Tales on Film

As a photographer you can be dedicated to your craft, but I don’t think many of us would go as far as Robert Landsberg. He was one of the many photographers covering the eruption of Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980. He had been going there several times in the days leading up to the eruption and was only miles away from the volcano when it erupted.

He must have realized that he could not outrun the rapidly approaching ash cloud and in his last moments he kept on shooting for as long as possible and then took the film out of the camera, put the film in a bag in his backpack. He laid himself on top of the backpack in order to preserve the last film shot. Sadly he did not survive the ash cloud and was found 17 days later under the ashes, with the film still in his backpack.

The film was developed and has provided scientists with very valuable info about the first moments after an eruption. The only photos I could find of the film are sadly enough low quality scans from a magazine that published the photos.

It’s amazing what you do when you realize you are going to die in a very short time. I guess I would not come up with the idea of preserving the film instead of trying to save myself anyway.

Everybody older than 18 by now, probably still knows where he or she was on 9/11. James Nachtway had just returned from abroad and was unpacking his bags at home in NYC, when he saw the second plane fly into the WTC. As a war photographer he immediatly knew that he had to get over there. The images of his 27 rolls made the frontpages of every newspaper in the world.

But untill recently James had never again looked at his contactsheets of that day. He now shares through the lightbox of time magazine, a couple of unpublished photos. I find these photos beautifull to look at, untill you realise the magnitude of the event that happened.

I’m not starting a political discussion about the death toll and the consequences, but the amount of emotions you must feel as a war photographer, when shooting a war in your own home town has to be enormous. You can’t disconnect or go home to a save refuge, if you take that into account and then look at the pictures I can only bow in respect for. James and his 28 rolls of film…

Most people think that every great photo just comes to the photographer. Let me tell you a little secret, it doesn’t. Most great photos are made through carefull planning, waiting for the right moment to click and taking several different photos.

In this short video, world renowned photographer William Klein, shows you contact sheets of 20 of his best photos and explain how the photos became what they are. I find it fascinating to see, that even a great photographer as William Klein takes multiple shots and selects afterwards the best photo.

Anyway, enjoy a look into the mind of William through this video.

Most of you will probably already know about this, but I recently rediscovered the awesome photo stream of the Library of Congress on flickr.

The LoC started collecting photos from all over the world in the 1800′s when photography was a novelty. By now they have a collection of over 14 million photos in their archives. As the goal of the LoC is to share as much of their archives as possible with the world, they decided to post about a 43 000 of the photos on Flickr. They claim to have about 1 million photos posted online somewhere but flickr is probably the easiest way to go through them.

Also the LoC shares all the photos are completely copyright free. There are photos on flickr of almost everything that happened during the early 1900′s and a lot of important people from that time. But not only important things are shown, there are photos of ordinary people doing ordinary things, it’s a great peak into a different time period.

Be warned once you start browsing through the vast collection of photos, you are likely to keep on clicking for several hours. So if you have some time to spare, go check the awesome photo stream of the Library of Congress.

Mario Tama is a Getty Images photographer and was one of the photographers during the events of september 11, 2001 in New York. Now for the 10th anniversary of 9/11 he
decided to do a series about the 9/11 site today. To make it something different, he decided to use black and white film and a Lomo sprocket rocket camera. The photos are taken over the last couple of months and he will continue to shoot new images between now and the ceremonial event on september 11.

A small selection of his images can be see below.

All images in this post are fully copyrighted by Mario Tama