[Leica] RIP Jim Marshall

[passaro.vince at gmail.com (Vince Passaro)]

All the preceding was in reaction to that very photo just mentioned, the
Janis Joplin with pint of Southern Comfort -- who I was just listening to
last night and was so moved by I actually went on to Facebook which I never
do anymore and put up a remark about how unearthly and miraculous her
singing was. And today here she is in that great photograph, so young, so
completely young. To hear her sing you'd think she was a million years old,
or more -- as old as the planets.

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 10:05 PM, Vince Passaro <passaro.vince at 
gmail.com>wrote:

> Looking at all the Jim Marshall pics on the Times site and on The Online
> Photographer (the two by the way are running reversed versions of the Miles
> Davis pic and something tells me it's the Times, not the OP, that's got it
> wrong) I started thinking about great portrait photography; of course I
> thought of it in terms of how I cannot do it; and it struck me that what I
> admire so much about it and what makes it so hard for me to do is that the
> space between the camera and the subject is clear; that great portraitists
> are interested in what's there whereas my training, as a writer, is to be
> interested in how I'm reacting to what's there, seeing it, constituting it
> (or re-constituting it) in language. I can meet people, exchange
> pleasantries, and be (essentially in secret) watching them, assessing them,
> memorizing them, so that I can go home and render them not as they ARE or
> even remarkably closely to how THEY APPEAR TO BE but rather as I have seen
> them and reshaped them. I do this by writing words down to evoke certain
> images and certain kinds of understandings. But it's an exceedingly low-res
> portrait: the writer leaves room for the reader to fill in with his or her
> own imaginative vision so that the reader is bonded to the text.  When I go
> to take a picture of someone I am too aware of myself there with the 
> camera;
> I feel clumsy or embarrassed or pushy or trivial or comical or SOMETHING
> that's important to me: and I feel as if I should be DOING something to 
> make
> that person become that person, whereas of course what I need to do is be
> invisible.  But how I feel about me in the scene still matters. So the 
> space
> is never clear, the light is obscured, because in the end all the great
> portraitists from Paul Strand or Walker Evans or even that French Cote
> d'Azure guy who's always taking slightly out of focus pictures of flappers
> climbing on summer rocks -- what was his name? -- 1920s... or Man Ray for
> that matter, so stylized: they all have a style, certainly, but the space
> between the lens and the subject is left clear of opinion as it were. Guys
> like Irving Penn and Avedon  --- LARTIGUE is the French dude's name, it 
> just
> came back to me -- Penn and Avedon can be egomaniacs and probably were but
> not while the camera was at their eye.
>
> But since I cannot do it my speculations on what it requires could be
> entirely wrong. Only practice confirms truth, really.
>
> On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 9:15 PM, EPL <manolito at videotron.ca> wrote:
>
>> In 1999, Jim Marshall and I corresponded a little and then talked by phone
>> a
>> few times about Leica gear. Jim -- like me -- was a certified gearhead.
>> Yes,
>> he preferred the M4 (his were modified) above all other Ms.
>>
>> But more important: he took some of my favourite photos. Janis Joplin with
>> the Southern Comfort mickey is one.
>>
>> Lucky man, he was, at a time when his nation was in turmoil, he saw the
>> best
>> of it.
>>
>> Emanuel
>>
>>
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>>
>
>