The William Daniell House, 1790

                                 The William Daniell House, Watkinsville, Georgia

After the death of his first wife, with whom he had eleven children, Revolutionary War veteran William Daniell married 17-year-old Polly Melton, and in 1790, built a new, Plantation Plain-style house for her. Fortunately, he built large, because the couple had thirteen more children together. Daniell lived to be 97, and the home he built for Polly is now thought to be the oldest house in Oconee County. In fact, it may well be the oldest house in North Georgia, although that depends upon where one draws the line between North and Central Georgia.

If you consider the line of demarcation to be Interstate 20, than the Daniell House's only rival north of the interstate is the 1793 Fort Hollingsworth-White House between Homer and Cornelia.

Just slightly south of I-20 is the Thomas Ansley Rock House near Thompson, built in 1785. The Jacob Burkhalter house in Warrenton is even older, dating from around 1778. 

On the National Register of Historic Places, the Daniell House is now owned by Oconee County and is used for weddings, receptions, family reunions, and other meetings and events.

Adapted from my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia.

(Photo: Canon EOS 6D camera, Canon EF 24-85mm f3.5-4.5 lens.)

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $3.95 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail me a check to 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and you might find something you like.

Photography and text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags:   photography  travel     Georgia     Oconee County     Watkinsville     historic houses     Canon 6D camera     Canon EF 24-85mm lens

Winter on the Farm

 Winter at Deer Run Farm: Chickamauga Creek and Pigeon Mountain.

This photograph was made a few days after the great blizzard of March, 1993 covered the land with snow from north Florida to the North Pole. A 36x24-inch canvas print of this scene now hangs above our fireplace.

We had about a foot of snow in most places on our farm, with drifts much deeper in some places. I bottomed out my four-wheel-drive Chevy Blazer in our yard and had to pull it out with the tractor.

During all of this, one of our young heifers, who had been bred prematurely by our neighbors enormous Brahma bull, went into labor with a calf that was far to large for her to deliver. She was suffering greatly. Our veterinarian was able to come in his four-wheel-drive truck and give her an injection the slowed the labor contractions. We and our neighbors Ken and Sara sat up with her most of the night in near-zero weather, sheltered by a ring of large hay bales in our barn. The veterinarian was able to come back the next day with his assistant and do an impromptu C-Section. The heifer survived, but unfortunately, the calf died just before delivery.

But that was life on the farm. A lot of good memories that far outweigh the bad.

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $3.95 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail me a check to 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and you might find something you like.

Photography and text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags:   photography   farm life     cattle

 

Was This Always the Goal?

The empty tomb. Jerusalem, Israel 

Who shows a picture of a tomb at Christmas? Well, I do, because in the deepest sense that's what Christmas is about. But most people prefer to think about the baby in a manger. Seems cozy and comforting, doesn't it?

Unless you grew up poor on a farm, you probably have no idea what a cold and incredibly filthy place that stable was, and how unsuitable as a birthing place for anyone, let alone a king. 

But his birth, necessary and important as it was, was not the goal.

His life, which he lived perfectly and without sin, was not the goal, although that goal was ever before him.

His death, cruel and unjust, was a necessary step. For on that horrible cross he bore in his own body every sin you and I have ever committed or ever will commit. But even the cross was not the goal.

The tomb itself, where his body laid for three days, was not the goal. 

The goal, from all eternity, was the empty tomb. God raised Jesus from the dead. This was the ultimate proof that Christ's sacrifice had been accepted by the Father and our debt was paid in full. This is the gospel, as expressed clearly in I Corinthians 15, verses 1-5: "That Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures."

When Jesus went to that cross, he carried with him in his own body your sins and mine. He paid in full the debt of our sin and now offers you and me eternal life as a free gift.

What does he ask of us? He asks only that you and I accept the fact that we are sinners in need of a savior, and that we receive Jesus by faith as the savior we need.

My prayer is that if you have never received Jesus as your savior, you will do so on this Christmas Day.

Photography and text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags:   Christmas    Jesus Christ     Israel     Jerusalem     the garden tomb

The Sense of Wonder

                                                Can horses actually laugh? Did this one?

 

Blog Note: This post is adapted and reposted from July, 2020 because it's important to remind ourselves frequently what photography is all about.

 

Photography is a tool with many uses. It can be used to make portraits, report the news, photograph weddings, fashion, landscapes, architecture, and products for sale -- its uses are almost endless. Yet, photography, alone among the arts, has an unique ability that goes far beyond its utilitarian applications. It is the sense of wonder.

 

As distinguished from other visual media, the art of photography is primarily the art of seeing. A photograph is created at the instant of exposure, and nothing done to it afterward will make it art if it was not well seen to begin with. Throughout the history of the medium, the works that have had power, the works that have lasted, have been straight photographs. Their power and their art are in the photographer's ability to see and to present his vision in a tangible form.

Beauty and mystery. Where is the woman whose shadow is at the left?

What is the significance of the hanging rope? Who is the man

half-seen on the right? What is the source of that brilliant light

illuminating the wall on the right?

The essence of photography is that it is photographic. It is a picture made by the action of light reflected from something that has objective reality onto a sensitized surface. Light rays bouncing off something that is really there go through a lens and are recorded onto film, a sensor of some kind, or something not yet invented, but whatever it is, it is "writing with light." The unique power of photography is derived from this direct connection to reality.

Dorothea Lange kept a quotation by the English essayist Francis Bacon on her darkroom door: “The contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention."

As photographer Fred Picker wrote in Shutterbug Magazine, "This Koudelka (print by Czech photographer Joseph Koudelka). . .contains the most amazing combination of things that I know happened, because when he made that photograph there was no electronic imaging. Here are two horses, standing in a certain position, a boy sitting on a bicycle wearing an angel suit with angel wings, here's an old lady scolding him, all in magnificent light and beautifully composed. Today, that picture could be made by some guy sitting in front of a computer. Knowing that would take all the wonder out of it."

  

 The priest grabbed the bridal bouquet

and flourished it while the couple kissed.

 

In actuality, it isn’t likely “some guy sitting in front of a computer” would make such a picture, because those who alter and/or combine photographs are limited by their imaginations. They can only do what they can conceive. But photography goes beyond human imagination. As novelist Tom Clancy has said, “The difference between fiction and non-fiction is that fiction has to make sense.

 

The magic of photography is that life holds so many amazing and wonderful things that are entirely unanticipated, unexpected, even unimagined in the deepest sense; that is -- no one would ever have thought of such a thing happening. And then, suddenly, right out of the fabric of life, there it is. The uniqueness of photography is in that sense of wonder that only photography can provide.

 

"I can do a beautiful illustration, but it doesn't have that 'instant of wonder' that a photograph will have." (Art Director Tony Anthony, quoted in Photo District News). 

 

Who in the world abandons a valuable instrument

such as a harp to molder away in a field?

Photograph copyright Judy and Tony King Foundation, 2020

 

Photography shows us things that lie beyond our imagination and compel our amazement because they really happened. It revels in the beauty, the mystery, and the strangeness of life. It is the most powerful purely visual medium ever created.

 

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $3.95 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail me a check to 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and you might find something you like.

Photography and text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags:   photography   

Beginnings

 
 

Carol was taking a test in my history class.

My Yashica TLR was sitting on the corner of my desk.

I reached over and quietly squeezed the shutter.

Blog Note: In case some of my newer readers have wondered how my life in photography first began, I'm reposting this article from February, 2020.

One question I’m frequently asked is “How do you get started in professional photography?”

 My standard answer is that you get into photography the way you get into prostitution: You start out doing it for fun, then you do it for your friends, then you wind up doing it for money!

Actually, though, that's not how I started.   

In the summer of 1968 my second son was born. We were living in Miami at the time, and the only camera I had was an old Kodak Brownie with a sticky shutter. Obviously, something better was needed to make pictures of the new baby. I found a magazine ad from a company offering to give me a brand new Kodak Instamatic camera and five film cartridges for free if I would send the film to their lab for processing.

Not long after that I bought a photo magazine — the August,1968 issue of Popular Photography. More magazines followed, and better cameras. I was hooked. (As for the influence of the magazines, I think it would be fair to say that I would not be a photographer today if it had not been for photo magazines.)

Also in August, 1968, I began a new job: teaching in a private school. The following year, I was asked to be the faculty advisor to the yearbook staff. By that time, I had acquired a Nikon F and two lenses -- a 35mm f2.8, and a 135mm f2.8, both Tamrons. The school also had a Yashica twin-lens reflex donated by the yearbook company. 

 

Senior Car Wash

Florida Christian School, Miami, Florida

Yashica 24 Twin-Lens Reflex, Plus-X (probably)

As it happened, I wound up making all the candid photos for the yearbook and doing the layout as well. I also photographed school activities and sports and sold prints to the students and their parents -- a practice that would probably be frowned upon these days, but it was a private, not a public, school, times were different then, and it was all perfectly acceptable. In the process, I realized that I liked photography better than teaching.

After that year I moved my family back to the Chattanooga, Tennessee area, which I consider my home town even though I was not born there, and began looking for ways to get into photography full-time. I picked up a few small commercial jobs, but nowhere near enough to make a living, tried my hand at selling life insurance (a disaster), and worked a year at a newspaper doing page layout.

In the summer of 1972, I followed up a classified ad I found in that newspaper and applied for a job at Continental Film Productions, a small film and audio-visual production studio. I was interviewed, but nothing happened until that fall, when I was called in for a second interview and hired as a trainee/general dogsbody. Over the next four or five years I worked my way up to producer/director/writer before leaving for a year as director of advertising at another organization. 

On January 1, 1978 I opened my own business in my basement, with the name Photomedia Productions and a $3000 deposit to create a catalog for an electronics company.

From there, it has been a long, sometimes adventurous, often difficult, always interesting, ride. Truly a life in photography.

 Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $3.95 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail me a check to 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and you might find something you like.

Photography and text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags:   photography     cameras    Nikon F     Tamron     Yashica TLR     Popular Photography     Florida Christian School

In Praise of Cheap Lenses

  

         This is a more-than-100-percent crop from the photo below. Sharp enough?

 

Fuji X-T20 camera, Fujicron 16-50mm f3.5-5.6 lens.

 I'm not a lens snob.

 In fact, I mostly tune out the never-endiing discussions of rendering, edge sharpness, bokeh, etc., that seem to be the bread and butter of many blogs and web sites. I have difficulty seeing the fine distinctions they make, and wouldn't care much if I could. A lens is to take pictures with. If it does a reasonable job of that (as in, do the photos look okay?) nothing else is required.

 

I began my full-time professional career in 1978 with a pair of Nikkormats, a 50mm Nikkor lens, and two Vivitar lenses -- 28mm f2.5 and 100mm f2.8. They were fine. A year or so later, I switched to the Olympus OM system, which I used for 12 years with great satisfaction. I had quite a few lenses for the OMs, and all were satisfactory except for the 35-70 f3.6.

By 1993, aging eyes necessitated a switch to autofocus, so I bought into the Canon EOS system and used various bodies and lenses for the next 24 years. Along the way, I owned a number of Canon's top-rated "L" lenses, including the 28-80 f2.8-4L, the 28-70 f2.8L, and the 24-70 f2.8L. I also owned the 24-105 f4L. But I kept going back to the 24-85 f3.5-4.5 and the 28-105 f3.5-4.5, neither of which is an L lens, but both are small and light, fast enough for the work I do,  and again, sharp enough for the work I do.

Not long after my book Rock City Barns: A Passing Era was published, I walked into my local pro film processing lab and found another photographer standing at the counter leafing through my book, which is in 9x12-inch coffee-table format. Having learned from the lab owner that I was the creator of the book, he asked if I had made the photos on 5x7-inch film. When I told him no, he said, "Oh, 4x5?" When I explained that all but one (the cover) were made with 35mm cameras, he had difficulty believing it. But in fact, almost all the photos in the book were shot with the Canon EF 28-105 f3.5-4.5 or the 24mm f2.8. As Kirk Tuck says, there are very few lenses that aren't sharp at f8!

In 2017 I sold my Canon gear and bought into the Fuji system. I will tell you that I do not own their more expensive and highly rated lenses, but the ones I have do the job for me just fine.

I don't do weddings anymore, but the photo at the top of this pose is from a wedding in 2018, taken with a Fuji X-T20 and the 16-50 f3.5-5.6 kit lens. Looks sharp enough to me. 

 

(This post was adapted from a post originally made in 2019.)

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $3.95 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail me a check to 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and you might find something you like.

Photography and text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags:   photography     cameras    Fuji X-T20   Fujicron XC 16-50mm f3.5-5.6 lens     Olympus OM cameras     Nikon     Nikkormat     Vivitar lenses      Canon EOS cameras     Canon L lenses

Penfield Baptist Church, Greene County, Georgia

Penfield Baptist Church (formerly Mercer University Chapel), Penfield, Georgia.

About thirteen miles by road from Bethesda Church (but much less as the crow flies) is the village of Penfield, founded about 1830. Mercer University began here in 1833 as Mercer Institute, founded by the Georgia Baptist Convention as a manual labor school and named in honor of Jesse Mercer, a leading Baptist minister of the day. It was renamed Mercer University in 1837. 

Penfield was quite a growing and bustling place through the Civil War era and survived the years after the war, even though the Baptist Convention voted to move the university to Macon in 1871. The boll weevil ended the southern "Cotton Economy" around 1919 and Penfield fell into obscurity. The town's Historic District still includes a number of fine Victorian houses.

Penfield Baptist Church was erected by David Demorest in 1846 as the university chapel. The building is a striking example of Greek Revival architecture and looks remarkably contemporary even after more than 175 years.

When the university moved to Macon the chapel was given to the former congregation of Shiloh Baptist Church, which quickly occupied its new home and  maintains an active ministry to this day.

(Adapted from my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia.)

Photo: Olympus OM-D E-M5, Panasonic Lumix G Vario 12-32mm lens.

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $3.95 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail me a check to 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and you might find something you like.

Photography and text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags: photography   travel   Georgia    Greene County     Penfield,     Penfield Baptist Church     Mercer University     Olympus OM-D E-M5    Panasonic Lumix G Vario 12-32mm lens

An Historic Church in Greene County, Georgia

Bethesda Baptist Church, built in 1818.

 

Located in a somewhat remote rural area in east central Georgia's Greene County, Bethesda Baptist Church was organized in 1785. In 1818, after spending two years making bricks by hand from clay on the property, the parishioners erected this building. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1998.

Built with two stories in a vernacular Federal style, the old building still looks surprisingly modern. The first floor walls are 18 inches thick, with interior brick chimneys at both ends. Remnants of the old slave gallery are still visible. 

The church is very much alive and has an active ministry to this day, 238 years after its founding.

(Adapted from my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia.)

Photo: Olympus OM-D E-M5, Panasonic Lumix G Vario 12-32mm lens.

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $3.95 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail me a check to 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and you might find something you like.

Photography and text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags: photography   travel   Georgia    Greene County     Bethesda Baptist Church     Olympus OM-D E-M5    Panasonic Lumix G Vario 12-32mm lens

Who Remembers Br'er Rabbit?

                     Brer Rabbit statue at Putnam County Courthouse, Eatonton, Georgia.

Do kids today even know about the Uncle Remus stories? Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Fox. the Tarbaby. and other characters  made famous in the stories by Joel Chandler Harris? Children loved them for a hundred years, but I'm not sure this generation knows they exist.

The memories are alive and well, however, in the east central Georgia town of Eatonton, where Harris was born. The Uncle Remus Museum is here, and a statue of Br'er Rabbit even adorns the lawn of the impressive Neoclassical Revival Putnam County Courthouse. Built in 1824, it is the third oldest courthouse in Georgia and the oldest still in use as a courthouse.

Brer Rabbit Museum, Eatonton, Georgia.

The Br'er Rabbit Museum in Eatonton is a log cabin made from two old slave cabins from Putnam County. The museum is similar to a cabin in which Uncle Remus would have lived. Scenes and mementos depict antebellum plantation life. Turner Park, where the museum is located, was part of the original home place of Joseph Sidney Turner, the "Little Boy" in the Uncle Remus stories. 

As the birthplace of Harris and of Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, Eatonton was chosen as the location for the Georgia Writer's Museum. The museum hosts frequent lectures and workshops by well-known writers.

(Adapted from my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia.)

Photos: Br'er Rabbit statue: Fuji X-H1, Fujicron XC 16-50mm lens. Uncle Remus Museum: Olympus OM-D E-M5, Panasonic Vario II 14-140mm lens.)

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $3.95 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail me a check to 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and you might find something you like.

Photography and text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags: photography   travel   Georgia    Eatonton      Putnam County     Uncle Remus     Joel Chandler Harris     Alice Walker     The Color Purple   Fuji X-H1     Fujicron XC 16-50mm lens     Olympus OM-D E-M5    Panasonic Vario II 14-140mm lens

The Southernmost Covered Bridge in America

                        The Coheelee Creek Covered Bridge, Early County, Georgia.

My travels on Georgia's backroads for my books Backroads and Byways of Georgia (now in its second edition) and Georgia: A Backroads Portrait led me to some remote, beautiful, and interesting places. Few were more interesting and beautiful than the Coheelee Creek Covered Bridge, and very few were more remote.

On a dirt road about ten miles southwest of Blakely, county seat of Early County in the extreme southwest corner of Georgia, is the 121-foot-long Coheelee Creek Covered Bridge, set in a pleasant park with a picnic area. 

Built in 1891 by J.W. Baughman and utilizing a modification of the queen post truss design, the Coheelee Creek bridge is the southernmost covered bridge in the United States. Just below the bridge is a small waterfall, which may possibly be the southernmost waterfall in Georgia. 

The photo was made with an Olympus OM-D E-M5 with a Panasonic 14-140mm f3.5-5.6 lens which pretty much stayed glued to that camera.

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $3.95 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail me a check to 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and you might find something you like.

Photography and text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags: photography   travel   Georgia    Blakely     Early County    Coheelee Creek Covered Bridge    Olympus OM-D E-M5    Panasonic 14-140mm f35-5.6 lens

Post-Covid Blues

A reminder of a happy time. Louise at Riomaggiore, in Italy's Cinque Terra, 2005.

We are grateful that our lives have been blessed with opportunities to travel to many places. We have had some enjoyable adventures.

However, for the past month or so, not so much.

So, no new post today. We are both fighting off the lingering after-effects of Covid from the first two weeks of November.

Check back on Friday.

(Photo: Canon EOS 20D camera, Canon EF 24-85mm f3.5-4.5 lens.)

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $3.95 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail me a check to 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and you might find something you like.

Photography and text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags: photography   travel    Italy    Cinque Terra     Canon EOS 20D camera      Canon EF 24-85mm f3.5-4.5 lens

The Best Photographer of the 20th Century

 

Elliott Erwitt: Mother and Baby with Cat

New York, 1953. Erwitt's first wife with their first child.

I consider Elliott Erwitt, who died last Wednesday, to have been the best photographer of the 20th century. I did not say "greatest," because he was not a seminal photographer. He did not found any major movement in photography, as did Kertesz, Steiglitz, Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and maybe a few others. But he  worked in many different genres -- advertising, architecture, reportage, film -- and was the best or among the best at everything he did. As a commercial photographer, he was a consummate professional, good enough to own a spacious condominium in one of the stately old buildings on the West Side of New York's Central Park. 

However, the area in which he excelled all others was in the genre we often call "Decisive Moment" photography. (Cartier-Bresson, by the way, did not invent the genre, although the phrase was coined for his first book. He actually built on the work of Steiglitz and Kertesz.) 

In this work of observation and documentation of human (and often, dog) nature, juxtapositions, incongruities, absurdities -- combined with razor sharp reflexes and technical skill, Erwitt was simply the best. He could size up a complex situation and make a striking photograph in an instant. And no one else comes close to producing the volume (I should say "volumes") of incisive photographs Erwitt spun out, seemingly effortlessly.

This looks like a typical Erwitt photograph, yet it was made to advertise the boots.

There are others who do this work very, very well -- my favorites among them are Robert Doisneau and B.A."Tony" King, who have each produced many photographs as good as Erwitt's -- but Erwitt produces great photographs in phenomenal volume. He could walk around the block -- just about any block -- and come back with more good photographs than I could produce in a year.

Erwitt was 95 years old at the time of his death. For the past several years he had been going through his contact sheets, finding more gems, and publishing more books. Many of his books are now available on the used market. They are all worth having. I especially recommend Personal Exposures, a large volume filled with many of his best-known photographs. 

I had a large collection of Erwitt's books, but since we downsized and moved into a smaller home I've sold most of them. I'm keeping Private Experience, from the Peterson Masters of Contemporary Photography series. Private Experience is not a large book and was published more than 40 years ago, but I have not found a better overview of his life and work. It's the one book I won't part with. I'm fortunate to have a copy in hard cover. Used, softcover copies have been readily available for $5 or so at amazon.com and abebooks.com. 

I think the photograph of Erwitt's first wife and baby with the cat is one of the most beautiful photographs ever made.

Read more of Erwitt's wit an wisdom here. 

This post is adapted from one I wrote in April, 2020.

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $3.95 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail me a check to 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and you might find something you like.

Text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins. Photographs copyright The Estate of Elliott Erwitt 2023.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags:    photography     street photography    Elliott Erwitt

Street Photography

 Four Women of Vernazza.

Street photography is an ever popular genre of photography. In the broadest sense, street photography is just documenting the world around you. 

In some cities, much of life is lived out in public, on the street. This is more the case in other countries, of course, but it's also still true in some cities in the U.S., especially the larger ones. This makes the streets an open-air studio for photographers sufficiently skilled to make something of the opportunity.

Browsing through photography web sites and blogs, I see a lot of what is called "street photography." And it is indeed street photography, if by that you mean someone out on the street photographing people and things in passing. However, most of the work I see has no point to it. Most so-called street photographs look as if someone had just gone into a public place and started firing his camera around at random. There's no apparent point. No apparent message. Not even anything unusual or unique to capture the eye or the imagination. Most of those voluminous photographs are simply meaningless junk.

I believe street photography must reveal some aspect of life, of the human condition. If it fails in this, it fails. Period.

Elliott Erwitt died Wednesday at the age of 95. I consider him to have been the greatest street photographer of all time. He created thousands of poignant, incisive photographs simply by carrying a camera with him at all times and keeping his eyes open and his mind engaged. He had a gift for this that most of us can only marvel at. He excelled at making photographs that show some aspect of human, or sometimes, as he so ably demonstrates, animal behavior. But the operative words here are "carrying a camera at all times." "Open eyes." And "an engaged mind." 

Sometimes Erwitt's wit is very subtle,

and sometimes it's like a slap in the face.

As he said, "It's about reacting to what you see, hopefully without preconception. You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what's around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy."

Check out his web site here.

(Top photograph: Canon EOS 20D, Canon EF 24-85mm f3.5-4.5 lens.)

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $3.95 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail me a check to 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and you might find something you like.

Top hotograph and text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins. Bottom photograph copyright Elliott Erwitt 2023.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags:    photography     street photography    Elliott Erwitt     Vernazza     Canon EOS 20D camera     Canon EF 24-85mm f3.5-4.5 lens