Happy Birthday Abe

Thanks to wetplate collodion this (cropped) image of Abraham Lincoln still sharp and penetrating.  Photographed by Alexander Gardner, and taken on February 21, 1885.  The interesting detail to this image is, in the course of removing the plate from the camera, Alexander Gardner cracked it, so it was in two pieces, but still printable, you can see the crack in the albumen prints made from it still smiling at us after 123 years.  

Happy 204th birthday Abe!

Abe cropped, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Abe cropped, 

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Abraham Lincoln  -  Alexander Gardner, 1865/Albumen silver print/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Abraham Lincoln  -  Alexander Gardner, 1865/Albumen silver print/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Don McCullin gives a tour @ National Gallery of Canada

Recently I had the great pleasure of being part of a tour given by the veteran photojournalist Don McCullin of the new National Gallery of Canada retrospective exhibition of his work.  

For more than an hour we walked through the galleries as he spoke intimately of his life, his work and the many dangerous and heart wrenching encounters encompassing the several decades he traveled the world.

The small gallery spaces were packed with people in a breathless silence as Mr. McCullin spoke in a humble, and at times shockingly frank manner of the horrors and injustices he personally witnessed and sometimes captured with his camera. 

I say “sometimes” because, as he explained, often he could not bring himself to capture the brutality and other worldliness of what he was witnessing and in some cases he was told in no uncertain terms, “you take any pictures we will kill you”.  The images he captured on film represent only a small portion of his actual life experiences.  

That could be said of us all, but very occasionally in life we meet people that seem to have lived many more lives within this short lifespan we all experience - their bodies and minds, vessels of a million stories witnessed. Don McCullin is this sort of rare person.  And, as he admitted himself, it is even more rare to have come through it all with your sanity intact, “I am not sure why or how I am not like one of those insane street people in my photographs.”

He often spoke in an off-handed manner about stumbling about in the dark and how anger was a motivating force in his work. His humility seemed to attribute credit for his images to “luck” of some sort.  One look at the evidence, his photographic legacy and you can easily recognize there is much more at work here. 

Don McCullin intuitively understands light, has mastery over composition and visual language - he can in an instant capture fleeting moments so powerful that they sum up human emotion, frailty and injustice.  Perhaps, he was in the right place at the right time, but I am thankful it was his finger on the trigger of the Nikon F.

Do not miss this exhibition, now on at the National Gallery of Canada.

Don McCullin speaking to a full house at the National Gallery of Canada

Don McCullin speaking to a full house at the National Gallery of Canada

Going Live

...after many weeks at of this... i am happy to roll out www.elter.ca, NEW and improved, stay tuned for more.

time for a caffeinated beverage...

time for a caffeinated beverage...

Jam For Thought

As the calendar year of 2012 draws to a close this gives me the opportunity to catch up on a couple of images and notable events that I have as yet not posted over the last, hmmmm, 6 months or so. I hope to do recollect these events in the Next 6 months or so – so stay tuned.

 As a segue, let’s begin with cookies and winter solstice - and what is solstice without cookies, you may ask?

The Jam.

The Jam.

Delicious Linzer cookies, which if you are a fan, know that these cookies are jam filled. As the dough is being prepared, I am tasked with choosing the jam; opening the cupboard the pickings are slim. Near the very back I pull a half litre vintage jar of jam. In fact, both the jar and the jam within are vintage - 1986 to be exact, yes, that is a 26-year-old pear and plum jam.

 As I appreciated the irregular blue glass of this old Mason jar, and whether or not this jam is still safe to eat, I began to think of what 1986 brought me/us:

 In North America we had the dynamic duo of actor turned politician Ronald Reagan and his side kick the biggest chin in the north Brian Mulroney - (shudder); The iron lady, Margaret Thatcher held fast to the reigns in Great Britain,Microsoft holds its first public offering of stock; Apple Computer introduces the Macintosh Plus. It features a 8 MHz 68000 processor, 1 MB RAM, SCSI connector for hard drive support, and an 800 kB 3.5-inch floppy drive. Price is US$2600.  Chernobyl nuclear power station goes critical and explodes; in the night sky Halley’s comet burns a trail as it passes by; Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrates 73 seconds after launch killing everyone on board. Back on earth “Rock Me Amadeus” by Falco played on the radios while Sega, Atari and Nintendo kept children glued to their ‘joysticks”.

Bon Jovi gave love a bad name, while “New Wavers” Wang Chung(ed) tonight. The Beastie boys changed the face and direction of music with album Licensed to ill; The Dead Kennedys played their last show and later that year their front man Jello Biafra battles the right wing crazies - Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) with stated goal of saving children from “music deemed to be violent, have drug use or be sexual” via labeling albums with Parental Advisory stickers. Don’t worry, he won, unfortunately we did not. Mind you, now all children know which music to buy thanks to the Parental Advisory sticker! Ferris Bueller took the day off and we also learned that there are places in the universe not to go alone, in part two of the Alien quadrilogy.  In the visual arts we lost some of the greats Henry Moore, Joseph Beuys, Georgia O’Keeffe, leaving us all lots to think about and enjoy.

Yes, all this from one jar of jam!

1986 was a personally pivotal year for me and looking back it was a very interesting time to be alive, and made for some mouth-watering cookies too.

The cookies.

The cookies.