There is little I can say about the immense body of creative work Elliott Erwitt left behind and the profound influence he had on the world of photography that hasn’t been said. His greatness simply goes beyond words for me at this time of his passing. He was without equal and will be missed.
https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/remembering-elliott-erwitt-1928-2023/
This article is packed with much more than the title suggests and delves into life, meaning, and much more that a photographer (or anyone) might find interesting and insightful.
https://petapixel.com/2023/03/04/why-are-so-many-gen-z-ers-drawn-to-old-digital-cameras/
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/stgp/hd_stgp.htm
When I was in photography school years ago, besides learning all the facets of working with film photography, we also studied the history of photography, including the biographies of the great photographers from its roots to the present.
Of all those, I found Alfred Stieglitz one of the most fascinating. He was schooled in engineering but was a pioneer who took photography beyond the technical and just capturing images, into the aesthetic , artistic world of infinite creative possibilities. His life spanned a time of significant geopolitical events and modernization that changed the world. His life with Georgia O’Keefe helped further assimilate photography into an expressive art from. He was a skilled photographic technician but also excelled in whatever genre and style of photography he chose to work in.
If anyone enjoys art, photography, history and a good story as much as I do, but is not aware of the life and work of Alfred Stieglitz, then I would suggest you take a look at the brilliant legacy he left behind to enrich our lives.
This is a picture I took at sundown of a Bell UH-1D Iroquois Huey Helicopter on static display. Because of the fading light, I was able to capture a nice, silhouetted image of its iconic shape contrasted against a muted gradient of transitioning sky colors at twilight. For those interested, this aircraft is on permanent static display at the Frontiers of Flight Museum at Love Field in Dallas Texas. There is a wonderful history behind this particular helicopter and it is a story worth checking out. You can find it in the link below.
I have often said that when capturing images, as soon as the camera shutter closes one has visually captured the past. It may not feel that way while in the moment, but it will become increasingly apparent as time passes and the captured image is revisited.
Shooting Photographs sometimes begins and ends in one day for me with a 2 step process of capturing images, then downloading them to my computer. Once downloaded, unless I am time-limited, it may be some time before I get around to revisiting some of those images. It is later, when going through my tens of thousands of images, that I often “rediscover” images that I had forgotten about and depending on how much time has passed, may have taken on some level of historical significance. This picture was taken the last (and 20th) time the Trinity River crested above 40ft, a literal “high water mark” that has only been exceeded 22 times since the flood of 1908, before the Dallas levee system was built. Only time will tell if this image will gain any real historical significance, but for me, it created an opportunity to experience a nice morning at daybreak in order to capture a rare image of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge with the Dallas skyline reflected in a body of water that is the flooded Trinity River. I am not sure when an opportunity like that will arise again but was happy to recently “rediscover” this image.
Often when taking a picture, it is merely to capture the image of a subject I find interesting. The image visually captures that moment, often in a fraction of a second. What I don’t know exactly at the time, and only discover later is how I captured a piece of history as it was and will never be seen again. The level of importance of that image and it’s historical significance varies and is subjective, but what I find fascinating is how the visual image of that moment in time stays exactly the same, and yet how it is perceived can change greatly as the history surrounding it evolves.
