Typical shotgun houses: Arcadia Place, Vicksburg

Arcadia place is a dead-end street a few blocks west of Drummond Street. It features a set of almost-identical shotgun houses. I have photographed here before and occasionally walk by to see if they have changed. They are an excellent example of modest early-20th century architecture, low-cost homes built for workers. Much has been written about the American shotgun house, but I am not an architect or sociologist and am unfamiliar with the literature. These little houses are disappearing from the South, and I try to photograph them when I can. I previously wrote about these houses in 2010. This 2017 photograph is an Ektar 25 frame from a Hasselblad camera.

The little houses in 2004 looked about the same as now, but the porches were open then. This is a Panatomic-X frame from a Fujifilm GW690II medium format camera.

This is the view from the east across Stouts Bayou (below the rip rap in the foreground). I do not know if the Bayou ever rises enough to flood the yard and the street beyond. The houses are up about 2 ft on their post and beam foundations, so they are probably safe from flooding.

Fading quickly: Fortification Street, Jackson, Mississippi

Fortification Street is one of the main east-west thoroughfares through downtown Jackson. East Fortification, between the I-55 exit and North State Street, passes through the Belhaven neighborhood, a traditional 1920s and 1930s residential area. The highly respected New State Theater is just a block north. But drive west of North State Street, and the scene deteriorates. Let us take a short short tour of the area, starting just west of North State and proceeding west. Most photographs are from Kodak TMax 100 film taken with a compact Olympus Trip 35 camera.

513 East Fortification Street

Garage at 513 East Fortification Street

The neighborhood was once residential, with handsome 1920s and older cottages. The huge Baptist Hospital complex is just to the north. Its footprint gobbled up many former residential blocks. Now, because of the heavy traffic, living on Fortification would be noisy and unpleasant.

427 East Fortification Street

A sign at the back of the handsome Queen Anne cottage at 427 identifies it as the Galloway-Williams House, 1895. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) fact sheet describes it as:

The Galloway-Williams House is one of Jackson's finest examples of a Queen Anne style cottage with Eastlake-inspired ornament. Both its external and internal character are almost completely intact. It is one of only a very few such structures remaining in an area of Jackson which was once dominated by similar late-nineteenth-century residences. Its site is an especially important one, directly across Fortification Street from the fastidiously restored Gothic Revival Manship House, one of Jackson's most notable historic structures.

930 North Congress Street

A short diversion onto North Congress Street reveals a semi-residential semi-professional neighborhood. This big 2-storey house was unoccupied.

395 East Fortification Street

1009 North West Street

At the corner of West Street and Fortification, we have the typical gas station-convenience store-strip mall. Not too inspiring. I wonder if it replaced a neighborhood grocery store?

998 North Lamar Street

1107 North Lamar Street

Let's walk another block west and turn left onto North Lamar Street. Again we see a residential neighborhood with some occupied houses and many abandoned units. It is sad.

Cohea Street

I did see a number of modest new houses or townhouses on Cohea Street, so some degree of revival underway. Maybe a reader can let me know who is funding this project or what is happening.

Grayson Court, no longer extant

A couple blocks west and we reach what is left of Grayson Court. This was once a double row of shotgun houses. In 2004, they were pretty nasty, although I met a workman there who was painting and repairing. They have all been torn down, and even the lane is hard to see.

Just south of Fortification Street overpass is a complex of steel buildings and sheds. I think these were once a soybean processing facility. It has been closed for many years. At one time, many of the men in the Farish Street district to the south may have worked in the plant.

Canadian National Railway shunting yard, view north from Fortification Street overpass

View northwest to Wood Street from Fortification Street overpass.

Continuing west, Fortification Street rises over the Canadian National Railways rail yard on a 4-lane overpass. There is a good view of the tracks from here. To the west, a broad area of debris and brush was, I assume once industrial. Now it looks like an area to dump bricks, gravel, and brush.

Salem Street cottages

Just south of the Fortification overpass is a group of cottages along Salem Street. I saw the standard Pit Bull dogs tied up and decided I better not venture into the area alone.

Bell Street

Walking north on Wood Street, the first cross street was Bell. A stream of clear fresh water was flowing in the gutter. In the distance, City workers were repairing the pipes, which had burst in the unusual freeze of early January. The City suffered hundreds of burst pipes, which compounded the problems of aging and ill-maintained pipe infrastructure.

1107 Wood Street

TJ's lounge sits at the corner of Wood and Bell Street. TJ was sitting in a car watching the city workers and the flowing river of fresh drinking water. We chatted. TJ does not allow anyone under 31 or any drugs, hard liquor, smoking, weapons, or firearms in his club. He said many lawyers and professional people came to listen to Blues.

This is the end of this tour. There is plenty more to record in Jackson.

The Mississippi Delta 12b: Return to Clarksdale

During an Easter weekend road trip through north Mississippi, my wife and I stopped in Clarksdale.

We stayed at the Shack Up Inn, a blues-oriented inn/motel that houses its guests in cabins, silos, and shotgun shacks. It is quite comfortable, and the shacks have been rebuilt and are well-insulated (which was welcome during the night as a cold front passed).

Shack Up has accumulated a large collection of vintage memorabilia - perfect for the photographer with a Rolleiflex.

An unused warehouse was just north of the property. I looked for barn owls but did not find any.

Jade building on Delta Ave., Clarksdale

Deak's Mississippi Saxophones & Blues Emporium, 3rd St., Clarksdale

Art Deco Greyhound Bus terminal, now visitor's center.

I need to return to Clarksdale again and spend more time looking around. There is a wealth of cultural material to record. On my previous visit, wisps of snow and bits of sleet were falling through the gloomy winter sky. Maybe next winter....

The square photographs with brilliant color are from Kodak Ektar 25 film, exposed in a Rolleiflex 3.5E twin lens camera with a Schneider 75mm f/3.5 Xenotar lens.  Click any one of those frames to see the amazing detail. All of the Rolleiflex exposures were tripod-mounted. The duller and more "accurate" photos are from a Moto G5 phone.

1950s excellence: the Leica 50mm f/2.0 Type 2 Summicron-DR lens

Leitz 50mm f/2.0 dual range Summicron lens in original box. 

Introduction. Leica's 50mm Summicron lenses have been famous for optical and mechanical excellence for over 60 years. Leica's term Summicron means a lens with maximum aperture of f/2.0. They have been improved over the decades and are still in production - how many other consumer products have lasted over a half century? Even more amazing, a new lens will fit on a 50-year-old Leica M body, or a 60-year-old lens will work on a brand new film or digital body. When you consider the longevity, Leica lenses are reasonable price, despite the hatred (or envy) from many modern digital photographers.

A convenient summary with photographs of the different Summicron versions is on Ken Rockwell's site.

5cm f/2.0 Summitar lens in extended (ready to photograph) position

Summitar. The predecessor lens, the 5cm Summitar, was in production from 1939 to 1953, with 170,761 units total. War-time lenses were uncoated, but from 1946 on, they were anti-reflection coated. Eastman Kodak and Zeiss had coated optics for military use during the war, but coating all air-glass surfaces on general civilian optics became widespread only after World War II. The Summitar had a complicated design of 7 elements in 4 groups. Human computers using mechanical calculators and trigonometry tables must have made a heroic effort to compute the ray paths. The Summitar's central sharpness is superb, but the edges fall off, and there is some field curvature. This can be used creatively, and regardless, "sharpness" is not normally the factor that makes a photograph successful. For examples, please look at some of my 2017 Nepal articles. In 1953, the Summitar lens cost $158 in USA.

Summicron Type 1. The first Summicron, the Type 1, was introduced in 1952. It was an update of the Summitar, also mounted in a collapsible barrel. I do not know if the formulation of this new lens benefitted from early-vintage electronic computers. For a German consumer product, I suspect no. The first electronic computers after World War II were used for ballistics analysis, atomic weapons research, rocket trajectories, and military optics. The 1953 USA cost for the Summicron was $183.

A note on collapsible lenses: When E. Leitz company introduced its first camera in 1923, it used perforated cine film but doubled the frame size to 24×36 mm. All other cameras then used much larger roll film or individual sheet film. So the new small image surface became known as miniature format. The cameras were intended for travel or adventures like mountain climbing. Therefore, the manufacturers wanted to make the cameras compact and portable. One way to do that was to build a lens in a barrel that could be collapsed into the body. As the years went by, cameras grew larger and heavier (like automobiles or, most grotesquely, American SUVs). The Zeiss Contarex of 1960 had grown to 910 grams for just the body. The Nikon F with its metering head was a big package, as well. And today, the digital single lens reflex (DSLR) in "full frame" size is an enormous bulbous thing graced with a protruding penile lens that points at its subject like a cannon. Just tell the DSLR fanbois that they really have the miniature format.

Type 2 Summicron lens with single focus range.

Summicron Type 2. E. Leitz introduced their Type 2 Summicron in 1956. It was in production until 1968. To improve the precision of the glass alignment, Leitz mounted Type 2 optics in a rigid barrel. It was a masterpiece of mechanical precision and elegance, but the construction of brushed chrome over brass made it heavy. This lens was also most likely hand designed.

Leitz began computer-aided lens computations after about 1960 at their factory in Midland, Ontario, Canada, under the guidance of Dr. Walter Mandler (from Erwin Puts). It is an interesting history of international competition that about this time, Japanese optical companies such as Canon, Nikon, and Topcon were also exploring new lens designs with the aide of early computers. They were able to market lenses with almost as refined optical characteristics as Leica but at lower price. The brilliance of the Japanese companies was to bring superb optics to a wide audience at reasonable price.

Leitz made two version of the Type 2 lens. One had a single focus range covering 1m to infinity. The photograph above shows a 1963 lens that I bought from a friend in town. It was available in M-mount  (63,055 units) as well as the 39mm thread mount (1160 units; now a rare collector item).

Dual range Summicron without goggles.

Dual range Summicron with goggles attached on the flat plate. The lens has been extended to its closest focus distance.

The second version had a dual focus range and is known as the DR. The normal range was 1m to infinity. But if you wanted to focus on a closer object, you slid a spectacle viewfinder attachment onto a flat plate on the top of the lens. The goggles depressed a button, which let the lens focus from 0.48 to 0.88 m. The goggles correct the parallax of the rangefinder view. It was a clever way to let a rangefinder camera focus more closely than the normal 0.8 or 1.0 meter. A reflex camera does not have these limitations, but in the 1950s, most miniature camera photographers were still using rangefinders. Total production was 55,145 units.

My stepdad bought the DR in the pictures above in 1962. This lens and M2 camera took family pictures in Greece and traveled to Asia, Africa, the Indian Ocean, and North America. Now it photographs urban decay in Mississippi. This one has pristine coating.

I could not find a complete Leica price booklet from the 1960s, but I found a few prices in US $ for M2 and lenses:

• M2 w/50mm f/2 rigid Summicron 423.00
• M2 w/50mm f/2 DR Summicron 465.00

Optical unit and focus mount of Summicon-DR lens. Serial numbers must match.

Special note: the optical unit can be unscrewed from the focus unit. If you buy a used DR lens, the serial numbers must match. Do not accept an unmatched lens.

I also have a Type 4 50mm Summicron from 1984 or 1985 production. I will write about it in a future article. It is mounted in a lighter weight alloy barrel as opposed to the gorgeous brushed chrome of my DR unit.

Test with Kodak BW400CN film. On a recent day trip through rural Mississippi south of I-20, I grabbed a roll of Kodak BW400CN. I have had mixed results in the past. Sometimes it looks muddy, but sometimes I like the tonality. Could there be differences in the C-41 chemistry? Regardless, here are a few samples exposed through my Leica M2 and the 50mm Summicron-DR. I was surprised how the film renders green as quite light, but only for long exposures in settings such as dense underbrush. I do not recall seeing this before. The BW is pretty grainy, but I like the effect.

Abandoned farm house, Rte 18 in Brandon, MS.

Remains of a gasoline station, Raleigh. Taken with polarizer filter.

Big Smittys, Hwy 149, Mendenhall, MS. This is a former Pan-Am filling station. 

Main Street, Mendenhall, MS. Polarizer used to darken sky.

Shop on MS 28 east of Georgetown.

Historic Crossroads Store on Old Port Gibson Road, Reganton, MS.

References

Laney, D. 1994. Leica Camera and Lens Pocket Book, 6th Edition revised and updated, Hove Collectors' Books, East Sussux, UK, 142 p.

Other

An interesting 2007 article about Leica cameras is in The New Yorker, September 24, 2007 Issue, Candid Camera, The cult of Leica.

Small Towns in Mississippi: Bolton

Old US 80, Bolton, Mississippi

Bolton is an old agricultural town in Hinds County on the east-west Kansas City Southern railroad line between Jackson and Vicksburg. Many Vicksburgers who go to school in Raymond take the exit from I-20 and pass through Bolton in a hurry, likely not paying much attention. Like many other small towns, Bolton has faded. The small commercial strip is mostly empty, the shops and nearby houses rather run-down. It is sad.

The gas station at the corner of Old US 80 and Bolton-Raymond Road is now a fast food joint.

I do not know if Bolton had a passenger Depot. This old railroad warehouse or shed is at the crossing of the Bolton-Raymond Road. I have photographed it several times over the years. The tracks and bedding are in good maintenance because this is the main Kansas City Southern east-west line.

Jackie's Beauty Boutique is just a few steps from the railroad warehouse.

East of Bolton, Old US 80 runs through woods interspersed with farm fields. I am not sure how much of the route is the real 80, the old Dixie Overland Highway, and how much is 1970s-vintage frontage road.

Proceed west on Madison Street, which is also Old US 80, and you reach the police station in a tiny modern office. Across the street is a closed gas station.

Continue west, and we have cottages and shotgun houses in various states of habitation and maintenance. I like the symmetry of these older cottages. Unfortunately, there is not much more to see in Bolton.

Most of the black and white photographs were taken with an Olympus Trip 35 compact 35mm camera.