Shadow & Light Monthly #49

Shadow & Light is a list of curated photography stories, features, techniques, news and inspiration that I’ve come across this month.

In this edition we examine the work of W. Eugene Smith and take a look inside the lives of the Elite. We learn about how Anton Corbijn approaches his emotive celebrity portraits and learn what lies inside a mystery abandoned cabinet full of Kodachrome slides.

So, with no further ado, I give you this month’s Shadow & Light Monthly. Go grab yourself a cuppa and enjoy this month’s selections below. Please let me know in the comments what you think.

Pick of the month – W. Eugene Smith and the Largest Stories of his Career

Between 1955 and 1965 famed photojournalist W. Eugene Smith worked on his two largest photography projects. Two books about those projects by Sam Stephenson, who spent 20 years researching Smith, have just been reissued by The University of Chicago Press.

Smith, who had just resigned from his post at LIFE magazine, was commissioned in 1955 to spend 3 weeks in Pittsburg to produce 100 photographs for journalist and author Stefan Lorant, who was making a book to celebrate the city’s bicentennial. But Smith ended up staying for a year, and created 20,000 photographs. It was the most ambitious photo essay that Smith ever undertook. But despite Smith’s lifelong conviction that it was his greatest collection of photographs, only a fragment of it had ever been seen. That is until Stephenson started his work.

Stephenson’s article on the project, though various paths, eventually led to an offer of publishing the book Dream Street in 2003 and a chance to curate an exhibition of the work. And the research that he put into the projects led him even further into Smith’s life and work.

“While I was working on those projects, I learned about Smith’s voluminous collection of audio tapes which are stored in his photography archive at the University of Arizona. I was in the early stages of becoming a jazz head and when I saw names like Thelonious Monk chicken scratched on Smith’s labels of his reels of tape, I could not let it go. It all just grew incrementally.”

Read more over on Blind Magazine.

Additional reads

Slim Aarons’ Photography Caught the Elite in Their Habitats. A New Book Captures a Lost World

George Aarons (everyone called the six-foot-four-inch New Englander “Slim”) had the good fortune to make pictures for magazines from the 1940s to the 1990s. His work filled the glossy showbooks of the day: Life and Holiday, Town & Country and Travel + Leisure, and, on occasion, Vanity Fair. 

His sunny portraits of postwar affluence captured the habits and habitats of the elite—and of the wider stylish class, whose socialites commingled with bohemians and trendsetters. Decades later, those same images from another era, through their buoyant mood and almost fetishistic attention to detail, have continued to hold sway over today’s influencers in the worlds of fashion, design, and advertising—a group of tastemakers who simply can’t get enough of Aarons’s idealised depictions of the good life.

You can see more of Aarons’ amazing images over on Vanity Fair.

‘I learn a lot from these people’: Anton Corbijn photographs artists – in pictures

Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn has shot everyone from Nirvana to Patti Smith. I absolutely love his bold, gritty black and white style and as always, I find it fascinating to read about how portrait photographers collaborate with their subjects to get incredible results.

Over on The Guardian, Corbjin talks in detail about why shooting musicians and artists is his passion.

And finally – The Mystery of an Abandoned Cabinet Full of Kodachrome Slides in San Francisco

This story is right up my street. Not one but three mystery cabinets full of Kodachrome slides were discovered lying on a sidewalk in a San Francisco neighbourhood. One of them found its way to local photo collector David Gallagher who could not believe the treasure trove one of his social media followers had brought to him.

“I was knocked out. People bring me stuff and it’s not always great. But these were pretty amazing — things I’d never seen before.”

David Gallagher

The 920 Kodachrome slides shows San Francisco in the 1960s undergoing changes as the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system was built, the subway beneath Market Street was constructed, as well as fascinating photos of daily life in the Californian municipality.

Gallagher actually managed to track down the original photographer thanks to social media. You can read the full story, and see some of the images found in the slides over on PetaPixel.

Until next time…

I hope you enjoy the articles above. Don’t forget you can follow my Shadow & Light magazine over on Flipboard if you’d like to see more of what I’m reading if you like what you’ve seen here.