Inessential Stuff

I take pictures here and there all the time–at Marcus’ t-ball games, on the way back from weddings, on photoshoots. It gets to be an odd assortment of photographs that aren’t easy to categorize and, therefore, don’t usually end up in a gallery on my blog. So I decided to lump them all together into a category of their own, and here they are. Will notice a rural theme, and an acute interest in hay bales.

I met Amy on the day of our shoot.  Within the first few minutes, she told me, “I’ve been sick all my life.”

She is 23 years old, and has been in and out of hospitals all her life. She has fought cancer twice. She has had open-heart surgery. She has had countless images taken of her body—–MRIs, CAT scans, X-Rays.

But she’s been in good health for a while now, and, as if to remind herself of who she really is, she wanted some pictures of the outside of her body, pictures that showed a healthy woman.

She told me beforehand she didn’t want me to photoshop out the scar on her sternum from the surgery, but that she really wanted me to make her look pretty.

That was not difficult to do.

It so happens that her boyfriend is a motorcross rider, so she wanted pictures of her with his bike and gear, and she found a great farm location.  I met her and her friend downtown, and they led me to the farm.  We did some shots around the barn at first, and then moved out to the field, which was much better.

She was very nervous at first, skitter-ish, and reluctant to look into the camera for more than an instant.  But with a bit of coaching and encouragement, she became more and more relaxed.

We tried a bit of this (some shots by the barn) and that (shots in the field), and by the end, not only was she anticipating what I wanted her to do next, and posing beautifully, but she was actually enjoying it

We finished up.  I packed up my gear, and she put away the bike equipment.  And as we were heading back across the field to the barn, she said, to no one in particular, “This has been the best day of my life.”

That makes for a pretty gratifying day of shooting.

We had scheduled a shoot a couple weeks in advance, so we simply lucked out on the weather.  It had been 0ver 90 that day, but a storm was rolling in.  That night would bring thunder and rain and the next day the highs would be in the low 60′s.  But for the evening, when the shoot was scheduled, the weather was perfect:  not too hot, but with spectacular clouds, as the storm came closer and closer.

I’ll post some pictures of the scenery later.  For now, here are a few of the portraits we got.

Britta is a photographer/model with a keen interest in fairy tale concepts.  She contacted me and showed me some of her favorite images and wondered if I would be interested doing a shoot along the same lines.  The idea appealed to me, in part because it isn’t something I’ve really done before.  So she came up with a wardrobe and location and together we kind of floated around this vague idea.  More of a mood, really.

Once we started shooting, it seemed clearer to me.  Nymphs.  Forest nymphs.  Water nymphs.  Tree nymphs.  Nymphs of the night.  Britta was great, and we got this little collection for our efforts.

Charles M. Conlon is rarely mentioned in books of the history of photography, and his name is even unknown to many fervent baseball fans. But he was a brilliant photographer who documented the early modern baseball era, photographing the greats of the game, as well as the average players, and even the utterly obscure.

The power of his images is in his ability to capture the personalities of the players, most of whom were, in that area, ordinary young men who took second jobs in the off-season to support themselves.

Conlon was an amateur photographer and a newspaperman at the New York World-Telegram, which featured some of the most complete baseball coverage of all New York newspapers. One day in 1904, his editor asked if he’d go out to the ballparks and photograph some of the players. He did so, hauling his bulky equipment out of the studio. And for the next 38 years, he compiled the most complete and famous record of baseball from that period.

He wasn’t the best photographer technically—he struggled often with focus and often guessed at exposure in difficult lighting situations, though he constantly experimented to improve himself. He also had no pretense to art.  Furthermore, his images are often neglected because his subject matter was baseball players, many of whom came from the farmlands and coal mines and were considered ruffians.  It was not considered a gentleman’s game.

However, his images go beyond documenting baseball and reach the level of art based on the power of his portraiture, which capture the personality of the players. One can see in the portrait of Babe Ruth, for instance, not just a powerful man, but the vulnerability and even sadness in the eyes of man raised in an orphanage who usually hid behind bluster and a larger-than-life personality.

I am particularly fond of his portrait of Christy Mathewson, taken in 1915. From 1903-1914, Mathewson won over 71% of his games, averaged 27 wins a year, and was one of the two most dominant pitchers in all of baseball. In 1915, however, it all started slipping away. Mathewson would have his first losing season in 13 years, struggle to strike batters out, and be hit hard, giving up more home runs than anyone in baseball. He had, in one year, gone from dominant to a below-average pitcher.

And during that season, Conlon took Mathewson’s picture. You can see the story in his face. He is a big, strong man, a proud man, but it is no longer easy. His hair is sweaty. He looks tired. Always considered a great gentleman of the game, his smile of only an imitation. He would be traded the next year, and only pitch 26 more games before retiring.

Conlon, who shot with a Hassleblad and a Speed Graflex, captured his images on glass negatives, 8000 of which survive. He retired from photography when his wife died in 1942, and he died 3 years later.

Many of his original photographs can be found in baseball’s Hall of Fame. His images can be collected in baseball card form in a series released by The Sporting News in the 1990s, and in the book Baseball’s Golden Age:  The Photographs of Charles M. Conlon.  They will appeal not just to baseball fans, or photography enthusiasts, but to anyone drawn to powerful portraiture.