Photographers Have to Make a Living Too, Part 6

Evans, Weston, McGinley and Meyerowitz
In Advertisements for All Sorts of Stuff

Joel Meyerowitz for Epson printers

PDN, October, 2005
You can find more examples from this campaign here and here.

Ryan McGinley by Jurgen Teller for Marc Jacobs

Details, March, 2009

Details, January, 2009

Edward Weston for freezers?

PDN

Walker Evans images in an advertisement
For Checkered Past Records

Communication Arts, 1999 Advertising Annual

Roy DeCarava Passes Away

Roy DeCarava, 1996 By Sherry Turner DeCarava

Roy DeCarava died last Tuesday. I was working on a post of ephemera from his career but had not written a bio for it. Now, I'll just refer you to the New York Times obituary and run the ephemera.

DeCarava's first major museum show was at the Studio Museum of Harlem, NYC. His first retrospective was at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, in 1975. What follows is the publication released in conjunction with that show. It's 76 pages so I haven't scanned the whole booklet.

Stiff wraps, 8.5 x 8.5 inches, saddle-stiched, 76 pages, 1976

The show that brought him the attention of the larger audience he deserved was the retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, in 1996. There was a nice catalog published to accompany the exhibit and this was the brochure handed out at the museum.

5.25 x 8.5 inches, accordion-style fold unfolds to 26.25 x 8.5 inches with 5 panels per side, 1996

You can see an interview by Charlie Rose here with DeCarava around the time of the MoMA retrospective.



And again, around the same time, he did an interview with NPR.

Postcard, 6 x 4.25 inches, 2004

Card stock, 5.75 x 8.5 inches, unfolds twice to produce a 17.25 x 8.5 invite, 2006

Glossy photo-printer paper, 4 x 6 inches, 2006

In 2006, Roy DeCarava was awarded a National Medal of Arts by then President George Bush.


Caption that accompanied the above photo: 2006 National Medal of Arts recipient and photographer Roy R. DeCarava accepts his award from President and Mrs. Laura Bush in an Oval Office ceremony on November 9, 2006. Mr. DeCarava's citation reads, "In the midst of the Civil Rights movement, his revealing work seized the attention of our Nation while displaying the dignity and determination of his subjects." White House photo by Paul Morse.

Robert Frank and Politics

Robert Frank, 1994, by Barry Kornbluh/Kahmann Gallery, Amsterdam

Robert Frank photographed at the 1984 Democratic Convention, San Francisco, on assignment for California magazine. A selection appeared in the November, 1984, issue of American Photographer, which follows.

Captions: top, Evangelical group;
bottom, Photographer shoots a Japanese woman commemorating the Hiroshima bombing

Captions: top left, A young man on his way
to rock and roll concert by "The Dead Kennedys";
bottom left, One of many Democratic parties;
right, Jesse Jackson supporter

Captions: left, Street photographer;
top right, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley;
bottom right, Parking lot outside Moscone Center

W. Eugene Smith in Pop Photo

Gene Smith shot this photograph that ran on the cover of the November, 1945, issue of Popular Photography. By November of '45, Smith was convalescing in the hospital, recovering from shrapnel wounds to his face. This photo was shot the year before; presumably while home from the Pacific. Pretty cool image for the time.





Here is the text from the above page:

THE NOVEMBER COVER
W. Eugene Smith entitles his picture of Miss Hazel Scott "The Hot Spark of the Blues." He made the picture at Cafe Society Uptown in New York, about a year ago, when Miss Scott was appearing there.
Smith writes that the picture "was shot from a tripod sitting on the edge of the top of the piano. The piano was reverberating with the pounding it was receiving most of the time I was setting up the camera." He was trying to show Miss Scott as a great artist of the piano, and in doing so, he thinks he had "to slaughter the looks of the young lady."
The camera he used was a 4x5 Speed Graphic with a 5-1/4 inch f 4.5 Zeiss Tessar lens. The exposure was made on Kodachrome film, Type B, with 6 flashbulbs. A 2A (yellow conversion) filter was used, and the picture was taken open flash with the lens stopped down to f 16.

Interestingly, this following item is on the next page. It's from a list of gossip items about photographers:

This is positively the last story (I promise) on W. EUGENE SMITH and his adventures in the hospital following his injury on Okinawa, but everyone who knows "Idea Man" FRED SPARKS will appreciate it. When Gene was in the hospital at Guam he had many visitors, but he was too weak to do much more than lift his hand slightly in recognition. When Sparks was sent as a Look correspondent to the Pacific theater, he stopped at Guam, poked his head in the door of Gene's room. Gene took one quick look and said painfully: "I want to go back to Okinawa."

Not only did Gene Smith not get back to Okinawa but he didn't even shoot for the two years it took him to recuperate from his wounds and the subsequent plastic surgery.

An Envelope

Irving Penn Dies at 92

Irving Penn died today at the age of 92. The obit in the New York Times is long and detailed. For years I've had a subscription to Vogue for one reason only and that was to see the intermittent Penn photos. (To their credit, the editors did seem to try to get him in as often as possible.)

The door to his studio on 5th Ave., Manhattan

(top, l to r)
Penn, 1944, in the American Field Service; self portrait, nd;
with Her Royal Highness Princess Désirée, 1985,
at the Hassalblad Awards ceremony honoring Penn

(bottom, l to r)
Self portraits: 1986, 1992, 1993, 1993

Elliott Erwitt Exhibition Cards

Erwitt by D. Lykes Keenan

James Danziger Gallery, NYC
c. 1989 - 1993
11.75 x 8.5 inch stiff card
folded once to create a 5.75 x 8.25 card that opens horizontally

Edwynn Houk Gallery, NYC
2000
5 x 7 inch stiff card

Robert Koch Gallery, NYC
2001
5 x 7 inch stiff card

Book Signing at Eyestorm Gallery, NYC
2001
4.25 x 6 inch post card

HackelBury Fine Art, London
2001
11.75 x 8.25 inch stiff card
folded once to create a 5.75 x 8.25 card that opens horizontally

Leica Gallery, NYC
2004
16.5 x 5.5 inch stiff card
folded once to create a 8.25 x 5.5 inch card that opens horizontally
(I doubt that this is of any interest to anyone, but, there are two versions of this card,
where the front and back photos have been reversed.)

Edwynn Houk Gallery, NYC
2006
7 x 5 inch stiff card

Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR
2007
Poster

Erwitt can be a humorous guy. For years he has shot his own holiday card greeting cards. I've seen a couple and they're funny. If anyone has any of these, please scan them and send them to me. I'd like to gather the whole lot and display them here. And if anyone knows when the first one was made or anything else about them, do tell. Thanks.

Erwitt by Alec Soth