Today I’m in the midst of preparing for a talk I’m giving next week on 20th Century American Photographers.  The final announcement for it just went up today in  the “upcoming events” portion of the website for the Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut Tübingen, the organization that is sponsoring the talk. Here’s a link in to a description of the talk in English: 20th-century-american-photographers-in-focus.html

I’m having a lot of fun preparing for how to provide a brief (1 hour) overview of famous American photographers: essentially, it’s a high-level who’s-who of American photographers and some of their iconic works. Another theme is how we can learn basic ideas from these photographers to improve our own photography. Not-so-coincidentally, I’m also teaching a hands-on photography workshop starting at the end of February based that same theme.

Fortunately for me, since this is the German-American Institute, talks there are offered in either English or German.  So I’ll be lecturing in English for this one. Whew. 🙂

Anyway, as I was reading something today I ran across the phrase “what a picture”.  A song suddenly popped into my head; it’s from the musical Half a Sixpence:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HptmXm956oI

There’s an interesting anecdote I remember about that song, actually. In the above clip, which is from the movie version of the musical Half a Sixpence, the song turns into a big dance number. But in the original stage version of that musical, while it was still in “previews”, they realized just before opening night that the second half of the musical wasn’t playing well because they didn’t have a big number catchy number in the second act. They tried a bunch of things, but nothing was working.  Just a day or two before opening night, the composer, David Heneker, came up with Flash Bang Wallop, the song in the clip. The lyrics talk about taking a photo. As there wasn’t time to do any real staging/choreography for the number before the show opened, someone came up with the idea of just having people stand in poses getting their photo taken. The song was a huge hit, as was the show.

They’ve kept that idea in the movie version of the song, but if you watch it you’ll see they had a little more time to work on the choreography for the movie. 😉

Anyway, while I’m not talking about that particular fun little anecdote in my talk, I am including lots of  other little tidbits about famous photographers and their photos. I.e., my talk is not a technical one about camera process, types, settings, etc.

I’m actually not planning on including any other songs in the talk, either. But if I really get stuck for something to fill up the time, I can always use another song about a camera, a little ditty written in 1891 about the 1888 Kodak camera, the first “point and shoot” camera. The name of the song comes from the slogan for the then new idea of pressing a button to take a photo or do other daily life activities: the song is called You push the button, we do the rest. The lyrics comment on the effect of new technology on life in general. circa 1890. Follow this link to see the lyrics – click where it says “.mp3” to hear it sung.

Too funny – who knew someone wrote a song about the first Kodak camera. But, as I once told my 11-year-old nephew, stick with me kid, I can find a song or song lyric for just about anything. I guess that really is true. 😉