Deceased--Bunny Yeager

Bunny Yeager
March 13th, 1929 to May 25th, 2014

"Bunny Yeager, photographer of Bettie Page pinups, dies at 85"

by

David Colker

May 26th, 2014

The Los Angeles Times

Bunny Yeager had success as a model in Miami in the 1950s, but she wanted to be a photographer. She saw her chance when she met the little-known Bettie Page, who had modeled for under-the-counter photo sets that specialized in sadomasochism.

Yeager took a somewhat more wholesome, holiday-themed photo of Page — nude except for a Santa hat — and in 1955 sent it off to fledgling magazine Playboy. "I figured because they were new they might pay attention to an amateur, and that's what happened," she told the London Telegraph in 2012.

The photo launched her career as one of the most successful pinup photographers, often with Page — who became an international sex symbol — as her model.

Yeager, 85, died Sunday in a nursing facility in North Miami. The cause was heart failure, said her agent, Ed Christin.

In recent years, along with a revival of interest in Page, who died in 2008, there was much renewed appreciation for Yeager's photography. Her work was the subject of several gallery and museum shows, such as the "Bunny Yeager: The Legendary Queen of the Pinup" exhibition at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2010.

Yeager worked with numerous models over the years, but said that Page was uncommonly cooperative.

"It was like us doing a dance together," Yeager said in an interview last year in the Sun Sentinel newspaper in Florida. "I would snap my fingers and she would do exactly what I told her to do: 'Stand on your toes. Kick your leg in the air. Jump in the air.'"

There were pictures of Page frolicking on the beach in Key Biscayne, dressed in a bikini that Yeager designed and made. Another locale was a wild animal park in Boca Raton, Fla., where many of the animals were not caged. Page, dressed in a leopard-print swimsuit, was shown sitting among real cheetahs.

Yeager came to be admired for her use of natural light, sometimes enhanced by flash even in daylight, to make a model's skin look luminous. But unlike nude photographers whose depictions of women were hyper-sexual and pumped up, Yeager found sensuality in a more natural look.

"Bunny has that good understanding of how to photograph the female body. At the same time, she knew how to captivate men's sexual fantasies," Miami gallery owner Harold Golen told the New York Times in 2011 when the gallery hosted an exhibition of Yeager's work. "Her women are real. None of them are spray-tanned. Their breasts aren't ballooned. They have curves and a bit of cellulite."

The 1950s and 1960s were Yeager's boom years, with her working for several magazines. She appeared on the quiz show "What's My Line" and had a few roles in movies, including as a Swedish masseuse in the 1968 Frank Sinatra detective film, "Lady in Cement."

The statuesque, blond Yeager was also known for taking pictures of herself, using a timer. But with no full nudity in those.

In the 1970s her career as a photographer ground nearly to a halt. Magazines were getting more graphically anatomical. That was over the line for Yeager, who prided herself on making models comfortable and earning their trust. "You had magazines like Penthouse ... kind of smutty," she said in the Sun Sentinel interview. "They had girls showing more than they should."
"I'm not doing it to titillate anybody's interest," she continued. "I want to show off how beautiful my subjects are, whether it's a cheetah or a live girl or two of them together."

She was born Linnea Eleanor Yeager on March 13, 1929, in Wilkinsburg, Pa. She gave herself her nickname after seeing the 1945 movie "Week-End at the Waldorf" in which Lana Turner played a character named Bunny Smith.

The inspiration for her photography also came from a movie star — she spotted a magazine pictorial of Rita Hayworth. "She was posing on a bed in what looked like a slip," she told the Miami Herald in 2013. "It was probably a nightgown, I know that now, but it wasn't like any nightgown I'd ever worn."

For fun, Yeager started taking pictures of friends in slightly risque poses. But nudity was out of the question. "Where would we even get something like that developed?" she asked.

When she was 17 her family moved to Florida, where she won local beauty contests and got ample work as a model. In 1953 she enrolled in a photography night class at a vocational school. For one of her assignments, she took model pals — dressed in leopard-print swimsuits — to the same animal park where she later shot Page. One of her photos ended up on the cover of Eye magazine and her career began.

Yeager was married twice, and even became a Girl Scout leader. "Nude photographer and Girl Scout leader, that was Bunny," Christin said.

When her work was rediscovered after so many years of little work as a photographer, Yeager was thrilled. "It's exciting to find out that I'm appreciated by so many people," she told the Miami Herald in 2011. "The phone hasn't stopped ringing. People want to see me.

"It's like my life is starting all over again."
Yeager is survived by daughters Lisa Packard of North Miami and Cherilu Duval of Hamilton, Ohio. Yeager's first husband, Arthur Irwin, died in 1977. Her second husband, Harry Schaefer, died in 2000.

"Bunny Yeager, Pinup Portraitist, Dies at 85"

by

Margalit Fox

May 25th, 2014

The New York Times

Bunny Yeager, a model-turned-photographer whose images of a scarcely clad Bettie Page, embodying feral sexuality and winsome naïveté all at once, helped propel Ms. Page to international stardom as a midcentury pinup queen, died on Sunday in North Miami, Fla. She was 85.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said her agent, Ed Christin.

Ms. Yeager, who took up her art by accident, was one of the world’s most celebrated photographers of female nudes and near-nudes of the 1950s and ’60s. She is widely credited with helping turn the erotic pinup — long a murky enterprise in every sense of the word — into high photographic art.

Her work appeared in Playboy, for which she shot a string of centerfolds, and in a spate of postwar men’s magazines whose names — Cavalier, Escapade, Nugget, Fling, Sunbathing, National Police Gazette, Figure Quarterly — recall a bygone era of salacious innocence.

Ms. Yeager’s work, which fell dormant in the 1970s and remained so for decades as many of those magazines folded, has lately enjoyed a renaissance.

In 2010, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh mounted a show — the first museum exhibition of her career — of Ms. Yeager’s self-portraits. As artfully sensual as anything she shot from behind the camera, they prefigure the work of self-photographing artists like Cindy Sherman.

Other exhibitions followed, including “Bunny Yeager: Both Sides of the Camera,” on view last year at the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale.

Ms. Yeager was played by Sarah Paulson in the 2005 film “The Notorious Bettie Page,” which starred Gretchen Mol in the title role.

For all the luminous women Ms. Yeager photographed over the years, she remained best known for her work with Ms. Page, whom she shot a thousand times during their brief collaboration in 1954.

“Oh, she was beautiful!” Ms. Yeager told The Miami Herald last year. “When I told her I thought I might want to photograph her nude, she said, ‘Funny, I sunbathe nude and I have a tan like this all over.’ And she did, everywhere, even behind her knees and all the places you wouldn’t think.”

More than 250 previously unpublished photos by Ms. Yeager are collected in the coffee-table book “Bettie Page: Queen of Curves,” with text by Petra Mason, to appear in October.

Ms. Yeager’s images, shot most often with a Rolleiflex or a Speed Graphic camera, are characterized by their imaginative compositions and exotic locales. A famous photo of Ms. Page depicts her, clad in a leopard-print swimsuit, beside a live cheetah.

Other stylistic hallmarks include a luminosity that seemed to pulsate from every image. A longtime Miami resident, Ms. Yeager shot frequently in the brilliant South Florida light and used a flash even in the daytime.

But the most conspicuous hallmark of her work was her use of vibrant, natural-looking models, who exuded a confident female sexuality that — at the moment the shutter clicked, at least — did not appear destined for the male gaze.

“I’m not doing it to titillate anybody’s interests,” Ms. Yeager said of her work in an interview last year. “I want to show off how beautiful my subjects are, whether it’s a cheetah or a live girl or two of them together. That’s more important to me than anything.”

Ms. Yeager’s compositions are also memorable for the singular outfits she made for her models out of frugal necessity. For the image that propelled her and Ms. Page to celebrity, published in the January 1955 issue of Playboy, Ms. Yeager sewed the Santa hat worn by her winking, tree-trimming subject. She was not obliged to sew anything else.

Linnea Eleanor Yeager was born on March 13, 1929, in Wilkinsburg, Pa., near Pittsburgh. At 17, she moved with her family to Miami and there, Linnea, a self-described shy young woman, reinvented herself. She adopted the name Bunny from Lana Turner’s character in the 1945 film “Week-End at the Waldorf” and enrolled in modeling school.

Tall, slender and photogenic, Ms. Yeager was soon one of the most sought-after models in the city. She won a string of local beauty pageants, including, The Tampa Bay Times reported in 2011, Queen of Miami, Miss Personality of Miami Beach and Miss Trailer Coach of Dade County.

Ms. Yeager took up photography as a way to economize: Duplicating her portfolio was expensive, and she vowed to learn to make her own prints. Enrolling in a night-school photography class in her early 20s, she sold her idiosyncratic first homework assignment — the model Maria Stinger posed with cheetahs — to the men’s magazine Eye.

In 1954, Ms. Yeager met the raven-haired Ms. Page, who had come to Miami from New York, where she was known for the bondage imagery shot by the brother-and-sister photographers Irving and Paula Klaw.

After shooting Ms. Page as a suitless Santa — a demure image compared with Ms. Page’s previous work — Ms. Yeager set her sights on Playboy because, she said, “I heard they paid more than anybody else.” Playboy bought the picture for $100.

Ms. Yeager’s first husband, Arthur Irwin, known as Bud, died in the 1970s; her second husband, Harry Schaefer, died about 15 years ago. Survivors include two daughters, Lisa Irwin Packard and Cherilu Irwin Duval, and four grandchildren.

Her books include “How I Photograph Myself” (1964), about self-portraiture; “Bunny Yeager’s Flirts of the Fifties” (2007); “Bunny Yeager’s Bouffant Beauties” (2009); and, in 2012, “Bunny Yeager’s Beautiful Backsides.”

Bunny Yeager [Wikipedia]

Bunny Yeager's home page


Bunny Yeager...pinup photographer

"Fashionable" "Blow-up"

"Blow-Up and the photography revolution"

Antonioni's portrait of the Swinging Sixties set the template for the hell-raising photographer. A new exhibition in Vienna explores its lasting influence on photography.

by

Tim Burrows

May 17th, 2014

The Telegraph

 Is there another film that seems to crystallise a moment in time as perfectly as Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up? Viewed today, it seems like a heightened “Greatest Hits” compilation of London’s swinging period: the buoyant Herbie Hancock soundtrack; the Yardbirds gig, complete with a cameo from a young, crimson-pouted Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck smashing up his guitar; Jane Birkin’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it full-frontal nude scene that ushered in more lenient censorship in cinema.

A new book and exhibition at Vienna’s Albertina gallery seek to delve deeper into the context of the 1966 film, with a mix of photographs from the film’s set, shots that inspired the film, and works that were influenced by it such as Richard Hamilton’s Swingeing London III, a screen-printed version of the epochal image of Mick Jagger handcuffed to art dealer Robert Fraser. “It was a time of social revolution,” says the documentary photographer Don McCullin, who was hired by Antonioni for £500 to provide the famous shots of Vanessa Redgrave with her mystery man in Charlton’s Maryon Park. “That’s why Antonioni chose to come to England, I suspect – he saw it as an uptight country that was suddenly breaking open like a paper bag.”
Antonioni was fascinated by London’s fashion photography boom – in particular, the “black trinity” of David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Brian Duffy, gobby London photographers who matched sex with spontaneity in a string of shoots for such publications as Vogue, Queen, and Harpers Bazaar. They were immortalised in Francis Wyndham’s 1964 Sunday Times article, “The Model Makers”. “The only thing between you and the girl is the camera. A three-legged phallus,” explained Bailey, in a quote that reads like an elevator pitch for Blow-Up.

In preparing for the film, the Italian director sent a detailed questionnaire to these and other London-based fashion photographers, resulting in the movie’s snap-happy protagonist, Thomas. The film became an intricate process of art imitating pop life. After Bailey himself declined to appear in the project, Terence Stamp was lined up to play Thomas, but lost out after Antonioni caught David Hemmings in a Dylan Thomas adaptation in Hampstead. It opens with an American photographer shooting the model Donyale Luna on an east London rooftop. The interiors were shot at the studio of John Cowan, with Sixties supermodels Veruschka, Peggy Moffitt and Jill Kennington posing for a baiting Hemmings. (Kennington says the direction in the movie was more restricted than in real-life shoots – “We had to stand where we were told, we couldn’t run around the studio.”)

"For me, [that period] was all about collaboration," Kennington says. "I heard Bailey could be rude but I didn't work with him much. People like John Cowan, Helmut Newton and Terence Donovan would give you creative freedom as a model. If you got closely involved, working on a spread was like making a mini-movie."

 Blow-Up isn’t a simple glorification of the photographer-as-hellraiser. It also highlighted the political and social ambiguities that resonated during the Sixties boom. At the film’s start we see Thomas leaving a Peckham dosshouse; later we see him leafing through a book of hard-hitting street photography, which was actually a collection of Don McCullin’s early work.

“David Bailey and me go back a long time, but I did streetwalking and slept in hostels with down and outs, while he of course slept with all the great beauties – we were as different as chalk and cheese,” says McCullin, now 79, who photographed atrocities in Vietnam and Biafra during the period. “If I’d gone into the fashion world it would have destroyed me because I would have had too many affairs. Bailey was a very strong person and kept control.”

Perhaps to ensure an authentic naivety in the shots, Antonioni did not tell McCullin that there was a body in the bushes when he was shooting in Maryon Park. “The whole thing left a cloudiness over the plot for me,” he recalls. “I just thought he wanted me to take a picture of these bushes – even I found it a bit confusing. Some sticklers have bemoaned technical inaccuracies such as the ludicrously quick speed with which Thomas's shots are supposed to have been made in the darkroom. But the romance shone through, influencing photographers such as Mario Testino, Hans Feurer and Miles Aldridge to set up studios in London ever since. Model Jill Kennington, too, moved on to photography after her career in front of the camera.

In many ways, Blow-Up was an uncannily prescient film. Antonioni understood the importance of the sudden shifts in fashion and pop in the 1960s, blurring the line between reality and fiction in a way that seems to have presaged our own self-referential age. Yet to this day the film remains an enigma, to even those who had a hand in making it: "To me it seemed like a fruit salad: it had a bit of this and a bit of that," says McCullin, who is still working at 79. "I've seen it about twice in my life and I am still left in a quandary as to what it's all about." It is perhaps exactly this mystery that has seen the film endure.

David Bailey [Wikipedia]

Terence Donovan [Wikipedia]

Brian Duffy [Wikipedia]

Blow-Up [Wikipedia]

Missed it...Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's birthday

Probably the most beloved child literature author was born on January 27th,1832. Adults enjoy his literature too.

Above is a snap of a stage production of Alice in Wonderland taken by Victorian society photographer Alexander Bassano in 1900 at the Vaudeville Theatre.

Use the blog's search engine for many more items on Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland.

Deceased--Deborah Turbeville

Deborah Turbeville
July 6th, 1932 to October 24th, 2013 

 

Style is reminiscent of the early pictorial photographers.

"Deborah Turbeville, Fashion Photographer, Dies at 81"

by

Margalit Fox

October 25th, 2013

The New York Times

Deborah Turbeville, who almost single-handedly turned fashion photography from a clean, well-lighted thing into something dark, brooding and suffused with sensual strangeness, died on Thursday in Manhattan. She was 81.

Her death, at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, was from lung cancer, her agent, Marek Milewicz, said.

Though images like Ms. Turbeville’s — which might include pale, haunted-eyed models in derelict buildings — are practically de rigueur in fashion photography today, they were almost beyond contemplation when she began her work in the early 1970s. She was the only woman, and the only American, in the triumvirate (the others were Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin) that by wide critical consensus changed fashion photography from sedate to shocking.

Ms. Turbeville, who began her career editing fashion magazines, became famous, Women’s Wear Daily wrote in 2009, “for transforming fashion photography into avant-garde art” — a distinction all the more striking in that she was almost completely self-taught.

Her photographs appeared in magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Mirabella; in newspapers including The New York Times; in advertisements for clients like Ralph Lauren, Bruno Magli, Nike, Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s; in exhibitions worldwide; and in books, including “Unseen Versailles” (1981), a collection of her photos of the hidden, dusty spaces underpinning Louis XIV’s grand palace.

“Fashion takes itself more seriously than I do,” Ms. Turbeville told The New Yorker in 2011. “I’m not really a fashion photographer.”

In mid-20th-century America, fashion photography was about precisely that: fashion. The clothes, vividly lighted, were front and center, with the models chosen for their well-scrubbed, patrician femininity. They looked, as often as not, as if they had just come from tennis at the country club, though reassuringly free of sweat.

Ms. Turbeville’s photos, by contrast, were unsettling, and they were meant to be. In her fashion work, clothes are almost beside the point. In some images the outfits are barely visible; the same is often true of the models, resulting in an elegiac landscape defined more by absence than by presence.

In a de facto commentary on fashion’s manipulation of women, Ms. Turbeville literally manipulated her negatives — scratching them, tearing them, scattering dust on them and otherwise distressing them — to make the finished images redolent of decay. She employed faded color, black-and-white and sepia tones; prints were often deliberately overexposed, rendering her subjects spectral.

The settings were as striking as the subjects. Ms. Turbeville’s photos are awash in ruin: she favored places like grimy, deserted streets, abandoned warehouses and, in the image that nearly 40 years ago horrified the public and cemented her reputation, a decrepit New York bathhouse.

“I can’t deny that I design the background,” Ms. Turbeville told The Times in 1977. “A woman in my pictures doesn’t just sit there. In what kind of mood would a woman be, wearing whatever? I go into a woman’s private world, where you never go.”

By the late 1970s, articles on photography had begun to refer to “the Deborah Turbeville look,” which, as The New York Times described it in 1977, was “not the kind that mother used to admire in Vogue.”

Unlike other world-renowned fashion photographers, Ms. Turbeville rarely shot the famous, though when she did the results could be startling. In a portrait of Julia Roberts published in The Times Magazine in 2004, Ms. Roberts looks so expressively solemn as to appear on the verge of tears.

For the viewer, the net effect of Ms. Turbeville’s work is one of dreamlike, melancholy beauty. Her images exude an almost palpable sense of longing, with questions about the woeful women they depict — Who are they? Why are they so sad? — hanging unanswered in the air.

Her barren settings leave abundant room for loneliness and loss, and the dissolution they contain is a constant reminder of the passage of time. (“I like to hear a clock ticking in my pictures,” Ms. Turbeville once said.) Her photos seem to depict small, once exquisite worlds that, by the time she clicks the shutter, have already evanesced.

Deborah Lou Turbeville was born in Stoneham, Mass., on July 6, 1932. (Many sources give the year erroneously as 1937 or 1938.) As a young woman she moved to New York, where she was an assistant and sample model to the noted fashion designer Claire McCardell. Afterward, she held editorial positions at Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle, though she deplored the work.

“I’d get a note from some senior fashion editor saying, ‘We find your arrival half an hour late for Bill Blass appalling,’ ” Ms. Turbeville told The Independent, the British newspaper, in 1993. “I just stopped going.”

She began taking photographs on her own in the 1960s, and in 1966, having had no previous instruction, enrolled in a six-month workshop taught by the photographer Richard Avedon and the art director Marvin Israel.

“If it hadn’t been for the two of them, I wouldn’t have taken my photography seriously,” Ms. Turbeville told The Times Magazine in 1981. “It was so out of focus and terrible. The first evening in class, they held up pictures. They said, ‘It isn’t important to have technique, but you must have an idea or inspiration, and we feel the only one who has is this person who’s never taken a photograph before.’ I became very unpopular in the class.”
In 1975 Ms. Turbeville produced an image that would become, The Independent wrote in 1993, “one of the most famous fashion photographs of the last 50 years.” Part of a swimsuit shoot for Vogue, it showed five listless women leaning against the walls of a shower room in a condemned New York bathhouse.

Writing in The Times late that year, Hilton Kramer reviewed an exhibition at Hofstra University that included the image, calling it “one of the most beautifully composed pictures in the show,” but going on to say, “Yet its ‘Marat/Sade’ imagery leaves one wondering if we have not moved beyond the boundaries of fashion photography.”

The reaction from others was even more strident.

“People started talking about Auschwitz and lesbians and drugs,” Ms. Turbeville recalled in an interview quoted in the 1991 book “Appearances: Fashion Photography Since 1945,” by Martin Harrison. “And all I was doing was trying to design five figures in space.”

Ms. Turbeville won an American Book Award in 1982 for “Unseen Versailles,” a project for which she had been recruited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, then an editor at Doubleday. The volume, with an introduction by the novelist Louis Auchincloss, documented the echoing, long-disused backstairs rooms that visitors never see. (To heighten their autumnal aspect, Ms. Turbeville smuggled in armfuls of dead leaves.)

She and Mr. Auchincloss also collaborated on “Deborah Turbeville’s Newport Remembered” (1994), which captured the vanished Gilded Age in all its crumbling particulars.

Among her other books are “Wallflower” (1978), a collection of misty, death-imbued fashion photographs; “Studio St. Petersburg” (1997), shot in Russia; “Casa No Name” (2009), shot in Mexico, where she long had a home; and “Deborah Turbeville: The Fashion Pictures” (2011).

Ms. Turbeville, who lived part of each year in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, is survived by a brother, Thomas.

She also maintained an apartment in the Ansonia, the Beaux-Arts pile on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. There, she left generations of old paint unstripped, speckled mirrors unsilvered, threadbare tapestry unrestored and tattered curtains unmended.

From W magazine...

Nothing lasts forever...the daguerreotype

The Grandmother and aunts of the photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston, c. 1850.

"A Portrait of Immortality, Faded"

by

Michelle Nijhuis

July 31st, 2013

The New Yorker

In 1843, a Dartmouth College freshman named Augustus Washington needed to earn some money for tuition. As a man of mixed-race—a black father, a South Asian mother—many professions were closed to him. But anyone could learn the new art of daguerreotype photography, which had been perfected and publicized a few years earlier by the French artist Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. After mastering the bulky camera, Washington opened a studio in Hartford, Connecticut, where he made a good living photographing middle-class families.

In 1853, Washington began to document a more public piece of history: he emigrated to the newly established Republic of Liberia, where he photographed former American slaves trying to build a free republic in West Africa. Today, Washington’s portraits of Liberian colonists are among the few surviving images of a strange political experiment. Daguerreotypists like Washington were history’s first reliable photographic witnesses: they documented the Gold Rush, early surgical procedures, and the fierce face of the hundred-and-one-year-old Baltus Stone, one of the last surviving Revolutionary War veterans. They captured the sunken-eyed stare of a newly elected congressman named Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War, daguerreotypes and other early photography techniques played a prominent role in the “cult of memory” created by the hundreds of thousands of families torn apart by the fighting.

Daguerreotypes are still cherished for their eerie clarity—each plate in an 1848 series of photographs of the Cincinnati waterfront, for example, is equivalent to a hundred-forty-thousand-megapixel photo. They are so detailed that a viewer can distinguish the time on a clock tower, German names on storefronts, and underwear hanging from apartment clotheslines.

Made with a light-sensitive plate held within a shoe-box-sized wooden camera, daguerreotypes required such long exposure times—the earliest daguerreotypes sometimes required subjects to sit still for as long as thirty minutes, though exposure times fell over the life of the technology—that subjects were often held in place with iron collars fitted to the backs of their chairs. The discomfort was apparently worth the novel promise of immortality. And daguerreotypes did initially seem to promise a more robust form of immortality than its successor, photography: because the images were produced on metal plates rather than more fragile material like paper, it was thought that they would be more resistant to degradation.

Yet of the millions of daguerreotypes created during the technology’s heyday, only a small fraction survives. Many were simply discarded—miracles that had become mundane. Others were destroyed by well-meaning, but disastrous, cleaning techniques: in 1934, when a London photographer attempted to restore a nearly century-old portrait of Dorothy Draper, the sister of the scientist and physician John Draper, he accidentally erased the image. In an abject letter to the portrait’s owner, he expressed his regrets: “It is bewildering and has many times made me feel quite dizzy.”

While some daguerreotypes do survive today in excellent condition—even some of the earliest examples, such as a photograph that Daguerre presented to the Austrian chancellor in 1839, are in good shape—other images now seem to be slowly fogging and darkening, even when protected from tarnish under a layer of glass. In 2005, shortly after a well-known set of daguerreotypes from the Eastman House, an independent photography museum in Rochester, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston were exhibited at the International Center of Photography, curators used high-resolution imaging to examine them; they found the degradation to be so sudden and extensive that several other museums took their own daguerreotypes off display, fearing similar casualties.

Daguerreotypes are made in several steps. First, a copper plate coated with silver halides—compounds made of silver and a halogen, like silver iodide—is exposed to light, which renders the image in a pattern of pure silver and silver halides. The plate is then exposed to mercury vapor, which bonds with the silver to create silver-mercury crystals in the light areas of the image. Finally, it is washed in a solution that removes the halides from the dark areas of the image, leaving behind pure silver. The silver-mercury crystals appear white, while the pure silver appears black, creating an image that seems etched onto the plate.

Early photographers didn’t realize just how complex their creations were. Edward Vicenzi, a researcher at the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute, has looked closely at daguerreotypes with a variety of tools, including the Advanced Photon Source, at Argonne National Laboratory, the brightest X rays in the Western Hemisphere. “It’s become clear that there are a beautiful range of nanostructures, just a wealth of information at an impossibly tiny scale,” he said.

At Eastman, the conservator Ralph Wiegandt has also examined the physical structure of daguerreotypes, using an electron microscope to explore a three-dimensional landscape. On the surface of the daguerreotypes, and in a network of tiny voids underneath the silver-mercury crystals, Wiegandt and Nicholas Bigelow, a physicist at the University of Rochester, have found contaminants like chlorine and fungi, which may help explain the degradation of some daguerreotypes.

Bigelow, Wiegandt, and others have theorized that the Eastman House images, originally taken in Boston, trapped chlorine from the sea air in their subsurface voids. When the images were exposed to light, the chlorine reacted with the silver plate and clouded the surface. Others suggest that the tin boxes and other materials used to store some of the daguerreotypes in the past have reacted with the chemicals on and in the images.

While sealed enclosures filled with nonreactive gas such as argon can forestall some of these damaging reactions, any preservation has to balance access against longevity. “If you put your daguerreotypes in an inert atmosphere, in the dark, at zero degrees centigrade, maybe they’ll last for a thousand years,” said Grant Romer, a former Eastman conservator and a daguerreotype specialist. “But what’s the use of having them if you can’t see them?” Photographs are intended to be enduring but not eternal, said Romer, and some degradation may be as inevitable as human aging.

The daguerreotypist Augustus Washington died in 1875 in Liberia, having served three terms in the Liberian legislature and established a thousand-acre sugarcane farm near Monrovia. His emigrant portraits are now stored in the Library of Congress, and while most are in good condition, a portrait of the second Liberian president, Stephen Allen Benson, is now obscured by a dark haze. The silvery surface of the daguerreotype, it seems, is as complex as some of the political legacy it preserves.

Deceased--Cornel Lucas

 Cornel Lucas
September 12th, 1920 to November 8th, 2012

 Mai Zetterling

Brigitte Bardot

Cornel Lucas--A Portrait

"Cornel Lucas, Photographer Whose Portraits Defined Film Stars, Dies at 92"

by

Paul Vitello

November 18th, 2012

The New York Times

Cornel Lucas, a British portrait photographer who created defining images of Brigitte Bardot, Katharine Hepburn, Gregory Peck and a host of other celebrities during the 1950s and ’60s, when publicity photos were the lifeblood of the star-making process, died on Nov. 8 in London. He was 92.

His death was confirmed by his son, Linus.

Considered a master of lighting and the 10 by 12 plate camera, Mr. Lucas also took publicity photos of David Niven, Stewart Granger, Joan Collins, Leslie Caron, Dirk Bogarde, Cyd Charisse and Lauren Bacall.

He photographed Ms. Bacall in 1958, shortly after her husband, Humphrey Bogart, had died. She gave Mr. Lucas her trademark look for the portrait — “that eyes-lowered pose she would do in photographs and films,” he said — though in Mr. Lucas’s picture there are emotional shades of darkness in her gaze rarely captured in her films.

The Bacall photo is one of many of his that hang in Britain’s National Portrait Gallery. In 1998 Mr. Lucas was the first photographer recognized by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts for service to the nation’s film industry.

His career had taken off in 1948, when, as a relative newcomer in the publicity department at British Film Studios, he was assigned to create stills of a leading lady who had just dismissed another photographer for what she considered incompetent lighting technique.

The actress was Marlene Dietrich, then filming “No Highway in the Sky” with James Stewart. She became Mr. Lucas’s first famous subject and in some ways his best teacher.

Her favorite lighting was from above, he said in a newspaper interview in The Telegraph several years ago. Though it is a difficult technique to master, he said, it was the best angle for accentuating the sharp lines of Dietrich’s cheekbones and the icy symmetry of her face. She insisted on it, he said, and could be imperious in other ways. “Mr. Lucas, I’m telling you now that a photograph to me is more important than film,” he quoted her as saying.

Dietrich scoured the proofs with a magnifying glass, and used eyeliner pencil to mark places she wanted darkened or lightened. But she liked his work, and her imprimatur soon made Mr. Lucas London’s most sought-after portrait maker of the stars.

Henry Cornel Lucas was born in London on Sept. 12, 1920. He started taking photographs when he was 13, using a Kodak Brownie Box given to him by his mother, Mary Ann. Soon he was developing and printing his shots in the family’s bathroom. He went to work for a film lab at 15, and during World War II helped develop spy photography systems for the Royal Air Force.

After the war he went to Hollywood, but he found that a glut of American photographers returning from the armed forces left little work for a young British photographer, so he returned home and made his name there.

It was the height of the studio system, when thousands of prints were sent around the world every week. “We had to be very careful with censorship abroad,” Mr. Lucas recalled. “In some Middle Eastern countries you could not show a belly button.”

His survivors include his wife, Susan; three sons, Jonathan, Frederick and Linus; and a daughter, Charlotte.

Mr. Lucas worked into his later years, though the demand for his kind of painstaking photography declined in the new century. “I gave up when digital cameras came in,” he told an interviewer. “They have ruined celebrity prints, because photographers take up to 500 pictures at a sitting but few are any good.”

He recalled a picture he took of Dietrich in that 1948 session. The ash at the end of her cigarette testifies to a different pace of photography, he said: He had asked her to hold a pose, and while he had circled her and assessed his angles, the cigarette in her perfectly still hand burned down.

“It was a two-minute ash, maybe three,” he recalled — the time it took for them to make the picture.

During the session, which produced several seminal portraits, Mr. Lucas took all of five shots.

 
Cornel Lucas's website

Deceased--Martine Franck

Martine Franck
April 3rd, 1938 to August 16th, 2012

Martine Franck in 1972, photographed by her husband, Henri-Cartier Bresson. 
 


Winter near Paris, France, 1978

 

 

Paris. Opéra Garnier. The “Petits Rats” of the Paris Opera in one of the dressing rooms. 1979.

"Martine Franck obituary"

Photographer whose work ranged from portraits of the famous to pictures of the poor

by

Amanda Hopkinson   

August 19th, 2012

guardian.co.uk

Martine Franck, who has died aged 74, was a photographer of great contrasts. She started out by taking pictures in Asia, a continent she revisited for weeks at a time, but she also devoted herself to documenting daily life close to her homes in Paris and the Luberon, Provence. Her work is characterised by a fascination with the little intimacies and interactions in the lives of anonymous poor, marginalised and elderly people, yet she also assembled a matchless portfolio of portraits of famous authors and artists, including Seamus Heaney, Marc Chagall and Diego Giacometti.

Franck never adhered to the opinion professed by her fellow Magnum agency photographer Eve Arnold that all photographers are obliged to be intrusive. Ever modest, she said: "I think I was shy as a young woman and realised that photography was an ideal way of expressing myself, of telling people what was going on without having to talk." In 1970, she married the celebrated French photographer and co-founder of the Magnum agency, Henri Cartier-Bresson. The couple collaborated on a series of portraits of the artist Balthus, as retiring by temperament as Franck herself.

She was born to a Belgian banker, Louis Franck, and his British wife, Evelyn, in Antwerp. With the outbreak of hostilities in 1939, her father, who made his career in London, joined the British army. The rest of the family was evacuated to the US and spent the war on Long Island and in Arizona. She was educated in Europe, and studied history of art at Madrid University and the Ecole du Louvre in Paris.

Writing her thesis (on Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and the influence of cubism on sculpture) convinced Franck that she did not wish to be an academic or a curator, but a photographer. Her father had moved in artistic circles and one of her first portraits was of the sculptor Etienne Martin emerging from a cave smeared with clay. In 1963, she went to China, taking her cousin's Leica camera with her, and discovered the joys of documenting other cultures. Returning home via Hong Kong, Cambodia, India, Afghanistan and Turkey, she paused to visit the theatre director Ariane Mnouchkine and bought her first camera in Japan. She kept to a Leica, and predominantly used black-and-white film, throughout her career.

Returning to France, she worked as a photographic assistant at Time-Life while developing her own technique. Her early mentors were Eliot Elisofon and Gjon Mili, yet she also cited dramatically different female photographers as influences: Julia Margaret Cameron, for her portraits, and Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke-White. Lange's social conscience was reflected in Franck's project on old people's homes for the Petits Frères des Pauvres association. Bourke-White's love for play of light and geometric shapes is embedded in arguably Franck's single most perfect image, that of the bathers at the poolside at Le Brusc, Provence, taken in 1976. She described her experience of capturing it: "I remember running to get the image while changing the film, quickly closing down the lens as the sunlight was so intense. That's what makes photography so exciting." A moment later the positions of all five figures and their shadows on the white tiles would have irrevocably altered. The image has stood the test of time and was used as the cover shot for her book in the series I Grandi Fotografi in 2003.

Franck's work was used in Life, Fortune and Vogue, for which she shot portraits of women in public life, including her fellow photographer Sarah Moon and Mnouchkine, who made Franck the official photographer to her Théâtre du Soleil. Franck's fascination with masks and disguises found an outlet in Mnouchkine's ambitious deployment of kathakali, kabuki and commedia dell'arte. Their collaboration led to Franck experimenting with colour photography, which she used to capture theatrical productions such as Robert Wilson's ethereal version of Fables de la Fontaine at the Comédie Française in 2004. Franck's love of the theatrical could transform her quiet unobtrusiveness.

In 1966, Franck met Cartier-Bresson, who epitomised Magnum's tradition of humanitarian photography. Franck was adamant that she would neither bask in his reflection nor disappear in his shadow and she joined the Vu agency in 1970. Her first solo exhibition was planned for the ICA in London that year; when she saw that the invitations were embossed with the information that her husband would be present at the launch, she cancelled the show.

With Vu's demise, Franck co-founded the Viva agency in 1972. It also collapsed and it was not until 1980 that Franck joined Magnum, becoming a full member in 1983. She was one of the few women to be accepted into the agency and served as vice-president from 1998 to 2000. Eschewing the war/human tragedy reportage that characterised Magnum's reputation, Franck continued her projects on marginal or isolated lives. When I first met her, in the 1990s, she had just completed her book on Tory Island, a "small rock" off the northern Irish coast with a population of around 130 Gaelic-speakers, where she lived in order to document their way of life.

Always a feminist, Franck was not above picking a grandiose book title – such as Des Femmes et la Création. It is typical that one of her final projects involved three weeks spent visiting small villages in Gujerat, western India, documenting young girls embroidering their own dowries.

As well as their homage to Balthus, Franck and Cartier-Bresson undertook a joint project in the Soviet Union. Franck also created a small book of portraits of her husband. Among the most memorable of this similarly shy and elusive character is that taken from behind, showing the back of his head. His reflection in the square mirror before him is repeated in the self-portrait he is sketching: a reflection on a reflection. Franck never used him as mentor or protector but warmly concluded: "Henri was both critical and inspirational as well as warmly supportive of me as a photographer." They had a daughter, Melanie, another reason for Franck to operate close to home when possible.

Franck's brother, the photographic curator and collector Eric Franck, affirms: "Henri was always very generous in encouraging her work, something she respected greatly." Franck's sister-in-law, Louise Baring, adds: "What was so extraordinary about Martine was that with subtlety and grace she could both be a great photographer herself and at the same time honour her husband's tradition."

She worked hard to launch the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in 2002; Henri died two years later. In 2005, she was made a chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur. After her diagnosis with bone marrow cancer in 2010, she continued showing her work, and had exhibitions earlier this year at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York and at the Claude Bernard Gallery in Paris.

She is survived by Melanie, three grandchildren and her brother, Eric.

 
Martine Franck [Wikipedia]

Henri Cartier-Bresson [Wikipedia]

Classic portrait photographers are a thing of the past...George Hurrell

 George Hurrell

 

 Ray Miland

Greta Garbo

"George Hurrell: the master of the Hollywood still"

George Hurrell didn't just photograph Hollywood's greats: as a new collection of his work reveals, he also imbued them with their mysterious allure

by

Lucy Davies

August 14th, 2012

The Telegraph

 At 16, George Hurrell couldn’t decide whether to become a priest or an artist. A Chicago resident, he applied to both the Quigley Seminary and the Art Institute, hoping the decision would be made for him, but was accepted at both. If I reveal that before he turned 40 he had divorced his first, beauty contestant wife to marry into the Disney family; that his friends included Joan Crawford, Rita Hayworth and a Pasadena aviatrix heiress, you can guess which path he took. And lucky for us he did. As the foremost portrait photographer in Hollywood, he gave its stars their sheen of grace and mystery. “A Hurrell portrait is to the ordinary publicity still,” said Esquire magazine, in 1936, “what a Rolls-Royce is to a roller-skate.”

Until recently, though, Hurrell’s photographs were valued for their famous subjects rather than his skill; few troubled to read the author-stamp on their yellowing backs. Now, thanks to the late John Kobal, a film buff who began collecting Hurrell’s work in the Seventies, they have been amassed, catalogued and restored. Highly prized, they rarely appear on the market, but when they do, command thousands.

What makes a Hurrell portrait so alluring? “The most essential thing about my style was working with shadows to design the face instead of flooding it with light,” he said. He fitted a boom microphone with a light so he could move it around his studio and sculpt with precision. Jawlines and cheekbones were brought into sharp relief, imbuing their owners with a magnetism they hardly possessed in real life. He was a master of retouching, preferring his subjects make-up free so he could work on the negative afterwards.

Such expertise came at a time when glamour was in high demand. His appointment at MGM came a few months after America had plunged into the Depression. Even as people queued for bread, they found a nickel for the cinema, desperate for the escape its gods and goddesses offered.

Hurrell came to California as a landscape painter, but began taking photographs of locals to boost his income. He struck gold with aviatrix Florence “Pancho” Barnes, rendering her masculine, portly appearance as radiant and handsome. The silent film star Ramón Novarro saw the image and engaged Hurrell to take his. Next came Norma Shearer, wearing nothing but a gold, fur-trimmed dressing gown. Hurrell had soon photographed every star on the lot, from Clark Gable to Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn. His zenith came in the early forties, when he styled Veronica Lake’s hair into its famous peek-a-boo style and stood a gun-toting Jane Russell on a haystack. Not only did the portraits establish both actresses, they became pin-up sensations – hardly a soldier departing for the front didn’t have one or the other in his pack.

But when Hurrell returned from war service he found glamour photography out of fashion. By the time he was rediscovered in the Seventies, Ramón Novarro had been murdered, Veronica Lake had died of alcoholism and both Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo were recluses. Joan Crawford lived to see her friend’s work rediscovered but only just — she died a year later, in 1977.

Hurrell’s fortunes revived in the Eighties, with the return of glamour. One of his clients was Sharon Stone, then a virtual unknown. She later said: “I’ve done photo sessions with maybe a thousand different photographers. They take hundreds and hundreds of pictures. George takes three frames and every one is good.” 

 
George Hurrell [Wikipedia]

George Hurrell website

Use Google images for more samples.

Deceased--Eleanor Callahan

Eleanor Callahan
June 13th, 1916 to February 28th, 2012

"Eleanor Callahan, Photographic Muse, Dies at 95"

by

Richard B. Woodward

February 28th, 2012

The New York Times

Eleanor Callahan, the muse for her husband, Harry Callahan, whose varied and sensual photographs of her taken over more than 50 years can be said to rank with Alfred Stieglitz’s of Georgia O’Keeffe, died on Tuesday in a hospice in Atlanta. She was 95.

The cause was cancer, said her daughter, Barbara Callahan Hollinger.

With her raven hair and ripe figure, Eleanor Callahan is one of the most recognizable models in the history of 20th-century photography, an inseparable part of both the life and work of one of its most renowned artists. Clothed and standing among trees in a public park, or nude and turned to the wall while clutching a radiator in an empty room, she served as a formal element within Mr. Callahan’s austere compositions as well as a symbol of warm, breathing womanhood. From 1941 to his death in 1999, she allowed herself to be photographed by him, without complaint, hundreds of times.

Eleanor Annetta Knapp was born on June 13, 1916, to an electrician and a homemaker in Royal Oak, Mich. The middle of three daughters and the only one not to go to college, she supported herself (and later her family) with her shorthand and typing.

She met Harry Callahan on a blind date in 1933 when both worked for Chrysler in Detroit. She was a 17-year-old secretary, and he was a 21-year-old clerk in the parts department. They married three years later after he dropped out of college, mainly because he had missed being with her. Although he began to photograph earnestly in 1938, he often credited a 1941 lecture he attended by Ansel Adams with having “freed” him to pursue a career as an artist.

With no money between them to speak of, it was economical for the frugal Mr. Callahan to feature his wife in his pictures.

“I never initiated any of the poses myself,” she said in a 2006 interview with the curator Julian Cox. “Everything, photographically, was purely from Harry.” She confessed to being “a little uncomfortable about frontal nudity,” but noted that “there was not too much of that.”

In 1950, Barbara, their only child, was born, and soon mother and child were appearing together in pictures that are themselves signal images of familial tenderness.

The Callahans were married for 63 years. “And they were, I’d say, all nice ones,” Mrs. Callahan said. “We never had any real fights.”

The trust and interdependence between them has been chronicled in several exhibitions, most recently in “Harry Callahan: Eleanor,” which opened in 2007 at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta; and also throughout “Harry Callahan at 100,” the retrospective now at the National Gallery in Washington.

In addition to her daughter, Mrs. Callahan is survived by two grandchildren.

As the family moved from Detroit to Chicago to Providence, R.I., Mrs. Callahan managed her husband’s business affairs, leaving him all the time he wanted to be an artist. For most of their early life she earned more money as an office assistant than he did as a teacher. But even after the 1970s, when he became a lionized figure and had offers from many other models, he seldom photographed anyone but her.

“He just liked to take the pictures of me,” she told an interviewer in 2008. “In every pose. Rain or shine. And whatever I was doing. If I was doing the dishes or if I was half asleep. And he knew that I never, never said no. I was always there for him. Because I knew that Harry would only do the right thing.”

Photography Now...

Callahan, Harry
American, 1912-99

Born in Detroit, Callahan studied at Michigan State University before going to work for the Chrysler Motor Parts Corporation. In 1936, he married Eleanor Knapp, who later became the subject of some of his most important images. Callahan bought his first camera in 1938, and credits Ansel Adams' visit to the Detroit Photo Guild in 1941 as pivotal in his decision to become a photographer. Although he had almost no formal artistic training he received encouragement early in his career from such luminaries as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. At the invitation of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Callahan joined the staff of the Institute of Design in Chicago (later known as the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology) in 1946. In 1948 his work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Self-taught in photography, Harry Callahan enjoys [Callahan died in 1999] a long and influential career which began in 1938. After studying engineering at Michigan State University he worked first for the Chrysler Corporation and then at the General Motors Photographic Laboratories in Detroit. Callahan's early photographic work was influenced by Ansel Adams, whom Callahan heard lecture, and by the life of Alfred Stieglitz. In 1946 he met Moholy-Nagy and joined the faculty of Chicago's Institute of Design, becoming chairman of the photography department in 1949. He left Chicago in 1961 to become chairman of the photography department at the Rhode Island School of Design, serving in that capacity until 1973 and continuing to teach there until 1977.

Harry Callahan's work is an exception, for it draws us ever more insistently inward toward the center of Callahan's private sensibility. This sensibility is expressed in his perception of subject matter that is remarkably personal and restricted in its range. For thirty years Callahan has photographed his wife and child, the streets of the cities in which he has lived, and details of the pastoral landscapes into which he has periodically escaped - materials so close at hand, so universally and obviously accessible, that one might have supposed that a dedicated photographer could exhaust their potential in a fraction of that time. Yet Callahan has repeatedly made these simple experiences new again by virtue of the precision of his feeling.

The point is not merely that Callahan has responded faithfully as a photographer to the quality of his own life, or merely, even, that photography has been his method of focusing the meaning of that life. The point is that for Harry Callahan photography has been a way of living - his way of meeting and making peace with the day.

Callahan's work is personally oriented; many of his pictures artistically interpret his family relationships, especially portraits of his wife, Eleanor, and daughter, Barbara. His early work experimented with representational abstraction; recent work in color includes additional subject matter, both city and landscapes as well as multiple exposures.

Harry Callahan [Wikipedia]

Elsa Dorfman and huge prints

Bob Dylan was in Lowell with the Rolling Thunder Review, and Allen was staying at our house. Harvey (Silverglate) and I went to the concert. I brought my camera. Although the concert folks were very fussy about no cameras, the Dylan people let me bring mine with me. I went into the Dylan green room with Allen. Dylan was wearing light-blue suede boots. He asked me if I knew where Poe was buried. Where he lived in Boston. Alas, I had no idea. He and Allen fooled around for my camera. This image is one of the only images of Allen and Dylan together. It has a total underground life of its own.

"Gear Behind the Career: Elsa Dorfman and the Giant Polaroid Camera"

by

Jakob Schiller

February 7th, 2012

Wired

The hulking dinosaur of a camera that photographer Elsa Dorfman has based her career on for over 30 years could soon become extinct.

Dorfman, now 74 and living in Cambridge, was first introduced to the 20?x24? Polaroid in 1980. She had been invited by the company to try one of the 240-pound behemoths that had originally been built in 1976. Simply referred to by the size of the prints it makes, the 20×24 was like a much larger version of the Polaroid cameras most people were familiar with (the camera and Dorfman are pictured above). It only took a few shots to get her hooked.

“From the minute I used it I loved it,” she says.

She particularly appreciated the physicality of both the camera and the film. The only way to move the heavy, wood-frame beast is on wheels. Once it’s in place, the 5’5? Dorfman opens the back and gets on a stool to see through the focusing screen, adjusting the enormous accordion-like bellows to focus the lens. Focusing takes skill but also a little guessing: The subjects appear upside-down and backwards, and the focusing screen never truly captures the full plane of what appears on the film.

“You just get used to it,” Dorfman says. “By now I think I could walk in an upside-down world.”

Once she has the focus where she likes it, she closes the back and triggers the shutter with a cable release.

All of the film and developing chemicals are stored in the back of the camera. When the lens opens, it exposes a negative. Through a series of buttons and levers, the exposed negative is then sandwiched together with a piece of positive film, and pulled through a set of rollers that apply the developing chemicals and transfer the negative to the positive.

To get the developed picture out of the camera, Dorfman then has to kneel down (or now that she’s 74, sit on a stool) and physically pull it out from the bottom of the developing back and cut the exposure off of the roll.

“It’s sort of like delivering a baby,” she says.

She then waits 90 seconds and peels the old negative off the positive, revealing the final picture.

“There are a lot of steps where you can make mistakes and every picture is like a mechanical miracle,” she says. “The photographer has to be very focused, there is no going back and correcting.”

Because Polaroid only originally made five of these cameras, Dorfman can tell whether a print came from her camera or another, just based on the streaks the developing pods leave behind. She says the film has aged well, but has lost a little bit of the vibrancy and soul it had back in the day.

While Polaroid was still in business, it was relatively easy to find someone who could fix the camera any time it broke. Today, there are only a handful of people who know how to tinker with the finicky creatures. A while back, Dorfman’s regular repair person was busy so she had to beg a furniture maker who was familiar with cameras to help her fix a broken handle that helped open and close the film rollers.

“Everyone who could work on these cameras keeps on dying or moving to Florida,” she says.

Since Polaroid filed for bankruptcy in 2001, the future of their products have been in question. In an attempt to ensure the 20×24 project would live on, in 2007 Dorfman connected her friend Daniel Stern, an investor, with John Reuter, a photographer who ran the 20×24 program for Polaroid. Together the two formed a new company that secured and stored the remaining 20×24 film, found a place to mix the needed chemicals and figured out how to keep making the developing pods.

But even with all this work, there is only enough 20×24 film left for a couple more years. A new company is exploring ways to re-manufacture the giant film, but at the moment there is a finite amount left. A single photo now costs $200 to make.

Like everyone who shot on the handful of 20x24s Polaroids made, Dorfman started by renting the camera. She shot portraits of anyone who would pay her, and slowly her style and aesthetic started to evolve.

“I seem to be the kind of person who doesn’t know where she’s going, but about three quarters of the way there I say, ‘Oh, I’m doing such and such,’” she said. “I would be too afraid to think about [a direction] for fear I would ruin it or that I would be too self conscious.”

After thousands of shots on the giant Polaroid, some of which hang in permanent collections at places like the National Portrait Gallery, and lasting influence in the photo world for her work, Dorfman refuses to categorize herself as a “name.”

“I might be a name to some people, but I’m not a name to myself, or my husband, or my son. I still take out the trash,” she says.

Like Dorfman herself, the photos don’t pull any punches. They’re straightforward portraits that aren’t over-stylized but somehow get to the soul of their subjects.

The poet Robert Creeley (who Dorfman collaborated with on a book) described her work this way: “She is a remarkable reader of people, hears and sees them so unobtrusively that there is no overbearing hand of the artist to contend with, or perversely — to value. Her photos have extraordinary passion for their subjects, but nothing is ever sweetened or blurred.”

Her first book, published in 1974, called Elsa’s Housebook: A Woman’s Photojournal, is a set of portraits and snapshots that document a time of her life as a young, single woman living in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

She was hanging with a well-known crowd that included people like Allen Ginsberg, but the photos don’t attempt to make him, or anyone else out to be more than just her friends. Shot on regular film, the photos are quite intimate but also relatively simple. Often times they’re just snapshots that do nothing more than capture day-to-day life. Dorfman says she’s never had the energy to chase big projects or travel across the world, so a lot of her work is centered around her own life.

While she has slowed slightly, and often becomes bogged down in the mountains of paperwork needed these days to run a photo business, Dorfman says retirement isn’t on the horizon.

“I can’t think that far ahead, to tell you the truth,” she said. “When you’re 30, 40, 50, you can think 10 years ahead. But not me. Retiring would mean putting away my camera. What would I do? The answer is no. I still have so much fun with what I do that it’s almost illegal.”

So much fun, in fact that she can’t imagine stopping for anything. Though her long career has largely been based around an affection for the Polaroid, Dorfman’s love for photography itself is stronger. If the film runs out, she says, maybe she’ll get a digital camera.

Elsa's housebook: A woman's photojournal

by

Elsa Dorfman

ISBN-10: 0879230991
ISBN-13: 978-0879230999