Tiger's Tale Told in Two Pictures

Tiger Woods at the 2010 Ryder Cup, by Mark Pain for the Daily Mail

I was alerted late yesterday by a friendly researcher who lives in my house that there was "an incredible" photo of Tiger Woods up on the Yahoo home page.

Wow, I thought, has that sex tape already been released?

In point of fact, it was a shot of Tiger at the 2010 Ryder Cup, and the blog that ran it did indeed day it was the "greatest golf photo you'll ever see."

I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree.

The picture is really an accident rather than a photograph. Tiger shanks his shot, and his ball hits the camera of photographer Mark Pain (you can't make this up) of the Daily Mail, who hits the shutter before the ball hits him. Let's all agree that the best thing about the non-moment moment is that guy on the right with the hat, mustache, and cigar.

Now look at the picture below, which a number of people have put forward as the greatest golf photo you'll ever see. It was made on the 18th tee of the final round of the 2001 Masters tournament by photographer Fred Vuich, and it famously ran on the cover of Sports Illustrated the following week with only one cover line: "Masterpiece."

Tiger Woods on the 18th tee of the 2001 Masters

The magazine was referring primarily to Woods's performance at the Masters that year, but I'm pretty sure the editors understood that the picture was a perfect illustration of their point. It was a masterpiece, too. Vuich shot with a medium-format camera with a 43mm lens, and, lacking a motor drive, he relied on his own sense of timing to press the shutter button when Woods's swing was at its apex and his  face emerged from shadow. "I thought it would make a nice opener" Vuich told the Sports Shooter blog. Instead, he got something painterly, even pastoral: an ode to perfection itself, and a cover

What do you think? Is there a better photograph of the game of golf?

There's one other aspect of Vuich's picture that is remarkable, though it's something we can see only from the perspective of 2010. Vuich made Tiger small in the frame and surrounded him with the serenity and stateliness of the Augusta National golf course. Tiger, we see now, was not bigger than the game.

Pain's painful shot only highlights the fall from the grace that Vuich captured in 2001. Tiger, with one Masters win under his belt when he entered the 2001 tournament, had already fulfilled his early promise of greatness and was well on his way to becoming legend. The legend has been rewritten, the perfect swing is gone. He shanked it.

Photo of the Day: Meg Whitman's Suit of Armor

Whitman the Warrior Goddess by Rich Pedroncelli/AP

Earlier in this election year, the Republican candidate for senate, Carly Fiorina, was caught on tape ridiculing the hairstyle of her Democratic opponent, Barbara Boxer. So we know that looks matter in that state's politics. And of course candidates who are women have a lot more choices to make in this regard than men, who by convention still wear suits and ties. For her debate over the weekend with California Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown, Republican Meg Whitman chose an orange top and black pants.
    Her choices walk the fine sartorial line that women running for office must navigate. During the Republican primary, Whitman projected her feminine side, but general elections apparently call for sterner stuff. Her clothes were neither frilly nor masculine, and while informal and assertive they stayed within boundaries of taste that only a few powerful women can cross.

Ruining the leather biker's jacket for all time

 What's more, by skipping orange pants she avoided any unfortunate comparison to Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign look.
    When Whitman stepped from behind her podium, as in the picture above by Rich Pedroncelli for Associated Press, her commanding height (she's 6-feet tall) was obvious, even tree-like, which isn't bad politically if the tree is an oak rather than a willow.
     If the picture tells us anything about Whitman's wardrobe choice, it is that she she wore them like a suit of armor. She certainly needed it during the debate on Saturday, in which she fended off flak about her hiring of an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper.
     Men have an advantage here, since their suits and ties are essentially protective. (The tie is a modern adaptation of the cravat, which had its origins in 16th-century military attire.) If Brown was a bit colorless, he could afford to be.

50 Years Later: Breakfast with A Dream

Publicity shot credited to Paramount Pictures, 1961

At dawn on Sunday, October 2, 1960, exactly fifty years ago, Audrey Hepburn stood in front of the Tiffany store on Fifth Avenue, dressed in Givenchy and sunglasses, nibbling a Danish pastry while  cameras rolled on the first day of filming on her new movie. As Sam Wesson reveals in his book "Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.," the actress hated Danish and asked director Blake Edwards if she could  lick  an ice cream cone instead. He said no, because of course she was supposed to be having breakfast at Tiffany's, and ice cream isn't breakfast.

A Danish for breakfast, at you know where

Wesson's marvelous, entertaining book draws the straight line that leads from the "Breakfast at Tiffany's" to "Sex in the City" and its successful, sexual female singletons. It's probably no wonder that the iconic image of Hepburn as Holly Golightly, hair swept up, dark glasses, tiara, and extravagant cigarette holder, has become a staple of girls' dorm rooms all across the country. The daughters of Carrie Bradshaw are the granddaughters of Holly.

I wonder who took the publicity stills for the film. All the sources I've found credit the photos (example above) simply to Paramount Pictures. No doubt this photographer, or these photographers, assumed they were merely doing a job, producing pictures for a marketing campaign. They most likely had no idea that the images they were creating would define what would become a pervasive idea: glamour as accessible as a black dress, freedom without a loss of innocence.

Fine Art From Google Earth

The nice people at "The Big Picture" have created a new source for fine-art photography: Google Earth, best known as a global spying technology for everyone who isn't working for the NSA. Who knew that Glengarry Glen Ross salesmen in southwest Florida were creating modern-day Incan Nazca lines, perhaps to direct ancient astronauts returning to Earth? I say if developers are going to turn swampland into partially completed residential developments, the least the world should get from it is astonishing visuals.

Near Fort Meyers

Southeast of Bonita Springs

South of Port Charlotte

North of Fort Meyers

Tony Curtis, 1925-2010

Curtis at home in Los Angeles, 1960, by Dennis Stock

 Movie stars are remembered for their film work, but also, in some case primarily, through still photos. Curtis is memorable for both. The Magnum Photo blog has a nice collection of stills taken by the agency's photographers, including the 1960 shot above by Dennis Stock. And then there is one of my favorite celebrity portraits, a shot by Annie Leibovitz that reunited the cross-dressing male leads of "Some Like It Hot."

Curtis and Jack Lemmon, by Annie Leibovitz, 1995

As for the films, Curtis happened to appear in two (at least...suggestions of others?) that were filled with the wittiest and venomous dialog...ever? Most the obits about Curtis today mention "Some Like It Hot" first, and of course it's final line is movie legend. But my favorite Curtis film is "Sweet Smell of Success," in which he used his native New York accent to create Sydney Falco, a demeaned and demeaning press agent looking for lunch at the lower end of the show-business food chain in New York. He is, as Burt Lancaster's brutish newspaper columnist J.J. Hunseker says, "a man of forty faces, not one, and none too pretty." Sometimes a photo is enough, but when Hunseker turns to Falco and says, "Match me, Sydney," it's all about the words.

Prize-Winning Photos of Devil Rays, Pit Vipers...and the Urge to Preserve

Florian Schultz's photo of devil rays in the Sea or Cortez

 Until today, the only devil ray I'd ever seen was at Yankee Stadium a few years back, when the MLB team from Tampa Bay came to town. You can't see that sight anymore, because they're just the Rays now, and, as it turns out, you'd have a very hard time seeing an actual devil ray—the kind that swim in the ocean—because they are "near threatened," according to the International Union for Conservation. (The devil rays are apparently vulnerable to gill-net fishing.) So the photo above, taken by German photographer Florian Schultz in the Sea of Cortez near Baja California, is a wonder. It was also the overall winner of the Environmental Photographer of the Year contest sponsored by the London-based Chartered Institution of Water and Environment Management. 


There are so many photography contests sponsored by environmental groups, and they remain vital and popular. I can say from experience that landscape and nature are the most popular subjects for amateur photographers, probably because nature is relatively accessible, and because there is a fundamental link between the urge to take a picture and the instincts of conservation. Both are meant to preserve something.

Photographs, which communicate instantly and across the boundaries of language, are also awesomely effective tools. It has been so since the Sierra Club started producing its famous calendars back in the 1970s.

Here two other highlights from the contest:

Gray Seal in the Baltic Sea, by Kaido Haagen

 The shot above, of a gray seal poking its head through underwater plant life, was taken by an Estonian photographer, Kaido Haagen, near the Estonian island of Vilsandi. The photo below, showing a hummingbird facing off with a green pit viper, was taken by Hungarian photographer Bruce Mate.

Hummingbird, say hello to green pit viper

The Bloody Truth Behind the "True Blood" Cover of Rolling Stone

High Concept: Naked bloody vampire sex

Let's do some role-playing: You're the photo editor of a big entertainment magazine that comes out a couple times a month, and your biggest job is to make sure that each of those issues has a spectacular cover.  You line up the right celebrities, the right photographers, and the right ideas, and you hope pray that you'll end up with an image that will A) Sell; B) Sell; C) Sell; D) Not totally offend a large number of people; and E) be kind of great. If possible.

Now let's say you've got the stars of "True Blood", an HBO TV series about vampires, blood, and naked-bloody vampire-sex, in a Los Angeles studio with photographer Matthew Rolston. What do you want them all to do? What are the words you could use to describe your intentions? Here's a hint: Say you want something "high-concept, but simple, and attention-grabbing." Really, I've done it. Works every time.

"I heard that, and I thought right away, 'Oh, "True Blood"...naked, and covered in blood," says Rolston, who did indeed shoot the recent cover of Rolling Stone that featured undead "True Blood" stars Alexander Skarsgard, Anna Paquin, and Stephen Moyer undressed and covered in stage blood.

High-concept? Check. Simple? Check. Attention Getting? You're the big-time photo editor...what do you think?

Avid "True Blood" bloggers went crazy for Rolston's gory vampire sandwich. For fangirls of the series, Christmas came early. Yes, Hollywoodreporter.com declared the image NSFW but that only meant people across America would be staging work stoppages to look at the photo. People.com said the cover had taken the show's famed raciness to a new level.The AtlanticWire maintained its decorum by calling the picture "rather erotic." Ryan Seacrest just didn't like it at all.

When I talked with Rolston (look for him to make an appearance on "America's Next Top Model" tonight), he was understandably thrilled by the attention. One of legends of Hollywood photography, he has been shooting for Rolling Stone for 30 years, and he showed that he can still pull a shocker out of his bag of visual tricks. But he said the cover almost didn't happen, because when editors and art directors say "high-concept, simple, and attention-grabbing," they usually don't have naked bloody vampires in mind.