ra­phy yield?

His talk runs 30 min­utes, and it will inter­est the casu­al observ­er or the all-out pho­tog­ra­phy geek.

Don Pet­tit Videos from the ISS:

Ani­mat­ed Auro­ra Bore­alis from Orbit

Great Cities at Night: Views from the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion

What It Feels Like to Fly Over Plan­et Earth

Star Gaz­ing from the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion (and Free Astron­o­my Cours­es Online)

via Metafil­ter

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Marilyn Monroe Reads Joyce’s Ulysses at the Playground (1955)

in Film, Photography | November 8th, 2012

Dur­ing the 1950s, the pio­neer­ing pho­to­jour­nal­ist Eve Arnold took a series of por­traits of Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe. The now icon­ic pho­tos gen­er­al­ly present Mon­roe as a larg­er-than-life celebri­ty and sex sym­bol. Except for one. In 1955, Arnold pho­tographed Mon­roe read­ing a worn copy of James Joyce’s mod­ernist clas­sic, Ulysses. It’s still debat­ed whether this was sim­ply an attempt to recast her image (she often played the “dumb blonde” char­ac­ter in her ’50s films), or whether she actu­al­ly had a pen­sive side. (Her per­son­al library, cat­a­logued at the time of her death, sug­gests the lat­ter.) But, either way, Arnold explained years lat­er how this mem­o­rable pho­to came about:

We worked on a beach on Long Island. She was vis­it­ing Nor­man Ros­ten the poet.… I asked her what she was read­ing when I went to pick her up (I was try­ing to get an idea of how she spent her time). She said she kept Ulysses in her car and had been read­ing it for a long time. She said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to her­self to try to make sense of it — but she found it hard going. She couldn’t read it con­sec­u­tive­ly. When we stopped at a local play­ground to pho­to­graph she got out the book and start­ed to read while I loaded the film. So, of course, I pho­tographed her. It was always a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort of pho­tog­ra­ph­er and sub­ject where she was con­cerned — but almost more her input.

You can find more images of Mar­i­lyn read­ing Joyce over at The Retro­naut. Of course, you can down­load your own copy of Ulysses from our Free Ebooks col­lec­tion. But we’d rec­om­mend spend­ing time with this fine­ly-read audio ver­sion, which oth­er­wise appears in our list of Free Audio Books.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 430 Books in Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s Library: How Many Have You Read?

Stephen Fry Explains His Love for James Joyce’s Ulysses

Hen­ri Matisse Illus­trates 1935 Edi­tion of James Joyce’s Ulysses

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