Agfa motion picture topics (Apr 1937-June 1940)

Record Details:

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world — a generous share of this problem rests in the lap of smiling young Lawrence Kronquist. Working entirely apart from the firm’s two other photographic departments, which make in,ake innumerable straightforward pictures of each plane and its building for purposes of engineering and production record. Kronquist’s job is to dramatize with his camera the Douglas plant, its people, and its products, to grace not only the company’s advertising, but the pages of such select, hard-to-crash journals as Fortune, Life. Saturday Evening Post, and a host of newspapers and magazines the world over. Artist and Photographer For this assignment, Kronquist has unusual qualifications. More than a few photographers of greater or lesser attainments have from time to time chosen to style themselves as ‘"ArtistPhotographers.” Kronquist would probably disdain to apply the term to himself — but that is precisely what he is: an artist who a few years ago momentarily laid aside brush and pencil for a camera, and discovered that in this modern world the camera, in the proper hands, can often offer artistic possibilities as great or even greater than the older media. Graduated only a few years ago from Chicago’s celebrated Art Institute. Kronquist served a term as staff artist on the Chicago Tribune, from which he branched out into commercial art. An assignment to do a series of sketches for the Great Northern Railway supplied his unintended entrance into camera artistry, for when certain of the sketches were to showr the line’s crack trains at various points on the run, he found it best to sub stitute photographs as “sitters” for the actual trains which might whiz past his canvas but twice or thrice a week — and then pass it at fifty or sixty miles per hour. To get his “model” exactly right, he made the photos himself — and so successful were they that camera-art as well as pencil-art was ultimately included in his railroad assignment! Picturing Boeing Clippers Completing this task at Seattle, the Great Northern’s western terminus, Kronquist found himself tumbled unexpectedly into the aircraft industry. Boeing was at that time a major center of aviation news-interest, for the first of Pan American’s famous transoceanic “clippers” was just being built, and newspapers and magazines were clamoring for pictures. With only a fifteen-foot section of the hull actually completed, supplying this demand for pictures with photographs was manifestly impossible. So, too, would he the use of the engineering staff’s strictly technical drawings; and as the Boeing executives soon found out, the average commercial artist is somewhat at a loss when asked to make an accurate*, yet dramatic-appearing drawing of a non-existent airplane! At this stage. Kronquist entered the picture and solved the problem neatly. All of those pictures you saw in the nation’s “class” magazines, showing the “clippers,” inside and out, long before the first of them left the factory, came from Kronquist’s drawingboard. Some even showed the as yet uncompleted “clipper,” apparently in flight, spreading its hundred-foot wings over an authentic air-photo of Seattle! The answer, of course, was 18