Tossed Cats, and the Quietest Sound in the Universe
Or: Dispatches #02
Two weeks past this very afternoon, I flew back to Warsaw from a short trip to Scotland. Marta and I took a few days' drive to the Cairngorms then across to the Isle of Skye before returning back to Airdrie, a base for some Glasgow and Edinburgh city life.
In the Cairngorms, we stayed at the Balsporran Bed and Breakfast. This may be Marta's favourite place on our long, narrow land - the plant-based breakfast, a particular pleasure. I can't recommend it more highly, though book early to avoid disappointment, as they say. It’s a popular spot - and rightly so.
My photos, though developed, aren’t processed yet. Still, we first stayed there in February last year and the photo above is from that trip, from the window of our room. Not bad, eh?
Let’s get started…
What's been happening this month
My start in photography coincided with the year James Nachtwey received the TED Fellowship award. Watching his TED talk had a profound and lasting effect on me. This past Sunday, he appeared with Anderson Cooper on CBS' 60 Minutes.
Having been named Master of Photography at this year's Photo London, Martin Parr is interviewed in the Guardian and shows some recent work.
A post-doctorate roboticist and photographer from Cornell has combined a Leica M2 with a Raspberry Pi camera module and created his own digital MPi. It is very cool though does have a crop factor of 5x! I briefly considered it before thinking... "nope!"
When they're loud, they're thunderous, and when they're quiet, they are in danger of tripping the emergency dead air system on BBC radio, however, it turns out Mogwai aren't quite the quietest sound in the universe.
This one isn't news, as such, but I've been trying to find a way to thread it into one of my emails for a while now. Here is as good a place as any... Robert Frank's Elevator Girl sees herself years later.
Recommendations
Photographer
Philippe Halsman had an incredibly bleak start to his adult life. At 22 years old, he was convicted of murdering his father and spent 2 years in prison. There was more than a whiff of antisemitism in his conviction and he was eventually pardoned by the president of Austria. After moving to France, working for Vogue, and then fleeing Europe for the US during the second world war, he became one of the world's most acclaimed portrait photographers. It was, however, his close collaboration with Salvador Dalí that drew me first to him, and his work with the Spanish surrealist is still captivating to this day.
Book
This last month has been a book-heavy few weeks as I continue to study and research for school. My focus for the last few days has been on portrait photographers and I've read about Julia Margaret Cameron, Nadar, Arnold Newman, Yousef Karsh, Richard Avedon, and others. An intriguing trend seems to be that, very helpfully, many have a book letting the reader behind the scenes of the photographer at work. It was Philippe Halsman's book Halsman At Work that I found to be a particular treat.
Online
And that is a perfect segue to the next recommendation for this month. In my research for school, I've started adding archive.org searches to my regular diet. Book after book can be found digitised and available through Open Library, and all that's needed is an email address. I feel I may be very late to this party but Open Library is a game-changer for an ageing mature student.
Television
It may just be my false impression, however, compared to Netflix, HBO, Disney, and others, Apple TV+ seems to have grown steadily over time, throwing less at the wall to see what sticks, and taking more time over some big swings. Foundation was superb, Slow Horses tremendous, and though, again, I was late to the party, I love Ted Lasso (and the recent episode's use of Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel was beautiful). Apple's latest dystopian sci-fi drama, Silo - based on books by Hugh Howey - is exceptional. Having never read the series, I have no idea where it is going so, I'm now living Friday to Friday for the next instalment.
Music
Scanning countless rolls of film recently, in an unfeasible, quixotic attempt to clear the backlog, I switched on my Apple Music radio. Several songs, and a few skips, down the playlist and Stuart Murdoch’s singing to me of Judy and her equine dreaming. Having missed this album terribly, I played Belle and Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister from back to front, and again, then dug out Pitchfork's documentary of the making of the album which in itself is a recommendation.
And finally…
For the 6th issue of the newsletter, I had planned to include a readers' survey to get some idea of what readers would like more of, less of, etc. Time got the better of me, so I've set a new milestone before I do something like that, though it will happen sometime before the end of 2023, I'm sure.
For this month's And Finally... question though, I want to ask instead for your recommendations. Recommend me a contemporary portrait photographer I might enjoy. Let me know in the comments, and look out for Issue 7 of Photos, mostly coming on 31st May.
If you’ve enjoyed this recommendations mail, I’d be very grateful if you could subscribe, share, and recommend it to any street photography-loving friends.
This newsletter is free to read, however, I've recently left corporate life and returned to school, so if you like what I do, please consider buying me a roll of film. You can do so by clicking here, or by aiming your camera at the QR code below.
I'm partial to some of that Tri-X 400 if you're asking. Thank you!
Love that photo by Philippe Halsman. My folks live close the Dalí museum in Florida. I don't know how many times I've been, but I try to go whenever I have the opportunity.