Did we really look like that in the 70’s?

Thank you Rotating Corpse. This picture comes from a fantastically daggy Hallmark book from 1976 called “Please Don’t Promise Me Forever” which Brittany at Rotating Corpse has scanned. Every page delivers a gem of wonderful picture and cringe-making verse.

Rotating Corpses is a collaborative site which features pictures and other artwork from a huge variety of sources. A place to idly browse for the odd, fascinating and the strangely pointless.

Unfortunately, their pages are not well indexed and their is a fair degree of pot luck with what you find. I do like this though from “The Curious Sofa” by Ogdred Weary (in fact Edward Gorey) some pages of which have been scanned for our pleasure.

It was another time

In response to a challenge from a dedicated commenter, I am posting some of my old photos.

Two from Sydney 1971

  

Two from the Melbourne Moratorium march as 1971

And one from a Led Zeppelin Concert also in 1971

Rennie Ellis

If it is summer holidays it must be time for photographic exhibitions. This time last year I wrote about an exhibition of photographs of August Sander at the Gallery of New South Wales. This year it is an exhibition of photographs by celebrated Australian photographer Rennie Ellis at the National Gallery of Victoria entitled No Standing Only Dancing

Some of Ellis’s wonderful documentary photographs set off some strong memories for me, particularly those from the early 1970’s. He took photographs at events and locations which exactly mirror one’s which I also took – Melbourne Moratorium of 1971, Hippies and Hare Krishnas in Kings Cross and others. Looking at mine, it is enough of a reminder of why he was a celebrated photographer and I was not!

  

Do Play with Your Food

These are from a Russian website called Snowfall. I can’t find any hint as to who is the creator of these wonderful photos (or any other of the photographs on the site). They are too good not to post.

Jazz in B&W

Watching, and more importantly listening, to the wonderful jazz short Jammin’ The Blues I was struck by how beautifully jazz and black and white photography go together. This1944 film is particularly stylish to look at on top of the sensational jam session it records. It turns out that the film was directed by the Albanian born American photographer Gjon Mili. Mili spent most of his career as a photographer for Life magazine, including taking many cover shots.

Mili was an innovator and had a great ability to capture movement, sometimes enhanced by multiple exposures – a technique he also used in Jammin’ The Blues. The film, which features Lester Young, begins on a top view of Young’s hat. A similar image to one used a few years later by Herman Leonard in his 1948 photograph of Lester Young’s hat.

I have a number of Herman Leonard’s photographs on my living room wall. Deep blacks, stark shadows, whips of smoke. They fill the room with music – complex , moody jazz.

To me, Herman Leonard is the great jazz photographer. His pictures are all atmosphere and music and of course could only be seen in black and white.

Compare those photographs of Dizzy, Duke and Billie with the better-known but more formal photographs by William Gottlieb.

No contest.

Incidentally, although many thousands of Leonard’s photographs were lost in Hurricane Katrina, fortunately for fans of these wonderful photographs, the negatives were saved.

People of the Twentieth Century

The Art Gallery of New South Wales is currently showing a large retrospective exhibition of the work of Sidney Nolan, whose long career encompassed many styles and techniques and produced a great deal more than his best-known Ned Kelly painting. The exhibition does not disappoint, but for me it was overshadowed by another smaller, less well-publicised exhibition – that of German photographer August Sander on loan from the J Paul Getty Museum, entitled Extraordinary Images of Ordinary People.

August Sander was one of a number of photographers in the early 20th century who used the camera to record the diversity of human life. As he wrote “We know that people are formed by the light and air, by their inherited traits, and their actions. We can tell from appearance the work someone does or does not do; we can read in his face whether he is happy or troubled,”

For about 25 years, Sander photographed the people living in and around the area of Cologne where he lived. His aim was to document the physiognomy and body-language of all walks of life, in a monumental series entitled – People of the Twentieth Century. From 1909 until 1934 when the Nazis banned his portraits and he moved to taking architectural and nature pictures, he took many thousands of photographs of farmers, workers, officials and families. The genius of Sander was his ability to allow his subjects to speak for themselves. His photograph of a man in Nazi uniform can sit side by side with a portrait of a Socialist leader Paul Frölich with little indication of Sander’s own political view.

Sanders photographs were published in various books including Face of Our Time and his work appeared in The Family of Man.

Although the Nazis and later a fire destroyed many of his negatives and photographic plates, many thousands of his pictures survive. The major collection of his work can be found at the August Sander Archiv in the Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung, Cologne.

But is it art?

A few interesting visual sites have come my way recently thanks to the random wanderings created by using Stumbleupon.

Particular favorites include this alphabet from typography student, Lisa Rienermann from the University of Duisberg-Essen (translated by Google translation as Duisberg Meal). Some of these letters have been Photoshopped, but most are images of the sky between buildings as she found them. Clever stuff. But is it art?

Or this one? The first image is one that I have removed the shadow from the background. The second is as it was intended by the artists who produced it – Tim Nobel and Sue Webster. That website asks the question itself “is it art?”

Not art:

Art?:

Coolidge’s ‘A Friend in Need’ copied in the dust of a car windscreen by an unnamed artist (?)

These also uncredited hand art examples.

Let’s not leave sculpture out. Again sculptor uncredited.

There is an enormous amount of creative energy out there in the world. Long may it continue – art or not.

Wolfgang Sievers

Like many others I was familiar with this photograph entitled Gears for Mining Industry 1967, an iconic Australian industrial record. What I didn’t realise was how prolific the photographer was, nor much about his life and politics. Wolfgang Sievers who was born in Berlin but lived in Australia from1938 has just died at the age of 93. He spent his life recording industrial and architectural scenes, often employed by the companies whose works he photographed. There are tens of thousands of Sievers photographs in the Digital Collection of the National Library of Australia. They cover a huge range from mining, office building, scientific processes, schools and both light and heavy industries. Most are in black and White, though he was also a very fine colour photographer.

In the 19050’s he was hired by the Australian Government to help change the image of Australia from rural and agricultural to industrial and manufacturing .

Unexpectedly, as well as his many industrial and architectural pictures there are also many lovely people pictures, including some from Colombia.

One of the companies who employed Sievers was the now defunct Vickers Ruwolt (sited at what is now my local shopping centre!). A former employee of that company maintains a website that records the company’s history. The site features Wolfgang Sievers photographs and contains this quote about him – “Often controversial, his strong beliefs, intolerance of racism and increasing concern at the destructive practices of capitalism also led him to question the morality behind many corporate entities, in many cases his clients.”

Wolfgang Sievers donated $1 million worth of photographs to raise money for justice and humanitarian causes and was strongly opposed to the Australian Government’s treatment of asylum seekers.

An interesting man.

Rock photos

Rock music fans in Melbourne in the 1960s were well served by local bands. Dance venues always had live bands (or half-live if you count Tony Barber and tape-recorded backings), record shop appearances were reasonably frequent and there were live concerts at universities every week. What we didn’t have was access to the bands and artists from the rest of the world. Remember that this was before rock videos became ubiquitous and no specialist TV show to feature visiting bands. Except for a few bands brave enough to travel the vast distance to Australia, we had to largely depend on records and the radio to keep up with music from the UK and USA (forget the rest of the world, they didn’t count. I’m talking pre-ABBA afterall). The concerts were a big deal, even if they were held in that huge uncomfortable barn called Festival Hall. And the Stadium in Sydney wasn’t any better. They were great events – The Who and The Yardbirds stand out in my memory particularly.

There were occasional snippets from overseas that added a little joy. A friend used to send the New Musical Express from London, the ads in which made me incredible jealous. UK and US television variety shows sometimes featured bands and every now and then an Australian TV show included a visiting artist or band. Thankfully ‘Go-Set’ magazine had stories and pictures from overseas to keep the enthusiast informed.

With so little exposure to the world’s best music, it is no wonder that D A Pennibaker’s film of the Monterey Pop Festival – Monterey Pop made such a strong impression on me. I saw it several times when it came out and although the line-up of acts was incredible and included many of my favorite bands, the one that stands out in my memory is Janis Joplin.

How extraordinary then to discover Colin Beard 40 years later in a market in Maleny in the Glasshouse Mountains. Colin is a photographer, now taking beautiful nature pictures, but in the 60’s was one of the founders and the photographer for the aforementioned ‘Go-Set’. Colin, with writer Lily Brett spent several months travelling to the UK and the USA including the Monterey Pop Festival, returning stories from both places. Colin’s wonderful photographs from there were on show last year at the Nikon Gallery in Sydney and can also be seen online.

I bought a copy of the photo of Janis Joplin at the top of this page and it now sits on the wall above my computer. How wonderfully entangled to look at the clip from Monterey Pop and see Colin Beard in the reverse-angle shots, standing at the front of the stage taking the photo that is in front of me here.

Incidentally, a great resource for information about Australian music is the almanac section of Milesago – though they need a better search engine. The one they have does not work, but the pages themselves make a good nostalgic read and you can always use your browser’s search facility to search each year’s entry.

Photos That Changed The World

In amongst the interesting collection of photographs and videos on the Neatorama website is one which shows 13 photos that changed the world (originally from Mental Floss). This selection raises similar questions to those posed by the 100 greatest songs of all time (see my earlier post on the subject). Although you’d be hard pressed to question the inclusion of any of the pictures as important photographs, there is a question about whether they are famous photographs rather than necessarily history-making ones.

I don’t doubt that Dorothea Lange’s photographs of the Great Depression raised the public’s consciousness of the hardships that many were going through, but I don’t know that Arthur Sasse’s photograph of Einstein did anything to actually change history. Neatorama asks the same question but suggests that the Einstein photograph is there because it humanises science. I don’t think that justifies its inclusion.

I am sure that there are many other photos that could be included. Comments on Neatorama offer the following

For Australians, one poster to Neatorama suggests –

There are many others that I would include in a longer list – the Kent State University shooting, Neil Armstrong on the moon or Yuri Gagarin in Vostok I, The World Trade Centre attack etc. My list would be more political than Neatorama’s. Clearly, everyone has their favourites.

By chance, I have just looked again at the book of the famous 1955 photographic exhibition – Family of Man.

I realise that many of the pictures in the book are very familiar and have lived with me since my childhood. Not just the memory of the pictures themselves but also of the eye-opening images of a world that I didn’t know anything about. An undoubted proof of the power of the photograph.