A recap of the World Health Organization images I’ve made. There are more coming, but they’re on several rolls I haven’t had a chance to process yet (I’ve got to get a couple more shot to run a batch).
This first one is in some ways the most graphic of the bunch, if not the most abstract. In winter, near sundown, you can see this bare tree in front of the white marble wall on the end of the building. There’s the contrast between the black organic shape of the tree against the white rectilinear grid of the wall.
Tree, Stone WallThe rest of these don’t bear commentary because you’ve seen them before here on my blog. Go back and re-read the posts ( here, here, here, here, here, and here) for the details of my thoughts and ideas about the images.
Underneath the WHO Columns Handrail Flagpoles WHO Column, Angle World Health Organization Curves Eaves, World Health Organization World Health Organization, Thirds World Health Organization, Cylinder PAHO/WHO Building WHO building WHO building Pavers, Reflection, Grass
This is a very dear old friend of mine who I’ve known for close on 20 years now. We originally met on an IRC chatroom (that’s really dating me – how many of you out there even remember what that was?) and stayed in touch long after. Simon came to visit me when I was living in Baltimore, then I ran into him again several years later at Chatuchak Market in Bangkok, quite unplanned and unexpectedly. Several years after that, he returned to Baltimore, this time as a graduate student. Now he lives outside DC and we get together periodically to keep up with what’s going on in our lives. We were having dinner the other night at a newish Italian restaurant in my neighborhood when I took this- he was just perfectly lit by the setting sun coming through the window. I think this perfectly captures his jovial inner spirit.
Simon Fong
I had the Rolleiflex sitting on the table next to me after taking this picture, and the women at the table next to us saw it and remarked on it. We ended up having a good fifteen minute conversation with them about photography and using film and old cameras. This is why I call the Rollei “the happy camera” – it gets so many people talking with you about photography, and always in a positive way. Everyone has good feelings about this camera.
The World War I memorial, taken toward evening in early spring. The grass is obviously getting green but the trees haven’t come into leaf yet. Once the trees have gotten their leaves, the memorial is all but invisible from the road behind it.
WW I Monument
This is still one of my favorite monuments on the Mall because of its simplicity, and because it is doing double-duty – there is no national World War I monument, so this monument to the fallen from the District of Columbia stands for all the soldiers and sailors of that conflict.
A new acquisition to the CDV collection – another Civil War soldier (definitely Union this time!) complete with sword, cap, and patriotic studio backdrop. The sword, his youth, and the overall style of his uniform suggest to me junior grade officer. Some non-commissioned officers did carry swords, particularly in the cavalry and artillery, but they would have had rank insignia on their sleeves.
Brother Charley
This is the first soldier portrait from the period that I have which has a patriotic battle-themed background (notice the cannon to his right just above the table, along with the field tents and flag). This was a popular thing to do during the Civil War for soldiers. Many itinerant photographers had backdrops painted to depict scenes of camp life in front of which they would pose the soldiers. These backdrops served as positive propaganda back home, as it gave the soldiers’ loved ones a sense of normalcy to the life of their son/brother/husband/father. This one was done in a proper studio in Washington DC, just a few doors down the street from Matthew Brady’s parlor. I would guess based on the rather healthy looking condition of the young man that this was taken before he first marched into the field, and probably early in the war.
On a separate but not entirely unrelated note – if you observe carefully, you can see the foot of the posing stand peeking out from behind his legs. I’ve been seeing a lot of comments on Facebook lately about how some at best tragically uninformed and at worst scandalously unscrupulous people out there on Ebay and other online venues have been describing ANY photo of this period where the posing stand is visible as a post-mortem. I want to debunk this myth as strenuously and vigorously as possible. Posing stands were NOT meant to keep corpses in the upright position while they were being photographed. For that matter, most genuine post-mortems I’ve seen have shown the deceased in a prone position if an adult, sometimes sitting up or being held by a parent if a child, but even then children were not uncommonly posed in their coffins.
I would say that this young man is very definitely, obviously alive and well at the time of the taking of this photograph, wouldn’t you agree?
As a Washingtonian, I normally avoid the Jefferson Memorial and the Tidal Basin area at Cherry Blossom time like it was ground zero for the Zombie Apocalypse. The cherry blossoms may be beautiful, but the groves are so overrun with tourists with necks snapped back in positions normally reserved for car wreck victims as they stagger mindlessly about, blocking traffic, walking into your camera’s frame of view and not moving while THEY compose a shot, and pointing with arms at full length like the walking dead in the general direction of everything and nothing at the same time. Most of my photographer friends who want to shoot the blossoms do so at the crack of dawn when most tourists can’t be arsed to get out of bed to go see them. At which time I, too, can’t be arsed to get out of bed to go photograph them because I have a day job.
Cherry Blossoms, 2015
That said, there are other places to see cherry blossoms around DC that aren’t completely overrun. There happens to be this tree, for example, on the George Washington University campus in the front yard of a fraternity house no less. I caught this one on one of my lunchtime walkabouts. This was also with the Tele-Rolleiflex, shot basically straight up into the tree from a standing position (the tree is in a yard several feet above the sidewalk, so it was easy to stand beneath it and shoot up into the blossoms).
The Federal Reserve Board of Governors buildings in Washington DC have an incredible art collection inside. Most of it is not accessible to the public, as it is displayed throughout the working areas of the facilities. There is, however, an exhibition space inside one of the buildings that can be viewed by appointment – The Federal Reserve Art Collection. There are some pieces, however, that are on permanent public display. There is a gorgeous fountain that operates from April to November-ish (depending on weather) and on the north side of the Martin building, there is the baseball sculpture and the Italian bronze Discus Thrower sculpture. It’s not entirely clear from my reading that the baseball sculpture, entitled Full Count, is part of the Federal Reserve collection, but I believe it to be so from this article. The Discus Thrower, however, is not. It is a replica of the Discobolos of Myrmon, an ancient Roman bronze, given to the people of the United States by the nation of Italy in commemoration of the United States’ assistance in returning Nazi looted art after World War II.
Here is the discus thrower statue. He stands atop a marble column head carved to mimic an ancient Corinthian capital. The discus thrower is located in a city park which also houses a tennis court.
Discus Thrower, Kelley Park
I have two different takes on Full Count – one in color and one in b/w, each from a different perspective. The color image is viewing the sculptural group from over the pitcher’s shoulder. The white marble building in the background is the Martin building of the Federal Reserve.
Full Count, from the Pitcher’s View
The black-and-white image is my take on just the pitcher, from a profile view. Both were shot on the same rainy, overcast day.
Pitcher, Full Count
I think the two images side-by-side really brings out what I was talking about yesterday regarding emotional impact of an image in one medium vs the other. There’s no judgment value being placed on that difference – each one has its own equally valid resonance, and there’s no need to prefer one medium over the other, just as joy and sadness are equal emotional partners.
All three images were shot with my Tele-Rolleiflex. As I’m getting used to shooting with it, I’m really liking the images it makes. It just takes a bit of practice to get to know when to use it and how best to use it to take advantage of its strengths.
I have to toot my own horn a little today – my spring session of Introduction to Large Format Photography is sold out! I’m even adding three additional seats today to accommodate the folks who contacted me yesterday about registering. The class will cover the basics of how to use a large format camera. We’ll get an understanding of the camera itself – the various types of large format camera, the components of the camera, how to use it, and especially in this digital day and age, WHY to use it. To paraphrase Edward Weston’s comment about color photography: “There are things you can say in large format that you can’t say in anything smaller”. We’ll have specific lessons on film handling and processing for large format, portraiture, studio/tabletop photography, and architecture.
Glen Echo Midway
I teach at Photoworks Glen Echo, a non-profit photography education center in Glen Echo Park, which is operated by the National Park Service. Glen Echo Park is a former amusement park a few miles away from downtown DC in Glen Echo, Maryland on the banks of the Potomac River. Originally envisioned as a suburban housing development for the elite of Washington at the end of the 19th century, the only resident to ever build and take up residence was Clara Barton. It became a Chataqua meeting center, and then in the early years of the 20th century, an amusement park. It rose to its peak by being at the terminus of a street car line running out from Georgetown (a neighborhood in DC and formerly a separate incorporated city in itself). The park endured changing demographics and evolving tastes, but closed up shop in 1970. The US Park Service took over and converted it into a community art center where people can come to learn pottery, glassblowing, cast and fused glass, stone carving, photography, painting. There is a children’s dance theater and puppet theater, and the 1902 Spanish Ballroom has square, contra, ballroom, and swing dancing events practically every night of the week. The centerpiece of the park is now and has been since its installation in the 1920s, the Dentzel Carousel which is freshly restored and fully operational. The carousel offers rides daily from May to October.
Dentzel Carousel, Glen Echo, Sunset
Photoworks is the photography center, located in the Main Arcade building. This year marks their 40th anniversary. They offer a full range of classes from introductory photography for children and teens to advanced classes on topics such as The Long-Term Photo Project, iPhone Fun (getting the most of mobile device photography), Photographic Editing and Presentation, and Platinum/Palladium Printing. Photoworks has a full wet darkroom for film processing and black-and-white printing up to 16×20 inches, a fully equipped digital darkroom with Macintosh workstations, Epson flatbed scanner and Nikon 35mm dedicated film scanner, and Epson printers for up to 24″ wide prints.
I had stopped in this wine and beer shop on my way home from work yesterday to pick up a six-pack of Mahou, a Spanish beer I have been dying to find since I had one on a very hot afternoon in Salamanca years ago, and as usual, I had the Rolleiflex around my neck. The owner’s eyes lit up when he saw it and we had a long chat about photography in between his customers. I mentioned that I do all my own darkroom work, both black-and-white and color. He remarked that he never did get into color, but was very much in love with black-and-white. This brought to mind the old Edward Weston quote, “there are things you can say in color that you can’t say in black-and-white”. Very true- the two media have different emotional resonance frequencies. This photo is a great example of the difference.
Badass Scooter
It’s a cute scooter that when photographed in color, is white with a medium-blue splash on the rear fender, and reads as cheerful and fun. In black-and-white, it has a much more serious edge to it, and it reads almost macho, for a scooter. Like a member of the Sons of Anarchy wouldn’t feel compelled to commit suicide if forced to ride it. Thus the semi-ironic caption – “badass scooter”. No scooter ever really is menacing, but in black-and-white, this one is respectable at least. I’m sure some of my motorcycle enthusiast friends will disagree with me on this and tell me in no uncertain terms that it is impossible for a scooter to be butch.
This was also a lens test of sorts for my new-to-me 1959 Tele-Rolleiflex. I wanted to see not only how smooth the out-of-focus areas are with it, but how much telephoto perspective compression it gives – the “3-D effect”, in other words. I’d say it pops more than the standard, but it’s still subtle as the lens is not even twice the focal length of the Standard lens (135mm vs 80mm for the standard).
I shot this as another test of the Tele-Rolleiflex, to see what it could do as far as separating the background and foreground. This cast-iron bollard with the dual lions’ heads is on the sidewalk outside ProPhoto, one of the last remaining real camera stores in DC now that Penn Camera/Calumet is gone.
Lion-Head Bollard
ProPhoto is tiny. They relocated from their old store location on I Street to new digs on Pennsylvania Avenue, and cut their space by 2/3rds. But the important thing is that they’re still in business, and now at least the photo paper stock they do carry is all in-date. The most critical thing for me is that they have a repair service on-site, and their repair tech is qualified to work on Rolleiflexes.
The latest acquisition in my collection – an unnamed Corporal in the US Army, photographed by Alexander Gardner.
Unidentified Corporal, by A. Gardner
If you look carefully you can see the service stripe on his sleeve. This designates three years of service, so in all likelihood this was taken in 1864, as Gardner was working for Mathew Brady until late 1862, and opened his own Washington DC studio in 1863. Soldiers with the three year service stripe would have been quite rare before 1864 due to the politics of enlistment in the first years of the war and the relatively small size of the army prior to 1861. I’m not sure how long after the War ended he continued to use the “Photographer to the Army of the Potomac” logo, but it most likely ceased within a year or two after the war, as the civilian population quickly tired of reminders of the irrepressible bloody conflict.
I just discovered one reason why Gardner studio imprint CDVs are so much less common than Brady studio imprint CDVs – Gardner ceased photographing in 1871 and opened an insurance firm, whereas Brady continued working as a photographer until his death three decades after the war.
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