Nikos Economopoulos
4 198801 308909
Edward Quinn
Peter Turnley
Jan Michalko
Meg Hewitt
2 . 2 0 2 0 F E B R UA RY | M A R C H
D 8,90 € NL B L 10,10 € I 10,20 € UK 8,20 £
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L E I C A F O T O G R A F I E I N T E R N AT I O N A L ENGLISH EDITION
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36 LEITZ AUCTION
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LFI 2. 2020
P O RT F O L I O L I G H T B OX
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96 | L F I . GA L L E RY
82 | M10 MONOCHROM
More than 25 000 photographers present over half a million pictures in the LFI Gallery. In this issue, a best-of in black and white, taken with the Leica M Monochrom
The new M10 Monochrom is a clear affirmation of Leica’s commitment to black and white photography. In contrast to its predecessor, the camera features a specially developed sensor with a significantly higher resolution than the standard M10
P H OTO
8 8 | M SUMMILUX 90
106 | EXHIBITIONS
Its extraordinary image quality and unusual compositional possibilities place the new Leica Summilux-M 90 f/1.5 Asph at the forefront of fast lenses for the Leica M-System
Gabriele Basilico, Palazzo Rom; Dawoud Bey in San Francisco; Masculinities, the Barbican Art Gallery, London; Diane Arbus, Ontario, Canada; Wright Morris, FOAM, Amsterdam
Nikos Economopoulos: from On the Road, Ghana, Cape Coast 2017
Edward Quinn 8 | LEICA CLASSIC
A gentleman rather than a paparazzo: the fifties and sixties found Edward Quinn mingling with the rich and beautiful on the Côte d’Azur Fully clad in elegant black: the new Leica M10 Monochrom
Nikos Economopoulos 2 4 | O N T H E R OA D
The Greek photographer’s current project took him all over the world in search of the perfect melange of colours, form and emotions
Meg Hewitt
108 | BOOKS New publications by Tomeu Coll, Mitra Tabrizian, Nadav Kander and Bruce Gilden 109 | LEICA GALLERIES The program of Leica Galleries worldwide. Among them, Chris Steele-Perkins in London and René Groebli in Frankfurt on the Main 1 1 0 | I N T E RV I E W The Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center opened in Budapest in 2013. We spoke with the curators Gabriella Csizek and Emese Mucsi
3 8 | TO KYO I S YO U R S
Using strong contrasts in black and white, the Australian photographer paints an expressionist picture of the Japanese megacity and its citizens
Jan Michalko 54 | LIFE FLASHES
Berlin photographer Jan Michalko spent six months in Sir Lanka. The outcome is a delightful interplay of shapes, colours and lines
114 | MY PICTURE The return trip from a popular electro festival in Siberia took Jakob Schnetz across the snowcovered expanses of nowhere 114 | IMPRINT
Peter Turnley 68 | FRENCH KISS
A photographic love letter: as far as Turnley is concerned, there is no place where romanticism and love are as visible as in Paris
COVER: Meg Hewitt, from the Tokyo is Yours series
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The Côte d’Azur in the 1950s and 1960s: a glamorous playground of the rich and beautiful, where film stars, artists, industrialists and aristocrats congregated. Edward Quinn’s images are akin to a family album of this golden era. We pay tribute to the late photographer on the centenary of his birth.
LEICA CLASSIC
Edward Quinn
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Painters Jean Cocteau and Raymond Moretti working on their joint project, La Naissance du Verseau, Nice 1962 (top); David Hockney leafing through Edward Quinn’s photo book, Picasso de Draeger, Paris 1975 (left)
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LEICA M
Nikos Economopoulos
O N T H E R OA D
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Greek Magnum photographer Nikos Economopoulos spends his life on the move. With his Leica M he often captures surreally suggestive encounters between light and shadow. His carefully composed pictures tell individually-interpretive, miniature stories full of poetry.
“It’s all about travelling without a specific purpose, being curious about what you see, being constantly surprised by new encounters,” the photographer says, describing the essence of his project. “While taking pictures, reasoning is suspended. It’s like playing with reality”
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T O K Y O
Y I O S U R S
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Meg Hewitt
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Hewitt works up close to people. In the picture on the left, her friend Yuka uses body language to demonstrate how she felt after the TĹ?hoku earthquake in 2011, when she was stuck in Tokyo. The large picture below shows Kerobokan train station, where the entrance to the Sumo Stadium is also located
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LEICA M
Jan Michalko LIFE FLASHES
Heat, noise, and a myriad of colours: for six months, Michalko lived and worked on the island of Sri Lanka. His images capture the vibrancy of everyday life in an extraordinary country.
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Above: this day labourer from Pettah, a neighbourhood in Colombo, has become a local celebrity for his fashion style. Right: the snake charmer from Peradeniya proudly holds up his Cobra for the camera
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Peter Turnley FRENCH KISS
The American photographer, Peter Turnley, now also a French citizen, chose to make his home in the French capital nearly fifty years ago. His pictures document the hustle and bustle on the streets, while paying tribute to life and love.
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Love is in the air: Peter Turnley succumbed to charm of the city when he first arrived in Paris in 1975
Ever since Grand Master photographers like Henri-Cartier Bresson and Robert Doisneau put their fellow human beings at the centre of their creative work, photography and philanthropy have enjoyed a close association. It is no coincidence these two chroniclers inspired Peter Turnley to pick up a camera at a young age, and to head out on explorations. Defined by late sixties and seventies society in the USA, and a progressive upbringing in an otherwise rather conservative part of the country, Turnley’s humanist outlook towards his surroundings was reflected in his early photographs. When they were just seventeen, Peter and his twin brother David,
set out to document life on a working class street, McClellan Street, of their home town, Fort Wayne, Indiana. The one-year photographic project brought the brothers to the attention of many of the leaders of the New York photography community and led to their first publication in the magazine, 35mm Photography. Not least, one of the great lessons learned during that project was that a photographer does not need to travel far to discover an insightful story. If one goes through life with eyes wide open, the questioning gaze of Turnley’s photographic icons, and appropriate empathy, fascinating life will be found right in your own backyard. Even so, Turnley’s curiosity and wanderlust grew the more pictures he made. He quickly became aware of the doors
photography opened for him: into unknown places and into the hearts of his fellow human beings. Today, he continues to work according to the principles taken from The Family of Man: there are more things between heaven and earth that bring people together than there are that divide them. This philosophy has served Turnley well during his decades-long career, leading him to document numerous significant, incisive and sometimes dark, chapters of world history, yet managing to be at home across the globe. But, there is one place that has firmly captured the globe-trotting photographer’s heart, and that place is Paris. →
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According to Turnley, photographers do not need to reinvent the world – there is marvel in the realities of life everywhere. Even so, they should be able to convey the poetry so that the viewer can feel it
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ANYTHING GOES L E I C A S U M M I L U X- M 9 0 F/ 1 . 5 A S P H
The new Summilux-M 90 f/1.5 Asph lens represents the pinnacle of fast lenses for Leica M cameras – both in terms of image quality and creative possibilities.
With the Summilux-M 90 f/1.5 Asph Leica continue their range of extremely fast lenses, which now spans seamlessly from 21 to 90 mm – covering all of the most important focal lengths. With its traditional portrait focal length, the new 90mm lens is not only the longest lens in this segment, but also a classic contender for a wide maximum aperture. Leica do, of course, already offer a lightsensitive portrait tele – the Summicron-M 90mm f/2 Asph. However, the new Summilux goes several steps further, with its shallower depth of field, more ambitious focus and, inevitably, next-level pricing. It offers the advantage of an enormously high light sensitivity for this focal length, and all of the creative possibilities this entails. SPE C I A L PO RT RA I TS.
The construction of the Summilux-M 90 f/1.5 Asph is based on the renowned Noctilux-M 75 f/1.25 Asph – the bodies of the two lenses are almost identical
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When composing a portrait in its most classic form, with the subject’s face captured at close range, the Summilux’s exceptional light sensitivity does not necessarily come into play. At a focusing distance of one meter, the wide open lens yields a depth of field of just about 11 mm, which is barely enough to get the eye area in focus – though it does open up the possibility of isolating minute details from the background. The Summilux truly comes into its own at greater distances: even at three metres, the in-focus area is only around ten centimetres deep. But Leica lenses are not just distinguished by their exceedingly sharp rendition, but also by their aesthetic interpretation of out-of-focus areas – and
this, in particular, is where the Summilux-M 90 leaves nothing to be desired. Especially at fully open aperture, the SummiluxM 90 delivers a pleasantly smooth bokeh, without any hard edges between the sharp and defocused parts of the image. Distant highlights captured with a wide open lens are rendered with a beautifully soft effect; when stopping down, their form is slightly altered as they take on the shape of the circular, eleven-bladed aperture. In addition to producing a smooth transition from sharpness into blur, the state-of-the-art Summilux-M 90 f/1.5 Asph delivers an extremely sharp rendition even at fully open aperture, with only the slightest, usually imperceptible, fall-off in the outermost corners. In fact, even with this extremely lightsensitive lens, stopping down is only ever a compositional option, rather than a technical necessity. T E C H NI CA L DE TA I LS.
The construction of the Summilux-M 90 f/1.5 Asph is based on the Noctilux-M 75 f/1.25 Asph (LFI 1/2018, page 66), whose lens body it has adopted. Two of the Summilux’s eight lens elements, which are assembled in six groups, have aspheric surfaces. A floating element ensures a consistently high imaging performance at all distances. Even the vignetting (which is inevitable →
When captured with an open aperture, distant bright spots are rendered in a wonderful manner. Image: Markus Tedeskino
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