Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/03/23
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]A book I am currently reading is William Mortensen's "The Negative" (1940 edition). It is very interesting technical reading and at least the edition I have shows the entire process, from start to finish, equipment selection to printing. Although my edition of the book was released when a medium-sized camera was still bigger "2-1/4 by 3-1/4 inches," and Leicas were not accepted at all for most types of serious photography, he did admit the possibility that one day miniature (i.e., 35mm) cameras and film could produce great results. It is well written, especially for a photo book, and has the wit that is so lacking in today's Anchell-style books (whose greatest and only joke was "Urinol"...) Mortensen, FYI, was a Hollywood photographer who was very famous for his high-key portraits of actors and actresses in the 1920s and 1930s and his pictorial portraits later. He found himself marginalized in the 1930s, when things became more prudish. After the war, a somewhat bitter man, he opened a photo school and began to teach photographers (on the GI Bill) how to take the more cheese-cake glamour pictures of women (he criticizes there harshly, and his pictures, from an artistic standpoint, are orders of magnitude better than anything from the last 30 years). Mortensen was really talented, blending photography, oil painting (both the lighting and sometimes even the art through paper negatives), and even photocompositing (seventy years before Photoshop made it practical). Definitely someone to check out. You can see a lot of his shots in the Eastman Collection web site. Cheers - ------------ Dante Stella http://www.dantestella.com - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html