35mm Publication: Maximum Exposure

MAXIMUM EXPOSURE 1

CHAPTER Chapter Title

Copyright Š 2020 by Kassi Coronado All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying or other electronic or mechanical methods, without written permission of the copyright owners.

Published in 2020 by Kassi Coronado

Printed in the United States of America First Printing, October 2020

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MAXIMUM EXPOSURE

“

I am a visual man.

I watch, watch, watch.

I understand things through my eyes.

— HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON

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CHAPTER Chapter Title

CONTENTS

01 02 6

THE BIRTH OF 35MM THE BEGINNING OF FILM PHOTOGRAPHY THE LEICA

STREET PHOTOGRAPHY HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON VIVIAN MEIR WALKER EVANS

MAXIMUM EXPOSURE

03 04 7

COLOR VS. BW SEEING IN MONOCHROME THE WORLD IS IN COLOR

TYPOGRAPHY HISTORY OF TUNGSTEN HISTORY OF FAIRPLEX

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CHAPTER 1: THE BIRTH OF 35MM

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HISTORY OF FILM PHOTOGRAPHY Camera Obscura: 500 BCE — 1600 CE

The history of photography timeline is a history of art and science together.

Many photography timelines start with the first known photograph

by Nicéphore Niépce in 1827. But it actually goes much further back than that. It goes back to a time and technology before lenses, cameras, and even film.

The camera obscura was a tool used by some artists that allowed for them to easily draw or paint realistic landscapes and rendering of architecture. In its simplest form, a pinhole projects a scene in a dark room or box that the artist can basically trace over.

Since the word photography is literally defined as drawing with actual light, we can look back at the concept of the first camera obscura as a possible beginning for our timeline in photography. The earliest historical mention of the idea dates back to China in around 500 BCE.

Early Optics: 1400s — 1700s Near the start of the 16th Century, the amazing artist, scientist, and inventor Leonardo da Vinci sketched out diagrams and wrote instructions about the camera obscura. In these papers, he included not just pinholes but also simple glass lenses.

Lenses and optics were a relatively new but established science by that time period, being used by astronomers to broaden our knowledge of the universe. Interestingly for our history of photography timeline, astronomers were also a driving force behind the advent of film.

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Developing a Film Timeline: 1604 — 1827 Did you like that pun? Johannes Kepler, an astronomer and was generally all around smart guy, gets credited with coining the term photograph for a drawing with light in 1604. He was referring to using telescopic optics to project an image onto a sheet of paper or a canvas to draw the stars.

Astronomers and inventors sought a way to make the paper or canvas itself sensitive to light. Glass or metal plates were also used in experiments by various people.

In 1717, Johann Heinrich Schulze showed that a solution of silver nitrate darkens when exposed to light. The problem now was how to stop the solution from continuing to darken to light, in other words, how to fix the image to the medium.

First Photograph: 1827 It was just one in a series of experiments, but View from the Window at Le Gras is the earliest surviving photograph. Nicéphore Niépce used a sheet of metal with a film of chemicals spread on it.

Though light-sensitive, it wasn’t very sensitive. It took 8 hours to record the image. You can see sunlight illuminating both sides of the buildings. From here on, the timeline of photography moves rapidly.

Different metal plate technologies began to be used by astronomers, other scientists, and a new breed of artist/scientists, the naturists. The naturists were quite often scientists and inventors themselves, using this new technology to record the beauty of the world all around them.

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ONE The Birth of 35mm

THE LEICA Hailed as the best camera brand and a true pioneer of the Magnum aesthetic, Leica is one of the most prestigious names in photography, and is a camera that is responsible for some of the most memorable photographs in collective memory (and in history).

camera could be manufactured with his lenses.

Determined to change things, Leitz instigated the Leica prototype in 1914 and later handed over the reins of production to Oskar Barnack, a fellow optician and photographer.

The very first 35mm camera was a Leica, and its invention was a game-changer for a flourishing artistic, creative and journalistic medium.

As Oscar Barnack worked on the camera, he also fitted it with a Leitz anastigmat 50mm 3.5 lens.

The fully functional prototype was called the URleica—a still camera for 35mm perforated film.

In the early 1900’s cameras were still very quite bulky and difficult to carry around. Annoyed by the lengths a photographer had to get their shot — Ernst Leitz, a German optical engineer, ran an institute that actually produced microscopes, was convinced that a smaller and more portable

The birth of UR-leica signified a leap into the world of photography as Barnack’s invention was small enough to use handheld, creating a camera that was compact enough to take anywhere. Then by 1925, his prototype had been perfected and the "Leica I" was ready for worldwide release.

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“Shooting with a Leica is like a long tender kiss, like firing an automatic pistol, like an hour on the analyist’s couch.”

– Henri Cartier-Bresson

© Christer Strömholm

Whilst the Leica I was a 35mm fixed-lens camera, Barnack wanted to develop the original further, granting photographers the flexibility to shoot in all manner of conditions. By developing an iconic rangefinder camera body with detachable and interchangeable lenses, the Leica II was born.

Professional photographers soon realized that the Leica offered them the freedom to shoot dynamically, in extraordinarily high quality. The portability of the Leica is said to have sparked growth in photojournalism in the 20th century.

From Robert Capa’s falling soldier, the man jumping the puddle by Henri Cartier-Bresson, the kissing couple in Times Square by Alfred Eisenstaedt – these historic images make Leica a true icon. Enabling the artist to break free

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ONE The Birth of 35mm

from the studio and discover what was on the street, and the mobilisation of photographers has been a revolution in itself, and the Leica an instrument of upheaval.

We should be grateful to the little red circle for the legendary photos that have defined and written 20th century history, and remember other words of wisdom, perhaps Leica’s most iconic photographer :

“It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera… they are made with the eye, heart and head.”

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CHAPTER 2:

STREET PHOTOGRAPHY

“To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.” ­— Henri Cartier-bresson

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TWO Street Photography

HENRI CARTIERBRESSON 1908-2004

Henri Cartier-Bresson has intuitively chronicled decisive moments of human life around the world with poetic documentary style.

His photographs impart spontaneous instances with meaning, mystery, and humor in terms of precise visual organization, and his work, although tremendously difficult to imitate, has influenced many other photographers. His photographs may be summed up through a phrase of his own: "the decisive moment," the magical instant when the world falls into apparent order and meaning, and may well be apprehended by a very gifted photographer.

Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup, and studied literature at the university of Cambridge in 1928-29. He began photographing in 1931 and purchased a Leica in 1933. He joined an ethnographic expedition to Mexico the next year, and in 1935 studied cinematography with Paul Strand. He assisted Jean Renoir in 1936 and 1939, and made his own documentary, Return to Life, in 1937. He was drafted into the film and photo unit of the French army in 1940 and was taken prisoner by the Germans that same year. After three years of imprisonment he escaped and began working for the French underground. In 1943 he made series of portraits of artists, including Matisse, Bonnard, and Braque. Through 1944 and 1945, Cartier-Bresson photographed the occupation of France.

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VIVIAN MAIER 20

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1926-2009

Vivian Maier had made her living as a nanny, first in New York Aography. Her former charges—all now adults—recounted with her great affection how she would take them on outings to the city, always carrying her trusty Rolleiflex. She had very little patience for those who put on airs and a show—and she did little to call attention to herself. Everyday dresses. Small brimmed hats. In one self-portrait, she’s looking away from the camera, awkward and uncomfortable. In another, much of her face is hidden by a shadow. She was a loner of sorts. She was never married. Families she lived with have said they couldn’t recall her ever receiving a personal phone call. All of which is somewhat astonishing, given the incredible intimacy of her photographs.

“We have to make room for other people. It’s a wheel – you get on, you go to the end, and someone else has the same opportunity to go to the end, and so on, and somebody else takes their place. there’s nothing new under the sun.”

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WALKER EVANS 1903 - 1975 The man who wrote the story of america with his camera.

One of the greatest historians of life in 20th-century America was Walker Evans, a man with a camera and an insatiably curious eye. He inspired a league of influential street photographers such as Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, and even Bruce Gilden. He is most famous for photographing the Great Depression with the FSA, his candid work of Subway riders in NYC, and his street photos and urban landscapes all around America (his most famous book being “American Photographs” which was the first photography exhibition to be held at the New York MOMA. He was also a non-dogmatic photographer who often proclaimed that the camera didn’t matter and experimented with the 35mm format of the Leica, the 2 1/4 format of the Rolleiflex, the cumbersome 8×10 large-format, and even using a Polaroid SX-90 more or less exclusively towards the end of his life.

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Walker Evans was certainly a great pioneer in photography not because he followed the path that others paved before him, but that he was a rebel and did things nobody else did. He photographed ordinary things, signs, and people which were against the popular “fine art aesthetic� of the time.

He also disgregarded conventions, cliches, and strove to create visual impactful images photos that burned themselves into our thoughts and memories. He was also fervent enough in photograhping America during his time that we have rich images of what it was half a century ago.

So let’s all try to follow in the footsteps of Evans and pave new ground in our street photography.

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TWO Street Photography

CHAPTER 3:

BLACK &

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COLOR VS. & WHITE

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THREE Color vs. Black & White

SEEING IN MONOCHROME

Why would Cartier-Bresson dismiss color so forthrightly?

Most likely because black and white works so differently than color does. Subjects that look great in black and white often don’t look good in color. It’s for the same reason that vivid color pictures look boring once desaturated. Images in the photo-historical cannon were made for one palette or another.

One sees and shoots in the same color or B&W of your camera film or sensors.

For the pioneers of photography, it had meant learning to shoot subjects that worked well in black and white — just look at the high contrast shots of the Modernist like Edward Weston and Tina Modotti, the abstract portraits of Man Ray. They didn’t just shoot in but also for black and white, emphasizing form, contrast, and shapes.

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“Color negates all of photography’s threedimensional values” Cartier-Bresson would later claim. Black and white wasn’t limiting to him — photographers of the time knew how to use it.

These photographers’ ways of taking pictures also explains their stance when color arrived on the scene. Color forced them to look differently. After experimenting in polychrome, Cartier-Bresson was reportedly so unhappy that he destroyed his negatives — and keeps being known for his monochrome work only.

In “Understanding a Photograph”, John Berger wrote that “paintings, before the invention of photography, are the only visual evidence we have of how people saw the world.” I would argue that black and white photos, before the invention of color photography, also give us a clue how photographers saw the world: In beautiful shades of grey.

Just as black and white now looks reduced to our eyes, color must have seemed gaudy to the photographers of the 1950s: It looked like embellishment.

When advertisement photographers embraced color, the artists’ disdain only grew. In 1959, Walter Evans dismissed, “There are four simple words for the matter, which must be whispered: Color photography is vulgar.”

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THREE Color vs. Black & White

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THREE Color vs. Black & White

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And why wouldn’t it? Why would amateurs, unperturbed by dogma of black and white, use black and white if they could capture life in all of its brilliant colors?

In the black and white years, being a photographer had meant developing your own film, cropping the pictures, and making the prints. Processing color photographs, in contrast, was too complicated for many professional photographers — but lent itself perfectly to amateurs, who simply just had their photos developed in a lab.

Most of all, it must just have seemed more realistic.

Black and white “elevated a photograph from banality to a work of art”, but hobbyists just wanted to shoot realistic family photos. William Eggleston once summarized what must have been on the mind of many people at the time — and what we have come to accept: “The world is in color. And there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Along with Saul Leiter, Steven Shore, Joel Meyerowitz and others, Eggleston is widely credited with pioneering color in the artistic realm. In the 1970s, they made the switch from black and white to color — despite fierce opposition.

“Photographers looked down on color or felt it was superficial or shallow,” said Leiter. Meanwhile, photography legend Paul Strand told Shore that shooting in color was a “disastrous career move”.

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THREE Color vs. Black & White

THE WORLD IS IN COLOR

While artistic photographers turned their noses at it, color film quietly conquered the global mainstream. In the post-war years, photography turned from something only professionals did to an amateurs’ hobby. The invention of (usable) color film — Kodak introduced Kodachrome in 1936 and Ektachrome in the 1940s — led to a gradual, popular adoption of color photography.

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THREE Color vs. Black & White

TUNGSTEN

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Foundries: Hoefler & Co. Designers: Jonathan Hoefler & Tobias Frere-Jones Release Date: 2009 Tungs t en is a conden s e d s ans - s er i f t y pe f ace cr e b y Ho e f ler & F r er e -Jon e s ( n o w k no w n a s Ho e f ler & C o . ) in 2 0 0 9 . T his is a t h a t is k n o w n a s g a s pip e and w a s popul ar w i t h p o s t er de signer s o f t he t w en t ie t h cen t ur y a s t h e f la t side s m ade i t e as y t o s p ac e le t t er s .

T h e n o r m a l v e r s i o n o f Tu n g s t e n i s a f a i r l y c o n d e n s e d f o n t, h o w e v e r, t h e r e a r e a n e x t r a t hr e e addi t ion al w id t hs —n ar r o w, condens e d and c ompr e s s e d —t h a t f ur t h er t a k e s t h e d e s i g n i n t o e v e r m o r e c o m p a c t t e r r i t o r y. E a c h v e r s i o n o f i s a v a i l a b l e in eight weights, however, there are no italic styles available. Frere-Jones made the u l t r a c o n d e n s e d a n d b e a u t i f u l Tu n g s t e n F o n t t y p e f a c e w i t h 3 w i d t h s ( c o n d e n s e d , c ompr e s s e d , and n ar r o w). I t gi ve s a po w er f ul imp ac t t o t h e de sign . www.typewolf.com/tungsten

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FAIRPLEX

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

Fo u nd r ies : Em ig r e D esig ner s : Zu z a n a L ic k o R elea se Da t e: 20 02 Zuzana Licko’s goal for Fairplex was to create a text face which would achieve legibility by avoiding contrast, especially in the Book weight. As a result of its low contrast, the Fairplex Book weight is somewhat reminiscent of a sans serif, yet the slight serifs preserve the recognition of serif letterforms.

When creating the accompanying weights, the challenge was to balance the contrast and stem weight with the serifs. To provide a comprehensive family, Licko wanted the boldest weight to be quite heavy. However, this meant that the Black weight would need more contrast than the other Book weight in order to avoid clogging up. Harmonizing the serifs ended up proving to be quite difficult. The initial serif treatments she tried didn’t stand up to the robust character of the Black weight. www.emigre.com/Fonts/Fairplex

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FOUR Typography

DESIGN KASSI CORONADO PHOTOGRAPHY HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON (pg. 5, 10, 16, 19) WALKER EVANS (pg. 22,23) VIVIAN MAIER ( pg. 20,21) CHRISTER STRÖMHOLM (pg. 14, 15) KA S S I C O R O N A D O ( p g . 8 —9 , 24 — 3 3 , 3 6 – 3 7 ) TEXT LARS MENSEL OWEN EDWARDS ALEX KOTLOWITZ I N T E R N AT I O N A L C E N T E R O F P H OTO G R A P H Y TYPEFACE TUNGSTEN FAIRPLEX

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“

If the world were clear, art would not exist.

— Albert Camus

www.kascoronado.com $49.99

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