Olive Cotton
Third in a continuing series of posts about still photographers following posts on Alfred Palmer and Arthur Rothstein.
Olive Cotton, you should know, spent much of her life marginalized. As with many great female artists, the sexist dictums of her day proclaimed her husband, Max Dupain, the greater photographer, and of course he was the great Australian photographer of advertising and fashion editorial of the midcentury.
But in 1985, an Olive Cotton retrospective shed light on her remarkable talent: though thoroughly uncommercial, Cotton's work is stunningly pictorial, drawing on German expressionist and French impressionist influences. Cotton's subject matter - flowers, teacups, shadows - becomes haunting through her lens.
Here is her most famous work, Teacup Ballet (1935). Cotton often left her work slightly out of focus, the fuzziness producing a dreamlike quality to her images:
Her Shasta Daisies (1937) uses a full, active frame and a narrow depth of field to give the image a childlike, almost fairy-tale beauty:
Dead Sunflowers (1984) works in a similar vein and wide-angle lensing to produce a moody, expressionistic image:
Cotton was a photographer with a strong investment in the inner life of objects and landscapes. Here are a pair of stunning landscapes where individual elements (the cloud, the tree branch) are drawn with full personalities:
Cotton could invest herself in seemingly uninspired subjects and find a compelling play of light and shadow, as in Fence and Tree (1937):
Cotton's portraiture is less successful than her still-life and landscape work. There's a telling lack of engagement with the subject in this fashion still she shot for the Dupain studio:
Cotton's work is on a continuum with a certain Australian visual tradition that Russell Boyd explores in his work as cinematographer on Peter Weir's film Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Olive Cotton's The Way Through the Trees (1938)
Russell Boyd, Still from Picnic at Hanging Rock
And then there are images beautiful enough to defy analysis:
Olive Cotton, Photographer is out of print but can be purchased for a lot of money here.
Arthur Rothstein
Of course I like Arthur Rothstein.
A couple months back, I made a post highlighting the exceptional photography of Alfred Palmer, and wanted to do some more posts about photographers whose work I greatly appreciate. All images from Shorpy.com.
Rothstein would've been a great filmmaker. Notice the way he situates his characters in their environment. Love that reflection. This could be a textbook example for instructors trying to demonstrate the rule-of-thirds.
Here's another example, from March 1936, simply noted "Children's playground, St. Louis."
From his most famous series, documenting a tenant community at Gee's Bend, Alabama for LIFE. Rothstein reveals an wry, bitter sense for narrative irony: the newspaper used to wallpaper this window is an ad for cellophane:
A rare action shot. Wouldn't you love to see what this guy would've done with a handheld 16mm camera?
Every establishing shot should be this well-composed:
Rothstein had a strong tendency toward diagonal compositions, as seen above and below. Compare that to better-known FSA luminaries Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, both of whom primarily worked in planimetric staging. Also here, here, here, and here.
I would get chills if this was in a movie:
Here's an exception -- love the way all six of these kids come across in this photo. Such a strong eye for character.
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Photo Thursday! (3/4/10)
Here's a new feature for this blog: two days ago, I bought this silly app that allows me to take cool pictures with the otherwise lame iPhone camera, so once a week I'm going to dump the best pictures I took in this program here. Enjoy!
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