Jane Bown, 1925 - 2014

Jane Bown, Samuel Beckett, 1976

Jane Bown died on 21 December 2014.
Bown worked as a staff photographer on The Observer from 1949 - in the course of her work she encountered many remarkable people and made many remarkable portrait photographs. According to her obituarist, Bown was noted for being genereally uninterested in camera equipment. She began her professional career with a Rolleiflex but later moved onto an Olympus OM1 - she owned about a dozen Olympus cameras, all bought secondhand. She always worked with natural light and, apart from a brief spell in the 1960s, in black and white. Her simple and direct approach allowed her to work quickly and quietly and without fuss. Interestingly, although she apparently was meticulous in her checking of her equipment before an assignment (which she carried in a shopping bag) she did little or no research about her subjects and so would encounter them without preconceptions.
Below is a selection of my favourite examples of her work (great pictures, great subjects). Click on images to enlarge; see more pictures here and here.
Read obituaries by Luke Dodd and Eamonn McCabe and in The Telegraph; read also a profile by Luke Dodd and a collection of articles in The Guardian, including: The Lady Behind the Lens, The Eye Had It, Jane Bown Remembered, The Final Image.

Jane Bown, Postman and Postwoman Having a Picnic, 1966

Jane Bown, American Tourists in London, 1968

Jane Bown, W.H. Auden

Jane Bown, Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1957

Jane Bown, Sir John Betjeman, 1972

Jane Bown, Francis Bacon, 1985

Jane Bown, Orson Welles, 1951

Jane Bown, Lucian Freud, 1983

Jane Bown, Bridget Riley, 1989

Jane Bown, David Hockney, 1966

Footnote.
It is sad to note that Billie Whitelaw died on the same day as Jane Bown; if Bown's greatest picture is of Samuel Beckett (see top of post) it seems fitting to conclude with her picture of Whitelaw who was the greatest interpreter of Beckett. Read an obituary for Whitelaw.

Jane Bown, Billie Whitelaw, 1976

Lewis Baltz, 1945 - 2014

Lewis Baltz, from The New Industrial Parks, 1974

Lewis Baltz died on 23 November 2014.
One of my favourite photographers.
Lewis Baltz' most famous series of photographs, The New Industrial Parks, Near Irvine, California (1973-75) offers a remarkable contrast to the traditional, Romantic concerns of landscape photography: instead of natural beauty and the sublime Baltz shows us the facades and structural details of anonymous, prefabricated industrial units and parking lots. While the series clearly constitutes a critique of urban sprawl - the relentless spread of a 'man-altered landscape' - at the same time Baltz' precise Minimal aesthetic, crisp, formal composition and attention to details and textures make these very beautiful pictures.
Baltz was included - alongside Robert Adams, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore Henry Wessel Jr, Bernd and Hilla Becher - in the seminal exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975 in which the participants collectively proposed an aesthetics of the banal.
In addition to The New Industrial Parks (1973-75), Baltz' work includes (amongst others): The Prototype Works (1967-76), Tract Houses (1971) and Sites of Technology (1989-91), from which the examples below are selected.

Read an obituaries by Gerry Badger and Sean O'Hagan; read the 'last interview' at L'Oeil de la Photographie; watch a short video of Baltz talking abut his work on the Tate website;  read more interviews with, and articles about, Baltz at American Suburb X; read an article about New Topographics by Kelly Dennis: Landscape and the West: Irony and Critique in New Topographic Photography

The Prototype Works (1967-76)

Tract Houses (1971)

The New Industrial Parks (1973-75)  

Sites of Technology (1989-91)

Chris Bracey, 1954 - 2014

Chris Bracey died on 1 November 2014.
I confess that I had not heard of Chris Bracey ('the Neon Man') until I read his obituary. However, as a fan of neon (see blog entry below on the centenary of neon) I found his story interesting. As a young man he worked for his father's company Electro Signs making neon signs for circuses and amusement arcades; Chris' innovation was to take the business to Soho and the sex industry. For 20 years he supplied the neon 'glamour' for sex shops and clubs. In the 1980s an art director of film saw him erecting a sex shop sign and commissioned him to do work for film sets - his work has been used in Batman, Blade Runner, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Eyes Wide Shut and many others. In 1998 he saw the Bruce Nauman exhibition at the Hayward Gallery and was astonished to discover that neon works could be art! Since then, in addition to his own creations he has made work for artists including Martin Creed (the whole world + the work = the whole world). To be sure Bracey's own work is more kitch and 'Vegas' than Nauman or Creed, but his workshop and collection - "God's Own Junkyard" in Walthamstow looks like an amazing place.
Read obituaries in The Guardian  and The Telegraph.
Vlick on images to enlarge.

René Burri, 1933 - 2014

René Burri, Self-Portrait, Coronado, New Mexico, 1973/83

René Burri, photographer, died on 20 October, 2014.
René Burri, a longstanding member of Magnum, was perhaps the archetypal photojournalist in the heyday of that profession: he travelled the world filing work for Life, Paris-Match, Stern, Du, The Sunday Times and many others. He covered the Vietnam War, the Suez crisis, made work with Picasso, Le Corbusier and Che Guevara. In her obituary notice Amanda Hopkinson says he "combined an ability to get along with people with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s knack for disappearing into a crowd."
Read obituaries in The Guardian, The New York Times and at Phaidon; read a short interview with Burri on his 'best shot'; watch a short video in which Burri talks about the making of six of his most iconic photographs; watch a video of Burri talking about colour photography.

René Burri, Che Guevara, 1963

René Burri, Picasso, 1957

René Burri, Sao Paolo, Brazil, 1960

René Burri, Former Summer Palace. Dead lotus flowers on the Kunming Lake, Beijing, 1964

René Burri, San Cristobal, Mexico City, 1976

René Burri, Moscow, 1988

René Burri,Warsaw, 1989

René Burri, Beirut, Lebanon, 1991

René Burri, Havanna, Cuba, 1993

Ray K. Metzker, 1931 - 2014

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1963

Ray K. Metzker, photographer, died on 9 October 2014.
Ray Metzker was an original and stylish Modernist photographer. He was trained at the Institute of Design, Chicago  - originally founded as the New Bauhaus - where he studied under Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. He consistently experimented with the formal possibilities of black and white photography in single images as well as 'composites' of multiple exposures. His pictures are bold, dramatic, high contrast images pushed to the edge of, and into, abstraction. He seems to have had a bit of a thing about cars - and, since I do too, my selection of his work here is exclusively from those featuring cars. This may not be fully representative of the breadth of his work - but they are all great images!
Read an obituary in The New York Times; see more images at Laurence Miller Gallery.
Click on images to enlarge.

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1963

Ray K. Metzker, Spain, 1960

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1964

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1963

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1963

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1963

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1980

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1963

Ray K. Metzker, Marseille, 1961

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1963

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1964

Ray K. Metzker, Washington DC, 1964