Robert Altman, the legendary San Francisco photojournalist who focused on the city’s counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s, died on September 24th.

He died at the age of 77, a month before his birthday, from a longstanding battle with esophageal cancer, his press agent Lee Housekeeper said in a press release.

The photographer “is survived by his work,” says the publication, profound evidence of his far-reaching influence and talent in all genres.

Born in New York City, Altman was trained by Ansel Adams before moving to San Francisco in 1968, where he quickly became a fixture on the city’s counterculture scene, making friends and sometimes taking photos with artists, musicians, and hippies.

The Rolling Stones Ron Wood, Mick Jagger, Ian Stewart, Bill Wyman and Keith Richards perform on stage during the Day on the Green # 4 concert on July 26, 1978 at the Oakland Coliseum in Oakland, California.

Robert Altman / Getty Images

He shot for the city’s underground newspaper Good Times before becoming Rolling Stone’s chief photographer, capturing some of history’s greatest talent, including Keith Richards and David Crosby.

“They gave me the front page and the full back and an inside page. I was up all night waiting for the paper to come out,” Altman told rock journalist Ben Fong-Torres of his time for Good Times, who introduced the The Sixties: Photographs, a book Altman published in 2007.

In a statement, Rolling Stone founder Jan Werner (and Altman’s former boss) said that Altman “was instrumental in portraying the look, feel and vitality of the 1960s.”

Revelers attend the Holy Man Jam in Boulder, Colorado, in August 1970. It was known as the first rave.

Robert Altman / Getty Images

Frankie Ann, a director working on a documentary about Altman, called him “a wonderful and lovable person and friend” in a statement. She said his “exquisitely sincere recordings capture the historic moments that shape the 1960s”.

In his often very raw and naturalistic work, Altman has captured over 30,000 images ranging from hippie protests to Rolling Stones recording sessions. He later turned his lens to fashion.

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The San Francisco Mime Troupe poses for a portrait in October 1974 in San Francisco, California.

Robert Altman / Getty Imagesshow moreShow less

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Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell poses for a portrait during the 1969 Big Sur Folk Festival, September 13-14, 1969 at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.

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Peter Pizzitola plays a guitar while a lady reads a book when they visit from San Francisco and live in a community in Tecate, New Mexico in about July 1969.

Robert Altman / Getty Imagesshow moreShow less5from5

Altman’s work is now in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley as part of the Robert Altman Photograph Archive.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The post San Francisco images legend Robert Altman lifeless at 77 appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

In an 1857 photograph so epic and populous that it resembles a history painting, Oscar Rejlander presents an allegory of the tension between virtue and debauchery. On display at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, a bearded sage escorts two young men onto the stage of life. An eager youth crouches to the right, toward an abundance of temptations: drinking, gambling, and a swarm of dreamy nudes. The other marches, eyes closed with delightful sobriety, towards a future of study and good works. There, patients are cured and penitents are acquitted, workers work with hammers and saws, and a scholar stabs a globe with his compass.

Your choice, the old man suggests: satisfy the body or uplift the soul?

As a bit of a sophisticated Victorian moral code, Rejlander’s “Two Ways of Life” is ambiguous. Yes, the path of devotion is its own reward and all that, but the tableau makes the voluptuous side appear much more appealing. If the sin has disadvantages, the photographer does not respond to it. Even the grizzled prophet in the center seems undecided; he tends to lust in one version and to light in another.

Rejlander, who began as a painter in his native Sweden and then settled in England as a photographer in the mid-19th century, was one of the forgotten pioneers of this art form. A trickster, darkroom virtuoso, and technological convertor, he had never had a retrospective until the Getty Center released 150 prints with insightful insights into his techniques. For example, “Two Ways of Life” is a composite of more than 30 negatives that were seamlessly joined together more than a century before Photoshop first shone in the eyes of a programmer.

The debut of the work provoked allegations of impropriety and humiliation. One critic praised Rejlander’s technical ability, but claimed that “such a photo has neither art nor decency”. It was one thing to idealize a bare Venus, as painters had done for centuries, and quite another to “see the public realistically and in great detail photographs of naked prostitutes in flesh and blood.”

‘The Juggler’ (around 1865) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

‘Mourning’ (1864) © Museum of Fine Arts of San Francisco

Some saw the picture as an attack by industrial production on the realm of the handmade. “Works of high art cannot be carried out by a mechanical device,” snorted one critic.

Prince Albert loved the epic tableau, and Queen Victoria bought a print for each of the royal residences: Windsor, Osborne House, and Balmoral, where it was intended for the Prince’s wardrobe. Rejlander’s most famous work often appears in the history of photography as a vulgar copy of Victorian kitsch. In the 20th century, sober modernists evaded a path they found bathing. Compound narratives fell into disrepute, and artists endorsed Alfred Stieglitz’s definition of “linear photography” – “brutally direct, without flicker; free of tricks and any ‘ism’. “

This retrospective offers a counter-narrative that suddenly appears contemporary. Postmodern practitioners with little interest in authenticity – such as Gregory Crewdson or Cindy Sherman – have taken up the theater model. And digital tinkering has finally shattered any remaining belief that the camera is telling the unvarnished truth. The Getty celebrates a sensitivity that undermines strong realism with sentimentality, but that is also heartbreaking, hilarious, and tech-savvy.

‘Non Angeli sed Angli’ (1854–56) © Emile Askey

Rejlander was at his best taking pictures. He approached the subjects the way a director treats actors and persuaded them to project emotions as if they were on stage. He was so effective that Darwin recruited him to document the full spectrum of human facial expressions.

For his part, Rejlander pushed children, friends, neighbors and passers-by into his studio and dressed them from his well-stocked costume box. There he could control the lighting and take his time – and later, if necessary, exchange a background from the Scottish Highlands or a charming stream. His favorite subjects were the most available: his wife, his dog, and himself. The three appear with reassuring regularity. “Happy Days (Returning from the Fair)”, for example, shows Oscar and Mary arm in arm in matching hats.

‘Ah!’ (1865) © The J. Paul Getty Museum

‘Mental Distress’ (1871) © Victoria and Albert Museum

This picture suggests that even the most brazen forgery can have a real streak: an expression of marital affection binds the two spouses together. As Thespian-Manqué, Rejlander assumes a variety of comical poses, inexplicably sits at the table with a handkerchief on his head or stares at his desk, while a parrot seems to mock his profession as nothing but stupid facial expressions.

Rejlander adored Garibaldi, the Italian nationalist and revolutionary, with whom he bore an uncanny resemblance. He posed as the wounded Patriot more than once, comforted and encouraged by Hope (his wife again). In a quasi-religious image, St. Peter’s Basilica hovers in a balloon over his head, a vision of the liberator’s dream of wresting Rome from the Pope.

‘Hard Times’ (1860) © George Eastman Museum

Like Garibaldi, Rejlander thought he was a man of the people and went out into the streets to find subjects among the poor. His chimney sweeps, organ grinder and laundresses are marked by cliché and condescension, similar to Dickens or Doré in their most kitschy form. But his depictions of children almost always hit the right note. The boys in their ragged clothes and bare feet maintain dignity, beauty and grace despite their circumstances – or, to be more precise, despite the circumstances Rejlander created for them. We see “Poor Joe”, folded in his rags to seek protection from a brutal London night that is only visible through the photographer’s affectionate sympathy for elegant society. The same boy appears in another picture during the day and rages in undisguised exuberance.

‘Night in Town (Poor Jo, Homeless)’, (before 1862; printed after 1879) © National Gallery of Canada

Self-portrait with a parrot (c1865) © NPG

Rejlander was one of the earliest advocates of photography to realize it could rival painting, and he made his strongest case in an 1866 portrait of Mary Constable and her brother. The young couple crouch thoughtfully, temple to temple gazing at a fireplace backstage and faces lit by the embers. Actually, Rejlander probably used a more reliable source – sunlight streaming through a window – but the resulting double portrait has a kind of romantic glamor that the film studios would eventually perfect all over again.

Had he lived a few generations later, Rejlander would surely have made it straight to Los Angeles. It’s good to know that it has finally arrived.

“Mary Constable and Her Brother” (1866)

Until June 9th getty.edu

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