Reader’s Diary

Gary Winogrand

Inspired by “Bystander“, I picked up a couple of collections of Winogrand’s photographs at the library. This one contains about a hundred of his pictures, some, like the World’s Fair park bench, are familiar, but there are many unfamiliar ones as well.

Winogrand was a promiscuous shooter and it’s tempting to think that the Google street view cars would capture similar photos given enough time. Even though his photographs occasionally fall apart into randomness, most of them are remarkably deliberate, taken in that split second when natural light, the forms of the urban landscape, and people - always people - arrange themselves into an interesting, often amusing, image.

For me the most striking photograph in the book is the one on page 58. Winogrand’s wide-angle lens makes it seem as if the people on the sidewalk coming towards us are rushing in an endless stream from the receding buildings of the background. The light, coming from behind the photographer at a low angle is almost theatrical. In the left center two large men are carrying on a conversation and to the right two toddlers in strollers echo the tilt of the mens’ heads; the children are a tiny echo of the adults. I’m amazed at Winogrand’s skill at picking such a coherent, humorous composition out of the chaos of a busy sidewalk.

There are quite a few interesting photographs in “The Man in the Crowd”. There are also a few failures. The ones taken during street demonstrations, in particular, are forgettable. Over all, though, the book is a success and the short supporting essays are worth reading, especially Ben Lifson’s “Garry Winogrand’s Art of the Actual”.

Jonathan Spaulding

Ansel Adams was - and is - perhaps the best-known photographer of all time. People with no interest in fine art photography know his work, which still, two decades after his death, seems ubiquitous. His technical influence continues: when fine art photographers today strive for deep blacks and rich tonality in their ink-jet prints they’re striving to emulate Adam’s silver gelatin prints. Because his photographs are so iconic it’s easy to fail to really see them or, worse, to regard them as little more than black and white postcards.

Jonathan Spaulding’s biography refocuses our attention on Adams’ work by placing it in the context of his lifetime and in the context of the transition of the conservation movement into the ecology movement. The Adams of Spaulding’s book is a technical perfectionist with a spiritual devotion to wilderness and the landscape of the American West. He experienced the landscape deeply and used his technique to capture not the landscape, but his experience. He was not about pretty pictures.

Ed Offley

Offley’s theory that the 1968 sinking of the U.S. nuclear sub “Scorpion” was caused by a torpedo from a Soviet submarine sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory. However, he does make a plausible, though far from provable case. Even if you think he’s strung together old sailors’ tales with lots of assumptions, the book is a good read and a reminder of just how intense and dangerous the Cold War was.

Stephen Shore

This very short book describes what a photograph is, what affects it’s meaning, and how it is read. Some of it will seem obvious, but there is a benefit in examining the seemingly obvious. For instance, how often do we think about how the photograph’s most innocuous trait, the projection of a three dimensional world onto a two dimensional plane affects the composition of the image? That projection moves things in the frame and causes juxtapositions that don’t exist in the real world: an important thing to keep in mind when using zoom lenses, which seem to encourage a “plant yourself and zoom to frame” approach.

This is a book worth reading for photographers and anyone who wants to perceive photos more deeply.

Joel Meyerowitz and Colin Westerbeck

“Bystander” is an excellent book on the history of street photography from the medium’s earliest days up to the 1970s. It’s richly illustrated, though the merely-average reproduction isn’t up to current standards. The pictures chosen are not always the photographers’ best-known ones, a strategy that encourages the reader  to take fresh look at famous photographers. There is also a lot of work by not-so-famous artists, and their work is just as interesting as that of the big names’. The text is informative and illuminating, almost never descending into artspeak. The writing is significantly better than the dense verbiage that passed for photographic criticism when I last followed such things decades ago.

Another way in which this book departs from older writings on photography is that it doesn’t treat photographers as isolated artists, rather the authors trace the threads of influence that link them. For example, they describe Eugène Atget’s affect on more stereotypically “street” photographers that came after him. They also call attention to the local communities of practice: Paris in the 1930s, New York in the 1930s, 1940s and again in the 1970s, and the distinctive work of photographers from Chicago’s Institute of Design.

Oddly, no connection is made between snapshots and street photography. Are the similarities superficial? Do the differences enlighten? The authors are silent on this, unlike the writers of the BBC’s “Genius of Photography” series, who highlighted the snapshot’s role in the history of “serious” photography.The book isn’t about about technique but intelligently discusses technical matters that affected the photographers’ work.

Additional material about street photography since the 1970s was added for 2001 edition. Sadly, it’s somewhat cursory and not of the same quality as the bulk of the text with no discussion of color despite the inclusion of some color works. The newer edition appeared between traditional photography’s glory years in the 1970s and the coming of the Internet. The authors claim that photographers since the 1970s have become isolated from one another. It would be fascinating if they updated the book again and address the questions of whether the Internet restores community and whether or not the ease with which photographs can be made and distributed ultimately devalues the work.

Reading this book has made me more interested in the street photography genre and has given me a new, deeper, appreciation of some familiar artists and works. It’s also focused my attention on some photographers whose work I didn’t used to care for. Why has my judgment changed over the decades? Street photos by people like Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand used to appear cluttered and random to me; I preferred more formal composition. Now I respond more favorably to them. Is it because my eye has been re-educated by ubiquitous “edgy” media images over the last few decades?

“Bystander” is an outstanding book that should be on the required reading list of anyone seriously interested in photography.

David Weber

It might be time for me to take a break from this series: “Ashes of Victory” is a huge disappointment. Almost nothing happens for two thirds of the book and when the action does - finally - commence, it’s not all that interesting. The biggest development, a truce between Manticore and the PRH, shows up almost as an afterthought and Weber again pads his work with sleep-inducing blocks of unnecessary backstory.