Howard Schatz

Howard Schatz is a wonderful photographer.
Here's some recent B&W, on models and their mothers:
See it here.

Great TV Tonight

Weds. has become a crowded night for highly improbable but extremely-entertaining TV, with both Supernatural and The Americans.

The Americans tonight hinges on the shooting of Ronal Reagan, so it should be interesting.

Learn B&W from Zone VI's Fred Picker

Calumet has remastered and re-released Fred Picker's (founder of Zone VI) three important B&W photo videos from the 1990s, Printing; The Camera; and The Negative: Exposure and Development and is offering the DVD w/ all three for $9.99 this week to celebrate Ansel Adams' 111th birthday.
Picker was an enormously important figure in the revival of interest in B&W, large format and slow photography. He had very strong opinions about how things should be done, and while he might not have always produced the most exciting work, he was right about the best ways to print, develop and shoot. 
Highly recommended.
See it here.

Printing Ansel Adams' Negatives

Here's a short piece about printing Ansel Adams' negatives - we wish it were longer and more detailed, but it is what it is:
Read it here.

Is Sherlock Holmes in the Public Domain?

Well, it depends...
Read about it here.

NYC in Cyanotype

See it here.

"Notorious"-ly Great B&W Hitchcock

Great B&W movies on Blu-ray! We can't get enough!

Grant and Bergman: Notoriously good looking.

We picked up a Blu-ray of Hitchcock's Notorious (1946) for a crazy low price on Ebay and we're thinking this one needs to move from our "Merely Great" list to the "Masterpiece" list.

The HD is mostly pretty good if unspectacular; it looks like it is a straight transfer from a decent 35mm print (the package says nothing about a restoration).

As for looking good, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman are both astonishing looking; Almost distracting in their visual appeal. 

The box quotes Ebert: "The most elegant expression of the master's visual style." 

Indeed.

To put it another way, you can watch this film w/ the sound off (we know, we tried it) and you will still follow the entire thing. Hitch tells the story w/ his actor's faces, carefully-planned closeups and precision camerawork and framing. 

That is how movies are supposed to be made - film is, first and foremost, a visual medium.

And Hitch was the master.

Terrific movie.

(Sidenote: there does not seem to be a single [first unit] exterior shot in the film. Every exterior in which one can see the stars's faces is back projection. At least so far as we've noted. There's one wide shot right before they kiss for the first time, on the mountaintop, but it is such a wide shot the actors are certainly stand ins. Hitch was known for never shooting on location if he didn't have to -- immediately postwar and all, tight budgets, it looks like Hitch and his stars never left the studio!)

www.bwphotopro.com Lives on Here!

bwphotopro.com has moved!

This is the new home of the long-running B&W photo Web site www.bwphotopro.com (also known as bwphotopro.com):

See it here.

We've moved on to a blog format, as it is much easier and faster to update. 

So come back often for lots of cool B&W photography and news.

And Get Out Your Film Lenses!

A very helpful guide to using your film lenses on digital cameras:
See it here.

Get Out that Old Polaroid Pack Camera!

We shoulda known this:  
Fuji makes 100-series instant film for use in Polaroid 100-series Pack cameras.
We really thought there was no such film being made. 
The cameras in question are the '60s era folding ones with bellows.
See the B&W film here.
They make color film also.
These cameras are widely available for low prices, and the film is not costly.
We knew about The Impossible Project and the great interest in everything Polaroid, but did not know these great old folding Polaroids could live again.
We found out from watching a DVD of the great Portland, Oregon band Pink Martini: 
bandleader Thomas Lauderdale is shown shooting backstage (and onstage) w/ a battery of Type-100 Polaroid cameras. The DVD has a big selection of his quite-good shots, as does the band's Web site.

Lots of Great TV This Week

(This has nothing to do w/ B&W; we sometimes post material from our other blogs. This is from:

http://tvbeatsmovies.blogspot.com/) 

Eureka, Leverage and In Plain Sight are gone but there is still a good deal of really worthwhile TV, and this week holds some goodies.

Tonight we have Justified, which is intensely violent but quite unusual and good. And now features the GREAT Jim Beaver, who stepped out of the character-actor shadows in Supernatural in the powerful part of senior demon-hunter Bobby Singer.

Tom'w there is a brand-new episode of Supernatural and episode #3 of The Americans, which is holding our interest/enthusiasm.

Th. is Elementary, which we will be trying again after bailing out early on the pilot. The great crime writer Lawrence Block is a big fan, so it must be good.

And Monday (and next Monday) there was the looney, loopy and brilliant Bunheads. (If you missed it, you have options to catch it - via ABC Family Web site or a "Look Back" feature on your cable system.)

Ron Asheton R.I.P.

www.bwphotopro.com, Where B&W Photography Lives

(Photograph of Ron Asheton and Iggy Pop, Copyright 2009 Eric Rudolph, All Rights Reserved, No Reproduction Permitted Whatsoever.)

Guitar legend Ron Asheton died a few years ago; he was an under-appreciated rock-guitar genius.

After about 30 years of a fairly low-profile post-Stooges career, the man who played those amazingly brutal and beautiful guitar parts on The Stooges' ferocious Fun House finally began to reap the rewards of his so-called primitive genius. 
He played 150 shows worldwide with the reformed Stooges (and was quoted saying he'd become a millionaire as a result). 
I took this photo on March 27th, 1973 at the now-shuttered Ford Theater in Detroit at the premiere concert for Raw Power. I was there w/ Brian Zabawski (who got me interested in the band); we were covering their return for Rock magazine. Asheton had, by then, been usurped to the bass chair by new Stooge James Williamson. 

BLACK AND WHITE ON BLU-RAY: The Black-and-White Western.

Everything's better on Blu-ray, especially B&W. 

Notable recent Blu-ray B&W releases include Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (which can now be seen for the work of drop-dead genius it is, thanks to the clarity of Blu-ray), his somewhat under-appreciated masterwork Notorious and, just out, the original The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Westerns are usually though of as color movies, but great saddle sagas were also made in B&W. 

Exclusively for bwphotoprocom.blogspot, Film expert Brian Zabawski reviews the newly-released Blu-ray of Pursued, shot by B&W genius James Wong Howe, and will soon weigh in on The Furies:

BLACK AND WHITE ON BLU-RAY:

The Black and White Western

(Copyright 2013 Brian Zabawski)

By Brian Zabawski

Critics have long called Raoul Walsh’s 1947 western “Pursued”, “the first psychological western.”  Martin Scorsese, in his introduction to the newly released, first time on Blu-ray edition calls it ”the first noir-western.”

Film critic for Sight and Sound Magazine Michael Atkinson chimes in, calling “Pursued” “the first modernist western.” 

With so many firsts attributed to it, ”Pursued” should be required viewing by any serious film buff.  This new Blu-ray makes that viewing a pleasure – all the easier to appreciate its black-and-white cinematography by the renowned James Wong Howe and the dynamic lead performances of top-billed Teresa Wright (she of Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt”) and Robert Mitchum.

In “Pursued”, Mitchum plays Jeb Rand, a man tormented by a vivid childhood memory of witnessing his family members being killed by a mysterious stranger he remembers only by the distinctively large spurs on his boots.  Mitchum’s character spends much of the rest of the film in pursuit of the killer and his significance to his unusual family life.  The orphaned Jeb is raised by Judith Anderson’s character, Medora Callum. He falls in love with his stepsister, played as an adult by Teresa Wright. Her full brother is overly protective of her - maybe even a little in love with her himself - and sets out to wreck Jeb’s relationship with her.  All the while, on the fringes of this familial conflict, lurks Ward Bond’s character – a judge and frontier politician – who has carried on an affair with Judith Anderson’s mother figure. 

The plotting and conflicted characters of “Pursued” are rightly described as Oedipal.  In fact, the implications behind the psychological torments portrayed in the film were thought to be so disturbing to 1947 audiences that censor boards in several southern U.S. locales banned the film outright.

The inspiration for this story came from a true incident that caused screenwriter Niven Busch (Teresa Wright’s husband at the time) to ponder what it would be like for a young boy to grow up an orphan, who, after witnessing the killing of his own family, is raised by the killers.  Busch provides a perhaps overly simplified Freudian framework to explore this disturbing theme, but he does so with characteristically powerful results.  He thought of the story as a Greek tragedy set in the American west.  Busch was an unusually prolific author of many memorable western novels and screenplays, including “Duel in the Sun”; the noir masterpiece “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (adapted from the James M. Cain novel), and ”The Furies”.  “Pursued” is one of his most notable original screenplays.

Shot in vivid black and white by famed cinematographer James Wong Howe

“Pursued” is not necessarily distinguished for its striking images alone.  This may be due to director Raoul Walsh’s typical emphasis on story and character, and to his penchant for keeping his story as fast moving as possible.  According to the first comprehensive biography of the director, “Raoul Walsh  - The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director” by Marilyn Ann Moss – Walsh almost never looked through (or stood alongside) the camera when shooting.  Instead, he would usually hover in the background, often with his back turned to the scene, listening intently to the actor’s reading of the lines of script.  When that rhythm and pacing seemed right to him, he knew he had his shot.  Given this technique,  “Pursued”, as well as such enduring Walsh masterworks such as “High Sierra”, ”White Heat” and “The Roaring 20’s”, contain some of the most penetrating, memorable images in film history.  The ruggedly beautiful scenery of the New Mexico locations used for “Pursued” (Red Rock Mesa, and other locales near Gallup) is captured artfully by Wong – Howe.  Significantly, many scenes were filmed on infrared film stock, all the better to make the cloud formations stand out. 

James Wong Howe was one of the first cinematographers to achieve such a degree of recognition from his peers it could almost be classified as ‘star status’.  Born in China, his Hollywood film career spanned the silent era to the 1970’s.  Until 1933 he was billed as James Howe (or How), reflecting a desire to Anglicize his name, and conceal his Chinese origin.  Nicknamed “Low Key” Howe because of his predilection for that shadowy lighting style, Howe is credited with many cinematographic innovations, including early use of the crab dolly, and a utilization of deep-focus lenses which predated Gregg Toland’s use of the same in “Citizen Kane” by a good decade.  “Pursued” was his sixth collaboration with Raoul Walsh, including such titles as “The Strawberry Blonde” and the WW2 Errol Flynn starrer “Objective Burma”.

Some characteristic ‘low-key’ Howe scenes in “Pursued” include a nighttime shootout and ambush on Mitchum’s Jeb that would not seem out of place in a more contemporary-set film-noir, and the film’s frequent use of scenes where a tormented Mitchum is set in a dark, confining interior.

Wong Howe was eventually honored with two Academy Awards, and readers who want to revel in his black and white imagery, should check out his Oscar winning (or, nominated) work in “Hud” (1963, w/Paul Newman); “Sweet Smell of Success”(1957 – Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis); and his hyper-expressionistic, fish-eye-lens-crazy work in John Frankenheimer’s “Seconds” (1966).

Whether or not Raoul Walsh actually looked through the camera’s lens while filming “Pursued” is almost immaterial, for there appears a characteristic composition in this film that is seen in several of his other films.  It is the signature way he frames his characters as small figures dwarfed in long shots by the towering buttes of the landscape that looms over them.  This type of shot appears several times in “Pursued” – and he uses it as well in another of his significant westerns “Colorado Territory”(1949).  A crackling good western yarn starring Joel McCrea, Virginia Mayo, and Dorothy Malone, the film is also in black and white and filmed on locations around Gallup, New Mexico.  “Territory” is actually a loose remake of Walsh’s Bogart triumph “High Sierra” from eight years previous, and shares the same W.R. Burnett novel as its basis.  More traditionally action-oriented a western than “Pursued”, “Colorado Territory” makes for enjoyably fascinating viewing when seen alongside “Pursued” and “High Sierra”.  The mountainous landscapes of Bishop, California are also framed by Walsh’s signature long shots, dwarfing over the hunted Roy Earle, played by Humphrey Bogart.  The cameraman on “High Sierra” was Tony Guadio, and on “Colorado Territory” – Sidney Hickox.  Perhaps proving, like Hitchcock, that a director doesn’t always have to look through the camera-lens to make great movies.  (Whether or not Walsh used a director’s viewfinder to frame his set-ups, could not be determined conclusively.)

Today’s audiences can finally appreciate “Pursued” as its makers intended, on this handsome, new Blu-ray edition from Olive Films.  Marvel at an atypically emotional performance from the usually laconic Robert Mitchum, and another memorable character-turn from the versatile Teresa Wright.  And contemplate just how much twisted, tortured, Freudian neuroses can be packed into the durable form of the western genre.

Great Gray Hair

Cool slide show of gray hair.
See it here.

Ezra Stoller - Slide Show

We love this slide show of Ezra Stoller's work:
See it here.

What's this Blog?

This is the new home of the long-running B&W photo web site www.bwphotopro.com:
See it here.

We've gone to a blog format as it is much easier and faster to update. So come back often for lots of cool B&W photography and news.

Kinga Owczennikow

We love Kinga Owczennikow's work. We'll be featuring more of it soon.

All photos below Copyright Kinga Owczennikow; All Rights Reserved