Alfred Stieglitz: The Eloquent Eye

Alfred Stieglitz: The Eloquent Eye is a 90-minute look into the life and legacy of the father of modern American photography, part of the American Masters series for PBS. All the famous pictures are here as well as rare and early ones, the O'Keefe pictures, portraits of artist friends and fellow photographers, and the work of contemporaries like Edward Steichen, Clarence White, Frank Eugene, and John Marin. As a special treat, Georgia O'Keefe reminisces about her life with Stieglitz as his wife and muse in a rare interview.

I have divided the film into four bite-size parts. Higher quality versions can be downloaded here:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four


Part One


Part Two


Part Three


Part Four

Nokton and the yellow raincoat

Yellow raincoat, Boca Raton, Florida, February 2010.

Florida in February did not offer respite from San Francisco's relentless rain. But the gloomy weather in Boca Raton had a bright side: the beach was deserted and my wife was compelled to wear a sunshiny yellow raincoat. When God gives you clouds, you make pictures.

The blue-gray Florida weekend turned out to be the perfect occasion to test my new lens, Voigtlander's Nokton 50mm f/1.1, the poor man's Noctilux. I already know that this extremely fast lens can record things in the dark that the human eye cannot see. I've tested it in surroundings that are practically pitch-black, where it succeeded in capturing images in the faintest of light.

What about daylight I wondered? Wide open at f/1.1? Here are the results: At 1/2000th of a second, it recorded my wife and her yellow raincoat against a diaphanous backdrop of utmost delicacy, rendering sky and sea like gauze, and objects like they were peering through mist. I love it; it's a perfect portrait lens.