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A variant of this picture appeared in George Silk's photoessay for Life, 'Wild Creatures of America', in December 1961. The overall theme of that special double issue of the magazine was 'Our Splendid Outdoors'. Silk travelled 11,000 miles across America over four months on the assignment. To make this picture he used his knowledge of the way spawning trout react when disturbed: '... I moved
some rocks to make the water flow in a way attractive to spawning trout.'
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This image was the centrepiece of George Silk's story in Life, 20 April 1962, and showed three successive stages of a dive by the 14-year-old national champion Kathy Flicker - which the copywriter declared was surely worthy of a 'perfect ten' score. The assignment was shot in one afternoon. Silk had the water level lowered to half-way down a trainer's observation window in the side of the pool; he had six flash units set up to record Kathy's entry into the water - knowing that his timing had to match the entry exactly. More >
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In 1962 Gretel was the first Australian yacht to challenge the New York Yacht Club for the famed America's Cup. The defenders in Weatherly won the Cup. George Silk's image of the two boats captures the audacity and excitement of the 1962 Cup, but also makes the boats appear abstract and magical as in a children's book illustration. More >
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Silk did not get sent to the 1948 Olympics in London but covered the British Empire Games in 1954 and the Pan American Games in 1955 where he made dramatic images using a Panon wide-angle camera. At the 1956 Games in Melbourne he made some wide-angle images but did not produce a major story. More > |
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George Silk made this image of a pregnant cow in New Zealand in September 1942 while on leave after being in the Middle East, Greece, Crete and North Africa and before going to New Guinea. It reminded him of the book and Disney cartoon character Ferdinand the Bull, and remained a favourite image perhaps because of the contrast its humour and fertility made with the horrors of war. From New Guinea he sent a print to Life - he first saw copies of the magazine in the Middle East. More > |
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George Silk became
interested in the aesthetic possibilities of the distortions produced
in race-finish cameras when he covered the 1959 Kentucky Derby. Photo-timers
had been in use since 1951 for athletics, and at the Olympics in 1952
and 1956. Photographs made in these cameras stretched or foreshortened
the figures leaving only a tiny vertical slit of the film in focus at
the exact finish line. More > |
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Silk had first tried out his slit camera by photographing his children and their friends dressed in Halloween costumes. A sequence of these colour images appeared as 'Spectacle of Spooks to be wary of on Halloween' in Life, 31 October 1960 — Executive Editor, Bernard Quint had the images cut and duplicated into wild graphic patterns worthy of a technicolour fantasy by Walt Disney. |
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