Group items tagged

THEORY - "Walker Evans and American Life" Scavenging the Landscape: Walker Evans and American life Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 1996 by Melissa Rachleff The Great American Depression, spanning the 1930s, inscribed into the culture a psychic crisis. Faith in industrial ingenuity, heralded as "progressive," came unhinged. By 1933, four years after the stock market crash, one quarter of the work force was unemployed.(1) Into this dilemma came a multitude of photographic projects, the most famous of which were sponsored by the federal government in the form of agencies that provided relief to farmers, the unemployed and others. The most completely realized project was the documentation of conditions faced by displaced farmers, recorded by the Historic Section of the Resettlement Administration (RA), later the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The socially-oriented photographic book made its appearance, as did the photographic magazine, best exemplified by Life in 1936. Many of the best known American photographers came to prominence during the Depression, including Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks and Margaret Bourke-White. Of all the photographers from that era, one represented the quintessential photographic style of the Depression while remaining an elusive figure in photographic history: Walker Evans (1903-1975).

Photographs The photographs collection is a key resource for the visual history of London during the second half of the 19th and 20th centuries. It includes work by both professional and amateur photographers and covers most aspects of London life. It contains some topographical and architectural images but the main emphasis is on social documentary. Notable bodies of work include: * Early topographical views of London by Roger Fenton, c.1857 * Construction of the Metropolitan District Railway by Henry Flather, 1860s * London street life by John Thomson, c.1876 * Historic London buildings by Alfred & John Bool and Henry Dixon, 1870s & 1880s * Poverty in the East End by John Galt, early 1900s * Impressionist views of London by Alvin Langdon Coburn, early 1900s * Suffragettes by Christina Broom, early 1900s * Street and river scenes by George Davison Reid, c.1930 * East End homes by Humphrey Spender, early 1930s * London street life in the 1930s by Margaret Monck, Wolfgang Suschitzky and Cyril Arapoff * Underground shelters during the Blitz by Bill Brandt, 1940 * Bomb damage to the City of London during the Blitz by Arthur Cross and Fred Tibbs, 1940-41 * London street life in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, including work by Nigel Henderson, Roger Mayne, Paul Styles, B J Green, Cory Bevington, Jerome Liebling, Lutz Dill, Jim Rice and Paul Trevor * Topographical views of London by Edwin Smith, 1960s * Contemporary work by many photographers including Yoke Matze, Anna Fox, Alan Delaney, Paul Barkshire, Tim Daly, Chris Dorley-Brown, Tom Evans, John R. J. Taylor, Ed Barber, Magda Segal, Paul Baldesare, Dave Trainer, Paulo Catrica, Ronen Numa, Angus Boulton, Janet Hall, Dave Young, Michael Donald, Jason Wilde, John Davies, David Turner Tom Hunter and Mike Seaborne

Top 10 Tips for Twitter … and Life by Guest Poster on January 22, 2009 in Twitter for Beginners In this post Crystal N Woods (follow her at @crystalsquest) shares some great tips for those starting out in Twitter. twitter-tips.png The buzz this year is all about Twitter, the 'microblog' service. Both the web and twitter are full of pleas from people who say they don't 'get it'. In a nutshell, the point of twitter is to post very short updates - no more than 140 characters. It's a bit like a txt msg for the web, on 'what you're doing now'. These tweets can be links to cool sites you've found, conversations with other twitter users, questions you want a quick answer for, what you're having for dinner or even haiku poetry. The main difference between twitter and txt is: when you send it out it goes out to everyone who's opted to follow you. On the receiving end, you're getting these updates from everyone you've chosen to follow. This constant flow of short messages to and from is called the 'twitter stream'. It can be a bit overwhelming at first. Just like modern life. In fact, it occurred to me that the people who 'get it' and rave about it the most are the very same people who have achieved vast levels of success in this information age. So, here's my take on the top 10 success tips for twitter… and Life!

About this magazine LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine which chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today's people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use.

About this magazine LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine which chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today's people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use.

Search millions of historic photos Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.

Through the Lens of Time: Images of African Americans from the Cook Collection is a digital collection of over 250 images of African Americans dating from the nineteenth and early twentieth century, selected from the George and Huestis Cook Photograph Collection at the Valentine Richmond History Center. The digitally scanned images on this site are of prints from glass plate negatives or film negatives taken by George S. Cook (1819-1902) and Huestes P. Cook (1868-1951), primarily in the Richmond and Central Virginia area. The Cook Collection consists of over 10,000 negatives taken from the 1860s to the 1930s in Virginia and the Carolinas. The lens of a camera can both reflect and refract reality, and it is important to understand that a photograph, like any work of art, can tell us as much about the photographer as the photographed. These photographs of African Americans provide an interesting combination of examples of African American life and the white photographers' perceptions of that life, often at least tinged by stereotypes. While some photographs more obviously represent one or the other, it is an interesting exercise to attempt to determine which photographs were taken in a completely spontaneous manner and which ones were posed or staged by the Cooks. These photographs of African American life in turn-of-the-century Central Virginia are valuable both as conveyers of unique historical information and as examples of the nascent art of photography. Their preservation by the Valentine Richmond History Center and their digitization by VCU allows everyone from historical researchers to school children to access and learn from this fine and rare resource.

" I was introduced to the work of Trent Parke (born in Australia in 1971, a member of Magnum since 2007) by a mutual friend, the photographer, Matt Stuart. He showed me two books by Parke, both self-published. The first was The Seventh Wave (2000), photographs of Australia's beaches, by Parke and his partner - now wife - Narelle Autio. A more intimate and egalitarian collaboration is hard to imagine. Without the list at the end explaining which pictures are by whom it would be impossible to tell them apart. Much of the action takes place in or under the waves. You don't look at this book. You open it and plunge in. Whoomp! Immediately, you're immersed, submerged. They're like pictures of being born, of people exploding into life beneath the sea, or bursting through the surface and into being. It's as if evolution has been speeded up and compressed so that the origins of life on the planet turn, in a split-second, to the creation of an individual human life. In the same breath it's mythic and candid - street photography from Atlantis! In one photograph we get a blurry echo of Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel. Here it's two hands almost touching underwater, one clutching a ball of burning light. In a related picture - included in the Minutes to Midnight series - we see the birth of the photographers' own son, erupting from the water, dragging the umbilical cord like a lifesaver."

"On the Internet, everybody is a millenarian. Internet journalism, according to those who produce manifestos on its behalf, represents a world-historical development-not so much because of the expressive power of the new medium as because of its accessibility to producers and consumers. That permits it to break the long-standing choke hold on public information and discussion that the traditional media-usually known, when this argument is made, as "gatekeepers" or "the priesthood"-have supposedly been able to maintain up to now. "Millions of Americans who were once in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff-and that many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the profession," Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who operates one of the leading blogs, Instapundit, writes, typically, in his new book, "An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths." The rhetoric about Internet journalism produced by Reynolds and many others is plausible only because it conflates several distinct categories of material that are widely available online and didn't use to be. One is pure opinion, especially political opinion, which the Internet has made infinitely easy to purvey. Another is information originally published in other media-everything from Chilean newspaper stories and entries in German encyclopedias to papers presented at Micronesian conferences on accounting methods-which one can find instantly on search and aggregation sites. Lately, grand journalistic claims have been made on behalf of material produced specifically for Web sites by people who don't have jobs with news organizations. According to a study published last month by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, there are twelve million bloggers in the United States, and thirty-four per cent of them consider blogging to be a form of journalism. That would add

The New York Times is running a slideshow by photographer Jan Grarup about life in the Daadab, reportedly the oldest refugee camp in the world. "The strength of the project rests within its immediacy," Mr. Grarup said. "It has an honesty to it." I was in Daadab not so long ago myself. I may not have been there for long but I was there long enough to notice that life in the camp wasn't one you would wish on the  worst of your neighbors -Kenyans and Somalis from Somalia aren't the best of neighbors. In the camps there is of course suffering but I would also have loved to see images of the children that were playing in the camp, images of the schools set up, images of the street with all the shops where refugees who've refused to be victims of circumstances are taking charge and rebuilding their lives. Where are the photos of the weddings that happen in the camp and where are the photos of people who despite their many tribulations, still observe prayers without fail? Where are the photos telling the other side of the story?

Digital Storytelling is the practice of using computer-based tools to tell stories. As with traditional storytelling, most digital stories focus on a specific topic and contain a particular point of view. However, as the name implies, digital stories usually contain some mixture of computer-based images, text, recorded audio narration, video clips and/or music. Digital stories can vary in length, but most of the stories used in education typically last between two and ten minutes. And the topics that are used in Digital Storytelling range from personal tales to the recounting of historical events, from exploring life in one's own community to the search for life in other corners of the universe, and literally, everything in between. A great way to begin learning about Digital Storytelling is by watching the following video introduction to Digital Storytelling.

Bill Owens: Photographing the Suburban Soul Interview by Robert Hirsch Bill Owens's Suburbia (1972) is a quintessential photographic study of suburban California life and of its rituals. Owens followed with Our Kind of People (1975), which examined political, religious, scholastic, and sports groups and their practices. Then he published Working: I Do It for Money (1977) that looked at people who work from nine to five. In 1976, Owens received a Guggenheim Fellowship and, afterwards, two National Endowment for the Arts awards. Between 1978 to the 1982 he was a freelance photographer and did work for magazines including Life and Newsweek. In 1982 Owens started Buffalo Bill's Brewery and published American Brewer Magazine (1984 - 2001). In 2004 Owens added to his visual anthropology cycle of the American middle class with the publication of Leisure: Americans at Play. Currently, Owens is making mini digital movies about America society. This piece is the result of conversations and emails between Owens and the author from December 2004 through March 2005.

Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans - Expanded Edition by Sarah Greenough, Robert Frank Steidl First published in France in 1958, then in the United States in 1959, Robert Frank's The Americans< changed the course of twentieth-century photography. In eighty-three photographs, Frank looked beneath the surface of American life to reveal a people plagued by racism, ill-served by their politicians, and rendered numb by a rapidly expanding culture of consumption. Yet he also found novel areas of beauty in simple, overlooked corners of American life. And it was not just his subject matter - cars, jukeboxes, and even the road itself - that redefined the icons of America; it was also his seemingly intuitive, immediate, off-kilter style, as well as his method of brilliantly linking his photographs together thematically, conceptually, formally, and linguistically, that made The Americans so innovative. More of an ode or a poem than a literal document, the book is as powerful and provocative today as it was fifty years ago.

10x10â„¢ ('ten by ten') is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The result is an often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous, but always fitting snapshot of our world. Every hour, 10x10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10x10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life. 10x10 is ever-changing, ever-growing, quietly observing the ways in which we live. It records our wars and crises, our triumphs and tragedies, our mistakes and milestones. When we make history, or at least the headlines, 10x10 takes note and remembers. Each hour is presented as a picture postcard window, composed of 100 different frames, each of which holds the image of a single moment in time. Clicking on a single frame allows us to peer a bit deeper into the story that lies behind the image. In this way, we can dart in and out of the news, understanding both the individual stories and the ways in which they relate to each other. 10x10 runs with no human intervention, autonomously observing what a handful of leading international news sources are saying and showing. 10x10 makes no comment on news media bias, or lack thereof. It has no politics, nor any secret agenda; it simply shows what it finds. With no human editors and no regulation, 10x10 is open and free, raw and fresh, and consequently a unique way of following world events. In 10x10, we respond instinctively to patterns in the grid, visual indicators of relevance. When we see a frequently repeated image, we know it's important. When we see a picture of a movie star next to a picture of dead bodies, we understand the extremes that exist in our world. Scanning a grid of pictures can be more intuitive than reading headlines, for it lets the new

Joe McNally shoots assignments for magazines, ad agencies, & graphic design firms. Clients include Sports Illustrated, ESPN Magazine, National Geographic, Life, Time, Fortune, New York Magazine, GEO, Golf Digest, Discover, Men's Journal, Business Week, Rolling Stone, New York Stock Exchange, Target, Sony, GE, Nikon, Lehman Brothers, & PNC Bank. In addition to having been a recipient of the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for outstanding magazine photography, McNally has been honored numerous times by several of the following: Communication Arts, Applied Arts, Photo District News, Pictures of the Year, The World Press Photo Foundation, The Art Directors' Club, American Photo, and Graphis. Joe's teaching credentials include: the Eddie Adams Workshop, the National Geographic Masters of Contemporary Photography, the Santa Fe Workshops, the Smithsonian Institute Masters of Photography, Rochester Institute of Technology, Maine Photo Workshops, Department of Defense Worldwide Military Workshops, and the Disney Institute. He has also worked on numerous "Day in the Life" projects. One of McNally's most notable large scale projects, "Faces of Ground Zero - Giant Polaroid Collection", has become known as one of the most primary and significant artistic responses to the tragedy at the World Trade Center. Joe was described by American Photo magazine as "perhaps the most versatile photojournalist working today" and was listed as one of the 100 most important people in photography. In January 1999, Kodak and Photo District News honored Joe by inducting him into their Legends Online archive. In 2001, Nikon Inc. bestowed upon him a similar honor when he was placed on their website's prestigious list of photographers noted as "Legends Behind the Lens".

Everywhere you look there are dark signs for newspapers: bankruptcies, less print editions, the threat of closings in San Francisco and Boston, layoffs and pay cuts. But the journalism of newspapers will live on in digital form online. How will this after-life look? We brought together five people for the latest episode of 5Across who are working for newspapers -- or who have worked for them in the past and are now making their own independent forays online -- to discuss what's working now and what will work in the future. This was not a disussion about gloom and doom, but about things that these folks could see working at the ground level in their own experience. The informal talk ranged from business models to building site loyalty to how people can network online through "goodness" and not just trying to game the system. Here's the lineup of guests for this month's video show (who largely were beer drinkers):

Interview with Bruce Davidson, The Kojo Nnamdi Show (WAMU/Chicago), November 2006 Q: You're on the streets of Chicago, wandering into Pentecostal churches, how did that initial roaming around, years ago, play out later in life? BD: I think that I was a born loner. My mother was a single parent, working in a torpedo factory in the Midwest, and I didn't like school. I felt very isolated. And so I could do both my reading and my writing at the same time, with a camera. Q: And that is what became the trajectory for the rest of your life. I want to go to 1961, because even as I look at the book "Time of Change", I think it was before you ever rode with the Freedom Riders that you got a job to shoot fashion models. And you got caught-up in that - it was quite glamorous. But at the time, your heart wasn't really in it, was it. BD: In 1959, I photographed a Brooklyn gang for a year. And when that was published, Alex Lieberman at Vogue asked me if I'd like to do fashion. He'd been told by Cartier-Bresson that I could do fashion because I could do gangs - it doesn't make a difference. So I began to do fashion to support other things I wanted to do. But my heart wasn't in it. The models were too tall and too sophisticated for me, and I'm a sloppy dresser.

"Corentin Wauters: Gamma is one of the most famous photojournalism agencies. Some even call it legendary. How important has it been for photojournalism? Michiel Munneke: I think Gamma - but also others like Magnum, for instance - played an extremely important role from early years on, especially in documenting crucial news events around the world. It's important to realise that in those days you had magazines like Life and the Picture Post who very generously allocated tens of pages to events like the war in Vietnam, for example. Those publications and photographs made a huge impact on their readerships. I think it's fair to say that the founders of Gamma, like Raymond Depardon - although he moved to Magnum at the end of the '70s - and Gilles Corron, who died in 1970 in Cambodia, can be classified as legendary. They played a very important role in news documenting in those years. Raymond Depardon said that in 1966 you only had to travel far away and take three shots to get published in magazines Paris Match or Le Nouvel Observateur. How has the profession of photojournalism changed since Gamma was founded? If Depardon was saying that competition for space in publications like Paris Match or Le Nouvel Observateur is stronger, then he's absolutely right. Competition is far more severe. Circulations are going down, advertising revenues are shrinking, and consequently budgets for journalism and for photography are being cut. image Nowadays its very rare that publications send photographers for assignments overseas. Take a renowned magazine like Time. They still have photographers on staff but they very rarely get assignments to go overseas. It's a sign of the times. Gamma, but also other big photojournalism agencies like Sipa, were founded in Paris. The city had a big name as a centre for photojournalism. To what extent is that true today? I think for those years it was really true. But now, in the era of globalisation and digitisation, it doesnâ

This a guest post by Ken Jarecke, a world-renowned photojournalist and founding member of Contact Press Images, an illustrious photo agency based in New York. Please also visit and read his blog, Mostly True. The past few years it's been hard for me to pick up a camera. We all know that the industry, at least the editorial side of it, has been at an all time low. Sure, I've worked to put a good face on it, like in this piece on the New York Times Lens blog, but more often than not, my desire to make wonderful images has been absent. My heart has just not been there.

"One of the most exquisitely intimate portraits not only of an artist's process, but also of a marriage and a life." - The New York Times As one of the world's preeminent photographers, Sally Mann creates artwork that challenges viewers' values and moral attitudes. Described by Time magazine as "America's greatest photographer," she first came to international prominence in 1992 with Immediate Family, a series of complex and enigmatic pictures of her three children. What Remains-Mann's recent series on the myriad aspects of death and decay-is the subject of this eponymously titled documentary.

Terrorist Bombings: From Stopped Time to Still Life Posted by Hariman in visualizing war Representation in any public art today has to include using old forms to capture what is distinctive about our time. Eventually new forms emerge, and we should ask what might become the artistic conventions of a "catastophile" society in which disaster and violence are fatal attractions and spectacular sources of energy. One image that might be on the cusp of old and new is this screen shot of a bombing in Sri Lanka: