It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, Just as we discover the instinctual
unconscious through psychoanalysis. Moreover, these two types of unconscious are intimately linked.
For in most cases, the diverse aspects of reality captured by the .. camera lie outside only the normal spectrum
of sense impressions. Walter Benjamin

Glamor photographer Peter Gowland died last month. Peter was not only a very successful photographer of beautiful women, he was also an inventor of note, and thinking about his life caused me to remember some of the  strange picture-making machines I’ve encountered in my life, including his 1950s invention the  Gowlandflex which I once managed to borrow for an afternoon. Interesting, but a bit beyond my budget, I concluded.

 

 

 

 

 

The Gowlandflex was basically a twins lens camera, based more on the medium-format Mamiyaflex than the iconic Rollei. But the big difference was the Gowlandflex took 4×5 inch film and it was intended to be hand-holdable although you needed  to wrap big hands around this machine to get steady pictures without a flash.

One of the problems with the Gowlandflex was that there was already a hand-holdable 4×5 camera in the form of the  Speed Graphic,  the ubiquitous press camera from the 30s through the 50s. I have owned several Speed Graphics, battered veterans of many days and nights of shooting, and I have nothing but respect for this fine piece of machinery.  Check almost any movie from the 30s and you’ll see a gaggle of press photographers blinding their subjects with lightning blasts from these assertive machines. The  Speed Graphic (and its variations) was a 4×5 inch film camera which instead of  the usual ground glass viewfinder (included with the camera) came with both an optical and a wire viewfinder. To complete the outfit most users attached an enormous flashgun to the camera which served as a light source both day and night – the hand-held  Speed Graphic not being what you’d call a natural light camera.

 

 

Weegee with his Speed graphic camera. A self portrait

 

 

The problem with shooting in natural light with a hand-held 4×5 camera of any kind was the extremely shallow depth of focus, not surprising when you consider that even the  wide-angle lens included with most Speed Graphics was 135mm in focal length – only with a small aperture would you get any depth of focus. Then you would have to compensate with a slow shutter speed which introduced the problem of camera shake. The big flashgun took care of both motion and focus  problems – almost every shot was f22 or smaller and the flash enabled the use of high shutter speeds.

 

 

 

WeeGee “Lovers, 1941″

 

What did these pictures look like? Look at almost any WeeGee picture to see the work of a consummate master of the flash-enhanced Speed Graphic.

 

Less well known but typical and equally eloquent in its quiet way is this Speed Graphic photograph of a small town pharmacist by commercial photographer  Bill Wood. During the 40s and 50s every small town had its local newspaper  photographer documenting the history of their time with their Speed Graphics.

 

 

Bill Wood, Pharmacist, 1940

 

 

From the beginning of photography both artists and photojournalists have longed for a professional camera that would give high resolution and yet be be free of the tripod and both the Gowlandflex and the Speed Graphic cameras were examples of that longing. But as far back as 1910, the Graflex Company had invented a predecessor to the Speed Graphic and  that was the Graflex camera, the first press camera, a hand-held 4×5 SLR, a monster of a machine.

 

 

 

 

The Grapflex was a true single lens reflex; instead of using an optical viewfinder you peered down a long hood at the image projected by a mirror onto a ground glass plate. When the shutter was pressed the 4×5 inch mirror would leap out of the way so the image could reach the film. The resulting mirror crash would cause many a photographer to stagger, if not actually leap. Sharpness and depth of field were also a problem with the camera as it was with its successors. You could  attach a flashgun to the camera although that placed the Graflex at the extreme limits of what you would call portability.

Photo: Robert W. Marks

 

 

Nevertheless there was at least one artist who managed to make timeless images with this formidable machine and that was Lewis Hine.  he turned the disadvantage of soft focus to his advantage, using the subtle changes of focus to give his images the empathy that distinguished his inimitable style.

 

Lewis Hine: Breaker Boys Working in Ewen Breaker of Pennsylvania Coal Co. 1911

 

 

Even Dorothea Lange tried her hand at the Graflex if this uncredited photo is any evidence. It is also evidence that she felt it necessary to sit down when using the monster!

 

 

-2-

Eventually resolution was sacrificed for speed and size when it became evident that marvelous photographs could be made with tiny, exquisitely engineered 35mm cameras.  Now  segue into the early years of this new century and the digital revolution and the goal of portability along with high resolution has well been realized. For example, I now own a marvelous little digital camera that gives me view camera quality images.

 

Panasonic Lumix GF1 by Y. Shumin

 

Furthermore, with a high quality lens I can photograph in almost any light without resorting to a flash or a tripod. And if I was willing to give up pocketability ( and shell out a lot more cash)  I could get a professional DSLR with multiple lenses  that would be like having an 8×10 film camera around my neck.

Now the bean counters will hasten over with their laptops and algorithms and say the digital images taken with my pocket camera are not the equivalent of a large format film image and they have the numbers to prove it. My answer is I have hands-on experience with almost all formats of film cameras from 11×14 to 35mm and I trust my eye more than I do science. I’ll concede perhaps not the equivalent of 4×5 film especially in terms of dynamic range, but pretty close nevertheless. Certainly the equivalent of any medium format film camera  if I don’t print much larger than 20×24 inches, a reasonable size for almost any photographer except those showing in New York galleries.

 

 

 

Spaghetti alla Puttanesca, Mark L. Power. Camera: Panasonic Lumix GF1. 2010

 

Chest spaghetti, Mark L. Power, camera: 4×5 Speed Graphic 1981

 

 

So the seemingly incompatible goal of achieving higher resolution along with shrinking the size of the machine has been satisfactorily reached at least for me. But not for camera manufacturers. Although pixel counts seem to have leveled off somewhat, the race is still on for ever larger sensor sizes in what they are calling ‘medium-format’ digital cameras, very expensive machines, such as the Hasselblad  H3D designed mostly for studio use.

 

Hasselblad H3D

 

These large sensor high-pixel count cameras are  seemingly designed give you only one kind of picture, one that is extreme high def as the TV people like to say. To me it seems to me like high definition run amuck. But then I’m somebody that still prefers low-def  TV so make of that what you will. Instead of “medium-format”   I would call them “ultra-high-format” cameras. Pictures taken with these machines seem hyper-real ; for example this literally in-your-face portrait of The First Gentleman taken by Martin Schoeller.

 

 

Barack Obama by Martin Schoeller

 

Now it appears these cameras are within reach of those of us who aren’t successful commercial photographers.  Pentax will be introducing a 40mb digital camera, model 645D, that is ‘reasonably priced’, reckoned to be about $5,000. When you consider a high end Canon DSLR is about the same price I guess the ‘relative’ quotient is in effect.

 

 

 

Ever higher resolution has always seemed the goal of the photo scientists but artists I think have been more ambivalent about the virtues of hyper-realism.  What if artists only drew with needle sharp number 3 pencils? A rougher charcoal pencil look can be attractive too. The answer of course is to suit the machine  to the style; in the old days if you wanted a pictorial look you could buy soft-focus lenses and if pictorialsm makes a comeback I’m sure there will be digital cameras and lenses to suit. ( in fact, we already have the Lensbaby ).

The question are these new large sensor cameras a true evolutionary path of image-making machines?  Will they become classics  or just a curiosity like the Lawrence mammoth plate camera, probably the largest camera ever made?

 

George Lawrence was another prolific camera inventor. Proof that the camera is a curiosity (if one is needed) is that a picture of the camera survives but not a picture taken with the camera.

 

 

Back to Peter Gowland and another curiosity: the 8×10 Gowlandflex. Even more curious is the androgynous person holding the machine, possibly Peter Gowland himself.

 

In a way you could regard this path as a circle instead of a straight line because the images from these new digital cameras are approaching or exceeding the resolution of mammoth plate photography, the giant contact prints as large as 18×22 inches made by such 19^th century pioneers as W.H. Jackson and Carleton Watkins.  In those days before the invention of enlargers if you wanted big prints, you used big cameras, and the resulting “mammoth plates”  are still a high point in both the history of photographic art and photo technology.

 

Mammoth plate salt print , 17×21.5 inches, Giant Cedars at Nikko, Japan 1860,

attr. to Leander Weed

 

Perhaps not the greatest example because it is that rare mammoth-plate image that is more pictorial than high-def ( mostly due to the salt printing process) but I couldn’t resist because it is so unusual.

Let’s wrap up this stroll down camera-memory lane by repeating the question: where do these large-sensor cameras and their successors take the evolutionary path of fine art photography?

Are we looking at  evolution or devolution?

 

 

There has been a controversy about the startling resemblance  of Canadian photographer David Burdeny’s  images  to some of the work of Chinese photographer Sze Tsung Leong.  For brevity’s sake, I’ll restrict my comments to that comparison, but several blogs have mentioned other photographers seemingly channeled by David Burdeny.  The resemblance was first noticed by the blog for the Photo District News and later three more blogs, noted for their seriousness towards issues photographic, picked up the ball with extensive discussions of what comprises plagiarism as well as providing images buttressing arguments pro and con.  Those would be The Online Photographer, Muse-ings, and Conscientious and doubtless there are others who have weighed in with their comments. *

I provide two examples which to my mind make it clear that there is more than a resemblance between the two artist’s work. You will find others on the aforementioned blogs.  In fact, there seems no escaping the observation that in both cases Burdeny’s images are deliberate copies of Leong’s photographs. However plagiarism is defined, and the blogs do a good job  of exploring the legal and ethical connotations of that term,  I know plagiarism when I see it and this is such a obvious  case that I am surprised there is any debate.

 

Tse Tung Leong: Dashur, Egypt, 2007

 

 

David Burdeny, Bent Pyramid, 2009

 

Part of what defines plagiarism is intent : if you declare your work to be a copy of another’s work you’re either making a homage or displaying your virtuosity as a forger. In the case of  the Rephotographic Survey Project series done in the  late 1970s by Mark Klett and others , in which there was a deliberate effort to completely recreate W.H. Jackson’s landscapes after the passage of a century or so,  you have both motives coupled with a scientific inquiry into the effect of time. Another possibility is that you’re allying yourself with artists such as Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, both of whom deliberately copy other people’s artwork as a conceptual enterprise.

However, in my opinion if you conceal the fact that your art work is a deliberate duplicate of someone else’s art, you’re a plagiarist.

One’s work can legitimately resemble other work and in fact, it would be a cause for alarm if it didn’t. Influence is a healthy phenomenon; as the classicists say, we learn  by imitating, and most educators believe that by imitating – not copying! – sooner or later, we find our own voices. The history of art is rife with examples.  Braque’s  work owes a lot to Cezanne and Cezanne’s early work shows the influence of Poussin and Pissarro. Early Cartier-Bresson looks  like Brassai and some of  Sally Mann’s early work clearly reflects the influence of Emmett Gowin.  The artists in all those examples went on to discover their own influential and powerfully original voices.  There is a continuum of influence from one artist to another and from one era to  another that is a pleasure to discover.  Plagiarism on the other hand brings that continuum to an abrupt halt; there’s no place to go after that discovery.

 

Sze Tsung Leong: Seine 1, 2006

 

 

David Burdeny, River Seine 2, 2009

 

Burdeny essentially claims he is mimicking, not copying, a claim that shows he misunderstands the meaning of both terns. Copying means “to make an identical duplicate of” and mimicking means “to imitate, to resemble” . It’s a question of degree. If you mimic an art work it is likely  some part of that  work will remain substantially different as well as emphatically similar. To copy work is to replicate it in almost every detail. True, in the photographs of Paris there seems to be a difference of season and in one of the Egyptian photos the angle of the pyramid is different. These are insignificant variations especially when compared to the far more significant similarities. The images remain as  examples of faithful copies, not mere mimicries.

“To imply that I am somehow the first person who has ever made a similar image, even if I was aware of that image—that’s the climate that everybody else works in…people appropriate other people’s images, people are aware of certain people’s work, the knowledge of what people are doing travels at light speed. Everybody draws from each other….”  David Burdeny.

Disingenuous to say the least. People don’t appropriate other people’s images unless it’s a deliberate conceptual strategy. Yes, borrowing, and blatant borrowing at that, goes on in fashion and advertising and of course is present in the field of fine-art. Downright plagiarism is rarer. Andy Warhol perhaps illustrated a contemporary attitude towards photography in that he apparently thought photographs existed for the gathering. But he never pretended the photographs he used were authored by him ( a few were) although once he was finished altering them, they became his. As far as blaming the duplication on the ‘climate’ of the time, it is true every era has a certain generic look. In our time, large front-mounted glossy color prints constitutes the look; in the 1970s, East Coast photography often consisted of small black and white prints with black lines around the images.  But within that generic similarity you had some of the most original visual minds of the 20^th century making images: Friedlander, Winiogrand and Arbus, just to name three.

Burdeny maintains “ these are fairly common tourist locations…more often than not I am standing next to someone who is taking the same image… There are hundreds of copies of pretty much the same viewpoint.”

Poor Leong; he has not only inspired one plagiarist but apparently hundreds. Can you imagine an artist being content just to take someone else’s picture? Or worse, being proud of it, to the point where he’d display it to the public? No one is maintaining that photographing  the same subject constitutes plagiarism. You might even say that that there is no such thing as original subject matter; the originality lies in one’s vision of that subject. Given that proposition it is evident that Burdeny has a counterfeit vision: parasite-like, he is content to let another photographer not only choose his subject but even choose how he sees that subject; in other words he’s a plagiarist.

I don’t know how many of you have tried to take another person’s photograph. I have, and it’s damned difficult. As I related in another post ( “Frank Redux”) as an art student I spent some time trying to re-take one of Frank’s L.A. images from 1956: St Francis and City Hall.  I was more interested in sharing the experience than  in making any kind of statement.  Had I succeeded I certainly would have termed the work a homage. But the fact is even though I discovered the location of this image, the look and spirit of Robert Frank had long since vanished, locked up forever in the pages in The Americans. As I said in the previous post:

“Long after I had given up this quixotic quest, I was standing on a street corner in LA and I looked up to see the statue of St. Francis. But it wasn’t a Robert Frank picture: the light was different, the time was different, and I wasn’t Robert Frank!”

 

 

Robert Frank: St. Francis and City Hall, L.A. 1956

 

 

So even if  were I inclined to duplicate  this Robert Frank photograph and pass it off as one of mine ( hoping no one would remember the original) I certainly would not attempt to re-take the same picture even if I could find the imprint of Frank’s feet, and even if I knew the exact time and season when he made the image. No, instead I would  re-photograph Frank’s image, either by scanning or duplicating it with a copy camera. I would then in the post-processing, attempt to change it just enough to avoid the label of plagiarist.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that turned out to be the Burdeny strategy. I doubt if he traveled to France  to make that image of Paris; most likely he went no further than the pages of Leong’s 2007 catalog of “Horizons” . There is no other way to explain the fact that light, the vantage point and the visual facts are almost exactly the same. A shift in the color balance; changing the season from winter to Spring by adding some leaves to the trees, and altering the reflections in the water seems to be the extent a lethargic Burdeny can add to Leong’s vision.  Nevertheless, whether Burdeny traveled to France or got no further than an image in a catalog, these minute alterations hardly disguise the fact what we have here is a blatant example of plagiarism.

 

 

 

*Soon after finishing the above, the story appeared in the Los Angeles Times http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/28/entertainment/la-ca-photoplagiarism28-2010feb28. It looks like Burdeny’s  pilfering may be going national.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It seems that every Christmas Santa dips into his electronic goodie bag and hands me a digital  Panasonic camera. Christmas 2008 it was the estimable LX3; last Christmas he he brought me a Panasonic GF1 with a 20mm lens. Just one these excellent machines might end up being the main instrument but for now, like Wyatt Earp, I’m a two gun man.

I learned a while ago that when cameras or lenses are the subject of discussion all hell breaks loose and an army of strange people emerge from the woodwork, all of whom seem personally offended when you have an opinion about equipment that differs from theirs. So I usually manage to stay away from camera discussions unlike my much braver friend Mike Johnston over at The Online Photographer ( http://www.theonlinephotographer.com) who often fearlessly leaps in with invariably interesting comments and thoughts about photographic equipment, new and old. Mike also has a new GF1  and he recently said: “The more features something has, the less in control of it I feel.” I couldn’t agree more, to the point where I’m diving into this contentious topic once again, amplifying my previous rant ( A Christmas Rant) ) despite the inevitable flak.

There is no doubt these are wonderful machines that give you every opportunity to express yourself photographically. There is also no doubt that  Panasonic has a cadre of engineers that seemingly delight in seeing how many features they can cram into very tiny boxes. One pictures them sitting before electronic graphs with two lines flying away in opposite directions, never to converge: one says number of features; the other line is called camera sensor chip. More into less is the motto of these determined engineers, and one senses they are frustrated by the fact that the human hand dictates the size of camera bodies instead of sensors. The other limitation that they generally ignore is the number of parameters the human brain can comprehend before deciding to take a picture  – I would say speaking for myself  that that number has already been well exceeded.

The logical culmination of this engineering madness is to take choice away from the photographer by making the camera  completely automatic. In other words, full circle: we’re back to the Kodak Brownie of 1900, the original point and shoot. “you take the picture and leave the rest to us”. But this won’t be your grandmother’s point and shoot or even your father’s which limited themselves to deciding a few parameters such as white balance, focus, shutter speed and aperture. On the outside of this machine you’ll just see a large shutter release button but on the inside the equivalent of many mainframe computers will be busy whirring away making billions of calculations. Is the subject a moonlit night in the tropics, a Caucasian baby, a beautiful African-American woman? The camera will decide what makes the best  image of all of those possibilities  and the only decision left to you will the most basic: the act of pointing. You’ll still have to point, to show the camera what you’re interested in seeing, but once that’s done, the nano-computer will take over and make what it considers the best photograph from any given arrangement of light and form. If it doesn’t like where you’re standing it will insert a frame suggesting possibilities it prefers. What if you disagree with its choices? Sorry, there’s no room for manual controls in this camera – besides who wants manual control other than a few dinosaurs mired in the bygone days of free-choice photography?

Of course the idea that the machine makes the photograph is as old as photography itself. Kodak began early to implant this idea, most notoriously by placing footprints in front of scenic vistas so the photographer would know where to stand for the good photograph.  And Kodak was not the only one. The ‘mirror with a memory’ entranced many into thinking that it was the machine that made the art, not the artists and it took many decades before people realized it was the mind directing craft that determined the quality of the photograph. And there are still some tough survivors out there: camera clubs pursuing the holy grail of pictorialism, and magazines like Popular Photography still promoting the belief that it is equipment which makes good photography.  And now we ‘re in the digital age -  as technology becomes ever more amazing, the designers of these machines seem less and less inclined to leave the image decisions up to the photographer.

There are many modern technical innovations which have made for better photography such as auto focus, auto exposure, auto white balance, and image stabilization, to name a few. Nevertheless, there are many others which seem to exist only to show off the brilliance of design engineers.  I would argue that a significant number of these  features are simply bewildering to the novice and makes for an unnecessarily steep learning curve. Back in Paleolithic times I owned a Leica 111f. Despite the fact that this was one of the most beautifully engineered cameras ever made, the instruction manual  was only about 50 pages if I remember correctly. How to load film, set f stops and shutter speeds, a list of accessories and lenses. That was about it. The instruction manuals for the Lumix GF1 runs 203 pages. I once asked a student to bring in her Nikon DLSR camera manual so we could work on a problem she was having. She hauled a brick out of her bag twice the size and weight of the camera itself.

Why a near-infinite number of exposure and color sets when all is said and done there isn’t that much difference between them? In one of the Lumix settings, the camera tries to persuade me that certain colors are ‘nostalgic’. What’s the problem , you say, just ignore that judgment if you don’t agree with it.   Yes,  that’s the professional’s response but if am a beginner I might think to myself: maybe the camera’s right, you have to have that color set for true nostalgia. There goes independent thinking, experimentation, and judgment, the basis of meaningful photography.  And then we have the absurdity of some of these settings which apparently make ethnic judgments – it has been reported that some of the face detection modules recognize only Caucasian skin tones. What’s next? A “negro” setting?

So basically  we have camera manufacturers  deciding what makes a good picture by essentially removing control from the photographer and giving it to the in-camera computer. The Lumix has at least four portrait settings, two of which assert that a good portrait is a head and shoulders image with a very shallow depth of field. You would never know that there are many brilliant portraits which break that rule but to the camera there is only one way which also happens to be the most trite way.

Breaking all the rules forty years ago ago: Lee Friedlander’s

portrait of Nina

Of course, to repeat, the experienced photographer, professional or advanced amateur, can ignore all these distractions and use these cameras to make meaningful images. My GF1 is a marvelous machine which is rapidly becoming an intuitive extension of my eye. But all too many novices are grateful to leave the important decisions up to the camera. The result is they will end up with technically brilliant photographs which will look like all the other pictures made by cameras instead of photographers. Good photography is made by an eye connected to a mind; the camera is simply an intermediary between the two; a means to an end. When you substitute a machine for the mind the result is usually bland mediocrity. I hate to say it ( said he, putting on his football helmet and getting under the bed) but if you don’t believe me look at dpreview.com’s new gallery section.  Prime examples of how mediocre photographs made by cameras instead of minds can be.

As long as we’re on the subject of cameras, I came across an arresting example of how photographers value equipment, in this case a camera which has been elevated to the status of a holy relic.

Here are pictures of Garry Winogrand’s Leica M4 camera, courtesy of used camera dealer, Stephen Gandy, and his site, cameraquest.com There is something inexpressibly  sad about seeing  this machine with all its imprints of Winogrand’s hand, if not his eye. There’s a ghost stirring there in the faint imprint of sprocket holes on the pressure plate. As with all authentic relics, an aura of the artist remains. I feel if I picked this Leica up and looked through the viewfinder, I might for a split second see a wisp of a masterful Winogrand image.

Apparently the camera is still being used by its current owner. Stop! This is not just any camera. You want a Leica buy one from Mr. Gandy. This is a machine into which a major American artist poured his heart and soul. Donate it to the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, the home of the Winogrand archive.

February of 2010 was a mensis horrendus, as Queen Elizabeth might say.  February is always a mensis horrendus but this one seemed more horrendous than usual. A friend died – see the next post – and my wife adopted an elephant named Makena, the two events being completely unrelated. Fortunately, Makena lives in Kenya because if she were on this continent she would be permanently ensconced in our basement; my wife would have it no other way.

Makena

Also during this cursed month we were slammed with two blizzards within three days of one another. The first deposited almost three feet of snow on the ground (adding to the December snow – see previous post- which was still around) and the second added a vicious wind along with another six inches of the white stuff. For hours, we could hear large branches falling off the trees. Three weeks later, a plow was still snuffling up and down our street. There was no place to put the snow so finally they brought in big trucks and took it someplace else, probably to dump on people’s houses who owed the County money.

When our power went out as it did for about 100,000 other households in the Washington area we found a.) a flashlight with dead batteries b.) a single candle stub left over from a dinner party c.) No matches or lighter to light the candle with (another reason I should have continued to smoke) d.) No way to light gas stove burners because they have electric ignition e.) No way to light the gas oven for heat as it only ignites via an electric ‘glow bar”. We couldn’t go to a neighbor for help; the snow was too deep even for crawling. I tried to remember TV survival shows I watched when half-asleep but most were about eating beetles when you were lost in the jungle. There weren’t any about surviving in a suburb.  So there was only one recourse: to kiss our dogs goodbye and stick our heads in the oven.  Fortunately at that point the electricity returned.

Amazon reported being swamped with orders for emergency kits. I jumped into the swamp. I am now ready for a power outage lasting up to twenty years, in other words long after my own personal energy source will most likely disappear.

To illustrate diametrically opposite attitudes towards snow:

The cup half full: ( my wife, Virginia)

The cup definitely empty ( me)

A friend of mine , photographer Mathias Thomas Oppersdorff, of Mantunuck, Rhode Island, died January 26,  2010 after a 12 year struggle with Parkinson’s disease.  He was 74 years old.

 

Mathias, always known as Mo, and never Mathias, was a friend in high school. Later both he and I became professional photographers although oddly neither of us touched a camera during our days at Portsmouth Abbey School in Portsmouth, RI.   We took different paths with our photography; my day job was in the halls of academe while Mo ventured into the marketplace, becoming a travel photographer for Gourmet magazine for eighteen years. As he often proclaimed, it was a great job but somebody had to do it.

I looked around for some of Mo’s  Gourmet work  but all I could find was this sensitive study of women making batik cloth in Bali. Gourmet itself closed down shortly before Mo died.

 

 

 

Other Oppersdorff photos I remember from the magazine were epicurean repasts usually spread under olive trees in Sardinia or Tuscany. Oddly, despite lurking (a favorite Mo verb) in fine restaurants most of his adult life, and despite the constant consumption of  feasts spread under olive trees throughout the Mediterranean,  Mo’s physique never changed: he was thin, very tall, Teutonic in appearance and always elegantly dressed.  At our school’s 50th  reunion, most of us were follicularly challenged, somewhat overweight white men of a certain age wearing dark business suits. Not Mo; he wore tailored blue jeans and a white safari jacket, complete with an ascot, and he strongly resembled the youth he had been half a century earlier.

Mo and I  spent some time together after high school – it was a period in the late 50s when he was taking courses at Georgetown’s Foreign Service school. For reasons forgotten now, we ended up  sharing a room on Prospect Street near the University. He told me he needed a job, so I  enlisted him in my place of employment,  a parking garage in downtown Washington. For some reason, Mo thought the proper attire for a parking lot attendant were overalls topped by a large foam rubber yellow ten gallon hat that no  cowboy, much less a reputable parking lot attendant, would have been seen dead in.

 

 

 

from Under the Spell of Arabia

 

 

Mo’s talents were many, and among them was a linguistic ability that one could only marvel at. In high school, he was said to be tri-lingual (French, German and English) and the rumor was that he could learn a language after only a few weeks of glancing at a textbook. Mo’s version of the English language was also unique. It was not his accent which was all-American but rather his vocabulary. Mo had his own individual  syntax which had a curiously archaic Victorian boarding school quality. For example, with Mo people didn’t appear; they “hoved into view” as if they were sailing vessels rounding the Cape of Good Hope.  I mentioned “lurk”; you never stayed anywhere, you lurked after you hoved. In Mo’s world, the most innocent of activities seemed tinged with the possibility of ambush, either being ambushed or ambushing someone yourself.

 

 

 

from Under the Spell of Arabia

 

Mo apparently had a lifelong interest in guns – I suppose I knew this all along but it didn’t really register until recently because in appearance and demeanor Mo was not your average gun nut. He was a gentle man who rarely talked guns, at least not when he was with me. But during our 50^th reunion he mentioned hunting elk with his close friend Michael Sheehan, another classmate, and I suddenly remembered an episode on Prospect Street when I came home to find Mo on the floor sighting down the long barrel of a .22 target pistol. To make a long story abruptly short, Mo had decided to amuse himself by shooting cockroaches as they scampered across the floor and he seemed quite puzzled when this behavior caused the other occupants of the house to seek refuge in  the street.

 

 

 

from Under the Spell of Arabia

 

 

Then another memory surfaced: a photograph I did of Mo when we spent the day on a Virginia farm. Alas, the picture only lives in the memory like many another lost photograph, all of which inevitably become more impressive with passing time.  In the picture Mo is wearing shorts so long they almost could be called pedal pushers. As he was around six feet five in height we’re talking very long shorts. I was not to see their like again until years later when Michael Jordan and company began burning up the basketball court;  Mo was always sartorially ahead of the game.  In the photo, Mo has the aforementioned target pistol in one hand; in the other he holds aloft a black snake he had just dispatched.  Two regrets: one, that I have lost this picture, and two, that I never saw Mo with a downed elk –that would have been a truly memorable image. I bet Mo sported a pith helmet. I’ll have to ask Michael Sheehan about that next time we cross paths.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

from Under the Spell of Arabia

 

 

But the real reason I remember Prospect Street is because one day Mo handed me an envelope he had just picked up from a film lab. In it were ten or twelve black-and-white photographs of a friend of ours, portraits that Mo had done with his Leica camera. I was bowled over by the quality of light on our friend’s face – that  afternoon sunlight so eloquently described character that I suddenly had an intimation of the possibilities of this wonderful medium.  I wonder now if I saw those pictures again if they would still be as magical. The likelihood is –- after fifty some years of looking at, writing about, and talking about photography –  they would seem little more  than competent portrait studies. So this is one time when I’m glad those pictures only live in the mind. But regardless of their quality, those images of a friend turned me into a photographer. I was hooked and a couple of weeks later  I was also the proud owner of a second-hand Leica 111f. A month after that I was in Baltimore being inducted into the Army. It was 1957, and now that he had succeeded in his life’s ambition – to turn me into a photographer – Mo went his separate way, returning to college rather than defending his nation against the Yellow Peril. (Actually, Mo was 4F due to a childhood bout with polio).

 

 

 

from Under the Spell of Arabia

(click to see entire image)

 

Years later, Mo would occasionally leave New York and spend a few days in Washington visiting various cousins.  Mo had a distinguished lineage. His father’s family were Silesian aristocrats and his mother came from one of America’s oldest families. Not that this background ever came up in conversation ( to my regret); Mo just wanted to be one of the fellows. But there were certain give-aways ( along with his undeniably aristocratic appearance) and one was the fact that when Mo came to Washington he would invariably stay at the “Cincinnati” which I took to be a hotel. But I soon discovered that the marvelous beaux-art building on Massachusetts Avenue  was the home of the Society of the Cincinnati, a very private club indeed – the only members are people directly descended from officers in George Washington’s  Continental army of 1776!

During these occasional visits, Mo and I would mostly talk photography, being well into our respective careers. In addition to his years of work for Gourmet,  Mo – who never married – traveled extensively, pursuing  fine art projects, some of which ended up as books. He did a book on Irish tinkers called “People of the Road” and he  also photographed  people in the mountains of New York, which resulted in the book  “Adirondack Faces“.

 

 

But the work Mo was most proud of, and justifiably so, was the result of a 12 week odyssey in the Middle East ( rumor had it he came out of this adventure speaking idiomatic Arabic) which he managed to get published some years later as “Under the Spell of Arabia”.  Most of the pictures which accompany this article are taken from that book and I think they eloquently demonstrate Mo’s talents as a photographer.

 

 

Mary Ellen Mark  said of Mathias Oppersdorff’s work that it has ‘a beautiful quality..that is honest and direct.” She might well have been speaking about the man himself.