Final Analysis
Roger Hicks considers…
‘Detail of Industrial Building in Massachusetts,’ 1940-41, Jack Delano
The US Library of Congress invites the question of whether it is possible to have too much of a good thing. One answer, obviously, is yes. But as an excess of pictures won’t give you anything like the same kind of hangover from an excess of vintage Champagne, another answer is no. I pretty much wallow in their galleries.
Most of us have taken or tried to take similar pictures to this one, which could have been taken at absolutely any time since Kodachrome was introduced in 1936. Given it was the equivalent of ASA 10, though ASA hadn’t been invented yet, a tripod would have been (and almost certainly was) extremely useful: you really can count the bricks, at least where they haven’t been painted over too thickly. What really gets your attention, though, is the composition. Well, that and the vile round corners, the result of the cardboard Kodachrome mount.
Brilliant composition
The contrasts of verticals and horizontals are captivating, and they are leavened with just enough diagonals to draw yet more attention to the geometrical rigidity of the composition – above all the shadows and the conical device (condensing chimney?) on the right. And yet, there are other diagonals there, or things that read like diagonals: the right angle in the upper main pipe and (above all) the converging verticals.
They don’t converge very much, it’s true. My suspicion is that he was on a rooftop or looking out of a high window, and possibly using a longer-than-standard lens, perhaps 85mm or 90mm. But converge they do. There were no ‘PC’ lenses for 35mm in those days, nor could verticals be ‘trued up’ in Adobe Photoshop. And yet, somehow, it doesn’t matter.
Why not? This puzzled me at first. It still does to some extent, but I think it’s because of something I often refer to in this column, namely, that we see what we expect to see. We know, unshakably, what geometrical buildings look like. And we see what we know, the more so because we have been so heavily primed with the brilliant use of verticals and horizontals in this composition.
Then I thought, ‘Well, I have a good scan. I can run it through Adobe Photoshop.’ So I did, using ‘Perspective’, then stretching the image by about 10% vertically. It still worked very, very well. But I’m not convinced it was better. This gave rise to two thoughts. One is that often, I prefer the original of a picture: probably, simply because I saw it first. The other is that you, too, can download pictures from the Library of Congress, play with them in Photoshop, and see whether you can improve on the work of genius.