Showing posts with label color photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label color photography. Show all posts

Friday, March 5, 2021

Ektachrome moments: The color work of Ida Wyman

 Via Pasatiempo

March 5, 2021

By Michael Abatemarco

black and white photograph of young Ida Wyman with 2 of her cameras
Ida Wyman with two of her cameras in an undated photograph

The golden age of street photography, photojournalism, and documentary photography lasted from the 1930s to the 1950s. It was an era that saw the birth of a number of influential photography agencies and collectives, including Magnum, founded in Paris in 1947, and New York’s Photo League, founded in 1936. Many of their number were among the most respected photographers of their day, including Magnum’s Henri Cartier-Bresson and the Photo League’s Paul Strand and Arthur Leipzig.

Most of the images that came out of the era were in black and white, partly because color printing was more expensive and less stable, and most news agencies and magazines only printed in black and white. “Color negates all of photography’s three-dimensional values,” claimed Cartier-Bresson.


color photograph of a Stickball on St. Nicholas Avenue, East Harlem, 1947


Stickball on St. Nicholas Avenue, East Harlem, 1947


Ida Wyman: East Harlem, 1947 in Color is a selection of 14 photographs on exhibit at Monroe Gallery drawn from a series called Lost Ektachromes. The photographer, who was a member of the league, came across the negatives sometime around 2010. They remained undeveloped until then because Wyman, who was proficient at printing in black and white, lacked the expertise to do her own color printing. She needed to find someone she could trust who could print them with fidelity and under her supervision.

“She was already in her 80s,” says Wyman’s granddaughter Heather Garrison, who manages the estate. “She always said she wanted to do an exhibit on this work. And as we catalogued it, we found additional pieces.”

Wyman (1926-2019) was “no slouch,” says Michelle Monroe, co-owner of Monroe Gallery of Photography, adding that she shot more than 100 assignments for Life magazine throughout her career as a freelance photographer. Her work exemplified the cooperative’s focus on capturing the human condition in America’s urban and rural settings at mid-century.

“It was really one of the first movements to use photography as a social documentary tool,” says gallery co-owner Sidney Monroe.

The work in the show includes portraits, street scenes, and candid images of people. Some are street vendors selling their wares. Some sit on stoops engaged in conversation, and some are merely walking or otherwise going about their day. As a whole, it’s a simple snapshot of life in the city.


color photograph of The Key Maker, East Harlem, 1947

The Key Maker, East Harlem, 1947


East Harlem was a neighborhood of immigrants and the working class poor. As a photographer, she had an ethos in line with that of the Photo League, although she was not yet a member at the time the photos were taken. And none of them were shot as an assignment but purely to indulge her own enthusiasm for the medium. Wyman was also experimenting with a new kind of film. Ektachrome was only developed in the early 1940s. The work languished in her archives, in part because Wyman never achieved the notoriety of her contemporaries until late in life, and she was never focused on showing her work publicly in galleries or museums.

“Ms. Wyman — whose work for Life, Look and other magazines went largely unheralded for decades — discovered what she called a ‘special kind of happiness’ in photographing subjects like a little girl wearing curlers, a peddler hauling a block of ice from a horse-drawn cart and four boys holding dolls, pretending to be the plastic girls’ fathers,” wrote Richard Sandomir in Wyman’s New York Times obituary (“Ida Wyman, Whose Camera Captured Ordinary People, Dies at 93”). Perhaps that’s because Wyman, like many of the subjects she photographed, came from a working-class family. Her parents were Jewish immigrants in Malden, Massachusetts, who later owned a small grocery store in the Bronx.

Soon after graduating from high school in 1943, Wyman started working in the mailroom at Acme Newspictures. Eventually, she was promoted to photo printer. Her intention was to spend a year working before starting nursing school. “She was always fascinated by science and medicine,” Garrison says of Wyman, who got her first box camera at 14. But in the interim, her love of photography superseded other ambitions.

Wyman spent her earnings on film and processing. “On her lunch breaks and in her spare time she just loved to walk the city and take pictures,” Garrison says. “Then she would have a body of work that she could show.” Determined to land assignments, she reserved these bodies of work to show to editors.

Wyman had no job security at Acme. When the men came back from the war, Wyman and women like her were out of a job.

However, her career in photography was just beginning.


color photograph of a  Shoe Shine Man, East Harlem, 1947

The Shoe Shine Man, East Harlem, 1947


Over the course of the next six years, she worked as a freelancer, taking assignments for Fortune, Look, Life, and Parade, among other publications. “She had the usual soft assignments, like for the Saturday Evening Post,” Michelle Monroe says. “If there was a grocery store opening, ‘send the woman.’ She wasn’t picky. She wanted the work. I think it was very hardscrabble working as a woman without the affiliation of a publication directly.”

But Wyman was motivated. Garrison says she landed assignments through sheer perseverance. “I give her a lot of credit, a young girl — 18, 19, 20, 21 — especially in a man’s world, walking into these offices and self-advocating,” Garrison says.

Wyman was encouraged to join the Photo League on the advice of her husband, photographer Simon Nathan, but in the early 1950s, the demands of family life temporarily curtailed her career. When she returned to photography in the 1960s, it was as a photographer in medical fields. She was chief photographer at the department of pathology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons from 1968 until 1983 when she returned to freelancing.

“Her varied assignments always focused on human interest stories, which have become a hallmark of her work,” Garrison says.

That’s what we see in her black-and-white photographs, but also in the Ektachromes. And like her monochromatic work, the contrasts are stark, the shadows deep and rich, befitting, perhaps, the work of one who’s not used to shooting in color. The palette is muted, giving them the appearance of hand-colored photographs, a technique that was common since the early days of photography. And they weave a similar kind of nostalgic spell. But unlike hand-coloring, their ethereal and dreamlike quality, says Michelle Monroe, was due in part to the city’s pollution.


color photogrph of 2 boys with a stringless banjo, East Harlem, 1947


The stringless banjo, East Harlem, 1947


“Most cities in, say, like the 1920s through the 1960s, were powered by coal,” she says. “There’s a lot of diffused light. Coal hung around the lower city so much. There’s such a softening of the air from that particulate. Margaret Bourke-White taught us that — not directly, but in studying her work.”

But it’s the joyous aspects of the familiar and the sense of commonality that also make them captivating.

“She always had an eye for people,” Garrison says. “She loved to connect with people, and I think that’s what made her photos so wonderful.” 


details

Ida Wyman: East Harlem, 1947 in Color

Through April 11

Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar Ave., 505-992-0800, monroegallery.com

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

International Photography Hall of Fame Induction & 50th Anniversary Celebration Honors Ernst Haas

Via The International Photography Hall of Fame

IPHF announced its 2016 class of Photography Hall of Fame inductees. Eight photographers and photography industry visionaries who embody the spirit, artistry and innovation of modern photography have been selected for induction:
Inductees were selected by a nominating committee made up of IPHF representatives and distinguished leaders in the photography industry. To be eligible, inductees must have made a notable contribution to the art or science of photography, having a significant impact on the photography industry and/or history of photography.

“As we look ahead to the next 50 years of the IPHF, we are honored to continue to recognize and celebrate photographers and industry professionals that have made significant contributions to the profession, helping to shape and define modern photography,” said Patty Wente, executive director of the IPHF. “This year’s inductees represent the perfect combination of innovation and artistry; bridging photography’s pioneering past with its fantastic future.”

The Induction and 50th Anniversary Celebration Event for the 2016 inductees will take place on October 28, 2016 – additional details will be announced soon


Ernst HaasErnst Haas (1921-1986) is acclaimed as one of the most celebrated and influential photographers of the 20th Century, and considered one of the pioneers of color photography. In the 1950's he began experimenting with Kodachrome color film and went on to become one of the premier color photographers of the decade. In 1953, Life featured his groundbreaking 24-page color photo essay on New York City, the first time such a large color photo feature was published in the magazine. In 1962, a retrospective of his work was the first color photography exhibition held at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Throughout his career, Haas traveled extensively, photographing for LifeVogue and Look, to name a few of many influential publications. Haas has continued to be the subject of museum exhibitions and publications such as "Ernst Haas, Color Photography" (1989), "Ernst Haas in Black and White"(1992) and "Color Correction" (2011).

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

"Thanksgiving Table With Turkey": The Carbro Process




"Daughter Linda At Thanksgiving Table With Turkey, Saturday Eve". Dick shot this image of his daughter Linda as a one-shot Carbro print that was built into the final cover for the Post. Dick did this by making multiple shots and carbros of various items such as the turkey, cranberry sauce and tableware, cutting and pasting the images together and re-shooting and reprinting the final carbro. Because that image became the first photograph to displace Norman Rockwell on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, when Dick told Paul Hesse, who had tried unsuccessfully for years to sell the Post a cover, Paul said that Dick was lying, since he believed that it was impossible to sell the Post a photograph. But Dick wasn't lying and it became a cover in 1941, launching Dick's commercial carreer.


"Daughter Linda At Thanksgiving Table With Turkey, Saturday Eve". Dick shot this image of his daughter Linda as a one-shot Carbro print that was built into the final cover for the Post. Dick did this by making multiple shots and carbros of various items such as the turkey, cranberry sauce and tableware, cutting and pasting the images together and re-shooting and reprinting the final carbro. Because that image became the first photograph to displace Norman Rockwell on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, when Dick told Paul Hesse, who had tried unsuccessfully for years to sell the Post a cover, Paul said that Dick was lying, since he believed that it was impossible to sell the Post a photograph. But Dick wasn't lying and it became a cover in 1941, launching Dickís commercial career.




The Carbro Process by Paul Martineau

Over a decade before the 1935 introduction of Kodachrome colour film by Eastman Kodak, a subtractive colour process was developed that made it possible to create vivid prints from black & white negatives. The tricolour carbro transfer printing process - or carbro - demanded strict technical control but produced highly-saturated and permanent colour prints.

BECAUSE OF its complexity and high expense (some practitioners reported a finished print took about 10 hours to produce at a cost of $125), the carbro process was rarely the province of the amateur. By 1937, full colour illustrations made from direct colour prints were being used regularly in the big subscription magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and House Beautiful. Colour photography in the form of carbro prints was also being shown in museums and in popular touring exhibitions. In the United States, photographers Anton Bruehl, Nickolas Muray, Paul Outerbridge, Edward Steichen, and H.I. Williams, among others, became identified with the quality and artistry of their carbro prints through a participation in these publications and exhibitions. The demand for colour advertising photography was such that a few of the top photographers regularly commanded prices ranging from $300 to $1000 per print. Continue reading here.

Friday, September 2, 2011

NEWLY DISCOVERED ERNST HAAS COLOR PHOTOGRAPHS

Ernst Haas: America, 1978

A new book of recently discovered "new" color photographs by Ernst Haas has generated a lot of interest.

Ernst Haas is unquestionably one of the best-known, most prolific and most published photographers of the twentieth century.

Ernst Haas: New York, 1980

He is most associated with a vibrant colour photography which, for decades, was much in demand by the illustrated press. This colour work, published in the most influential magazines in Europe and America, also fed a constant stream of books, and these too enjoyed great popularity. But although his colour work earned him fame around the world, in recent decades it has often been derided by critics and curators as “overly commercial”, and too easily accessible – or in the language of curators, not sufficiently “serious”. As a result, his reputation has suffered in comparison with a younger generation of colour photographers, notably Eggleston, Shore and Meyerowitz.

Paradoxically, however, there was also a side of his work that was almost entirely hidden from view. Parallel to his commissioned work Haas constantly made images for his own interest, and these pictures show an entirely different aspect of Haas’s sensibility: they are far more edgy, loose, complex and ambiguous – in short, far more radical than the work which earned him fame. Haas never printed these pictures in his lifetime, nor did he exhibit them, probably believing that they would not be understood or appreciated. Nonetheless, these works are of great complexity, and rival (and sometimes surpass) anything done at the time by his fellow photographers

Exhibition at London's Atlas Gallery September 14 - October 22

Prints available from Monroe Gallery of Photography

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Ernst Haas: Color Corrections




Color Correction by Ernst Haas, published by Steidl / www.steidlville.com
California, USA, 1976

Out There
| By Kenneth Dickerman
Via Time LightBox

Born in 1921, Vienna’s Ernst Haas is considered by many to be one of the first true masters of color photography, Though he began his career working with black and white. Following the tradition established by Henri Cartier-Bresson, who focused heavily on the decisive moment and rich monochromatic tonality, Haas would receive worldwide recognition for his early work documenting the homecoming of Austrian prisoners of War. Haas eventually moved to color, favoring its ability to work in a more metaphoric, poetic vein that photographers like Saul Leiter and Eliot Porter were examining.

A significant amount of Haas’s output throughout his career landed in the pages of mainstream magazines such as Life, Look and Esquire. But in addition to this more commercial work, Haas was always making photographs for himself. It is these photographs that the German publisher Steidl has brought together for the new book, Ernst Haas: Color Corrections. The book shows mostly unseen work by Haas, work that is at once rich in color and texture as well as being more edgy and experimental than much of the work he became known for during his lifetime.

Haas’s Color Corrections will be released by Steidl in the United States this month.

 
California, USA, 1977


New Orleans, USA, 1960



New Mexico, USA, 1975


USA, circa 1970


USA, 1967


Brooklyn, New York, USA, 1952


New York, USA, 1974


Color Correction by Ernst Haas, published by Steidl / www.steidlville.com

 

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Ernst Haas: Master of Colour



USA, 1967 by Ernst Haas


Via BBC News In Pictures

Phil Coomes

Picture editor
July 12, 2011

For many of us who came to photography in the 1970s or 80s it was black and white that drew us in, and in terms of press or documentary photography it called the shots.


There was of course plenty of colour work out there, particularly in the US, but it was an Austrian, Ernst Haas, who first grabbed my attention and showed me the power of colour photography.

Working with a 35mm camera and primarily on Kodachrome film he had an eye like no other. His pictures showed intense pools of colour and light. Were these really scenes from our world or creations of his mind? The answer was both.


Brooklyn, New York, USA, 1952 by Ernst Haas
Brooklyn, New York, USA, 1952 by Ernst Haas


Of course Haas was a big name and had been photographing in colour since the 1950s. His landmark exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1962 was the first to challenge the rule of black and white photographs in the art world. Haas was riding high and continued to do so throughout his career.

Haas was one of the early members of Magnum Photos and photographed for Life Magazine among others. He also shot film stills and his book The Creation went on to sell more than 350,000 copies. He also produced a number of audio visual slideshows feeling you could say more with multiple images than a single frame, I reckon he'd do well today.

And yet in the forward to a new book, Color Correction, William A Ewing states that Haas' pictures were often seen as being too commercial and by the 1970s parts of the art world no longer championed him.

Ewing goes on to say: "His (Haas) work was also judged too simplistic, lacking in the complexities and ironies that marked the imagery of Haas' younger rivals, who were also busy forging a new language of colour. As a result, Haas's reputation has suffered in comparison with the leading lights of what came to be known as 'the New Colour', notably William Eggleston, Joel Sternfeld, Stephen Shore, and Joel Meyerowitz."

Yet alongside his commercial work Haas shot for pleasure, and it is a small number of these pictures that are reproduced in the book.



New Orleans, USA, 1960 by Ernst Haas
New Orleans, USA, 1960 by Ernst Haas

Ewing searched through around 200,000 of Haas' pictures held in the Getty Archive in London, spurred on by a nagging doubt that perhaps he had dismissed his work too readily. Ewing says that these pictures:

"Are far more edgy, loose, enigmatic, and ambiguous than his celebrated work. Most of these pictures he never even printed, let alone published, probably assuming that they were too difficult to be understood. These images are of great sophistication, and rival (and sometimes surpass) the best work of his colleagues."

Haas' desire to shape the world as he sees it through his colour work sits well today. For we accept the way a photographer's own views alter and manipulate the picture he or she takes, and no longer hold to the notice of objective reality. It's time to dust off his archives and let them be seen by another generation, for now you can enjoy the frames here.


California, USA, 1976 by Ernst Haas
California, USA, 1976 by Ernst Haas

I'll leave the last word to Haas:

"Bored with obvious reality, I find my fascination in transforming it into a subjective point of view. Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself - less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive - less prose, more poetry." Ernst Haas from About Color Photography, in DU, 1961, via Color Correction.


New Mexico, USA, 1975 by Ernst Haas
New Mexico, USA, 1975 by Ernst Haas

Color Correction by Ernst Haas published by Steidl






Wednesday, May 4, 2011

ERNST HAAS: New York: Magic City



Clouds and Skyline, New York, 1957


ERNST HAAS "NEW YORK, MAGIC CITY" IN PARIS

May 6 - June 4, 2011

Details here. (in French)

Gallerie Basai Embiricos

Gallerie Photo 12


Ernst Haas (1921-1986) is considered one of the most important photographers of the second part of the 20th century. Haas attended medical school in Austria, but, in 1947, left to become a staff photographer for the magazine Heute. His photo essay for the magazine on prisoners of war coming home to Vienna won him acclaim and an offer to join Magnum Photos from Robert Capa. Haas and Werner Bischof were the first photographers invited to join Magnum by the founders Capa, David "Chim" Seymour, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and Bill Vandivert.

Haas moved to New York City and in 1953 produced a 24-page, color photo essay on the city for Life Magazine. Life then commissioned similar photo spreads on Paris and Venice. In 1962, the Museum of Modern Art mounted a one-man show of Haas' color photos. Haas' first photo book, Elements, was published the next year.

In 1964, film director John Huston hired Haas to direct the creation sequence for Huston's 1964 film, The Bible. Haas continued working on the theme, producing the photo book, The Creation in 1971. Other photography books by Haas included In America in 1975, a tribute to his adopted country for its bicentennial year; Deutschland in 1977; and Himalayan Pilgrimage in 1978. Other films that Haas worked on included The Misfits in 1961, Hello, Dolly! in 1969, Little Big Man in 1970, and Heaven's Gate in 1980. Haas also photographed a number of advertising campaigns for Marlboro cigarettes.

In 1986, Haas received the Hasselblad Award for his photography. He died September 12, 1986. (More here)

The Paris exhibitions are conducted under the direction of Victoria and Alex Haas will include a selection of previously unpublished photographs. It will include vintage prints, contemporary prints and dye transfer prints.

Related - New Book: Colour Correction by Ernst Haas, published by Steidl





The Cross, New York, 1966