Mark Luthringer's typologies

via Gallery Hopper I love this selection of photographic grids by Mark Luthringer - his Ridgemont Typologies - typologies of our mundane world. In a way they also make me rather angry as they highlight so strongly the generic and homogenized nature of the environment around us and the pathetic level of thought and imagination that goes into designing not just the buildings and places we live and work in, but the objects we use everyday.

Good design, good architecture isn't just about looking pretty or pleasant - it's about the quality of life we chose to live. These pictures highlight so much of the the creative and imaginative malaise that afflicts so much of our society.

"The typological form achieves an uncanny synergy and resonance with this subject matter because it mimics the mental images I suspect many of us form as a way of ordering the chaos of abundance that surrounds us. We can’t help but form in our heads lists, groups and categories based on product, brand, price point, style, market segment, country of origin, etc.
To see one of these turned into a group of images lined up together can be unnerving, though. In print, they confront us in a way never possible when they're just in our heads. We are presented with order, and while it is often an absurd, seemingly pointless order, it is one that we recognize immediately". Mark Luthringer

The worlds oldest darkroom?

Apparently, when Joseph Fortuné Petiot-Groffier (known as one of the pioneers of photography) died in 1855 - his darkroom in Chalon-sur-Saône in Burgundy was simply abandoned and the door closed. His heirs and successors never did anything with that part of the house and just left it locked up. Upon the death of the last of his family two years ago it was eventually found that the whole darkroom was still fully intact - complete with bottles of chemicals, apparatus and everything a photographer in 1855 needed.

From Luminous-Lint :

Petiot-Groffier practiced daguerrotypy in 1840, after which he traveled to India. In the 1850s, he began to use albumen and collodion, and later came to prefer the calotype process with which he produced his best work.

In the year 1854, Petiot-Groffier had become a founding member of Societe Francaise de Photographie, and that summer, he traveled with Baldus through Auvergne in central France. At the time, Petiot-Groffier was a sugar beet-refiner, inventor, entrepreneur, and politician, and he had renewed his interest in photography. During this trip, he worked in very close collaboration with Baldus, who was twenty-five years his junior. Despite their age difference, Baldus considered Petiot-Groffier his "best student." Together they worked their way through the countryside, carefully choosing motifs together, such as thatched huts, forest scenes, and generally the physical character of the Auvergne area. Baldus had never directed his artistic vision towards common architecture or unpopulated landscapes, and so much of the subject matter from the Auvergne journey was new compared to his prior photographic experience. Certain prints are signed by both photographers, and because of their extremely similar styles - even considered identical, at times - it is difficult to tell their work apart from one another.

Thanks to Ted Stoddard on the LF List. All the stories I could find so far are in French. (The original French newspapaer page has disappeared. Here's a link to the - at times rather funny - google translation). Of course, I'm assuming France doesn't have some kind of april fools day in early June...

creating a world with invoice and dead fly

Mark Hobson had an interesting post across on his blog The Landscapist the other day.

I think I need to quote this post in full (and use his photo...), some good ideas about photography (despite my overall feelings about Burtynsky...):

"There has been much discourse and discussion on The Landscapist regarding truthin photography and words with pictures. Recently, I mentioned an intro essay by Mark Kingwell from the book Burtynsky - China titled, The Truth in Photographs, in which Kingwell deals rather nicely with truth.

Here's a passage which struck a chord with me - Photographs are not multiple depictions of some single reality, waiting out there to be cornered and cropped, and somehow regulating, even in cornering and cropping, how/what the image means. Rather, photographs offer multiple meanings. The presented image is not a reflection, or even an interpretation of a singular reality. It is, instead, the creation of a world.

Yikes ... holy cow ... scratch my back with a hacksaw - I don't know if I have ever read/heard so simple and direct a statement which seems to encapsulate the core/root idea of Art.

In the case of picturing, one is not capturing the world, one is, in fact, creating aworld (my world and welcome to it). The phrase 'creating a world' explains, on so many lelvels, good Art - again, in the case of picturing, so many are creating one-dimensional worlds which are filled with the already-known. Worlds which are shallow, not deep. Worlds which are impoverished, not rich. In short, worlds which display no imagination, which we all know, because Mr. Einstein said so, is more important than knowledge.

Imagination - the source of all creativity and originality - is the single most important tool in a photographers kit - both for creating and 'reading' worlds. Think about it. More on imagination to come."

Among many other things (such as, this is pretty much a good encapsulation of the whole issue of "meaning" in photography as well as "truth") to me, this approach and understanding also seems to be the antithesis of the whole "art is a verb" idea, which I think both misses the point about art in general as well as having a big chip on its shoulder about Art. Ironically, art as a verb is the ultimate pomo, taking art to its logical post-modern popular conclusion.

War then and now - UPDATE

A further update on the War Then and Now post

Michael Shaw writes in the Huffington Post on Photojournalist Michael Kamber's response to the effect of the new tight restrictions on photographing injured soldiers in Iraq:

"What you're looking at (above), I'm afraid, is a potentially historic image.

Specifically, the photo above -- taken by embedded photojournalist Michael Kamber two weeks ago during a fateful patrol in search of missing American soldiers -- could well become the last visual evidence of U.S. casualties in the Iraq war.

In a message to colleagues earlier this week, Michael shared his personal thoughts about the new military restrictions on photographing American wounded in Iraq. He writes from Baghdad:

The embed restrictions have tightened up considerably since I was last here. You now need written permission from a wounded soldier to publish his photo if he is in any way identifiable. and even if his face is not visible. If unit insignias or faces of others soldiers are visible, that also disqualifies a photo from being used, according to one of the highest-ranking PAO's [Public Affairs Officer] in Iraq. As I'm told, the wounded man's family can figure out who he is from the other people in the picture.

I was on an operation last week that suffered five casualties including one KIA. One soldier was temporarily blinded and put on a plane to germany. Should I have asked him to sign a piece of paper giving permission to use pictures he can't see as he's lying on a stretcher in great pain?

When I was here in '03 and '04, the military was much more welcoming. I was invited to shoot memorials (now off limits) and when I embedded with the 1st Cav, they just invited me out. No papers to sign, no written conditions. They just asked that I show respect for the soldiers if they were killed, which I would do anyway.

Now there all these new restrictions make it nearly impossible to shoot the dead and wounded. They say it is for the soldiers protection. but the soldiers in the unit I was with -- the one that took the casualties -- loved our story and photos, thanked me and asked me for copies. The grandfather of the most seriously wounded soldier recently tracked me down demanding copies and saying the photos were crucial to his grandson's recovery. I seriously question who these restrictions are for.

One journalist asked whether being wounded takes away your right to privacy. Actually, it does in my opinion. You're involved in a very public event, the largest war for the US since Vietnam. When you enlist and go into a war zone with journalists around, with historical consequences, you can not then claim that what happens is a private affair.

The question I pose is: What would have happened to our visual history if Robert Capa and Gene Smith were running around the battlefield during WWII trying to get releases signed as they worked? What if this had been required in Vietnam? Or any war?"

Lynn Davis

I suppose it's a good thing that your appreciation and understanding of an artist's work can develop (hopefully in the "mature" direction), but it can be frustrating as well.

A few years ago I bought Lynn Davis book Monuments. And although there was something about it that must have interested me, it never really clicked for me and eventually I sold it on ebay. I recently came across it on the library shelf and took it out. Looking through it now I am thoroughly enjoying it and kicking myself for selling it in the first place. Sometimes I guess we just need to give things time...

In part, in the meantime, I had become fascinated for a while with the work of Francis Frith, Maxime DuCamp and others who photographed in Egypt, Palestine and the Middle East in the 19th Century, and so what she was doing in some of her work started to make a lot more sense


I haven't looked at her more recent book American Monument yet, either. It does include pictures of the Salk Institute - one building in America that I would love to photograph (Louis Kahn is surely the greatest American architect of the 20th Century)

Unfortunately I couldn't find many of the monuments pictures online, especially those from Egypt, Jordan and the Yemen. There's also a bit of info here on her shows Iceberg and Ancient Persia

KKK

No, not that KKK - Klee, Kandinsky and Klimt. I never tire of looking at the work of these three, as different as they are in many ways.

As well, some of their writings are good companions. Kandinsky's Point and Line to Plane and Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook; On Modern Art and his Diaries

“To emphasize only the beautiful seems to me to be like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers.” Paul Klee

"Each period of a civilisation creates an art that is specific in it and which we will never see reborn. To try and revive the principles of art of past centuries can lead only to the production of stillborn works."

"The true work of art is born from the 'artist': a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being." Wassily Kandinsky

"If the weather is good I go into the nearby wood - there I am painting a small beech forest (in the sun) with a few conifers mixed in. This takes until 8 'o clock...On my first days here I did not start work immediately but, as planned, I took it easy for a few days - flicked through books, studied Japanese art a little...Sometimes I miss out the morning's painting session and instead study my Japanese books in the open... Then I paint again for a while: if the sun is shining a picture of the lake, if it's overcast then a landscape from the window of my room." Gustav Klimt

Magenta Magazine

Well, this is a fine looking Canadian photography magazine - Magenta. Trouble is, so far it only seems to have been distributed in Toronto. Not only are nearly all the best Canadian photographers from the West... but it also tends to confirm our opinions of the poor misguided Torontocentric universe. Hint hint, the world doesn't end at the 401 - neither does Canada.

Either way, it certainly looks like it would be nice to see a copy if it ever makes it beyond Sault Ste Marie. For now all we get is teaser PDF's of a couple of pages. It does look like it has the potential to be a little more grounded than Prefix though, while remaining interesting and creatively stimulating.

Cool...

I just think this is rather neat - "green" bussiness cards...

"LANDSCAPED BUSINESS CARD by Tur & Partnersby Tylene

With all the business cards we’re being inundated with this week (the downside of trade-shows), its nice to find business cards that stand out from the crowd and add a little greenery to your day. Here’s a clever and useful little business card design that perfectly expresses the mission of the company it represents:landscape architecture firm Tur & Partner. Add a little light and water to this seeded business card and in a couple days, you’ve got yourself a professionally landscaped miniature garden. Seeds embedded into the card sprout right through the holes in the plan printed on the card. This creative card was designed by Jung von Matt of Germany."

If the camera never lies, can it ever tell the truth?

Jim Johnson has picked up on this at some length in his thoughtful post Eliciting Poignancy, reflecting some of my own thoughts about this picture from the NY Times the first time I saw it.

First off, it is a wonderfully evocative and poignant piece of photojournalism (or, depending on your viewpoint, a masterful piece of propaganda).

"War Dead Honored On Memorial Day
WeekendARLINGTON, VA - MAY 27: Mary McHugh mourns her dead fiance Sgt. James Regan at "Section 60" of the Arlington National Cemetery May 27, 2007. Regan, an American Special Forces soldier, was killed by an IED explosion in Iraq in February of this year, and this was the first time McHugh had visited the grave since the funeral. Section 60, the newest portion of the vast national cemetery on the outskirts of Washington D.C, contains hundreds of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Family members of slain American soldiers have flown in from across the country for Memorial Day. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)"

But then as you dig deeper into how the picture has been made and then edited and presented, it's clear that while it does indeed reflect the facts of its caption, how it presents itself to us isn't quite as unambiguous.

In the picture as it was published in the Times, Mary McHugh appears to be essentially alone in her youthful grief among the rows and rows of new American war dead in the "Iraq" section of Arlington National Cemetery.

Yet when we see another of John Moore's pictures we see this just wasn't so.

And further still, when we view his picture on which the one in the Times is based, it's clear that even in that one, others are present.

But Moore, by carefully manipulating the framing, focused in just on this young war widow. And the editor at the NY Times by "judicial" cropping enhanaced this impression even further.

All of this being regarded, I'm sure, as "traditional" image manipulation and perfectly allowable under the rules of the news game.

But on the other hand, crop out someones insignificant and slightly visually annoying legs at a sports event - and you lose your job, because you did so using the dreaded Photoshop. I still find it intriguing that an editor can chop a big chunk off a photo (as they always have) to make it look stronger and they get kudos for doing their job well, but if the photographer removes an annoying lamppost (or heaven forbid, boosts an orange sky) then it's as if the Spanish Inquisition has descended upon their head (even though there is also a long tradition of this in photojournalism, long before Photoshop was ever dreamed of)

So, who exactly is manipulating who here. And more to the point, does it really matter? Photojournalism has never really ever been about the facts and certainly not always about "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth".

Probably the biggest problem has generally been that people haven't always realised this - especially at time, the photographers themselves.

Photojournalism falls in line with a lot of photography - and has done so since the days of its historic roots - it's about storytelling and appearances (and, cynically, who is paying the bill - less cynically, it's about the inherent opinions and pov of the photographer themselves). It's never been unbiased or objective - but at it's best, it's always been honest (which, for the record, is how I view the picture at the centre of this story).

ADDENDUM

I've had a number of responses to this post which highlight the confusion surrounding this issue. It boils down to this: the discussions in newsrooms and editorial boards are usually about the nature and the amount of any manipulation which may have been made a photograph (almost always post clicking the shutter) but this misses the point entirely. It's about the effect of the manipulation.

But because there is a high level of denial in such places about the fact that news photographs have always been manipulated (which isn't the same as saying all news photographs are manipulated) - by both photographers and editors - it is a safe way to deal with it. That is, avoid the real issue. And of course, these are the same folks who set the "rules".

Spandrels

Okay -if you are reading, could whoever told me about spandrels pipe up. It's been resonating with my urban/suburban photography ever since, but I can't remember who first mentioned it to me...

In architecture as well as biology - and by extension, as a metaphor for accidental spaces in the city

"Dr. Gould and Dr. Richard Lewontin soon elaborated on the importance of how organisms are built, or their architecture, in a famous paper about a feature of buildings known as a spandrel. Spandrels, the spaces above an arch, exist as a necessary outcome of building with arches. In the same way, they argued, some features of organisms exist simply as the result of how an organism develops or is built. Thus researchers, they warned, should refrain from assuming that every feature exists for some adaptive purpose."

---------------------

There are four or five accepted and cognate meanings of spandrel in architectural and art history, all relating to the space between a curved figure and a rectangular boundary — such as the space between the curve of an arch and a rectilinear bounding moulding, or the wallspace bounded by adjacent arches in an arcade and the stringcourse or moulding above them, or the space between the central medallion of a carpet and its rectangular corners."

-------------------

"In the context of evolution, a spandrel is a metaphor for characteristics that are or were orginally side effects and not true adaptions to the environment. This metaphorical meaning works no matter which kind of architectural spandrel is referred to: the spandrel is the un-designed gap between other features, which is then often exploited for a use of its own."

(Tim Atherton)

Alberta Provincial Art Collection

Well, what's the use of a blog if you don't blow your own horn every now and then...

I had some good news today - the Provincial Art Collection of Alberta is acquiring (through a juried selection process) two prints from my Immersive Landscape series for their collection. It's always good to know someone else actually gets - and even likes - your work.

(Thanks the JB for all the help and to the Alberta Foundation for the Arts)

- thanks Dylan - they are of course available as limited edtion prints...

Mitch Epstein

I mentioned Mitch Epstein the other day and I realised it had actually been quite a while since I looked at any of his work.

There was a time when I looked at a number of his books, but I hadn't seen some of the more recent stuff. I remember when it came out, but I hadn't really looked at his whole series and book Family Business, which is very personal and has quite a back story to it.

I was 48 and living in New York when my mother called me about the fire. On a windy August night in 1999, two 12 year old boys had broken into a boarded up apartment building owned by my father in Holyoke Massachusetts and, for the hell of it, set it ablaze. The fire had spread, engulfing a 19th century Catholic church, then a city block.

The 15 million dollar lawsuit the church brought against him threatened to unravel my father's life. He had insufficient liability insurance. If he lost, my parents would be, in effect, after 50 years of a comfortable suburban life together, out on the street... more

I managed to get a copy of Family Business from the library and it was well worth it. Photography that is autobiographical very easily runs the risk of becoming introverted navel gazing and quite boring. This isn't.

In most ways, I think you can probably put Epstein int he same grouping as several of the other New Colour photographers - Shore, Sternfeld, Meyerowitz. I often find his work a little harder to notice, because what he does is often very subtle and needs spending time with. He also seems to photograph more people then many of the other New Colour types have done. He's often quite droll, and the irony is often more affectionate than biting. Indeed, there's a whole new generation of photographers doing this same kind of work now who you get a sense that they sprang right out of Epstein's work.

There are lots of pictures on Epstein's site (as well as here) as well as articles and reviews.

Simon Armitage

One of my favourite contemporary poets is Simon Armitage (though the one I'd really like to like but find almost impenetrable no matter how many attempts I make to read her is Anne Carson).

I'm just reading his recent book Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid and the poems are by turns funny, moving and poignant

I'm also looking forward to reading his new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight which I've enjoyed since I first read Tolkien's version many years ago. I wouldn't mind reading his new version of the Odyssey as well, but as good as our city library is, when it comes to poetry, if it's not CanLit, then they aren't likely to have it if it's less than 50 years old

KX

Northerner, this is your stop. This longhouse
of echoing echoes and sooted glass,
this goth pigeon hangar, this diesel roost
is the end of the line. Brace and be brisk,
commoner, carry your heart like an egg
on a spoon, be fleet through the concourse, primed
for that point in time when the world goes bust,
when the unattended holdall or case
unloads its cache of fanaticized heat.

Here’s you after the fact, found by torchlight,
being-less, heaped, boned of all thought and sense.
The camera can barely look. Or maybe,
just maybe, you live. Here’s you on the News,
shirtless, minus a limb, exiting smoke
to a backdrop of red melt, onto streets
paved with gilt, begging a junkie for help.

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

THE STONE BEACH

A walk, not more than a mile,
along the barricade of land
between the ocean and the grey lagoon.
Six of us, hand in hand,

Connected by blood. Underfoot
a billion stones and pebbles -
new potatoes, mint imperials,
the eggs of birds -

Each rock more infinitely formed
than anything we own.
Spoilt for choice - which one to throw,
which one to pocket and take home.

The present tense, although
some angle of the sun, some slant of light
back-dates us thirty years.
Home movie. Super 8.

Seaweed in ropes and rags.
The weightless, empty armour
of a crab. A jawbone, bleached
and blasted, manages a smile.

Long-shore drift,
the ocean sorts and sifts,
giving with this, getting back
with the next.

A sailboat thinks itself
across the bay.
Susan, nursing a thought of her own,
unthreads and threads.

The middle button of her coat.
Disturbed,
a colony of nesting terns
makes one full circle of the world

then drops.
But the beach, full of itself,
each round of rock
no smaller than a bottle top,

no bigger than a nephew's fist.
One minute more, as Jonathan, three, autistic,
hypnotised by flight and fall
picks one more shape

and, underarms the last wish of the day -
look, like a stone - into the next wave.

Fumimasa Hosokawa

I came across some info about Fumimasa Hosokawa last year I think it was, when he had a joint show in Pittsburgh with another Japanese photographer. I'm glad I saved a couple of the images that were online, because I could find almost no other ones online. He was also featured at PS1 in a show of "emerging" Japanese photographers.

There is a reference to his book Anonymous Scapes which I'm figuring out how to get a copy of - and there's probably some more stuff in Japanese I probably missed.

The show in Pittsburgh was Unspoken Ground: Two views of Japan at the Silver Eye Center for Photography and I did find a piece form Art in America about it:

"...In Fumimasa Hosokawa's more conceptual project, the artist researches public records going back 100 years to find obituaries of people who died on the streets in and around Tokyo in accidents, fights or from illness. Hosokawa visited the locations--determined from the descriptions and addresses in the obituaries--and photographed the sites in black and white in an "official-looking" documentary style. Both photographers point their cameras at should-be populated areas--city streets, construction sites--yet all the settings in the more than 30 works in this show are deserted. This in itself is not particularly unusual. But Kobayashi and Hosokawa focus on the implied interaction of human and site.

...More poignant than formally beautiful, Hosokawa's 22 gelatin silver prints each show the obituary that inspired the accompanying image. (The gallery placed English translations on the wall beside each piece.) He provides the forgotten histories of the locations, but because the images don't always seem to correspondto the narratives, the texts often read more like poetry than death notices. In 1901, for example, a photograph of a characterless paved road with parking signs and a smattering of trees in the background is accompanied by text describing an "approximately 60-year-old man, with thin hair, a 'low nose,' wearing an unlined livery coat ... discovered at this location, 'dead from disease.'" The photograph 1961 shows a small bar nestled between two modern high rises, where an unidentified woman with "a round face and long permed hair, carrying a Shiseido lipstick and a green comb" was found dead on the tracks, now covered up, after being struck by a train near Itabashi Station. In this compelling exhibition, a visual and conceptual dialogue unfolds between the works of two photographers who investigate the effect of human activity on this planet." full article

War then and now - follow up

Just a short follow up post on War then and now

American Photo's State of the Art blog has a short post for Memorial Day - Why We Don't See the Real Story from Iraq

Among other things it says this:

"...He also notes that since last year the military has enforced new embedding rules that require photographers to obtain consent from wounded soldiers before images of them can be published. In effect, this means photographers must get soldiers to sign wavers before they are even injured--an absurd kind of Catch 22."

which is beyond bizarre... lets wipe the Death of a Loyalist Soldier form the official record - I don't think Capa got a release from the guy between his being hit by a Republican bullet and his hitting the ground

Almanac - new online mag

(Misty Keasler)

I think it's a good thing, but the internet makes producing a magazine - albeit online - a relatively low cost proposition compared to actually printing and distributing an actual ink and paper one.

Of course this leads to some really bad ones coming along (not that that doesn't happen in the "real" world as well). And then some also come along that a good but only last a few issues.

Anyway, I got an email this week from the Chris Callahan & Benedict Fernandez - the people who are producing Almanac, a new online photography magazine

And although it's a Flash site, it's one of the few that actually works well - that is, it basically operates in the background and the damn website doesn't dominate the work. They should get some kind of award for that alone...

The magazine so far also seems worth a look (I actually like Petra Berger's essay - although the über-grainy bits are a bit ott - but I have childhood memories of old racing cars, so it's probably what all that's about - and she basically seems racing car obsessed). The Leonard Freed interview is also worth listening to I think.

Oh and this is issue #2. Number one is also worth a look too (with a Diane Arbus interview). Not too shabby for a startup.

(Petra Berger)

Shoot an Iraqi - Wafaa Bilal's Domestic Tension

This is worth a look http://wafaabilal.com/ Wafaa Bilal's Domestic Tension

...until June 4, Bilal is living his entire life inside one room at Chicago’s Flatfile Gallery, which anyone with a Web connection can log on to watch. Oh, and to shoot him. With “Domestic Tension" Bilal has turned his makeshift living quarters into a 24-hour-a-day war zone. Viewers can peep in on him anonymously at any time, and even chat with him online. On the installation’s Web site, his audience can fight for control of the camera and pan it around the room. Since the camera is affixed to a rifle-sized paintball gun—and the Web site has a button that allows viewers to fire the gun—they also have the opportunity to shoot at him, or anything else in his room. Which they have done an astonishing 40,000 times in the project’s first two and a half weeks... from Newsweek

also here and here

Photos of old barns

I have to admit that The Onion is probably my favourite news source (I especially like that one US police department once put out a warning about Al Qaeda fundraisers using telemarketing, based on an Onion story... I'm sure there have been others).

Every now and then they are good at lampooning and skewering photography. The magazine cover above for one, and catches the whole side of photography - lets call it Guild Photography - which seems to have as it's sole purpose endlessly repetitive photographs of old barns in fields, white New England churches, Mexican colonial doorways and cloisters, nudes languishing on a rock/against a tree in the forest or yet another picture of Yosemite. In these, much thought and often monumental effort goes into choice of camera, lens, film developer and paper.

Often, the larger the camera the better. Great kudos is attained by lugging a bloody great 20x24 camera into he middle of some prairie field or the Everglades. Even better if the photo can be made using some kind of alternative process - a van dyke print or platinum maybe. The aim, of course is to enjoy the journey, not the destination. To satisfactorily expend a lot of enjoyable time and energy making another photo that replicates one of a large swatch-book of images that were already cliches by the 1890's. Which of course matters little tot he Guild practitioner - it's the fun and satisfaction they get out of it that matters - and more power to their elbow for that.

Finally, here's another area of photography that the Onion applies it's dry wit to - School Portrait Photographers:

Seminal School-Portrait Photographer Dies At 92

PHOENIX—Henry Anszczak, the photographer whose influential work revolutionized modern school portraiture, died Sunday at his family home in Eloy. He was 92.

According to longtime assistant Dave Olsen, Anszczak died of natural causes.
"On Sunday, Mr. Anszczak passed away peacefully in his sleep, surrounded by his family and scores of yearbooks," Olsen said. "We will never forget his wonderful artistic achievements. He blazed the trail for thousands of school photographers nationwide. The lion of 20th-century public-educational culture roars no more." ...

Anszczak was the first to present his subjects as individuals, rather than as one tiny, grainy part of the class as a whole," said Geraldine Menzies, director of the National Academy of Classroom Arts in Philadelphia, where many of Anszczak's works are exhibited. "He lifted the school-portrait camera from its rigid confines and moved it several feet closer."

Fresh out of the Army in 1946, armed with a Graflex Speed Graphic camera and a tripod, Anszczak began his school-photography career relatively late in life. The 34-year-old entered a stagnant field, where the standard practice of shooting black-and white snapshots of entire classes from a distance had gone unquestioned for decades. While it saved on film and developing costs, the process resulted in a final portrait in which many subjects were out of focus, too small to see, or obscured altogether. When Anszczak retired in 1986, he left a field that had fully embraced his color close-ups and woodland backdrops.

Anszczak is credited with having invented the classroom composite, in which many small, rectangular portraits are arranged in rows for display. "Anszczak single-handedly standardized the wallet-size," Menzies said. "It was his discovery that, in addition to a 5"x7" portrait suitable for framing, a student might like a number of smaller photos to offer to those peers with whom he or she plans to remain best friends forever." ...

Anszczak was the first school photographer to offer matte finish. He was the first to seat subjects on a stool, to direct them in proper placement of their hands, and to offer them the use of a black plastic comb before the photo was taken. He pioneered use of soft-focus, previously seen only in Hollywood glamour portraits, in senior-year photos. And he introduced the now-famous "fence post, wagon wheel, and bale of hay" tableau, which became an industry standard.

"Scholars debate whether it was Anszczak or his assistant who invented the double-exposure, in which a profile of the student's face appears over the shoulder of the forward-facing subject," Menzies said. "But there is no question that they were the first to use the technique in the portable studio."

Anszczak's innovations, now universally accepted, were initially criticized. Parents thought that the individual close-ups bore an uncomfortable similarity to police mug shots. Additionally, many argued that the process of focusing so closely on the subject placed students under undue stress.

Following the Vietnam war, a new batch of critics argued that Anszczak's work had reactionary, antisocial tendencies. In a famous essay for Mrs. Larsen's tenth-grade English class at Sherman High School in Little Rock, AR, sophomore Wayne Kleiff derided the photographer's individual portraits as "a physical manifestation of the isolation produced from postwar suburbanization." ... more