This is the 35th installment of the online series by Peter Fetterman Gallery called the Power of Photography highlighting hope, peace and love in the world. We invite you to enjoy and reflect on these works during this time.
George A. Tice (United States, b. 1938 -2025)
Petit’s Mobil Station, Cherry Hill, New Jersey, 1979
George Tice is one of the true greats in American photography and this image is one of the all time great Classic American photographs.I have loved it since I first arrived in America in 1979. The subject may seem commonplace. A gas station in New Jersey, where most of his great images have been shot, but it is compelling and haunting.George has not travelled much in his career. He has found a wealth of subject matter right on his doorstep. This image emanates a great feeling of mood and layers of meaning and even a slight melancholy and sense of loneliness in the same way that Edward Hopper’s best paintings affect you. It is in the physical beauty of the print.George has honed his darkroom skills over six decades of an intense work ethic like no one else I have seen. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? How do you make a print that just glows and staggers you in it’s profound beauty? Experience and in a god given rare talent and eye..This is a great example of the poetics of place. Through George’s work I have come to understand America better and appreciate all it’s myriad small miracles and moments. Thank you George for almost 40 years of inspiration and friendship.
Kristoffer Albrecht
Small Apples, 1984
I was visiting our great friend and artist, Pentti Sammallahti, in Helsinki and I casually said to him, “Perhaps there is another great photographer in Finland I should meet?”He made a telephone call and the next day he drove me for over 3 hours in the freezing cold through what seemed like at the time endless forests to meet his most favored student and protege, Kristopher.We spent a delightful few hours all together and as we were talking and eating out of the corner of my eye I saw this gem of an image hanging on a discrete wall. I had to get up to look at it more closely. Then like a powerful Ali punch I was knocked out by it’s power and physical beauty.A tender and loving portrait of his wife.It remains, to this day, one of my all time favorite images.
Jeffrey Conley 1969
Figure and Coastal Mist, Oregon, 2018
“Photography is for me a kind of meditation that widens my perception of the existing and evolving world around us.” ~ Jeffrey Conley
Jeffrey’s landscapes are brilliant. This one stuns us with a particularly soothing gradient. Admiring the lines of the cliffs and shades of grey we are rewarded to find a figure hidden amongst the mist. A reminder of how small we are in the immense arms of nature.
Martin Elkort
Puppy Love, Coney Island Boardwalk, Brooklyn, NY, 1950
“I surely am pursuing happiness with my camera. When I take pictures of children, I’m not trying to capture their cuteness or emerging beauty .I seek to capture the essence of childhood. I see the child as a chrysalis of a future adult.”~ Martin Elkort
I love Marty’s line here “I see the child as a chrysalis of a future adult”. He certainly nailed it here. The body language of the two children tells it all. The girl a little nervous and the boy nervous too as can be seen in the way his legs are somewhat twisted like a pretzel despite his apparent confidence and coolness. Coney Island was such a refuge and still is for so many New Yorkers trying to escape the pressures of the city and in the Summer the unbearable heat.Like the other areas of the city a sense of genuine community prevailed in the 1950’s when this image was taken.
Cig Harvey
Claire in the Forsythia, Rockport, Maine, 2010
“How to Force Blossoms 1. Acknowledge out loud your desperation for spring. 2. Find branches with plenty of buds on them. 3. Cut the stems at an angle. 4. Arrange in warm water. 5. Change the water daily. 6. Place in indirect sunlight all over the house. 7. Wait. Warning — Forcing forsythia may cause a temporary aversion to violet, its opposite on the color spectrum.” ~ Cig Harvey
Today we bring you a strategy for winter survival – and a glorious floral vision, seen through the eyes of British Artist Cig Harvey. In her own words, “The ephemeral nature of flowers is a perfect metaphor for what it is to be human, what it is to feel. My pictures are often of flowers, but they are not about flowers; they are about living and dying. Searching for and bearing witness to beauty to share it with others is a political act. The experience I want the viewer to have with this collection of photographs is the same as when I find the images—a feeling in the body, a witness to something rare in an everyday world. Experience this. Feel this. They are an invitation to experience the natural world in an immersive way, to find and celebrate beauty in the everyday.”
Michael Kenna
Cherry Blossoms, Nara, Honshu, 2002
“I find the time in the dark room to be fascinating and inspiring. It forms and enriches the way that I see and therefore photograph.”~ Michael Kenna
Photographers like Michael are an endangered species. They revel in the intricacies of the classic, old fashioned analogue darkroom. No digital tricks. Each print he makes is a slow, meticulous process of deep though and application. Patience and a slow pace are givens.But the results are painstakingly beautiful.
William Klein
Atom Bomb Sky, New York City, 1955
“Anything goes. No rules, no limits, no holding back.” ~ William Klein
How do you finish up your year long project on New York? Well if you are William Klein you go out with a bang..One of the great iconoclasts in the history of photography he better end on a high note. So he literally goes up in a helicopter to capture his final shot and calls it “Atom Bomb Sky”. Maybe living during the height of the Cold War prompted the title but the image can certainly be open to many interpretations.Here’s mine – I think it is a tribute to the indestructibility of this city. Whatever trials and tribulations this city suffers it always bounces back. It came back from bankruptcy, survived 9/11 and will overcome the Pandemic. Survival is in its DNA, that’s what makes it such a special place and this image captures it all. I think it is epic.
Pentti Sammallahti (Finland, b. 1950)
Fabiansgatan, 2001
“You don’t take a photo, the photo gives itself to you”. ~ Pentti Sammallahti
Every photograph may be a gift to Pentti from the photo gods, but they are also a gift from Pentti to all of us. Thank you Pentti for having your eyes open and camera ready for this beautiful moment.
John Simmons b. 1950
Archie Shepp Nashville, TN, 1971
“Today music is visual.” ~ Archie Shepp
John Simmons has captured the great Archie Shepp, the music and the feeling of the moment in this powerful shot. But that’s Johnny, always where the action is, and camera ready! He has gifted us a portal to side stage next to a great jazz saxophonist.
Sabine Weiss
L’homme qui court, Paris, 1953
“I realized very young that photography would be my means of expression. I was more visual than intellectual. I was not very good at studying. I left high school. I left on a summer day on a bicycle.”~ Sabine Weiss
Well Sabine left on a bicycle from her small Swiss town to Geneva and never returned. She apprenticed to a photographer there for a couple of years then she did the gutsy thing of without knowing anyone or having any money she moved to Paris and apprenticed to a fashion photographer, Willy Maywald. After some years there when she thought she was ready to go out into the precarious world of freelance photography, that is exactly what she did and slowly established herself and never looked back. She worked nonstop on assignment with ferocious intensity solving compositional and technical problems for all the major magazines and her commercial clients, but she still managed to do her own self-directed work and created a body of humanist imagery equal to all her contemporaries like Boubat, Doisneau, Ronis, Izis and others.When you sit with her, even at the age of 96 years old, the intensity and drive for perfection is still there and her passion is contagious.I love night imagery and this is one of the best and one of her greatest images. She enlisted her husband, the American painter Hugo Weiss, to venture out into that Paris cold night air and she came back with some magic. It is almost like a frame from a great Film Noir “nouvelle vague” piece of French Cinema, full of mystery and suspense. Is he running away from someone or towards a special assignation? We may never know but that is part of its allure especially from this viewer.As Sabine says about her work, “All the pictures I take are entirely instant. What I like is to make an instant picture. Even if there are no people, I like the click, click, click. I never wait.”I only hope when I am 96 years old I will be as full of energy and spirit as Sabine is.
Peter Fetterman Gallery
2525 Michigan Ave, #A1
Santa Monica, CA 90404
http://www.peterfetterman.com
The Power of Photography is now a book published by ACC ART Books.
Peter Fetterman : The Power of Photography
ACC ART Books
Pages: 256 pages
Size: 7.87 in x 9.06 in
ISBN: 9781788841221
$45.00
https://www.accartbooks.com/us/book/the-power-of-photography/
www.accartbooks.com
