Cunningham had a photographic career that spanned most of the twentieth century. She worked continuously from her college years and her postgraduate studies in Dresden, to her early career as a successful studio portrait photographer in Seattle, through her children’s youth and her participation in Group f/64, all the way into the decades after her divorce. At the ripe old age of 92, still living and working independently in her modest home in San Francisco, she embarked on one more photo project: creating portraits of other old people. She died at age 93, and After Ninety was published posthumously in 1976. But she had a hand in selecting the images and composing the captions.

While there are a few images in the collection from earlier in her career, including three of her parents, Cunningham took most of the photos after turning ninety herself, when every subject reflected to her how she would have appeared to anyone who did not know of her own experienced sense of youth and vigor. Blessed with longevity and health inherited from her family (her parents and sisters, like her, lived into their late eighties or beyond) and accustomed to a simple and hardworking life, she didn’t feel her age. In her introduction to After Ninety, Margaretta Mitchell writes, “The Imogen Cunningham reflected in the eyes and remembrances of her ever widening circle of friends was not an old person. An old person – in the view of so many in our society, including Imogen herself – was alone, lonely, dependent, passive, and dull. Since in no way did she want to be that kind of person, she could not think of herself as old – even if she looked it.”

Cunningham may have shared society’s stereotypes of senescence, but she set those aside for her After Ninety project, photographing each subject as an individual and rarely extrapolating any person into a symbol of old age. “For Imogen,” Mitchell writes, “it was important that she photograph the old people for After Ninety to learn something…This final project is a humble one, completely in keeping with the direction of her lifelong creative interest in the particular, in the human core of a person, and it reflects her acceptance of her own aging…There is just courage, courage to look through the lens and see herself mirrored in others, always looking with a childlike curiosity, learning from another’s reality ways to be strong, active, interesting, and useful.” In her subjects, then, Cunningham saw some like-minded people who were determined to live full and active lives for as long as they could, and others who despaired when they weakened and were consigned to long term care.

What the photos have in common is Cunningham’s lifelong honesty, which she expressed both verbally and photographically. She lights and prints her images beautifully, but makes no effort to conceal the effects of age on her subjects’ bodies and characters. All the images are compassionate but frank portraits. Her captions are also blunt and sometimes snarky. She included two images from a session of photos of her ex-husband, Roi Partridge, noting on one, “the one he liked the least was with the cow’s skull, so I decided to include it.” She gave each subject a print of the image she made, and one chemistry professor sent her in return his article on the viscosity of liquids, to which her response was, “It’s wonderful, but what do I care about the viscosity of liquids?” (All the more ironic because she majored in chemistry!)

Here in this article I’ve selected a group of images from the collection that display Cunningham’s photographic skill along with her wit and her fascination with the personalities of her subjects.  

Martha Ideler

Cunningham’s caption for this striking photo reads, “She was a famous pianist, and she’s ninety-some. She had just undergone an operation for cancer, and she refused further treatment. She said, ‘I might as well die when I’m supposed to,’ and I said, ‘You’re right.’” Musician Martha Ideler gazes straight into the camera (and at Imogen) with her head held high, more certain than most of the other subjects of the imminence of her death.

The three ages of woman, on Fillmore Street

This is apparently an anonymous street portrait, unlike most of the images in this collection, and captures what seems to be the coincidence in the image of an old woman in the forefront, with a younger woman and a little girl over her shoulder. The subject appears to be unrelated to and perhaps even unaware of the two figures in the background, but Cunningham links them together to speak in a fleeting moment about the older woman’s past and the younger people’s future.

Young Lym Wong

This picture intrigues me because of its mix of Eastern and Western elements. Young Lym Wong sits in her kitchen knitting, looking just ready to rise and prepare a meal for her photographer/guest. The light subtly highlights the cross and jade bangle she wears. Cunningham describes the domestic scene: “She was knitting a red sweater for her granddaughter because red is good luck to the Chinese. I stayed for a Chinese lunch, but it was too elaborate.”

Irene “Bobby” Libarry and Dr. Eleanor Bancroft

I’m cheating here a bit and counting these two as one photo, because these images are among several interesting juxtapositions in Cunningham’s collection. The image on the left is of a woman who had spent her life in a carnival and whose upper body is covered in tattoos – Cunningham’s caption says, “It looks like lace, doesn’t it?” On the right is an image of Dr. Bancroft, whom Cunningham describes as “a physician in a women’s college and very religious.” Actual lace covers her hair and wrists, and in her hands, folded in prayer, she holds a rosary. Dr. Bancroft, photographed in 1951, is in turn juxtaposed with several successive images of aging nuns photographed in a convent in the 1970s, most wearing crosses and the last, very old, bent in her wheelchair over her rosary. Her attitude of prayer in extreme advanced age, though less deliberate than that of Dr. Bancroft, is no less sincere.

Cunningham was not religious herself (asked on her deathbed by a preacher what her religion was, she replied, “Haven’t chosen one yet”), but these images show her respect for the religious women she photographed, and an equal amount of respect, perhaps even reverence, for the tattooed woman from the carnival.

My father after ninety

Cunningham included two photographs of her father and one of her parents together. The last image of her father, and of the entire book, shows her father in profile, facing a bright and focused source of light, looking almost patriarchal with his long white beard in which every hair is illuminated. Cunningham was close to her father, a freethinking autodidact who formed her mind and character from childhood, and her photos show the love and respect she had for him in his old age. It was the energy, independence, curiosity, and compassion he passed on to her that made her the photographer who could bring After Ninety to life.

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At American Moments, a 2015 exhibit of photographs at the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., I saw one of her images and was intrigued by her depiction of the landscape with which I’m so familiar, defined more by form and tone than flamboyant color or dramatic light. I soon ordered her book Landscapes and became engrossed in her photography as well as her story. Randlett voices a Northwestern sense of place in the way that the South is portrayed by William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor in literature and Sally Mann with photography. She captures the mood of her native environment with remarkable attention to detail, while at the same time distilling it to its minimalist, abstract forms.

Born Mary Willis in 1924, she was raised in Seattle but spent a great deal of time outside the city, especially in the summers, visiting her grandparents’ summer home on Bainbridge Island and photographing the scenery of the San Juan Islands with her box camera, a birthday gift when she turned ten, and in high school with a 620 folding camera.

She lost a year of high school due to an eye infection and hadn’t even graduated when she tagged along with her sister to Whitman College in eastern Washington. There she engaged in the usual college shenanigans and learned the ins and outs of the hobby that became her lifelong vocation. Frances McCue in her forward to Randlett’s Portraits describes the profession as “part scientist and part artist,” which I think is what has drawn me (a humanities major and daughter and granddaughter of engineers) to photography; Imogen Cunningham, another Northwest native, likewise learned photography from a scientific perspective as a chemistry major at the University of Washington a generation earlier.

After college, Randlett apprenticed with portrait photographers in Seattle and took out a loan to buy a Rolleiflex, soon striking out on her own as a freelancer and continuing to photograph after she married and had children. Her mother, a museum curator, facilitated introductions to local artists, and her photographs of poet Theodore Roethke shortly before his death launched her into prominence. The artists she photographed were part of a loosely affiliated group who became known in the 1950s as the Northwest School, representing the nexus of the region’s geography and climate – mountains, rivers, and pebbly beaches, lit through an atmospheric softbox of mist and fog – with the influences of Asian art and abstract expressionism.

Mary Randlett knew and photographed local artists like Morris Graves and Guy Anderson, along with those such as Jacob Lawrence who passed through the region’s intellectual center of gravity at the University of Washington. While she took commissions for photographs of people, architecture and public art, Randlett was at heart a landscape photographer, and her portraits consciously place her subjects in their environments – their studios, homes, and gardens, or the landscapes that inspired their work. Throughout her life (she photographed until not long before her death in 2019) she shot black-and-white film and made her own darkroom prints, eschewing color for the infinite range of tones she saw in the Northwest’s subdued light.

The images in this article are drawn from two published collections of Randlet’s photographs, Mary Randlett: Portraits and Mary Randlett: Landscapes, both available from the University of Washington Press and quite affordable either new or used.

Deception Pass, 1972

This is my favorite Randlett photo, and possibly my favorite photograph ever.  Deception Pass is a narrow strait connecting the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Skagit Bay; it owes its name to Captain George Vancouver’s expedition, which took several days to determine that it divided Whidbey Island, which they had believed to be a peninsula, from Fidalgo Island and the rest of the eastern Puget Sound land mass. It’s a beautiful place to visit, where a dramatic bridge spans the treacherous waters below. Here Randlett has captured one of infinite possible combinations of swirls and eddies thrown into relief by angular sunlight; only a singular tree clinging to a cliffside grounds the viewer in a specific place.

Richard Gilkey, c. 1997

Randlett’s portrait of artist Richard Gilkey places him on the porch of his home in the Skagit Valley north of Seattle, with the lines of the railing, columns, and logpile drawing the viewer’s eye to Gilkey in repose with a mug of coffee, and to the foggy landscape of the slough beyond. Gilkey himself had roots about as deep as Northwestern roots get, himself the descendant of Skagit Valley bridge-tenders and dike-builders, and Randlett’s photograph captures within his environment the artist who himself painted the Valley’s moody sloughs.

Swan in Falling Snow, December 1984

This image showcases Randlett’s ability to weave minute details in landscapes into a unified composition captured at the perfect moment. Two snowy shorelines frame an icy lake broken by a dark, almost script-like crack that leads the eye to a swan whose head is slightly turned toward the negative space behind it. Each element of the image unites into a composition that is simple but nonetheless more than the sum of its parts. Randlett has a number of images that similarly capture little details like the patterns in water, ice, and sand or the motion of an animal through its habitat.

Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence and Jacob Lawrence

I love this image for the strength of the partnership and mutual respect it captures between the two artists, who were married nearly sixty years and moved from Harlem to Seattle when Jacob began teaching at the University of Washington. Frances McCue quotes Jacob Lawrence’s words showing his regard for his wife: “She’s a person whom I respect. She criticizes my work. You know, there are things an artist will do that he’s unaware of and which may not be quite right. And you have a person around whom you respect, who sort of pulls you up sometimes and points this out to you.” Randlett’s posing captures their relationship along with their independent characters, united as “kindred spirits” but each capable artists in their own right.

Rockport, Skagit River, January 1982

I struggled to select a fifth picture from the subtle but dazzling landscapes of mountains peeking from mist and sloughs lit by fleeting sunbreaks. So I settled on a photo of mud and melting snow. It’s not a striking image at first, but Ted d’Arms, who wrote the introduction to Mary Randlett’s Landscapes, describes what makes it special: “This is an ordinary winter day for Northwest sportsmen and it is as familiar as an old sopping-wet wool glove. The photographer has stripped away all of the normal means of seducing a viewer into ‘liking’ the place. It is not seductive but it is utterly convincing … The viewer becomes hypnotized by the barely definable elements that contribute to such an accurate description of place.”

My last two visits to Seattle were in the winter, and I spent hours walking among forests and marshes like these. The drizzle and clouds broke once the morning after a snowfall, when the late-rising sun backlit trees and shone on ephemeral patches of white. The Northwest, outside its brief bright summers, is melancholy but reveals a quiet beauty to those who look for it, and this photo epitomizes the out-of-season, damp, cool Northwestern landscape that Randlett knew, loved and captured so well.

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Against this backdrop many Japanese photographers would emerge to document the profound changes in their nation with bare, raw realism. Others pushed the boundaries of long held societal norms and taboos.

I’ve taken on the daunting task of picking just five photographers from this long period. These five Shōwa era masters of light exemplify the blistering pace of life that was challenging the very foundations of the nation. They propelled Japanese photography down new pathways.

Daido Moriyama (1938-    )

For me, photography is not a means by which to create beautiful art, but a unique way of encountering genuine reality. – Daido Moriyama

After serving as an assistant to the influential photographer, Eikoh Hosoe, Daido Moriyama would seek to interpret reality with a camera in his own distinctive style. Now referred to as the Godfather of Japanese street photography, Daido Moriyama’s work is characterized by dark, gritty, moody, images that attack traditional conventions of composition, focus and form. Uncompromisingly unpolished and raw, his style was best showcased in his book, Farewell Photography (Sashin yo Sayonara) published in 1972.  His photographs mirrored his personal desire to break free from the confines of a highly structured society and commercial photography.

Still active, he has gone on to produce well over one hundred photography books and has had gallery showings all over the world. He has made the Shibuya district of Tokyo the primary location for his street photography, and his work has influenced a generation of street photographers worldwide.

Nobuyoshi Araki (1940-)

Only artist without talent try to shock people. – Nobuyoshi Arak

A career that has spanned more than five decades, Nobuyoshi Araki, is one of Japan’s (and the world’s) most prolific photographers – he has produced over five hundred photography books. To some, he is a genius, to others a pariah. A complex and nuanced artist, his portfolio includes eroticism, still lifes, landscapes, celebrity portraits and intimate voyeuristic pictures of his personal life.

Controversial and provocative, his erotic depictions of bound women featuring the form of Japanese rope binding called kinbaku-bi has been labeled as misogynistic and pornographic by some critiques. While others hail it as cutting-edge fine art.

Themes of life and death permeate much of his work. Sentimental Journey and later Sentimental Journey/Winter Journey is perhaps his most poignant and celebrated series of images. He visually chronicles his honeymoon, marriage, and the subsequent death from ovarian cancer of his wife, Yoko. Sentimental Journey exemplifies the duality of the man and his work.

Toyoko Tokiwa  (1930 – )

Toyoko Tokiwa picked up a camera at a time when men dominated photography in a highly patriarchal society. Her early subject matter focused on the lives of the prostitutes in the red-light district, and their interactions with the American military in Yokohama. 

Driven partially by her disdain for prostitution and her initial animosity towards the US military because of the loss of her father in an American bombing raid, her candid pictures in her photography book Dangerous Fruitless Flowers (Kiken na Adabana) captures the sorrow and joy of these marginalized women.

Her lens also documented the scores of women joining the workforce to help reshape Japan. Her camera was a sympathetic instrument used to give testament to the lives of numerous Japanese women suddenly thrust into finding their place in post-war Japan.  

Ken Domon (1909 – 1990)

If it is not realistic, it is not photography. – Ken Domon

Ken Domon is called the master of Japanese realism. He is widely known for his unflinching photographs of the survivors of Hiroshima which he documented twelve years after the bomb was dropped. For many Japanese, his jarring photos of the deformities, burns and mangled bodies due to the atomic bomb blast and the aftereffects of radiation were too unsettling. He was heavily criticized in many corners of the country at the time. However, he was not a detached observer of the subjects of his camera, stating in an interview that the plight of many of his subjects would bring him to tears.

A series of strokes would eventually confine him to a wheelchair and his photography ventured more into a spiritual and a cultural direction. He would spend the remainder of his life photographing Buddhist temples and statues around his cherished land . This culminated in his major work of several decades entitled, Old Temple Pilgrimage ( Koji junrei) 

He would donate all 70,000 pieces of his life’s work to his hometown of Sakata in Yamagata prefecture. There, in 1983, a museum was established and dedicated solely to him and his photography.

Akira Sato (1930 – 2002)

While a student of Economics at Yokohama National University, Sato would become obsessed with the images of Western fashion and photographic magazines. Soon after graduation, he became a freelance photographer. Within a few years, he would specialize in fashion photography. In time, he became one of Japan’s most influential fashion photographers of the 1960s and ’70s. His photos were often published in SO-EN, Japan’s oldest and leading women’s fashion magazine.

His style is described as sophisticated and avant-garde, known for his edgy and stylistic close up black and white portraits of models. He blended fashion, portraiture, East and West into his own distinctive look. He would later utilize color, photographing models during his visits to Europe. His most notable collection of work is entitled, Woman, published in 1971.

Throughout the Shōwa period, Japan was a nation in transition. It was trying to hold to its long-held traditions while attempting to purge painful memories of its past, all while forging ahead to an uncertain future. These photographers (and many more not listed here) were witness to their country’s most tumultuous history. In this chaotic cauldron of creativity they would document, experiment and push the frontiers of photography, adding their own unique perspectives. They have gone on to influence countless photographers in their native land and now the rest of the world.

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Still, I’ve always felt a weird pressure to distinguish myself as one or the other, a photographer or a musician, usually to confused family or concerned friends or over-it college career counselors. After studying both arts and practicing both for much of my life, I simply can’t imagine one without the other. Being a good photographer makes me a better musician and vice versa.

When I heard about musician/photographer Milt Hinton, I was relieved. For the first time I’d found a shining example of success in this duality that I wasn’t sure was possible. The similarities were uncanny – not only was Milt Hinton a musician and a photographer, but he was a bassist just like myself. His career as one of the world’s premier big band bassists and studio double bassists afforded him an unusually intimate perspective on some of the most famous musicians of his day, as well as a look at life as a working musician.

Looking over Milt Hinton’s photos as somebody who shares his profession has been a life-affirming experience. Though the subjects are of course different, the scenes are startlingly familiar – stressed out bandleaders in the recording studio, errant musicians found sleeping in a train car, guerilla recording sessions in a hotel room. Normally I’d break off here and highlight five of my favorite photos of his, but to do so wouldn’t do justice to the importance of his photography. Instead, here are a few lessons I’ve learned from Milt Hinton about both photography and music, and their relationship to each other.

Timing Is Everything

Milt “The Judge” Hinton is often referred to as the “dean of jazz bassists.” Hinton basically codified what it means to be a “sideman,” a role in a band in which a musician must throw away their ego and act as a foundational support for the music. Sidemen provide this support primarily through self-control, having a good ear, and an even better sense of time. Like Duke Ellington said, it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, and sidemen are responsible for providing swing. Judging by the sheer length of his career, his client list, and the raw sound of his music, Milt Hinton could swing the hell of out a band.

It’s not a stretch to imagine that this skill translated well to photography. Jazz critic Dan Morgenstern wrote, “Even the earliest photos… demonstrate [Milt Hinton’s] talent for composition within the frame, his skills as an observer, and his perfect sense of timing — the latter a gift surely akin to his mastery of jazz rhythm.” Just like playing that single note at the right time that fits the chord, harmonizes with the rest of the instruments, and gives the song meaning, so too do photographers click their shutters at the brief moment their subjects line themselves up, the background settles, and the scene achieves its one split-second of consummate poetry. In music, this phenomenon is called swing, taste, and pocket. In photography, this has famously been called “The Decisive Moment.”

Of the many decisive moments that Milt Hinton captured, the one photo that stands out to me is a photo of singer, bandleader, and Hinton’s longtime boss, Cab Calloway. Charisma and energy defined Cab’s career and persona, and the entire swing era of jazz. This particular photo of Cab shows that energy, but in a more casual setting. Here, he seems to have given a little boy a trombone to play on a stoop, while the others kids and their guardian look on in amazement. Cab’s got a massive suit on along with his signature mile-wide smile and looks back at everyone else, delighted. 

Hinton manages to capture perfectly the joy Cab brought to everyone, as well as his unique propensity to let others shine, both in his band and in life. The perfection in Hinton’s craft shows when we look at the eyelines, the subject placement, even the facial expressions. Call it whatever you want – perfect timing, pocket, capturing the decisive moment – but Hinton had it, and it’s what all great photographers and musicians need.

All Artists Are People First

Great artists often seem superhuman. People like Da Vinci, Coltrane, and Shakespeare occupy a rarified air in our society. It’s easy to understand why; their influence is quite literally immeasurable and without them our world would not be the same. If given the opportunity to meet these figures, I’m sure many of us would be dumbfounded and starstruck. I know I’d be.

But point-of-view is a funny thing, especially in photography. Even the most vaunted subject can be made to look ordinary, and conversely the most commonplace scene can be made to look holy. Milt Hinton understood this and used it as a major theme in his work. He worked with legendary musicians like Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, but considered them his friends. Of these subjects, Hinton says, “…I took pictures so I could show my family and friends that I’d really been to all those places and knew all those people. Several years later, the guys I was traveling with became my friends and I shot things we all experienced so we could share them later.”

I find Hinton’s most poignant subject to be the great jazz trumpeter and bebop icon Dizzy Gillespie. Hinton knew Gillespie before he really became “Dizzy” to the general public; he knew him as a brash, young musician newly hired to be a trumpeter in Cab Calloway’s band. Both Hinton and Gillespie would tour all over the country by train and bus with Cab’s band, and the two got to know each other quite well. When the band had a residency at Harlem’s famous Cotton Club, both Gillespie and Hinton would go up to the roof in between gigs and practice radical, cutting edge soloing techniques together, techniques that would form the basis for a new style of jazz – bebop. For any jazz musician, this would be like hearing the sermon on the mount from Jesus himself. For Milt Hinton, this was part of the job, and a special moment shared with a friend.

It follows that Hinton’s many photographs of Dizzy Gillespie are unassuming and personal in nature. My favorite of these is a photo of Gillespie wrapped up in a winter coat and a hat, sleeping on tour. To any touring musician it’s a familiar scene, and a reassuring one. Touring is a tiring business and makes a vagabond out of any and every musician, if only for a while. A simple photo like this shows that even the most brilliant among us lived a life like ours. For a moment it can even give us hope that we can reach those heights ourselves.

Your Work Is More Powerful Than You Might Realize

A corollary to the last point – artists are people too, but they rarely know exactly how important they can be to others. After doing something for a long while, even the most fantastic feats can look commonplace. Artists then tend to forget that their audience doesn’t see this sausage being made. To at least a large portion of the audience, artists may as well be magicians, and that comes with a certain kind of power and responsibility.

Milt Hinton knew how important his personal archive of jazz history was, but it took the gratefulness of a fan to remind him of how important that work could be. Hinton travelled to the Soviet Union near the end of his career to give a couple of performances in an effort to foster the growth of jazz in the weakening nation. After a performance in Moscow, a young Russian jazz musician came up to him and announced he was a member of the mostly underground Lester Young Jazz Club in Moscow. The rest of the story is best told by Hinton himself.

From his autobiography, Bass Line – “I happened to be carrying a looseleaf portfolio with about thirty of my photographs in it. I knew I had a nice 11 x 14 portrait of Prez (Lester Young) which I’d taken back in the late fifties. I opened the case, slipped the picture out of its plastic sleeve, and handed it to him – just like that. In a way I startled myself because I almost never give away my prints. This guy took one look at what I’d given him and flipped. He stared at the picture for ten or fifteen seconds, shaking his head from side to side. There were tears in his eyes. Then he grabbed me and gave me a bear hug.”

Most of our portfolios and back catalogs probably don’t contain errant photographs of jazz legends, but it’s quite likely that nearly all of us have taken a photograph that’s important to someone. In the music world, there are a ton of songs that mean a lot to me that have been composed by friends of mine, and I try to remind them how important their work is especially when their chips are down. It’s easy to get down on your work and yourself if you’ve spent a lot of time with it; Milt Hinton’s story reminds us that our work is more valuable than we realize.

Listen and Observe; Don’t Exploit

Photographers (and writers) can be accused of being intrusive, searching for their narrative often at the subject’s expense. Though the greatest photographers take pains to avoid this –  Eugene Smith once famously said that he wanted to “fade into the wallpaper” – sometimes it’s unavoidable. Fortunately for Milt Hinton, he was never viewed as a professional photographer and was therefore free to observe musicians in their most natural state. This could’ve been exploited, but Hinton chose not to. His images are built upon the simple act of listening and observing with compassion, and for the purpose of lifting his subjects up.

In none of Milt Hinton’s photographs is there ever a sense of voyeurism or glamorization. His photographs of Dizzy sleeping on the train, of Cab Calloway having fun with the community, of Louis Armstrong sitting proudly next to his hotel recording rig, or even of the late Billie Holiday on her last recording session, never feel glamorous or grotesque. He lets the subjects speak for themselves and provide their own human beauty.

In the foreword to Milt Hinton’s autobiography Bass Line, jazz critic Dan Morgenstern describes perfectly the psyche of an artist like Milt by enumerating the skills that made him a legendary bassist and, inadvertently, a legendary photographer:

“A good bassist knows how to make the soloists sound better, and thus must be someone who can sublimate his ego for the cause. A good bassist must also be a good listener, able to discern the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the players he is there to support – in sum, a team player. It’s plausible, I think, that this professional perspective also became a personal point of view. In any case, Milt Hinton is a man who knows how to listen well, a man who observes and remembers, and who is compassionate.”

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This past Monday, September 9th, 2019, we lost Robert Frank, and with him his knife-twisting, fly-on-the-wall photographic style. We lost a man who created one of the clearest portraits of American society, and developed the perfect style for it. Here are five photos, mostly pulled from his early work, that we think exemplify his style of photography and serve as a good introduction to his oeuvre.

Hoboken, New Jersey. 1955

Robert Frank is often described as having a “snapshot” style of photography. This is true on some level, but I find the term “snapshot” tends to imply a level of casualness that isn’t present in his images. Frank’s photography does have a candidness to it, but there’s a depth and intent to these images that places them a cut above most snapshots.

Hoboken, New Jersey from The Americans showcases this perfectly. None of the subjects in this photo, from the two people in the window, or the flag up top, are shown in their entirety, nor are they perfectly placed. They did not, by some divine or cosmic coincidence, form a classically informed photograph a la Cartier-Bresson. Frank’s genius instead lies in the ability to use the absence of traditional beauty to make his point.

Even though Frank’s subjects are not shown in full, they are presented as being fragmented, and subject to their claustrophobic surroundings. The shadows almost eat up the subject on the left, while the subject on the right is partially covered by the flag of The United States. The obscuring of the two subjects and their placement among and behind elements of their surroundings suggest an underlying anxiety and darkness in the frame, and in America itself. There isn’t much that’s traditionally beautiful about this photo, but then again, that might be the point.

Railroad Station, Memphis, 1955

Among other things, Robert Frank was adept at getting himself into the right situations, and for letting those situations speak for themselves. Take for example his photo of a shoe shiner in a railroad station in Memphis, Tennessee. The slight crookedness of the photo makes it look like we’ve stepped into this dingy restroom as Robert Frank, and that we ourselves are at least a little taken aback by what we’ve found. It’s a man getting his shoes shined by what looks to be the railroad station janitor, not a foot away from a whole row of urinals. His hand is partially holding his head up, as if he can’t believe this is actually happening here, in this railroad station restroom.

This is jarring image on its own, but when taken into the context of Frank’s book The Americans, it takes on a greater importance. One of the most common criticisms of The Americans when it came out was that it portrayed postwar America not as a glamorous, prosperous nation, but one filled with anxiety and limited opportunity. And if you ask me, getting your shoes shined next to some urinals at a railroad station is pretty inopportune, in America or elsewhere.

Downtown NYC, 1954

Pictures of skylines come with a certain set of clichés. They’re usually supposed to imply a sense of grandeur and inspire some sort of admiration for human achievement. Robert Frank’s photo of the Manhattan skyline is anything but, and speaks from a distinctly different point of view on the subject of a big city.

Frank’s sense of timing and technical brilliance shows in this photo, as he’s somehow managed to frame the biggest parts of the Manhattan skyline within the girders of the Manhattan Bridge, while also keeping the Brooklyn Bridge in frame. He also implies a sense of motion, the slower shutter speed blurring the girders, giving the effect of traveling in a car towards Manhattan.

Technique aside, this photo of the skyline is devoid of the usual clichés. The sky is gray and possibly stormy, the buildings seem to loom from behind the shadows of bridges, and we seem to be hurtling towards them whether we like it or not. Framed like this, even one of the biggest cities in the world doesn’t seem grand or glamorous at all – it seems terrifying. The fact that Frank used one of America’s most iconic skylines to prove this point is a small example of his genius.

Wellfleet, Massachusetts. 1962

The loss of America’s innocence (or at least the breaking of that illusion) remained a constant theme in Robert Frank’s work even after The Americans was published. This photo of kids playing on a beach with an American flag, one of them reading a paper with the shouting headline “MARILYN DEAD” might be a bit on the nose, but it does a very good job of portraying a loss of innocence, and what that means for children moving forward.

There isn’t a whole lot to say technically about this photo other than that it is exceptionally well framed. The girl running across the frame spreads the American flag across the sky, underneath which a boy reads that Marilyn Monroe has died. The boy has a confused, uncertain look on his face, amplified even more by the relative freedom of childhood surrounding him and the symbol of freedom flowing right above him. Frank is suggesting that these children may not be able to enjoy American idealism the same way previous generations did, and that they’ll have to figure out what that means on their own.

Robert Frank is mostly known for his work on Americans, but we’ll close this one out with a picture from across the pond. This is an older photo, taken back in 1951 in postwar London.

For all of Robert Frank’s eschewing of traditional photographic composition, I personally love this photo because of its resemblance to a somewhat traditionally beautiful painting, “Paris Street; Rainy Day” by Gustave Caillebotte, an 1877 painting which actually owed much to the then-recent development of photography itself. Coincidentally (or not – we may never know), both the painting and the photograph make good use of the same photographic technique – depth of field.

Caillebotte’s painting was renowned for its photographic realism, particularly in the way that its figures became more indistinct as they were placed closer to the horizon, a function of depth-of-field. Robert Frank utilizes this same technique in his photo. The figure in the foreground wearing the top hat (also eerily present in the Caillebotte painting) is distinct, in focus, and walking towards the camera, but most of the figures are walking away and eventually dissolving into a literal fog. Frank also angles his camera slightly sideways to give a slight vertigo to the image, as well as a sense of candidness, which adds realism and Frank’s visual signature.

Robert Frank will be sorely missed, but his influence and legacy lives on in nearly every single documentary-style photographer to come after him. Everybody’s taken a tip from his style at some point. If you’re interested in more of his work, I’ll list a few volumes to get you going.

Further reading –

The Americans

What We Have Seen

The Lines of My Hand

Obituaries –

https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2019/09/10/759386718/influential-documentary-photographer-robert-frank-dies-at-94

https://www.vogue.com/article/photographer-robert-frank-obituary

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49646420

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-shock-of-robert-franks-the-americans

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His photos of the Kumkapi fishermen were made for the local parish newspaper Jamanak, and though he made them early in his career, they’re among his most gripping work; pensive, cap-adorned men smoking cigarettes as they cut the Marmaran chop, Istanbul’s mosque silhouetted in the far off distance. Later these men would storm the Jamanak offices accusing Güler of portraying them as alcoholics. Güler would recall, “I wrote that they drank spirits for the hell of it, and the blighters stormed the paper.” 

Though unsettling, Güler’s piece on the fishermen set the tone for the remainder of his career. Güler would go on to reject the notion that what he produced was art and shirked time and time again any title that pushed him into that realm – he even took exception to the title of “photographer.”

“I am a photojournalist, not a photographer; I certainly am not an artist. I shoot what I see. I don’t do art. I transmit what is natural, what I see to people. That is called photojournalism. A photographer is very different from a photojournalist.”  

These words are strange coming from a man who would in his lifetime be declared “Master of Leica” by Leica (an honor given to only thirty-eight photographers in history). But perhaps Güler’s admonishment to those that would deem him “artist,” is more appropriate given the existential burden he bestowed onto his so-called “photojournalist.” A sort-of ubermensch, Güler’s photojournalist “rushes towards death … [and] records history with his camera”; the photojournalist is “tasked with transmitting the life of the era, its arts, traditions and customs, what people are involved in, their joys, their sorrows to future eras.” 

For Güler, then, the photojournalist is one tasked less with creation and more preservation – but that preservation will ensure the life of moments and epochs for millennia to come. 

From the Turkish Life to Cartier-Bresson’s Magnum 

Güler grew up living the posh life, a pharmacist’s son. As a child, he would swim at the beach in Florya and as an adolescent he rode horseback while wearing his Borsalino hat. It was evident that Güler’s interests lay not in medicine or law, as his parents might have hoped, but rather in something more creative. 

Ara’s first love was the cinema. His father had gifted him an Ernemann Kinox projector and the local shop Ipek Film would happily let Ara trod off with ten rolls of film for free, just to clear space for new stock. Güler recalled that he “was absent from school and flunked for three years to play films.” This was the way of his life, until Ara nearly perished in a cinema fire. He was the last person to be saved from the roof of the burning cinema, and with that, his filmmaking days were over. 

If the cinema would not have him, maybe the stage would. By twenty, Ara had written nine plays. His ninth, A Strange New Year’s Eve, was published in small newspapers, and it was then that journalism caught Güler’s eye. 

At twenty-two, Güler bought a Rolleicord II. Soon after, he transformed his father’s pharmacy storage warehouse into a darkroom. After working for small papers like Jamanak, Güler sought a wider reach and more prestige. He found himself working at Yeni Istanbul, a new and popular paper that stood out from the traditional red mastheads of the other papers with its novel, blue header. 

Güler’s camera and apparent photographic ability meant he covered myriad stories, from sports to crime to culture. He took photos at breakneck pace, blowing through five rolls of film a day, compared to his peers’ typical pace of one roll in the same span. He devoured release after release of Camera and Leica Photography magazines, which compelled him to acquire his own Leica. The journalists that Güler admired did their work using Leica cameras, so he too decided to work with a Leica. He remembers every detail down to the serial. “It was my first Leica…Leica IIIb, number 382418, 1938.” 

What might have been Güler’s big break came on a serendipitous night in 1954. Upon perusing the list of new guests at the Hilton Istanbul, Güler happened across the name of Tennessee Williams, the famed American playwright. Chance, raki, and maybe charm on Güler’s part led to Güler photographing Williams in his hotel room followed by a night of socializing, drinking, and a midnight dip into a hamam (a heated Turkish bathhouse). But the paper for which Güler was writing, Hurriyet, didn’t want the photos. 

Disillusioned with the Turkish newspapers and what he perceived to be a disinterest in quality photography, Güler took his talents to a publication that cared more about images than copy. Hayat was known as the Turkish equivalent to Life magazine. The quality of the stories and copywriting was poor, but the magazine prized its aesthetic, central to which was high quality photographs. 

While at Hayat, Güler had the chance to explore pieces he felt were actually valuable – touring Anatolia to cover pressing stories; being the de-facto-official photographer of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes; work with cultural figures like Halide Edip Adivar, the prominent Turkish feminist novelist. Point being, Güler’s life had become one defined not just by photography generally, but photography of public figures. 

It wasn’t long before Güler’s status started to rise. After Hilmi Sahenk, the chief of photography at Hayat, threw a Rolleiflex across the room at a managing director, Güler was chosen to replace him. With this new role, Güler found himself reaching an audience three times that of Hurriyet’s readership.  

Over time, Güler managed to branch out from Hayat to simultaneously produce material for other publications such as Time, which had opened an office in Istanbul. While working at Time, Güler became acquainted with what he called “European style journalism” taught to him by Bob Neville, an acclaimed American journalist and Time’s global news editor. In particular, Neville impressed on Güler that photojournalist must be empowered to be in the right places at the right times, even if nothing comes of it. 

When Pope Pius XII became ill in the later stages of his life, Neville dispatched his photojournalists to Rome to patiently anticipate the coming events and what would surely be a global story. But Pius XII recovered from that scare and so the resources poured into covering the story were apparently wasted- even so, Bob Neville received a fifty-thousand-dollar bonus. Güler understood the message communicated; being prepared for a story that falls through is better than not being prepared for a story that happens. 

Balancing Hayat for Turkey and Time for the U.S., Güler began to add more spinning plates to an already tenuous act. At the Cannes Film Festival, a story Güler would not have to be convinced to cover, he met Andrea Lakaz, editor of the wildly popular Paris-Match, a French lifestyle and news magazine which at the time had a massive circulation of 1.8 million. Paris-Match wanted Güler to produce interviews and photographs for them; when he asked his American bosses at Time they simply said, “go ahead, our market is different.” Another plate Güler would have to keep spinning. 

Around this time, Germany sought Güler out to add another plate yet. Stern, one of Germany’s largest news magazines, reached out to Güler to see if he would lend his eye and camera to their publication. Another quick conversation with Time.

“’I have been offered a reporting job from Germany, what do you say?’

‘We are the U.S., Europe is of no interest to us, do what you want.’

So, I accepted the offer.”

Due to Güler’s prolific work, he would often carry with him four cameras. One labeled Stern, another Hayat, another Paris-Match, and a fourth Time. Güler recounts that he chose which camera by whatever his intended audience would be interested in. The Stern camera would be used to shoot photos that would interest Germans. The Time camera would be used to shoot photos that would interest Americans, and so on. 

By 1960, Güler was working for Time, Paris-Match, Stern, and a fourth publication, the British Observer. This was the year that The British Journal of Photography cemented Ara Güler’s place in the annals of photographic history. Each year, the journal published a Yearbook in which they selected the world’s seven best photographers in a highly competitive and rigorous review process. Güler was chosen as one of the seven, among names like Walter Klein and Philip Jones Griffiths. 

Eventually Güler become associated with the legendary Magnum Photos cooperative. It was Romeo Martinez, editor of Camera from 1953 to 1964, who introduced Güler to Henri Cartier-Bresson, a co-founder of Magnum. Martinez, described by Cartier-Bresson as “the father confessor of many photographers who came to him begging for absolution,” managed to catapult Camera to higher heights than its already prestigious beginnings. Though not a photographer himself, Martinez used his knowledge of journalism and the art world to broaden Camera’s readership at the same time as he refined its mode and message. 

It was Martinez that gave showcases to photographers like Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and Bill Brandt – a range of photographic style was procured because Martinez loved the medium in its saturation. Cartier-Bresson felt that Romeo Martinez “knows each of us better than we know ourselves.” And so Martinez introduced one luminary to another. After meetings in Paris, a visit to Istanbul, and because of Ara’s growing journalist clout, Güler become a regular member of the Magnum cooperative. 

For Güler, Magnum was “prestige” and “a symbol to aspire to”- being a part of Magnum “was like a business card … [or] like having an American Express card.” Güler himself clarified, however, that his responsibility was never to Magnum, despite the fact that Magnum distributed the majority of his most significant interviews. True to form, Güler insisted that his first responsibility was to “representation, reporting.” Magnum was simply a seal of prestige on the work Ara Güler produced for history’s sake and history’s sake alone. 

The Choreographed and the Unchoreographed 

Ara Güler’s photography can be neatly divided into two subject matters; the common folk and the celebrities. Güler roved around the world taking photos of simply what was – a lethal train catastrophe in Catalca, a quiet morning in a Rajasthan temple, a group of herdsmen in Mongolia. 

But beyond his photojournalism and street photography, Güler became the visionary behind one of the most impressive archives of public figure portraits. The personalities captured by Güler’s lens include Ansel Adams, Mother Teresa, Winston Churchill, Pablo Picasso, John Updike, James Baldwin, and Indira Gandhi. 

Güler’s portraits are haunting. The photos are almost always shot on black and white film stocks—as Güler himself said: “We have black and white in our genes.” The subjects are most often unposed, but frequently staring the camera down as if trying to express in strain alone a message that will make its way from the light in that moment to the viewer’s eye now decades later. 

Güler’s best portraits come when he is looking down the lens into the subject’s face as they glare upward. These are the defiant captures of timeless personalities against the preserving agents of Güler, his camera, and his film. 

The same thing that compelled Ara to become a renowned celebrity portraitist is the same thing that impels his street photography, that is, his love of humanity. “There is nothing without humans,” Güler said. The temples, the mosques, the ships, the docks, the alleys, and the markets all matter less than and only because of the people that inhabit them: “It was never about what venue I shot. I shot pieces of life.” 

Güler maintained that long after he developed his last roll of film (which, for posterity’s sake, he developed with his own hands) his archive contained 800,000 to one million frames. The ones he clung to dearest were the ones taken in the cityscapes and landscapes of his home, Turkey. His photos of Istanbul are homage to the city. They do not depict the city with glitz or sanitation, they simply depict. 

Güler was known to have lamented the supposed loss of Istanbul’s roots. In a revelatory profile published by the New York Times in 1997, Güler mourns the lost “poetic, romantic, esthetic aspect of the city”; luckily for those too young to have witnessed the great Istanbul, Güler proclaimed, “I understand the smell of Istanbul.” His photos are of the swirling ethos of what Istanbul was and perhaps still is beneath the artifice of modernization. Güler’s Istanbul is the Ottoman yalis, the stone-and-plaster backstreets where children clamor, the men of the sea that give fervor to the city from dawn to dusk, and the solemn religiosity of a city marked by mosaic rather than monolith. 

Of his work, Güler said he completed only three major projects in his life; the biblical ark of Noah, the ancient Mount Nemrut, and the village built on the ruins of the Hellenistic city Aphrodisias. All three sites are located in Turkey and all three bear distinctly religious heritages ranging from Judeo-Christian histories to Greek goddesses. In his photos of these places, Güler photographs the past and, in doing so, commemorates the historical importance that his homeland had to the development of civilization. 

What persists throughout Güler’s extensive and varied portfolio is his desire to prove, not to create. With his photographs, he proves to you that Istanbul is beautiful, that Yarimburgaz train crash was cataclysmic, that Turkey is one of humanity’s birthplaces. 

Ara Güler on Photography

Güler was as opinionated about photography as he was good at photography, which is to say tremendously. The man owned up to fifty cameras, believed his best photos were shot with a Rolleicord (coincidentally), best liked Kodachrome (get in line, Ara), and would take with him up to five hundred rolls of film for one photographic trip. 

The following are the three most poignant claims made by Güler that I have come across in my reading. Rather than dissect and explicate them as if I am qualified to clarify the master’s teachings, I simply leave them here at the end as they were when he said them, straightforward and unexplained. 

“Photographs are not important enough to be hung on walls.” 

“A good photographer can take a picture with a sewing machine.” 

“The magic that enhances our world is nature, the cosmos itself. When light is spread, it is beautiful, when the light is gathered it becomes dark, something else. Therefore, the magic paint will always be present. This is light, everything starts with light.” 

More information on Ara Güler can be found via Magnum Photos

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The post “Everything starts with light” – An Oral History of Ara Güler appeared first on Casual Photophile.