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 in addition to  the usual ground glass viewfinder 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 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 pictorialism 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 19th 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?