A picture of Robert Frank

[Beniliam]

Maybe a less-know picture of him for someone.

Robert Frank at the old Metropolitan Opera, New York, 1955.




This picture was taken by the great Czech photographer Bedrich Grunzweig.


I think that the most curious detail of this picture is see a bow tie in the throat of Robert Frank!! ... He seems left eye too!

[Al Kaplan]

Nothing at all unusual about it. He was dressed for the occasion, wearing a tux to attend the opera. Notice the sheen on the satin lapels? At least he wasn't trying to impress anybody with black paint Leicas. I never realized that he was left eyed! He shot all of his verticals upside down. That must have driven the editors crazy when they looked over his contact sheets.

[Beniliam]

Al Kaplan, thanks for your comment.

I have always this image in my mind about Robert Frank among the crowd. Its funny the contrast between the two pictures!

[JohnTF]

Nice shot by Grunzweig, all my trips to Prague, and still missed his work. ;-)

Thanks for the wake up. ;-)

Regards, John

[35mmdelux]

Very interesting, thanks.

[xayraa33]

Good photo of Robert Frank with cameras.

I like to play guess the lenses on the cameras.

[Melvin]

Can anyone identify the lenses? They look like fast 50mms, which makes sense. The cameras look like Leicas.
I just showed "Pull My Daisy" to my painting students and they loved it.

[xayraa33]

Originally Posted by Melvin

Can anyone identify the lenses? They look like fast 50mms, which makes sense. The cameras look like Leicas.
I just showed "Pull My Daisy" to my painting students and they loved it.

I wish it was a higher quality photo, but my guess would be an 85mm f2 Nikkor and a 50mm f1.4 Nikkor.

maybe the cameras are Tower type 3s ;-))

he got all the gear at Sears !!

[Al Kaplan]

My thought was 85/2 Nikkor and 50mm Summarit but it might be a 50/1.4 Nikkor, probably on black dial III-f bodies. At the time nobody in the U.S. thought that the Niccas were quality cameras. In the mid 1960's you could still buy used Nicca bodies for $15, and the Tower was a rebranded Nicca.

[xayraa33]

Since the camera to his eye has the vulcanite going around the upper part of the lens mount, it looks to be a Leica III, IIIa, IIIb type, not the IIIc/IIIf.

The Tower/Nicca type 3 was an outright copy of the Leica III.

[Pickett Wilson]

So what film is he using?

[xayraa33]

Originally Posted by Pickett Wilson

So what film is he using?

the proof sheet of the shots he took in Britain, before he came to the states, say Ilford.

Kodak Super XX would be my guess in the states, Tri X was out on the market for a year in 1955.

Note: some of the negs from the Americans show Kodak Plus X

[xayraa33]

[Al Kaplan]

That book cover shows "blacks riding in the back of the bus". A half a century sure made a big difference. Kerouac's book "The Town And The City" was a literary breakthrough at the time.

[Beniliam]

Thanks for your comments!



Its possible that many photographers used in the 50´s the new film that in 1955 Ilford introduces in rolls, the HPS: "the fastest film in the world". I dont know if in the USA the Ilford films arrived normally...

http://www.photomemorabilia.co.uk/Il...hronology.html


Read this interesting blog entry:

http://eddeasy.blogspot.com/2008/07/...kin-young.html

[Siluro]

Originally Posted by Melvin

I just showed "Pull My Daisy" to my painting students and they loved it.

When I was a photo student, one of my lecturers showed us Pull My Daisy...brilliant! I like your style Melvin.

[Al Kaplan]

I remember using Ilford HPS in the early 1960's. It was extremely grainy, but not quite as bad as the competition, Agfa Isopan Record. Today they'd be rated ISO 800 for HPS and ISO 1,000 for Record, but Kodak made a still faster film, Royal-X Pan Recording. I think it was about ISO 1,200 and only available in bulk. Using the brand new Acufine developer you could get a decent, but very grainy, negative up to about ISO 3,200.

I have a Royal-X Pan print hanging in my living room of a girl, Karina, of perhaps 18 or 19 playing guitar. She's sitting inside of a big tent made out of a white cargo parachute illuminated by a small campfire. It's printed full frame on 8x10 paper and dated 1962. I was probably using a Canon II-S with a 35/1.8 Canon lens. I couldn't afford Leicas yet.

[furcafe]

That's not upside down! That's the "correct" way to shoot a vertical, or @ least that's the way I learned to shoot a vertical. And the fact that Robert Frank held his Leicas that way must mean it's the right way.

But seriously, I think it's a more stable hold than having the right hand on top, because as a righty (& right-eyed, too), I prefer to have the camera rest on the stronger hand. I use my right thumb to release the shutter about 1/2 the time. In Zeiss Ikon Contax manuals, this was the recommended vertical hold & it's also shown as an alternative in Leica & other manufacturers's manuals. For extra stability, this hold also lets you press the camera to your forehead.

Originally Posted by Al Kaplan

I never realized that he was left eyed! He shot all of his verticals upside down. That must have driven the editors crazy when they looked over his contact sheets.

[Al Kaplan]

furcafe, with lever wind rangefinder cameras I often shoot and wind one handed. Sometimes it's because I'm holding a flash off camera with one hand, sometimes I'm holding the camera over my head to shoot over a crowd. The past few years I've been shooting with a 15mm holding the camera off to the side so I'm in the picture too.

When I am shooting the "normal" way I prefer having the camera alongside my nose just like Frank does, but I'm right eyed, hence the cameras is turned the opposite way because it's on the other side of my nose.

[Beniliam]

Al Kaplan, thank you for comment your experiences with the differents films of that time. Do you use sometime the Adox films in the 50´s and the 60´s?

Bruce Davidson remembered the famous shot that he did in the UK in the 50´s. Maybe a repost but interesting know that he use Ilford HPS film ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesi...04/photography

[Al Kaplan]

I first started developing my own film in 1961. Like many newbies I immediately wanted to try every available film in every available developer. Adox KB-14, KB-17, and KB-21 were readily available. The numbers were actually the DIN speed numbers equivalent to ISO 20, 40, and 100. I believe that Adox also made a higher speed film only available in Europe. I tried all three and for a year or two shot a lot of KB-17. I settled on using FR-22 developer. It came in 1 ounce bottles and was a one-shot designed for slow films.

KB-14 didn't seem to have much finer grain. Both Ilford FP3 and Kodak Plus X had finer grain than KB-21. If you enlarged big enough, at least 11x14, you could notice that ISO 20 Agfa Isopan FF and ISO 40 Isopan F seemed to have sharper grain than the Adox film.

If anybody wants to come by, go through my boxes of negatives and contact sheets, and make some sample prints...LOL...I still have all of them. You might even be able to print up some sexy pictures of your wife's grandmother. Just to study the grain of course.

By today's standards they were all grainy films. Even Kodak dropped Panatomic-X and the motion picture film of the same speed, Eastman XT Pan a few years ago. Faster films had fine enough grain.

[lawrence]

Originally Posted by Beniliam

This picture was taken by the great Czech photographer Bedrich Grunzweig.

That's a great shot, many thanks for sharing it.

[Beniliam]

Im glad that this topic could be interesting for you.

Al Kaplan, thank you again.

I read many times that photographers like Louis Faurer, Robert Frank, Eugene Smith... developing their films by inspection (using a green bulb for ´see´ in milliseconds what density the negative have), I supposed that this method was ´common´ among the photographers in those years. Always intrigued me how this photographers can photography the night in that time without using a tripod.

For example:

-Horacio Coppola (argentinean photographer, more than a century of life and still alive!)




-William Klein




-Eugene Smith (Thelonius Monk band) This Smith serie of portraits and group portraits I think is quite interesting.

[summaron]

Anther thank you for posting the Robert Frank photo. He looks so different than he did later on, after the years of living "poor as a churchmouse" on the lower east side.

I remember Agfa being more available than Ilford, at least in California. The guy I used to buy film from recommended it for low light photography--it was 600 ASA or something like that, and TriX was maybe 200. Roaul Coutard liked Ilford so much he spliced 100' rolls together when he was filming Breathless for Godard and so Ilford brought us the first splash of the New Wave. But Frank's existentialism was on plus x or double x, I'd guess, probably whatever was cheapest and/or most consistent from batch to batch.

[Al Kaplan]

You're RIGHT, Summaron. Agfa was easier to find than Ilford in Miami, New York and Boston in the early sixties.

Film speeds of the era included Weston, G.E., Scheiner, British Scheiner, DIN (German), Gost (Russian), and ASA (American). The American system included a one stop "safety factor" with faster films, a bit less for more contrasty slower speed films. Everybody knew this, the photo magazines wrote about it: ASA 200 Tri-X was really ASA 400 and Agfa Isopan Record was 1000, not 500....and so on. At some point as we approached the seventies the American Standards Institute confessed and eliminated the "safety factor". Tri-X became labeled as ASA 400!

Some speed scales were arithmetic like ASA and GOST ~ double the number equals double the speed. Others like DIN were logarithmic ~ add 3 and the speed doubled. ASA 100 was 21 degrees DIN and ASA 400 was 27 degrees DIN. When the International Standards Institute, ISO, came along it combined the American and German system numbers seperated by a slash so Tri-X became ISO 400/27. A few years later the DIN number was dropped. Tri-X became just plain 400.

Tri-X developed to a standard gamma (contrast) in a standard developer of the D-76 type was ALWAYS a 400 speed film by our present standards. Over the years it got finer grain and better tonality but it DID NOT BECOME FASTER. This was true of every other film as well.

It used to be common to refer to films like Tri-X as EI 400 with standard development but E.I. 1200 in Acufine. EI or E.I., short for Exposure Index, meant that when using the ASA scale that rating gave you good exposure, but since it didn't always use "standard development" it didn't meet ASA standards for rating the film speed it wouldn't be ASA 1200 in Acufine.