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Reviews
| Big Picture: The Artistry of d'Arazien. By Arthur d'Arazien. Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 2002. xx+107 pp., illus. $45 hb (ISBN 0-87338-751-1).
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This is a book of really great photographs. Most of them are of industrial subjects, but they are not at all what most of us think of when we say "industrial photographs." Arthur d'Arazien's photographs were not done to document industry but to praise it. Most of his clients were corporate advertising departments and people who created annual reports to shareholders. His photographs were meant to show his clients' mills and factories in the best light.
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D'Arazien's family emigrated from Turkey in 1922 when he was only eight. He wanted to be an architect but had to drop out of school to help support his family after his father became ill. D'Arazien did manage to take night courses at the Cooper Hewitt Institute and through a family connection got a job as a lab assistant at White Photographic Studio. Eventually he became an assistant to the firm's theatrical photographer, George Lucas. He spent the next couple of years helping Lucas photograph Broadway productions. He learned a lot about theatrical lighting, which would be invaluable to him later in his career. By 1940 he had his own studio and his first big client, AT&T. He was drafted into the U. S. Army in 1942 and taught aerial photography. It was there that he learned how to use magnesium flash powder to light large areas and realized that it could be the key to photographing industrial interiors.
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When d'Arazien returned to New York after the war, he reopened his studio intent on becoming an industrial photographer. While at first he had to do "scenics" to make ends meet, he quickly developed a reputation as an innovative industrial photographer.
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Most of the photographs in this book are in color, and most of them show something happening. Even distant shots give the impression of activity. Each photograph is accompanied by a brief description of how the picture was made, and it is these descriptions that allow one to see the genius in this man. He did incredible things to get the perfect picture in a pre-PhotoShop world. He worked with cameras with formats from 35mm up to Kodak's 8-×-20-inch camera, which was used to take the pictures for the 72-foot-wide colorama ads in Grand Central Station in New York. Some of his most interesting photos were taken by making multiple exposures several hours apart. In some cases he bracketed the exposures by using three 8-×-10-inch Deardorf cameras because he either did not have the time to change film holders or could not risk having the camera move.
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D'Arazien was fortunate in that most of his industrial clients were willing to give him full access to their facilities and the time and help to set up the pictures. In one of his pictures of charging an open-hearth furnace, he used 12 ounces of flash powder and 60 flash bulbs (3B) to illuminate the scene. Because there was a possibility that the flash powder might be set off prematurely by sparks from the ladle, Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation loaned him six safety engineers who kept the powder covered until it was time to make the exposure.
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While d'Arazien's photographs are often the result of clever and sometimes rather extensive manipulation of lighting and exposures, they are real. What you see is what was there, even if you could not have seen it if you had been there. They convey a sense of place and work that pictures taken after a mill or factory has closed can never provide. In fact, they do a much better job than the pictures that I or any of the other participants in SIA tours can take because d'Arazien had the freedom of both time and access. If he needed a tower built to get the right angle for a shot, his client would have one built; if he needed a scheduled train to stop at a certain point during rush hour, it could be arranged. A number of pictures in the book also demonstrate that d'Arazien had a good eye and could take great photographs with no gimmicks or complicated setups.
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| In 1989 when d'Arazien retired, he donated his collection of original negatives and transparencies to the Smithsonian. Many of his photographs may eventually be available on a Smithsonian Web site, but for now you will have buy the book, which is more than worth the price. |
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