Iconic Monday: Tiger's Masterpiece

What an end to the 2011 Masters! Poor Rory McIlroy, who faded under pressure. And then there was Tiger, mounting a comeback that fell short--I think I saw him yip on that four-foot put he missed.

     The Masters is, IMHO, the one PGA major that casual sports fans, like myself, will plunk themselves in front of a TV to watch. And like most casual sports fans, I pretty much watch to see how Tiger Woods is doing. 

      Which brings me to the subject of this Iconic Monday post: Fred Vuich's shot of Tiger launching a drive on the 18th hole of the final round of the Masters in 2001. Many sports photographers and editors I know consider it to be the greatest golf image ever made. It appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated, with just a single, superlative coverline, “Masterpiece,” which summed up both Tiger's play that year and the image itself. (I myself have called this the greatest golf image ever.)

      Ten years ago, in April 2001, America had yet to see the terror of 9/11, or the two wars that followed, or the election of its first black president. Tiger Woods, with one Masters win under his belt when he entered the tournament, had already fulfilled his early promise of greatness and was well on his way to becoming legend. A decade after the image was made, the legend has been tarnished, and Tiger's legacy has gone to rewrite.  But the image taken of April 16, 2001 remains.

      Vuich, who shot mostly for Golf magazine and occassionall for SI (both owned by Time Inc.) had been assigned to shoot the 16th and 18th holes that day in Augusta. In addition to his 35mm SLR--the standard for sports photographers--he had a rather unorthodox piece of equipment with him: a manual-focus medium format camera with a 43mm lens. It was that camera Vuich chose to use while documenting Tiger's final drive of the tournament: ""I thought it would make a nice opener" Vuich told the Sports Shooter blog.The camera lacked a motor drive, which meant that he would have only one chance to get the perfect shot, relying on his own sense of timing to get press the shutter at the instant Woods reached the apex of his swing. 

      The result was a picture like no other taken that day. It wasn’t a closeup of Woods with arms raised in ecstasy; it wasn’t a close-up of his determined face, or a flash of action. Rather, it was painterly, even pastoral: Less a timely report on what had happened than a timeless meditation on the game itself.  

  

    

      

  

The Week in Photos: Brooke Shield; Prince William; Mark Zuckerberg

My weekly photo review is up at Le Lettre de la Photographie...here's the usual sampling.

1. William and Grandmother

The is a photo pool image shot by Christopher Furlong for the New York Times. That lady in the red coat  is Queen Elizabeth II, visiting a Royal Air Force Base in Wales. She was greeted there by her grandson, the soon-to-be-married Prince William, who is stationed at the base as a search-and-rescue helicopter pilot. The man at right is the Queen's husband, and William's grandfather, Prince Philip. Perhaps William is admiring the Queen's sensible shoes. We just don't know, because photos don't talk.

2. Ageless Brooke

Allure magazine's April issue has a heartening piece about ageless beauty--heartening, because it is illustrated with portraits of former supermodels who, while of a certain age, maintain a high degree of incredibleness. The pictures were all shot by Patrick Demarchelier, a photographer who also maintains incredibleness. Brooke Shield managed to keep it all real, though: She told the magazine that when she drinks too much, or doesn't get enough sleep, she looks five years older. 

3. Mark of Success

The April issue of Success magazine features a cover shot of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, shot by photographer Jill Greenberg. A few years ago Greenberg stirred up some controversy by taking pictures of crying toddlers. She's also shot bears, monkeys, John McCain, and I suppose other species as well. She has a signature style that always seems to make her subjects look both familiar and alien. Imagine a Venn diagram, where one circle represents "cute" and the other represents "scary." In the overlapping area, you'd find this image of Zuckerberg.

4. Red Riders

Ivory Coast's embattled Laurent Gbagbo seems to be on his way out--hiding in a bunker, the last I heard. In this photo by Philippe Lsiazek for AFP, which shows fighters loyal to Gbagbo, we see what the past weeks of life have been like there.

5. Muammer Love

Another embattled leader, Libya's Muammer el-Qaddafi, seems to be holding onto power, despite NATO intervention. This Qaddafi supporter, photographed in Tripoli by Moises Saman for the New York Times, is happy to have him stay. Very happy, it would appear.

Auction Hero: Calhoun Daguerreotype Sells for $338,500

John C. Calhoun by Mathew Brady, 1849

 I don't get to do much breaking news here, but this morning I attended the morning session of Sotheby's spring photography auction in New York, where a 1849 daguerreotype of the great American politician John C. Calhoun sold for $338,000.

If you believe--as I sort of do--that art sales results reflect the overall state of the economy, then the morning session today indicates that we are well underway with recovery from the financial perils of 2008. Buyers seem to be sticking with the classics, though, just in case the rug gets pulled out again: A circa-1960s print of Ansel Adams's "Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, From Manzanar, California," sold for $182,500, and Edward Weston's "Dunes, Oceano," shot in 1936 and printed in the 1940s, went for $158,500.

"Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, From Manzanar, California," by Ansel Adams

"Dunes, Oceano," by Edward Weston

 As is typical these days, the auction gallery at Sotheby's was sparsely populated--perhaps 50 to 75 bidders on hand. (My friend Stephen Perloff, who edits The Photograph Collector newsletter, likens auctions these days to a Mets game in September.) But there was plenty--plenty--of auction action phone bidders. Denise Bethel, head of Sotheby's photography department, handled it all with aplomb from her podium, her voice sometimes sounding like one of those police dispatchers in old movies (Lot 41...Timothy O'Sullivan...Canyon de Chelle...thank you...over and out...").

The big dag of the day was made by Mathew Brady in 1849. The image became one of his most famous portraits, noted for the way it captured Calhoun's penetrating gaze (or as my son Henry would say, his "crazy-ass eyes.") It was widely printed and was used as the basis of a painting by Henry Darby that is now owned by the U.S. Senate. The actual object for sale here--the daguerreotype--was only recently rediscovered, according to Sotheby's.


High prices at auction often simply reflect the competition between two motivated bidders, and that seemed to be the case with this lot. But objects like this, in their rarity, have intrinsic historical value. Calhoun was a giant of American politics, a cngressman, senator, secretary of war under James Madison and vice president under both John Quincy Adams and Adams's archrival Andrew Jackson. He was a great orator in an era of oratorical greatness, parrying with Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. He was a champion for his state, South Carolina, which at the time was pushing the idea of nullification--whereby states could ignore federal laws they didn't like. Jackson killed that effort, saving the union for another 30 or so years.

All in all, an interesting morning.

Iconic Monday: A Brief History of Briefs (and Bras)

You know it was a slow weekend for me, because I caught myself reading this piece yesterday, which I will now summarize in case you don't want to go to the bother of reading it for yourself.

A poll of Britons, conducted by Outdoor Media Centre, ascertained that the most iconic billboard of all time was the famous "Hello Boys" advertisement from Victoria's Secret, in which model Eva Herzigova is seen admiring her girls, which are cinched up in a Wonderbra. The article says that tens of thousands of Brits were polled. Whether that means tens of thousands of Brits responded, I don't know. If they did, they've got too much time on their hands and might want to find a nice English hobby, like cheeserolling.

The Wonderbra billboard began popping up in 1994. I happen to remember. It was a terrific ad, fulsome, even—with humor—but it was not the most iconic billboard of all time. Even the British should know that.

The greatest billboard of all time was the 1982 advertisement for Calvin Klein underwear that towered over Times Square in 1982. Bruce Weber's shot of lean, tanned male wearing nothing but his  Calvins stopped traffic—and in those days Times Square was a really colorful place, with many interesting things to see in every direction, so it really took something to get traffic to stop.

The model was Tom Hintnaus, a Brazilian pole vaulter. (I could just stop this post here: How much more do you really have to say after you've said  "Brazilian pole vaulter?") Weber took him to the Greek Island of Santorini and backed him up against one of those white-walled buildings they specialize in there, the sky the color of the Aegean Sea (or what I imagine the color of the Aegean to be--I've never been). Hintnaus leaned backward, Weber shot upward, no doubt keeping in mind the all-important rule of thirds as he composed.
 

 You can look the ad up on Wikipedia and other websites, and you will see that American Photographer magazine named the ad as one of the "10 Pictures that Changed the America." That isn't true; I had just started editing the magazine when we did that story in 1989, and we actually named it one of the "10 Pictures that Changed the World." The image, we noted (as many others have as well), eroticized the male form in a way that had never been done before--or at least in such a mainstream commercial way. Tighty-whiteys went from being functional apparel to being lingerie, and men went evolved from sexual beings into sex objects. So in that sense we can connect the dots between Tom Hintnaus and Eva Herzigova.

Today, of course, the vampire boys in True Blood and the gladiators in Spartacus: Blood and Sand are often seen without any underwear at all, and it's cool. As for Victoria's Secret, the Wonderbra—"wonder" connoting something marvelous that mankind has made—has given way to the Miracle Bra—"miracle" implying some sort of supernatural intervention. And where's the funny in that? Times Square has the Naked Cowboy, of course, but only the tourists from Ohio pay any attention to him.

On Huffington Post: When America Fell in Love with Speed

My latest item for Huffington Post is just up--it's about the era of board-track motorcycle racing, which was a brutal sport that thrived from 1908 thru the early 1920s. There's also more on this topic in the April issue of Smithsonian magazine.

Friday Photo Review: Qaddafi's Face, Rhianna's Behind, Immortal Elizabeth Taylor

As usual, my weekly review of selected photos from newspapers and magazines is up at Le Lettre de la Photographie. Also as usual, here is a sampling:

1. Go, Muammar, Go

You say Gaddafi, I say Qaddafi...in any language the dictator is a menace. The rest of the world learned to live with him because he's got oil, but then came the Arab Revolution. Then came the Arab Revolution of 2011, and a popular uprising, and a counter-attack by his government forces, and a no-fly zone enforced by a coalition of Western governments that used to buy his oil, and now Fareed Zakaria wonders in the April 4 issue of Time what might happen if Qaddafi (or Gaddafi, if you prefer) manages to hang onto power. That's a lot of narrative to express in one cover photo. The magazine went with a 2009 portrait taken by photographer Platon when the Libyan leader was visiting the United Nations in New York. (Read about the making of the photo here, especially the part about Qaddafi being surrounded by female body guards.) In this picture, crazy Muammar doesn't look crazy; shot from a relatively low level, the image communicates his power, and, in the curled upper lip, a sense of his cruelty.
 
2. Behind the Scenes with Rhianna

Recently I praised Annie Leibovitz's Vogue cover shot of Rhianna; she also covers the April 14 issue of Rolling Stone. Mark Seliger's portrait is a bit...trashier than Annie's, but Rolling Stone's readers are a bit different from Vogue's. Miraculously, Rhianna's appeal seems span the entire popular culture. (Poor Britney Spears--the cover make the explicit point that she is no longer the queen of pop. Her comeback? Oh, it's monster, which is not the same as monstrous, but whatever.)  I read one blog speculating that Rhainna's shorts were painted on, but I can't swear to it.

3. Remembering Her

If you are like me--and let's both hope you're not--you read a number of tributes to Elizabeth Taylor this past week. My favorite was in Time (Qaddafi on the cover). The great Richard Corliss wrote this about her: "Many talented tyros had been bred in the studio hothouse, but in the '40s, none came to flower so luxuriantly; in the '50s, none found so bracing a challenge in Hollywood's search for artistic maturity; and in the '60s, when the system collapsed, none survived it so craftily as Taylor did." Accompanying Corliss's essay was this portrait of Taylor and Montgomery Clift, her greatest costar, made on the Paramount lot in 1950 by Life magazine photographer Peter Stackpole. These people were professionals, and they knew what they were doing--her breasts and bottom jutting in opposite directions, his right hand giving an award-winning stand-in performance. Today's tastes require more forthright symbolism, of course--Rhianna with painted-on cutoff shorts, for instance.

4.  Remembering Reality

I will conclude with a portrait that has nothing to do with popular culture. This image, by Carlos Barria for Reuters, shows a woman examining the ground where her house once stood in the town of Kesennuma, in northern Japan. It was destroyed, completely, by the earthquake and tsunami of March 11. Pictures tell us so much, and yet they can be so elusive and frustrating. When I first saw this, I took the woman's gestures for sad resignation, perhaps mild shock. She may in fact be feeling those things, but her hands are in fact at her face because she is talking on a cell phone.

Iconic Wednesday: The Attempted Assassination of President Ronald Reagan

Thirty years ago today, a mentally unbalanced man named John Hinkley Jr. fired six shots from a Rohm RG-14 .22 caliber revolver, nearly killing the President of the United States. In the aftermath, a photographer would become famous, a Secretary of State would fumble a media (if not constitutional) test, and the country would once again spend a few minutes looking at astonishing pictures and wondering if perhaps something should be done about keeping guns out of the hands of lunatics.

Salgado recorded the scene outside the Washington Hilton after Hinkely's shots were fired

 On March 30, 1981, Ronald Reagan, the president for the past 69 days, gave a speech to ALF-CIO representatives at the Washington Hilton Hotel. Afterward, he left the building through its T Street NW exit, where his limousine was waiting. Hinkley, 25 at the time, was also waiting near the exit, standing in a group of Reagan admirers. Inspired by the movie Taxi Driver and obsessed with actress Jodie Foster, he had decided to assassinate the president. The Secret Service had screened the audience inside the hotel, but not the crowd on the sidewalk outside. Hinkley was standing about 15 feet away from the president when he fired, missing with each shot. He did hit White House Press Secretary James Brady, and a D.C. police officer. Another shot ricocheted off the president's armored limousine and struck Reagan under his left arm, eventually lodging in one of his lungs. Reagan's life was saved at George Washington University Hospital.

Standing on the sidewalk when it all happened was a 37-year-old Brazilian photographer named Sebastiao Salgado. A former economist, Salgado had spent the past decade documenting famine and civil war in Africa; in 1979 he joined the Magnum Photo agency; he happened to be in Washington D.C. in March of 1981 and was on hand to cover the president's speech at the Washington Hilton. He was the only professional photographer to record what happened when Hinckley fired, and his images appeared on newspaper front pages and magazine covers around the world.

It was a desperate, frightening time for Americans that day--take it from someone who spent the day watching network news anchormen (no women, no CNN) trying to piece together conflicting reports on the president's health. The situation wasn't helped when Secretary of State Alexander Haig--a former Army general and Nixon White House chief of staff--went into the White House press room to assure the country that everything was all right. In fact, he did the opposite.

The Vice-President of the United States, George H.W, Bush, happened to be travelling that day, and, quite naturally, the press wanted to know who was calling the shots while president was being operated on. Haig replied, "Don't worry. As of now I am in control here in the White House." Today it is generally understood that Haig was not in fact rejiggering the constitutional line of authority--when the president is incapacitated, the vice-president assumes control, whether he's in the White House or not--but on March 30, 1981 the statement made it sound as if Haig was unaware of such legal niceties.  At best. At worst, he was simply setting the constitution aside.

It was a moment that would haunt him for the rest of his days. When he died in 2010, the New York Times ran an obituary by Tim Weiner with three brilliant opening paragraphs:

Alexander Haig, the four-star general who served as a confrontational secretary of state of President Ronald Reaga and a commanding White House chief of staff as the Nixon administration crumbled, died Saturday at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, according to a hospital spokesman.He was 85.

Mr. Haig was a rare American breed: a political general. His bids for the presidency quickly came undone. But his amibtion to be president was thinly veiled, and that was his undoing. He knew, Reagan's aide Lyn Nofziger once said, that "the third paragraph of his obit" would detail his conduct in the hours after President Reagan was shot on March 30, 1981.

That day, Secretary of State Haig wrongly declared himself the acting president. "The helm is right here," he told members of the Reagan cabinet in the White House Situation Room, "and that means right in this chair for now, constitutionally, until the vice president gets here." His words were taped by Richard V. Allen, then the National Security Advisor.

Haig "in control" in the White House press room

It was the vision of Haig hotly addressing the press that I remember best from that day. This image of that moment--I cannot find a credit for the picture--became iconic and almost fondly remembered, once we learned to laugh about Haig's misstep. That's the way history works sometimes.