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Hugh McCabe

Hugh McCabe

b: Dublin

I encountered Hugh McCabe's work in a round-about way, as explained in a May 2020 blog post.

Hugh photographs bands in exposure times the duration of a song using B&W film on a 5x4 camera. There are parallels with Sugimoto and Shulman, but these pieces are more visually interesting. There are many examples on his web site. I intend to have one for my next birthday, probably one those shown below.

I asked Hugh how he calculated the exposure and he replied promptly by email,

When I started doing the photos I used to bring along a digital camera and do test exposures on that in order to figure out the aperture etc (the length of the photo was always supposed to be the length of the song that the band happened to be playing). After a while I stopped bothering with that because it almost always told me I should be using f32.Hugh McCabe email 16 May 20

Further technical details were given to a rather insistent questioner in his blog, they relate to fig. 5.

1. It is a photograph of the band Animal Collective
2. It was taken in Vicar Street a few weeks back
3. The band were touring their new album which is called Centipede Hz
4. They had huge inflatable stage props with lights inside them
5. It is an exposure of approximately 4 minutes
6. The aperture setting was f32
7. It was taken using a Cambo camera with a 90mm Schneider lens
8. It was shot on Ilford FP4 4×5 film
9. The film was processed by Artur Sikora of the Darkroom Service
10. The negative was scanned on an Epson V700 scanner
11. The resultant digital image file is 1200 by 960 pixels wide giving a total of 1,152,000 pixels altogether

Hugh McCabe blog reply 23 Dec 2012

A string quartet would be interesting, as would the use of colour.

The labels are taken from the title or the contents of the blog posts in which they appear: they are not titles.

Fig. 1 has an interesting feature,

Right in the centre, up near the front of the audience, there are two people standing there who are rendered quite sharply within the image. There is a blur of bodies all around them but you can see them clearly, grinning away, while they take a photograph of themselves, probably on a mobile phone. What’s obviously happened here is that the flash from their photo has caught them and frozen them onto my film.

sources - no Wikipedia entry

links - artist's web site

added - 17May20

Vivian Maier

Self-portrait,
New York City, c. 1950s

b: 1926, New York / d: 2009, Oak Park, Illinois

The Maier story is both sweet and tragic, in that she found fame, but only posthumously.

She was undoubtedly a great street photographer but the real joy of her work is in her ingenious self portraits as shadows and reflections. Lee Friedlander, with tenacious dedication, set the benchmark in this genre, but Maier repeatedly outclassed his work in terms of wit and invention.

My first encounter with Maier's self portraits was at Photo London 2019.

The Huxley-Parlour Gallery in Piccadilly currently has exhibitions of Maier's (relatively) rare 35mm colour work (and, incidentally, a fine selection of Calders). There are only sixteen pieces on show (prices £2,200-£4,000) but they are gems and include several self-portraits.

The exhibition leaflet states,

… dating from 1960 to 1984, the works on display depict street scenes of Chicago and New York, as well as including a number of her enigmatic, intricately-staged self-portraits. Maier's colour work was made during the last 30 years of her life when she began to work with a 35-millimetre camera. During this time she produced roughly 40,000 Ektachrome colour slides. Her colour work became increasingly more abstract than her earlier black and white photography, as she focused her lens on texture and pattern as well as on found objects, newspapers and graffiti… Huxley-Parlour Gallery promotional material

sources - Wikipedia

links - Huxley-Parlour Gallery

added - 1Sep19

Sally Mann

Sally Mann
(first image,
Ted Orland, 1973)

b: 1951 Lexington, Virginia

Sally Mann gets a mention in the course material, quoting her comments on the difference in light between northern ("crisp and clear") and southern ("layered, complex and mysterious") states of the US (EyV p.80). There are two links, a 2010 interview and the portfolio, Southern Landscapes (link corrected 3Jan19)

Mann's career has consisted of a series of collections and photographic books, one of which, Immediate Family (exhibit 1990, monograph 1992), caused worldwide controversy. The book comprised photographs of her three children, all under 10 at the time, and they were naked in some of the images. Mann was accused of child pornography and exploitation, though never charged. It is reported that she took legal advice before publishing the book (Wikipedia).

Mann has often used old, large-format cameras for her projects, including landscapes shot on 8x10 collodion negatives † in the late 1990s.

In 2006 she suffered a riding accident and during her two-year recovery took ambrotype ‡ self portraits.

Mann is reported as saying,

It's always been my philosophy to try to make art out of the everyday and ordinary … it never occurred to me to leave home to make art.

† glass plates, coated with collodion, dipped in silver nitrate, and exposed while still wet.
‡ a positive variant of the wet plate collodion process which replaced the daguerreotype.

sources - Wikipedia

links - artist's web site

Peter Mansell

Peter Mansell

b: 1958

Peter is another OCA student featured as an example (see also Jodi Taylor). His work is discussed by tutors on a video. He also appears in C&N p.62.

The images (most are are screen grabs from the video) are from an unconventional 8-shot landscape portfolio,l. As a wheelchair user, he seems to be exploring the limiting effect of his condition on his landscape horizons.

After his degree, Peter moved on to a Fine Art MA at Camberwell College of Arts. The GUP Magazine link below is to an interview about his book, Paralysis Unseen.

Mansell also appears in C&N p.62.

sources

links - OCA, Shape Arts, Blurb, GUP

Robert Mapplethorpe

self portrait, 1980

b: 1946 New York: d: 1989 Boston

Mapplethorpe's nudes are discussed in a C&N essay.

Wikipedia states,

an American photographer, known for his sensitive yet blunt treatment of controversial subject-matter in the large-scale, highly stylized black and white medium of photography. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits and still-life images of flowers. His most controversial work is that of the BDSM subculture in the late 1960s and early 1970s of New York City. The homoeroticism of this work fuelled a national debate over the public funding of controversial artwork. Wikipedia

sources - Wikipedia

links - The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

added 20Nov18

Chris Marker

Chris Marker

b: 1921 Neuilly-sur-Seine, France / d: 2012 Paris

Marker is introduced in Part 3 of the EyV course, Traces of Time, for using "stills from a
simple Pentax Spotmatic 35mm film camera to make the classic time-travel film La Jetée (1962)".

After WW2, Marker "Marker began to travel around the world as a journalist and photographer, a vocation he would continue the rest of his life". In the early 1950s he became involved with the Left Bank Film Movement. He made and collaborated on several films throughout the 1950s, but came to fame with La Jetée, described as, "a series of filmed photographs developed as a photomontage of varying pace, with limited narration and sound effects" (Wikipedia).

His stills work is listed as,
Photographic Series: Koreans (1957, printed in 2009), Crush Art (2003–08), "Quelle heure est-elle?" (2004–08), PASSENGERS (2008–10), Staring Back (varying years)
Digital Prints: Breathless (1995, printed 2009), Hiroshima Mon Amour (1995, printed 2009), Owl People (1995, printed 2009), Rin Tin Tin (1995, printed 2009)
Photogravures: After Dürer (2005–07, printed in 2009).

sources - Wikipedia

links - artist's estate web site

László Moholy-Nagy

László Moholy-Nagy

b: 1895 Bácsborsód, Hungary / d: 1946 Chicago

Moholy-Nagy is mentioned in the course material (EyV p.25) as follows,

László Moholy-Nagy was a crucial figure for photography in the Bauhaus, the radical German school of art and design. By the time it closed in 1933, having been successively expelled from the cities of Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, the Bauhaus had made an indelible stamp upon the future development of art, design and photography. Moholy-Nagy encouraged his students to use the new 35mm camera technology together with a high viewpoint perpendicular to the subject to create pictures with a flat, abstract quality. OCA, Expressing your Vision, p.25

The description at the Guggenheim is,

[he] believed in the potential of art as a vehicle for social transformation, working hand in hand with technology for the betterment of humanity. A multifaceted artist, educator, and prolific writer, Moholy-Nagy experimented across mediums, moving fluidly between the fine and applied arts, pursuing his quest to illuminate the interrelatedness of life, art, and technology. Among his radical innovations were his experiments with cameraless photographs (which he dubbed “photograms”); unconventional use of industrial materials in painting and sculpture; experiments with light, transparency, space, and motion across mediums; and his work at the forefront of abstraction. guggenheim.org

sources - Guggenheim, Wikipedia, Atget Photography

links - The Moholy-Nagy Foundation

Viviane Moos

Viviane Moos

b ?

Moos was suggested as a photographer of interest (along with Edward Thompson) by my tutor in feedback on assignment 2, for which I photographed a church, St Stephen Walbrook.

The about page on the artist's web site states,

As an award winning photographer and a world citizen with the ability to create a genuine connection with my clients as well as my subjects, my work is my passion and my passion is telling stories about the world we live in.
Raised in Brazil and Europe and traveling since childhood, I became a photographer so that I could share the way I see the world; using my camera as a communication tool, I allow my heart, my eye and my experience to guide me. vivianemoos.com

The recommended page shows adherents of various religions in their daily lives and at prayer, so as with Edward Thompson, these images concentrate on religious people rather than (as with my assignment ) a religious building.

The images are a mix of, on the one hand, the engaging and atmospheric, exploring religious milieu (fig. 1) , and, on the other hand, more prosaic religious life (fig.2). All the photographs are well executed and the compositions appear carefully considered (in contrast to Thompson's work).

sources - no entry found in wikipedia

links - artist's web site

entry added 17Dec18

Abelardo Morell, see Nichers

Abelardo Morell

b: 1948 in Havana, Cuba

Morell is best known for creating camera obscura in a variety of locations and photographing the results, including the contents of the room he happens to be using. He followed this with a portable camera obscura in a tent.

Before these, he created the memorable Light Bulb, 1991, the first image below.

Morell is a striking example, perhaps the finest, of a photo-artist who has had a single idea that is good enough and strong enough to trade on and make interesting work for his whole career. See also O. Winston Link.

(Please note that this was written before I read page 61 of the EyV course material that states, "you only need one good idea to sustain a whole career in photography".)

sources - Wikipedia

links - artist's web site, aperture.org

Tish Murtha

Tish Murtha

b: Newcastle 1956, d: 2013

This is the text of a blog entry. More details in due course.

Tish Murtha could scarcely be more different [to Alex Prager], conceptually. Born in Newcastle in 1956, she went to Newport (South Wales) in 1976 to study documentary photography at the Art College. She died, suddenly, in 2013 on the day before her 57th birthday.
While in Newport, she photographed a notorious local pub, the New Found Out. As thorough readers of this [site] will know, I was born and brought up in Newport. My father was a governor of the Art College. I have said for years that I wished I had gone there to study photography in the 1970s rather than starting an economics degree. I am a couple of years older than Tish Murtha: my schoolchums and I sometimes called into the New Found Out at the end of an evening drinking in town: I think we favoured their rough cider. It was a dive, used by serious drinkers. I recall entering the toilet once to find a very old prostitute (there were several who plied their trade there) working on one of the regulars. This would have been when we were 17 or 18, so around 1972.
I hadn't thought of any of this for decades - it came to mind when the pub was named in articles about the exhibition in AmPhot and in the RPS Journal. It was a delight to see the photographs from this project that brought it all back. There are several projects in the show [list from the TPI web site Newport Pub (1976/78); Elswick Kids (1978); Juvenile Jazz Bands (1979); Youth Unemployment (1980); London by Night (1983) and Elswick Revisited (1987 – 1991)] . I thought it significant how much more I was affected by the Newport images (nos 1-3 below) than any of the others (nos 4-9), which I found, by comparison, interesting but not engaging.
One other point on the Tish Murtha show which brings us back to Alex Prager, although they are nearly all reportage, a few of the images (nos 7-9) seemed staged.
And she used an Olympus OM1 - my favourite film camera. It was on show with some other artifacts including her Durst enlarger - I should have taken a snap of that too.blog

I returned on 4th Oct to get a snap of the OM1, the Durst enlarger and also got Tish Murtha's student card and her credit agreement with Dixons, High Street, Newport (I remember it well, past Woolworth's on the left) to buy the OM1.

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sources

links - The memorial web site run by Tish's daughter.

Eadweard Muybridge, see Nichers

Eadweard Muybridge

b: 1830 Kingston upon Thames / d: 1904 Kingston upon Thames

Muybridge is introduced in Part 3 of the EyV course, Traces of Time, dealing with the shutter.

He began his professional career by producing large panoramic photographs before moving on to his famous motion studies in the 1870s. These used a series of cameras triggered in rapid succession with a variety of moving subjects, allowing the examination and understanding of, for example, a horse's gait which had never been appreciated before that time.

Wikipedia quotes this from the 2010-11 Tate exhibition,

His influence has forever changed our understanding and interpretation of the world, and can be found in many diverse fields, from Marcel Duchamp's painting Nude Descending a Staircase and countless works by Francis Bacon, to the blockbuster film The Matrix and Philip Glass's opera The Photographer. Wikipedia

The Tate released the muybridgizer app at the time of the exhibition. Regrettably this is no longer available.

sources - Wikipedia

links

Félix Nadar

Self portrait
c. 1860

b: 1820 Paris / d: 1910 Paris

▲ Stamps ▼

Born Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, he was nicknamed Tournadar and later Nadar. He abandoned his medical studies to become a caricaturist and took up photography in the early 1850s. He specialised in portraits but also took the first aerial photographs and was an early experimenter with artificial lighting.

sources - Wikipedia

added 24Nov18

Helmut Newton

Helmut Newton

b: 1920 Berlin / d: 2004 California

One of Peter Stepan's 50 Photographers You Should Know.

He is described in Wikipedia (quoting Jesse McKinley) as,

a German-Australian photographer. He was a "prolific, widely imitated fashion photographer whose provocative, erotically charged black-and-white photos were a mainstay of Vogue and other publications". wikipedia

sources - Wikipedia, Stepan (2008)

links - Helmut Newton Foundation

added - 22Dec18

Ingrid Newton

Ingrid lives and works in Cornwall. A recent project entitled Having a Whale of a Time featured in Issue 39 of fLIP, the journal of London Independent Photographers. She describes the project as follows,

Using my collection of vintage postcards of St Ives and photographs of the same locations taken with my plastic Holga camera, I have created collages of the old and the new, including a snippet of the postcard message. fLIP Issue 39 p. 25

sources

links - artist's web site

Nicéphore Niépce

Nicéphore Niépce, c. 1795

b: 1765 Chalon-sur-Saône, Saône-et-Loire / d: 1833 Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, Saône-et-Loire

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was a French inventor, now usually credited as the inventor of photography and a pioneer in that field. Niépce developed heliography, a technique he used to create the world's oldest surviving product of a photographic process: a print made from a photoengraved printing plate in 1825. In 1826 or 1827, he used a primitive camera to produce the oldest surviving photograph of a real-world scene. The image depicts the view from an upstairs window at Niépce's estate, Le Gras, Burgundy. It is held at the University of Texas.
Among Niépce's other inventions was the Pyréolophore, the world's first internal combustion engine, which he conceived, created, and developed with his older brother Claude.

A second image attributed to Niépce is a still life. This is only available as a reproduction: the original glass plate is believed to have been destroyed at around the turn of C.20th (Wikipedia).

sources - Wikipedia

links - Texas U.

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sources - Wikipedia

links

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