[Leica] Feininger/Stock briefly revisited

[Daniel Bowdoin <danlb@mindspring.com>]

There was a little thread here recently about Andreas Feininger's
visually dramatic 1951 portrait of Dennis Stock. Part of the thread had
to do with identifying Feininger's subject. There was even some doubt
about whether it was a young man or a young woman. I've just been taking
a few minutes to browse through the Sept/Oct issue of American Photo,
which just not hit the newsstands. It has been mentioned several times
recently, by subscribers who had already received it, because of an
interview with Sabastiao Salgado. The interview looks to be a lot less
than I had anticipated, but that's not my purpose for being here right
now. More interesting (to me) was the photograph spread across pp. 74 and
75. It's Bert Stern's 1961 portrait of a group of Magnum photographers
who were in NYC for their annual meeting . . . Erwitt, Stock, Haas,
Hartmann, Cartier-Bresson, Capa (Cornell), Morath, Glinn, and Arnold.  A
not unimpressive group. Anyway, if you look at Dennis Stock's face in
this photograph, and sort of wind it back ten years, you see the face in
the Feininger photograph. Other random and casual observations--what an
attractive woman Inge Morath was (and still is), how incredibly straight
all the males in the photograph look, how HCB bears a striking
resemblance to Dwight Eisenhower. An interesting photograph.

Regards

Daniel Bowdoin