I was in New York on Monday and Tuesday. The initial motivation for the trip was to have a Fine Art print made at Laumont Studios for an exhibition at the Contemporary Art Center in March 2011. Laumont has printed for Stephen Shore, Mitch Epstein, Nan Goldin and my personal favorite, Elliott Erwitt. In short, this studio is bad ass and I want the best possible prints for the show. They have a whole process of going in and talking about your project needs, from scan to framing.

So, I was standing at a large table talking to a printer, Alison, about paper preferences when I hear a person come in and call over another employee. My back was still turned when I heard a man say, “I’d like you to meet Elliott Erwitt.” My jaw dropped and my eyes opened wide. I turned around and sure enough there is Elliott Erwitt in a puffy, black, knee-length parka. I turned back to Alison and mouthed, “oh my god!” It’s like I was a 13-year-old girl with Bieber fever. I went on talking to Alison like it was no big deal that Mr. Erwitt was at the same table as me. I tried to drag out my meeting in the hopes that I might walk with him to the elevator, but unfortunately my meeting was done and his was just beginning. It would have been darn unprofessional to interrupt. That was my brush with Elliott Erwitt, my favorite photographer. For anyone reading this outside the photo world, Elliott Erwitt is a living legend. He is 82 and still shooting. Learn more about the man here and view some photos here. Below is one of my favorites. In the next few days, I’ll post about the rest of my New York visit, which included showing my portfolio around.

This post is related to the previous post about altering images.

A few weeks ago I was at the Chrysler Museum of Art and bought the catalog for a 1994 exhibit called Pictorial Effect/Naturalistic Vision: The Photographs and Theories of Henry Peach Robinson and Peter Henry Emerson. It has some really interesting text about what Brooks Johnson refers to as “the contest between ‘straight’ or ‘manipulated’ photography.” Johnson, the Curator of Photography at the Chrysler, goes on to say, “…the debate today is not about why one is better than the other. Instead, it is a decision as to the approach chosen to best serve the needs of the artist.” I agree with him.

Manipulated photos are here to stay and might eventually be usurped by complex graphic animation. As an evolutionary process it’s really interesting to compare what H.P. Robinson was doing over 100 years ago in the dark room to what Erik Almas and many others do today in Photoshop. Below, you can read the two men describe the picture making process. The photos they describe are found at the end of this post.

H.P. Robinson quoted in Pictorial Effect describing his 1890 photo When The Day’s Work is Done:

The first negatives taken were the two of which the background is composed. The division runs down the centre, where the light is relieved by the dark beyond it. The two negatives were not printed separately…but were carefully cut down with a diamond and mounted on a piece of glass…making, in fact, one large negative of the interior of the cottage, into which it would be comparatively easy to put anything. The next negative was the old man. This included the table, chair, and matting on which his feet rest…The old lady was then photographed, and is simply joined round the edge; so also was the group in the corner, and the glimpse of the village seen through the window.

Excerpt from interview with Erik Almas in F STOP discussing a 2007 photo:

…there’s usually three elements to my images. But with the fisherman image, I used so many more [about 20]. It was three like little coves sitting next to each other. Like each one I wanted to shoot at. And then I thought, why don’t we put that arch into the other scene. So I decided I’d shoot in pieces. A wave like this would be perfect next to that, and this would be perfect next to that…you just see the picture in front of you, and you just start gathering pieces to recreate that. Then of course it didn’t look exactly like that because when you sit down with it on the computer, you have this framework and you start building the puzzle and putting the pieces in. It was a fun exercise… You really have to see the picture and photograph for that and then you put it together. I think I sat there for a day, I just put it together, you know. Then I probably spent another few days making it seamless.

Here is a link to an article by H.P. Robinson discussing his methods in the THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY. April 2, 1860.