Today’s Post by Joe Farace
journaling…is simply writing down your thoughts and feelings to understand them more clearly. And if you struggle with stress, depression, or anxiety, keeping a journal can be a great idea. It can help you gain control of your emotions and improve your mental health.—University of Rochester, Medical Center
Sometime around January 1, 2022 someone on social media—I don’t remember who, sorry, issued a challenge for people to read 52 books during the year. So I decided, what the heck, I would keep a list in my journal of all the books I read during 2022. And in case you’re keeping score, the final total of number of books I read in 2022 was 71.
By the way, if you’re not into journaling, I’ve discovered that it’s kind of a fun pastime. Journaling for me grew out of two different interests: For several years my wife gave me Peanuts-themed 5×8.25-inch Moleskine notebooks as gifts but I never did anything with them. Around the same time, my interest in fountain pens was growing and while I don’t own any expensive pens, I enjoy writing with the ones I did own. So the two interests collided ending up with me keeping a daily journal, writing in them with fountain pen, using a different pen each day. And when I’ve used all of them—there’s not that many— I start over. Each pen delivers a different writing experience and each uses a different kind and color of ink. Fountain pen purists, of which I am certainly not one, clain Moleskine’s paper is not very “fountain pen friendly” but I don’t care because I’m not a paper snob either.
My New Year’s journal is not Moleskine but was made by Compendium. It was also a gift from Mary and is pictured here along with a couple of my favorite pens. I really like using the Conklin Duragraph—the red/black pen—because that’s the brand of pen Mark Twain used for his writing. (The company was started in 1898.) As I type this, I don’t know what writing with the Duragraph, in Backpack Inks Rome Purple ink, on this notebook’s paper will be like, but I look forward to finding out starting with my list of “books read” in 2023.
Book of the Week
Many photographers assume if they get to photograph beautiful people they’ll be able to make beautiful photographs. Sadly, this is not true. During my life I’ve been lucky enough to photograph many beautiful women and, if anything, they are more difficult to photograph because your eyes sees their beauty but your camera work is challenged to match that reality. The late Bob Willoughby, who passed away in 2009, knew how to photograph beautiful people and his book, A Cinematic Life, is a testament to his considerable technical and aesthetic skills.
The book itself is an event. For some reason, I’ve been reading an ever increasing number of heavy books lately and A Cinematic Life has the heft of an old Monkey Wards catalog, yet instead of photographs of bicycles and tires, it’s filled with spectacularly reproduced images of film stars along with accompanying and illuminating text. This alone makes it a masterful instructional text in the art and craft of photographing people.
The introduction to the book was written by the photographer’s son, Christopher who gives some familial insight into the kind of man his father was was, while the rest of the book includes comments from Bob Willoughby about each image and how they were made. Unlike a set photographer who is part of the film crew and stays with a movie during the entire production, Willoughby was a magazine photographer during the heyday of magazines like Life and Look who was brought in to do feature stories on the stars. But he photographed more than just film stars and sprinkled throughout the book are also images of Jazz musicians that demonstrate a different more sensitive side of Willoughby. His images of Miles Davis show a youthful and pensive person not often seen in other portraits, while his portrait of the talented yet tragic Chet Baker is simply heart-breaking.
Willoughby‘s captions shed some rare insights into the personalities of some of the stars and you may be surprised—no spoilers— as to how nice some of these stars were and well as how not-so- nice others turned out to be. As a fan of a particular actress, one of his stories broke my heart with how venal she was compared to others actors he photographed. Don’t miss the story he shares about Dustin Hoffman when working on the set of The Graduate. It’s a fun one. It’s insights like this that make this book a joy, not just to look at the remarkable photographs, but also the text from Bob himself. To amplify Willoughby‘s relationship with some of the subjects, sprinkled throughout the well produced and well-worth-the-price book are quotes about him, not just his work, from such diverse stars as Tony Curtis and Peter O’Toole.
While much of Willoughby‘s work is in black and white, there are some color images here too and they are stunning. They range from formal images of Audrey Hepburn in her role of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady to sensitive photographs of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, Willoughby uses color to show us new sides of these stars. Occasionally images are spread across two pages producing a Wow! factor not often seen in photo books these days. The occasional inclusion of contact sheets within these pages gives you a peek into the photographer’s thought processes while at the same time making the book useful for the aspiring and even experienced portrait photographer.
There is no doubt that Bob Willoughby was a photographic genius and A Cinematic Life is as much an instructional book–and an inspirational one—for photographers as it is a coffee table book. I highly recommend Bob Willoughby: A Cinematic Life for both photographers and lovers of the movies, especially classic films.
- Bob Willoughby: A Cinematic Life
- Bob Willoughby
- ISBN-13: 978-1797217024
- Publisher: Chronicle Chroma
- Pages: 368 pages (hardbound)
- Size: 10 x 1.25 x 13 inches
- Weight: 5.64 pounds
- Price: $44.99 (Prime)