Happy New Year!

Fireworks at the birth of 2009 in Miami Beach.

Ocean Drive was closed to cars; the restaurants set up extra tables and chairs on the pavement and people danced in the street. It was a huge, happy, peaceful, multicultural crowd of all ages: many families with babies in strollers, as well as many young couples, of course. And the vibe was an Obama-like calm, an easy-going warmth.

The Postcard Aesthetic

After scanning, captioning, key-wording and retouching numerous vintage postcards from the 1900s through the 1960s for my new stock image archive, I'm beginning to see real life as a series of postcard views.

I mean that the postcard aesthetic has infiltrated my photography -- at least for now -- and I like it. Here's a recent example of my postcard-influenced photography:



There was a layer of unreality, of fantasy, to the classic postcards of yesteryear.

During the golden age of American postcards -- roughly from 1930 to 1950 -- picture postcards were generally made from black-and-white photos that were heavily retouched and colorized, often by a staff artist for the big postcard companies who had never actually seen the subject of the photograph in person.

So the airbrush artist pretty much guessed at the colors -- and modified them up as he saw fit, as he imagined them.

In some cases, when, for instance, a hotel commissioned a postcard company to create a card for the hotel, the postcard company would ask the client to write on a translucent sheet overlaid atop a black-and-white proof what the various colors should be -- so the staff artist could paint, or airbrush, in the approximate colors, in a sort of paint-by-numbers fashion, using the color descriptions written by the client on this overlay as his map.

All this resulted in a fantasy universe of imaginatively colored and airbrushed postcards featuring beautiful colors laid over the black-and-white photo which then became a nearly invisible base underneath all the paint.


For instance this Cuban postcard published in 1945 of gorgeous Cuban landscape seems to show a deliciously darkening sky over a vibrant layer of orange glow from the below-the-horizon sun. But I've seen three other postcard versions of this exact same photo in cards published in the early 1900s, in which it's clearly daylight and the totally blue daytime sky had big fluffy clouds, but they appear to have been painted out in this version.

Some postcards for Miami Beach hotels were notorious for airbrushing out all the crowded surroundings -- so there were no competing hotels next door in the picture. Some of these cards also moved the hotels closer to the beach, eliminating for example, a street that separated them. Sure, that's amusing to see, but also pretty dishonest and I suppose it offends my sensibilities as a former hardcore journalist for newspapers and magazines.

But in my current role as an advertising and fine art photographer, I like some other liberties that the airbrush artists took. I like their slightly muted, yet luminous color palette -- probably enhanced by the fact that the postcards' paper has over the decades now oxidized and slightly yellowed, giving a gently reddish-brownish-yellow undertint to the proceedings. I like what some anonymous artist did with that Cuban landscape photo.

I found technical means of creating similar looks with modern cameras and image-processing software.

The soft old colors of those vintage cards - and the inevitable, if often artifical, red-orange-yellow sunsets glowing low on the horizon, sometimes lighting up the underside of big fluffy clouds -- has made me want to do similar retouching in Photoshop.

Here, for instance, are images of Miami Beach palm trees I shot with my new G9 camera -- before and after I gave it the postcard look:





The G9 is brilliant, small (4 x 2 x 1-inch) camera from Canon with a 12-megapixel sensor and a fine lens, plus image stabilization and a host of other features, including the ability to shoot richly detailed and highly malleable RAW files.

I carry it with me everywhere (unless I'm carrying one of my big, heavyweight cameras). It fits into a cargo pocket or a little waist pouch

Anyhow, I added the lilac and yellow colors to the sky of these G9 palm tree images -- and it looked to me like a 21st century hommage to the postcard artists of an earlier day.

You can see more of my images -- some with a soft, and some with a bright, color palette -- on my new e-commerce-enabled, stock photo site at digitalrailroad.net/billwisser

Sleepless in Miami

Saturday night Miami Beach was more interesting than usual with art installations and live performances all over town nearly until dawn -- part of what was billed as a $400,000 "Sleepless Night" of culture.

Hookers were still click-clacking in their heels on Collins Avenue; and clueless teenagers, hip-hoppers and twenty somethings were still lining up to get into overpriced clubs on Washington guarded by hulking bouncers in suits -- a far cry from the glorious times of yesteryear (some 15 years ago) when the clubs were still cool, the crowds hipper, and achingly beautiful women in drop-dead gowns or drag queens in wings -- door goddeses they were called -- guarded the doors, deciding who'd get in.

Anyhow, the lure of the neon got to me, so I took some fast lenses (a 50mm f1.4; a 28 f1.8; and a 135mm f2) plus a 17- megapixel Canon 1Ds Mk3, and walked about for couple hours.

I shot architecture more than people -- though there were some cute kissing couples in Plaza de España, where Dana Keith's great Miami Beach Cinematheque put on an outdoor showing of the 1929 Surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou accompanied by a live performance of a flamenco troupe.

Even so, it was the architecture, the approximately 70-year-old Art Deco architecture, that drew me the most; and I photographed it handheld, mostly with the 28mm wide-angle, and then made the perspective more rectalinear in Photoshop, adjusting away distortion and making the lines more true.

The Sigma lens, the 28, is big and heavy, and I didn't think it would be very sharp wide open -- but it was, and yet had a creamy quality, abetted by some High Dynamic Range post-processing I dd in Photoshop.

I hadn't shot with my fast lenses for a long time -- I've been using f2.8 and f4 zooms and tilt-shift lenses mostly. But this was a return to my roots: I used to do photojournalism with a fast 50, a 28, and a 135; I love those focal lenghts.

This neon sign is gone now, but this picture brings back the sexy, funky look and feel of South Beach as it was about 10 years back, when it was so hot and hip. The Chamber of Commerce won't love me saying this, but Miami Beach has for the most part lost its mojo. Sure, it's still a beautiful place -- the beach, the Deco buildings, the bicycle-anywhere lifestyle, the gorgeous light, and subtropical weather remain. But the burning, bohemian, fashion-forward, and independent creative spirit -- the vitality -- that animated South Beach has faded slowly away as the town trended ever more mass-market.

Money -- lots of money -- is being made, surely more than ever before here. But the avant-garde glamour and excitement that is supposedly why people come here has largely slipped away along with the avant-garde, the artists. There's a kind of hollowness to the town now.

The neighborhood is more crowded today, but emptier.

Of course, no location can remain the hot, new, fashionable place forever. It's a contradiction in terms; and South Beach enjoyed an extraordinarily long run of being fabulous, from the mid-nineteen-sevenites through the mid-nineties. A decade or two ago, the town was full of artists and their studios -- now it's got beautiful branches of the Banana Republic and Victoria's Secret stores in their place.

Part of South Beach's decline was inevitable -- an example of the usual cycle of slum-art neighborhood-gentrification-developent-and-exploitation. But I think poor leadership was also a factor, poor stewardship by the politicians and planners. Maybe I'll expand on this in a later posting.

Actually, I've been writing in my head two, new chapters to update my critically acclaimed, 1995 book, South Beach, America's Riviera, Miami Beach, Florida, originally published by Arcade and distributred by Little, Brown.

It's out of print now, but e-mail me if you're looking for a copy. For the revised edition, I want to survey many of the South Beach pioneers and heavy-hitters that I know, and ask them about their perceptions of the changes here.

In any event, the flocks of Amazon-like beauties and Apollo-like gay guys I used to see working out in my gym have almost disappeared. I used to see Cindy Crawford work out there; Madonna also was a member, though she used to have private sessions. The number of fashion shoots in town has declined so precipitously that one production house has mothballed its fleet of RV production vehicles, though big-budgeted hip-hop music video shoots have taken up some of the slack for the production houses and the high-end hotels. But the hip-hop artists have not filled the gap entirely.

The people-watching simply isn't as great as it once was, back when supermodels strutted down Ocean Drive like a runway every day; and you'd see Gianni Versace and his family lunching on Lincoln Road. The town seemed like an enchanted village, or a planet all its own, with magnificent beauties of all sexes, wearing very little clothing, Rollerblading everywhere, like suntanned gods and goddesses on wheels. The nightclubs and restaurants were incredible, and there was music and art in the steets. Energy in the air. You'd see big fashion shoots everywhere. Versace's murder in July of '97 symbolized the end of that era, and the beginning of a coarser, more ordinary one.

Over the last decade, many of South Beach's artists and other creative people have decamped for the mainland, and a Miami warehouse district called Wynwood is up and coming -- but, far from the beach, Wynwood and the other mainland neighborhoods are simply not the same.

Meanwhile, somewhere along the way, South Beach became not just a place, but a brand:

Martha Stewart introduced a line of funriture at K-Mart called "South Beach"; a Miami cardiologist dubbed his new weight-loss regime "The South Beach Diet," and it became a phenomenon, his book a best-seller; next there was a line of soda pop named "South Beach;" then came a beautifully photographed but terribly written TV detective show called "South Beach;" and Ocean Drive magazine (itself named after South Beach's main street) licensed a stylish line of Ocean Drive fashion sunglasses and even published franchised, satellite edtions of Ocean Drive in such unlikey locales as Canada; while I, myself, wrote and photographed a lavishly illustrated coffeetable book called South Beach.

A million magazines all over the world did South Beach stories, year after year -- about how hip it was, plus where to eat, where to stay, where to party, where to spend your money. I licensed a lot of photos to these magazines! Did a lot of assignments. Photographed a lot of restaurants, boutiques and hotels. New ones -- actually redone Art Deco ones -- were opening all the time. It was great. And I remember when Pavarotti gave a huge concert on the beach; and then the Today show and then Good Morning America did weeks of live broadcasts from the beach. Television crews from all over were everywhere. I was a consultant and on-air commentator for one South Beach show done by a German network. The tabloid TV shows went wild: the nightclub scene, the models, the Deco, the whole place was eye-candy. Some paparazzi guys I know were making fortunes, as was the fashion business. The nightclubs -- including some mafia ones -- were making millions. Of course, it had to end. It was over-exposure.

And as more people came and real estate prices went up, and the artists and quirky one-of-a-kind boutiques were forced out by higher rents and poor planning, and chain stores replaced them -- the demographics of the people coming and the quality of the experience here changed. The character changed.

Meanwhile, more luxury high-rises and corporate-owned hotels have been shoehorned into South Beach, blocking more views, but I feel the sex, excitement, and style they're selling is more a reflection of the old days of 10 years ago, than of the current reality. Nonetheless, there's still a sort of luxury mafia of high-end real estate developers, mega-glossy magazines, exclusive nightclubs, hotels, restauranats, p-r agencies, and a parade of B- and C-list celebrities still incestuously cross-promoting each other here, keeping the image alive. (And some of them are my clients!) And, truth be told, the old magic hasn't totally left South Beach. It still has its moments plus a lot of great restaurants. Moreover, the history of this resort town has always been cyclical.

But the smart, sexy and sophisticated South Beach vibration has weakened enormously, indeed the vibe has fundamentally changed -- as one spring-break, college girl from Tennessee told me this year, "I'm so disappointed. This is the trashiest place I've ever seen!" When spring-breakers come to your town and think it's trashy, things are pretty bad.

Flying to New York, floating in infinity.