Helmut Newton at Top Shop

TopShop toured an instant photography installation called The Newton Machine round some of its stores earlier this month. Named after the late Helmut Newton, TopShop's Newton Machine was an installation of a self-photography solution inspired by this celebrated photographer. Newton was dismissive of other photographers whose reputations he believed were based mainly on the qualities of the model they partnered with. He thought the model was effectively the better photographer! He devised a set-up that allowed a model to photograph herself. This is what TopShop replicated in-store for its customers this month, in London, Manchester and Dublin.

TopShop's Newton Machine was a marketing promotion based around a studio installation that allowed the store's customers to come in, dress as they pleased from the TopShop wardrobe, be professionally made-up, and take their own self-styled fashion photo using a remote trigger. The Machine was quite a faithful reproduction of Newton's original set-up, using a mirror, marks on the floor where the model should stand, and the original brand of lighting. (The Times Online published a story about it, including a web video clip.)

Newton's original had a serious purpose, "to heighten the tension of the modelling session and to catch the model at the peak of each pose". To this end he incorporated an adjustable motor-drive that allowed the model to choose to work fast or slow, and a bell that would go off just before each shot was triggered. The studio strobes would trigger in sync with the shot.

TopShop Marketing Manager, Lara Einzig, came across the idea in Newton's autobigraphy and thought customers would love it. She saw it could work well in today's culture of shared, self-generated images, like those on FaceBook and MySpace. Being able to have fun, pose as a model, get images posted online, and instantly be given prints to take away and share, would encourage customers to come in and try on outfits.

It also created a favourable association between TopShop's own image and the legacy of the renowned Vogue photographer. The retailer worked with the Helmut Newton Foundation, and Newton's agent, to recreate the Machine. The waiting room for customers queing to use it was supplied with books of his work.

The only draw back is psychological. Newton's Machine can raise the anxiety of a certain type of photographic auteur about a secret fear – that much of the genius of photography may be inherent to the medium, rather than the artist, and that others may discover this!
Story from PhotoMart news 30 June 2008.

Robert Frank and his wife, June Leaf (right), at the opening of the Pingyao International Photography Festival, in Pingyao, China. Photograph by Edward Keating.

Robert Frank's Unsentimental Journey

Published in 1958, Robert Frank’s photographic manifesto, The Americans, torched the national myth, bringing him such comrades as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and—for a controversial documentary—the Rolling Stones. On a trip to China, the 83-year-old rebel of postwar film still defies expectations.

Read the story in full from April's issue of Vanity Fair by clicking here.

Also there is an audio interview with the same interviewer here.

There is also a video clip to accompany the Vanity Fair interview.

Yousef Karsh at the National Portrait Gallery, Room 33
Until 6 July 2008
Entrance free

This display marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Yousuf Karsh, one of the most important portrait photographers of the twentieth century. Fascinated by 'greatness', Karsh photographed many eminent public figures, from world leaders to Hollywood stars, during a career that spanned seven decades.

For more info - click here.


Sir Winston Churchill
by Yousuf Karsh, 1941
© estate of Yousuf Karsh

George Bernard Shaw
by Yousuf Karsh, 1943
© estate of Yousuf Karsh


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Joe Cornish Wild Stillness

Hoopers Gallery, London EC1
Until July 11th
Entrance free.

For more info - click here.

"My main mission as landscape photographer is to see the beauty of wild places (and to advocate their preservation). I pursue that task on coast, moor and mountain through a search for what Romantic philosophers would have called the Sublime." Joe Cornish

Kentucky Yard Sale Yields a Trove of Weegee Images

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: June 3, 2008



“Lovers at the Palace Theater (3-D Glasses),” around 1945.

As letters go, they aren’t exactly the stuff of literature. One from 1959 asks that the recipient phone Con Edison and complain about an unusually high electric bill ($54.92). Another requests a shipment of beloved New York cigars because of apparent dissatisfaction with the options available in Europe. At least one, written from the Regina-Palast Hotel in Munich, Room 551, starts to provide a hint of the sender.

“Looks like the picture won’t be finished on time,” the letter explains. “It rains every day and we can’t find 2 midgets, so it looks like I’ll be here at least 2 more weeks.”

The letters, along with 210 vintage black-and-white photographic prints, were found in 2003 in a zebra-stripe trunk that was bought at a yard sale in Kentucky by two Indiana women who were on their way back from a camping trip. One of the women simply liked the look of the trunk, and when she found old clothes, yellowed papers and pictures inside, she thought about throwing the contents away.

But she took them instead to an Indianapolis rare-documents dealer. And this week the Indianapolis Museum of Art plans to announce that it has acquired a trove of work and correspondence by Weegee, the crepuscular, stogie-smoking New York photographer whose visceral pictures became a template not only for artists like Diane Arbus but also for much of the uncomfortably close tabloid imagery that exists today. The museum described the acquisition as a partial gift and partial purchase from the dealer.

The trunk is assumed to have once been the possession of Wilma Wilcox, a social worker who was Weegee’s companion and lived with him from 1957 until his death in 1968. Upon her death in 1993, she bequeathed the bulk of his work — thousands of prints and negatives — to the International Center of Photography in Manhattan. How the trunk full of prints and 62 letters to Ms. Wilcox from Weegee (born Usher Fellig in what is now Ukraine, and later known as Arthur Fellig) ended up in Kentucky is a mystery that neither the Indianapolis Museum nor the dealer, Steve H. Nowlin, has solved.

“We’re just lucky that it all survived,” said Martin Krause, the museum’s curator of prints, drawings and photographs. “The woman who found them thought maybe these were just old family snapshots or something — though how you could mistake a Weegee for a family photograph, I don’t know.”

The size of the newly discovered collection pales in comparison with the holdings of the International Center of Photography, and Mr. Krause said that no previously unknown work had been found among the prints. But for a museum that began collecting photography seriously only 15 years ago, the work is an important addition — especially because the trunk contained a surprisingly broad survey of Weegee’s career, with the only weak spot being fewer prints from his early years of crime and murder-scene coverage in the 1930s.

Maxwell Anderson, the museum’s director, said the institution’s young collection has notable 19th-century work and a concentration of contemporary photography. “So this will serve as a great bridge between those traditions,” he said, adding, of the discovery of the prints and letters, that it was “like the last keystroke of a life of accidental purpose.”

Weegee — whose nickname, according to one story he told, was a transliteration of Ouija, a reference to his almost psychic ability to find a fresh crime scene — was the archetype of a tabloid photographer, working mostly at night in the lower-rent parts of New York City.

“People who work in the daytime are suckers,” he once said. Before the publication of his first book, “Naked City,” made him famous in 1945, he lived in a cheap room near police headquarters and was said to be so accustomed to working on the run that he once developed a picture of a prizefight in a subway motorman’s cab while rushing back to a newspaper office.

As his star rose in the 1950s and 1960s, he began to travel extensively, make experimental films and worked for other directors, some as illustrious as Stanley Kubrick, for whom he served as a consultant during the filming of “Dr. Strangelove.”

But as many of the newly discovered letters to Ms. Wilcox show, much of his film career was on a lower plane. The letter from Munich refers to his work on a 1958 quasi-documentary called “Windjammer,” the story of an epic sea journey filmed in something called Cinemiracle, a short-lived widescreen format. (In fact, very short-lived: “Windjammer” was the only movie to be shot with that method.) Given Weegee’s influence on Arbus, Andy Warhol and even contemporary photographers, Mr. Krause said the museum was extremely lucky to come into such a body of work all at once. But he added that the heavily flashed, high-contrast pictures — of corpses, movie-house lovers, jazz clubs, celebrities, bums and oddball street scenes — were also simply as entertaining as the man who took them.

“This gives our collection a certain personality,” he said. “And what a personality to get.”