The Grandfather of 35mm Photography - Page 3

By: Thorsten Overgaard        <--- Back to Page 1         Page 4 --->

Leica might very well be the grandfather of 35mm photography, which they invented, but photography existed before and also besides Leica cameras and Leica photographers. So let's spend some time looking also at the history of photograhy, and other photographers. We might learn something.

[a work in progress. Feel free to mail me at thorsten@overgaard.dk with comments, ideas and suggestions]

Jan Grarup, Denmark: "Eampaty, time, closeness and respect"

Jam Grarup: "Editors are not necessairly the most bright peope in the world," is one of the interesting statements from Danish photographer Jan Grarup in this Februrary 2011 video interview from Swedish Fotosidan.se on how to survive as a photographer who wants to tell stories. He used to shoot Leica M6 till he needed to go digital, and now shoots Nikon dLSR cameras with manual focus and fixed focal lenghts (from 24-85mm). He doesn't own a zoom lens.
Jan Grarup is a multi-World Press Photo award winner throughout the last years, winner of the Oskar Barnack Award 2011, along with a lot of other awards, and is a freelancher with NOOR and Das Bureau these days.

Herman Leonard: "Always tell the truth, but in terms of beauty"

Herman Leonard self portrait (AP Photo/Herman Leonard Photography, LLC., CTSIMAGES)

Herman Leonard (1923-2010) was the man behind iconic images of Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra. He won great priase, and well deserved, in the years before his death, in that he was the first photographer to be granted a Grammy Foundation Grant for Preserving and Archiving in 2008, enabling him to digitize, catalogue and preserve his collection of 60,000 jazz negatives. He also received the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Portraiture in 2008, and Bill Clinton said of him that he "is an extraordinary talent, the greatest jazz photographer in history." Lenny Kravitz, who photographed with Herman Leonard in the Bahamas in January 2010, said of him "I was blessed to have shared beatiful moments with Herman that will be among the highlights of my life."

For a look into his work, Herman Leonard tells "My favorite camera was the old speed graphic, that 4 x 5, handheld, large monstrous thing that you see in a lot of black-and-white films from the '40s and '50s. It was that newspaper man's camera - great big thing you held with two hands and it had a big flash on the side. You had to take your time. You could only take a certain amount of pictures in one night, physically I mean. The camera didn't have roll film. It had 4 x 5 slides. You could only carry so many film packs physically unless you were a horse. So if I went out to shoot something at the Roost or Birdland, I knew that I could not snap more than twenty or thirty pictures for the whole night. You had to be really careful and take your time about what you were shooting, compose it well and wait for the right moment. Sometimes I'd go for many nights without having a good shot. I would go home, process the stuff, and throw it away. In time you get up a collection of good shots. When you work with smaller cameras you have a tendency to overshoot, hoping to catch that moment, and you end up with a lot of junk."

Dexter Gordon photographed in 1948 by Herman Leonard. The smoke is illuminated by flash. (AP Photo/Herman Leonard Photography, LLC., CTSIMAGES).

Harman Leonard on composition: "You look, you just look. I think that when a musician or a musical composer sits down to compose a piece he will get the general outline of what he is doing and then he'll refine it, listen to it back, and make the changes that he wants. When I'm sitting there in front of a drummer or sax player, I look. I look at the angles. I look at the light. I look at the background. And being disciplined by using a large camera, you have to look. You don't look into the camera, you look at the subject. You feel the composition within the frame within which you're working, and you do it to your own liking. I happen to like a certain style. I like back lighting because it sets the subject off from the background, especially if the background is dark, which most of the clubs were. I like light that goes around the subject and not flat lighting."

For more on Herman Leonard, visit www.hermanleonard.com or read this 1995-article from where the above quites are from, "Herman Leonard: making music with light."

Vivian Maier

The incredible story about the unpublished photographer Vivian Maier who left a goldmine of street photographs when she died in 2009. In November 2011 the first book came out with her photos.

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