CPN Europe has a wonderful interview with David Burnett on his work covering the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

Film, slow ISO’s (Kodachrome and Tri-X, even Tri-X @ ISO 400 qualifies as slow these days), slower lenses, manual focus, maneuvering to get the film out of the country, a different time. But Burnett makes the case that even though technology has advanced over the interim, people and history remain quite similar.

Additional interview and story at NYT’s Lens blog from last September.

Burnett’s book, 44 Days: Iran and the Remaking of the World, and web site.

Marlon Brando on the set of "Apocalypse Now" in 1976. Photo by Mary Ellen Mark

Mary Ellen Mark, known primarily for her documentary photography, has a new book out on another aspect of her work – as a still photographer on movie sets. The New York Times has a slideshow online where Mary Ellen comments on a few of the photos plus a short article. In spite of the brevity there’s great insight conveyed about being a photographer. The book is “Seen behind the scene/Forty years of photographing on set/Mary Ellen Mark” published by Phaidon.

I’ve never met Mary Ellen but I did see her once behind the scene. In 1986, I was a staffer in New York City for a firm that did corporate and public relations photography. I was covering one of the first trade shows at the newly opened Jacob Javits Center. The show centered on physical rehabilitation and due to the odd confluence of events (first show plus the subject matter) I had photographed everyone from Spanky of the Little Rascals to Richard Simmons leading hundreds in exercise routines to Governor Cuomo touring the site and the show. I had walked the show floor dozens of times getting images and on one more round found the IBM booth covered with photo equipment cases. Many were open and it seemed like every lens in 35mm and medium-format was on display, each identified with black lettering on a white piece of tape on the lens cap. It was Mary Ellen Mark hard at work. She had a couple of lights set up, assistants with her, and was photographing subjects with IBM’s products.

I don’t know whom she was working for but for a newbie like myself it was a good lesson in not pigeonholing others and it gave me a fuller understanding of what it means to be professional photographer.

"Men's Race", Late 1930's, Ridgeway, Iowa, Everett "Scoop" Kuntz

Great article in The New York Times this morning about Everett “Scoop” Kuntz. As a teenager in the late 1930′s he acquired a 35mm Argus AF camera and began to document the life around him.  Ridgeway is a small farming community, population 300 (then and now.)  Scoop could not afford to have any of the images printed so he stored the negatives in a box and forgot about them until 60 years later.  Scoop passed away in 2003 but the images brought him some solace as he fought cancer during his last years.

Now the University of Iowa Press has published the photos as the book, “Sunday Afternoon on the Porch:  Reflections of a Small Town in Iowa, 1939-1942.”  The New York Times has a photo gallery in addition to the article.

It’s obviously interesting as a document of a small town some seventy years ago but it’s also interesting in light of the switch to digital.  One wonders if then was now and Scoop had made his images digitally would they still be around to find, in a box in the basement, seventy years later?  Would they be on a disc or a memory card?  Would it be clear what was there?  Would there be some way to retrieve and read the images or would storage or file formats have moved on many generations rendering the images irretrievable?