[Leica] RIP Jim Marshall

[passaro.vince at gmail.com (Vince Passaro)]

How were Marshall's M4s modified by the way?


On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 10:10 PM, Vince Passaro <passaro.vince at 
gmail.com>wrote:

> All the preceding was in reaction to that very photo just mentioned, the
> Janis Joplin with pint of Southern Comfort -- who I was just listening to
> last night and was so moved by I actually went on to Facebook which I never
> do anymore and put up a remark about how unearthly and miraculous her
> singing was. And today here she is in that great photograph, so young, so
> completely young. To hear her sing you'd think she was a million years old,
> or more -- as old as the planets.
>
> On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 10:05 PM, Vince Passaro <passaro.vince at 
> gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Looking at all the Jim Marshall pics on the Times site and on The Online
>> Photographer (the two by the way are running reversed versions of the 
>> Miles
>> Davis pic and something tells me it's the Times, not the OP, that's got it
>> wrong) I started thinking about great portrait photography; of course I
>> thought of it in terms of how I cannot do it; and it struck me that what I
>> admire so much about it and what makes it so hard for me to do is that the
>> space between the camera and the subject is clear; that great portraitists
>> are interested in what's there whereas my training, as a writer, is to be
>> interested in how I'm reacting to what's there, seeing it, constituting it
>> (or re-constituting it) in language. I can meet people, exchange
>> pleasantries, and be (essentially in secret) watching them, assessing 
>> them,
>> memorizing them, so that I can go home and render them not as they ARE or
>> even remarkably closely to how THEY APPEAR TO BE but rather as I have seen
>> them and reshaped them. I do this by writing words down to evoke certain
>> images and certain kinds of understandings. But it's an exceedingly 
>> low-res
>> portrait: the writer leaves room for the reader to fill in with his or her
>> own imaginative vision so that the reader is bonded to the text.  When I 
>> go
>> to take a picture of someone I am too aware of myself there with the 
>> camera;
>> I feel clumsy or embarrassed or pushy or trivial or comical or SOMETHING
>> that's important to me: and I feel as if I should be DOING something to 
>> make
>> that person become that person, whereas of course what I need to do is be
>> invisible.  But how I feel about me in the scene still matters. So the 
>> space
>> is never clear, the light is obscured, because in the end all the great
>> portraitists from Paul Strand or Walker Evans or even that French Cote
>> d'Azure guy who's always taking slightly out of focus pictures of flappers
>> climbing on summer rocks -- what was his name? -- 1920s... or Man Ray for
>> that matter, so stylized: they all have a style, certainly, but the space
>> between the lens and the subject is left clear of opinion as it were. Guys
>> like Irving Penn and Avedon  --- LARTIGUE is the French dude's name, it 
>> just
>> came back to me -- Penn and Avedon can be egomaniacs and probably were but
>> not while the camera was at their eye.
>>
>> But since I cannot do it my speculations on what it requires could be
>> entirely wrong. Only practice confirms truth, really.
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 9:15 PM, EPL <manolito at videotron.ca> wrote:
>>
>>> In 1999, Jim Marshall and I corresponded a little and then talked by
>>> phone a
>>> few times about Leica gear. Jim -- like me -- was a certified gearhead.
>>> Yes,
>>> he preferred the M4 (his were modified) above all other Ms.
>>>
>>> But more important: he took some of my favourite photos. Janis Joplin
>>> with
>>> the Southern Comfort mickey is one.
>>>
>>> Lucky man, he was, at a time when his nation was in turmoil, he saw the
>>> best
>>> of it.
>>>
>>> Emanuel
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Leica Users Group.
>>> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information
>>>
>>
>>
>