Between 1980 and 1984, photographer Barbara Crane used a Super Speed Graphic camera and Polaroid film to document the summer festivals in Chicago. The snapshots don’t provide the same nostalgia trip as Michael Galinsky’s mall photos, but instead focus on small intimate moments in tightly cropped, intense close-up, dynamic portraits of arms and hands and bodies conjoined in the summer heat.
From filmmaker and musician Michael Galinsky (of Sleepyhead), a series of candid, lyrical photographs documenting American malls in the summer of 1990.
From photojournalist Steve McCurry for National Geographic, this shot of a cemetery in Parsons, Kansas represents “the last photograph on the last roll of Kodachrome film manufactured by Kodak” — ever.
Arnold Odermatt, “Stansstad” (1967)
The photography of Swiss police officer Odermatt brings to mind the work of Weegee, or Mell Kilpatrick — for over 40 years, he served as a photographer of automobile accidents in scenic Nidwalden. Though formally untrained in the art, Odermatt had a natural eye for the spectacle of disaster and the mountainous natural terrain of his beat. His profession eventually became something of a hobby; he began taking one copy of photos for the police reports and one for his own records, and Odermatt’s beautiful and haunting (and morosely funny) pictures were published after his retirement from the force.
Philippe Halsman, “Donald O’Connor” (1952)
A photo of the great dancer/actor/funnyman O’Connor, taken as part of Halsman’s “Jump” series, wherein he captured various celebrities, politicians, and notables mid-air. The infectious energy on display here is a precursor to Robert Longo’s work.
Photographer unknown, The Buddy Bolden Band, c. 1905
The only known photo of the famed Buddy Bolden Band. The roots of ragtime and jazz can be traced back to Bolden’s reportedly wild style; since Bolden couldn’t read music, he adapted music by ear, reconfiguring the standard New Orleans band style to include elements of rural blues and gospel Church music. Bolden’s influence is largely the stuff of myth — before the rise of modern recording technique, he had to quit music at age 30 to enter a mental hospital, where he’d spend the remainder of his life. No known recordings of his band have survived.
Raymond Cauchetier was perhaps the world’s greatest movie set photographer. Besides being in the right place at the right time (Paris at the crest of the French New Wave), his strong sense of composition and light often equals the great films he was documenting. Here he presents Francois Truffaut and crew on the set of STOLEN KISSES.
Fred Herzog, “Granville/Smythe” (1959)
The street photography of Fred Herzog pops with vibrant colors and rich, almost Eggleston-ian detail. Some of the closer range shots double as a document of mid-century fashion elegance, and almost feel like a precursor to The Sartorialist.
Claude Friese-Greene, The Open Road (1927)
1927, in color: Friese-Greene made this legendary travelogue based upon the Biocolour process developed by his father William. (Though this is only the illusion of true color — black-and-white film stock processed through colored filters and stained — it’s still startling to see the distant past looking so vibrant.)
My favorite image-based site on the web alongside If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats is this terrific blog, which compiles amazing images across time and cultures. To give you an example of what the site offers, there have been recent posts on Year of the Monkey postcards, vintage souvenir magician programs, Tibetan anatomical paintings, and so much more, all in luscious hi-res. But like If Charlie Parker…, Ephemera Assemblyman is really a triumph of curation, an education in photos and drawings.
William Mumler, Self-portrait (1861)
This is the first “spirit photograph” ever taken, where Mumler captured what appeared to be the ghost of his cousin (at the time, dead for 12 years). His spirit photographs became wildly popular during the 1860s, when families sought consolation for relatives killed during the Civil War. He was eventually exposed as a fraud, once several living people were identified as the “ghosts” looming in his photos. Mumler at least deserves credit for his revolutionary, expert application of double exposure — or, if you’re a believer, for documenting the supernatural…
The “West Coast Weegee,” Mell Kilpatrick moved to Southern California with his wife and kids in 1928 to find work as a coronet player, but bad oral hygene cost him both his teeth and his budding musical career. After a temporary gig as a film projectionist, he found work as an automobile accident photographer, first part-time for an insurance company and later (because of his stellar work) full-time at the Santa Ana Register.
Though he’s still relatively unknown today, his photos remain both gruesome and gorgeous, and raise plenty of hairy questions about aesthetics and spectatorship. (They’ll also bring to mind Ballard, Cronenberg, and The Normal: “See the breaking glass/In the underpass… Hear the crushing steel/Feel the steering wheel.”) Like a driver passing the accidents themselves, you won’t be able to look away.
Photograph from the multitalented Abbas Kiarostami, one of the world’s greatest filmmakers.
“I’ve often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us, unless it’s inside a frame. So I took my car windscreen as a frame, and I turned off the windscreen wipers so as not to wipe off the rain — I wanted the raindrops to remain on the glass. Everything we can see in the photographs – the yellow-brown, the green, the black – we owe to the light. It’s the reflection of the light on the raindrops that gives the pictures these subtleties and nuances.”
“Rain on lens
Rain on lens
Boom in frame
Boom in frame
All is ruin
Let’s take it again”
- Smog (aka Bill Callahan)
“Anesthesiologist | Ft. Worth , TX | 3-Person Household | Youngest son works on lobster boat in Alaska | Day after Thanksgiving, 2007”
From photographer Mark Menjivar, “You Are What You Eat” is a photo series celebrating the things people keep in their refrigerators. Thanks to Kate Brokaw for the tip.
